"Rafts" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... between Quebec and Cap-Rouge. On July 28 the French repeated the experiment of fire-ships on a still more gigantic scale. A vast fire-raft was constructed, composed of some seventy schooners, boats, and rafts, chained together, and loaded with combustibles and explosives. The fire-raft is described as being 100 fathoms in length, and its appearance, as it came drifting on the current, a mass of roaring fire, discharging every instant a shower of missiles, was terrifying. But the British ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... stepped out upon the balcony. The river lay along the bottom of the valley, irradiated with a silver shine. Little rafts of pinewood floated on its surface like tiny splinters, the men who steered them not appearing larger ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... a monument to celebrate Hoch's achievement. Here we met with an enormous raft; and I assure you, Charley, it was a sight. We had seen two or three small ones before, but here was a monster. These rafts come from the woods on the tributary rivers—the Moselle, Neckar, Maine, &c. These prodigious flotillas are bound to Dordrecht, and are there broken up. This one looked like a town. It had at least twenty-five huts, and some of them tolerably large shanties; and I should think there ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... workers. It is here that the bathing-houses and the boat-houses are. Here lie the steamers that ply slowly on the shallow river. Here, also, is a trade in timber where from time to time one of the smaller rafts that float from the Carpathians down to Dantzic is moored and broken up. Here, also, are loafers, who, like flies, congregate naturally near ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... salvation."'... Ah, Your Majesty is asking, will the parallel never end? Not yet, not yet! For the Bodhisattwa did miracles as well. I read again: ... 'And the Blessed One came once to the river Ganges, and found it overflowing. Those with him, designing to cross, began to seek for boats, some for rafts of wood, while some made rafts of basket-work. Then the Blessed One, as instantaneously as a strong man would stretch forth his arm and draw it back again when he had stretched it forth, vanished from this side of the river, and stood on the further ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... passing through Hallowell, and the Kennebec changes sides. What a beautiful river! It is now full of logs and rafts. Well, I must bring this to a close. Good-by, dear, with unchanging love. Ever ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... hollow shoots of a yellow herb with a ball at the top, and which float on the water. At thirty leguas from the coast are seen many great bunches of grass which are carried down to the sea by the great rivers of the country. These grasses are called balsas ["rafts or floats"]. Also many perrillos are seen, and, in turn, all the various signs. Then the coast is discovered, and it is very high and clear land. Without losing sight of land, the ship coasts along it with the northwest, north-northwest, and north winds, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... certain grandeur about it all, for work was king there. Trains ran through the streets laden with barrels of petroleum or piled as high as possible with charcoal and coal. That fine river, the Ohio, carried along with it steamers, barges, loads of timber fastened together and forming enormous rafts, which floated down the river alone, to be stopped on the way by the owner for whom they were destined. The timber is marked, and no one else thinks of taking it. I am told that the wood is not conveyed in this way now, which is ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... eager to see the ocean. To which purpose he caused a great many row-boats and rafts to be built, in which he fell gently down the rivers at his leisure, yet so that his navigation was neither unprofitable nor inactive. For by several descents upon the banks, he made himself master of the fortified towns, and consequently of the ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... raised poop and prow and richly painted and gilded cabin to the light papyrus skiff,—everything had been called into use. Even the boats used to ferry cattle and to carry freight, and the reed rafts kept up by skins, which generally carried loads of clay vessels, had not been disdained. The waters of the Nile, beaten, lashed, and cut by oars, sweeps, and rudders, foamed like the sea, and formed many an eddy that broke the force of ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... buried in the eternal forest, far, far away from the haunts of man, they chop and hew; in the summer, they form the timber, boards, staves, &c., into rafts, which are conveyed down the great lakes and the rivers St. Lawrence and Ottawa to Quebec—on these rafts they live and have their summer being. Hard fare in plenty, such as salt pork and dough cakes; fat and unleavened bread, with whiskey, is their ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... up the cloud of frankincense, and felt that he was in the great ark which holds the better half of the Christian world, while all around it are wretched creatures, some struggling against the waves in leaky boats, and some on ill-connected rafts, and some with their heads just above water, thinking to ride out the flood which is to sweep the earth clean of sinners, upon their own ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... Rafts were quickly knocked together and the crossing made to the Indian shore. I had expected the band to dig out hidden canoes and descend to the mouth of the Scioto. Instead we struck into a trail across-country. The path was well worn, and the fork we followed ended at the Scioto above ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... hundred miles south of Madras. After laying out a bower anchor, and hauling the ship off, we set about preparing the boats to weigh it in the usual way. But the master-attendant of Porto Novo, who had come off to our assistance with a fleet of canoes and rafts, suggested to Sir Samuel Hood that it might he a good opportunity to try the skill of the natives, who were celebrated for their expertness in raising great weights from the bottom. The proposal was one which delighted the Admiral, who enjoyed everything that was new. He posted himself accordingly ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... that in the next battle his army should march across the Danube as safely and as rapidly as it could march along the streets of Vienna. Two solid bridges were built on piles across the broad arm of the river; no less than six bridges of rafts were made ready to be thrown across the narrow arm when the moment arrived for the attack. By the end of June all the outlying divisions of the French army had gathered to the great rallying-point; ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... the Custom-house officers; and when their domiciliary visit was over, Robert and Arthur went ashore. Navigating through a desert expanse of lumber rafts and a labyrinth of hundreds of hulls, they stepped at last on the ugly wooden wharves which line the water's edge, and were crowded with the usual traffic of a port; yet singularly noiseless, from the ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... miles away. Even when the sea was calm enough for stores to be landed, the ground swell was such as to make the ordinary landsman agree with Dr. Johnson's remark "that he would rather go to gaol than to sea." It is easy to understand why the materials for Solomon's Temple were brought to Jaffa on rafts; no other craft of those days would have withstood the ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... arrival and ascertain the fate of the other divisions of the expedition. For more than a century and a half the placid waters of San Diego bay had lain undisturbed by any craft more formidable than the tule rafts (balsas de enea) of the natives, when on the 11th of April, 1769, a silent ship slowly entered the bay and dropped her anchor not far from the point where now the ferry boat for Coronado leaves the ...
— The March of Portola - and, The Log of the San Carlos and Original Documents - Translated and Annotated • Zoeth S. Eldredge and E. J. Molera
... bank stands the little village of Rejang, and lying off it was a large Portuguese sailing vessel, loading "bilian" or iron wood. This is a tedious business. The wood is cut a considerable distance up river and floated down in rafts, an operation which sometimes detains a ship here for three or four months. Deaths are frequent on board these timber ships, as the country for miles round is one dismal mangrove swamp, and very productive of fever. ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... completed, would be at the mercy of the ice-floods of the winter and the enormous power of the ocean-tides. The Prince of Orange himself, on a former occasion, when Antwerp was Spanish, had attempted to close the river with rafts, sunken piles, and other obstructions, but the whole had been swept away, like a dam of bulrushes, by the first descent of the ice-blocks of winter. It was witless to believe that Parma contemplated any such measure, and utterly monstrous to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and silently, until the impact of the guns no longer smote upon the heart but came to the ear dulled by distance, until the four silenced ships to the eastward were little distant things: but were there four? Bert now could see only three of those floating, blackened, and smoking rafts of ruin against the sun. But the Bremen had two boats out; the Theodore Roosevelt was also dropping boats to where the drift of minute objects struggled, rising and falling on the big, broad Atlantic waves.... The Vaterland was no longer following the fight. The whole of that hurrying ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... Coho. The experts had already felled, stripped, and sawed into logs the huge trees. To Dennis and others remained the arduous labour of guiding, with the help of windlasses, these immense logs to the river, whence they would descend in due time to the inlet, there to be joined together into vast rafts, later on again to be towed to their destination. Of all labour, this steering of logs through dense forest to their appointed waterway is the hardest and roughest. Dennis, of course, wore thick gloves, but in spite of these his hands were mutilated horribly, because ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... party now descended to the edge of the swamp. Here in the shallow water lay three boats, or rather rafts, constructed of bundles of bulrushes. They were turned up in front so as to form a sort of swan-necked bow, and in outline were exactly similar to the iron of modern skates. Upon each stood a native with a pole for pushing the rafts along, and three ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... slaughtered at once or sent to Nantes, where thousands were either executed or drowned by the infamous Carrier, one of the most sanguinary villains produced by the Revolution. Many of the men managed to cross the river either by swimming on rough rafts or in boats. In La Vendee the war was still going on, for Charette had marched up again from Lower Poitou, and was keeping a large force of the ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... eyes of the enemy, and before the arrival of Scipio; and he possessed not a single boat. Immediately by his directions all the boats belonging to the numerous navigators of the Rhone in the neighbourhood were bought up at any price, and the deficiency of boats was supplied by rafts made from felled trees; and in fact the whole numerous army could be conveyed over in one day. While this was being done, a strong division under Hanno, son of Bomilcar, proceeded by forced marches up the stream till they reached a suitable point ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... this, I went ashore and, making my way to the carpenter's shop which formed part of our shore establishment among the islands, ordered a certain number of small triangular rafts to be made, of a size just sufficient to support a bamboo staff ten feet long, to the top of which a flag six feet long by three feet wide was to be firmly lashed, the flags to be of different colours, arranged in pairs. The rafts were constructed merely of rough timber stoutly ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... above a wallaby—the largest animal other than himself of his native land which, when hunted, occasionally swam towards the opposite shore, he constructed one or other of two rafts or floats, both derivable from Nature's models. One was in the form of an eagle's nest, and not nearly so large as that in which some eaglets are reared, made by interlacing branchlets of white mangrove until the mass was sufficient to support ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... between the ships of Caesar and Pompey in 49 B.C., when the Istrians took the part of the latter. The Caesarian fleet under Dolabella was destroyed, and Caius Antonius, Caesar's general, was shut up in Veglia, where he was encamped with two legions. The soldiers constructed three rafts made of two rows of boats fastened together with chains, and with a platform of beams upon them, and a great tower at one end, by means of which the rowers were to be protected and the enemy attacked. Octavian, Pompey's admiral, ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... we were penetrating filled me with an indefinable dread. I almost trembled, as the unfriendly clouds drove out the lingering tints of day. Here were the strange floating city, with its stranger people on all the open porches, quays, and jetties; the innumerable rafts and boats, canoes and gondolas, junks, and ships; the pall of black smoke from the steamer, the burly roar of the engine, and the murmur and the jar; the bewildering cries of men, women, and children, the shouting of the Chinamen, and the barking of the dogs,—yet ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... an upward run, it is the wind which usually brings misty weather. Then, from the icy regions of the Arctic circle, from the Land of Desolation, come floating through the Straits of Belle Isle the dangerous bergs and ice-fields. Early in the spring these ice rafts are covered with colonies of seals which resort to them for the purpose of giving birth to their young. On these icy cradles, rocked by the restless waves, tens of thousands of young seals are nursed for a ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... quite a harbor for bateaux and canoes; seven or eight of the former were lying about, and there was a small scow for hay, and a capstan on a platform, now high and dry, ready to be floated and anchored to tow rafts with. It was a very primitive kind of harbor, where boats were drawn up amid the stumps,—such a one, methought, as the Argo might have been launched in. There were five other huts with small clearings on the opposite side of the lake, all at this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... some works to block up the mouth of the harbor. He built piers on each side, extending out as far into the sea as the depth of the water would allow them to be built. He then constructed a series of rafts, which he anchored on the deep water, in a line extending from one pier to the other. He built towers upon these rafts, and garrisoned them with soldiers, in hopes by this means to prevent all egress from the fort. He thought that, when this work was completed, Pompey ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... our young literature. We have no songs; American domestic life has never been hallowed and beautified by the sweet and graceful and tender associations of poetry. We have no Yankee pastorals. Our rivers and streams turn mills and float rafts, and are otherwise as commendably useful as those of Scotland; but no quaint ballad or simple song reminds us that men and women have loved, met, and parted on their banks, or that beneath each roof within their valleys the tragedy and comedy of life have been enacted. Our poetry is cold and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... most difficult materials into instruments, where these instruments soon bring to an issue the events for which they are formed, is the frequent occurrence, on many of their lakes and rivers, of structures resembling the floating gardens of the Peruvians, rafts covered with vegetable soil and cultivated. Labor in this way draws from the materials on which it acts very speedy returns. Nothing can exceed the luxuriance of vegetation when the quickening powers of a genial sun are ministered to by a rich ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... breast Into such a sudden zest Of summertime joys That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest; Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood By. Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on the air, Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels there, Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots Rose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: off with— down he dings His bleached both and ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... cut down, and cannot be any longer obtained without going at least a hundred and fifty miles up the river. At this distance, however, it is still to be had in considerable abundance, and is easily floated down to the town in rafts. The government dispose of this wood in the same manner as the coals, at the price of L3 for each thousand square feet, intended for home consumption, and L6 for ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... brother and son of La Salle, and others, but seven in all, obtained a guide from the Indians for the Arkansas, and, fording torrents, crossing ravines, making a ferry over rivers with rafts or boats of buffalo hides, without meeting the cheering custom of the calumet, till they reached the country above the Red River, and leaving an esteemed companion in a wilderness grave, on the 24th ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... Samara and Baghdad. On this section of the river there are many shallows, sometimes caused by traces of old rubble weirs. Consequently any kind of craft which drew more than a few inches would be always in trouble. These rafts, made of light saplings lashed together, are rendered buoyant by being packed underneath with goat-skins inflated with air. Thus they require only a very slight depth of water to float them, and they are sufficiently tough ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... I commenced my march for Issus, where Darius was waiting for me at the head of his myriads. You know the sequel: yourselves can best say what was the number of the dead whom on one day I dispatched hither. The ferryman tells me that his boat would not hold them; most of them had to come across on rafts of their own construction. In these enterprises, I was ever at the head of my troops, ever courted danger. To say nothing of Tyre and Arbela, I penetrated into India, and carried my empire to the shores of Ocean; I captured ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... channels, for twelve miles in breadth from shore to shore: this width gradually decreases as the stream flows on to Prescot, fifty miles below; a short distance beyond that town the rapids commence,[142] and thence to Montreal the navigation is interrupted for vessels of burden; boats, rafts, and small steamers, however, constantly descend these tumultuous waters, and not unfrequently are lost in the dangerous attempt. The most beautiful and formidable of these rapids is called the Cedars, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... had cut his timber near a river that could float not only loose logs but rafts, and in a small lake-like basin hemmed in by cliffs and separated by a gorge from the river he had gathered them and bound them into three large rafts. Only such a stage as came with the "tide" would convert the gorge into a water-way out, and only then ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... were wild as could be, great rafts of them, and travelling faster than the old seiners in the gang said they had ever seen them travel before, and what was worse, not staying up long. There were boats out from three or four vessels before we pushed off with ours. I remember the porgy steamer ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... and half-breed. Countless canoes drove past the slower and mightier scow brigades; huge York boats with two rows of oars heaved up and down like the ancient galleys of Rome; tightly woven cribs of timber, and giant rafts made tip of many cribs were ready for their long drift into a timberless country. On this two-thousand-mile waterway a world had gathered. It was the Nile of the northland, and each post and gathering place along its length ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... stranded white boat, and the body of the third man half sunk in the mud. On the river canoes were moving again, for Patusan was recovering its belief in the stability of earthly institutions since the return of the white lord. The right bank, the platforms of the houses, the rafts moored along the shores, even the roofs of bathing-huts, were covered with people that, far away out of earshot and almost out of sight, were straining their eyes towards the knoll beyond the Rajah's stockade. Within the wide irregular ring of ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... which made a sort of super-religion out of obedience. At the mere sound of his father's voice, Adolph trembled and stiffened up like a recruit under training. Once the two boys and Marie strayed beyond bounds to a place where some timber rafts were tied up along the shore. Adolph led the way onto the rafts and the two others followed. It was great fun jumping from log to log where two rafts met, until Marie suddenly slipped into the water and began to sink ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... what the Jacobins do by forcibly commanding the services of all sorts of laborers,[4243] "all who help handle, transport and retail produce and articles of prime necessity," "country people who usually get in the crops," and, more particularly, thrashers, reapers, carters, rafts men, and also shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths and the rest.—At every point of the social organism, the same principle is applied with the same result. Substitute everywhere an external, artificial and mechanical constraint for the inward, natural ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... bright handkerchiefs on their heads. These were principally third-class passengers, who were, happily, not troubled by the prospect of a long return voyage. The Caucasus passed numerous boats being towed up the stream, carrying all sorts of merchandise to Nijni-Novgorod. Then passed rafts of wood interminably long, and barges loaded to the gunwale, and nearly sinking under water. A bootless voyage they were making, since the fair had been abruptly broken up ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... themselves into the river, and in spite of the pieces of ice, which cut and bled the chests and sides of their horses, succeeded in reaching the other side. Sourd, chief of the squadron, and fifty chasseurs of the 7th, each carrying a voltigeur en croupe, followed them, as well as two frail rafts which transported four hundred men in twenty trips. The Emperor having expressed a wish to have a prisoner to interrogate, Jacqueminot, who overheard him, had scarcely crossed the river, when he saw one of Tchaplitz's soldiers; he rushed after, attacked, and disarmed him; then seizing and ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... to visit a party of lumberers in the forest, I should not be disposed to pass a whole winter with them. Even of a very good thing one may have too much, I would go up in the spring, when the rafts are being formed in the small tributary streams, and I would come down upon one of them, shooting the rapids of the rivers as soon as the first freshets had left the way open. A freshet in the rivers is the rush of waters occasioned by melting snow and ice. The ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... disappeared, taking with them the crews of the drivers and the two tugs. After an interval they returned towing small rafts of the long timbers. Orde did not make any inquiries; nor until days later did he see a copy of the newspaper telling how a lawless gang of rivermen had driven away the railroad men and stolen the railroad's property. These piles lasted five ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... penetrated the whole district in the form of rivers, inlets and meandering tidal creeks. Navigation on them was so easy that watermen to the manner born could float rafts or barges for scores of miles in any desired direction, without either sails or oars, by catching the strong ebb and flow of the tides at the proper points. But unlike the Chesapeake estuaries, the waterways of the rice coast were generally ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... good-sized trees, stripped and bare, which had been brought down stream by the spring floods, and left stranded upon the bank. With considerable difficulty he managed to fashion these into a rude raft, binding all together with strong, pliable willow withes. As a boy he had often made rafts, and the knowledge acquired then served him in ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... Atlantis was Our lark sprang from some hollow in the grass, Some old soft hoof-print in a tussock's shade; And the wood-pigeon's smooth snow-white eggs were laid, High, amid green pines' sunset-coloured shafts, And rooks their villages of twiggy rafts Set on the tops of elms, where elms grew then, And still the thumbling tit and perky wren Popped through the tiny doors of cosy balls And the blackbird lined with moss his high-built walls; A round mud cottage held the thrush's young, And straws ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... perceived the danger which threatened the two rafts: I perceived it on looking back toward burning the vessel: the blacks were threatening to swim after, and seek refuge upon the rafts. Large numbers of them showed that they had formed this intention. It was apparent from their movements and attitudes. They were swarming over the bulwarks ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... more miles were covered down stream, and then Tom tried the opposite direction. But all to no purpose. A number of boats were seen, and several rafts, but they had no white men ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... some lumber rafts here," said Sam. "I wonder if that one stopped here that tried to ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... hollow of the sea, she rolled, and at the third roll the half-ton of metal toppled over, crashed down through the bottom of the ship, and sought the company of the screw. She was a compartmentless steamer, and in half an hour had followed, leaving her crew afloat in boats and on life-rafts. Scotty found himself in the boat with the captain, and wisely anticipating rebuke, had brought his shovel. The captain ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... the Assyrians rafts floated on inflated skins were employed for the transport of heavy goods, and these have survived in the keleks of the present day. They are specially adapted for the transportation of heavy materials, for they are carried down by the current, and are kept in the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... were given to hold them at all costs, so that on the day of the battle our infantry could start off from there without having any serious obstacle in their way. Many men crossed the canal by means of hastily constructed foot bridges or floating rafts made of biscuit and ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... Ewing's divisions of the 15th Corps, under command of Major-General Frank P. Blair, of his army. The pontoon bridge at Brown's Ferry having been broken by the drift consequent upon the rise in the river and rafts sent down by the enemy, the other division (Osterhaus') was detained on the south side, and was on the night of the 23d ordered, unless it could get across by eight o'clock the next morning, to report to Hooker, who was instructed, in this event, ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... forethought for them and their wants, and a strict watchfulness for their rights and comfort, I was able in a short time to make them obedient and the detachment cohesive. In the past year they had made long and tiresome marches, forded swift mountain streams, constructed rafts of logs or bundles of dry reeds to ferry our baggage, swum deep rivers, marched on foot to save their worn-out and exhausted animals, climbed mountains, fought Indians, and in all and everything had done the best they could for the service and their commander. The disaffected feeling they ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... of great hewn logs vexed its downward course, slender logs linked together in long rafts, and huge logs drifting down singly or in pairs. Men appeared, running hither and thither like ants, and going through mysterious operations the reason for which the river could never guess: but the mill-wheels turned, the ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... our Pulpit a bar of wood nailed to two neighbouring trees. In foul weather we shifted into an old rotten tent; this came by way of adventure for new. This was our Church till we built a homely thing like a barne set upon Cratchets, covered with rafts, sedge, and earth; so also was the walls; the best of our houses were of like curiosity, that could neither well ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... In this travel, because of my wound, I was somewhat favored in my load; I carried only my knitting work and two quarts of parched meal. Being very faint I asked my mistress to give me one spoonful of the meal, but she would not give me a taste. They quickly fell to cutting dry trees, to make rafts to carry them over the river: and soon my turn came to go over. By the advantage of some brush which they had laid upon the raft to sit upon, I did not wet my foot (which many of themselves at the other ...
— Captivity and Restoration • Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
... on the logs, ascertained how the raft was put together, and took a pull on the long, clumsy steering-oar. At length he seated himself beside Lynn. He was eager to ask questions; to know about the rafts, the river, the forest, the Indians—everything in connection with this wild life; but already he had learned that questioning these frontiersmen is a sure ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... going fast. Strangers were still coming in over the trail with awful tales of its horrors. Bennett was all excitement and seething life. Thousands of ungainly boats, rafts and scows were waiting to be launched. Already craft were beginning to come through from Lindeman, rushing down the fierce torrent between the two lakes. From where we were camped we saw them pass. There were ugly rapids and a fang-like rock, against which ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... required is a tennis ball, a broom stick and four rafts— one large and three small. The batsman and catcher stand on the big raft. On a small raft, ten yards away, stands the pitcher and the other two rafts are placed at easy swimming distance for bases. In striking, everything ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... blanket to cover their shivering frames. Their feet became blistered. Passing beyond the bounds of the open prairie, they sometimes found themselves in bogs, sometimes in tangled forests. There were streams to be waded or to be crossed upon such rude rafts as they could frame with their hatchets. Their clothes hung in tatters around them, and, most deplorable of all, their ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... called the place Pueblo de los Corazones. It is the entrance into many provinces on the South Sea. They who go to look for them, and do not enter there, will be lost. On the coast is no maize: the inhabitants eat the powder of rush and of straw, and fish that is caught in the sea from rafts, not having canoes. With grass and straw the women cover their nudity. They are ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... not far from the town that the whale threw him up when he discovered that he had no ticket. Jonah was disobedient, and of a fault-finding, complaining disposition, and deserves to be lightly spoken of, almost. The timbers used in the construction of Solomon's Temple were floated to Jaffa in rafts, and the narrow opening in the reef through which they passed to the shore is not an inch wider or a shade less dangerous to navigate than it was then. Such is the sleepy nature of the population Palestine's only good seaport ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... down, and those of her crew who remained hung on to the rafts that destroyers carry till they were picked up about the dawn by Shaitan, third in the line, who, at that hour, was in no shape to give much help. Here is Shaitan's tale. She saw the unknown cruisers overtake the flotilla, saw their leader switch on searchlights and open fire ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... great. Many expert swimmers shrink from it. Ellerthorpe has encountered this risk under almost every variety of circumstance. He has followed the drowning, unseen in the darkness of the night, in the depth of winter, under rafts of timber, under vessels at anchor or in docks, from great heights, and often to the bottom in great depths of water, and what is very remarkable, never in vain. Fortuna fortes favet (fortune favours the brave), ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... great lumber port," said Mr. Fluxion. "Those great rafts which float down the Rhine from Switzerland are mostly brought to this place. I hope the boys will have a chance to see one of those rafts, for they are stupendous affairs. One of them sometimes contains a hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... through the Province; and he gives them to understand that, if they should attempt to use violence, he would oppose them. The Helvetii, disappointed in this hope, tried if they could force a passage (some by means of a bridge of boats and numerous rafts constructed for the purpose; others, by the fords of the Rhone, where the depth of the river was least, sometimes by day, but more frequently by night), but being kept at bay by the strength of our works, and by the concourse of the soldiers, ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... Louis. With bitter disappointment, he and his two companions retraced their course, and at length approached Red River. Here they found the whole country flooded. Sometimes they waded to the knees, sometimes to the neck, sometimes pushed their slow way on rafts. Night and day, it rained without ceasing. They slept on logs placed side by side to raise them above the mud and water, and fought their way with hatchets through the inundated cane-brakes. They found no game but a bear, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... see, I have been on lost ships afore now, an' I know there is no larboard nor starboard rules when men are skeered. So I shall make my raft to hold the womenfolk, for the boats will be for the sailors—mark my word—and them that's wise will wait till the press is over and take the rafts." ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... two lines; both commanded by batteries on the farther, or Jersey, shore of the Delaware. The lower battery had been carried by troops; and when Howe arrived, the ships, though meeting lively opposition from the American galleys and fire-rafts, had freed the channel for large vessels to approach the upper obstructions. These were defended not only by a work at Red Bank on the Jersey shore, but also, on the other side of the stream, by a fort called Fort Mifflin, on Mud Island.[18] As the channel at this point, for a distance of half ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... constantly larger. The custom of fixing the widespreading horns of cattle on the prow gave these boats the alternative name of "broadhorns," but no accurate classification can be made of the various kinds of craft engaged in this vast traffic. Everything that would float, from rough rafts to finished barges, was commandeered into service, and what was found unsuitable for the strenuous purposes of commercial transportation was palmed off whenever possible on unsuspecting emigrants en route to the ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... of the Rhine that once heard them are gone forever. The vineyards creep up the hills on the light trellises, and the sun and the earth, as it were, fill the grapes with wine. The woods are as green as of old. The rafts go drifting down the light waves as on feet of air. But the river of history is changed, and one feels the spirit of the change with deep sadness as one listens to ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... work is "sluicing" the logs. When the boom reaches the run which connects the lake or river with the dam through the sluice of which the logs must pass, the chain of guard-logs is detached, and fastened in lines along both sides of the run, and the rafts are drawn off to one side and anchored to trees. The river-drivers, armed with their pick-poles, are then stationed along the run, on the dam, wherever they may ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... the slight grating sound of small cakes of ice, floating with various speed, full of content and promise, and where the water gurgles under a natural bridge, you may hear these hasty rafts hold conversation in an undertone. Every rill is a channel for the juices of the meadow. In the ponds the ice cracks with a merry and inspiriting din, and down the larger streams is whirled grating hoarsely, and crashing its way along, which was so lately a highway ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... sight I never saw in my life. Boats, canoes, hog-troughs, rafts hastily made of dry sticks, every sort of floating article, had been put in requisition, and were crowded with women, children, and plunder. There were several hundred people in all.... The whole convoy arrived safely at Sunbury, leaving ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... Porter and Samuel Taylor engaged in the business, obtaining their supplies from the Kittanninny Mountains. From this time the business developed rapidly, the village of Slateford being an outgrowth of it, and large rafts being employed to float the product down the Schuylkill to Philadelphia. By 1860 the industry had reached the capacity of 20,000 cases of slate, valued at $10 a case, annually. In 1839 quarries were opened in the Piscataquis River, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... killed on the torpedo-boat Winslow in the fight at Cardenas in the Spanish-American War, went down in seventeen minutes after she was struck. Gunner Harry R. Hood was killed by the explosion, but the remainder of the company got safely overside in rafts and boats. The submarine appeared after the sinking and took one of the survivors aboard as a prisoner. Lieutenant-Commander Bagley, with five others, landed in a small boat on the Scilly Islands while other ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... to behold a multitude of wretches, who all wanted to escape death, and all sought to save themselves, either in the boats or upon the rafts! The frigate's ladder was insufficient for so many: some threw themselves from the vessels, trusting to the end of a rope, which was scarcely able to bear a man's weight; some fell into the sea, and were recovered; ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... went down to the water; got down on their knees or laid down flat on the gangplank or on the rafts; and, scooping up the water in handfuls, washed their wet, heated faces and arms. Right here, too, on the shore, to one side, where a little grass had been left yet, they disposed themselves for dinner: placed in a circle ten of the most ripe watermelons, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... breakfasted for the second time, and entered the narrow gorge of the Piave. The road was cut out of the face of the rock. Below us the long lumber-rafts went shooting down the swift river. Above, on the right, were the jagged crests of Monte Furlon and Premaggiore, which seemed to us very wonderful, because we had not yet learned how jagged the Dolomites can be. At Perarolo, where the Boite joins the Piave, there is a lump of a mountain ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... approach, giving the semblance of a lake, on whose surface vessels of every nation lie at anchor, some with the sails hung out to dry, gracefully drooping from the taper spars; others refitting again for sea, and loading the huge pine-trunks moored as vast rafts to the stern. There were people everywhere, all was motion, life and activity. Jolly-boats with twenty oars, man-of-war gigs bounding rapidly past them with eight; canoes skimming by without a ripple, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... rain-water from our cistern, tightly covered; one barrel we left open to the warm sun and air, and the other we covered with the finest mosquito netting. The barrel left open was soon thronged with mosquitoes, constructing their little rafts of eggs and paving their way for the swarms of young wigglers that in the course of a week or two made their appearance in the open barrel in immense numbers. The process by which these wigglers hatch out into mosquitoes ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... enough. The evening after we had left New York, while we were still off the coast of Long Island, I saw on the poop a crowd of steerage passengers listening intently to harangues by speakers addressing them from the top of a pile of life rafts. Armenians, I was told, on their way to fight the Turks, all recruited in America by one frenzied woman who had seen her child cut in two by a German officer. Twilight was gathering as I joined the group, the sea was silvered by the light of an August moon floating serenely between swaying stays. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Would you jeer and gibe if you saw a man sinking in the waves time after time in spite o' rafts and life-preservers thrown out to him ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... brought down from the country on rafts (rakit), which are sometimes composed of rough timbers, but usually of large bamboos, with a platform of split bamboos to keep the cargo dry. They are steered at both head and stern, in the more rapid rivers with a kind of rudder, or scull rather, having a broad blade fixed in a fork or crutch. ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... too, it is to rehabilitate it as a great glacial lake. One can see its pellucid waters of clear amethystine blue and imagine the scenes that transpired when the ancestors of the present Indians fished, in rude dugouts, or on logs, or extemporized rafts, upon its surface. Now it is covered with brown, yellowish grass, with tree-clad slopes rising ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... the people huddled along the water's edge while scouts cast upstream and down, searching for a ford. When they returned with the news that there was no ford to be found, the tribesmen then sullenly went to work with flint axes and knives to make rafts. ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... Poppaea and the Augustians, and sat beneath the purple tent-roof, the oars struck the water, the boats moved, the golden cords stretched, and the raft with the feast and the guests began to move and describe circles on the pond. Other boats surrounded it, and other smaller rafts, filled with women playing on citharae and harps, women whose rosy bodies on the blue background of the sky and the water and in the reflections from golden instruments seemed to absorb that blue and those reflections, and to change ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... "I've sure already done it. I've got a dozen gangs strung out up the Yukon getting out logs. You-all'll see their rafts coming down after the river breaks. Cabins! They sure will be worth what a man can pay for them next fall. Lumber! It will sure go to top-notch. I've got two sawmills freighting in over the passes. They'll come down as soon as the lakes open up. And if you-all are thinking of needing lumber, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... them from Arabia Petraea, was to be effected in the first dark night; the sun, this evening, had set behind heavy storm-clouds that had discharged themselves in violent rain and had obscured the light of the waning moon. So they drew their boats and rafts down to the sea, and, unobserved by the sentinels on the mountain who had taken shelter from the storm under their little penthouses, they would have reached the opposite shore, the mountain, and perhaps even the oasis, if some one had not warned ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the party to proceed to the apartments at the Royal Hotel which he had bespoken for them. The commander made no further objections to the matter of expense, and the invitation was promptly accepted. A number of the masulah-boats, not the rafts, were engaged to land them. They were much like any other boat, though they were paddled, and not rowed. They saw the catamarans, constructed as the Hindu gentleman had described, paddled on the waves by a single man, wearing ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... farther up the stream. These were formidable forts of masonry, with an armament together of over a hundred guns, and garrisons of about six hundred men each. They also had auxiliary defenses: first, of a strong river barrier of log rafts and other obstructions connected by powerful chains, half a mile below the forts; second, of an improvised fleet of sixteen rebel gunboats and a formidable floating battery. None of Farragut's ships were ironclad. He had, from the beginning of the undertaking, maintained the theory that ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... anchor just inside the island, where blue lights were burned and rockets discharged to attract the attention of any who had escaped, and might have the means of reaching her; the boats were also manned and sent off, some to visit the scene of the disaster and others to search for any rafts or floating pieces of wreck on which the people might ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... lakes, now almost as familiar to many a cockney tourist as a hundred years since to Rob Roy Macgregor. We keep close by the water's edge, skirting a range of hills on which grow the finest strawberries in Scotland. Soon, to the right, we see many masts, many great rafts of timber, many funnels of steamers; and there, creeping along out in the middle of the river, is the steamer we are to join, which left Glasgow an hour before us. We have not stopped since we left Glasgow; thirty-five ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... nothing to him. At best he regards it as a means to an end—to make a living. All this must surely be of great consequence for the rise of a mental outlook that cares only for gain; and who will deny that colonial activity generates it? "Our rivulets and streams turn mill wheels and bring rafts into the valleys, as they do in Scotland. But not one ballad, not a single song, reminds us that on their banks men and women live who experience the happiness of love and the pangs of separation; that under each roof in the valleys life's joys and sorrows come and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... wood which is brought down the rivers Rokelle and Porto Logo from the upper countries. For this trade he contracts with the natives inhabiting the lands lying near the shores of the rivers, and the wood is floated down on rafts to Tombo, where ships come to take in their cargoes. The African oak is so heavy that the natives are obliged to raft it on wood of a much lighter specific gravity. This trade is of considerable benefit both to our colonists and the native tribes. It not only ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... or Dordrecht, which in the middle ages was the most powerful and wealthy commercial city in Holland. Huge rafts float down from the German forests, and at Dordrecht the logs are sawed by the many windmills. The Dutch province of Zealand is formed by nine large islands on the coast of the North Sea, and it has for its heraldic emblem a swimming lion with a ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... ankles. Though unskilful in managing canoes—an art to be learned, like riding and dancing, only in childhood—many villagers affect to walk about with a paddle, like the semi-aquatic Kru-men. Up country it is said they make rafts which are towed across the stream by ropes, when the swiftness of the current demands a ferry. The women are still afraid ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... word between us, save when I quarrelled bitterly with her brother, and he left the mill and went away. But she got over that mostly, though the lad's name was, never mentioned between us. That day I was so hungry for the sight of her that I got my field-glass—used to watch my vessels and rafts making across the bay—and trained it on the window where I knew she sat. I thought, it would amuse her, too, when I went back at night, if I told her what she had been doing. I laughed to myself at the thought of it as I adjusted ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... received by the inhabitants, and where he had seen with his own eyes that the houses and temples were decorated with golden ornaments, often massive in weight, and of almost priceless value. He floated his little band across the narrow strait on rafts. ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... midst of the seas, With thy rafts of cedar trees, Thy merchandise and thy ships, Thou, too, art become as naught, A phantom, a shadow, a thought, A name ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... donkeys, and ponies gave the best results, but do not abound in sufficient quantities to enable an army in Afghanistan to dispense with camels. A successful experiment in rafting, from Jelalabad to Dakka, was tried. The rafts consisted of inflated skins lashed together with a light framework; between June 4-13, seven thousand skins were used, and, in all, 885 soldiers and one thousand tons of stores were transported forty miles down the Kabul River, the journey taking five ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... of it all. But to get rid of it, turned out to be a very difficult task. He wandered along the bank of the Ekaterininsky Canal for half an hour or more and looked several times at the steps running down to the water, but he could not think of carrying out his plan; either rafts stood at the steps' edge, and women were washing clothes on them, or boats were moored there, and people were swarming everywhere. Moreover he could be seen and noticed from the banks on all sides; it would look suspicious for a man to go down on ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the swift wind, showers of rain poured down without intermissions, filling all sides round. And, O lord of men, all around there began to flow many rivers covered with foam and turbid with mud; and these bearing volumes of water spread over the frothy rafts rushed down with tremendous roar uprooting trees. And afterwards when that sound had ceased and the air had arisen they (each of them) cautiously came out of their coverts and met together, O descendant ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... repeatedly plunged under water, or dashed against the sides of the boats underneath, that many of the landsmen continued to throw themselves out of the stern window on the upper deck, preferring what appeared to me the more precarious chance of reaching the boats by swimming. Rafts made of spars, hencoops, etc., were also ordered to be constructed, for the twofold purpose of forming an intermediate communication with the boats—a purpose, by the bye, which they very imperfectly answered—and of serving as a last point of retreat, should the further ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... Boats and rafts appear more and more frequently on the river. From some of them men are catching fish in nets; on others they bring the harvest to granaries, or bellowing cattle to their stables. With other boats visits are made to ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... from a point far up the stream. He listened and the sound pleased him. The lone, weird note was in full accord with the night and his mood, and presently he knew it. It was some mountaineer on a raft singing a plaintive song of his own distant hills. Huge rafts launched on the headwaters of the stream in the mountains in the eastern part of the state came in great numbers down the river, but oftenest at this time of the year. Some stopped at Frankfort, and others went into the Ohio for the cities ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the British to avoid confusion. It was well that this was done just at this time, for on December 3, 1914, the Germans made a fierce onslaught along the entire front of thirteen miles between Ypres and Dixmude, bringing into use a great number of stanch rafts propelled by expert watermen, thus carrying thousands of the German forces over and along ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... Yankee schooner. In my own bush days a few counties further down in that same peninsula, I recall heaps of white oak slabs in the forest which I was told were the remains of the timber-men who had gone through buying and cutting out the oaks for square timber that floated away in rafts, probably to build tramp steamers in England. The bush farmer hired to wield the broad-axe on that oak was as much an industrialist as any moulder in a foundry. He would have fought with his naked fists any agitator who proposed to ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... in this extremity. But before she comes to that, she has many expedients. The mind does not know what diet it can feed on until it has been brought to the starvation point. Its experience is like that of those who have been long drifting about on rafts or in long-boats. There is nothing out of which it will not contrive to get some sustenance. A person of note, long held captive for a political offence, is said to have owed the preservation of his reason to a pin, out of which he contrived to ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... small steam tugs were owned by Mr. Bobbsey for use in hauling lumber boats, and lumber rafts about Lake Metoka. Some of these tugs were always at the dock, and one always had steam up, ready for ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on a Houseboat • Laura Lee Hope
... to the houses scattered over the country; smaller canals surround the fields and orchards, pastures and kitchen-gardens, serving at once as boundary wall, hedge, and road-way; every house is a little port. Ships, boats, rafts, move about in all directions, as in other places carts and carriages. The canals are the arteries of Holland, and the water her life-blood. But even setting aside the canals, the draining of the lakes, and the defensive works, on every side are seen the traces of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the Tigris near a town now called Senn. During the first of these five days, they saw on the opposite side of the Tigris a large town called Kaenae, from whence they received supplies of provisions, brought across by the inhabitants upon rafts supported by inflated skins.[27] ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... caressing lumps of white, cotton-looking dumpy dogs and toting them around, to the disgust of the lookers-on—with all the fondness and blind infatuation of a mamma with her first born, bran new baby. Wherever you see any quantity of white and black loafers—Philadelphia, for instance, you'll see rafts of ugly and wretched looking curs. Boz says poverty and oysters have a great affinity; in this country, for oysters read dogs. Who has not, that ever travelled over this remarkable country, had occasion to be down on dogs? Who ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... the Ohio, above the camp, by means of seventy-eight rafts. They worked hard, and formed ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... great scamps, exercising their dirty professions: teaching dogs to catch rats in the the sewers, and blacking shoes on ball nights in the passage of the Opera—amateur wrestlers, who permitted themselves to be thrown by the Hercules of the booths—or fishing at noontime from rafts; all of these occupations he followed to some extent, and, some months after he came out of the house of correction, he was arrested again for a petty theft—a pair of old shoes prigged from a shop-window. Result: a year in the prison of Sainte Pelagie, where ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... our sampan arrives opposite and reveals a curious two-storied cave temple, with many gayly dressed people, pleasure sampans, and bamboo rafts. This is the Kum-yam-ngan, a Chinese Buddhist temple dedicated to the Goddess of Mercy. It is the home of flocks of sacred pigeons, and the shrine to which many pilgrims yearly come; the pilgrims manage to keep their feathered friends in a chronic state of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... said Lena sharply. "I've been at her house. She has rafts of nurses to do all the waiting on her children. I guess she doesn't let them trouble her any more than she can help. If she's unlucky enough to have the squally little things, she keeps ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... were kept astern of the ship; a small quantity of bread, water, and other necessary articles, were put into them; two canoes, which we had on board, were lashed together and put into the water; rafts were made, and all floating ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... of July, the forces were embarked in one hundred and twenty-five whale-boats, and nine hundred batteaux, with the artillery on rafts. The vast flotilla proceeded slowly down the lake, with banners and pennons fluttering in the summer breeze; arms glittering in the sunshine, and martial music echoing along the wood-clad mountains. With Abercrombie went Lord Howe, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... where the Russians crouch, scream hurricane gales and white billows and myriad sea birds. The ships have been wrecked. The Russians are on an unknown island. Day dawn, December 8, lying half buried in the sand, Bering breathes his last. On rafts made of wreckage the remnant of his crew find way back to Asia, but they have discovered a trail across the sea to a new land. Fur hunters are moving from the east, westward. Fur hunters are moving from the west, eastward. These two tides will meet ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... other troops, to Rutherford Creek. They were hotly pursued by the second and the third battalions, but the high water in the creek made fording out of the question, and the Confederates escaped on boats, rafts, ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... river again, looking for a place where he could safely cross to explore the country on the opposite side. After ascending from the spot where he found the letters for five or six days, he concluded they could cross by means of rafts. In the construction of these rafts he invited the help of the natives of the neighbourhood. He was probably up near the Chocolate Mountains and the Cumanas, who were hostile to Alarcon, and whose sorcerer had attempted to destroy him by means of the magic ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the Silures to a more fierce resistance, and it cost the Romans many lives, and it took them many years, to break their power. The strangest sight that met the invaders was in Anglesey, after they had crossed the Menai on horses or on rafts. The druids tried to terrify them by the rites of their religion. The dark groves, the women dressed in black and carrying flaming torches, the aged priests—the sight paralysed the Roman soldiers, but only ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... different chiefs, ignorant of the real cause of the alarm, contended themselves with waiting in their several quarters; under arms. About four thousand of the sultan's troops, in this interim, crossed the river in boats and rafts which had been prepared for the purpose. The enemy's foot, stationed to oppose the passage, terrified by the alarm in camp and the approach of the sultan's forces, fled in confusion without waiting to be attacked. Before the morning ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... swimmers were across, they held the ropes, which were fastened at the other bank, taut, so that those who could not swim could cross by holding on to them. Some attempted to cross on hastily built rafts and in collapsible canvas boats. More of these were lost than of the swimmers who, partially submerged, were not so good targets for ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... of Lynch's creek and the Pedee. On the east flows the Pedee; on the west Clark's creek, a navigable stream, issuing from Lynch's creek above; and on the north lies Lynch's creek, nearly choked up by rafts of logs, but wide and deep. The island is high river swamp, and large, of itself affording much provision and live stock, as did all the Pedee river swamp at that day. In places, there were open cultivated ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... persons escaped in ships and on rafts, and, carried to the nations east and west the tidings of the appalling catastrophe, which has survived to our own time in the Flood and Deluge legends of the different nations of ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly |
