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More "Porpoise" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feet. But the water-sprites are round him still, To cross his path and work him ill: They bade the wave before him rise; They flung the sea-fire in his eyes; And they stunned his ears with the scallop-stroke, With the porpoise heave and the drum-fish croak. Oh, but a weary wight was he When he reached the foot of the dog-wood tree. Gashed and wounded, and stiff and sore, He laid him down on the sandy shore; He blessed the force of the charmed line, And ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... from Cape Mensurado, we set our course E. by N. the said cape being E.N.E. of us, and the river Sesto E. The 20th we fell in with Cape Mensurado or Mesurado, which bore S.E. 2 leagues distant. This cape may be easily known, as it rises into a hummock like the head of a porpoise. Also towards the S.E. there are three trees, the eastmost being the highest, the middle one resembling a hay-stack, and that to the southward like a gibbet. Likewise on the main there are four ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... remarked Ebony, going to a pool a little further from the fountain-head, where the water had cooled somewhat. There the negro dropped his simple garments, and was soon rolling like a black porpoise in his warm bath. It was only large enough for one, but close to it was another small pool big enough for several men. There Mark and Hockins were soon disporting joyously, while the Secretary looked on and laughed. Evidently he did not in the circumstances deem warm water ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... with an abundance of life. The black back of a porpoise showed above the surface; far away the sun glinted on the silver scales of a leaping tarpon. The red sides of a mangrove snapper were seen as it tried in vain to escape the jaws of a steel-gray barracuda, and a moment later ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... When a derelict porpoise was cast on the shore Our village policeman was much to the fore; He measured the beast from its tip to its tail, And blandly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... may catch some smaller creatures, though," exclaimed Willy. "I have just found a harpoon, and Paul Lizard has often told me that he is a first-rate harpooner, and has struck many a porpoise and dolphin in ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... saw a shark or porpoise swimming away from that schooner," he began patiently. "I saw it myself. You recall, on that night anything that moved in the water burned like fire. The ship was brilliant, the oars of the dinghy shone. The thing you saw had nothing to ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... and it was fitted for living in the water, though breathing the atmosphere. It had the vertebral column and general bodily form of a fish, but to that were added the head and breast-bone of a lizard, and the paddles of the whale tribes. The beak, moreover, was that of a porpoise, and the teeth were those of a crocodile. It must have been a most destructive creature to the fish of those ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... which the mighty storms of the month of falling leaves root up from the bottom of the ocean, and scatter along the margin of the feathery strand where we now dwell. Upon his face, which was shaped like that of a porpoise, he had a beard of the colour of ooze. Around his neck hung a string of great sea-shells, upon his forehead was bound another made of the teeth of the cayman, and in his hand was a staff formed of the rib of a whale. But, if our people were frightened ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... possible that the membrane-connected fingers and forearm of the galeopithecus might be greatly lengthened by natural selection, and this, as far as the organs of flight are concerned, would convert it into a bat." "The framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of a porpoise, and leg of a horse, the same number of vertebrae forming the neck of the giraffe and of the elephant, and innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... the words, and they "disturbed" him, to put it mildly. Evidently he had forgotten the peril to which all persons are exposed in tropical waters, and, as the truth was impressed upon him with such suddenness, he uttered a "whiff" like a porpoise and began swimming with fierce energy toward the shore. In fact, he never put forth so much effort in all his life. The expectation of feeling a huge man-eating monster gliding beneath you when in the water is enough to shake the nerves of the strongest swimmer. He kept diving ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... wild beasts upon their dresses. Over the fish was an immense cloud of sea-gulls—so many were there, and so thick were they, that the fluttering of their wings was like a swift fall of snow. Over the gulls were eagles soaring and watching their chance. The halibut, the cod, the porpoise, and the finback whale had followed the little ones out of the deep; and there was confusion worse confounded, and chaos came again in the hours of wild excitement that followed the advent of the small fry, for each and all ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... nothing but abuse for the journalism of their own time, it is curious to note that many of those who hurl the shafts of ridicule and contempt at the present period have only words of praise for 1850. Without, however, going so far as these stern descendants of CATO, it may be affirmed that the porpoise-hided Jack of all Journalisms, as we know him, never had a greater power, nor exercised it over a larger scope ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... 'un grand poisson,' but, biologically, it is no fish at all, being a mammal, mid-way between a dolphin and a porpoise." ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... rock home. When the lion felt something alight on his back, he dove to the bottom of the pool in a flash, taking the guard with him. But no human being could stick on the back of a slippery sea lion, and the guard soon came up to the surface of the water blowing and spouting like a porpoise. ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery
... them a good seaman in calm weather," Sieur Radisson observed; and he put them through marine drill all that week. La Chesnaye so far recovered that he sometimes kept me company at the bowsprit, where we watched the clumsy gambols of the porpoise, racing and leaping and turning somersets in mid-air about the ship. Once, I mind the St. Pierre gave a tremor as if her keel had grated a reef; and a monster silver-stripe heaved up on our lee. 'Twas a finback whale, M. Radisson explained; and he protested against the impudence of ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... timid. Trepidation and the coldness of the water made him turn back to regain the hole he crept out of. In coming near the staging where the sentinel was posted, he heard the poor fellow breathe, and at length got sight of him;—"Ah," says Paddy, "here is a porpoise, and I'll stick him with my bayonet." On which the terrified young man exclaimed—"don't kill me, I am a prisoner." The sentinel held out his hand, and helped him on to the staging, and then fired his gun to give the alarm. The guard turned out, and the officers ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... Ben trying to find an easy path,—which was no small thing to do in that utter darkness,—and Luke coming up behind, breathing like a porpoise, but vowing he could carry Larry a mile were it necessary. Boxer kept as far to the rear as he dared without missing their trail, and the life of any Filipino who might have appeared would not have been worth a moment's purchase at ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... Readings from Dickens are also spoken of. An occasional whale is seen blowing in the distance, and many grampuses come rolling about the ship,—most inelegant brutes, some three or four times the size of a porpoise. Each in turn comes up, throws himself round on the top of the sea, exposing nearly half his body, ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... comfortable; but all our food appeared to be damaged. As for the pork, we were cheated out of more than half of it, and when it was obtained one would have judged from its motley hues, exhibiting the consistency and appearance of variegated fancy soap, that it was the flesh of the porpoise or sea-hog, and had been an inhabitant of the ocean rather than the sty. The peas were about as digestible as grape-shot; and the butter—had it not been for its adhesive properties to retain together ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... must have been very large, seven or eight feet being the ordinary length, while specimens measuring from twenty to thirty feet are not uncommon. The large head is pointed, like that of the Porpoise; the jaws contain a number of conical teeth, of reptilian form and character; the eyeball was very large, as may be seen by the socket, and it was supported by pieces of bone, such as we find now only in the eyes of birds of prey and in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... in composite, cream mottled, carp, turbot, tench, perch, fresh sturgeon with whelks, porpoise roasted, memis fried, crayfish, prawns, eels roasted with lamprey, a leche called the white leche flourished with hawthorn leaves and red haws, and a march pane, garnished with figures of angels, having among them an image of St. Katherine holding ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... into play then, and soon captured the obese footman, who puffed like a porpoise in the firm and muscular grasp of the detective, who nabbed him just at the head of ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... a long time and was beginning to think that his trip had been in vain, when he heard a soft crackling of the twigs above him, a heavy tread crashing through the bushes, a puffing snorting breath from the porpoise-like Pat, and he held his own breath and lay very still. Suppose Pat should take a new trail and discover his hiding place? His heart pounded with great dull thuds. But Pat slid heavily down to the little clearing below him, fumbled a moment with his key, and then in a gruff ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail, "There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail. See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance? Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance? Will you, won't you, will you, won't ...
— Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. With a Proem by Austin Dobson • Lewis Carroll
... the shore, The shore of the Bristol Channel, A sea-green Porpoise carried away His wrapper of scarlet flannel. And when he came to observe his feet, Formerly garnished with toes so neat, His face at once became forlorn On perceiving that ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... corpulence, obesity; plumpness &c adj.; embonpoint, corporation, flesh and blood, lustihood. hugeness &c adj.; enormity, immensity, monstrosity. giant, Brobdingnagian, Antaeus, Goliath, Gog and Magog, Gargantua, monster, mammoth, Cyclops; cachalot, whale, porpoise, behemoth, leviathan, elephant, hippopotamus; colossus; tun, cord, lump, bulk, block, loaf, mass, swad, clod, nugget, bushel, thumper, whooper, spanker, strapper; Triton among the minnows [Coriolanus]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... for his prey. Numerous gulls were gathered in large companies on the trees along the river-shore; alligators lay on its surface, diving with a sudden plash at the approach of our canoe; and occasionally a porpoise emerged from the water, showing himself for a moment and then disappearing again. Sometimes we startled a herd of capivara, resting on the water's edge; and once we saw a sloth, sitting upon the branch of an Imbauba (Cecropia) ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... evening on the forecastle head. He was intelligent, very strong, and of proved courage. Incidentally we are told, so exact is our narrator, that Tom had the finest pigtail for thickness and length of any man in the Navy. This appendage, much cared for and sheathed tightly in a porpoise skin, hung half way down his broad back to the great admiration of all beholders and to the ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... be, with recovered scraps and glimpses and other intimations, only never yet for such a triumph of that particular sense. To be still frank, he was little less than a monster—for mere unresisting or unresilient mass of personal presence I mean; so that I fairly think of him as a form of bland porpoise, violently blowing in an age not his own, as by having had to exchange deep water for thin air. Thus he impressed me as with an absolute ancientry of type, of tone, of responsible taste, above all; this last I mean in literature, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... classification has been that of arranging organisms in accordance with their natural affinities, by comparing organism with organism, for the purpose of ascertaining which of the constituent organs are of the most invariable occurrence, and therefore of the most typical signification. A porpoise, for instance, has a large number of teeth, and in this feature resembles most fish, while it differs from all mammals. But it also gives suck to its young. Now, looking to these two features alone, should we say that a porpoise ought to be classed as ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... lightning and combinations of forces not found in any one creature, are common to the popular fancy. In Japan, the kappa, half monkey half tortoise, which seizes children bathing in the rivers, as real to millions of the native common folk as is the shark or porpoise; the flying-weasel, that moves in the whirlwind with sickle-like blades on his claws, which cut the face of the unfortunate; the wind-god or imp that lets loose the gale or storm; the thunder-imp or hairy, cat-like creature ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... step in the anatomy of the Cetacea is unquestionably due to Cuvier; but his dissections were almost confined to the genus Delphinus, or the common Porpoise of our coasts. I repeated all his dissections, and found them, as they almost always were, scrupulously exact; but when I came to examine Cetacea with whalebone instead of teeth, I was surprised to find how different, ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... Here's poor Rory come to see you before you die, and receive your blessing. What, man! Don't despair—you have been a great sinner, 'tis true. What then? There's a righteous judge above—ain't there?—Yes, yes, he's agoing—He minds me no more than a porpoise, the land crabs will have him, I see ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... forward, bawling blue hell; and just as I came by the foremast, something struck me right through the forearm and stuck there. I put my other hand up, and by George! it was the grain; the beasts had speared me like a porpoise. 'Cap'n!' I cried.—'What's wrong?' says he.—'They've grained me,' says I.—'Grained you?' says he. 'Well, I've been looking for that.'——'And by God,' I cried, 'I want to have some of these beasts murdered for it!'—'Now, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... came to our camp early, followed by his squaws bearing gifts of salmon, porpoise meat, clams and crabs; and at his command two of the girls of his family picked me a basketful of delicious wild strawberries. He sat motionless by my fire all the forenoon, smoking my leaf tobacco and pondering deeply. After the noon meal, which I shared with him, he called Billy, my interpreter, ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... yes, he sleeps like a porpoise now, and white as a wax he looked up there in the Cohue Royale," put in a centenier ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... It shook considerably, but he kept on, and had almost reached the opposite side, when the tree broke, and he disappeared in the cold water. He rose immediately, and, shaking the water from his face, struck out for the shore, puffing and blowing like a porpoise. A few lusty strokes brought him to the bank, and, as he picked up a handful of stones, he ...
— Frank, the Young Naturalist • Harry Castlemon
... bay-window in a one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. At one he disappears, presently emerges from a bathing-machine, and may be seen, a kind of salmon-coloured porpoise, splashing about in the ocean. After that he may be viewed in another bay-window on the ground floor, eating a strong lunch; and after that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... after the Germans sought retaliation by attacking a British squadron, but the effort miscarried. The British cruiser Birmingham caught a glimpse of her wake and with a well-aimed shot destroyed her periscope. The submarine dived, but shortly afterwards came up again making what was called a porpoise dive—that is to say, she came up just long enough for the officer in the conning tower to locate the enemy, then submerged again. Brief, however, as had been the appearance of the conning tower, the British put a shell into it and in a few minutes the submarine ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... dirty salt water, which must, in the nature of things, be associated in every one's mind with sick stomachs and lost dinners. The same people get so tired of their interminable view of poetry, that they will nearly crowd each other overboard, to get sight of a stray flying fish, or porpoise, or the back fin of a shark sticking out of the water. This trip to Hilton Head came near taking the poetry ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... in among the dirty welter, and the Puncher's bow pitched suddenly as the first big bar wave lifted her; a second later her propellers chug-chug-chugged in surface spume as she kicked upward like a porpoise diving. ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... weather the storm, which I knew was inevitable. I happened to be looking over the stern watching the clouds gathering in dark, black masses, when a strange upheaval of the waters took place almost at my feet, and a huge black fish, like an exaggerated porpoise, leaped into the air close to the stern of ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... all the precision he could summon, caught the grip of his muley in both hands. He made his fall heavily to the ground, landing on his shoulder. But as he keeled from the saddle the last thing that rolled over the saddle, like the flash of a porpoise fin, was the barrel of the rifle, secure in his hands. Karg, on horseback, was already bending over him, revolver in hand, but the shot was never fired. A thirty-thirty bullet from the ground knocked the gun into the air and tore every knuckle from Karg's hand. ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... ornamentation of the dish was almost as important as the dressing of the food. It was gilded, it was silvered, it was painted, it was surrounded with flame. From the boar and the peacock down to such strange food as the porpoise and the hedgehog, every dish had its own setting and its own sauce, very strange and very complex, with flavorings of dates, currants, cloves, vinegar, sugar and honey, of cinnamon, ground ginger, sandalwood, saffron, brawn and pines. ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... you look like a boiled porpoise with parsley sauce!' exclaimed Mr. Waffles, pulling up where the unfortunate youth was spluttering and getting emptied like a jug. 'Confound it!' added he, as the water came gurgling out of his mouth, 'but you must ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... morning sun, half way to the zenith, burned bright in a cloudless sky, whilst in the east and west distant banks of purple mist coloured the liquid plain with a cool green-blue, a celadon tint that reposed the eye and the brain. The porpoise raised in sport his dark, glistening back to the light of day, and plunged into the cool depths as if playing off the "amate sponde" of the Mediterranean; and sandpipers and curlews, the latter wild ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... it be that this warm hand is that of man; that the tradition of our forefathers is indeed true; and that this fish-devouring monster is going to destroy me after a mystick fashion of his own, so different from that of the porpoise and the sturgeon, whom I have escaped so well! Is it for a fate like this, that, avoiding the Delaware river and the profound Hudson, I have returned to these scenes of my nativity and earliest youth! Is it for an end so cruel as this, that I have taken such care of myself upon ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... evening, probably nine o'clock, with a bright fire burning, and the boys spreading down their beds for the night, suddenly the horses were heard running, and the next moment they hobbled into camp like a school of porpoise, trampling over the beds and crowding up to the fire and the wagon. They almost knocked down some of the boys, so sudden was their entrance. Then they set up a terrible nickering for mates. The boys went amongst them, and horses that were timid and shy almost caressed ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... greeted me quite cheerily when I at last managed to clamber up on the poop and make my way aft to where he was standing, holding on to everything I could clutch to maintain my footing. The ship was rolling from side to side like a porpoise, and the wind nearly blew the hair off my head, my cap having gone away to leeward the first step I took up the ladderway on emerging from ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... dim twilight recess, far in among the perilous rocks, the head of a young seal, which would instantly dive again and be seen no more. They watched the salmon splash in the shallower creeks where the sea had scooped out a tiny bay of ruddy sand, and then a slowly rolling porpoise would show his black back above the water and silently disappear again. All this was pleasant enough on a pleasant morning, in fresh sea-air and sunlight, in holiday-time; and was there any reason, Mackenzie ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... near Brandenburg, with its gardens, vines, and whitened cottages:—on the top of this Harlungsherg the Wends "set up their god Triglaph;" a three-headed Monster of which I have seen prints, beyond measure ugly. Something like three whale's-cubs combined by boiling, or a triple porpoise dead-drunk (for the dull eyes are inexpressible, as well as the amorphous shape): ugliest and stupidest of all false gods. This these victorious Wends set up on the Harlungsberg, Year 1023; and worshipped after their sort, benighted ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... to find each week a "leader," a translation, say, from In Allgemeine Fishcherei-Zeitwung, or Economic Circular No. 10, "Mussels in the Tributaries of the Missouri," or the last biennial report of the Superintendent of Fisheries of Wisconsin, or a scientific paper on "The Porpoise in Captivity" reprinted by permission of Zoologica, of the New York Zoological Society. To find each week for reprint a poem appropriate in sentiment to the feeling of the paper. One of the "Salt Water Ballads" would do, or John Masefield singing of "the whale's way," or "Down to the ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... swimming. Some of the latter, such as the pala (not the palu)—a long, scaleless, beautifully-formed fish, with a head of bony plates and teeth like a rip-saw—are of great size, and afford splendid sport, as they are game fighters and almost as powerful as a porpoise. They run to over 100 lbs., and yet are by no means a coarse fish. In the shallow water on the top of this mountain reef there are some eight or nine varieties of rock cod, none of which were of any great size; but far below, at a depth of from fifty to seventy ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... Her enormous dimensions gradually grew smaller to the eye, and the necks of the crowd were almost cricked as they gazed into the air. Gradually the whale became a porpoise, and the porpoise became a gudgeon. The ascensional movement did not cease until the "Go-Ahead" had reached a height of fourteen thousand feet. But the air was so free from mist that ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... The porpoise is a long, sleek fish without scales, black on the back, and white and gray beneath. He is from four to ten feet in length, and his sociability and good-nature are proverbial ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... in this frame of mind she reached the hill which commanded a view of the three-cornered field and the snug cottage, and down she rushed to embrace her darling Andy and his gentle bride. Puffing and blowing like a porpoise, bang she went into the cottage, and Matty being the first person she met, she flung herself upon her, and covered her ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... waves were white, and red the morn, In the noisy hour when I was born; And the whale it whistled, the porpoise rolled And the dolphins bared their backs of gold; And never was heard such an outcry wild As welcomed to life ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... four square haystacks quite round, and I lost twenty tons of hay; it twisted the iron lamp-post at the entrance just as a porpoise twists a harpoon, and took up a sow and her litter of pigs, that were about a hundred yards from the back of the house, and landed them safe over the house to the front, with the exception of the old sow putting ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... blackbirds, bullfinches, chaffinches and green canaries, a reward was formerly paid for the destruction of birds in St Michael's, and it is said that over 400,000 were destroyed in several successive years between 1875 and 1885. There are valuable fisheries of tunny, mullet and bonito. The porpoise, dolphin and whale are also common. Whale-fishing is a profitable industry, with its headquarters at Fayal, whence the sperm-oil is exported. Eels are found in the rivers. The only indigenous reptile ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... was the "Porpoise," and she was commanded by Captain Tubb. He put me very much in mind of Captain Cobb, except that he was considerably stouter. We sailed with a convoy of some fifty other vessels of all sizes and rigs; the larger portion having generally to lay to for the "Porpoise," which, with her Captain, ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... most beautiful smooth bit of ice, hain't you, larfin', and hoopin', and hallooin' like one possessed, when presently sowse he goes in over head and ears? How he outs, fins, and flops about, and blows like a porpoise properly frightened, don't he? and when he gets out there he stands; all shiverin' and shakin', and the water a squish-squashin' in his shoes, and his trousers all stickin' slimsey-like to his legs. Well, he sneaks off home, lookin' like a fool, ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... main course were served dried squid and porpoise, and fresh flying-fish and bonito and shrimp. The feast was complete with mangoes, oranges, and pineapples, also bananas ripened in the expeditious way of the Marquesas. They bury them in a deep hole lined with cracked candlenuts and grass and cover all with earth. In several days—and they ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... this river beyond the mouth of the Saguenay, and often in water but little over their own depth. On the western coast they also enter the great rivers, and have been captured up the Yukon seven hundred miles from its mouth. In their columnar movements they somewhat resemble the porpoise,—long processions being frequently seen, composed of three in a row, perhaps led ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... thing Miss Jenny saw, as she looked back before closing the room door, was Mr Fledgeby in the act of plunging and gambolling all over his bed, like a porpoise or dolphin in its native element. She then shut the bedroom door, and all the other doors, and going down stairs and emerging from the Albany into the busy streets, took omnibus for Saint Mary Axe: pressing on the road all the gaily-dressed ladies ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... army was established at Barita. At this time the squadron consisted of the frigates "Cumberland" (flagship), "Potomac," and "Raritan"; the steam frigate "Mississippi"; the sloops-of-war "Falmouth," "John Adams," and "St. Mary's"; the steam-sloop "Princeton"; and the brigs "Lawrence," "Porpoise," and "Somers." Before the close of the war some of these ships were recalled, at least one was wrecked, and the squadron was from ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... obliging as to attend Lord Lovat, with his archers, all the way to Angouleme. He had the luck to procure a cursed little chaise, where Lord Lovat was in a manner buried alive under the unwieldy bulk of this enormous porpoise." This relation, so different from that given by Mr. Arbuthnot, weakens the veracity of both accounts, and leads one to infer that the long narrative by the reverend gentleman of Lord Lovat's adventures in the Bastille were ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... space-cruiser he had ordered had been completed, and requested Urvan and his commander-in-chief to tow it to Norlamin, piloted by a ray. He then jumped to Dasor, there interviewing Carfon and being assured of the full co-operation of the porpoise-men. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... the otter remains, and comes so near the mighty City as just the other side of the well-known Lock, the portal through which a thousand boats at holiday time convey men and women to breathe pure air. The porpoise, and even the seal, it is said, ventures to Westminster sometimes; the otter to Kingston. Thus, the sea sends its denizens past the vast multitude that surges over the City bridges, and the last link with the olden time, the otter, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... be assured that, if he had been destitute of the capability of communing with the more exalted thoughts that appertain to human nature, he would have cared no more for the corpse of the stranger than for the dead body of a seal or porpoise which might have been cast up by the waves. We respect the corporeal frame of Man, not merely because it is the habitation of a rational, but of an immortal Soul. Each of these Sages was in sympathy ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Coming up, she splashed about in the pond trying to get her bearings. Then, seeing Harriet's struggle with Margery, Jane headed for them in a series of porpoise-like lunges. The last reach brought a hand in contact with one of Margery's feet. Jane gave it a mighty tug. "Put her under, put her under! That'll stop ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills - The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains • Janet Aldridge
... ears save the soft puff now and then of a porpoise, the slow creak of the masts as we swayed gently on the swell, the patter of the reef-points, and the occasional flap of the hanging sails. An awning covered the fore and after parts of the schooner, under which the men composing the watch on deck lolled in sleepy indolence, overcome ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... almost wholly ludicrous. Whether sleeping, quarrelling, or playing, whether curious, frightened, or angry, its interest is continuously humorous, but the Adelie penguin in the water is another thing; as it darts to and fro a fathom or two below the surface, as it leaps porpoise-like into the air or swims skimmingly over the rippling surface of a pool, it excites nothing but admiration. Its speed probably appears greater than it is, but the ability to twist and turn and the general control of movement is both ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... me to him instantly! Don't dare say he's out, for I know that he's at home! It's a matter of life and death! Woman dying—children starving—and the devil to pay generally. Wake Snakes, you fat porpoise, and conduct ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... p. 17, of a Lebaudy air-ship, we have a good type of the semi-rigid craft. In shape it somewhat resembles an enormous porpoise, with a sharply-pointed nose. The whole vessel is not as symmetrical as a Zeppelin dirigible, but its inventors claim that the sharp prow facilitates the steady displacement of the air during flight. The stern is rounded so as to provide sufficient ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... must sit still; if you keep moving, you'll stay where you are—that's all! There, by Gosh! we're in for it." At this point of the interesting dialogue, the young 'ooman gave a sudden lurch to larboard, and turned the boat completely over. The boatman, blowing like a porpoise, soon strode across the upturned bark, and turning round, beheld the drenched "fare" clinging ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... satisfied with a mere "tumulus inanis" at which to observe the usual solemnities; they thought it was possible to obtain the soul of the departed in some tangible transmigrated form. On the beach, near where a person had been drowned, and whose body was supposed to have become a porpoise, or on the battlefield, where another fell, might have been seen, sitting in silence, a group of five or six, and one a few yards before them with a sheet of native cloth spread out on the ground in front of him. Addressing some god of the family he said, ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... still was it that the field and stands might have been empty. Yet, though I tried, I could not keep my eyes closed. I opened them to watch the Rube. I knew Spears felt the same as I, for he was blowing like a porpoise and muttering to himself: "Mebee the Rube won't last an' I've no one ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... man with the spectacles was presently overtaken by a stout, elderly woman, who landed in the exhausted condition of a porpoise that has come ashore, and stood regardless of everything but her own weight, while member after member of the party straggled up. No sooner did this group espy the artist than they moved in his direction. "There's a painter." "I wonder what he's painting." "Maybe ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... called at the store of Laneville & Co. No one was in save a small lad, who, to his inquiry, replied that all were sick. The youth was a short, porpoise-shaped lad, who appeared quite independent for his age and station, and told George that he had better call the next day, as the folks would n't be down. In an instant George suspected the cause of their absence. Though ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... horrid place,' said Aunt Ada, when alone with her sister; 'and such a porpoise of a woman! Gillian should not have represented ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fish we were best acquainted with sturgeon, grampus, porpoise, seals, stingrays whose tails are very dangerous, brits, mullets, white salmon, trouts, soles, plaice, herring, conyfish, rockfish, eels, lampreys, catfish, shad, perch of three sorts, crabs, shrimps, crevises, oysters, cockles, and mussels. But the most strange fish is a small one so like the ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... silly to any witness; wallowing along the floor like a porpoise acting furtive in the ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... finally coming to the surface—like a porpoise, Ruth gigglingly suggested, to breathe! "I was sure one of those awful creatures was stamping on me. If I haven't suffered this day! Such spots as were not already black and blue, are now properly bruised. I shall ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... (HUZZA PORPOISE).—This is the common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... is Gyropus. Mr. C. Cook has found Gyropus ovalis of Europe abundant on the Guinea pig. A species is also found on the porpoise; an interesting fact, as this is the only insect we know of that lives parasitically on ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... 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, to swallow yon black porpoise." ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... a song thrush and that of the jackdaw; or to discern how the cuckoo's head is hollow where the organ of the love of offspring is located, whilst the same part presents a striking protuberance in the partridge. In the dolphin, the porpoise, the seal, and many other animals, the male could there be distinguished from the female by the form of the back part of the skull, where the same organ lies. Nor could any one fail to mark the form of head ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... length the water breaking some forty yards away, and the head and back of an animal appears in sight. Now another, and then a third, come into view. After cautiously glancing around, the creatures dive, with a roll like that of a porpoise, but shortly appear again. Our Indian, pushing the light canoe from amid the grass, paddles forward with eager strokes. One of our party fires, and misses, the echoes resounding from the wood-covered shores, and from island to island, till lost in the distance; ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... some houses in the borough, and an omnium gatherum like this was a good time to do the civil thing to him. There he is; peep into the card-room, and you'll see his great porpoise back, the same old man that Harry in his benevolence assisted to a chair. He shook hands with Leonard, and told him there was a snug desk at the ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... story it had to tell. Before then it had only blown in fitful gusts. Then again it blew steadily. I had caught some whispers from it years before. On the deck of the great, populous, electric-lighted ocean-hotel that was hurrying me across the Atlantic, racing the porpoise-schools to get to New York City; and later at Washington, when the red sunset-fires burned low behind the Capitol, it spoke to me in the wonderful, beloved voice I shall never hear on earth any more. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... nets in like that, Mas'r Mark!" said the other, now growing interested and hauling steadily in; "nets cost money to breed." [Note. Cornish. Making nets is termed "breeding."] "Why, it's a porpoise, and a good big 'un too! Steady, lads; steady! She's swum into the net that trailed overboard. Steady, or we shall lose her! Here, hold on, lads, and I'll get down into the boat and—haul away!" he ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... been abandoned. Our ancestors were, not difficult to please: they had good teeth, and their palates, having become accustomed to the flesh of the cormorant, heron, and crane, without difficulty appreciated the delicacy of the nauseous sea-dog, the porpoise, and even the whale, which, when salted, furnished to a great extent all the ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... roam o'er the bounding sea, Where the waters and winds are fierce and free, Where the wild bird sails in his tireless flight, As the sunrise scatters the shades of night; Where the porpoise and dolphin sport at play In their liquid realm of green and gray. Ah, me! It is there I would love to be Engulfed in ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... crash; it smote the caboose, tore it from its moorings, and after boxing it about, dashed it against the windlass, where it stranded. The water then poured along the deck like a flood rolling over and over, pots, pans, and kettles, and even old Baltimore himself, who went breaching along like a porpoise. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... useful or noxious, or have been inconspicuous, or have not happened to occur in the region inhabited by those who speak a particular language; and even things recognised and named may have been very superficially examined, and therefore wrongly classed, as when a whale or porpoise is called a fish, or a slowworm is confounded with snakes. A scientific classification, on the other hand, aims at the utmost comprehensiveness, ransacking the whole world from the depths of the earth to the remotest star for new objects, and scrutinising everything with the aid of crucible ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... aged decrepitude, swore peace again and everlasting. Then was discussed the matter of starting a German plantation twenty miles down the coast. The land, of course, was to be bought from Koho, and the price was arranged in terms of tobacco, knives, beads, pipes, hatchets, porpoise teeth and shell-money—in terms of everything except rum. While the talk went on, Koho, glancing through the window, could see Worth mixing medicines and placing bottles back in the medicine cupboard. Also, he saw the manager complete his labours by taking a drink of ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... washed Dodd away like a cork, and would have carried him overboard if he had not brought up against the mainmast and grasped it like grim death, half drowned, half stunned, sorely bruised, and gasping like a porpoise ashore. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... my daughters,' and then people say, 'You mean your sisters.' Still I married very young—at seventeen—and possibly that helps to explain it." ... "Oh, is that a shark out yonder? Well, anyway, it's a porpoise, and a porpoise is a kind of shark, isn't it? When a porpoise grows up, it gets to be a shark—I read that somewhere. Ain't nature just wonderful?" ... "Raymund Walter Pelham, if I have to speak to you again, young man, I'm going to take you to the stateroom and give you something you ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... and the Porpoises filled the close of this period. It is extremely difficult to know the truth concerning these wars, not because accounts are wanting, but because there are so many of them. The Porpoise Chronicles contradict the Penguin Chronicles at every point. And, moreover, the Penguins contradict each other as well as the Porpoises. I have discovered two chronicles that are in agreement, but ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... worked, law books sprang up around him and sprawled over his desk and lay half open on chairs and tables near him until he had found his point; then he would get up and begin rollicking, slamming books together, cleaning up his debris and playing like a great porpoise with the litter he had made. At such times—and, indeed, all the time unless he was in what he called a "legal trance"—Hedrick was bubbling with good spirits, and when he left his office for politics he could get out in his shirt-sleeves at a primary and peddle tickets, ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... Therefore the Mavericks lay down in open order on the brow of a hill to watch the play till their call should come. Father Dennis, whose duty was in the rear, to smooth the trouble of the wounded, had naturally managed to make his way to the foremost of his boys and lay like a black porpoise, at length on the grass. To him crawled ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... swimming brain to undergo Their doubt and dread, and blindly to forsake Thy purity of likeness and distort Thy worthiest love to a worthless counterfeit: As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port, His guardian sea-god to commemorate, Should set a sculptured porpoise, gills a-snort And vibrant tail, within ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... of kindred was thus: a man used to call a woman, my lean bit; the woman called him, my porpoise. Those, said Friar John, must needs stink damnably of fish when they have rubbed their bacon one with the other. One, smiling on a young buxom baggage, said, Good morrow, dear currycomb. She, to return him his civility, said, The like to you, my steed. Ha! ha! ha! said Panurge, that ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... The old porpoise, as I opened the drawing-room door, was sitting with his feet upon the mantel-piece, and a bumper of port in his paw, making strenuous efforts ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... might get wet there, but they didn't care about that. And the other end of the rope, that was fastened to each harpoon, was made fast up on deck, so that the harpoon shouldn't be lost if it wasn't stuck into a porpoise, and so that the porpoise shouldn't get away if it was stuck ...
— The Sandman: His Sea Stories • William J. Hopkins
... nothing in the matter. I gave 18 stivers for a red cap for my godchild; lost 12 stivers at play; drank 2 stivers, bought three fine small rubies for 11 gold florins, 1 2 stivers; changed 1 florin for expenses. Dined again with the Augustines; dined twice with Tomasin. I gave 6 stivers for thirteen porpoise-bristle brushes, and 3 stivers for six ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... berth, a never-failing resort, where one may analyze at one's leisure the life and emotions of an oyster in the mud. Walking the deck is a means of getting off some half hours more. If a ship heaves in sight, or a porpoise tumbles up, or, better still, a whale spouts, it makes ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... food, but which have since been abandoned. Our ancestors were, not difficult to please: they had good teeth, and their palates, having become accustomed to the flesh of the cormorant, heron, and crane, without difficulty appreciated the delicacy of the nauseous sea-dog, the porpoise, and even the whale, which, when salted, furnished to a great extent all ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... their own depth. On the western coast they also enter the great rivers, and have been captured up the Yukon seven hundred miles from its mouth. In their columnar movements they somewhat resemble the porpoise,—long processions being frequently seen, composed of three in a row, perhaps ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... animals than those of the Orinoco, we no longer heard the howlings of the monkeys. The dolphins, or toninas, sported by the side of our boat. According to the relation of Mr. Colebrooke, the Delphinus gangeticus, which is the fresh-water porpoise of the Old World, in like manner accompanies the boats that go up towards Benares; but from Benares to the point where the Ganges receives the salt waters is only two hundred leagues, while from the Atabapo to the mouth of the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the pork, we were cheated out of it more than half the time, and when it was obtained one would have judged from its motley hues, exhibiting the consistence and appearance of variegated soap, that it was the flesh of the porpoise or sea hog, and had been an inhabitant of the ocean, rather than a sty. * * * The flavor was so unsavory that it would have been rejected as unfit for the stuffing of even Bologna sausages. The provisions were generally damaged, and from the imperfect manner in which they were cooked were ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... Instead of nine hundred thousand dollars, there were more than one million collected for the Tammany campaign. No one can show where so much as two hundred thousand dollars were honestly disbursed. Let me tell a story; it may suggest an idea to our diligent friends of the Dailies. There is a rotund, porpoise-shaped globular gentleman known of these parts as 'Bim the Button Man.' This personage went into the printing business at the beginning of the late campaign and went out of it—like blowing out a candle—at the close. Bim the Button Man, for his brief parade as a printer, took a ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... a steamboat. Most people enjoy riding on a steamboat, shaking and trembling and chow-chowing along in pleasant weather out of sight of land; and they do not feel any ennui, as may be inferred from the intense excitement which seizes them when a poor porpoise leaps from the water half a mile away. "Did you see the porpoise?" makes conversation for an hour. On our steamboat there was a man who said he saw a whale, saw him just as plain, off to the east, come up to blow; appeared to be a young one. I wonder where all these ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Editor of a daily noosepaper. He took it into his nozzle one day to rite some essays 'on what he knowed of farmin,' which he was about as well posted on as a porpoise is about climbin' ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... was a great race, but we are concerned with but one horse—Eliphaz, late Fairfax. When the barrier rose Jockey Merritt booted the spurs home and tried to hurl the big black into the lead. He might as well have tried to get early speed out of a porpoise. Eliphaz grunted loudly and in exactly five lumbering jumps was in last place; the other horses went on and left the favourite snorting in the dust. Jockey Merritt raked the black sides with his spurs and slashed cruelly with his whip—the ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... The story of the transformation of the mariners is supposed by Bochart to have been founded on the adventure of certain merchants from the coast of Etruria, whose vessel had the figure of a dolphin at the prow, or rather of the fish called 'tursio,' probably the porpoise, or sea-hog. They were probably shipwrecked near the Isle of Naxos, which was sacred to Bacchus, whose mysteries they had perhaps neglected, or even despised. On this slender ground, perhaps, the report spread, that the God himself ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... caught a porpoise by striking it with the grains. Everyone eat heartily of it; and it was so well liked that no part ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... pierced in her left ear, and her back was struck with a heavy stick until the evil one was compelled to flee through the hole in her ear. Nor was such treatment confined to cattle. The muscular doctors of a thousand years ago claimed they could cure insanity by laying it on lustily with a porpoise-skin whip, or by putting the maniac in a closed room and smoking out the pestering fiends. One did well to retain one's sanity in ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... planet of Urvania. There he found that the gigantic space-cruiser he had ordered had been completed, and requested Urvan and his commander-in-chief to tow it to Norlamin, piloted by a ray. He then jumped to Dasor, there interviewing Carfon and being assured of the full co-operation of the porpoise-men. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... rest were white with horror at the death we so narrowly had avoided, old Davie did not even breathe more quickly. The man had no more imagination than a porpoise. ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... rocks, the head of a young seal, which would instantly dive again and be seen no more. They watched the salmon splash in the shallower creeks where the sea had scooped out a tiny bay of ruddy sand, and then a slowly rolling porpoise would show his black back above the water and silently disappear again. All this was pleasant enough on a pleasant morning, in fresh sea-air and sunlight, in holiday-time; and was there any reason, Mackenzie may fairly have thought, why this young ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... the said cape being E.N.E. of us, and the river Sesto E. The 20th we fell in with Cape Mensurado or Mesurado, which bore S.E. 2 leagues distant. This cape may be easily known, as it rises into a hummock like the head of a porpoise. Also towards the S.E. there are three trees, the eastmost being the highest, the middle one resembling a hay-stack, and that to the southward like a gibbet. Likewise on the main there are four or five high hills, one after the other, like ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... from Dickens are also spoken of. An occasional whale is seen blowing in the distance, and many grampuses come rolling about the ship,—most inelegant brutes, some three or four times the size of a porpoise. Each in turn comes up, throws himself round on the top of the sea, exposing nearly half his body, and then rolls ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... belaboring to break open, but the storm was too heavy, and, raising a sash, I went through: and, in good faith, I believe she bounced through after me; for, when I got fairly into the street and looked round, there she went, bounce, flounce, pell-mell, all in a rage, steam up, puffing like a porpoise—though, thank Jupiter! she took another course from myself. I was glad to get out of her clutches, ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... one of them was tender and timid. Trepidation and the coldness of the water made him turn back to regain the hole he crept out of. In coming near the staging where the sentinel was posted, he heard the poor fellow breathe, and at length got sight of him;—"Ah," says Paddy, "here is a porpoise, and I'll stick him with my bayonet." On which the terrified young man exclaimed—"don't kill me, I am a prisoner." The sentinel held out his hand, and helped him on to the staging, and then fired his gun to give the alarm. The guard turned out, and ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... all! There, by Gosh! we're in for it." At this point of the interesting dialogue, the young 'ooman gave a sudden lurch to larboard, and turned the boat completely over. The boatman, blowing like a porpoise, soon strode across the upturned bark, and turning round, beheld the drenched "fare" ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... former, although plenty of the latter were to be seen at times—generally out of range. Two I shot, but I believe when hit they sink. Anyway I did not see either of them again, although the water was coloured with blood, shewing that my aim had been true. I doubly wished to get a porpoise, for the sake of its oil, and also to cut a steak and try its flavour, as I have heard that in some of the ports on the eastern seaboard of the United States, boats are fitted out to capture young porpoises for the hotels, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... with attributes of fire, lightning and combinations of forces not found in any one creature, are common to the popular fancy. In Japan, the kappa, half monkey half tortoise, which seizes children bathing in the rivers, as real to millions of the native common folk as is the shark or porpoise; the flying-weasel, that moves in the whirlwind with sickle-like blades on his claws, which cut the face of the unfortunate; the wind-god or imp that lets loose the gale or storm; the thunder-imp or hairy, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... It was true that the port-hole might most of the time have been wholly ornamental for all the good it did them, for it was generally splashed with grey October sea, but, at least, as Nancy lucently explained, you could see things—once there had actually been a porpoise—and that neither of them, in their present condition, would have worried very much about it if their cabin had been an aquarium was a fact ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... post! The Society in consternation applied to Government for an expedition of investigation, and the Rev. R.R. Gurley, Secretary of the Society, and an enthusiastic advocate of colonization was despatched in June on the U.S. schooner Porpoise. The result of course revealed the probity, integrity and good judgment of Mr. Ashman; and Gurley became thenceforth his warmest admirer. As a preventive of future discontent a Constitution was ...
— History of Liberia - Johns Hopkins University Studies In Historical And Political Science • J.H.T. McPherson
... knees; to turn round and round between them, going forward or backward all the while; to vault over them and under them in complicated ways; to turn somersets in them and across them; to roll over and over on them as a porpoise seems to roll in the sea. Then come the "low-standing" exercises, the grasshopper style of business; supporting yourself now with arms not straight, but bent at the elbow, you shall learn to raise and lower your body and to hold or swing yourself as lightly in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... as it ought to be," hailed Hal, blithely. "Don't be at all afraid, madam. Porpoise is my middle name, and you can't sink while ...
— The Submarine Boys' Trial Trip - "Making Good" as Young Experts • Victor G. Durham
... river, To the ocean flowing ever, With its teeming life of porpoise, fish, and seal, There hardy, brave, and daring, Dwells the habitant; nor caring Save to make his frugal living by his skill. Nor heeds he of the weather, For scale, and fur, and feather, Lay their tribute in his hand the ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... the first, time to look at the boats lying on Bagley's wharf, their ominous porpoise-like appearance gave me a peculiar sensation. I had expected rough-water, but this was the first understanding I had that the journey was to be more or less amphibian. On a day when the waves on Lake Michigan were running high we took them out for trial. The crews were filled ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... Nautilus floated in these brilliant waves, and our admiration increased as we watched the marine monsters disporting themselves like salamanders. I saw there in the midst of this fire that burns not the swift and elegant porpoise (the indefatigable clown of the ocean), and some swordfish ten feet long, those prophetic heralds of the hurricane whose formidable sword would now and then strike the glass of the saloon. Then appeared the smaller ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... around and around a running track until my breathing was such probably as to cause people passing the building to think that the West Side Y.M.C.A. was harboring a pet porpoise inside. Once, doing this, I caught a glimpse of my own form in a looking-glass which for some reason was affixed to one of the pillars flanking the oval. A looking-glass properly did not belong ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... its wrathful force; And dolefully echoes the wild-fowl's scream, As the sallows are swept by the whelming stream; And her callow young are hurled for a meal, To the gorge of the barbel, the pike, and the eel: The porpoise[10] heaves 'mid the rolling tide, And, snorting in mirth, doth merrily ride,— For he hath forsaken his bed in the sea, To sup on ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... derelict porpoise was cast on the shore Our village policeman was much to the fore; He measured the beast from its tip to its tail, And blandly pronounced it "an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... I was dead and dacently buried, but here I am for my sins turned into a sale as other sinners are and will be, and if you put an end to me and skin me maybe it's worser I'll be, and go into a shark or a porpoise. Lave your ould forefather where he is, to live out his time as a sale. Maybe for your own sakes you will ever hereafter leave off following and parsecuting and murthering sales who may be nearer to yourselves nor you think." The story is universally believed, and on the strength ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... principal ones. No. 5 then hands the class to No. 6, who has on his post representations of the following fishes, viz., whale, sword fish, white shark, sturgeon, skate, John Dorey, salmon, grayling, porpoise, electrical eel, horned silure, pilot fish, mackerel, trout, red char, smelt, carp, bream, road goldfish, pike, garfish, perch, sprat, chub, telescope carp, cod, whiting, turbot, flounder, flying scorpion, sole, ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... after midday, and Glover, keeping a wary look out for Wilson, proceeded slowly to the quay with his friend, leaving the latter to walk down and discover the schooner while he went and hired a first-floor room at the "Royal Porpoise," a little bow-windowed tavern facing ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... in the distance, had been full of eager spectators of the fight, and now it boiled as they rushed in upon the disabled prey. Ravenous, cavern-jawed, fishlike beasts, half-porpoise, half-alligator, swarmed upon the victim, tearing at it and at each other. Some bore off trailing mouthfuls of dark wing-membrane, others more substantial booty, while the rest fought madly in the ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... consisted mostly in listening and interjecting questions. He wallowed in the cold tank like a porpoise; caught me and ducked me until I yelled for mercy, and while I was trying to get my breath, half drowned me with the water he splashed over me with both hands; talking incessantly, except when his head was under water. When we lay down on the divan in the ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Dodd away like a cork, and would have carried him overboard if he had not brought up against the mainmast and grasped it like grim death, half drowned, half stunned, sorely bruised, and gasping like a porpoise ashore. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... waves as though they were life-belts. All night the hammering of the logs made the ship echo like a monster drum, and all day without an instant's pause each log reared and pitched, spun like a barrel, dived like a porpoise, or, broadside, battered itself against the iron plates. But, no matter what tricks it played, a Kroo boy rode it as easily as though it were ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... With this purpose he had had a ship built at Quebec, and had bought another in order to begin at once. This very first year he sent to the markets of Martinique and Santo Domingo fresh and dry cod, salted salmon, eels, pease, seal and porpoise oil, clapboards and planks. He had different kinds of wood cut in order to try them, and he exported masts to La Rochelle, which he hoped to see used in the shipyards of the Royal Navy. He proposed to ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... of events has that time been that the sight of a party of bottle-nosed whales, two or three seals, and a porpoise, possibly on their way to a dinner or tea party at the North Pole, was considered an occurrence of great importance. Every glass was in requisition as soon as they made their appearance, and the marine monsters were well nigh ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... play I'm a porpoise. I've simply GOT to. Come on, Wheedles, nothing else will work off my pent-up excitement," cried Polly, diving off the float to tumble and turn over and over in the water very like the fish she named, for Polly's training with Captain Pennell during ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... fast, O Emir, not so fast, I pray you! Better a double mouthful of stale porpoise fat, with a fin bone in it, than so many questions ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... gone. I ran forward, bawling blue hell; and just as I came by the foremast something struck me right through the fore-arm and stuck there. I put my other hand up, and, by George, it was the grain; the beasts had speared me like a porpoise. 'Cap'n!' I cried. 'What's wrong?' says he. 'They've grained me,' says I. 'Grained you?' says he. 'Well, I've been looking for that.' 'And by God,' I cried, 'I want to have some of these beasts murdered for it!' 'Now, Mr. Nares,' says he, 'you better go below. If I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... master Doctor, that's even I, my hopes are small, and my despair shall be as little. Brother, sister, brother, what, cloudy, cloudy? "and will no sunshine on these looks appear?" well, since there is such a tempest toward, I'll be the porpoise, I'll dance: wench, be of good cheer, thou hast a cloak for the rain yet, where is he? 'Sheart, how now, the picture of the prodigal, go to, I'll have the calf drest ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... imitated a porpoise without knowing it. "Educated out of books! All any of that rabble rout of his knows is what they read secondhand. They don't know people. Don't know capitalists. Don't even know these wage slaves they write about. That's why they can't stop the war. They may be educated, but you're ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... a perceptible motion was produced. After considerable effort, however, he turned upon his face with a loud guffaw, and then upon his back. In fine, he put himself in various strange attitudes, puffed like a porpoise in an head sea, and began swearing as never general swore before, that the wretch who disturbed him of his slumbers should suffer for it at ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... shook considerably, but he kept on, and had almost reached the opposite side, when the tree broke, and he disappeared in the cold water. He rose immediately, and, shaking the water from his face, struck out for the shore, puffing and blowing like a porpoise. A few lusty strokes brought him to the bank, and, as he picked up a handful of stones, ...
— Frank, the Young Naturalist • Harry Castlemon
... romping through the stiff sea like a playful porpoise, dipping and plunging. A half-score of adventuresome gulls were still following in the foam-churned wake. In the face of all the pitching about, Mrs. Richards had quite a battle to direct her shuttle to any efficient purpose, and Claire ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... not be induced to go beyond a point where the water was a foot or two deep, and the waves rolled her around like an amiable porpoise. Merton and Junior were soon swimming fearlessly, the latter wondering, meanwhile, at the buoyant quality of the salt water. My wife, Mousie, and Winnie allowed me to take them beyond the breakers, ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... he touched the shore, The shore of the Bristol Channel, A sea-green Porpoise carried away His wrapper of scarlet flannel. And when he came to observe his feet, Formerly garnished with toes so neat, His face at once became forlorn On perceiving that ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... your nose and save your wind," she whispered to her partner, who was puffing like a porpoise and showed signs of giving in. The others had one by one succumbed to fatigue and were now sitting in a more or less exhausted state on the various benches, noisily applauding the endurance of the spinning couples and betting ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... haunting and surface swimming. Some of the latter, such as the pala (not the palu)—a long, scaleless, beautifully-formed fish, with a head of bony plates and teeth like a rip-saw—are of great size, and afford splendid sport, as they are game fighters and almost as powerful as a porpoise. They run to over 100 lbs., and yet are by no means a coarse fish. In the shallow water on the top of this mountain reef there are some eight or nine varieties of rock cod, none of which were of any great size; but far below, at a depth of from ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... tromp! Do lemme hurry an' set down! Seem like this room's awful rackety, the fire a-poppin' an' tumblin', an' me breathin' like a porpoise. Even the clock ticks ez excited ez I feel. Wonder how they sleep through it all! But they do. He beats her a-snorin' a'ready, blest ef he don't! Wonder ef he knows he's born into the world, po' little thing! I reckon not; but they's no tellin'. Maybe ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... appeared to be damaged. As for the pork, we were cheated out of more than half of it, and when it was obtained one would have judged from its motley hues, exhibiting the consistency and appearance of variegated fancy soap, that it was the flesh of the porpoise or sea-hog, and had been an inhabitant of the ocean rather than the sty. The peas were about as digestible as grape-shot; and the butter—had it not been for its adhesive properties to retain together the particles of biscuit that had been so ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... stragglers, thrusting off the stranded, leading his phalanxes wisely round curves and angles, lest they be jammed and fill the river with a solid mass. As the great sticks come dashing along, turning porpoise-like somersets or leaping up twice their length in the air, he must be everywhere, livelier than a monkey in a mimosa, a wonder of acrobatic agility in biggest boots. He made the proverb, "As easy as falling off ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... destroyers picked up and escorted the Adriatic of the White Star Line. As may be imagined, the Americans on board were delighted to see a destroyer with an American flag darting about the great vessel like a porpoise, while the British appreciated to the full the significance of the occasion—so much so that the following message was formulated and wirelessed to ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... Come, porpoise; where's Haterius? His gout keeps him most miserably constant; Your dancing shews ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... being often some yards across, and not arranged in radii and arcs, but spun like weaver's woofs. Paintings, remarkable only for their hideous proportions and want of perspective, are daubed in vermilion, ochre, and indigo. The elephant, camel, and porpoise of the Ganges, dog, shepherd, peacock, and horse, are especially frequent, and so is a running pattern of a hand spread open, with a blood-red spot on the palm. A still less elegant but frequent object is the fuel, which is composed of the manure collected on the roads of the city, moulded ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Singapore Straits, making but slow progress towards this emporium of the East. The number of native as well as foreign vessels which we passed, proved that we were approaching some great mart, and at 5:00 p.m. we dropped our anchor in Singapore Roads. Here we found the Porpoise, Oregon, and Flying-Fish, all well: the two former had arrived on January 22nd, nearly a month before, and the latter three days previously. Before concluding this chapter, I shall revert to their proceedings since our ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... superior servant replied, "Well, ma'am, to be sure, it always was so in them famullies where I have lived; the governess never didn't eat at the table." The fact is natural, and the reason obvious, but oh! my dear, the manner of the fat, pampered porpoise of a man-menial was too horrid. Then, on going for a candle into Miss Hall's room one evening, I found she had been provided with tallow ones, and, upon remonstrating about it with the chambermaid, she replied (with a courtesy at every ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... the anatomy of the Cetacea is unquestionably due to Cuvier; but his dissections were almost confined to the genus Delphinus, or the common Porpoise of our coasts. I repeated all his dissections, and found them, as they almost always were, scrupulously exact; but when I came to examine Cetacea with whalebone instead of teeth, I was surprised to find how different, in fact, the anatomy of the two great families was. Scarcely in ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... made more bad faces with his oppression than ever Michael Angelo made good ones. He lifts up 's nose, like a foul porpoise before a storm. ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. His name is Boz. At one he disappears, and presently emerges from a bathing machine, and may be seen—a kind of salmon-coloured porpoise—splashing about in the ocean. After that he may be seen in another bay-window on the ground-floor, eating a strong lunch; after that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... is to-morrow, the third day of the fifth moon. Ch'eng Jih-hsing, who is in that curio shop of ours, unexpectedly brought along, goodness knows where he fished them from, fresh lotus so thick and so long, so mealy and so crisp; melons of this size; and a Siamese porpoise, that long and that big, smoked with cedar, such as is sent as tribute from the kingdom of Siam. Are not these four presents, pray, rare delicacies? The porpoise is not only expensive, but difficult to get, and that kind of lotus and melon must have cost him no end of trouble ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... here offer a few notes picked up on the subject of whales, etc. The sperm or cachalot whale is a dangerous and bold fighter and is perhaps the most interesting of all cetaceans. His skin, like that of the porpoise, is as thin as gold-beaters' leaf. Underneath it is a coating of fine hair or fur, not attached to the skin, and then the blubber. He has enormous teeth or tushes in the lower jaw, but has no baleen. He devours very large ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... for the sake of argument, that a savage has more brains than seems proportioned to his wants, all that can be said is that the objection to natural selection, if it be one, applies quite as strongly to the lower animals. The brain of a porpoise is quite wonderful for its mass, and for the development of the cerebral convolutions. And yet since we have ceased to credit the story of Arion, it is hard to believe that porpoises are much troubled with intellect: and still more difficult is it to imagine that their big ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... horse pulled about by both hands, now right, now left, but rarely going out of a walk. Above a high shirt-collar his full-blown cheeks might be seen, as he sucked in the hot air and rejected it again like a blowing porpoise: cravat he had none, because he had no neck to tie it about; but in lieu of this article he carried, knotted over his broad shoulders, a little red handkerchief. Daily did I ask myself for a whole week "Will it walk again?" and, ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... my watch, I found I had been almost four hours climbing out. At that moment, Frank poked a red face over the rim. He was in shirt sleeves, sweating freely, and wore a frown I had never seen before. He puffed like a porpoise, and at first could ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... poise, remarked, "Well, but you must recollect that there was five of us taken down at the same time, and the other four died," and he made a graceful spring, boring a hole in the water, which seethed around him, arising a moment later throwing water like a porpoise, as though he wouldn't exchange his position in life, humble as it was, with any one of a ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... of an evening on the forecastle head. He was intelligent, very strong, and of proved courage. Incidentally we are told, so exact is our narrator, that Tom had the finest pigtail for thickness and length of any man in the Navy. This appendage, much cared for and sheathed tightly in a porpoise skin, hung half way down his broad back to the great admiration of all beholders and to ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... on board, their boots still bearing the mud of Flanders upon them. It was squally weather, and as we headed for the open sea I saw a dark object gambolling upon the waves with the fluency of a porpoise. A sailor stopped near me and ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... from my home in the sun in a fiery ship, before I bid him to-morrow, overturn his canoe, and drown him in lagoon or spring or ocean. If any woman go near them without Tu-Kila-Kila's leave, bind her hand and foot with ropes of porpoise hide, and cast her out into the surf, and dash her with your waves, and pummel her ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... of the vessel was the "Porpoise," and she was commanded by Captain Tubb. He put me very much in mind of Captain Cobb, except that he was considerably stouter. We sailed with a convoy of some fifty other vessels of all sizes and rigs; the larger portion having generally to lay to for the ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... Marathon legs into play then, and soon captured the obese footman, who puffed like a porpoise in the firm and muscular grasp of the detective, who nabbed him just at the head ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... trumpets, with drums and fifes; also winding the cornets and hautboys, and in the end of their jollity, left with the battle and ringing of doleful knells. Towards the evening also we caught in the Golden Hind a very mighty porpoise with harping iron, having first stricken divers of them, and brought away part of their flesh sticking upon the iron, but could recover only that one. These also, passing through the ocean in herds, did ...
— Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage to Newfoundland • Edward Hayes
... the breathless commands as if he were hypnotized, puffing and blowing like a porpoise as he struggled to slip the linen covers over the chairs. Gladwin worked at top speed, too; and just as he was covering the great chest he gave a start and held ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... are gregarious and very sociable in their habits. Porpoises race and play with each other and dart out of the sea, performing almost as many antics as the circus clown. They feed on mackerel and herring, devouring large quantities. Years ago the porpoise was a common and esteemed article of food in Great Britain and France, but now the skin and blubber only have a commercial value. The skins of a very large species are used ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... go! How helplessly one wades in the shifting, unstable footing—tumbling over with a touch, like a house built of cards! The children's laughter sounded merrily in the clear cold air; Bridget plunged about like a little porpoise in the water, and Rosalys quite forgot that she had attained the ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... stormy north-east, with the roar of whole parks of artillery. The cave in the western promontory, which bears among the townsfolk the name of the "Puir Wife's Meal Kist," has its roof drilled by two small perforations—the largest of them not a great deal wider than the blow-hole of a porpoise—that open externally among the cliffs above; and when, during storms from the sea, the huge waves come rolling ashore like green moving walls, there are certain times of the tide in which they shut up the mouth of the cave, and so compress the air within, that it rushes ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... in the convexity of waters. The morning sun, half way to the zenith, burned bright in a cloudless sky, whilst in the east and west distant banks of purple mist coloured the liquid plain with a cool green-blue, a celadon tint that reposed the eye and the brain. The porpoise raised in sport his dark, glistening back to the light of day, and plunged into the cool depths as if playing off the "amate sponde" of the Mediterranean; and sandpipers and curlews, the latter wild as ever, paced the smooth, pure floor. The shoreline was backed by a dark vegetable ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... a periscope suddenly appeared, then the submarine dived, rose once more, showing the rounded conning tower, dived, rose again, like a porpoise at play. ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... was the answer; "poor Mrs. Legend has picked up some straggling porpoise, and converted him, by a touch of her magical wand, into a Boanerges of literature. The thing is as clear as day, for the worthy fellow smells of tar and cigar smoke. I perceive that Mr. Effingham is laughing out of the ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... other vessels: one a New York brig, under English colours. The anchor had not been long down when a visit was received from the Captain of the Port, who proved to be an old acquaintance of Captain Semmes, he having piloted the brig Porpoise about the island at the time when the latter officer was First Lieutenant of that vessel. He seemed much pleased to renew the acquaintance, and volunteered to take on shore, to the Governor, Captain Semmes' request for permission to land ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... rises horizontally, showing first its back fin, then draws an inspiration, and dives gently down, head foremost. This mode of proceeding distinguishes the Tucuxi at once from the other species, which is called Bouto or porpoise by the natives (Inia Geoffroyi of Desmarest). When this rises the top of the head is the part first seen; it then blows, and immediately afterwards dips head downwards, its back curving over, exposing successively the whole dorsal ridge with its fin. It seems ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... broke on our ears save the soft puff now and then of a porpoise, the slow creak of the masts as we swayed gently on the swell, the patter of the reef-points, and the occasional flap of the hanging sails. An awning covered the fore and after parts of the schooner, under which the men composing the watch on deck lolled in ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... discussed the matter of starting a German plantation twenty miles down the coast. The land, of course, was to be bought from Koho, and the price was arranged in terms of tobacco, knives, beads, pipes, hatchets, porpoise teeth and shell-money—in terms of everything except rum. While the talk went on, Koho, glancing through the window, could see Worth mixing medicines and placing bottles back in the medicine cupboard. Also, he saw the manager complete his labours by taking a drink of Scotch. ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... "tumulus inanis" at which to observe the usual solemnities; they thought it was possible to obtain the soul of the departed in some tangible transmigrated form. On the beach, near where a person had been drowned, and whose body was supposed to have become a porpoise, or on the battlefield, where another fell, might have been seen, sitting in silence, a group of five or six, and one a few yards before them with a sheet of native cloth spread out on the ground in front of him. Addressing some god of the family he said, "Oh, be kind to us; let us obtain without ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... with this story it had to tell. Before then it had only blown in fitful gusts. Then again it blew steadily. I had caught some whispers from it years before. On the deck of the great, populous, electric-lighted ocean-hotel that was hurrying me across the Atlantic, racing the porpoise-schools to get to New York City; and later at Washington, when the red sunset-fires burned low behind the Capitol, it spoke to me in the wonderful, beloved voice I shall never hear on earth any more. Yet once more the wind came faintly sighing, in the giant blue shadow of Table Mountain; ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... "You are an old porpoise, and I believe it all owing to you that my husband neglects his wife and family. What's vampyres to him, I should like to know, that he should go troubling about them? I never heard of vampyres taking ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... gardens, vines, and whitened cottages:—on the top of this Harlungsherg the Wends "set up their god Triglaph;" a three-headed Monster of which I have seen prints, beyond measure ugly. Something like three whale's-cubs combined by boiling, or a triple porpoise dead-drunk (for the dull eyes are inexpressible, as well as the amorphous shape): ugliest and stupidest of all false gods. This these victorious Wends set up on the Harlungsberg, Year 1023; and worshipped after their sort, benighted ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... there a drove of small flying-fishes rose and skimmed over the surface like swallows, but they too soon plunged into the blue and sought below that the cool green depths. Into this tranquil scene steamed the Kinfauns Castle in a triangle of snow, a big porpoise rolling and rollicking along beside her, now rising on this side, now on that. When he came very close he could see into the saloon windows, and presently he saw the Captain standing at the end of a table ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... remonstrated with him, turning on them a face ghastly in the moonlight. 'Stand aside, men,' he cried, 'and if I fail, see to the girsha!' He was the strongest man in all the Island, and as much at home in the water as a porpoise. They saw his sleek head now and again flung out of the trough of the waves, and his huge shoulders labouring against the weight of the storm. Then suddenly the rope they were holding fell slack in their hands,—they said afterwards it had snapped on a jagged razor of rock,—and the ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... kindred was thus: a man used to call a woman, my lean bit; the woman called him, my porpoise. Those, said Friar John, must needs stink damnably of fish when they have rubbed their bacon one with the other. One, smiling on a young buxom baggage, said, Good morrow, dear currycomb. She, to return him his civility, said, The like to you, my steed. Ha! ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... It's a porpoise!" cried Jack. "No danger of one of those hog-fish going near a man. They're as timid as mice. Just see him go! There ought to be a lot of others, for they generally go in schools. Maybe this one was kept in because he couldn't spell 'book,' ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... you old fool; if you make a noise we have six more girls waiting in a boat to fling you in the river and drag you up and down for a while tied on to a rope like a porpoise. Do ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... portly presence, mad for food, With dark hints muttered under breath Of casting lots for life or death, Offered, if Heaven withheld supplies, To be himself the sacrifice. Then, suddenly, as if to save The good man from his living grave, A ripple on the water grew, A school of porpoise flashed in view. "Take, eat," he said, "and be content; These fishes in my stead are sent By Him who gave the tangled ram To ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... rolling over and diving, and chasing each other just as if they knew they had a "gallery." We did not reward them very well either, for the Prophet shot one, and we ate bits of him for lunch—the porpoise, I mean, not the Prophet. I thought he would make a good companion-piece for the polar bear, and he was quite edible. He only needed a rasher of bacon to make you believe he ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... ancestors adored Goddesses. I discover ze voice of a Goddess: I adore it. So you call me mad; it is to me what you call me—juste ze same. I am possessed wiz passion for her voice. So it will be till I go to ashes. It is to me ze one zsing divine in a pig, a porpoise world. It is to me—I talk! It ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the feasting and loud was the harping in the halls of Alef the Cornishman, King of Gweek. Savory was the smell of fried pilchard and hake; more savory still that of roast porpoise; most savory of all that of fifty huge squab pies, built up of layers of apples, bacon, onions, and mutton, and at the bottom of each a squab, or young cormorant, which diffused both through the pie and through ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... sea, the o—pen sea, the blue, the fresh;' but here we halt; Mr. CORNWALL knew very little about the sea, or he would have written SALT. 'The whales they whistled, the porpoise rolled, And the dolphins bared their backs of gold;' Worse and worse; more blunders than words, and such a jumble! Whales spout, but never whistle; dolphins' backs are silver; and porpoises never roll, but tumble. 'It plays with the clouds, it mocks the skies, And like a cradled ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. At one he disappears, presently emerges from a bathing-machine, and may be seen, a kind of salmon-coloured porpoise, splashing about in the ocean. After that he may be viewed in another bay-window on the ground floor, eating a strong lunch; and after that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... between curiosity and fear. La Salle knew those with whom he was dealing, and, without ceremony, entered the chief's lodge with his followers. The crowd closed around them, naked men and half-naked women, described by Joutel as of a singular ugliness. They gave buffalo- meat and dried porpoise to the unexpected guests; but La Salle, racked with anxiety, hastened to close the interview; and, having without difficulty recovered the kidnapped men, he returned to the beach, leaving with the Indians, as usual, an ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... the two other rowboats had picked up eight of those who had leaped overboard. The boys succeeded in getting on board two others, a short, fat man who was puffing like a porpoise, and a young man. ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... logs of wood every thirty or forty yards; and near Goat Island we observed a large number of planks floating by for several hours, the cargo of some unfortunate vessel. Here we saw three gulls, the only birds we had observed in all our passage, and no fish, not even a porpoise, which should more readily be excused as they are mostly seen in ...
— A Journey in Russia in 1858 • Robert Heywood
... blankets, but it will never hold up two." Cadogan could see a long spanner, or bar, held ready on the shoulder of the man on the raft. The man in the water was now twining his legs about him, whereupon, still clinging to his man, Cadogan dived, porpoise-like, head down into the sea. When he felt his feet under he kicked once, twice, three times powerfully. ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... he laugheth with the meadow; he waveth with the tree, and he quivereth with the leaf; he singeth with the bird, and he buzzeth with the bee; he roareth with the lion, and he pranceth with the steed; he crawleth with the worm, and he soareth with the eagle; he darteth with the porpoise, and he diveth with the fish; he dwelleth with the loving, and he pleadeth with the hating; he shineth with the merciful, and he aspireth with the prayerful. He is ever nigh unto men,—he, the ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... fine gentle wind, and Mr. Pickwick's hat rolled sportively before it. The wind puffed, and Mr. Pickwick puffed, and the hat rolled over and over as merrily as a lively porpoise in a strong tide: and on it might have rolled, far beyond Mr. Pickwick's reach, had not its course been providentially stopped, just as that gentleman was on the point of resigning it to ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... but abuse for the journalism of their own time, it is curious to note that many of those who hurl the shafts of ridicule and contempt at the present period have only words of praise for 1850. Without, however, going so far as these stern descendants of CATO, it may be affirmed that the porpoise-hided Jack of all Journalisms, as we know him, never had a greater power, nor exercised it over a larger scope with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... fast in his jaw with the boat, for he suddenly awoke. He lifted himself, wagging his sword, showing his great silvery side. Then he began to thresh. I never felt a quarter of such power at the end of a line. He went swift as a flash. Then he leaped sheer ahead, like a porpoise, only infinitely more active. We all yelled. He was of great size, over three hundred, broad, heavy, long, and the most violent and savage fish I ever had a look at. Then he rose half—two-thirds out of the water, shaking his massive head, jaws ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... quarter where, under the circumstances, it was least likely to be looked for, namely, straight ahead. Of course what I had seen might merely have been a ray of moonlight glancing off the wet body of a porpoise, a whale, or some other sea creature risen to the surface to breathe; but it had so much the appearance of the momentary flash of oars that I was loath to believe it anything else. Assuming it to be what I hoped, my cue was now of course ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... triangular log, as a trefoil grass. I do not find how long Triglaph held his state on St. Mary's Hill. "For a time," says Carlyle, "the priests all slain or fled—shadowy Markgraves the like—church and state lay in ashes, and Triglaph, like a triple porpoise under the influence of laudanum, stood, I know not whether on his head or his tail, aloft on the Harlungsberg, as the Supreme of this Universe for the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... found a smaller shark, enclosing in its turn one still smaller, "both alive," says the traveller, which is manifestly an exaggeration; then, after describing the remora, the dactyloptera, and the porpoise, he speaks of the sea near the Maldive Islands in which he counted an enormous number of islands, among them he mentions Ceylon by its Arabian name, with its pearl fisheries; Sumatra, inhabited by cannibals, and rich in gold-mines; Nicobar, and the Andaman Islands, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... lain still a long time and was beginning to think that his trip had been in vain, when he heard a soft crackling of the twigs above him, a heavy tread crashing through the bushes, a puffing snorting breath from the porpoise-like Pat, and he held his own breath and lay very still. Suppose Pat should take a new trail and discover his hiding place? His heart pounded with great dull thuds. But Pat slid heavily down to the little clearing below him, fumbled a moment ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... occupied, and you must go and stand by the rail till one is vacant, when another gall that ain't ill, but inconveniently well, she is so full of chat, says, 'Look, look, Sir, dear me, what is that, Sir? a porpoise. Why you don't, did you ever! well, I never see a porpoise afore in all my born days! are they ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... presents most affinity with Lowell, but the differences are marked. The intellectual sphere of the German is vaster, but though with certain aims before him, he rather floats and tumbles about like a porpoise at play than follows any direct perceptible course. With Lowell, on the contrary, every word tells, every laugh is a blow; as if the god Momus had turned out as Mars, and were hard at work fighting every inch of him, grinning ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... Wiff-Waff—on account of the way it waves its tail, swimming, I imagine. That's what I went on this last voyage for, to get that. You see I'm very busy just now trying to learn the language of the shellfish. They HAVE languages, of that I feel sure. I can talk a little shark language and porpoise dialect myself. But what I particularly want ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... pilot-fish swam on ahead, The shark was at his heels; The dolphin a procession led Of porpoise, whale, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... had puffed like a Porpoise, grunted and wallowed like a Hog, to his heart's content and to the envy of the eight who sat sweltering and impatient, he arose, all dribbling ooze, probably to seek a new wallowing place, when his ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Lordship, "was so obliging as to attend Lord Lovat, with his archers, all the way to Angouleme. He had the luck to procure a cursed little chaise, where Lord Lovat was in a manner buried alive under the unwieldy bulk of this enormous porpoise." This relation, so different from that given by Mr. Arbuthnot, weakens the veracity of both accounts, and leads one to infer that the long narrative by the reverend gentleman of Lord Lovat's adventures in the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... too hot here," remarked Ebony, going to a pool a little further from the fountain-head, where the water had cooled somewhat. There the negro dropped his simple garments, and was soon rolling like a black porpoise in his warm bath. It was only large enough for one, but close to it was another small pool big enough for several men. There Mark and Hockins were soon disporting joyously, while the Secretary looked on and laughed. Evidently he did not in ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... arranged along the tops of the wall-cases. These include the leonine seal of the Southern Ocean, the Cape porpoise and dolphin, and the long-beaked dolphin of the Ganges. Having noticed these specimens, the visitor should proceed to examine the ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... Penguins and the Porpoises filled the close of this period. It is extremely difficult to know the truth concerning these wars, not because accounts are wanting, but because there are so many of them. The Porpoise Chronicles contradict the Penguin Chronicles at every point. And, moreover, the Penguins contradict each other as well as the Porpoises. I have discovered two chronicles that are in agreement, but one has copied from the other. A single fact is certain, ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... the master and his boat's crew were lost before the Investigator was joined by the Lady Nelson, from Port-Jackson; and when the former ship was condemned, the people embarked with their commander on board the Porpoise, which was wrecked on a coral reef, and nine of the crew ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... ensuing night under easy sail, during which our soundings were between forty and forty-six fathoms. A very large natives' fire was burning about two or three miles inland, but the Indians did not show themselves. Last night our people caught a porpoise, which helped to diminish the bad ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... boy! you look like a boiled porpoise with parsley sauce!' exclaimed Mr. Waffles, pulling up where the unfortunate youth was spluttering and getting emptied like a jug. 'Confound it!' added he, as the water came gurgling out of his mouth, 'but you must have drunk the ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... out these words he raised himself in the water and curved over like a porpoise, diving right down, and at the same moment the shark gave a sweep with its tail, the combined disturbance making so great an eddy that it was impossible to see what took place beneath the surface. Then all at once there was a horrible discoloration in the sea, and I drew back, holding on ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... 'These are my daughters,' and then people say, 'You mean your sisters.' Still I married very young—at seventeen—and possibly that helps to explain it." ... "Oh, is that a shark out yonder? Well, anyway, it's a porpoise, and a porpoise is a kind of shark, isn't it? When a porpoise grows up, it gets to be a shark—I read that somewhere. Ain't nature just wonderful?" ... "Raymund Walter Pelham, if I have to speak to you again, young man, I'm going to take you to the ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... coast, were whales, porpoises, and seals. The last of these seem only of the common sort, judging from the skins which we saw here, their colour being either silvery, yellowish, plain, or spotted with black. The porpoise is the phocena. I have chosen to refer to this class the sea-otter, as living mostly in the water. It might have been sufficient to have mentioned, that this animal abounds here, as it is fully described in different books, taken from the accounts of the Russian adventurers in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... slowly fashioned, as if there were an artificer at work in each of these complex structures that we have mentioned. This embryo, as it is called, then passes into other conditions. I should tell you that there is a time when the embryos of neither dog, nor horse, nor porpoise, nor monkey, nor man, can be distinguished by any essential feature one from the other; there is a time when they each and all of them resemble this one of the Dog. But as development advances, all the parts acquire their speciality, till at length you have the embryo converted ...
— The Present Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... sea-sickness, but occasionally undergoes periods of nervous depression which require the administration of the stimulant already referred to. It is a singular fact that the present voyage is strangely illustrative of remarkable events in the life of the late Fusby; there has not been a sail or a porpoise in sight that has not called up some reminiscence of the early career of the major; indeed, even the somewhat unusual appearance of an iceberg, has been turned to account as suggestive of the intense suffering undergone by the major during the period of his ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... to occur in the region inhabited by those who speak a particular language; and even things recognised and named may have been very superficially examined, and therefore wrongly classed, as when a whale or porpoise is called a fish, or a slowworm is confounded with snakes. A scientific classification, on the other hand, aims at the utmost comprehensiveness, ransacking the whole world from the depths of the earth to the remotest star for new objects, and scrutinising ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... seen a boy a-slidin' on a most beautiful smooth bit of ice, hain't you, larfin', and hoopin', and hallooin' like one possessed, when presently sowse he goes in over head and ears? How he outs, fins, and flops about, and blows like a porpoise properly frightened, don't he? and when he gets out there he stands; all shiverin' and shakin', and the water a squish-squashin' in his shoes, and his trousers all stickin' slimsey-like to his legs. Well, ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... The British cruiser Birmingham caught a glimpse of her wake and with a well-aimed shot destroyed her periscope. The submarine dived, but shortly afterwards came up again making what was called a porpoise dive—that is to say, she came up just long enough for the officer in the conning tower to locate the enemy, then submerged again. Brief, however, as had been the appearance of the conning tower, the British put a shell into it and in a few minutes the submarine and most ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... the light ripples melted away into a blue and white haze upon the water, a small black smudge, like the back of a porpoise, seemed to ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... irregular splashing in the water, quite different from the regular, diagonally crossing surges that the boat swept upon the bank. Looking at it more intently, he saw a black object turning in the water like a porpoise, and then the unmistakable uplifting of a black arm in an unskillful swimmer's overhand stroke. It was a struggling man. But it was quickly evident that the current was too strong and the turbulence of the shallow water too great for ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... less walk. My clammy, muddy garments clung to me like sheets of ice. I thought I should never get them off. So numb and lifeless were my fingers, and so weak was I that it seemed to take an hour to get off my shoes. I had not the strength to break the porpoise-hide laces, and the knots defied me. I repeatedly beat my hands upon the rocks to get some sort of life into them. Sometimes I felt sure I was going ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... scraps and glimpses and other intimations, only never yet for such a triumph of that particular sense. To be still frank, he was little less than a monster—for mere unresisting or unresilient mass of personal presence I mean; so that I fairly think of him as a form of bland porpoise, violently blowing in an age not his own, as by having had to exchange deep water for thin air. Thus he impressed me as with an absolute ancientry of type, of tone, of responsible taste, above all; this last I mean in literature, since it was literature we sociably ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Raymond, grows like a very porpoise," remarked a young captain, who prided himself much on the excessive smallness of his waist. "Methinks that, like the ground hogs that abound on his Island, he must fatten on hickory nuts. Only ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... But, in the higher orders, and especially the larger members of these orders, the grooves, or sulci, become extremely numerous, and the intermediate convolutions proportionately more complicated in their meanderings, until, in the Elephant, the Porpoise, the higher Apes, and Man, the cerebral surface appears a perfect ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... witnessing the sudden disappearance of an English brig. She was lying-to, directly on our course, and I was looking at her from the windlass, trying to form some opinion as to the expediency of our luffing-to, in order to hold our own. Of a sudden, this brig gave a plunge, and she went down like a porpoise diving. What caused this disaster I never knew; but, in five minutes we passed as near as possible over the spot, and not a trace of her was to be seen. I could not discover so much as a handspike ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
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