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More "Surf" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the ocean bearing him on, that even to draw his breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if he had been struggling in the surf at the South Sea, until he was landed in the outer courtyard of the Bastille. There, against an angle of a wall, he made a struggle to look about him. Jacques Three was nearly at his side; Madame Defarge, still heading some of her women, was visible in the inner distance, ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... undermine it, sweep away the pieces which tumble down, leaving the gold on the beach. The gold is in very fine particles, and it moves with the heavier sand, which alters its position frequently under the influence of the waves and surf. One day, the beach will have six feet depth of sand; the next, there will be nothing save bare rocks. The sand differs greatly in richness at various times: one day, it will be full of golden specks; a few days later, at the same place it will be barren. The ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell
... hastily, "tells me there is a most amusing place a few miles down the coast, Las Bocas, a sort of Coney Island, where the government people go for the summer. There's surf bathing and roulette and cafes chantants. He says there's ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... master reached a point opposite the imperilled swimmers, he was obliged to wait a little for the life-line, but as soon as it reached him he tied one end of it around his waist and plunged into the surf. The men who had brought the line did not uncoil it nor even take it out of the box, and very soon it was seen that the bathing-master was not only making his way bravely through the breakers, but was towing after him the coil of rope, ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... surf in the early morning that the officers and soldiers going ashore had to be carried from the rowboats to the beach on the backs of natives, but it fortunately calmed down enough before we women went over in the afternoon to allow of our entering ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... laugh loud in the surf over yonder. If one should dive deep, And rise not—no more need he suffer or ponder O'er losses, or weep, But sink low and sleep While ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... I was mistaken then," Steve explained, "but I could have sworn I heard surf." He leaned over the chart. "This doesn't show anything, though, nearer than the land. Toot ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... on shore, and, by ascending a hill, discover a place to lay the boat in. This I agreed to; and the quarter-master immediately threw off his clothes. I made a lead-line fast to him under his arms, that we might pull him in if we found him exhausted. He went over the surf with great ease, until he came to the breakers on the beach, through which he could not force his way; for the moment he touched the ground with his foot, the recoil of the sea, and what is called by sailors ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... strip of sandy beach, dazzlingly white in the blazing sunlight; heard the deep hoarse roar of the breakers, and saw the flashing of the snow-white foam as the rollers swept grandly on and dashed themselves into surf and diamond spray upon the strand. Then I saw the natives launching their light canoes and paddling off through the surf to the ship; or leapt eagerly into the boat alongside; reached the strip of dazzling beach—strewn now with beautiful shells; plunged into the grateful shade of ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... five minutes walk of the Pacific Ocean. I was born at Digby, Nova Scotia, and the first music I ever heard was the surf of the Bay of Fundy, and when I close my eyes forever I hope the surf of the Pacific will be the last sound ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... the vessel. The time is, however, very much beguiled during this last day's sail by the sight of the land and the various objects which it presents to view—the green slopes, the castle-covered hills, the cliffs, the lines of beach, with surf and breakers rolling in upon them; and sometimes, when the ship approaches nearer to the shore than usual, the pretty little cottages, covered with thatch, and adorned ...
— Rollo on the Atlantic • Jacob Abbott
... there were, when Angel as Captain, I as mate, with The Seraph for a cabin boy, fought the bloody pirate gangs on those surf-washed shores, and gained the fight, though ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... blowing the nose violently when there is secretion or fluid in the back of the nose, or the employment of the post-nasal syringe are one and all attended with this danger. Swimming on the back, diving, or surf bathing also endangers the ear, as cold water is forcibly driven not only into the external auditory canal, but, what is more frequently a source of damage, into the Eustachian tubes through the medium of the nose or throat. In this case ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... fitful gusts between A sound came from the land: It was the sound of the trampling surf On the rocks ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... who sat down on a boulder with the water dripping from her skirt, looked ruefully at him and the dinghy, which was rolling over in the surf. ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... tide runs strongest, the cliff rises steep, Where the wild waters eddy, I've rock'd him to sleep: His sleep is so sound that the rush of the stream, When the winds are abroad, cannot waken his dream. And see you that rock, with its surf-beaten side, There the blood of my false love runs red with the tide; The sea-mew screams shrilly, the white breakers rave— In the foam of the billow I'll ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... fixed on a strip of waning light above the chimneys. From somewhere in the city came sounds like the distant beating of drums, and beyond, far beyond, a vague muttering, now growing, swelling, rumbling in the distance like the pounding of surf upon the rocks, now like the surf again, receding, growling, menacing. The cold had become intense, a bitter piercing cold which strained and snapped at joist and beam and turned the slush of yesterday to flint. From the street below every sound broke sharp and metallic—the ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... supplied the money both to carry on the traite and to put it down. Three miles south of the Gallinas the Sulayma River flows in. Here the scenery suggests a child's first attempt at colouring in horizontal lines; a dangerous surf ever foams white upon the yellow shore, bearing an eternal growth of green. Two holes in the bush and a few thatched roofs, separated by a few miles, showed the Harris factories, which caused frequent ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... supper. They would make a picnic cruise of the adventure. Handily Joe reeved a purchase and they hauled away until their raft slid off the sloping deck to leeward. With a gay hurrah to Captain Wellsby, they paddled around the stern of the ship and through the ruffle of surf that ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... he lay in the bow to her stern her decks were packed with men. She was steaming swiftly down a broad river. On either side the gray light that comes before the dawn showed low banks studded with stunted palmettos. Close ahead David heard the roar of the surf. ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... it yesterday 30 We heard the sweet bells over the bay? In the caverns where we lay, Through the surf and through the swell, The far-off sound of a silver bell? Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, 35 Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, Where the salt weed sways in the stream, Where the sea-beasts, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... nothing but the presence of mind which was shown by Captain Savage could have saved the ship and her crew. We had chased a convoy of vessels to the bottom of the bay: the wind was very fresh when we hauled off, after running them on shore; and the surf on the beach even at that time was so great, that they were certain to go to pieces before they could be got afloat again. We were obliged to double-reef the topsails as soon as we hauled to the wind, and the weather looked very threatening. In an hour afterwards, ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... Earn—sixteen miles away. Further off, and only to be seen on rare days, when the sun's rays are dancing to be dry after rain, are sturdy, broad-shouldered Benmore, and slender, graceful Binnein, the twin guardians of the enchanted region beyond, where Beauty lies in the lap of Terror, and the Atlantic surf sings lullaby. There are the Monzievaird hills to the right, rising in Benchonzie to the height of 3048 feet, and to something under this figure in the Cairngorm or Blue Craig, upon which you see the stone-heap of Cainnechin—memorial, ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... coast has heavy surf and no natural harbors; during the rainy season torrential flooding ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... she, her looks to all made known Her love for Timmaraj, the author brave Of all his country's good. Yet still she kept A seal upon her lips, until by chance An incident occurred which sealed her fate. As on the sand near by the water's edge One thoughtless stands to watch with eager eyes The surf that beats continuous on the shore, And suddenly when least expected flows A wave that reaches far beyond the rest, So stood the king and queen of Vijiapore In parents' place, tempting their daughter fair To marry whom she loved not, could not love, When Chandra ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna
... serious business which had brought us to Crescent Beach. While we children disported ourselves like mermaids and mermen in the surf, our respective fathers dispensed cold lemonade, hot peanuts, and pink popcorn, and piled up our respective fortunes, nickel by nickel, penny by penny. I was very proud of my connection with the public life of the beach. ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... snow-house upon his lips. Though rather alarmed on tasting the salt, which could not proceed from a common spray, he kept quiet till the same dropping became more frequently repeated. Just as he was about to give the alarm, on a sudden a tremendous surf broke close to the house, discharging a quantity of water into it; a second soon followed, and earned away the slab of snow placed as a door before the entrance. The missionaries immediately called aloud to the sleeping Esquimaux to rise and quit the place. They jumped up in an instant. ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... of Lissa, on the Dalmatian coast. Though Lissa is a strong position, the usual comparison of it with Gibraltar is exaggerated. It ought to have been possible to land the Italian troops which Persano had with him under cover of his guns, and to take the island before Tegethoff came up. The surf caused by the rough weather, to which he chiefly attributed his failure, would not have proved an insuperable obstacle had the ships' crews been exercised in landing troops ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... favourable for his departure, but the dry weather had made the river so shallow that it was impossible for the caravel left with the settlers to cross the bar, and as they had no boat strong enough to weather the surf, it seemed impossible for them to carry to him tidings of their condition. They were in despair; for if they were left, they knew that they were left to perish. The admiral, on his part, had become uneasy, ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... the steed with his nostril all wide, But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride: And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf, And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... them. At corners it struck so tumultuous a blow upon the chest of the pedestrians that for a moment it would halt them, and you could hear them gasping half-smothered "AHS" like bathers in a heavy surf. Yet there was a gayety in this eager gale; the crowds pressed anxiously, yet happily, up and down the street in their generous search for things to give away. It was not the rich who struggled through the storm to-night; these were people who carried their own bundles home. You saw them: ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... the scurvy were evident among the men, and the captain well knew that in no way could the dread disease be kept away better than by constant exercise on the sands of the seashore. The sailors entered heartily into their captain's plans, and spent hours racing on the beach, swimming in the surf, and ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... had been already made. The surf was breaking over the ledges in all directions, and it was with the utmost difficulty that they succeeded in getting clear out into deep water. A breeze which had sprung up from the east, tended to raise the sea a little, but when they finally got ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... they, believing that he had been wrecked, had embarked in a skiff which he had left them, and had reached the main land, from which they were not far distant; but their skiff was shattered to pieces in the surf, and they had saved themselves by swimming. Believing that they were not far from the river Columbia, they had followed the shore, living, on the way, upon shell-fish and frogs; at last they arrived among strange Indians, who, far from receiving them kindly, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... or at masthead or in lighthouse or on lightship a twinkling diamond point. A moon, apparently as big as a barrel-head, hung up in the east and below it a carpet of cold fire, of dancing, spangled silver spread upon the ocean. The sound of the surf, distant, soothing; and for the rest quiet and the fragrance of the summer ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... giant wreck, Fiercely blazed the riven deck; Thick and fast as falling stars, Crashed the flaming blocks and spars; Loud as surf, when winds are strong, Wailed the scorched and stricken throng, Gazing on a rugged shore, Fires behind, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... had been telling me as we came along, and then the parting when I didn't expect it, all I had of the man about me gave way somehow in a moment. And I sat alone, crying and sobbing on the sand-hillock, with the surf roaring miles out at sea behind me, and the great plain before, with Matthew walking over it alone on his ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... Cape. Here we had calms again, and the grass and barnacles grew very fast. Indeed, the ship's bottom was like a half-tide rock, and when the water washed up the sides, as she rolled, the noise made by the barnacles was like the surf on a sea-beach. We were followed for several days by a shoal of dolphins, which we caught in great numbers night and morning. Finally we got round the Cape, and to St. Helena, where we stayed four days, and employed men to assist us in chopping off grass and barnacles as far as we could ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... barking or rushing out to fight back a wave that was sneaking too close. He loved the water, and the best time of all, he thought, was when his mistress took her swimming lesson and he could plough through the waves beside her. Often she would lie on her back in the hissing, white surf, holding to Jan's collar until they both landed on the warm sand. Sometimes the two of them would dig a big hole, and the dog would scrunch into it, while she buried him until only his nose and eyes could be seen. Jan was so happy that at ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... patrol outside. The skipper had already chosen his course. Because of the gale, he calculated that the blockaders would get a considerable offing, lest they flounder mid the shoal waters inshore. He knew too, even if it were not so dark, that a long, foamy line of surf curtained the bay from any watchful eye on the open sea. By the time she reached the beach channels, La Luz had full speed on. Then, knifing the higher and higher waves, she made a ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... been a pleasure to him since that day six months ago when his old schooner, dismasted and leaking in a gale, had foundered near the Wolves, two sharp-toothed islands near Grande Mignon. Four islanders had been lost that day, and he alone had lived through the surf. ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... tinge upon the shell washed in the surf, and planted a paradise of bloom in a child's cheek, let us leave it to the owl to hoot, and the frog to croak, and the ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... the captain to that old worthy, who was just poking his head up out of the forecastle,—"Trull, is that noise the surf?" ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... rounded at all, and diametrically opposed to the late Gothic conditions, 24 to 28, in which it advances gradually, like a wave preparing to break, and at last is actually seen curling over with the long-backed rush of surf upon the shore. Yet the Torcello base resembles these Gothic ones both in expansion beneath and in ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... dust, Aerial surf upon the shores of earth, Ethereal estuary, frith of light.... Bird of the ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... hard winter day, the wind shrill, black and silver clouds booming across the sky, everything in panicky motion during the brief light. They struggled against the surf of wind, through deep snow. Kennicott was cheerful. He hailed Loren Wheeler, "Behave yourself while I been away?" The editor bellowed, "B' gosh you stayed so long that all your patients have got well!" and importantly took notes for the Dauntless ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... his gray beard from the corner of his mouth;—he was dead! As I laid him back on the pillow and turned to restore some quiet to the ward, a Norther came sweeping down the Gulf like a rush of mad spirits; tore up the white crests of the sea and flung them on the beach in thundering surf; burst through the heavy fog that had trailed upon the moon's track and smothered the island in its soft pestilent brooding; and in one mighty pouring out of cold pure ether changed earth and sky from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... on; and at day-break the next morning, I steered for the N.W., or lee-side of the island; and as we stood round its S. or S.W. part, we saw it every where guarded by a reef of coral rock, extending, in some places, a full mile from the land, and a high surf breaking upon it. Some thought that they saw land to the southward of this island; but, as that was to the windward, it was left undetermined. As we drew near, we saw people on different parts of the coast, walking, or running along the shore, and in a little time after we had reached the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... as he looked up at the sky where some stars showed through. "The clouds seem to be breaking away and the wind has died down a little. The surf doesn't sound so loud on the cliffs ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... a foreign shore. Weeks passed, and there came intelligence that the ill-fated vessel in which she embarked was a total wreck. Among the lost were his sister and her husband, who now slept quietly beneath the billowy surf ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... with a gentleman to the Ocean House, the other day, to see the sea horses, and also to listen to the roar of the surf, and watch the ships drifting about, here, and there, and far away at sea. When I stood on the beach and let the surf wet my feet, I recollected doing the same thing on the shores of the Atlantic—and then I had a proper appreciation of the vastness of this country—for I had traveled ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... him by past selves, other incarnations of himself, who had gleaned it in their lives, from days when the world was young. He had a thousand souls, which had known great sorrows and joys and adventures. His blood seemed to smoke gold, like spray on rushing surf in sunshine. Never had he admitted any one he had known (except the people his own mind created for inhabitants of that kingdom) into his land; but now the girl whose name he scarcely knew stood at the door ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... like prodigious amethysts,—and beyond them, to the left, the glorious spectre of Fuji, towering enormously above everything. Between sea-wall and sea there is no sand,—only a grey slope of stones, chiefly boulders; and these roll with the surf so that it is ugly work trying to pass the breakers on a rough day. If you once get struck by a stone-wave,—as I did several times,—you will ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... thistle lifts a purple crown Six foot out of the turf, And the harebell shakes on the windy hill— O the breath of the distant surf!— ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Kinta appeared, a black shadow on a silver sea, roaring for a boat, but the surf was so heavy that it was some time before the police boat was got off; and then Mr. Maxwell, whose cheery, energetic voice precedes him, and Mr. Walker landed, bullying everybody, as people often do when they know that they are the delinquents! It was lovely in the white ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... intending to return at daylight. In a short time, however, it fell calm. The lead was hove. It was evident that a current and swell combined were drifting the ship fast towards the shore, on which the surf was breaking heavily. On this the captain ordered an anchor to be let go, which happily brought her up. Though there was scarcely a breath of air, every now and then heavy rollers came slowly in, lifting the ship gently, and then, passing on, broke with a terrific roar on the rocky coast. The ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... a door had been swiftly and silently closed, the sound of the surf became suddenly less. The boat floated on an even keel; she opened her eyes ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... swell of the ocean burst in thunder, and flew to almost the height of the cliff in a very great and glorious fury of foam. In other parts, where I suspected a sort of beach, there was the silver tremble of surf; but in the main, the heave coming out of the north-east, the folds swept the base of the ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... food. Larvae. The early forms of many animals. Kinds of food in the earth. The bruang. The sun-bear of Malay. The bear and the honey pot. How it was tamed. The sport. The ocean. George and Harry at the beach. Bathing in the surf. The discovery of the wreck of an upturned boat. Finding the compartments belonging to their lost boat on Wonder Island. Sending for John. The skeleton beneath the upturned boat. The bound skeleton. The startling discovery of the same kinds of ropes found in their lost ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... exaggeration so long as the laws which nature observes in her increase be observed. Thus, for instance: the form and polished surface of a breaking ripple three inches high, are not representation of either the form or the surface of the surf of a storm, nodding ten feet above the beach; neither would the cutting ripple of a breeze upon a lake if simply exaggerated, represent the forms of Atlantic surges; but as nature increases her bulk, she diminishes the angles of ascent, and increases her divisions; and if ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... breakers that were rolling wildly upon (happily) a sandy beach beneath the cliffs. I told my men to be ready to jump out the moment that we should touch the sand, and to secure the canoe by hauling the head up the beach. All were ready, and we rushed through the surf, the native boatmen paddling like steam engines. "Here comes a wave; look out!" and just as we almost touched the beach, a heavy breaker broke over the black women who were sitting in the stern, and swamped the boat. My men jumped into the water like ducks, and the next moment we were all ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... 'Reo paddled past the schooner in a wretched old canoe, whose outrigger was so insecurely fastened that it threatened to come adrift every instant. The old man grinned as he recognised Denison; then, pipe in mouth, he went boldly out through the passage between the lines of roaring surf into ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... approach the stricken heart are closed and silent forever. And in such a crisis, let no counsel be taken of narrow, niggard sentiment. When in a sea-storm some human being is seen in the distant surf, clinging to a plank, that is sometimes driven nearer to the shore, and sometimes carried farther off; sometimes buried in the surge, and then rising again, as if itself struggling like the almost hopeless sufferer it supports, who looks sadly to the shore as he ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... is the pitch of the ground, and so narrow the shingly ledge at the bottom. And truly in bad weather and at high tides there is no shingle ledge at all, but the crest of the wave volleys up the incline, and the surf rushes on to the top of it. For the cove, though sheltered from other quarters, receives the full brunt of northeasterly gales, and offers no safe anchorage. But the hardy fishermen make the most of its scant convenience, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... her face, keen, sweet, vibrant, thrilling. What he had heard that night at the monastery, the humming life of the land of white fire—the desert, the million looms of all the weavers of the world weaving, this she heard in the sunlight, with the sand rising like surf behind her horse's heels. The misery and the tyranny and the unrequited love were all behind her, the disillusion and the loss and the undeserved insult to her womanhood—all, all were sunk away into the unredeemable past. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... you hear. Only the musical plash of the fountains and the sonorous undertone of the organ, like the distant roar of surf upon the beach? Ah, me! ah, me! how materialistic you are, my children. Your old uncle hears in these myriad-voiced fountains the musical instruments which Boccaccio gave to the Satyrs; 'cymbals, pipes, and whistling reeds,' and the song of the nymphs. Did you note that startled cry? It ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... vegetable matter, is of so poisonous a nature that it is not only undrinkable, but absolutely kills the fish, which in stormy weather are driven in from the sea. As may be imagined, the furious tempests which beat upon this exposed coast create a strong surf-line. After a few days of north-west wind the waters of the Gordon will be found salt for twelve miles up from the bar. The head-quarters of the settlement were placed on an island not far from the mouth of this inhospitable river, called ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf of green surges. Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... it on the other side of Surf Avenue, nigh that long line of dashin' horses Serenus depicters, that go racin' and cavortin' round and round, bearin' the gay and ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... guile of the fish, he sought to make the deeper part of the weir secure, and for an hour or so he laboured in the water with head, hands, and feet. While with deft fingers he weaved creepers and branches to the stakes, his feet beat the surface into surf and surge to the scaring of the fish to the remote limits of their retreat. But the tighter the weir became, the more the pressure was on it. Fast as repairs were made at one spot gaps appeared in another which demanded immediate attention. The quantity ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... made her talk. Kept asking her questions: If the wind had not gone down? If she heard the surf upon the beach? If she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... now much more easy, for the high bank had broken the run of the surf. The water beyond it was much smoother, and they were able to swim, pushing ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... against the rampart that it could be mounted readily, if the assailants could but time their arrival at the right moment. This was not easy, as that rocky and tempestuous coast was often made inaccessible by fogs and surf; Shirley therefore preferred a plan of his own contriving. But nothing could be done without first persuading ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... again in imagination the dark room where she had gone to be by herself, she heard the thunder of the surf on the rocks outside and the rumble of the thunder overhead. She saw once more the vision of Alien as she had seen it then. Allen stretched out cold and dead perhaps on some shell-ridden battlefield or perhaps, more terrible still, ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge - or, The Hermit of Moonlight Falls • Laura Lee Hope
... thing instinct with life, walking the waters—and our feelings are not only excited for the safety of the crew, but for that of the vessel itself, to which we attach a degree of interest as for a friend. A gale was now up; the boat put off to their aid was in danger of being swamped by the surf, and found it impracticable to make way against a violent head-wind and tide united. Nothing short of a miracle could now save the ship; however the wind suddenly shifted a little, and I began ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various
... Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking forever. Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... pressure, of prodigious poetry and beauty and amazement. This was a strange jungle of life. Tall coasts of windows stood up into the pure brilliant sky: against their feet beat a dark surf of slums. In one foreign street, too deeply trenched for sunlight, oranges were the only gold. The water, reaching round in two arms, came close: there was a note of husky summons in the whistles of passing craft. Almost everywhere, sharp above many smells of oils and spices, the ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... closed his eyes again for a moment and became aware that the sound which had before seemed like the pounding of surf on the shore was the steady cheering of Brimfield's supporters. "I feel—all right," he answered, "and—and for the love of mud take that beastly sponge ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... proved almost useless owing to shortage of rolling stock, and consequently supply depended almost entirely on motor lorry and camel from Railhead, or from the Wadi Sukharieh, where some supplies were being landed in surf boats. The question of supply had been most difficult, and water supply hardly less so, even for the one corps, and it looked as if we might come in for some scarcity when we got up nearer the front. In the pursuit of the ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... be waiting and her father would be impatient. But she hesitated. Her thoughts were out there on the water where she loved to be. The twang of the wind as it swept through the trees along the shore, and the beat of the surf upon the gravelly beach were music ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... centre of Dorre Island, and stood in to within about two miles of the shore, which we found steep and rocky with a heavy surf breaking on it; we then tacked and stood off ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... they had sail-vessels there at the disposal of visitors. But Mr. Neale and Mr. John Simpkins, the present agent, can put you in the way of visiting the island, and you might carry my sweet daughter, Tabb, over and give her a surf bath. But do not let the mosquitoes annoy her. Give her much love from me. I am writing in Mildred's room, who is very grateful for your interest in her behalf. She is too weak to speak. I hope Rob had a pleasant trip. Tell me Custis's plans. ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... appearance of stone, and they are formed along the beach in a beautiful manner; they are built with piazzas and verandahs, and they extend about one mile along a sandy beach, while the natives parading along the shore, and the surf spraying upon the beach, gave the scene a very picturesque appearance. The surf beats here with so much violence that it is impossible for any ship's boats to land ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... that moment, was engaged in smoothing either paths or people. The private secretary was no worse off than his neighbors except in being called earlier into service. On April 13 the storm burst and rolled several hundred thousand young men like Henry Adams into the surf of a wild ocean, all helpless like himself, to be beaten about for four years by the waves of war. Adams still had time to watch the regiments form ranks before Boston State House in the April evenings and march southward, quietly enough, with the air of business ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the hot sun as they broke into foam, and under its grateful coolness we glided comfortably along, with a flowing sheet. The bar at the mouth of the Macalister was eighteen miles distant, and we hoped to cross it about sunset, when the breeze would have dropped, and the passage through the surf would be readily distinguishable; but our plans were completely upset by one of the troopers espying smoke issuing from the scrub on a small creek, that entered the bay about half-way between the ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... Thursday with coach, horses, and William her coachman. That matter being finished, and the trunks being unpacked, she decided to take her first bath in the sea, expecting me to support her through the trying ordeal of the surf. As we were returning from the beach we met a carriage containing a number of persons ...
— Lemorne Versus Huell • Elizabeth Drew Stoddard
... frowningly overhead, its base all worn and furrowed by the furious surges that for ages had dashed against it. All around lay a chaos of huge boulders covered with seaweed. The tide was now at the lowest ebb. The surf here was moderate, for the seaweed on the rocks interfered with the swell of the waters, and the waves broke ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... their work and over the creak of the leather in the rowlocks the rumble and fume of the seven mile beach came mixed with the yelping and mewing of the gulls. The boat made slow progress, then a few yards from the surf line it hung for a moment till the rowers suddenly gave way and moving like a relieved arrow she came on the crest of a wave, then the oars came in with a crash and the two men tumbling out dragged her nose high and dry. They helped the girl out and ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Among the tall climbing roses, which hung a mantle of yellow flowers to the fretted baluster of the terrace, there stood out in the distance the illuminated fronts of the hotels and villas, and occasionally women's laughter was heard above the dull, monotonous sound of surf and the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... people thought the longboat too must have overturned, and that all the women had perished. The Santiago, nearly sinking, had only just reached port. The beach above Point Pinos was thronged with people searching in the surf for the bodies of the victims, and the captain of the Idaho was broken hearted, if not well-nigh crazed. The news of the safety of the women flew from street to street, fast as the papers could speed their extras. Loving ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... pulled for the little cove about four miles distant, bearing west by north. For the first three miles the soundings did not show less than three fathoms, with an even sandy bottom, the last mile shoaling gradually to the beach; the landing being easily effected, as there now was but little surf. The shore was found to be generally very sandy, a low flat valley extending from the head of the cove across the isthmus about two miles to Mermaid Strait, where it terminated in a muddy mangrove ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... place they had reached was just outside the northern boundaries of Harlem, a sylvan spot still unspoiled by the rude invasion of the flat-house builder. The land, thickly wooded, sloped down sharply to the water, and the perfect quiet was broken only by the washing of the tiny surf against the river bank and the shrill notes of the birds ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... sang, the chimney coughed in its throat. One heard outside the whistle of the wind, the moan of the surf far off in the night, and the ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... it: I myself Have spoilt the emperor by indulging him. Nine years ago, during the Danish war, I raised him up a force, a mighty force, Forty or fifty thousand men, that cost him Of his own purse no doit. Through Saxony The fury goddess of the war marched on, E'en to the surf-rocks of the Baltic, bearing The terrors of his name. That was a time! In the whole imperial realm no name like mine Honored with festival and celebration— And Albrecht Wallenstein, it was the title Of the third jewel in his crown! But at the Diet, when the princes met At Regensburg, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... pausing or looking behind, he by and by heard the sea roaring at a distance. At this sound, he increased his speed, and soon came to a beach, where the great surf waves tumbled themselves upon the hard sand, in a long line of snowy foam. At one end of the beach, however, there was a pleasant spot, where some green shrubbery clambered up a cliff, making its rocky face look soft and beautiful. A carpet of verdant grass, largely ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... small veins of tin ore were discovered crossing each other in every direction. Although the surface was covered for about ten months in the year, and had at spring-tides nineteen feet of water over it, while a heavy surf often broke on the shore, a poor miner, named Thomas Curtis, about a century ago determined to attempt winning the ore. The work could only be carried on during the short time the rock appeared above water. Three summers were spent in sinking ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... the eyes of the ancient navigators, when, as they came coasting along from the north in their frail galleys, on their voyages to Greece and Italy, they saw it frowning defiance to them as they came, with threatening clouds hanging upon its summit, and the surges and surf of the AEgean perpetually thundering upon its base below. To make this stormy promontory the more terrible, it was believed to be the haunt of innumerable uncouth and misshapen monsters of the sea, that lived by devouring the hapless ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the smoke of turf, A heathery land and misty sky, And turned on rocks and raging surf His ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... go rushing on, on the car, past the Children's Hospital, past miles of sandhills, out to the very shore of the ocean, where the air was salt, and filled with the dull roaring of surf. Mary Lou, sharing with her mother a distaste for peanuts, crowds, tin-type men, and noisy pleasure-seekers, ignored Susan's hints that they walk down to the beach, and they went back on the ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... slippery things they couldn't see, cursing perhaps, or praying their prayers, or perhaps already sliding away, down and down, into the cold, black caves of the sea. And then the shadows seemed to be full of shades, and the surf-tongues were near to catching my ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... are drowned while bathing in the surf are said to experience but little pain. In fact, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... to a spot indicated by the lieutenant, and left as it had been taken from the surf. Everything in it was arranged in order, so that it could be hastily put into the water if circumstance demanded a hurried retreat from the scene of operations. Near the spot was a post set up in the sand, which might have been one of the corners of a shanty, or have been used years before by ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... over my face and thin night-dress, then tore past up the hill. I looked and listened, but nothing could be seen or heard; no blue light, nor indeed any light at all; no cry, nor gun, nor signal of distress—nothing but the howling of the wind as it swept up from the sea, the thundering of the surf upon the beach below; and all around, black darkness and impenetrable night. The blast caught the lattice from my hand as I closed the window, and banged it furiously. I turned to look at my mother. She had fallen forward on her knees, with ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had run the dingy into the surf, had shipped oars, and were lustily pulling away—Cap'n Sproul in the stern roaring abuse at them in a way that drowned the howls of Mr. Butts, who ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... the head of the bay and musselbakes down by the roaring surf; and Tom told shamelessly of the Halcyon, and of the run of contraband, and asked Frederick before them all how he had managed to smuggle the horse back to the fishermen without discovery. All the young men were in the conspiracy with Polly to pamper Tom to his heart's ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... water to port and starboard, like bits of the Garden of Eden gone astray and floated out to sea. I'd like you to smell the breezes that come off from them towards evening, to hear the 'trades' whistling overhead, and the thunder of the surf upon the reef. Or at another time to get inside that selfsame reef and look down through the still, transparent water, at the rainbow-coloured fish dashing among the coral boulders, in and out of the most beautiful fairy grottos the brain of man ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... two of them put in nearly the whole of the growing season dodging one another through the close twigged manzanita, lilac, laurel and mahogany that broke upward along the shining bouldered coasts of San Jacinto. the chaparral at this season took all the changes of the incoming surf, blue in the shadows, darkling green about the heads of the gulches, or riffling with the white under side of wind-lifted leaves. Once its murmurous swell had closed over them, the mule-deer would have his own way with the Pot Hunter. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... went now knee-deep in the surf, and Du Mesne, clinging to the gunwale as he passed out, was soon waist deep, and time and again lost ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... sort of kindergarten, where children like The Babe are given, at small expense, object-lessons and exercises peculiarly adapted to young and plastic minds. In Central America certain tribes living by the seaboard throw their children into the surf, wherein they sink or learn to swim, as the Fates ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... itself stands on a bluff high above the sandy beach, where the great waves come rolling in. And there is 'Tom Never's Head.' Also Nantucket Town is on high ground sloping gradually up from the harbor; and just out of the town, to the north-west, are the Cliffs, where you go to find surf-bathing; in the town itself you must be satisfied with still-bathing. An excellent place, by the way, to teach ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... testified in this case to start using Internet filtering software. The testimony of the Chairman of the Board of the Greenville Public Library is illustrative. In December 1999, there was considerable local press coverage in Greenville concerning adult patrons who routinely used the library to surf the Web for pornography. In response to public outcry stemming from the newspaper report, the Board of Trustees held a special board meeting to obtain information and to communicate with the public concerning the library's provision of Internet access. At this meeting, the Board ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... spoilt the emperor by indulging him. Nine years ago, during the Danish war, I raised him up a force, a mighty force, Forty or fifty thousand men, that cost him Of his own purse no doit. Through Saxony The fury goddess of the war marched on, E'en to the surf-rocks of the Baltic, bearing The terrors of his name. That was a time! In the whole imperial realm no name like mine Honored with festival and celebration— And Albrecht Wallenstein, it was the title Of the third jewel ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... as a strip of white beach flashed beneath them, and Peggy, peering over the edge of the chassis, saw the big Atlantic swells rolling below them. The thunder of the surf on the beach came clearly to their ears, ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... organ, and the voice of the Cathedral throbbed through its echoing aisles in tremulous waves of sound. Above the deep tones of the bass notes a delicate melody floated, like a lark singing above the surf. ...
— The French Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... could I help her? "Would I—was it wrong?" (Claspt hands and that petitionary grace Of sweet seventeen subdued me ere she spoke) "O would I take her father for one hour, For one half-hour, and let him talk to me!" 115 And even while she spoke, I saw where James Made toward us, like a wader in the surf, Beyond the ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the tent over their heads, got up and assisted Montague to erect it anew in a more sheltered position, after which, saying that he meant to take a midnight ramble on the shore to cool his fevered brow, he made straight for the sea, stepped knee-deep into the raging surf, and bared his breast to ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... they did have. There were bathing in the surf, and lawn tennis, and dancing at the hotel in the evening, and also lovely walks and drives, and once they went out on horseback to a large fruit farm some miles away, and were royally entertained by some of Bob Sutter's friends. ...
— The Rover Boys on Land and Sea - The Crusoes of Seven Islands • Arthur M. Winfield
... heads on the crest of a wave, striking out to where, for one instant, an upstretched arm and nothing more rose feebly from the water. The next moment, hurled thither as it seemed by the wave, he had reached it, and was battling for dear life with the surf that swept him ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... too, if he would but remain awhile longer. Archie was firm, however, and passed out into the narrow alleyways again, feeling that he had learned a great deal through a very small expenditure of money. He gradually found his way back into the crowded Surf Avenue, where there were hundreds of things, evidently, which he had not yet seen. The crowds, too, seemed greater even than before, and there seemed to be thousands of people arriving every hour from New York and Brooklyn, over the various street-car and railway lines, and by the excursion boats ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison
... night, even at our supposed distance from the Keys; but we were now in no situation to complain. A part of our stern and the yawl at the davits, had gone together. I ran forward to clear the anchors in order to prevent her from ranging ahead on another rock which I could perceive among the surf; but a greater part of the bows were gone, and with them the anchors.—The water was already groaning under the deck—she arose for the last time on the crest of another sea nearly to the top of the rock, quivering like a bird under its death-wound. ...
— Narrative of the shipwreck of the brig Betsey, of Wiscasset, Maine, and murder of five of her crew, by pirates, • Daniel Collins
... the monotonous roar of the surf would have lulled him to rest; but now his anxiety was so great that, despite all efforts, his eyes would persist in staying open very wide, and he spent the remainder of the siesta trying in vain to decide ...
— The Search for the Silver City - A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan • James Otis
... night, stood away from the land, intending to return at daylight. In a short time, however, it fell calm. The lead was hove. It was evident that a current and swell combined were drifting the ship fast towards the shore, on which the surf was breaking heavily. On this the captain ordered an anchor to be let go, which happily brought her up. Though there was scarcely a breath of air, every now and then heavy rollers came slowly in, lifting the ship gently, and then, ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... to go back to Singapore And ship along the Straits, To a bungalow I know beside Penang; Where cocoanut palms along the shore Are waving, and the gates Of Peace shut Sorrow out forevermore. I want to go back and hear the surf Come beating in at night, Like the washing of eternity over the dead. I want to see dawn fare up and day Go down in golden light; I want to go back to Penang! I ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... countered with a wave of warmth as he leaned into the wind and started to walk. The connection between the Union Hotel and the building he had just left was an arched sidewalk that curved between them, five stories above the sand and surf. ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... was a good deal of both; so much as greatly to terrify the females. Of all the craft known, however, one of these egg-shells is really the safest, if properly managed, among breakers or amid the combing of seas. We have ourselves ridden in them safely through a surf that would have swamped the best man-of-war cutter that ever floated; and done it, too, without taking on board as much water as would serve to wash one's hands. The light vessel floats on so little ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... on May 12 was not managed according to Shirley's written instructions; nor was the siege. Shirley had been playing a little war game in his study, with all the inconvenient obstacles left out—the wind, the weather, the crashing surf in Gabarus Bay, the rocks and bogs of the surrounding country, the difficulties of entering a narrow-necked harbour under a combination of end-on and broadside fire, the terrible lee shore off the islands, ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... the line of bath-houses that backed upon the low sand-bank behind them, with its tufts of coarse silvery-green grasses. The Maxwells bowed to some of the ladies who tripped gayly past them in their airy costumes to the surf, or came up from it sobered and shivering. Four or five young fellows, with sun-blackened arms and legs, were passing ball near them. A pony-carriage drove by on the wet sand; a horseman on a crop-tailed ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... an awful one, when George Borrow, the well-known author of Lavengro and The Bible in Spain, dashed into the surf and saved one life, and through his instrumentality the others were saved. We ourselves have known this brave and gifted man for years, and, daring as was his deed, we have known him more than once to risk his life for others. We are happy to add that he has sustained ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... the island we found it was at a place where there could be no landing, there being a great surf on the stony beach. So we dropped anchor, and swung round toward the shore. Some people came down to the water edge and hallooed to us, as we did to them; but the wind was so high and the surf so ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... again beating in his brain like heavy surf on a beach. Curtis was sick. The least he could have done was die. Well, maybe he still would. And if he didn't he could be helped to—Stern saw the beast looking at him intently, malevolently. Its ...
— Martians Never Die • Lucius Daniel
... shot struck home. Above the Russian trenches lay a long white cloud of powder forming a great wall of waves. The dull thunder of the guns was tremendous. It whistled and howled, it cried and moaned, it roared like the surf of the ocean, like the terrifying growl of a thunderstorm, and then it threw back a hundredfold clear echo. In between came the dull crack of the Russian shrapnel. They broke in the broad, swampy lowlands of the Rawka; they pierced the cover of ice which broke with a tremendous noise while ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... to this malediction, the boat ran swiftly past a low rocky point, over which the surf ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... were at least acres of them. Occasionally an instantaneous photograph gave a lively picture of the beach, when the water was full of bathers-men, women, children, in the most extraordinary costumes for revealing or deforming the human figure—all tossing about in the surf. But most of the pictures were taken on dry land, of single persons, couples, and groups in their bathing suits. Perhaps such an extraordinary collection of humanity cannot be seen elsewhere in the world, such ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Aspendale, Mentone and Brighton, near Melbourne; at Narrabeen, Manly, Cronulla, Coogee, near Sydney; and at a hundred other places on the Australian coast, are beautiful beaches. You may see on holidays hundreds of thousands of people—men, women, and children—surf-bathing or paddling on the sands. It is quite safe fun, too, if you take care not to go out too far and so get caught in the undertow. Sharks are common on the Australian coast, but they will not venture into the broken water of surf beaches. But you must not bathe, except in enclosed baths in ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... and massive rock, upon which the swell of the ocean burst in thunder, and flew to almost the height of the cliff in a very great and glorious fury of foam. In other parts, where I suspected a sort of beach, there was the silver tremble of surf; but in the main, the heave coming out of the north-east, the folds swept the base of ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... 30 We heard the sweet bells over the bay? In the caverns where we lay, Through the surf and through the swell, The far-off sound of a silver bell? Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, 35 Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, Where the salt weed sways in the stream, Where the sea-beasts, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... thrown the pilot into the sea they gained the shore, so long looked at with anxiety and suspense. The spars of the raft, jerked by the running swell undulated and rubbed against each other, as they rose and fell to the waves breaking on the beach. The breeze was fresh, but the surf was trifling, and the landing was without difficulty. The beach was shelving, of firm white sand, interspersed and strewed with various brilliant-coloured shells; and here and there, the bleached fragments and bones of some ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... night with clinging darkness; the faded leaves hung slack and motionless from the trees, waiting for their fall; the tense notes of the surf beyond the sand-dunes vibrated through the damp air like chords from some mighty VIOLONO; large, warm drops wept from the arbour while I sat in the garden, holding the poor little book, and thinking of the white blot in the record of a life that was too proud to bend ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... strong enough to bear any reasonable weight. My next care was what to load it with, and how to preserve what I laid upon it from the surf of the sea: but I was not long considering this. I first laid all the planks or boards upon it that I could get, and having considered well what I most wanted, I first got three of the seamen's chests, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... himself sliding toward the land he was so provoked with the cow that he dived head first, down to the bottom of the sea. That was a pull! The Elephant was jerked off his feet, and came slipping and sliding to the beach, and into the surf. He was terribly angry. He braced himself with all his might, and pulled his best. At the jerk, up came the Whale ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... whispered to him by past selves, other incarnations of himself, who had gleaned it in their lives, from days when the world was young. He had a thousand souls, which had known great sorrows and joys and adventures. His blood seemed to smoke gold, like spray on rushing surf in sunshine. Never had he admitted any one he had known (except the people his own mind created for inhabitants of that kingdom) into his land; but now the girl whose name he scarcely knew stood at the door of the castle, asking to come in, saying with her eyes, which he had likened ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Atlantic roll was swinging lazily in, and the yawl rose to it sleepily, with a long, slow movement. The distant roar of the surf upon the Finisterre coast rose in the peaceful atmosphere like a lullaby. The holy calm of sunset, the hush of lowering night, and the presence of the only man who had ever drawn him with the strange, unaccountable bond that we call sympathy, moved the heart of the ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... safety, Mr. Archibald handed Jeanie out of the carriage, and, not without some tremor on her part, she was transported through the surf and placed in the boat. He then offered the same civility to his fellow-servant, but she was resolute in her refusal to quit the carriage, in which she now remained in solitary state, threatening all concerned or unconcerned with actions for wages and board-wages, damages and expenses, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... boats, however, admit so much water at the seams, that one person at least is continually employed in throwing it out. The only thing in which, they excel is landing, and putting off from the shore in a surf: By their great length and high sterns they land dry, when our boats could scarcely land at all; and have the same advantages in putting off by the height of the head. The Ivahahs are the only boats that are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... to guard against was not to praise the river sunsets too much at any cottage on the Point; and in cottages on the river, not to say a great deal of the surf on the rocks. But it was easy to respect the amiable local susceptibilities, and Gaites got on so well that he told people ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... in the spectral surf Along the spectral sands, And all the air vibrates, as if from harps Touched by ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... some things in words. I seemed to be out of the world of everyday life, and surrounded by what was pure and fresh and powerful and beautiful—it all comes back to me now, when I think of the surf breaking on the rocks, and the lights and colours, and the ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... down this rocky descent! So! Here we are on the floor of the vasty deep! What a glorious race-course! The polished and printless sand spreads away before you as far as the eye can see, the surf comes in below breast-high ere it breaks and the white fringe of the sliding wave shoots up the beach, but leaves room for the marching of a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted. O, how noiselessly runs the wheel, and how dreamily we ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... spacious fire-place in the "baronial" hall was a wide semicircle of young people, and before that in the parlor, a cluster of elders, whose graver talk was enlivened, from time to time, by the peals of laughter that tossed into jubilant surf the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... troops at several points, the steamer at last arrived off Cape Coast; but not yet were they to land. A strong wind was blowing, and the surf beat with such violence, on the shore, that it was impossible even for the surf boat to come out. The officers had nothing to do but to watch the shore. Even this was only done under difficult circumstances, for the steamer ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... is it makes the vessel roll? What sounds are these I hear? It seems as if the rising waves were beating on my ear!' 'Oh, it is the breaking of the surf—just that, and nothing more, My Captain ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... it. He had made himself felt. That girl was, one may say, washing about with slack limbs in the ugly surf of life with no opportunity to strike out for herself, when suddenly she had been made to feel that there was somebody beside her in the bitter water. A most considerable moral event for her; whether she was aware of it or not. They met again at the one o'clock dinner. I ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... out fishing," promised the man. "And so you're here to get moving pictures; eh? Well, I don't know much about 'em, but you couldn't come to a nicer place than this spot on the coast. And you only have to go a little way to get right where the real surf comes smashing up on the beach. Of course, as I said, we're so land-locked just here that we don't see much of it, even in a storm. Moving pictures; eh? I'd ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton
... to kick about, Miss Sternberger? Didn't I see you in the surf this morning with that shirtwaist ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... grounds through the hedge behind the spring-house, and ran like a hare through his garden. I had to hammer upon his door before I could make Achmet hear me, so loud and surf-like was the noise of the wind ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... help to unload and load the ship. And, to comfort me in my distress in that time, two of the sailors robbed me of all my money, and ran away from the ship. I had been so long used to an European climate that at first I felt the scorching West India sun very painful, while the dashing surf would toss the boat and the people in it frequently above high water mark. Sometimes our limbs were broken with this, or even attended with instant death, and I was day by ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... porch, a negro boy brought the town paper, and Mrs. Crittenden found a paragraph about a soldier springing into the sea in full uniform at Siboney to rescue a drowning comrade, who had fallen into the surf while trying to land, and had been sunk to the bottom by his arms and ammunition. And the rescuer's name was Crittenden. The writer went on to tell who he was, and how he had given up his commission to a younger brother and had gone as a private in the regular army—how he had been offered ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... breakers. Forgetting the treasure which he had concealed in the cave, and the friendly treatment which he had so long received from the tribe who knew of its whereabouts, the sailor rushed into the surf, and throwing himself into the boat bade the men pull back to the ship. When he was standing on the deck of the latter he recognised fully his own position. Above him floated the Spanish flag, fierce glances of hatred from all the crew were turned upon him, and to complete ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... into a position of safety on the pinnacle of a little bluff. From this point of vantage he could see the entire plain. To the very verge of the horizon the brown masses of the buffalo bands showed through the dust clouds, coming on with a thunderous roar like that of surf. Camp was a mile away, and the stampede luckily passed to one side of it. Watching his chance he finally dodged back to the tent, and all that afternoon watched the immense masses of buffalo, as band after band tore to the ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... we met within sound of the surf, and having stripped to our shirts, faced each other with the length of our two swords between. Cludde was three or four inches shorter than I, but well made and muscular, and in mere strength ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... anything like his pictures! Did you ever see bay bluer than that? or sand whiter? or a more perfect semicircle of hills than this? or a more straggling town? There is the Custom-house on the rocks. You will go to a ball there to-night, and hear the boom of the surf as you dance." He turned with one of his sudden impatient motions. "Suppose we ride. The air is too sharp to lie about under the trees. This white horse mates your gown. Let us ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... was rolling its waves against the beach, like the ocean in a storm. In the attempt to land, La Salle's canoe was nearly swamped. He and his three canoe-men leaped into the water, and, in spite of the surf, which nearly drowned them, dragged their vessel ashore, with all its load. He then went to the rescue of Hennepin, who, with his awkward companion, was in woful need of succor. Father Gabriel, with his sixty-four ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... two days longer at Saint Mary's in an endeavour to take in wood and ballast, but being prevented by the heavy surf which broke upon the shore, he set sail on the 24th of February. After a fine run of two days the weather again became tempestuous, and there appeared every probability of ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... the first to go on guard and during the initial hour of his vigil practically nothing came to disturb him. He heard the occasional cry of the nightbirds and the booming of the surf on the reefs and the shore of the isle, and saw numerous fireflies flit to and fro, ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... horizon. Every light at sea or on shore, in cottage window or at masthead or in lighthouse or on lightship a twinkling diamond point. A moon, apparently as big as a barrel-head, hung up in the east and below it a carpet of cold fire, of dancing, spangled silver spread upon the ocean. The sound of the surf, distant, soothing; and for the rest quiet and the fragrance of the ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... ocean's shore What once a tortoise served to cover. A year and more, with rush and roar, The surf had rolled it over, Had played with it, and flung it by, As wind and weather might decide it, Then tossed it high where sand-drifts dry ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... now, boys," said the captain. "Don't spend yourselves. If we have to run a surf you'll need all your strength, because we'll sure have to swim ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... of the surf filled his ears; through flying patches of mist he caught glimpses of rollers bursting white against the reef; heard duller detonations along unseen sands, and shattering reports where heavy waves exploded among ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... lulled and the Norsemen, still undaunted, again ventured ashore in vast numbers, landing their boats through a tremendous surf. These new troops, led by Roderic MacAlpin and Haffling of Orkney, attacked the Scots upon two points, making a desperate charge, and with such success that they killed many and drove the whole army back into the farther valley. ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... accompanying click of Ellen's needles. Sometimes at the opera she took on a gossamer tint from the singer's face, and longer ago than he could afford operas, he had understood that all the beauty of the world, bursting apple buds, the great curve of the surf that set the beaches trembling, derived somehow its pertinence from her. Now at the age of forty he had ceased to think very much about ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... fishermen living along the strands of their placid lagoons,[447] and stimulate a timid inshore navigation which sometimes develops to extensive coastwise intercourse, where a network of lagoons and deltaic channels forms a long inshore passage, as in Upper Guinea, but which fears the break of the surf outside.[448] ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... warm breath of the meadow comes up in your face; to your knees you are in a sea of daisies and clover; from your knees up, you are in a sea of solar light and warmth. Now you are prostrate like a swimmer, or like a surf-bather reaching for pebbles or shells, the white and green spray breaks above you; then, like a devotee before a shrine or naming his beads, your rosary strung with luscious berries; anon you are a grazing Nebuchadnezzar, or an artist taking an ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Richard's colts came whinnying and staring round the intruders, and down through a rich woodland lane five hundred feet into the valley, till they could hear the brawling of the little trout-stream, and beyond, the everlasting thunder of the ocean surf. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... helmets on their heads and suits of snowy white as they walk about amid brown-skinned natives whose bare bodies gleam like satin, lands where lines of palm trees wave their long fronds over the pearly surf washing at their roots. We will visit also other lands where you look out over a glowing pink and mauve desert to seeming infinity, and see reflected in bitter shallow water at your feet the flames of such a sunset ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... whirled as if some sharp blow had dazzled him. Outside the implacable winds still rushed and warred, and beat and clamored, shrieking, wailing, like voices from hell. The snow dashed like surf against the walls. It seemed to cut off the little cabin from the rest of the world and to dwarf all human action like the sea. It made social conventions of no value, and narrowed the question of morality to the relationship of ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... breaking round them now; but the brig was almost flat bottomed and drew but little water. All on board hung on to the shrouds and bulwarks, momentarily expecting a crash, but she drove on through the surf until within a hundred yards of the shore. Then as she went down in the trough of a wave there was a mighty crash. The next wave swept her ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... you like a flood, so that you all have the look of visions, or people that dwell only in the fire light, and will vanish from existence, as completely as your own shadows, when the flame shall sink among the embers. Hark! let me listen for the swell of the surf; it should be audible a mile inland, on a night like this. Yes; there I catch the sound, but only an uncertain murmur, as if a good way down over the beach; though, by the almanac, it is high tide at eight o'clock, and the billows must now be dashing within thirty yards ...
— The Village Uncle (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shoulder under our burdens and take the lances of pain through His vitals, and wrapped himself in all the agonies which we deserve for our misdoings, and stood on the splitting decks of a foundering vessel, amid the drenching surf of the sea, and passed midnights on the mountains amid wild beasts of prey, and stood at the point where all earthly and infernal hostilities charged on Him at once with their keen ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... bank,—at one place running out into promontories that encroach upon the terrace beneath,—at another receding into picturesque, bay-like recesses; and where composed, as in many localities, of rock of an enduring quality, we find it worn, as if by the action of the surf,—in some parts relieved into insulated stacks, in others hollowed into deep caverns,—in short, presenting all the appearance of a precipitous coast-line, subjected to the action of the waves. Now, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... Shortly after daybreak on the 13th of September, we saw Sulphur Island, in the south-west quarter, and by eleven in the forenoon were close up to it. We intended to land, but were prevented by the high wind, which caused so great a surf all round the island, as to render this impracticable. The sulphuric volcano from which the island takes its name is on the north-west side; it emits white smoke, and the smell of sulphur is very strong on the lee side of the crater. The cliffs near the volcano are of a pale yellow colour, interspersed ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... convalescent from his recent serious experience, a few months perhaps had elapsed, when the surf at Waipio became very high and was breaking heavily on the beach. This naturally caused much commotion and excitement among the people, as the numerous surf-riders, participating in the sport, would land upon the beach on their surf-boards. Continuous cheering prevailed, ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... formed along the beach in a beautiful manner; they are built with piazzas and verandahs, and they extend about one mile along a sandy beach, while the natives parading along the shore, and the surf spraying upon the beach, gave the scene a very picturesque appearance. The surf beats here with so much violence that it is impossible for any ship's boats to land ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... cemetery. We spent little time in looking at the few rude head-boards and scattered mounds of those quiet sleepers by the sea, but bestowed more attention upon the beach-miners on our left. Here, at the edge of the water, and even standing in the surf, were many men at work, beach-mining with Long-Toms' or other contrivances, and all wore ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... the brown ooze became a smooth, even, brown paste, and then, a few minutes later, the usual transformation scene took place. The bay was so protected by the long arm of land that half surrounded it that there was not only no surf, but no large waves even. The first you knew, the deepening water hid the ugly mud-flats, which were so level that only two or three inches of water were needed to transform the bay into ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... enemy, a manoeuvre extremely difficult of achievement even with the most efficient hydrophone. Heavy seas, snow and fog have also to be taken into consideration, to say nothing of darkness, the presence of a second submarine, a surf-beaten rock or sandbank and the confusing sounds of passing merchant ships, making a difficult task more difficult, as will be seen when we come to the ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... campaign; And on their brows the bright invisible crown Victory sheds from her own radiant form, As o'er her favourites' heads she sings and soars. But dreams came not so calmly; as around Turbulent shores wild waves and swamping surf Prevail, while seaward, on the tranquil deeps, Reign placid surfaces and solemn peace, So, from the troubled strands of memory, they Launched and were tossed, long ere they found the tides That lead to the gentle bosoms of pure rest. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a hurricane, and is being beaten to pieces close to land. One stalwart sailor, stripped to swim for his life, approaches Virginie, imploring her to strip likewise and let him try to pilot her through the surf. But she (like the lady in the coach, at an early part of Joseph Andrews) won't so much as look at a naked man, clasps her arms round her own garments, and is very deservedly drowned. The sailor, to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... that from the middle they rose gradually, like the sticks of a fan, to the top of the cliff, and descended in the same fashion to its base. That miraculously light, yet perfectly firm, staircase cost them twenty-two days of toil. A little tinder and the surf of the sea would destroy all trace of it forever in a single night. A betrayal of the secret was impossible; and all search for the violators of the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Fairy, went with two men, named Wilson and Gibbs, in a whale boat to the islands near Warrnambool, to look for seal. They could find no seal, and then they went across the bay, and found the mouth of the river Hopkins. In trying to land there, their boat capsized in the surf, and Smith was drowned. The other two men succeeded in reaching the shore naked, and they travelled back along the coast to Port Fairy, carrying sticks on their shoulders to look like guns, in order to frighten away the natives, who were very numerous on that part ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... collected their chattels, and were gathering in a howling chattering mob by the surf-boats ready to go on board, when the first notion came to me of joining her. It was the Danish harbour-master who gave it. He came up, under his old white umbrella with the green lining, to the house where I was staying, and told me that the tramp was going ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the plashing of the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... shallowness; they found their position to be in Encounter Bay, east of Spencer's Gulf, and from what they saw it was evident that no ship could enter it during the prevalence of the S.W. winds. All hope of a safe return centred in themselves. The thunder of the surf, that they had so longed for, brought no message of succour, but rather warned the lonely men to hasten back, while yet some strength remained to them; and above all they were surrounded by hostile blacks. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... while walking below the sea wall, yearning for Zanzibar, he saw a man running, from time to time throwing something into the sea, and another man running silently in pursuit with a knife in his hand. He waded along the shore, and presently found in the surf a bag of gold-dust. Next morning he slipped aboard a north-bound coaster. Instead of calling at Zanzibar, this time it ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... I didn't like it. But this morning I looked directly down on a little fleet of fishing boats over which we passed, and on the crowds assembling on the beach, and on the bathers who stared up at us from the breaking surf, with an entirely agreeable exaltation. And Eastbourne, in the early morning sunshine, had all the brightly detailed littleness of a town viewed from high up on the side of ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... to let the sea go down. A hammerhead's nest on one of the trees was fully four feet high. Coarse rushes show the shoals near the islands. Only one shell was seen on the shores. The canoe ships much less water in this surf than our boat did in that of Nyassa. The water is of a deep sea-green colour, probably from the reflection of the fine white sand of the bottom; we saw no part having the deep dark blue of Nyassa, and conjecture that the depth ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... didn't take board with any of them. We went to the house of a lady who was a friend of Mr. Cholott, and she gave us a splendid room, that looked right out over the harbor. We could see the islands, and the light-house, and the bar with the surf outside, and even get a glimpse of the ocean. We saw the "Tigris" going out over the bar. The captain wanted to get out on the same tide he came in on, and he did not lose any time. As soon as she got fairly out to sea, we hurried down, to go ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail! He lived as his fathers lived—stole his food, worked his wife, sold his children, ate his brother, content to drink, ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... quivered and shook under the stroke of the blasts. And my heart sank as I thought of the wreck, for I felt that she had not one chance in a thousand of weathering it out. She was on what was now the windward reef—as it had been when she struck upon it; the surf would pile up on the reef again, raising the level of the water by perhaps three or four feet, and in that case the poor old Yorkshire Lass would be washed off the coral into the lagoon, and would there sink. And with her would go all the material ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... the coast of Coromandel these small rafts are named Catamarans, and are employed for carrying letters or messages between the shore and the ships, through the tremendous surf which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... elementary warfare which hardens the fibre, and strengthens the hold; as in those invincible algx towering in the stormy straits of Tierra del Fuego, swept from Antartic homes toward the equator,—defying the fierce flail of surf that pulverizes rock, "Breed is stronger than pasture; and no matter how savage a stepmother the circumstances of life may prove, the inherited psychological strain will sometimes dominate, and triumph." According ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... appreciatively a horn goblet carved with intricate figures of gods his Anglo eyes did not recognize. The hum of voices, the bray of mules, the baa-ing and naa-ing of sheep and goats, kept up a roar to equal surf on a seacoast. Afternoon was fast fading into evening, but Tubacca, aroused from the post-noon ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... they shrank, And fast she followed, as a towering surge Chases across the thunder-booming sea A flying bark, whose white sails strain beneath The wind's wild buffering, and all the air Maddens with roaring, as the rollers crash On a black foreland looming on the lee Where long reefs fringe the surf-tormented shores. So chased she, and so dashed the ranks asunder Triumphant-souled, and hurled fierce threats before: "Ye dogs, this day for evil outrage done To Priam shall ye pay! No man of you Shall from mine hands deliver his own life, And win back ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... &c. were called forth to admire it. She joins in abusing the Admiralty. She pressed me very much to dine with them at three o'clock; but, I told her I would not dine with the angel Gabriel, to be dragged through a night surf! ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol. I. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson
... feature of them—the moving of masses of people amid great architectural construction—sieges, triumphs, battles, mobs—but all this is akin to scenery. Its movements are like those of the trees or the surf. One can not make a play entirely of scenery, though the contrary seems to be the view of some managers, even on the stage of the regular theatre. So far, the individual acting and plot construction in the great spectacular ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... stoned Stigandi to death, and there he was buried under a heap of stones. Olaf kept his word to the bonds-woman, and gave her her freedom, and she went home to Herdholt. Hallbjorn Whetstone-eye was washed up by the surf a short time after he was drowned. It was called Knorstone where he was put in the earth, and his ghost walked about there a great deal. There was a man named Thorkell Skull who lived at Thickshaw on his father's inheritance. He ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous
... two sat down to their beer in a quiet corner of the billiard-room. There were but two players. Somewhere in another part of the building a mammoth music-box was jangling out a quickstep. From outside came the long, rhythmical rush of the surf and the sonorous barking of the seals upon the seal rocks. The four dogs curled themselves down upon ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... officials, teachers, and sanitarians are now slowly realizing the great improvement in health and temper that comes from bathing and are establishing beach and surf, spray, floating and plunge summer baths and swimming pools; often providing instruction even in swimming in clothes, undressing in the water, treading water, and rescue work, free as well as fee days, bathing suits, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... morning breaks upon the last day of creation, and the fiat goes forth that the proud waves of the Pacific, which have so long washed the table-lands of Guiana and Brazil, shall be stayed. Far away toward the setting sun the white surf beats in long lines of foam against a low, winding archipelago—the western outline of the coming continent. Fierce is the fight for the mastery between sea and land, between the denuding power of the waves and the volcanic forces underneath. But slowly—very slowly, yet surely—rises ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... and down in the beach grass, squealing like a Guinea hen with a sore throat, and waving his gun with one wing—arm, I mean—and there in front of him, in the foam at the edge of the surf, was two ducks as dead as Nebuchadnezzar—two of Lonesome Huckleberries' best decoy ducks—ducks he'd tamed and trained, and thought more of than anything else in this world—except rum, maybe—and the rest of the flock was digging up the ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... storm, which came, as an equinoctial storm should, exactly at the equinox, and for a day and a night heaped the sea upon the shore in thundering surges twenty and thirty feet high. I watched these at their awfulest, from the wide windows of a cottage that crouched in the very edge of the surf, with the effect of clutching the rocks with one hand and holding its roof on with the other. The sea was such a sight as I have not seen on shipboard, and while I luxuriously shuddered at it, I had the advantage of a mellow log-fire at my back, purring and softly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... day-break the next morning, I steered for the N.W., or lee-side of the island; and as we stood round its S. or S.W. part, we saw it every where guarded by a reef of coral rock, extending, in some places, a full mile from the land, and a high surf breaking upon it. Some thought that they saw land to the southward of this island; but, as that was to the windward, it was left undetermined. As we drew near, we saw people on different parts of the coast, walking, or running along the shore, and in a little time after we had reached the lee-side ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... and, as darkness closed the eyes of the harassed garrison, with the fleet all was activity. In boats and pinnaces the troops were being rapidly embarked, and soon Drake in person was piloting the flotilla for the surf-beaten shore. At a point within the bay, but some ten miles from the town, a practicable landing-place had been found. Watch-houses overlooked it, but watchmen there were none. Drake had got touch with the maroons. By his directions a party of them ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... drew a cup of near-coffee, and sat down. The screen showed a beach with booming surf. The sound track picked up the crash and hiss of the breakers. Considering the red plague that now covered the scene, I thought it was a poor choice. I dialed for a high ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... on the beach Syme saw the peasant who had driven their cart. He splashed into the surf on a huge cart-horse, and shook his axe ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... almanac was a treat, and was pored over through the long winter evenings. I must not forget to mention that both these families were near enough to the sea to behold it from the high places, and to hear in still hours the roar of the surf; the latter, after a storm, giving a peculiar sound at night. Then all hands, male and female, went down frequently on beach and bathing parties, and the men on practical expeditions for cutting salt hay, and for clamming ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... was now strong enough to bear any reasonable weight. My next care was what to load it with, and how to preserve what I laid upon it from the surf of the sea; but I was not long considering this. I first laid all the planks or boards upon it that I could get, and having considered well what I most wanted, I got three of the seamen's chests, which I had ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... looking toward the sea-beaten shore we beheld a vast wave pillared in heaven, so that the view of the heights of Sciron was taken from mine eye:[45] and it concealed the Isthmus and the rock of AEsculapius. And then swelling up and splashing forth[46] much foam around in the ocean surf, it moves toward the shore, where was the chariot drawn by its four horses. But together with its breaker and its tripled surge,[47] the wave sent forth a bull, a fierce monster; with whose bellowing the whole land filled ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... made the land we sought; and got ashore through a tremendous surf. Here we found the island had lately been the seat of war—some of the heathen having resolved to put an end by violence to the Christian religion there, or as they call it, the lotu. The Christians had gained ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... within them; clumps of palms dotted here and there among the light timber, and everywhere sunflecked, warm, dry shade. Nowhere is there a hint of that sinister suggestion of the Reach. Clear, beautiful, limpid, wide-spreading, irregular pools, set in an undulating field of emerald-green mossy surf, shaded with graceful foliage and gleaming in the sunlight with exquisite opal tints—a giant necklace of opals, set in links of emerald green, and thrown down at hazard to fall in loops and ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... streaming gold; syringa ivory pure; The scented and the scentless rose; this red And of a humbler growth, the other tall, And throwing up into the darkest gloom Of neighbouring cypress, or more sable yew, Her silver globes, light as the foamy surf That the wind severs from the broken wave; The lilac various in array, now white, Now sanguine, and her beauteous head now set With purple spikes pyramidal, as if Studious of ornament, yet unresolved Which hue she most approved, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... another passed under the boat. They lifted her high up, as if to show us the surf. As the boat sank slowly down into the trough of the wave, the surf disappeared and with it much of the shore. The ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... life. Like a strain of sad, sweet music which comes floating by us on the wings of night and silence, like the exhalation of the violet dying even upon the sense it charms, like the snowflake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth; like the light surf, severed from the billow, which a breath disperses, such is the character of the ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... sail out, and somewhat the wind got up, but they came to the isle and got hold of the ox; then asked Grettir which they would do, bear the ox aboard or keep hold of the craft, because the surf at the isle was great; then they bade him hold the boat; so he stood amidships on that side which looked from shore, and the sea took him up to the shoulder-blades, yet he held her so that she moved nowise: but Thorgeir ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... Noirmont fishermen," he reported. "He said it is the worst gale in thirty years and when the weather clears the surf ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... timber-line it was black, black not only with the gloom of night, but with the concentrated darkness of spruce and balsam and a sky so low and thick that one could almost hear the wailing swish of it overhead like the steady sobbing of surf on a seashore. It was black, save for the small circles of light made by the Eskimo fires, about which half a hundred of the little brown men sat or crouched. The masters of the camp were all awake, but twice as many ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... board the vessel. The time is, however, very much beguiled during this last day's sail by the sight of the land and the various objects which it presents to view—the green slopes, the castle-covered hills, the cliffs, the lines of beach, with surf and breakers rolling in upon them; and sometimes, when the ship approaches nearer to the shore than usual, the pretty little cottages, covered with thatch, and adorned with ...
— Rollo on the Atlantic • Jacob Abbott
... scanned the beach his eye was caught by three ladies and three natives standing about a surf-boat in animated discussion. The youngest of the ladies, who wore a bathing-suit of conspicuous hue and did most of the talking, suddenly detached herself from the others and came flying across the ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... to the merciless surges they launch her, And back she is flung to the white-pebbled beach! Now cleaves the wild surf, for never a stauncher, Or braver crew mounted a ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... most fertile soil, on which delicious vegetables grow ten months of the year. The region is especially famed for potatoes, which become almost a fruit here. The farm I live on is charmingly situated about a mile from the old Mission, and two from the beach, on which a tremendous surf breaks and thunders day and night. From my house I look over the coast-table and range of mountains, the hills of Monterey, the bay, and a near landscape, exquisitely diversified by plain and wood, hill and valley, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... ballast, and if we should try a kayah, it would certainly be on land. But those Greenlanders learn to handle themselves so well that their kayahs will go dancing over the big billows and then fly through a ragged, dangerous surf. From their kayahs, too, they will ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... call. The ship lay about half a mile off shore, and one could see black figures running about the beach and pushing off a big black boat. The spray shot high in the air as the bow dived through the surf, and soon we could hear the hiss and gasp of the rowers as they drew near. They were naked negroes, shining with oil and sweat. Standing up in the boat, with face to bow, they plunged their paddles perpendicularly ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... than ten minutes the boat was enveloped in a dense fog. The position was decidedly awkward. Had there been any wind they could have steered by the sound of the surf breaking at the foot of the cliffs, but the sea was absolutely calm, and they could hear nothing. They rowed on for some time, and then Nelson said: "Lay in your oars, men, we may be pulling in the wrong direction for all we ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... preacher, when he landed in New York and faced the roar of its advancing ocean of materialism, fluttered hopelessly about for a year or two like a frightened sand-fiddler in the edge of the surf of a cyclone, ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... part of the afternoon of the 22nd March, they sailed towards the beach in one of the brig's boats, and having been taken into a canoe that was waiting at the edge of the breakers to receive them, they were plied over a tremendous surf, and flung with ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... changes which a pretty girl can always make when her lover is expected any instant and she does not want to lose a moment of his time, but it had sufficed. Something soft and clinging it was now; her lovely, rounded figure moving in its folds as a mermaid moves in the surf; her hair shaken cut and caught up again in all its delicious abandon; her cheeks, lips, throat, rose-color in the ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... clouds, like the spray that beats against the chalk cliffs on the shore of the mighty Atlantic; and amid the last plunges of the doomed vessel the spray is tinged redder and redder, ere with her human cargo she disappears amid the surf. But no sooner has she sunk into the abyss than the foam and the fierce breakers die away, and a wondrous calm broods over all things. In twenty minutes' time nothing is left in the western sky but a tiny bar of golden cloud ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... the new station was a beautiful one. It lay amidst rivers and hills, and its position was such that the roar of the surf on both eastern and western coasts of the island could be distinctly heard. Shortly after his permanent settlement, Mr. Puckey made a journey to the extreme north of the island and reached Cape ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... in the morning, we heard the sound of breakers ahead, and above the sullen roar of the surf I distinctly heard the tinklings of a bell. We got out our sweeps and had commenced to row wearily once more, when the fog lifted and before us lay the blessed land. A high range of sparsely wooded hills, crowned with rocky ledges, and with abrupt slopes covered with dry brown grass, ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... to enter the sea and wade to the vessel, but Skallagrim caught him in his arms as though he were but a child, and, wading into the surf till the water covered his waistbelt, bore him to the vessel and lifted him up so that Eric reached the bulwarks ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... run the dingy into the surf, had shipped oars, and were lustily pulling away—Cap'n Sproul in the stern roaring abuse at them in a way that drowned the howls of Mr. Butts, who came peltering down ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... te-hee and squeak of the city exquisite learning how to laugh out loud, the splash of the brine, the cachinnation of a band of harmless savages, the stun of the surge on your right ear, the hiss of the surf, the saturnalia of the elements; while overpowering all other sounds are the orchestral harmonics of the sea, which roll on through the ages, all shells, all winds, all caverns, all billows heard in ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... for nothing." For it is no light matter, as he reminded me, to be in an open boat, perhaps waist-deep with herrings, day breaking with a scowl, and for miles on every hand lee-shores, unbroken, iron-bound, surf-beat, with only here and there an anchorage where you dare not lie, or a harbour impossible to enter with the wind that blows. The life of a North Sea fisher is one long chapter of exposure and hard work ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that about Mount Edgcumbe, near Plymouth, which faces the Sound. It abounds in wood, very thick groves and large trees. It is moderately high, but not mountainous. We did not see any fires on it, probably from the shore being inaccessible and much surf breaking on it. From Cape Albany Otway east-north-east 10 or 12 miles is another point of land which appears as a vessel rounds the former cape to the east. It is rather high land with a clump of trees—as if regularly planted on its brow. Thinking we could find an anchorage, ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... as I supposed to see some gay little gardens, fantastic to the verge of awfulness, that had caught Aunt Lavinia's eye. In one the earth for the chief bed was contained in a surf-boat that had become unseaworthy from age, and not only was it filled to the brim, but vines of every ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... their voice. On each of the jutting points of the shore was a low and ruddy tower,—last vestige of the thousand-year war of the Mediterranean. Accustomed to the rugged shores of the ocean and its eternal surf, the Breton sailors were marveling at this easy navigation, almost touching the coast whose inhabitants looked like a swarm of bees. Had the boat been directed by another captain, so close a journey would have resulted most disastrously: but Ferragut was laughing, ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... particular about his boats, and always had them built specially from his own design. They were broader than usual, and had a flat floor and a deep keel, thus they were extremely buoyant, their lines resembling those of the surf-boats on the west coasts of India and Africa, while their deep keels enabled them to sail close to the wind. The men chafed sometimes when, on their way to shore, they found themselves passed by the narrow boats of other ships; but the captain was perfectly indifferent ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... the outer or barrier reef which fringed the coast of beautiful verdured Upolu, and then, as the sun sank, there shone out myriad stars upon the bosom of a softly heaving sea, and only the never-ceasing murmur of the surf as it beat against the coral barrier, or the cry of some wandering sea-bird, disturbed the warm silence ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... we came in view of Suakim, the city of white coral, with her surf-beaten opalesque reefs stretching as far as the eye could follow. It seemed strange to me to be peacefully moving toward her outlying forts, for when I was last in her vicinity one could not go twenty yards outside the town without being shot ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... the pole well in the sandy turf, And called a jackdaw near to watch the place. Meanwhile the angel paddled in the surf, And playfully dared his brother to ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... island lying under the west shore) will bear W. You water at a well that is behind the beach at the head of the bay. The water is tolerable, but scarce; and bad getting off, on account of a great surf on the beach. The refreshments to be got here, are bullocks, hogs, goats, sheep, poultry, and fruits. The goats are of the antelope kind, so extraordinarily lean, that hardly any thing can equal them; and the bullocks, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... of its head somewhat resembles a rabbit. It is covered with a dense soft fur 3/4 in. long on the back and upwards of an inch in length on the sides, of a delicate French grey colour, darkly mottled on the upper surf ace and dusky white beneath; the ears being long, broad and thinly covered with hair. Chinchillas live in burrows, and these subterranean dwellings undermine the ground in some parts of the Chilean Andes to such an extent as to cause danger to travellers on horseback. They associate in communities, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... on the eastern side of it in Seal Bay—a wild anchorage, the swell constantly rolling in with too much surf to allow of our commencing a series of tidal observations. This bay, in the mouth of which lies a small cluster of rocks, is separated from the one on the opposite side, by a strip of low sandy land, which, as I have said, may easily be overlooked by vessels coming from ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... hermitage where he had passed the night, and was aware of a great company of men coming over the moor. They were all horsed, and were going towards the sea, which was on the right hand, where steep and fearful cliffs fell sheer to the thundering surf beneath. And in their midst he saw they held captive a full noble knight, who seemed wounded, and whose armour was all broken and cracked, as if he had fought valiantly before he had been overcome. Him they were going to hurl headlong down ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... be seen growing in the shallow waters of the lagoon are of a different kind from those which abound on the outer edge of the reef, and of which the reef is built up. Close to the seaward edge of the reef, over which, even in calm weather, a surf almost always breaks, the coral rock is encrusted with a thick coat of a singular vegetable organism, which contains a great deal of lime—the so-called Nullipora. Beyond this, in the part of the edge ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... while at the same time it is so large and so much exposed to the southeast and northwest winds, that it is little better than an open roadstead; and the whole swell of the Pacific Ocean rolls in here before a southeaster, and breaks with so heavy a surf in the shallow waters, that it is highly dangerous to lie near in to the shore during the southeaster season, that is, between the months of November ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Atmospheric Density); The Chant (Gradation through Values of Separated Objects) The View-Metre Three Pictures Found with the View-Metre View Taken with a Wide Angle Lens Photography Nearing the Pictorial The Path of the Surf—Photo (Triangles Occuring in the leading line); The Shepherdess—Millet (Composition Exhibiting a Double Exit) Circular Observation—The Principle; The Slaying of the Unpropitious Messengers (Triangular Composition—Circular ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... Island, where the ocean heaves in its wildest and most crystalline surf, a small cove had broken itself into the slopes of an irregular hill, after generations of beating storms and crumbling earth, taking a crescent shape, and forming one of the most picturesque bits of landscape to be ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... misty and overcast. Heavy, wet clouds hung in the east. I heard the surf thundering against the cliffs, and the gray gulls squealed as they tossed and turned high in the sky. The tide was creeping across the river sands, higher, higher, and I saw the seaweed floating on the beach, and the lancons ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... before the surf is safe for us, we can sail several hours toward Mobile, and gain that much. Indeed, I think we can get that far west before it will be tolerably safe to run ashore. We're hungry and thirsty, of course, but we must endure ...
— Captain Sam - The Boy Scouts of 1814 • George Cary Eggleston
... dancing to be dry after rain, are sturdy, broad-shouldered Benmore, and slender, graceful Binnein, the twin guardians of the enchanted region beyond, where Beauty lies in the lap of Terror, and the Atlantic surf sings lullaby. There are the Monzievaird hills to the right, rising in Benchonzie to the height of 3048 feet, and to something under this figure in the Cairngorm or Blue Craig, upon which you see the stone-heap of Cainnechin—memorial, as it is said, of a battle fought within what are now the ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... sundown they dropped upon the coast level under the palms and lemons among the vivid greens and scarlets and ochres of the tierra caliente. They rode into Macuto, and saw the line of volatile bathers frolicking in the surf. The mountains were very ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... sun. A breeze sprang up, but our first use of it was to get aground on Coney Island about five o'clock, where we lay till nine or thereabout, and then floated slowly up to the wharf. The roar of distant surf, the rolling of porpoises, the passing of shoals of fish, a steamboat smoking along at a distance, were the scene on my watch. I fished during the night, and, feeling something on the line, I drew up with great eagerness and vigor. It was two of those broad-leaved sea-weeds, with ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the sea, yer honour. Mr. Walter has been asking us; but there's no boat could get through that surf, not if all ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... companions were now worn out with toil, Frithiof bade them lie down in the boat and rest. And he himself took two oars at the prow and rowed onwards with his mighty strength till they came to land; and finding that his followers were still weak and weary he carried them over the surf on his shoulders and ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... pursued Julie. "You've done a thing that makes the rest of us feel pretty small, you know. Why, while there was any question of your getting better, there wasn't a dance given at any of the hotels between here and Surf Point, and all sorts of people came here with inquiries every day. This place was absolutely hushed. The maids used to fight for the privilege of carrying your trays up. None of us thought of anything but 'How is Miss ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... man woke," he had said, "he cursed the sea for bringing him as he thought nothing. One desire tormented him. It became intolerable. Day after day he went down to the ocean, but the surf only leaped in derision. For the thousandth time he cursed it, the isle to which he was bound. Weeks passed, until, almost mad through the monotony of the long hours, one day he inadvertently picked up a book. The brute ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... thrown over and she swung to starboard, paralleling the position of the Dewey. And just as she came around one of her big searchlights aft flashed into life and shot its bright rays over the water. For a moment or two a finger of ghostly white shifted aimlessly to and fro over the surf ace of the sea and then centered full upon the disappearing periscope of the Dewey! Instantly came the boom of the ship's guns as they belched a salvo ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... and forbidding, but that is not so at all. In the summer, when the sun is shining, they are beautiful. The glaciers lie like white untrodden land in a sea of sand, their lower rim flashing green and blue in the sunlight. When you come nearer, you see a chain of jagged sandhills like a dark surf, where the glacier and the sand waste meet. (He is silent again. Halla has picked a flower and is pulling its petals.) Why are you doing that? What are you ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... the water. Only a few days previously an unlucky French sailor, who had wanted to get back his hat, which had fallen into the water, had had an arm seized and taken off by a shark. I did as I was bid; we plunged into the surf, and got through without any drawbacks. Just as I reached the shore a tremendous fusillade began. It was a reception after the local fashion, which had been prepared for me: over three thousand dancing natives doing a sort of Arab fantasia ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... boy! Where are we? What is it? Oh, I was sleeping so soundly! Have we reached harbor yet? What's that noise—that roaring sound? Surf?" ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... are large, swift-sailing craft, commanded and manned by Arabs, savage fellows, who frequently fight desperately when attacked by the boats. With a strong breeze they often manage to elude even steamers. When hard-pressed, with a full cargo of slaves on board, they will run their vessels through the surf on shore in the hopes of carrying off some of their unfortunate captives who may escape from the wreck, being very indifferent about those who may be drowned. The Arabs themselves generally manage to get on shore, though sometimes the whole of their ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... Beowulf who once strove on the wide sea in a swimming-match with Breca, when ye two in boasting dared to breast the wave, and for vainglory risked your lives in the deep water? There was no man, friend nor foe, who could dissuade you from that sorrowful journey; but ye swam in the surf, stretching out your arms over the waves, and stirring up the surge with your hands. So did ye glide across the ocean, while the waves weltered in wintry storms, and for seven nights ye laboured in the tumult of the ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... river Mondego. After a consultation with Admiral Sir Charles Cotton, Sir Arthur had concluded that an attack at the mouth of the Tagus was impracticable, owing to the strength of the French there, the position of the forts that commanded the entrance of the river, and the heavy surf that broke in all the undefended creeks and bays near. There was then the choice of landing far enough north of Lisbon to ensure a disembarkation undisputed by the French, or else to sail south, join Spencer, and act against the French ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... journey, in perfect security; no one thinking about his arms. The evening was extremely bright and pleasant; but the wind rose during the night, and the waves began to break heavily on the shore, making our island tremble. I had not expected in our inland journey to hear the roar of an ocean surf; and the strangeness of our situation, and the excitement we felt in the associated interests of the place, made this one of the most interesting nights I ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... depths of a forest. Among the tall climbing roses, which hung a mantle of yellow flowers to the fretted baluster of the terrace, there stood out in the distance the illuminated fronts of the hotels and villas, and occasionally women's laughter was heard above the dull, monotonous sound of surf and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Farallones, lake, crag, or chasm, forest, mountain, valley, or island, river, bay, or jutting headland, every one bears the stamp of its own peculiar beauty, a singular blending of richness, wildness and warmth. Coastwise everywhere sea and mountains meet, and the surf of the cold Japanese current breaks in turbulent beauty against tall "rincones" and jagged reefs of rock. Slumbering amid the ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... on the lagoon as the Pelican paused in her story, and beyond the rookery the children could see blue water and a line of surf, with the high-pooped Spanish ships rising and falling. Beyond that were the low shore and the dark wood of pines and the shining leaves of the palmettoes like a lake spattered with the light—split by their needle points. They could see the dark bodies of ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... place inside of the little island of Sacrificios, some three miles south of Vera Cruz. The vessels could not get anywhere near shore, so that everything had to be landed in lighters or surf-boats; General Scott had provided these before leaving the North. The breakers were sometimes high, so that the landing was tedious. The men were got ashore rapidly, because they could wade when they came to shallow water; but the camp ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... manganese, iron ore, cobalt, bauxite, copper Land use: arable land 9%; permanent crops 4%; meadows and pastures 9%; forest and woodland 26%; other 52%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: coast has heavy surf and ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Manly, Cronulla, Coogee, near Sydney; and at a hundred other places on the Australian coast, are beautiful beaches. You may see on holidays hundreds of thousands of people—men, women, and children—surf-bathing or paddling on the sands. It is quite safe fun, too, if you take care not to go out too far and so get caught in the undertow. Sharks are common on the Australian coast, but they will not venture into the broken water of surf beaches. But ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... was not correct; for the coral polypes cannot live and build save in shallow water—say in thirty to forty fathoms. Indeed, some of the strongest and largest species work best at the very surface, and in the cut of the fiercest surf. And so arose a puzzle as to how coral rock is often found of vast thickness, which Mr. Darwin explained. His theory was, and there is no doubt now that it is correct, that in these cases the sea-bottom is sinking; that as it sinks, carrying the coral beds down with it, the coral dies, ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... toward the end," Graham replied. "We were both out of our heads for short spells and long spells. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other, that was all in. We made the land at sunset—that is, a wall of iron coast, with the surf bursting sky-high. She took hold of me and clawed me in the water to get some sense in me. You see, I wanted to go in, which would have ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... in, and put off through the surf with an air of triumph. He was a splendid sailor. His boat leapt through the breakers and flew before the wind with a mere rag of canvas. "Dangerous weather to be out!" I exclaimed to the fisherman, who stood with hands buried in ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... through his soul, as if whispered to him by past selves, other incarnations of himself, who had gleaned it in their lives, from days when the world was young. He had a thousand souls, which had known great sorrows and joys and adventures. His blood seemed to smoke gold, like spray on rushing surf in sunshine. Never had he admitted any one he had known (except the people his own mind created for inhabitants of that kingdom) into his land; but now the girl whose name he scarcely knew stood at the door of the castle, asking to come in, saying with her eyes, ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... capital stood. We landed at the Puerto di Oratava, several miles from the villa: it is defended by some small batteries, at one of which is the very difficult landing-place, sheltered by a low reef of rocks that runs far out, and occasions a heavy surf. I took my own saddle ashore: and being mounted on a fine mule, we all began our journey towards the hill. The road is rough, but has evidently once been made with some pains, and paved with blocks of porous lava; ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... the most feeble among us, were placed below deck, together with a few of the least skilful of the negroes, who composed the crew, and the hatches closed upon us, to prevent the sea from coming in between decks, while the dangers occasioned by the surf running over the bar, was passed. The wretched condition to which we were reduced, was such as to awaken a feeling of sympathy, even among the blacks, who shed tears of compassion for our misfortunes; during ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... the night lasted I cannot tell; to me it seemed an age, and no second of it was free from fear. Whether we were driving north, south, east, or west no one knew, while the fury of the storm would have drowned the thunder of waves on a surf-beaten shore. But the Aguila was an English boat, built by honest English workmen, and her planks held firmly together ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... came up in rapid procession; the surf began to sigh and moan; the sea-fowls caught the sound, and cried as they only cry when the ocean is angry. The boats lying out hoisted sail and scudded away for the nearest haven of shelter. Then a white line of light rose up sharply against the black bank of ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... against reason some mental kink made me feel that this optical law should not apply to the chalk cliffs when we came to the coast, where only the green sward which crowns them was visible and beyond this a line of gray, the beach, which had an edge of white lace that was moving—the surf. ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... The waves tossing surf in the moonbeam, The albatross lone on the spray, Alone know the tears wept in vain for the children Magic ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... early morning, and there was no shooting, for a southwesterly gale had been blowing all night, and the birds passed far inland. All along the beach, for twenty-five miles in an unbroken line, the surf thundered in, with a double roar, breaking on the bar, then gathering strength again, rising grey and curling green and crashing down upon the sand. Then the water opened out in vast sheets of crawling foam that ran up to the very foot ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... muscles relaxed. His magnificent tail, which had again expanded to thrice its natural size, sank; he uttered a faint mew, and the next moment a sound fell on Hildegarde's ear, like the distant muttering of thunder, or the roll of the surf on a far-off ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... baby under two years should never be given a sea bath, a word of caution about sea bathing for young children may not be amiss. The cruelty with which well-meaning parents treat young, tender children by forcibly dragging them into the surf, a practice which may be seen at any seaside resort in the summer, can have no justification. The fright and shock that a sensitive child is thus subjected to is more than sufficient to undo any conceivable good resulting from ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... boys, or we'll be rolling in the surf in three minutes! Haul away, Dick! Haul with him, Ford! Up with her! There, that'll give ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... surface or breaks upon its shores. Poets have found here an inexhaustible theme. Painters have here expended their utmost skill. Whether it is the tiny ripple that dies along the curving sands, or the merry, rustling, crested surf that hurries on to wanton in the rocky pools, or the storm billow that rushes wildly against an iron-bound coast to spurt aloft its sheets of spray or to hurl its threatening mass on the trembling strand—in each and every form the wave is a moving miracle. ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... great velocity. We had to get into the water and drag our canoes along the shore with a rope. Half a league from there we passed another little fall by rowing, which makes one sweat. Great skill is required in passing these falls, in order to avoid the eddies and surf, in which they abound; but the savages do this with the greatest possible dexterity, winding about and going by the easiest places, which they recognize ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... steady wind they drifted slowly closer and closer to the island. By noon they abandoned the timber and started swimming, but the submerged beach went out far more gradually than they had expected. The last hundred yards they walked arm in arm, floundering through the gentle surf. ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... not be in any way a cheerful embarkation. It was in the dark days of Lent, in March, when the north is most severe: and the grey skies and blighting wind would be appropriate to the feelings of the exiles as they put forth from their rock amid the wild beating of the surf, anxiously watched by the defenders of the place, who no doubt had at the same time to keep up a vigilant inspection landward, lest any band of spearmen from Albany should arrive upon the adjacent shore in time to stop the flight. The grey rock, the greyer leaden sea, the whirling ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... of the winter woods, of apple blossoms and nest-building, of New England uplands and wilderness rivers, of camps and canoes, of snowshoes and trout rods, of sunrise on the hills, when one climbed for the eagle's nest, and twilight on the yellow wind-swept beaches, where the surf sobbed far away, and wings twanged like reeds in the wind swooping down to decoys,—all thronging about one, eager to be remembered if not recorded. Among them, most eager, most intense, most frequent of all associations, there is a boy with nerves all a-tingle at the vast sweet mystery that ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... and mingling with melancholy dreams. Night arrived; and with its shadows a heavy discomfort. It oppressed my limbs with the oppression of some dull weight, and was palpable. There was also a moaning sound, not unlike the distant reverberation of surf, but more continuous, which, beginning with the first twilight, had grown in strength with the darkness. Suddenly lights were brought into the room, and this reverberation became forthwith interrupted into ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... commanding the whole range of the entrance channel. These forts and a few others, fifteen in all, would render the place in the hands of a skilful garrison almost impregnable, the shores on which they stand being inaccessible by reason of the surf, with the exception of a small landing-place at ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... was! I can see it all now quite distinctly. It was a queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People over here think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore and palm-trees and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance, wasn't a bit that way. Not common rocks they were, undermined by waves; but great curved banks like ironwork cinder heaps, with green slime below, and thorny shrubs and things just waving upon them here and there, and the water glassy ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Lissa, on the Dalmatian coast. Though Lissa is a strong position, the usual comparison of it with Gibraltar is exaggerated. It ought to have been possible to land the Italian troops which Persano had with him under cover of his guns, and to take the island before Tegethoff came up. The surf caused by the rough weather, to which he chiefly attributed his failure, would not have proved an insuperable obstacle had the ships' crews been exercised in landing troops ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... hath put exquisite tinge upon the shell washed in the surf, and planted a paradise of bloom in a child's cheek, let us leave it to the owl to hoot, and the frog to croak, and the fault-finder to complain.—De ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... fin and tail. Then the vapors would darken round them again, till, with the stray rays caught and refracted in their fleece, it seemed like living in an opal full of cloudy color and fire. Far off they heard the great ground-swell of the surf upon the beach, or there came the dull report of the sportsmen in the marsh, or they exchanged first a laugh and then a yawn with some other unseen party becalmed in the fog and drifting with the currents; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the mariner, When at reluctant distance he hath passed Some tempting island, could but know the ills That must have fallen upon him had he brought His bark to land upon the wished-for shore, 490 Good cause would oft be his to thank the surf Whose white belt scared him thence, or wind that blew Inexorably adverse: for myself I grieve not; happy is the gowned youth, Who only misses what I missed, who falls 495 No ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... temple pediment, in which, doubtful of their power to carve figures beautiful enough, they cut a trefoiled hold for ornament, and bordered the edges with harlequinade of mosaic. They then call to their help the Greek sea-waves, and let the surf of the AEgean climb along the slopes, and toss itself at the top into a fleur-de-lys. Every wave is varied in outline and proportionate distance, though cut with a precision of curve like that of the sea itself. From this root we are able—but it ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... on the seaside. I used to catch flat fish sometimes, with a long string line, it was like swimming a kite. If you go out in a surf boat, take care it does not "flounder" and get "squamped," as some people say, instead of founder ...
— Neighbor Nelly Socks - Being the Sixth and Last Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... curved scorpion's tail of rock and masonry, Messieurs Blandy's coal stores, to the west. Big ships must still roll at anchor in a dangerous open roadstead far off shore; and, during wet weather, ladies, well drenched by the surf, must be landed with the aid of a crane in what should be the inner harbour. The broken-down circus near Reid's is to become a theatre, but whence the money is to come no one knows. The leper hospital cannot afford to make up more than nine or ten beds. The jail is in ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... the opinion of the author it is the name of the board. A skilled Hawaiian says it is the name given the surf of a place at Napoopoo, in Kona, Hawaii. The action is not located there, but in Puna, it ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... their stand, where the rocky land Slopes down to the surf-worn beach, To intercept the herd that swept Like a torrent, the sea ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren
... shore, the surf was found to be too heavy for the boat to pass through it, and Major Tulloch and six men swam ashore and entered the fort. It was found to be deserted, and all the guns but two ten-inch pieces dismounted. The charges of gun cotton, that the swimmers ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... bent to their work and over the creak of the leather in the rowlocks the rumble and fume of the seven mile beach came mixed with the yelping and mewing of the gulls. The boat made slow progress, then a few yards from the surf line it hung for a moment till the rowers suddenly gave way and moving like a relieved arrow she came on the crest of a wave, then the oars came in with a crash and the two men tumbling out dragged her nose high and dry. They ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... shifted—a patch of barren rocks. The sergeant glanced at the survey picture, shifted the telescope, and found the northern-most island. He swelled the picture. He could see the white of monstrous surf breaking on the windward shore—waves that had gathered height going all around the planet. He traced the shoreline. There was a bay up at ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... drawn the cliff, and the strip of sand, and the waste of sea beyond; and now he was blotting in some boats and figures—figures of men wading through the surf and dragging the boats in shore; and other figures making for the steps. Last of all, close under the cliff, in advance of all the rest, he drew a tiny man standing alone—a tiny man scarce an eighth of an inch in height, struck out with three or four touches ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... shown by Captain Savage could have saved the ship and her crew. We had chased a convoy of vessels to the bottom of the bay: the wind was very fresh when we hauled off, after running them on shore, and the surf on the beach even at that time was so great, that they were certain to go to pieces before they could be got afloat again. We were obliged to double-reef the topsails as soon as we hauled to the wind, and the weather looked very ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... a beautiful beach, and surf bathing, and a boardwalk miles long, and piers, and merry-go-rounds, and shops, and hot sausages, and moving-pictures, and rolling-chairs, and lovely music, and ice-cream waffles, and orangeade, and popcorn. Your mother will see it all, but you will have to be careful at first—just sit in ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... the other, even more battered, but with no "look of the sea" about him—stood on a sand-drift gloomily gazing at the group of shipwrecked people on the shore, and the helpless mass of timber and spars out there among the beatings of the surf. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... beard from the corner of his mouth;—he was dead! As I laid him back on the pillow and turned to restore some quiet to the ward, a Norther came sweeping down the Gulf like a rush of mad spirits; tore up the white crests of the sea and flung them on the beach in thundering surf; burst through the heavy fog that had trailed upon the moon's track and smothered the island in its soft pestilent brooding; and in one mighty pouring out of cold pure ether changed earth and sky from torrid to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... scattered half-wreaths of opalescent foam on the snowy sands. The wind that fanned his face was filled with the spicy odors of the sea. Seized by a capricious impulse, he threw off his clothes and dashed into the surf. The undulating billows closed around him; a singular lassitude passed into his limbs as he swam; he felt himself slowly sinking, as if drawn downward by an invisible hand. He opened his eyes. The waves lapped musically above his head; a tawny glory was all about him, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... is clear, and the unconscious concert of sea-sounds, the deeper pulse of ocean (in the horns), the flowing ripples, the sharp dash of lighter surf (in the Glockenspiel), all with a constant tremor, an instability of element (in trembling strings). We cannot help feeling the illusion of scene in the impersonal play of natural sounds. Anon will come a shock of exquisite sweetness ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... of the gloom And down the moon-white river. 55 She stole like a gray shark over the bar Where the long surf seethes for ever. ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... the beach at Atlantic City watching a fair and very fat bather disporting herself in the surf. He knew nothing of tides, and he did not notice that each succeeding wave came a little closer to his feet. At last an extra big wave washed ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... voice, and were not long in showing their glistening faces and sea-green hair above the water, at the bottom of which was their home. They brought along with them a great many beautiful shells; and sitting down on the moist sand, where the surf wave broke over them, they busied themselves in making a necklace, which they hung round Proserpina's neck. By way of showing her gratitude, the child besought them to go with her a little way into the fields, so that they might gather ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... voyage. Alfonso was the first who reached the coast at Cape Branco, where he landed, and set up a wooden cross as a signal to his consorts, and then proceeded to the islands of Arguin, which afforded shelter from the tremenduous surf which breaks continually on the coast of Africa. While waiting at Arguin for the other ships, Alfonso paid many visits to the continent, where he made prisoners of twenty-five of the natives. When the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... days and weeks he wooed her to bring the smile to her lips, but always she grew whiter and more desolate; so that when she walked the terraces above the boiling surf, she seemed like a white flower torn of its petals and tossed up by the ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... his rage. Now "Santo Dio!" now "Scomunicat!" Sacrament! now "Allah!" "Imshe," "Kelb," "Andat," "per Bacco!" &c. At length, when a sailor from the mast-head descried the port, and a tremendous surf was seen or said to be seen rolling near the entrance, the Moors, who although mostly sulky under the influence of their fatalism, and show very little courage in the dangers of the sea, cried out with fear, "Allah, Allah!" "Ya, Mohammed!" (O God! O God! O Mahomet!) ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... soon descried two boats loaded with helpless men, women and children, near the edge of the surf at Watch Hill Light House, and with great difficulty and danger, on account of the heavy sea, succeeded in getting them on ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... Three men were put aboard the sloop, a lifeboat being left with them in case the "Sue" foundered. The revenue cutter then started towing her toward home. It was late in the evening when finally they came to anchor off Camp Wau-Wau. The surf was running so high that it was decided not to put the girls ashore until the following morning, though the "Sue" was cast off from her tow and allowed to drift into the bay. From here her crew rowed ashore and ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... boat and hang on to its sides, just to rest themselves until they were ready to go back. It would simply be a temptation to people to swim beyond the breakers. She went on, in a voice that the noise of the surf could not drown, to tell him that she hoped ten thousand more people would say the same thing to him, and to declare that he ought to have several boats outside during bathing hours, so that people could cling to some of them, and so, perhaps, save themselves from exhaustion on their return, ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... save her, if there was still time? It was too late. A frightful crash was heard above the tumult of the elements. The vessel had struck. The white line of surf was broken for an instant; she heeled over on her side and lay among ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... us the flames were roaring and surging like the breaking of a heavy surf upon the seashore, and every moment the fire was extending by the aid of the grass and dead branches of trees, which were like tinder, no rain having fallen in that part of ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... is going on, and ready to help any girl in distress. This picket will be in the boat with bathing costume and overcoat on. They may bathe only when the general bathing is over and the last of the bathers has left the water. If bathing in the surf, a stake should be driven into the sand on the beach and a rope securely fastened to the stake so that non-swimmers can hold on to the ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... leagues away, below the western waters. In the east lay but one slender boundary between the voyager and the shoreless deep, and this was so near that from its farther edge came now and again its admonishing murmur, the surf-thunder of the open Gulf rolling forever down the prone but unshaken battle-front ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... only I had the gift of words, I could make such pictures of the islands we sailed by, the colours of the waters, the joy of our going—the white coral sand beaches and the big cocoanut palms leaning over them, and the white surges that curled along and along the surf reef, over and over again, running like children to meet each other and join each other's hands, or like piano keys rippling white ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... and several gunboats ran close inshore and shelled the sand-hills and chaparral in which the enemy might be concealed. Only a few horsemen were made to scamper away. The Government for this very landing had sent out a number of surf-boats, flat on the bottom and sharp at both ends. Each of these carried one hundred men with their arms and accoutrements. They proved most admirable for the service, as the whole army was landed with out a mishap, and, singularly enough, the Mexicans ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... at the very entrance are the abode of another familiar revenant. The Prophet assures me that thirty years ago a vessel and crew were wrecked there, and on every succeeding stormy evening since that day, the captain, with creditable perseverance, waves his light on that wind-and surf-swept rock. In this instance the prophetical authority is in dispute, for there are those who assert that the light is shown by fairies to toll boats to their doom on the foggy point. The more scientifically minded explain the mysterious ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... Verrazzano (See "The World's Discoverers"), who visited the Atlantic seaboard nearly about the same time as the kidnapper Ayllon. Once, as he was coasting along near the site of Wilmington, N. C., on account of the high surf a boat could not land, but a bold young sailor swam to the shore and tossed a gift of trinkets to some Indians gathered on the beach. A moment later the sea threw him helpless and bruised at their feet. In an instant he was seized by the arms and legs and, crying lustily for help, ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... by drowning men. At Monterey the people thought the longboat too must have overturned, and that all the women had perished. The Santiago, nearly sinking, had only just reached port. The beach above Point Pinos was thronged with people searching in the surf for the bodies of the victims, and the captain of the Idaho was broken hearted, if not well-nigh crazed. The news of the safety of the women flew from street to street, fast as the papers could speed their extras. Loving friends came pouring down to meet and care for the survivors on ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... and Henry seized a pair of oars. Paul could steer well, but Henry's strength would be needed now. On they drove, the rain beating hard on their backs, and the surf from the lake also driving into the boat. Paul steered steadily and the four bent powerfully on the oars, driving the boat in a wide curve to the left, where it would avoid possible rocks ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sounds became music, My mother's voice in lullaby or hymn, (The voice, O tender voices, memory's loving voices, Last miracle of all, O dearest mother's, sister's, voices;) The rain, the growing corn, the breeze among the long-leav'd corn, The measur'd sea-surf beating on the sand, The twittering bird, the hawk's sharp scream, The wild-fowl's notes at night as flying low migrating north or south, The psalm in the country church or mid the clustering trees, the open air camp-meeting, The fiddler in the tavern, the glee, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... cheered by one bright and sunny day, when the angry clouds again began to gather to do them battle. The tempest rose so suddenly that they had no time to seek a harbor, but had to run their canoes through the surf on the shore. All had to leap into the waves to save the frail boats from being broken on the stony beach. This, their third landing, was near the point where the River ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... and silence. At the top, hardly distinguishable from the blackness of the sky, the sentinel was leaning against the parapet, looking out to sea. Many a night had he held that post, and seen the stars, and listened to the rustle of the surf; many a night he had heard the call of the sentry next below, and passed it to the man on the bastion beyond; but never a night had he seen anything but the stars and the dim forms of vessels in the harbor, heard anything but the hourly call of ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... he gazed out through the open window, off toward the whispering lines of surf on the eastern shores of Staten Island—the surf forever talking, forever striving to give its mystic message to the unheeding ear of man. And as he gazed, his blue eyes narrowed with the intensity of his thought. Once, as though some sudden understanding had come to ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... the surf some two thousand yards east of the entrance to Ostend Harbor, which she failed so gallantly to block; and when, in the early hours of yesterday morning, the Vindictive groped her way through the ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... into view, and is a very impressive sight. The Needles themselves are stacks of upper chalk, with flints, and are the remains of an extension of the chalk. The cliffs here are about four hundred feet in height, and at their base the sea breaks frequently in a long surf line on the steep shingly shore. In calm weather visitors engage boatmen at Totland and Alum Bays to take them in boats through the Needles and land ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... it makes the vessel roll? What sounds are these I hear? It seems as if the rising waves were beating on my ear!' 'Oh, it is the breaking of the surf—just that, and nothing more, My Captain Don ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... with smooth water of the deepest caerulean hue, and half with a solid sheet of glittering snow-white salt, the offspring of evaporation." "If," says Mr. Hugh Miller, "we suppose, instead of a barrier of lava, that sand-bars were raised by the surf on a flat arenaceous coast during a slow and equable sinking of the surface, the waters of the outer gulf might occasionally topple over the bar, and supply fresh brine when the first stock had ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... that old worthy, who was just poking his head up out of the forecastle,—"Trull, is that noise the surf?" ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... was offended. "Why, bless you, that ain't no stars and stripes. That there's the flag of Tortilla. There's no stars there. The red's my old undershirt, the blue I found thrown up in the surf one day and the white is a bit of sail I had with me when I dropped in to take my throne. That flag means ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... place of all for a child—there was a fascinating rocky island in the sea, connected by a neck of twenty yards of pebble covered hardly at high water; and on one side of this pebble isthmus was the full surf of the sea, and on the other the quiet ripple of the waters of the bay. But such an island! All their own to colonize and govern, and separated from home by just ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... have nothing but county meetings and shipwrecks; and I have this day dined upon fish, which probably dined upon the crews of several colliers lost in the late gales. But I saw the sea once more in all the glories of surf and foam,—almost equal to the Bay of Biscay, and the interesting white squalls and short seas of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... but did not answer, and they moved on in silence. The surf grew suddenly louder, as they emerged from the forest upon a stretch of sand dunes bordering the sea. A few goats were browsing among the sandy hillocks, and a skin-clad boy, aided by a wolfish-looking dog that was ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... their little green gloves, where the goats nibble perched on their hind legs, and the cows low in the huts of reeds; and there rise from the ravines, with the gurgle of the brooks, from the cliffs with the boom of the surf, the voices of unseen boys and girls, singing about love and flowers and death, just as in the days of Theocritus, whom your learned Excellency does well to read. Has your Excellency ever read Longus, a Greek pastoral novelist? He ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... had swept the young woman from her feet. She was a coquette, of course, but when his eyes fell like a plummet into hers they sounded depths beneath the surface foam. At such times the beat of the surf sounded in his blood. The spell of sex, with all its fire and passion, drew him to this lovely creature ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... they had struck was partially protected by cliffs, that rose like a wall in front. These cliffs turned off the direct force of the gale, but the general turmoil of the sea raised a surf around them which rendered the prospect of effecting a landing a very poor one, even if the vessel should hold together for any length of time. They had not struck on the shore of the mainland, but on a solitary islet or rock, not ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... north. For the first three miles the soundings did not show less than three fathoms, with an even sandy bottom, the last mile shoaling gradually to the beach; the landing being easily effected, as there now was but little surf. The shore was found to be generally very sandy, a low flat valley extending from the head of the cove across the isthmus about two miles to Mermaid Strait, where it terminated in a muddy mangrove ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... your eyes open to guard against detection, and at the same time maintain a bright lookout for me, and be ready to come to my help, should I be hard pressed. Ah! there is the reef that I spoke of a little while ago; see there, broad off the weather bow; you can see the surf breaking upon it—and there is a small island right ahead of us. Keep her away, lad; up helm and let her go off a point. So! steady as you go; that ought to carry us clear of everything. And, thank God, there is the dawn coming; we shall just get nicely in before it grows ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Pitons, and enter another little craterine harbor, to cast anchor before the village of Choi-seul. It lies on a ledge above the beach and under high hills: we land through a surf, running the boat high up on soft yellowish sand. A ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... the Adjutant, and both stood silent a moment listening to the long, deep, rolling thunder that boomed steady and unbroken as surf on a distant beach. "And they're our guns too, mostly," went on the Adjutant. "I suppose we're firing more shells in an ordinary trench-war-routine day now than we dared fire in a month this time last year. Last year we were short of shells, the year before we were short of guns and shells and ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... made of his coat. Fog opened his eyes. 'Anything come ashore?' he asked faintly, trying to turn his head towards the reef. Conquering his repugnance, the young man walked out on the long point. There was nothing there; but farther down the coast barrels were washing up and back in the surf, and one box had stranded in shallow water. 'Am I, too, a wrecker?' he asked himself, as with much toil and trouble he secured the booty and examined it. ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... an immense depth lay the raging sea—luridly illuminated by the moon which looked out from the storm-rent clouds. The surf sent upwards a deafening roar, although the raving of the wind seemed to struggle for the upper hand. This aerial gate led to a little cell which might not unjustly have been named the house of death. From the rocky wall, upon which the guard-room stood, ran out at right angles ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... at Time, They pillar up the Earth, They watch the ages pass, they bring New centuries to birth. They feel the daybreak shiver, They see Time passing ever, As flows the Jumna River As breaks the white sea-surf. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... of bursting surf undertoned all other noises and, prisoned as she was, the schooner and her floe were sweeping slowly toward the land in the grip of a current rather than ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... The skipper had already chosen his course. Because of the gale, he calculated that the blockaders would get a considerable offing, lest they flounder mid the shoal waters inshore. He knew too, even if it were not so dark, that a long, foamy line of surf curtained the bay from any watchful eye on the open sea. By the time she reached the beach channels, La Luz had full speed on. Then, knifing the higher and higher waves, she made a dash ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... experienced—first, two or three days of triumph, excitement, congratulations, a sort of sunburst of gladness, after a long night of gloom and anxiety; then two or three days of calming down, by degrees —a receding of tides, a quieting of the storm-wash to a murmurous surf-beat, a diminishing of devastating winds to a refrain that bore the spirit of a truce-days given to solitude, rest, self-communion, and the reasoning of herself into a realization of the fact that she was actually done with bolts and bars, prison, horrors and impending, ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... faithful study of the history of this strange and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of countless chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,—barred with brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where the surf and the sand-bank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries in which we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but their results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as they bear upon it at all, they possess ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... dump crept out on the beach, and in order to prevent the continuous attrition of the surf upon the outer edge of it from befouling the white-sand bathing-beach farther up the Bight of Tyee, The Laird had driven a double row of fir piling parallel with and beyond the line of breakers. This piling, driven as close together as possible and reenforced with two-inch ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... his canoe and destroy him.... If a man is knocked on the head with a club, or shot by an arrow or a bullet, the cause of death is clearly the malignity of persons using these weapons; and so it is easy to think that a man killed by the falling of a tree, or by the upsetting of a canoe in the surf, or in a whirlpool in the river is also a victim of some being using these things as weapons. For a man holding this view, it seems both natural and easy to regard disease as a manifestation of the wrath of some invisible being, and to construct ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... the babel of two hundred voices he would forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men—always ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... anchored in a fine picturesque bay, situated on the west side of the island, named Thor, in fourteen fathoms, sand and coral bottom, about three miles distant from the centre. A reef extends out some distance from the beach at this bay, almost dry at low water, and with much surf at the entrance, from which cause the procuring of wood and water is attended with more difficulty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... and you have more than a mile to walk over a very badly paved road before you arrive at the centre of the town; you may, however, land on the beach near the custom-house, from whence you immediately enter the best part of the town, but the surf is sometimes so rough that you cannot attempt this point without risking a ducking, or the upsetting of your boat, which you must immediately haul up on the beach ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... And fast she followed, as a towering surge Chases across the thunder-booming sea A flying bark, whose white sails strain beneath The wind's wild buffering, and all the air Maddens with roaring, as the rollers crash On a black foreland looming on the lee Where long reefs fringe the surf-tormented shores. So chased she, and so dashed the ranks asunder Triumphant-souled, and hurled fierce threats before: "Ye dogs, this day for evil outrage done To Priam shall ye pay! No man of you Shall from mine hands deliver his own life, And win back home, to gladden parents ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... them, to the left, the glorious spectre of Fuji, towering enormously above everything. Between sea-wall and sea there is no sand,—only a grey slope of stones, chiefly boulders; and these roll with the surf so that it is ugly work trying to pass the breakers on a rough day. If you once get struck by a stone-wave,—as I did several times,—you will ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... cheek of Kathleen discloses their dye; What ruby can rival the lip of mavourneen? What sight-dazzling diamond can equal her eye? Her silken hair vies with the sunbeam in brightness, And white is her brow as the surf of the sea; Thy footstep is like to the fairy's in lightness, Of Kathleen mavourneen, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... "She is the only person who lets me enjoy things, and now I cannot enjoy them in her absence. Yesterday I drove alone over the three beaches, and left her at home with a dress-maker. Never did I see so many lines of surf; but they only seemed to me like some of Kate's ball-dresses, with the prevailing flounces, six deep. I was so enraged that she was not there, I wished to cover my face with my handkerchief. By the third beach I was ready ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... o'clock in the morning they saw coming upon them through the darkness a breaker of such a height that at first Elias thought they must be quite close ashore near the surf swell. Nevertheless, he soon recognised it for what it really was—a huge billow. Then it seemed to him as if there was a laugh over in the other boat, and something said, "There goes thy boat, Elias!" ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... river's marge, See, from this window, how the turf Runs with a thousand flowers in charge To meet the silver feet of surf That fly ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... and daughter, hand on oar and face against the night. Maid and man whose names are beacons ever to the north. ...... all the madness of the stormy surf Hounds and roars them back, but roars and hounds them ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... beaches of Carmel the surf is mighty to-day. Breaker and lifting billow call To the high, blue Silence over all With the word no heart can say. Time-to-be, shall I hear it ever? Time-that-is, with the hands that sever, Cry all words but the dreadful "Never"! And name of her ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... where the muddy mouth of the river yawned wide, there rose ever a thin white line of surf, and underneath those crested waves there dwelt a very fearsome thing, called the Bar. I grew to hate and be afraid of this mysterious Bar, for I heard it spoken of always with bated breath, and I knew that it was very ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... who announced himself to be a good swimmer, had secured an end of the smallest of these to his waist; he now stood prepared to divest himself of all his superfluous clothing at a moment's notice, and to attempt the hazardous experiment of rushing into the boiling surf, to drag out any poor unfortunate whom he might be able to reach. Others were engaged in various ways in preparing themselves to render what assistance was in their power, when a cry from Grummet announced that the crisis had arrived; on looking ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... cleared away she saw a weird scene about her: hundreds of Japanese men and women, speaking in low angry voices which somehow reminded her of the breaking of the surf on the beach—perhaps because the Japanese language has a sing-song rhythm. The little boy, apparently limp and lifeless, lay in his sister's arms. Komatsu had leapt clear over the front of the car and pushed his way through the ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... found that it was attached to something which enabled him to keep his head above the water, but how it was or what it all meant he could not comprehend in the midst of the deafening rushing noise of the wind and the beating stinging blows of the surf that was flying ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... shores of Maine, and over the treacherous quicksands of Cape Hatteras, the billows of the Atlantic roll; the tropical storms of the Gulf of Mexico whip a high surf over the coral reefs of Florida; upon the Pacific coast, six thousand miles of sea fling all their fury on the land; yet no one fears. Serene in the knowledge that the United States Coast Guard and the Lighthouse Bureau never sleep, vessels from every corner of the world converge to ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... sounds did not disturb the universal stillness of the hour; neither did the gambols of yonder group of seals and walruses that were at play round some fantastic blocks of ice; nor did the soft murmur of the swell that broke in surf at the foot of yonder iceberg, whose blue sides were seamed with a thousand watercourses, and whose jagged pinnacles rose up like needles of steel into ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... too simple to strive to keep simple, unself-conscious, and with a hungry heart, she was not a spectator, half ashamed of being amused. She was Coney Island! Her heart a shoot the chutes for sheer swoops of joy, her eyes full of confetti points, the surf creaming no higher ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... rule, son. Always leave yourself a way out. Now ... let's check that equipment the surgeons put in your neck." Stetson put a hand to his throat. His mouth remained closed, but there was a surf-hissing voice in Orne's ...
— Missing Link • Frank Patrick Herbert
... her to take moonlight walks with him on the bridge, for the sole purpose, as it seemed, of pouring into her ear the longest of his ballads. He would lead her away to sequestered rustic seats, whence the rush of the surf to the sands was heard soft and soothing; and when he had her all to himself, and the sea lay before them, and the scented shade of gardens spread round, and the tall shelter of cliffs rose behind them, he would pull out his last batch of sonnets, and read ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... for dinner, on the banks of the Rugufu River, is eighteen and a half hours, or forty-six miles, from Ujiji; and, as Kabogo is said to be near Uguhha, it must be over sixty miles from Ujiji; therefore the sound of the thundering surf, which is said to roll into the caves of Kabogo, was heard by us at a distance of over one hundred ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... rail all the way for these two travellers. Not for them the joyous assembling on the Mediterranean shore, where Nice lies basking in the sun like a pink surf thrown up by the waves. Not for them the packing of the great carriage, and the swinging away of the four horses with their jingling bells, and the slow climbing of the Cornice, the road twisting up the face of the gray mountains, through perpetual ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... elapsed before the arrival of the litter. Meantime Shane and Davis, with their young companion, hastened along the shore. Several other persons having seen the wreck had now collected on the beach. A few, fastening ropes round their waists, bravely rushed into the surf to assist in dragging the floating men on shore. Some, however, it was very clear, were more eager to obtain any articles of value that might be washed up than to save human life. Many were thus employed when Shane ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... the land, we saw a young negro issue from the thicket. He was quite naked, loaded with chains, and armed with a machete. He invited us to land on a part of the beach covered with large mangroves, as being a spot where the surf did not break, and offered to conduct us to the interior of the island of Baru if we would promise to give him some clothes. His cunning and wild appearance, the often-repeated question whether we were Spaniards, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... press a small book Anedered has been preparing, and to follow us to Teste Island in the Ellengowan. We left Kerepunu on the morning of November 8th, the Mayri leaving at the same time, to sail down inside the surf. We went right out to sea, so as to beat down, had fine weather, and were off Teste Island by the 16th. After dinner we took the boat, and with the captain went in on the east side of the island through the reef, to ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... boys," said the captain. "Don't spend yourselves. If we have to run a surf you'll need all your strength, because we'll sure have to swim ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... round pieces of driftwood, which were slippery with water-slime, she laid them along the dock; two other billets she placed under the boat's keel. Then gathering her strength for one pull, she sent the boat into the churning surf. One of the fishermen advanced to detain her, but she waved him back with a gesture so determined and imperious that he hesitated. He then held consultation with his friends. Two or three now hurried down to the water's edge, but the boat had shot out beyond their reach, and was already rising like ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... so entangled by several large pieces, that her way was stopped, and immediately dropping bodily to leeward, she fell broadside foremost, on the edge of a considerable body of ice; and having at the same time an open sea to windward, the surf caused her to strike violently upon it. This mass at length either so far broke, or moved, as to set them at liberty to make another trial to escape; but unfortunately before the ship gathered way enough to be under command, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... and pulling for shore. Then we cut back to show the gun-crews serving the guns. Then we jump to the landing-party wading through the breakers. I lead them. The man who is carrying the flag gets shot and drops in the surf. I pick him up, put him on my shoulder, and carry him and the flag to the ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... the pulsing whirr of invisible locusts filled the whole air with a drowsy hum, and from the flat at the back of the township, where a few thousand ewes and lambs were shepherded amongst the quarry holes, came another insistent droning in a deeper note, like the murmur of distant surf. No one was stirring: to the right and left along the single thin wavering line of unpainted weatherworn wooden houses nothing moved but mirage waters flickering in the hollows of the ironstone road. Equally deserted was the wide stretch of brown ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... to walk to rehearsal by way of Fifth Avenue, and turning out of Forty-fourth Street to become part of the people-sea of the southward current, felt the eyes of the northward beating upon his face like the pulsing successions of an exhilarating surf. His Fifth Avenue knew its ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... loud in the surf over yonder. If one should dive deep, And rise not—no more need he suffer or ponder O'er losses, or weep, But sink low and sleep While ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... fine grain and clean, fresh quality of the man. Some passages in his poems had led me to expect something different. He always had the look of a man who had just taken a bath. The skin was light and clear, and the blood well to the surface. His body, as I once noticed when we were bathing in the surf, had a peculiar fresh bloom and fineness and delicacy of texture. His physiology was undoubtedly remarkable, unique. The full beauty of his face and head did not appear till he was past sixty. After that, I have little doubt, it was the finest head this age or country has seen. Every artist ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... and the shores leaped nearer, and I saw the tangle of the woods and the breach of the surf, and the brown roofs and the black insides of houses peeped ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... considerably more than six feet high, straddling about the street of the little village, and scouring and scrubbing the pavement with great energy. Close at hand was the shore; a strong west wind was driving the surges of the North Sea against it. A hundred fishing vessels rocking in the surf, moored and lashed together with ropes, formed a line along the beach; the men of Scheveling, in knit woollen caps, short blue jackets, and short trowsers of prodigious width, were walking about on ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... reef showed above water, but its extent and limits were very clearly defined by the ripples and agitation—gentle though this last was—of the surface of the water above it. The surf was breaking heavily on its outer margin in clouds of gleaming white that flashed and glittered in the brilliant sunshine; and an occasional undulation of swell came sweeping in across the reef, causing a thousand swirls and eddies ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... shore. Looking down upon them, he threatened to sink them in the ocean if they did not bring everything on deck in a minute. When I saw the portmanteaus brought up, and my friend and I safely on board, I thought that all was well enough, although we had got a ducking in the surf; but in a little, my friend found that he had been robbed of his purse, containing two sovereigns and some small money; but nobody could tell whether this had been done in the crowd on the pier, or when he was in the boat, or when helped up the side ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... the blasting wind, sweeping the sea of icy sands, hissed and howled round the little sod cabin like surf beating on a half-sunken rock. The wind and the snow and the darkness possessed the plain; and Cold (whose other name is Death) was king of the horrible carnival. It seemed as though morning and sunlight could not come again, so ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... Torridge where its branching crystal spreads To join the Taw. Hard by from a chalk cliff A torrent leaps: not lovelier Sappho was Giving herself all silvery to the sea From that Leucadian rock. Beneath your feet Lie sand and surf in curving parallels. Off shore, a buoy gleams like a dolphin's back Dripping with brine, and guards a sunken reef Whose sharp incisors have gnawed many a keel; There frets the sea and turns white at the lip, And in ill-weather ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... months of the year. The region is especially famed for potatoes, which become almost a fruit here. The farm I live on is charmingly situated about a mile from the old Mission, and two from the beach, on which a tremendous surf breaks and thunders day and night. From my house I look over the coast-table and range of mountains, the hills of Monterey, the bay, and a near landscape, exquisitely diversified by plain and wood, hill and valley, and almost every shade that herbage and foliage, in a country without ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... The ship moved gently onward. The monotonous cry of the leadsman in the chains was the only sound audible. The soundings were indicating shoaler water, although the murmuring of the surf had been left far astern. The almost imperceptible darkening of the mist on either beam seemed to show that the Excelsior was entering some land-locked passage. The movement of the vessel slackened, the tide ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... where rests the warrior's head; And we will sit in Twilight's face, and see The sweet Moon glancing through the Tooa[370] tree, 10 The lofty accents of whose sighing bough Shall sadly please us as we lean below; Or climb the steep, and view the surf in vain Wrestle with rocky giants o'er the main, Which spurn in columns back the baffled spray. How beautiful are these! how happy they, Who, from the toil and tumult of their lives, Steal to look down where nought but Ocean strives! Even ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... and terminate in cathedral spires. What grace in the motion of every spray of greenness! what a healing odor in the breath of the tree! And, hark! a little breeze has touched it, and tuned its language into a plaintive song,—a sound like the surf washing upon a distant shore. Do you know why the pine is so sad a tree? Let me tell you her story. No; she will sing it herself, if you will listen to the nocturn: "Long, long ago I had my home on an island of the ocean, and my branches swayed and sang to the waves that kissed my feet ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... from the waters, it was black beyond thought, so black that a few yards from the fire the sharpest pair of eyes could not see a hand held a foot away. And with the darkness came a sense of mystery, a hollow murmur as of the surf heard a long way off, which intensified the brooding stillness; and at times the ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... plants, the rude disorder of the boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the isle,—all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt with scarce a difference. I steeped myself in open air and in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he could play music that made the birds stop in their flight to listen. The mother loved the son so much that she wished to keep him by her so long as she lived, and that was why she never let him go with her to the shore. She believed that if he visited the towns and tasted the joys of surf-riding, shared in the games of the athletes, and drank the beer they brewed down there, and especially if he saw the pretty girls, he would never go back to his mountain home. And though Hiku wondered what ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... a coal-mine or a big estate in commercial England. Each lounges decorously through life after his own fashion; only the one lounges in a Russia leather chair at a club in Pall Mall, while the other lounges in a nice soft dust-heap beside a rolling surf in Tahiti or the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Sighted the centre of Dorre Island, and stood in to within about two miles of the shore, which we found steep and rocky with a heavy surf breaking on it; we then tacked and stood ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... left-hand bank, one came almost unawares on a sharp bend to the left: here the river suddenly ended, and the sea began; the rushes and reeds and high grasses ceased; a low, rocky barrier stayed them. Rounding this point, lo, your boat swayed instantly to the left: a gentle surf-wave took possession of you, and irresistibly bore you towards a yellow sand beach, which curved inward like a reaper's sickle, not more than a quarter of a mile long, from the handle to the shining point; smooth and glistening, strewn with polished ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... on the horse and attached a rope to it. The fishermen took the lines, and, paying out as they went so as to leave plenty of slack line, got on the rocks just above the little beach whereon, sheltered though it was, the seas broke heavily. There they waited, ready to pull the horse through the surf when he should have ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... cave should extend to within three feet of the front of the stage, and run back to the extreme background. The space between the footlights and the floor of the cave should be covered with blue cambric, painted to represent waves and surf. Directly behind the drop curtain there should be a representation of the roof and sides of the cave. Light frames, covered with brown paper, similar to the floor, and made very irregular at the edges, must be placed at each side of the stage, and at the top; these should ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... another through the close twigged manzanita, lilac, laurel and mahogany that broke upward along the shining bouldered coasts of San Jacinto. the chaparral at this season took all the changes of the incoming surf, blue in the shadows, darkling green about the heads of the gulches, or riffling with the white under side of wind-lifted leaves. Once its murmurous swell had closed over them, the mule-deer would have his own way with the Pot Hunter. Often after laborious hours spent in ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... dearth of "C's." Not more than a dozen of the crowded Monarchic's passengers were dancing with impatience beneath the third letter of the alphabet, and Mr. Rolls, Jr., walked straight up to tall Miss Child without being beaten back by a surf of "C's." To be sure, Miss Carroll was under the same letter, and observed the approach of Peter with interest, if not surprise; but she was seated on a trunk at some ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... disgorged them, ants of sober, neutral colours, marching in columns to attack other ants. They grew upon the vision and filled it, and the sound of their feet was louder than the beating of the surf on Sea Point, and although martial music beat and blew them on—a brazen whirlwind dominating the mind, blaring at the ears—the trampling of men's feet and the hoofs of horses, and the rolling of iron-shod wheels, triumphed in ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... storm in the early part of the voyage. Alfonso was the first who reached the coast at Cape Branco, where he landed, and set up a wooden cross as a signal to his consorts, and then proceeded to the islands of Arguin, which afforded shelter from the tremenduous surf which breaks continually on the coast of Africa. While waiting at Arguin for the other ships, Alfonso paid many visits to the continent, where he made prisoners of twenty-five of the natives. When the other two ships of the squadron had ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... cliff and went a little distance to the neighborhood of a Chinese fishing-station, where there was a sand-beach; and here, after throwing off my coat and waistcoat, I went down to have a closer touch with my treacherous friend. The surf sprang at me, and the waves, retreating gently, beckoned me to further ventures, which I made with a knowledge of my ground, but with a love of this sweet danger also. A strong breaker lifted me from my footing, but I outwitted it and pursued it in retreat; there came another afterwards, ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... the beach, where there were some bathing pavilions and several houses. The professor was walking along behind, in the vain hope of yet discovering a horned toad, perhaps on its way to get a dip in the surf or drink ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... "Island," iii. 3, and compare, of shore surf, the "slings its high flakes, shivered into sleet" ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... simple to strive to keep simple, unself-conscious, and with a hungry heart, she was not a spectator, half ashamed of being amused. She was Coney Island! Her heart a shoot the chutes for sheer swoops of joy, her eyes full of confetti points, the surf creaming ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... that the men had that wildness in their looks which usually accompanies excessive fatigue; and, though just as willing as ever to obey orders, they seemed at times not to comprehend them. However, by dint of great exertion, we managed to get the boats above the surf; after which, a hot supper, a blazing fire of driftwood, and a few hours' quiet ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... attempt some Amazonian Dames Contrive whereby to glorify their names. A ruff for Boston Neck of mud and turfe, Reaching from side to side, from surf to surf, Their nimble hands spin up like Christmas pyes, Their pastry by degrees on high doth rise ... The wheel at home counts in an holiday, Since while the mistress worketh it may play. A tribe of female ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... raft while any of its timbers kept together, and when it no longer yielded him support, binding the girdle around him, he swam. Minerva smoothed the billows before him and sent him a wind that rolled the waves towards the shore. The surf beat high on the rocks and seemed to forbid approach; but at length finding calm water at the mouth of a gentle stream, he landed, spent with toil, breathless and speechless and almost dead. After some time, reviving, he kissed the ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... solemnly on the vast ocean that spread out from beneath our feet to the golden west in the far distance, where sky and sea met on the hazy horizon—with never a sail to break its wide expanse, with never a sound to break our solitude, save the sullen murmuring wash of the surf as it rippled up on the beach, and the heavy, deep-drawn sigh of the water as it rolled back to its parent ocean, taking its weary load of pebbles and sand below, as if sick of the monotonous task, which it was doomed ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... tongue, his big chin down on the fiddle-tail, his white eyeballs glaring in the lamplight. Harvey swung out of his bunk to hear better; and amid the straining of the timbers and the wash of the waters the tune crooned and moaned on, like lee surf in a blind fog, till it ended ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... pediment, in which, doubtful of their power to carve figures beautiful enough, they cut a trefoiled hold for ornament, and bordered the edges with harlequinade of mosaic. They then call to their help the Greek sea-waves, and let the surf of the AEgean climb along the slopes, and toss itself at the top into a fleur-de-lys. Every wave is varied in outline and proportionate distance, though cut with a precision of curve like that of the sea itself. From ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... seldom ventured very close inshore in the vicinity of the batteries; and our pilot, who had been throughout the voyage in bodily fear of an American prison, began to wake up, and, after looking well round, told us that he could make out, over the long line of surf, a heap of sand called 'the mound,' which was a mark for ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... upon the grass, and for a time was incapable of deliberate thought or action. At length I arose and paced up and down the turf, staring around upon the changeless blue of the seaward horizon, the heaving swell of the ocean, the restless surf fretting against the shore, and the motionless hills that rose behind each other inland, and lured the eye to a distant group of mountains. The coloring of sea and land was wonderfully fine; both seemed formed of similar translucent purple; and despite the excited state ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of the eastern side of the Gulf of Carpentaria; not a cape, creek, bay, or island on this coast of the gulf escaped his notice and examination. It was his intention to have pursued the same mode of close and minute examination: "following the land so closely, that the washing of the surf upon it should be visible, and no opening nor any thing of importance escape notice;" but he was prevented by ascertaining that the vessel was in such a crazy state, that, though in fine weather she might hold together ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... agonizing; Lanyard's breath was almost completely shut off; he gasped vainly, with a rattling noise in his gullet; his eyeballs started; a myriad coruscant lights danced and interlaced blindingly before them; in his ears there rang a roaring like the voice of heavy surf breaking ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... night rides in the spectral surf Along the spectral sands, And all the air vibrates, as if from harps Touched by ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... bright blue vault was unflecked by a scrap of cloud to temper the solar rays, while a brisk breeze, blowing in from the south-west, gave a feeling of freshness to the air and raised a little wave of surf, that broke on the beach with a rippling splash far astern; the cooing of the doves in the distance chiming in musically with the ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the historic cruise described in these pages, the Kawa's owner, Dr. Traprock, has no hesitancy in saying, "Frankly, without Triplett the thing never could have been done." The accompanying photograph was taken just after the captain had been hauled out of the surf in Papeete. It will be remarked that he still maintains an indomitable front and holds his trusty Colt ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... saw everywhere a multitude of fires. While at anchor on this coast, there being no harbour to enter, we sent the boat on shore with twenty-five men to obtain water, but it was not possible to land without endangering the boat, on account of the immense high surf thrown up by the sea, as it was an open roadstead. Many of the natives came to the beach, indicating by various friendly signs that we might trust ourselves on shore. One of their noble deeds of friendship deserves to be made known to your Majesty. A young sailor was ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... Loseis, measuring their sinews against the crashing blows of the waves on the other side. They budged her inch by inch, often thrown back again; but at last she floated, and there they managed to hold her for a moment, rising and falling. Only one who has measured the strength of the surf against the smallest craft, may comprehend the magnitude of ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... that beach!—tropical, exotic varieties, such as were found nowhere else. And then—most ideal place of all for a child—there was a fascinating rocky island in the sea, connected by a neck of twenty yards of pebble covered hardly at high water; and on one side of this pebble isthmus was the full surf of the sea, and on the other the quiet ripple of the waters of the bay. But such an island! All their own to colonize and govern, and separated from home by just a breadth ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... I had finished it I constructed my ideal garden. And then I made a sea and a coast-line, and when it was finished it was so real to me that I actually seemed to go into its rooms, sit on the verandah, breathe in its sea-airs and listen to the surf below its cliff. I remember that one of its rooms did not please me entirely, and that I seemed to pull it down—in thought—and reconstruct it according to my wish. This took time, for brick by brick I thought the new room into existence. One law that governed that state was easy to ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... a few weeks he found himself in the centre of a brilliant company, and for the first time in his life tasted what it was to have free intercourse with his fellow-creatures of both sews. The son of a System was, therefore, launched; not only through the surf, but in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... no one slept, for until two o'clock in the morning, troops were still being disembarked in the surf, and two ships of war had their searchlights turned on the landing-place, and made Siboney as light as a ball-room. Back of the searchlights was an ocean white with moonlight, and on the shore red camp-fires, at which the half-drowned troops were drying their uniforms, and the Rough Riders, ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... Spring-bewildered eyes of mine, I seek above the surf of hedgerow line Where peeping branches reach, and reaching twine Faint cherry or plum or eglantine. But with pretence of whisperings The year's young mischief-wind shall take By storm these shy striplings, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... and from the flat at the back of the township, where a few thousand ewes and lambs were shepherded amongst the quarry holes, came another insistent droning in a deeper note, like the murmur of distant surf. No one was stirring: to the right and left along the single thin wavering line of unpainted weatherworn wooden houses nothing moved but mirage waters flickering in the hollows of the ironstone road. Equally deserted was the wide stretch of brown plain, dotted with poppet legs and here and ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... 19th.—Some surf observable this morning, increasing until about 4 P.M.; the wind variable, settling for a short time in the south-east. I became anxious on account of my berth, which was represented to me as insecure, in case of a blow from seaward. I sent and got a pilot ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... the River Colven flows into the sea. From the school-house we could often catch the hum of the waves breaking lazily along the shore of Colveston Bay; or, if the wind blew hard from the sea, it carried with it the roar of the breakers on the bar mouth, and the distant thunder of the surf on the stony beach. ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... moment, however, I knew it could not be a man, for the object suddenly glided over the face of the cliff and slid down the sheer, smooth lace like a lizard. Before I could get a square look at it, the thing crawled into the surf—or, at least, it seemed to—but the whole episode occurred so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that I was not sure I had seen ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... two little boys. William was five years old, and Johnny was not quite three. The weather was very warm, and these little boys got very weak, and looked so pale and sick, that the doctor said their parents had better take them to Newport, and let them bathe in the surf. So their Mother packed up their clothes, and some books, for she did not wish them to be idle; and, one pleasant afternoon, they all went on board of the steamboat ...
— Aunt Fanny's Story-Book for Little Boys and Girls • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... lifted from the level of the water and took on color and variety, till from the deck one could make out the swell of their contours and distinguish the hues of the wild vegetation that clothed them. The yellow of a beach and a snowy gleam of surf showed at their feet, and then, dead ahead and still far away, they opened, and in the gap there was visible the still shining blue of water that ran inland and lay quiet ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... their feet, saying, "Run before the next wave comes." Ten yards farther and they were beyond the reach of the sea. Harold was with them, and directed those who had got ashore to form lines, taking hold of each other's hands, and so to advance far into the surf and grasp their comrades as they were swept up. Many were saved in this way, although some of the rescuers were badly hurt by floating pieces of wreckage, for the vessel had entirely broken up immediately after her course had ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... passed. He went down to the shore where the wide Pacific flung long rollers away up the hard-packed sand. The fishermen were going out to sea in the rosy morning light, and as they stood up in their fishing-smacks, and swept their long oars through the surf, they kept time to the motion with singing. And their strong, brave voices rang out above the roar of ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... north he could see the southeastern half of Kennedy's Channel as far north as Mount Ross, 80 deg. 58' N. He says "Not a speck of ice was to be seen as far as I could observe; the sea was open, the swell came from the northward ... and the surf broke in on the rocks below in regular breakers." Morton described accurately the general landscape, but he was an incompetent astronomical observer, and his estimates of distances were excessive. The farthest point was charted nearly a hundred miles north of its true position, while Cape Constitution ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... glimpsed again in the pleasantest hide-and-seek fashion; and you have some tiny mountains, some quaint and picturesque groups of toy peaks, and a dainty little vest-pocket Matterhorn; and here and there and now and then a strip of sea with a white ruffle of surf breaks into ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a rockbound coast; for the western sky is dashed with fleecy clouds, like the spray that beats against the chalk cliffs on the shore of the mighty Atlantic; and amid the last plunges of the doomed vessel the spray is tinged redder and redder, ere with her human cargo she disappears amid the surf. But no sooner has she sunk into the abyss than the foam and the fierce breakers die away, and a wondrous calm broods over all things. In twenty minutes' time nothing is left in the western sky but a tiny bar of golden cloud that cannot yet ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... streams; if the swell be from the north, it enters almost without diminution; and the war-ships roll dizzily at their moorings, and along the fringing coral which follows the configuration of the beach, the surf breaks with a continuous uproar. In wild weather, as the world knows, the roads are untenable. Along the whole shore, which is everywhere green and level and overlooked by inland mountain-tops, the town lies drawn out in strings and clusters. The western horn is Mulinuu, the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... about four miles distant, bearing west by north. For the first three miles the soundings did not show less than three fathoms, with an even sandy bottom, the last mile shoaling gradually to the beach; the landing being easily effected, as there now was but little surf. The shore was found to be generally very sandy, a low flat valley extending from the head of the cove across the isthmus about two miles to Mermaid Strait, where it terminated in a muddy mangrove creek. In about half an hour several wells were found, some containing ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... second stories there were wide piazzas running around the house, and for hours at a time with my marine glasses at hand to look at passing steamers, I sat and enjoyed, what has always been a fascination to me, watching the magnificent surf crashing and dashing on the beach below. The house was protected by a formidable bulkhead, but it was no uncommon occurrence to have great showers of spray come ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... One seldom looks upon a hamlet so picturesque and wild. The rocks slope steeply down to the wonderfully clear water. Thousands of poles support half-acres of the spruce-bough shelf, beneath which is a dark, cool region, crossed with foot-paths, and not unfrequently sprinkled and washed by the surf,—a most kindly office on the part of the sea, you will allow, when once you have scented the fish-offal perpetually dropping from the evergreen fish-house above. These little buildings on the flakes are conspicuous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... "Surf on a rock-bound shore of the sea-king's blue domain— Look how it lashes the crags, hark how it thunders again! But all the din of the isles that the Delver heaves in foam In the draught of the undertow glides out to the sea-gods' home. Now, which of us two should test? Is it thou, with thy heart ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... Together we shall find the Princess of Ptarth and with you Kar Komak will return to the world of men—such a world as he knew in the long-gone past when the ships of mighty Lothar ploughed angry Throxus, and the roaring surf beat against the barrier of ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... enabled him to keep his head above the water, but how it was or what it all meant he could not comprehend in the midst of the deafening rushing noise of the wind and the beating stinging blows of the surf that ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... was the heavy plash of the waves, as in minute peals they rolled in upon the pebbly beach, and brought back with them at each retreat, some of the larger and smoother stones, whose noise, as they fell back into old ocean's bed, mingled with the din of the breaking surf. In one of the many little bays I passed, lay three or four fishing smacks. The sails were drying, and flapped lazily against the mast. I could see the figures of the men as they passed backwards ad forwards upon the decks, and although the height was nearly ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... characteristic a feature of the Netherland landscapes, the stream which ran from Ostend towards the town of Nieuport flowing sluggishly through them. It was a bright warm midsummer day. The waves of the German Ocean came lazily rolling in upon the crisp yellow sand, the surf breaking with its monotonous music at the very feet of the armies. A gentle south-west breeze was blowing, just filling the sails of more than a thousand ships in the offing, which moved languidly along the sparkling sea. It was an ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... from the ideals we started out to gain; the way we content ourselves with the environments of evil and forego forever the voice that calls us away to partake of things which shall be as wine and honey to the soul, frightens me; startles me as the sudden thunder of the surf might startle one who sojourned by ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... easterly gale, was rolling its waves against the beach, like the ocean in a storm. In the attempt to land, La Salle's canoe was nearly swamped. He and his three canoe-men leaped into the water, and, in spite of the surf, which nearly drowned them, dragged their vessel ashore, with all its load. He then went to the rescue of Hennepin, who, with his awkward companion, was in woful need of succor. Father Gabriel, with ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... the blush of the morning, The soft cheek of Kathleen discloses their dye; What ruby can rival the lip of mavourneen? What sight-dazzling diamond can equal her eye? Her silken hair vies with the sunbeam in brightness, And white is her brow as the surf of the sea; Thy footstep is like to the fairy's in lightness, Of Kathleen mavourneen, cuishlih ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Roar from the surf of boreal isles, Roar from the hidden, jagged steeps, Where the destroyer never sleeps; Ring through the ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... mere hazy line on the horizon; then it rose to a thrust of land, jutted with cloud-misted hill-tops. Then, as the two roaring specks that were airplanes came closer, heavy tropical foliage became distinct, and white slashes of surf breaking on the shore. This was the Azuero Peninsula, most western point of the ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... palms dotted here and there among the light timber, and everywhere sunflecked, warm, dry shade. Nowhere is there a hint of that sinister suggestion of the Reach. Clear, beautiful, limpid, wide-spreading, irregular pools, set in an undulating field of emerald-green mossy surf, shaded with graceful foliage and gleaming in the sunlight with exquisite opal tints—a giant necklace of opals, set in links of emerald green, and thrown down at hazard to fall in loops and curves within ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... any way a cheerful embarkation. It was in the dark days of Lent, in March, when the north is most severe: and the grey skies and blighting wind would be appropriate to the feelings of the exiles as they put forth from their rock amid the wild beating of the surf, anxiously watched by the defenders of the place, who no doubt had at the same time to keep up a vigilant inspection landward, lest any band of spearmen from Albany should arrive upon the adjacent shore in time to stop the flight. The grey rock, the greyer leaden sea, the whirling ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... carrying one end of the trunk with Jane, in addition to the pack she had slung over her shoulder. They finally started down a narrow path that led on down to the shore, leaving some of their equipment behind to be brought later on in the afternoon. As they neared the shore the boom of the surf grew ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... the soft expanse of Chincoteague Bay. There seemed a slender hand of silver reaching down from the sky to tremble on the long chords of the water, lying there in light and shade, like a harp. The drowsy dash of the low surf on the bar beyond the inlet was harsh to this still and shallow haven for wreckers and oystermen. It was very far from any busy city or hive of men, between the ocean and the sandy peninsula ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... the look of it, though," said the fisherman. "Mortal thick surf coming up for the wind that's in." But he slipped his boat, pulled ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... night had fallen upon the awful scene. A flash of lightning illuminated the wreck, Mr. Holmes was gone, and Stevens could not see another soul on the vessel. The wild roar of surf fell on his ears, and a moment later he felt the bottom of the ship grating on the sands. It seemed to glide further and further on the beach, as if the ship were being lifted and driven inland. The tide was at the full, and the wind was blowing a hurricane on shore, so that the wreck was ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... the mouth of the river, a dissolute-looking brig with its yards unsquared was at anchor higher up, and a sharp eye could detect a figure or two about the beach. On either side, as far as eye could reach, there was a line of surf. ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... birch woods would receive him, extending far over the rolling country. He would sit down in the moss and lean against a tree from which he could see a patch of ocean between the trunks. At times the wind would carry to him the noise of the surf, like distant boards falling on each other. The caw of crows above the treetops, hoarse, desolate, forlorn ... He had a book on his knees, but he read not a line in it. He was enjoying a deep oblivion, a floating in perfect freedom over space and time; and only occasionally did it ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... tribe. Laburnum rich In streaming gold; syringa ivory pure; The scented and the scentless rose; this red And of a humbler growth, the other tall, And throwing up into the darkest gloom Of neighbouring cypress, or more sable yew, Her silver globes, light as the foamy surf That the wind severs from the broken wave; The lilac various in array, now white, Now sanguine, and her beauteous head now set With purple spikes pyramidal, as if Studious of ornament, yet unresolved Which hue she most approved, she chose them all; Copious of flowers the woodbine, pale and wan, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... persuasion that a bevy took to the water. This was a sign of a general capitulation, and some hundreds immediately followed, jostling each other in their haste, squawking, whirring their flippers, splashing and churning the water, reminding one of a crowd of miniature surf-bathers. We followed the files of birds marching inland, along the course of a tumbling stream, until at an elevation of some five hundred feet, on a flattish piece of ground, a huge rookery opened out—acres and acres ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... witch always needs corpses. She makes ointments out of them, or perhaps she eats them. On moonlight nights she sits in the surf, where it is whitest, and the spray dashes over her. They say that she sits and searches for shipwrecked ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... a high chamber in the Hotel del Coronado, on the great and fertile beach in front of San Diego. It is the 2d of June. Looking southward, I see the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean, sparkling in the sun as blue as the waters at Amalfi. A low surf beats along the miles and miles of white sand continually, with the impetus of far-off seas and trade-winds, as it has beaten for thousands of years, with one unending roar and swish, and occasional shocks of sound as if of distant thunder on the shore. ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... magnificent storm, which came, as an equinoctial storm should, exactly at the equinox, and for a day and a night heaped the sea upon the shore in thundering surges twenty and thirty feet high. I watched these at their awfulest, from the wide windows of a cottage that crouched in the very edge of the surf, with the effect of clutching the rocks with one hand and holding its roof on with the other. The sea was such a sight as I have not seen on shipboard, and while I luxuriously shuddered at it, I had the advantage of a mellow log-fire at my back, purring and softly crackling in a quiet ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of the madness of the town, Deathly weary of all women, and all wine. Back, back to Nature! I will go and lay me down, Bleeding lay me down before her shrine. For the mother-breast the hungry babe must call, Loudly to the shore cries the surf upon the sea; Hear, Nature wide and deep! after man's mad festival How bitterly my soul cries ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... rocks at the very entrance are the abode of another familiar revenant. The Prophet assures me that thirty years ago a vessel and crew were wrecked there, and on every succeeding stormy evening since that day, the captain, with creditable perseverance, waves his light on that wind-and surf-swept rock. In this instance the prophetical authority is in dispute, for there are those who assert that the light is shown by fairies to toll boats to their doom on the foggy point. The more scientifically minded explain the mysterious light as a defunct animal giving out gas. It must be a persistent ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... sweet is the bosom of night that pillows the world to rest. But sweeter than the lips of morning, and sweeter than the bosom of night, is the voice of music that wakes a world of joys and soothes a world of sorrows. It is like some unseen ethereal ocean whose silver surf forever breaks in song; forever breaks on valley, hill, and craig, in ten thousand symphonies. There is a melody in every sunbeam, a sunbeam in every melody; there is a flower in every song, a love song in every flower; there is a sonnet ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... wind and the weather did not keep truce very long. A wailing blast around the upper peaks produced a caterwauling to equal the voices of half a dozen Throg hounds. And in their poor shelter the Terrans not only heard the thunderous boom of surf, but felt the vibration of that beat pounding through the very ground on which they lay. The sea must have long since covered the beach over which they had come and was now trying its strength against the rock of the cliff barrier. They could not talk to each other over that ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... walking through the lonely forests the mind of the visitor is involuntarily carried back to the scenes that took place there, as well as to the actors who centuries ago passed away. Now silence broods over the place once so active with life, and nothing but nature remains, while the distant surf is ever sounding an everlasting requiem to the memory of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... have helped to preserve this isolation: the fever that rises from its swamps and lagoons, and the surf that thunders upon the shore. In considering the stunted development of the West Coast, these two elements must be kept in mind—the sickness that strikes at sunset and by sunrise leaves the victim dead, and the monster waves that rush booming like cannon at the beach, churning the ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... named Thor, in fourteen fathoms, sand and coral bottom, about three miles distant from the centre. A reef extends out some distance from the beach at this bay, almost dry at low water, and with much surf at the entrance, from which cause the procuring of wood and water is attended with more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... of the land, called by the French, Cape Naturaliste, we had nearly run ashore from the darkness of the night, and the little elevation of the land. Our sounding in seven fathoms was the first indication of danger; and, on listening attentively, the noise of the surf upon the ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... and cast into the mill of revolution for a total remoulding. Every day came like the discharge of a great double-shotted gun. It could not but be that, humble as his walk was, and his years so few, his fevered mind should leap into the questions of the hour like a naked boy into the surf. He made mistakes, sometimes in a childish, sometimes in an older way, some against most worthy things. But withal he managed to keep the main direction of truth, after his own young way of thinking and telling ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... show him a human being. After remaining a quarter of an hour on the boom, during all which time the only sounds that were heard were the sighings of the night-air, and the sullen and steady wash of the surf, Captain Truck came on deck again, where he found his mate waiting his report with intense anxiety. The former was fully aware of the importance of his discovery, but, being a cool man, he had not ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... listened, and a noise like the roaring of the surf on a beach could be heard, but apparently at ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... of life to my necessarily skeleton-like generalities, memory pictures me a certain painting of Okio's which I fell in love with at first sight. It is of a sunrise on the coast of Japan. A long line of surf is seen tumbling in to you from out a bank of mist, just piercing which shows the blood-red disk of the rising sun, while over the narrow strip of breaking rollers three cranes are slowly sailing north. And that is all you see. You do not see the shore; you do not see the main; you are looking but ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... Motionless, with her burning and fixed glances, in her solitary apartment, how well the outbursts of passion which at times escape from the depths of her chest with her respiration, accompany the sound of the surf which rises, growls, roars, and breaks itself like an eternal and powerless despair against the rocks on which is built this dark and lofty castle! How many magnificent projects of vengeance she conceives by the light ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... humanity, which cried aloud for governance, for protection. Julian could be great, with the greatness only attained by purged humanity, superior surely to the peaceful purity of angels. But he could be a castaway, oh! as much a castaway as the fainting shipwrecked man whom the hoarse surf rolls to the sad island of a ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... shallow waters of the lagoon are of a different kind from those which abound on the outer edge of the reef, and of which the reef is built up. Close to the seaward edge of the reef, over which, even in calm weather, a surf almost always breaks, the coral rock is encrusted with a thick coat of a singular vegetable organism, which contains a great deal of lime—the so-called Nullipora. Beyond this, in the part of the edge of the reef which is always covered by the breaking waves, the living, true, reef—polypes ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the north, and a mountainous swell from the north-east. Shortly after daybreak on the 13th of September, we saw Sulphur Island, in the south-west quarter, and by eleven in the forenoon were close up to it. We intended to land, but were prevented by the high wind, which caused so great a surf all round the island, as to render this impracticable. The sulphuric volcano from which the island takes its name is on the north-west side; it emits white smoke, and the smell of sulphur is very strong on the lee side of the crater. The cliffs near the volcano ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... the flank companies of the first and second regiment, and at noon arrived within four miles of their destination. This operation was attended with considerable difficulty and risk, owing to the heavy surf that beat on the shore; and which was the occasion of some loss of ammunition, and of a few boats being ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... believe that these men were total strangers, that he'd never laid eyes on them before, and after a few words he wheeled about. As he did so, his glance fell on Faith standing there alone against the pale sky, for the weather 'd thickened, and watching the surf break at her feet. He was motionless, gazing at her long, and then, when he had turned once or twice irresolutely, he ground his heel into the sand and went back. The men rose and wandered on with him, and they talked together for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... no light matter which had so roused the soldier's admiration. Out of the haze which still lay thick upon our right there twinkled here and there a bright gleam of silvery light, while a dull, thundering noise broke upon our ears like that of the surf upon a rocky shore. More and more frequent came the fitful flashes of steel, louder and yet louder grew the hoarse gathering tumult, until of a sudden the fog was rent, and the long lines of the Royal cavalry broke out from it, wave after wave, rich in scarlet and blue and gold, as grand ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... into promontories that encroach upon the terrace beneath,—at another receding into picturesque, bay-like recesses; and where composed, as in many localities, of rock of an enduring quality, we find it worn, as if by the action of the surf,—in some parts relieved into insulated stacks, in others hollowed into deep caverns,—in short, presenting all the appearance of a precipitous coast-line, subjected to the action of the waves. Now, no geologist can or does doubt that this escarpment was at one time the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... mass of the waiting crowd were silent, scarcely exchanging a whispered confidence;—so still that the long, low boom of the surf upon the shore reached them distinctly, like a responsive heart-throb. They could hear the storm-waves outside the port dashing wildly against the rock-bound coast, with fierce suggestions of strife. But they knew that within their sheltered harbor their waiting galleys ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... debarkation of the troops. This service required the greatest coolness and skill, as the wind was blowing strong and the current running rapidly; the vessels were difficult to manage, especially as they were under almost constant fire of the British guns. Perry accompanied Scott through the surf, and rendered valuable service. He it was who as Commodore Perry soon after became known to the world as the hero of ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... Paulovna could stir the heart of a man who has constant twinges in his leg. I wonder if one of our own Yankee girls of the best type, haughty and spirituelle, would be of any comfort to you in your present deplorable condition. If I thought so, I would hasten down to the Surf House and catch one for you; or, better still, I would find you ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... she in Spanish, pointing to the surf that thundered beyond the reef. 'Go back! Here is the devil—the sea hath more mercy—go back whiles ye may!' And now she checked all at once and falls a-shivering, for a voice reached us, a man's voice a-singing fair to hear, and the ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... the merciless surges they launch her, And back she is flung to the white-pebbled beach! Now cleaves the wild surf, for never a stauncher, Or braver crew mounted a ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... daughter Molly, found Tom. He was washed up on the beach among the wreckage, in a great wooden box which had been securely tied around with a rope and lashed between two spars—apparently for better protection in beating through the surf. Matt Abrahamson thought he had found something of more than usual value when he came upon this chest; but when he cut the cords and broke open the box with his broadaxe, he could not have been more astonished ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... exclaimed. "It is horrid going on so. If I had swum out with a rope through the surf, there might be something in it; but just to jump in at the edge of the water is not worth making a fuss about, one ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... waited until the tide was at flood, and then, on the 29th of September, with a banner displaying the Virgin and Child above the arms of Spain in one hand and with drawn sword in the other, Balboa marched solemnly into the rolling surf that broke about his waist and took formal possession of the ocean, and all the shores, wheresoever they might be, which were washed by its waters, for Ferdinand of Aragon, and his daughter Joanna of Castile, and their ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... turkey-buzzards on the shore, and the slow procession of the pelicans, sailing past above the tops of the breakers. He saw the black fins of the grampuses cutting the water, and thought that they were sharks. He stood for hours at a time up to his waist in the surf, casting for sea-bass; he got few fish, but joy and excitement he ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... days, and reaped disappointment, but not despair. One night, shortly after his arrival, he was sitting in one of the windows of the library, looking towards the sea, when his attention was attracted by a figure which was moving near the edge of the surf, and which was dimly visible through the moonless summer night. Its motions were irregular, like those of a person in a state of indecision. It had extremely long hair, which floated in the wind. Whatever else it might be, it certainly was ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... are very like walls, but those are surf-waves, as they are called, that is, waves which break upon a shore. The waves I am thinking of just now are more like mountains—translucent blackish-blue mountains—mountains that look as if they were made of bottle-green glass, ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... remembered the still waters of Lake Darvra and the fond Dedannan host on its peaceful shores. Here the sighing of the wind among the reeds no longer soothed their sorrow, but the roar of the breaking surf struck fresh terror in ...
— Celtic Tales - Told to the Children • Louey Chisholm
... so shallow a sea that there was no danger of drowning. My walking-stick, which was a very necessary adjunct, as I still suffered from my accident on Marston Moor, was washed out of my hands, but brawny Arabs seized me and my fellow-passengers, and we were borne safely through the surf to the beach, where we arrived, dazed, breathless, and drenched ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... with the full flooding tide. Now the Channel Rock danger is o'er. One more stretch of water, some more dangerous rocks, Then the gleaming surf, then ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... ecstasy—it is Balzac. Upon that rock I built my church, and his great and valid talent saved me often from destruction, saved me from the shoaling waters of new æstheticisms, the putrid mud of naturalism, and the faint and sickly surf of the symbolists. Thinking of him, I could not forget that it is the spirit and not the flesh that is eternal; that, as it was thought that in the first instance gave man speech, so to the end it shall still be thought that shall make speech beautiful and rememberable. The grandeur and sublimity ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... drive without her," said the impetuous lady. "She is the only person who lets me enjoy things, and now I cannot enjoy them in her absence. Yesterday I drove alone over the three beaches, and left her at home with a dress-maker. Never did I see so many lines of surf; but they only seemed to me like some of Kate's ball-dresses, with the prevailing flounces, six deep. I was so enraged that she was not there, I wished to cover my face with my handkerchief. By the third beach I was ready for ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... come so rapidly up. I do not know if I am doing justice to the occurrence. There was more of apparent than real danger in it, and I myself was less nervous, because I had not long before been accustomed to the heavy surf of Norfolk Island. It was, however, a moment of great excitement. We had literally shot towards the shore, and were now within fifty yards of it, when Mr. Witch said to me, "Take care of yourself, Sir; we shall ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... Brigadier-General Worth's brigade of regulars led the descent, quickly followed by the division of United States volunteers under Major-General Patterson, and Brigadier-General Twiggs' reserve brigade of regulars. The three lines successively landed in sixty-seven surf-boats, each boat conducted by a naval officer, and rowed by sailors from Commodore Conner's squadron, whose lighter vessels flanked the boats so as to be ready to protect the operation by their cross-fire. The whole army ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... grounded upon the sand, the impatient rabble rushed into the surf to capture and make spoil; but were awed into admiration and respect by the appearance of the illustrious company on board. There were Moors of both sexes sumptuously arrayed, and adorned with precious jewels, bearing ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... advantage of having a strong point d'appui in Bayonne at the confluence of the Nive and Adour. Careful preparations were made by Wellington for throwing a large force across the Lower Adour below Bayonne, in concert with a British fleet. Contrary winds and a violent surf delayed the arrival of the British gunboats, but on February 23 Hope sent over a body of his men on a raft of pontoons in the face of the enemy's flotilla, with the aid of a brigade armed with Congreve rockets, which had been first used at Leipzig, and ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... with the waves, but walking soberly and anon halting to scan the beach ahead. Her legs were bare to the knee, and she had hitched up her short skirt high about her like a cockle-gatherer's. In the roar and murmur of the surf she did not hear the Elder approaching, but faced around with a start as ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the passage enlarging a little until two could pass abreast without stooping. Following this a distance of nearly two hundred feet they were astonished to hear the roar of water which sounded like the breaking of surf against rocks. The sound grew louder and louder as they advanced, until its roar filled the cavern with stunning echoes reverberating along its hidden passages. The cavern now became more lofty and wider, the sides more ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... On the Surf Line from San Diego to Los Angeles, a seventy-mile run along the coast, there is so much to see, admire, and think about, that the time passes rapidly without napping or nodding. Take a chair seat on the left of car—the ocean side—and enjoy the panoramic view from the ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... scream of the sea-fowl, and the thunder of the surf, were such common things to the little Darlings that they took but small notice of them. Grace, indeed, having them mingled with her mother's cradle-song, would scarcely like to have missed the familiar sounds, since they had lulled her to ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... vasty gasp came from the audience, as from five hundred bathers in a wholly unexpected surf. This gasp was punctuated irregularly, over the auditorium, by imperfectly subdued screams both of dismay and incredulous joy, and by two dismal shrieks. Altogether it was an extraordinary sound, a sound never to be forgotten by any one who heard it. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... house on the bluff. But would they go on with their bloody work? They would suddenly find themselves leaderless, unguided. Would that suffice to stop them? The vivid memory came to me anew of that arch villain, Sanchez, lying where I had left him, his head resting in the surf—dead. Would the discovery of his body halt his followers, and send them rushing back to their boat, eager only to get safely away? This did not seem likely. Estada knew of my boarding the sloop from the wharf, and would at once connect the fact of my being ashore with the killing of Sanchez. ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... was it yesterday We heard the sweet bells over the bay? In the caverns where we lay, Through the surf and through the swell, The far-off sound of a silver bell? Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, Where the salt weed sways in the stream, Where the sea beasts, ranged all around, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of bluejackets shore leave at New York was liable to find them all Americans when their leave was up. Other nations looked covetously upon our great body of able-bodied seamen, born within sound of the swash of the surf, nurtured in the fisheries, able to build, to rig, or to navigate a ship. They were fighting sailors, too, though serving only in the merchant marine. In those days the men that went down to the sea in ships had to be prepared to fight other antagonists ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... canon, a mountain stream rushes, plunging into the Athabasca, joyfully, like a sea-bather into the surf. Jaquis calls this side-stream "the mill-tail o' hell." Smith the Silent prepares to cross. It's all very simple. All you need is a stout pole, a steady nerve, and an ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... for the table. After seven or eight days we arrived in San Pedro, and found the town to consist of one long adobe house. The beach was low and sandy, and we were wet somewhat in wading through a light surf to get on shore. We had on board a Mr. Baylis, who we afterward learned came down with Capt. Lackey on a big speculation which was to capture all the wild goats they could on Catalina Island, and take them ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... her look. He gave the boat a push which sent it grinding down the pebbles into the sea. The woman began to work at the oars. Every now and then she looked over her shoulder at that thin line of white surf which they were all ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the lights they took, the scents They held, the movement of their shapes and shades); Of how the Border burners in cold dawns Of Summer hurried North up the high vales Past smoking farmsteads that had lit the night And surf of crowding cattle; and of how A laughing prince of cursed, impossible hopes Rode through the little streets Northward to battle And to defeat, to be a fading thought, Belated ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... leader being old Bill, who to some end, that I could not then divine, bore a boat-sail bundled on his back. Our first business was to make way to our surf or life boat. This lay about three miles from the village, reckoning as the crow flies, and was sheltered under a rude house which stood on the shores of a bay opening by an inlet into the sea. Our common way of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... regulars, six hundred militia, and four hundred Canadians and Indians. The harbor was protected by six ships of the line and five frigates, three of the latter being sunk at its mouth. The English ships were six days on the coast before a landing could be attempted, on account of a heavy surf continually rolling with such violence, that no boat could approach the shore. The violence of the surf having somewhat abated, a landing was effected on June 8th. The troops were disposed for landing in three divisions. That on the left, which was destined for the real attack, commanded ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... in exclamations from all around, as Undine sported in the water like a dolphin. "But then," someone added, "she's used to bathing in the surf in Hawaii. No wonder." ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... had no snow-capped mountains in the distance; no amethyst foothills to enchain the eye; no wonderful canyons and splendid rocky passes to make the tourist marvel; no length of yellow sea sands nor plash of ocean surf; no trade, no amusements, no summer visitors;—it was just a quiet, little, sunny, verdant, leafy piece of heart's content, that's what Beulah was, and Julia couldn't spoil it; indeed, the odds were, that it would sweeten Julia! ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... through to touch with silver the white breakers hissing on the sand. It spread its full glory on dunes and sea: one more of the countless soft nights where peace and calm beauty told of an ageless existence that made naught of the red havoc of men or of monsters. It shone on the ceaseless surf that had beaten these shores before there were men, that would thunder there still when men were no more. But to the tense crouching men in the car it shone only ahead on a distant, glittering speck. A wavering reflection marked the uncertain flight ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... devil's split! To mourn in plasmic Temple's fold With gyving sod no King can shirk! A spangled pomp of Death's gray peak Where owls and lizards blink and sit As curdling cries of monsters cold Pierce hollows deep until they irk, Each surf-thrown afrite's eclipsed dome. And cursing clans that felt the heat That dwale obscured in shadows vague, Clash thro' the broken forest boughs Until each ronyon's stuck in loam. There, then, bivouacs a unco Cheat, Whose limbs were struck with pains of ague, Who lifts his sightless eyes and sows ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... in his life, Howard fainted, The pink dawn went black in his eyes, his brain reeled, the booming as of a distant surf filled his ears and then unconsciousness engulfed him. When he, knew anything at all it was that he was sitting up, that two thin brown arms were about his body, that water ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... distanced her; and though Lieutenant Dumaresq showed lights, they were of little or no use in guiding her course. Squall after squall struck the little schooner; and, as she heeled over, it sometimes appeared that she would never again rise, or be able to beat out through the tremendous surf which came rolling in. At length Mr Kingston judged it wise to shorten sail, which he forthwith did, having set only his mainsail, jib, and fore-and-aft foresail, a fore-trysail. He also sent a good hand on the fore-yard to look out for any break which might happily appear in the ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... and encompassed him; and, by continually tormenting him, drove, him insensibly ashore. On grounding, the force with which he struck the ground with his fins is not to be expressed, neither can I describe the agility with which the Indians strove to dispatch him, lest the surf should set him again afloat, which they at length accomplished with the help of a dagger lent them by Mr Randal. They then cut him into pieces, which were distributed among all who stood by. This fish, though of the flat kind, was very thick, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... and weeks he wooed her to bring the smile to her lips, but always she grew whiter and more desolate; so that when she walked the terraces above the boiling surf, she seemed like a white flower torn of its petals and tossed ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... and it turned out to be the life-boat. As soon as it came within speaking distance the people on the shore cried out: "Did you save any of them? Did you save any of them?" And as the boat swept through the boiling surf and came to the pier-head, the captain waved his hand over the exhausted sailors that lay flat on the bottom of the boat, and cried: "All saved! Thank God! All saved!" So may it be to-day. The waves of your sin ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... fiddled tunes older than voodoo; Indian planters coming sullenly in with pale-green bananas; memories of the Spanish Main and Morgan's raid, of pieces of eight and cutlasses ho! Capes of cocoanut palms running into a welter of surf; huts on piles streaked with moss, round whose bases land-crabs scuttle with a dry rattling that carries far in the hot, moist, still air, and suggests the corpses of disappeared men ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... long time they sat in an apple tree and looked at the great lake, and watched the gulls swooping and soaring through the air. Many boats were plowing through the water, and many people were strolling along the beach or swimming in the surf. ...
— Exciting Adventures of Mister Robert Robin • Ben Field
... the party that boarded the tea-ships, he labored with all his might in throwing the tea into the water. It being about low tide, the tea rested on the bottom, and when the tide rose it floated, and was lodged by the surf along the shore. He was subsequently an officer in the Revolutionary army; was present at the surrender of Burgoyne, and himself fell into the hands of the enemy, in February, 1781, sharing in the imprisonment of General Peleg ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... Illy said. "They can't swim." He spat into the water. "So long, Vug. So long, Toscin. Take a pull, at the Hell Horn for me." He started off along the sea wall toward the sound of the surf. ...
— Gambler's World • John Keith Laumer
... kayah has no keel and carries no ballast, and if we should try a kayah, it would certainly be on land. But those Greenlanders learn to handle themselves so well that their kayahs will go dancing over the big billows and then fly through a ragged, dangerous surf. From their kayahs, too, they will fight the ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
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