"Flounder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in his stirrups and with hands trumpeted uttered a yell. The rider jerked his horse to a rear flounder, waved frantically, then split ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... suicidally to educate all the most promising stocks of the nation out of existence. But now what do we owe to her in the matter of providing the right kind of intellectual, moral, spiritual, psychical environment? It is a pity to flounder with so many adjectives, but nearly all the available ones are forsworn and fail to express my meaning. Let us, however, speak of the spiritual environment, seeking to free that word from all its lamentable associations of superstition and cant, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... my readers, to note it in the very commencement, and to learn, like the thoughtful students of painting, to put aside any half-childish over-estimate of the absurdity of a blue stroke transfixing a huge flounder-like fish as a likeness of a sea, (which you have been accustomed to see translucid, in breakers and foam, in modern marine pictures,) or your quick sense of the ugliness of straight figures with long hands, wooden feet, and clinging draperies, while your eyes have been familiar ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... gave him the crumpled letter, but he plunged into a torrent of stuttered words while he held out his hand for the letter. His Excellency carefully smoothed out the paper, read it, looked at Jean-Christophe, let him flounder about with his explanations, then checked him, and said with a malicious light in ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... reared, backed away into the ditch, collapsed there on his quarters, and recovered himself with the grunt and flounder of a ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... over with a rush as he neared the bank, for suddenly from a reed-bed above them there was a wallow and a flounder, with a tremendous disturbance in the water, as something shot ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... he assured his hostess. But this did not satisfy Miss Warren, who, with apparent innocence, questioned the two men until Papa La Branche began to bog and flounder in his explanations. Fortunately for the men, she was diverted for the moment by discovering that the table ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... who willingly pay high prices for the scanty supply of these delicious fish which they are able to obtain. Of other succulent fish there was a great variety, from the majestic "grouper," running up to over a hundredweight, down to the familiar flounder. Very little fishing could be done at night. Just as day was dawning was the ideal time for this enticing sport. As soon as the first few streaks of delicate light enlivened the dull horizon, a stray nibble or two gladdened the patient fishermen; then as the light strengthened the fun became ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... in an agony, yelled to White to hurry his shapeless stumps. Moles, with a last tremendous stretch, touched the rope, and Johnson plunged splendidly to his work. I took up my position on the mat and helped White to flounder out. ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... he cried, going with an immense flounder into the midst of the amused trappers, and slapping those next to him on the back. "Give me veapon, do, mes amis—gun, pistol, anyting—cannon, ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the wather, after the fish and the sayweed, if he was to get his livin' at all. And disthracted she was seem' him goin' out in their ould boat, that's laiks enough in her to sink the biggest ship ever set sail, and herself wid scarce the width to hould a sizable flounder. Sez I to Felix one wild evenin', when we was argufyin' wid him, that sure the little loadin' he could be puttin' in her 'ud never be worth losin' his life for. But sez he to me, the bit of food they'd put in their mouths was littler agin, and yet they might be losin' ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... little silhouette against the darkening sky, her hands clasped in amazement. Suddenly she turned and came tearing down the hill, floundering through sand, falling and picking herself up, only to flounder and fall again, finally rolling down the last few ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... twilight. I find a greater comfort in uncertain hope and a more uncertain faith. If I ever really and truly believed in spiritualism and then found, as so many people have done, alas! that the prophet of it was himself a fraud, I should be cut, as it were, from all my spiritual bearings, to flounder hopeless and broken-hearted mid the desolate wastes of agnosticism. I cannot give myself unless I am convinced that the sacrifice is for something which I must believe in spite of all doubt; not entirely what I want ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... But the use is at an end, and the stage is over. Ask yourselves if you do not sometimes feel in yourselves a sense, that in spite of the strenuous efforts for good of so many excellent persons amongst us, we begin somehow to flounder and to beat the air; that we seem to be finding ourselves stopped on this line of advance and on that, and to be threatened with a sort of standstill. It is that we are trying to live on with a social ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... has been struck with the curious adaptation of nearly all animals to their habitat, for example in the matter of color. The sandy hue of the sole and flounder, the white of the polar bear with its suggestion of Arctic snows, the stripes of the Bengal tiger—as if the actual reeds of its native jungle had nature-printed themselves on its hide;—these, and a hundred others which will occur to every one, are marked ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... of the paternal ire. "Stewart, I asked you to be candid with me. You're leaving me to flounder ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... as people say, of the story? What's a situation undeveloped but a subject lost? If a relation stops, where's the story? If it doesn't stop, where's the innocence? It seems to me you must choose. It would be very pretty if it were otherwise, but that's how we flounder. Art is ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... life, she learned what it was to seek to force a way through deep, loose-drifted snow. Feather-light in its individual flakes, in mass it made haste impossible; to push on six inches through it was labour; to come a dozen paces to Gratton was hard work. She floundered as she had seen him flounder; she threw herself forward as he had done, and, sinking with every effort, at last reached ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... sorry for the flounder. He looks as if he might have once been a fish of respectable, perhaps even beautiful shape and proportions, that had met with an accident. He is a shore frequenter, especially when young, and I cannot help thinking ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... so plaguy rough," continued the Clockmaker, "that he'd been the better, if it had been hammered and mauled down smoother. I'd a levelled him as flat as a flounder." ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... "Because their masters, sometimes, daub on colors with their full palettes and strong brushes, this feeble herd tag after them and flounder around in color and passion in a way that ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... more, that the baptism of civilization has not been equally efficacious for all? Does this not show that progress itself is a privilege, and that the man who has neither wagon nor horse is forced to flounder about for ever in the mud? What do I say? The totally destitute man has no desire to improve: he has fallen so low that ambition even is ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... they consume also considerable quantities of other supplies, especially flour, rice, sugar, coffee, crackers, &c., purchased from the traders. Of fish, halibut and salmon, dried and smoked, are mainly depended on, though many other varieties are eaten in their season—herring, flounder, trout, rock cod, true cod, clams, mussels, &c. Pollock, called by the Hydas skill, are caught off the west coast, principally for their oil, which is extracted by boiling them in large wooden tanks by means of heated stones. Dried herring spawn, salmon roe, sea and ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... pair of clean white cotton stockings, in this heavenly mood, under the green trees, and beside the still waters, out of which beautiful salmon trouts were sporting and leaping, methought in a moment I fell down in a trance, as flat as a flounder, and I heard a voice visibly saying to me, "Thou shalt have a son; let him be christened Benjamin!" The joy that this vision brought my spirit thrilled through my bones, like the sounds of a blind man grinding "Rule Britannia" out of an organ, and my senses vanished from me into a kind ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... the deputy to flounder for a moment in attempting to explain that he had misquoted his own sentiments, and then he went on with ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... bays and the Atlantic Ocean bordering the Virginia coast teemed with many kinds of fish and shellfish which were both edible and palatable. Varieties which the colonists soon learned to eat included sheepshead, shad, sturgeon, herring, sole, white salmon, bass, flounder, pike, bream, perch, rock, and drum, as well as oysters, crabs, and mussels. Seafood was an important source of food for the colonists, and at times, especially during the early years of the settlement, it was the ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... the line, I drew up with great eagerness and vigor. It was two of those broad-leaved sea-weeds, with stems like snakes, both rooted on a stone,—all which came up together. Often these sea-weeds root themselves on muscles. In the morning, our pilot killed a flounder with the boat-hook, the poor fish thinking himself secure ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... messenger. But the trail grew more and more indistinct as it neared the summit, until at last it utterly vanished. Still he kept up his speed toward the active little figure—which now seemed to be that of a mere boy—skimming over the frozen snow. Twice a stumble and flounder of the mustang through the broken crust ought to have warned him of his recklessness, but now a distinct glimpse of a low, blackened shanty, the prospector's ruined hut, toward which the messenger was making, made him forget all else. The distance was lessening ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... on shooting, fishing, and the gymkhana. Or, if you wish to divert it, you must ask him definite questions about matters of fact. Probably you will get precise and intelligent replies. But if you put a general question he will flounder resentfully; and if you generalise yourself you will see him dismissing you as a windbag. Of the religion, the politics, the manners and customs of the country in which he lives he will know and care nothing, except so far as ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... no light but the foggy stars, they missed the stakes and her horse had to swim, but they managed to flounder safely back to the ford each time; and after a little while her mount rose, straining through the red mud of the shore, struggled, scrambled madly, ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... some excellent ideas in home living and housebuilding. Their houses were, generally speaking, very sensibly contrived,—roomy, airy, and comfortable; but in their water arrangements they had little mercy on womankind. The well was out in the yard; and in winter one must flounder through snow and bring up the ice-bound bucket, before one could fill the tea-kettle for breakfast. For a sovereign princess of the republic, this was hardly respectful or respectable. Wells have come somewhat ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... smothered before they could recover their feet; and then a pretty pickle they were in, wet to the skin, and covered with mud from one end to the other; they could not see out of their eyes. Peggy did nothing but scream and flounder—she was frightened out of her wits—while the carman and I laughed ready to split. I gave him half a crown to drive on shore without them, which he did, and we left them to make their way out how they could; and ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... always with results in agreement with the strict Mendelian doctrine, so that I am not venturing to criticise without experience. I have not hesitated to reprint the figure, published many years ago, of a Flounder showing the production of pigment under the influence of light, because I thought it was desirable that the reader should have before him this figure and those of an example of mutation in the Turbot for comparison when following the argument ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... "a flounder is a queer sort of a flat fish. He's dark on top and white on the bottom. He swims on his side and has his two eyes on the one side of his head unlike any other fish. When the tide comes in he comes close inshore and burrows down into the sand to wait ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... a bit afraid it meant that I'd walked in myself, and hadn't heeded His warnings. Sometimes, I think, when folks do that, He leaves them to flounder awhile ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... sister Ellen," said Tom, "and that it is our duty to help in the entertainment of the company; but, for my part, I throw myself upon your mercy. I wouldn't, for the world, hint that we are more solid than the girls, but 'tis very certain that we are more lumbering. If I were to begin a tale, I'd flounder through it, like a whale with a harpoon in its body; while any of the girls, even down to little Anna, would glide along, like a graceful, snow-white swan upon a silver lake—happy in her element, and giving pleasure to all who witnessed her ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... wide Atlantic Avenue, the old footpath under Fort Hill, known as Flounder Lane, and afterwards as Broad Street, wound around the margin of the water. Sea Street was its continuation to Wheeler's Point (the foot of Summer Street). Opposite where Hutchinson (now Pearl) Street entered Flounder Lane, was Griffin's ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... superstition. It is not true that boys can only learn to write their own language correctly by means of Latin prose. Nor is it true that Latin prose supplies the ideal mental discipline. That is only true for the minority of boys who reach the stage at which real Latin prose is written. Most flounder about all their time in the stage of artificial Latin prose, wherein is nothing more than the meticulous application of a set of laboriously acquired grammatical rules—a tolerable training in conscientious application, such as any subject can supply, ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... 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
... the parents that he would make a third attempt to secure the child, whereupon they applied in their despair to Loki, who carried the boy out to sea, and concealed him, as a tiny egg, in the roe of a flounder. Returning from his expedition, Loki encountered the giant near the shore, and seeing that he was bent upon a fishing excursion, he insisted upon accompanying him. He felt somewhat uneasy lest the terrible giant should have seen through his device, and therefore thought it ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... toward evening, almost the hour of sundown, before Chick and Ten-Ichi were carried to the quicksand pit; and then a procession followed them. The hands and feet of the prisoners were not bound, for it was desired that they should flounder in the quicksand in order to hasten its work; and without ceremony they were hurled into the midst of it, one, and then ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... informal conversation parties, so popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which must have been very delightful. Tom Hood was among the guests on many occasions. Before being Brompton Grove, this part of the district had been known as Flounder's Field, but ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... shouts, and, to the surprise of all, the disabled horse began to flounder once more; and as they all lifted at his pack and pushed him forward he gave a series of plunges and finally ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... bream, the flounder, the sole, the cuttlefish, and all the chief vassals of the Dragon King of the Sea now came out with courtly ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... have been about two o'clock in the morning that I was suddenly conscious of a feeling of suffocation. I tried to call out, but there was something which prevented me from uttering a sound. I struggled to rise, but I could only flounder like a hamstrung horse. I was strapped at the ankles, strapped at the knees, and strapped again at the wrists. Only my eyes were free to move, and there at the foot of my couch, by the light of a Portuguese lamp, whom should I see but the Abbot ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... easy and alluring path to disgrace and ruin. But that is only an incident in the wider meaning of Flaubert's fiction, a meaning more amply expressed in Salammbo, where not one foolish woman alone but thousands on thousands of men, women, and children, mingled with charging elephants and vipers, flounder and fight in indescribable welters of blood and filth, and go down to rot in a common pit. If I read Flaubert's meaning right, all human history is there; you may show it by painting on broad canvas ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... it out so funnily that it sounded just like some queer old flounder trying to talk, and we thought he was joking. But he wasn't at all. Sometimes he is very nice and tells us the longest yarns about when he shipped on a whaler, but this time he was busy and the rudder-gudgeons didn't behave right, I think, so he let us do all the talking. We told him a ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... two boys pitched in. There was no lack of ammunition aboard the Seamew, and there seemed to be no lack of porpoises anxious to serve as moving targets. And, indeed, Mart soon found that he need spend no worry over leaving wounded fish to flounder out ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... to Flounder sadly in the mud-banks of this fishery question, still there is some hope that coercive measures may yet be taken for restraining the Dominion fishermen from having every thing on their own hook. Rumor has it that the monitor Miantonomah, Captain SCHUFELDT, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... about 8 o'clock. Men go to bed betimes who know that a bugle will sound the reveille at 5.30 in the morning. The end of the entertainment is planned to allow time for a final cup of tea or a glass of Horlick's Malted Milk before we go out to flounder through ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... all sorts of bathers. The little timid waders could dip their toes and splash their hair in the shallow basin in-shore. The more advanced could wade out shoulder-deep, and puff and flounder with one foot on the ground and the other up above their heads, and delude the world into the notion they were swimming. For others there was the spring-board, from which to take a header into deep water; and, further out still, the rocks rose in ledges, where practised divers could take ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... applications of comparative anatomy to natural history." The slower motions of the owl prove to the natural historian that it consumes less oxygen than the eagle. By the same physiological principle he can tell that the herring is the most active among fish, and the flounder the slowest, by merely seeing the gills of each: those of the herring being very large, prove that it consumes much oxygen and is very active; while the flounder, with its small gills, consumes but little, and is very slow ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... will look at the sketch of the brains of the codfish, flounder, and roach, as figured by Spurzheim, he will see in each a very small cerebrum, a larger cerebellum, and still larger middle brain or optic lobes. This is the model on which the human brain is first developed, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... DAB. The sea-flounder. An old general term for a pleuronect or flat fish of any kind, but usually appropriated to the Platessa limanda. The word is familiarly applied to one who ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... made up their minds to press this one a little, this one rather than the King, and hang upon his skirts; Daun and Prince Karl set out after him, just about the time of his arrival,—"70,000 strong," the Prince hears; including plenty of Pandours. Certain it is, the poor Prince's mind did flounder a good deal; and his procedures succeeded extremely ill on this occasion. Certain, too, that they were extremely ill-taken at head-quarters: and that he even died soon after,—chiefly of broken heart, said the censorious world. It is well known how Europe rang with the matter for a ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... power—the secret of so much success in this world—of thrusting forth a sure and steady hand to grasp the heart of a question and tear it from the tangle of side-issues among which the majority of men and women are condemned to flounder. ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... developed for what I might call the ultra-domestic school of fiction. Here is another example, Married Life (CASSELL), in which Miss MAY EDGINTON, following the mode, unites her hero and heroine at the beginning and leaves them to flounder for our edification amid the trials of double blessedness. I am sorry to say it, but her great solution for the eternal problem of How to be Happy though Married appears to be the possession of a sufficient bank-balance to prevent the chain from galling. In other words, not to be too much married. ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... of the little door in the back street, and the stone stairs that led to the whitewashed passage; and then she gave, as near as she knew, a full account of all that had taken place. Only when she came to describe Bim and to tell of what he said, did she flounder. Bim had spoken in a foreign language, and the translation of Yakoff had conveyed very little to her. But in this part of the narrative the old man was less interested. Again and again he returned to Boolba and ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... the rein, and after a flounder or two the pony started the load and struggled up the ascent. Leaving the woman at the top, voluble with thanks, Vane came down and sauntered on again ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... was full of water. To traverse this desert one must wade and flounder through liquid mud waist deep and sometimes deeper. Yet it had to be done. We had nine positions up there at each of which a handful of men must be relieved daily; or rather nightly, as it was, obviously, impossible to move about ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... asks you a series of questions demanding close reasoning. As he pins you down to statement of facts and forces you to draw valid conclusions, you feel in a most perplexed frame of mind. Either you find yourself unable to give reasons, or you entangle yourself in contradictions. In short, you flounder about helplessly and feel as though the bottom of your ship of knowledge has dropped out. And when the ordeal is over and you have made a miserable botch of a recitation which you thought you had been perfectly prepared for, you complain that "if the instructor had followed the ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... so bandied. Now I think on it, 'twere possible his legs were cushioned thus to hide a senile thinness! 'Tis human nature when badgered by excess of limit to flounder into limitless excess. Look upon the Burgomaster at thy feet with a surfeit of good round legs, he is unfortunate for being in excess, he cannot whittle down. 'Tis a queer being with whom he dances,—here comes a queen, see, she stops beneath ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... I rode rapidly over the savannahs, where the swallows were skimming over the top of the long grass to frighten up the insects which rested there. After another flounder across the San Jose plains, I reached San Ubaldo without incident, excepting a tumble with my mule in the mud. Much of the land between Pital and the lake is well fitted for the cultivation of maize, sugar, and plantains, and ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... gowns and laces, so much that is daintily pretty, appropriate for her. He can hardly refrain from buying her trinkets and nonsense, but he will not have her subjected to hostile criticisms, and he is not sure his judgment is to be trusted. He would doubtless flounder ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Wherefore, Madame Sand, try and be so preternaturally wise? Wherefore be so eager to jump out of one religion, for the purpose of jumping into another? See what good this philosophical friskiness has done you, and on what sort of ground you are come at last. You are so wonderfully sagacious, that you flounder in mud at every step; so amazingly clear-sighted, that your eyes cannot see an inch before you, having put out, with that extinguishing genius of yours, every one of the lights that are sufficient for the conduct of common men. And for what? Let our friend Spiridion speak for himself. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... into the bog and had done fairly well at first, but when he neared us he too sank to his belly and could only flounder about. We were in this predicament when Du-seen and his followers approached the edge of the horrible swamp. I saw that Al-tan was with him and many other Kro-lu warriors. The alliance against Jor the chief ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... would not care where the millions go; but since things are as they are, it is heartbreaking to see the cause of wild-life protection actually starving, or at the best subsisting only on financial husks and crumbs, while less important causes literally flounder in ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... recognise now, because they have so inadequately re-expressed it. We shall see that their system has no motive power at all in it, or that its motive power is simply the theistic faith they rejected, now tied up in a sack and left to flounder instead of walking upright. We shall see that their system is either nothing, or that it is a mutilated reproduction of the very thing it professes to be superseding. Once set it upon its own professed foundations, and the entire quasi-religious structure, ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... flounder, panting so that the swift rise and fall of her breast was an outward token of inward emotion. Steve Packard stared and flushed hotly and began to feel his own ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... according to a quaint authority, "an onocratylus, or pelican, a fowl between a stork and a swan—a melancholy water-fowl brought from Astracan by the Russian ambassador." This writer tells us, "It was diverting to see how the pelican would toss up and turn a flat fish, plaice or flounder, to get it right into its gullet at its lower beak, which being filmy stretches to a prodigious wideness when it devours a great fish. Here was also a small water-fowl, not bigger than a more-hen, that went almost quite erect like ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... flounder—but you leave him to ask what you want, ma'am; don't mention this [He puts the deed back into his pocket]. The Centry's no mortal good to him if he's not going to put up works; I should say he'd be glad to save ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ran madly for shelter. Luckily he had the advantage of Grumpy in one way. He had a bare ledge to run on, while Grumpy Weasel had to flounder for some distance through ...
— The Tale of Grumpy Weasel - Sleepy-Time Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... followed, The gasping cod swallow'd— 'Twas wonderful, really; And turbot and flounder, 'Mid fish that were rounder, Just caper'd ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... went on it came well over our knees, and every now and then up the tops of our thighs so there was too little holding ground for us or snipe. We walked in line, laboriously, halting every now and then to wait for one or the other to flounder out of a deep place; and when the sun got up the glare from the water made me think of sunstroke; however, we persevered and managed to get fourteen couple before lunch time, and I found my American five-shooter the ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... them rapidly. Your thoughts and feelings regarding a topic may be anything but clear, but you must not pause to clarify them. The words best suited to the matter may not be instantly available, but you must not tarry for accessions of language. Stumble, flounder if you must, yea, rearrange your ideas even as you present them, but press resolutely ahead, comforting yourself with the assurance that in the heat and stress of circumstances a man rarely does his work ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... possibly have succeeded and have caused him to be numbered with the benefactors of Europe,—he dallied with the thought until it was too late, fell into the pit which he had digged for himself, and, in trying to flounder out, met his death at the hands of an assassin who had a grudge against him. Thus even his death was pitiful rather than tragic. It does not appear to be the work of that high Nemesis which Schiller noticed as dominating the career ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... princes of high renown. A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gurnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty trees wave in different directions their firstclass foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... probably guessed his object; for the marines on her poop fired a close volley at him, and a scream of rage and despair from his messmates arose, when they beheld him wildly throw up his left arm in unmistakable agony, and flounder in what appeared his death-flurry. Then his body rose perpendicularly, till his shoulders were a foot or more clear above the water, and he slowly fell backward, with his head pointing to the Danish battery. Contrary to expectation, he did not sink, however, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... a colony always sails under the lee of its mother. Talk does it all, friend Harris. Talk, talk, talk; a man can talk himself into a fever, or set a ship's company by the ears. He can talk a cherry into a peach, or a flounder into a whale. Now here is the whole of this long coast of America, and all her rivers, and lakes, and brooks, swarming with such treasures as any man might fatten on, and yet his Majesty's servants, who come among us, talk ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... show," continued Slim, doing his best to appear at ease. The frantic corrections of his companions only made him flounder about the more. ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... looked on, and thought it great fun. Sometimes a big flat fish, called a flounder, would slip from one of the baskets, in which the men were putting them, and flop out on ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Aunt Lu's City Home • Laura Lee Hope
... fearsomely rattled the door, and shaken the cabin, and swept howling on. But she never in the world would have attended. Not in that emergency! She would not, for anything, have peeped out of the windows, in perfectly proper curiosity, to watch the Bottle River jacks flounder into town. Not she! Pattie Batch was busy. Pattie Batch was so desperately employed that her swift little fingers demanded all the attention that the most alert, the brightest, the very most bewitching gray eyes in the whole wide world could bestow upon ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... had taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he tried not to flounder in her grasp. "I don't think there's anything I've done in any such calculated way as you describe. Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having come before you, and ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... clerk, and reads the lessons when his superior's throat is hoarse with raving. He has a clear and powerful voice, which often serves him in good stead. The congregation has a knack of getting out of time and tune when the melody is unfamiliar; this, in turn, distracts the choir, who flounder hopelessly, until the schoolmaster drags them back by putting full steam on the harmonium and singing at the top of his voice. Every Sunday afternoon, at least, he was obliged to display his vocal prowess in this manner. After every one of the commandments read out ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... black mass of overhanging vapour, and so had let loose upon us the waters of a lake. In a moment the whole pit of the amphitheatre was awash, knee-deep, and before those who were standing there could flounder to the steps leading upward they were buried to their waists—and this although the water was pouring out through the vent provided for it with such violence that we could hear the rush and gurgle of it above the dashing and roaring of the falling ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... a dream of a little fish, however, called a sand dab—he is a tiny, flounder-shaped titbit hailing from deep water; and for eating purposes he is probably the best fish that swims—better even than the pompano of the Gulf—and when you say that you are saying about all there is to be said for a fish. And the ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... such As find our common nature—overmuch Despised because restricted and unfit To bear the burthen they impose on it— Cling when they would discard it; craving strength To leap from the allotted world, at length They do leap,—flounder on without a term, Each a god's germ, doomed to remain a germ In unexpanded infancy, unless...." (pp. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... by the score for the cure of such difficulties in love. But Maria was no reader of novels. Out of a strict Calvinistic family she and her brother had leaped into heterodoxy—William to pause neatly poised on the line where Conventionalism ended; Maria to flounder in an unsounded quagmire, which she believed the well of Truth. Five years ago she would have felt her chance of salvation in danger if she had spoken to a woman who persisted in loving a married man. But five years work strange changes in the creeds ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... distance, the plains appeared better grassed than they really were. At length, we got on a polygonum flat of great size, in the soil of which our horses absolutely sunk up to the shoulder at every step. I never rode over such a piece of ground in my life, but we managed to flounder through it, until at length we got on the somewhat firmer but still heavy plain. It was very clear, however, that our horses would not go a day's journey over such ground. It looked exactly as I have described it—an immense concavity, ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... the old aristocracy, and if they are foolish, become the most unfortunate pretenders to fashion. They are too near to be pleasant; and the gulf which people of hereditary fashion place between is impassable, even though they flounder up to their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... not advocate the elimination of regional considerations, but it has become apparent that without centralized executive action the management of this great business, like the management of any other great business, will flounder in incapacity and languish under a division of council. A plain and unmistakable reassertion of this principle of unified control, which I have always been advised was the intention of the Congress to apply, is necessary to increase the efficiency ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... quarters, however, they found that the seals were much more formidable to look at than anything that any of them had ever seen in the Arctic Seas; and when Joe brought his club down on the skull of the foremost with a terrible thwack, it refused to tumble over, but continued to splutter and flounder towards the sea. Dr Hayward, however, used his spear at this moment with such effect that the seal fell, and another blow from the Herculean club finished ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... curiosities was a sea-cow, who lived in a tank of salt water, and came at the keeper's call to kiss him, and flounder on its flippers along the margin of the tank after a fish. It was very like a seal, only much larger, and had four fins instead of two. Its eyes were lovely, so dark and soft and liquid; but its mouth was not pretty, and I declined one of the damp kisses ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... like; or to pass by something at which the truly initiated mind would arrest itself. She had no wish to fall into that grotesqueness—in which she had seen women (and it was a warning) serenely, yet ignobly, flounder. She was very careful therefore as to what she said, as to what she noticed or failed to notice; more careful than ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... trout, black bass, cod steaks, flounder fillet, perch, pickerel, pompano, smelts, whitefish steak, ...
— Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918) • C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss
... though boats and sea-men flounder, and the strait grind sand with sand and cut boulders to sand ...
— Sea Garden • Hilda Doolittle
... hurry over our little incidents: how the wagon couldn't go on by way of the shore, and had to flounder back over the rocks, and crawl out of the canon to the upper road; how Kitty and I set out vain-gloriously to walk to Broadlands by the river-trail, and Harshaw set out to walk with us; and how Kitty made it difficult for him to walk with both of us by staving on ahead, ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... some of the maimed wretches recognized Suarez, notwithstanding his changed appearance, the instant he spoke to them. At once they broke out into an excited chattering, and Suarez was so disconcerted by the tidings they conveyed that he stammered a good deal, and seemed to flounder ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... with a suffering brother!" remarked Bob, and seated himself, with a few words in Gaelic which drew a hearty laugh from the men about him, on a heap of turf to watch the unyielding flounder in the peat-hole, where there was no room to swim. He had begun to think the man would drown in his contumacy, when his ears welcomed the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... I want the pleasure of seeing how you look as you flounder through the rapids; and then, again, I may pick up a few points as to how ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... then and reach some sort of a conclusion. Out in the hills is the place where you can talk something besides business. I guess you've seen enough of me to know I'm pretty square. I—I do honor and respect you, and ... and all that, and I..." He was beginning to flounder, and the hand that rested on the desk blotter was visibly trembling. He strove to pull himself together. "I just want to harder than anything ever in my life before. I—I—I can't explain myself, but I do, that's all. Will you?—Just ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... into the darkness of the future, the impatience of an ungiven love to find its goal, the nobility of all her thoughts of life, the decision of her mind to suffer in a sphere of higher things rather than flounder in the marshes of provincial life like her mother, the pledge she had made to herself never to fail in conduct, but to respect her father's hearth and bring it happiness,—all this world of feeling ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... general. Without Woman, sir, what, or where, should we be? Until we attain a knowledge of—a—Woman, through the medium of the—a—Passion (I speak of it with reverence!), what, or where are we? We journey over arid plains, we flounder in treacherous quagmires. Suddenly looms before us, clear against the sky, as here represented, the Peak in Darien—Woman! Guided by the—a—Passion (I speak of its lofty phases, sir, its lofty phases!), we scale those crystal heights. It may be in fancy ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... learn from the same writer how both eyes of the flounder get, quite unintentionally, on the same side of the head. The writer makes much of this case (see p. 306), and we are not disposed to ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... allowing his voice to express his impious mood, "if we keep on monkeying out here! If we've got to flounder out here ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... and temperate, and upright, and unimpeached. For perhaps the most hopeless people, morally speaking, are those people who, according to their own confession, "have never done any harm." There is a good prospect for those who are trying to grow better, however they may slip and flounder. There is hope, on the other hand, for the desperately wicked—for the very violence of one extreme precipitates the other; and sometimes the best and purest souls have been swept by a thunder-shower of sin. But those who rest upon the ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... bog! But the water is not conquered after all! I have known houses burst asunder from the foundations giving way. I have seen a palace separated from the very steps that led up to its door. And in spring, when the snow melts which has been collecting for months, the horses can scarcely flounder along through the rivers of mud in ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... It was a wild flounder over the sodden ground, three hundred yards of it, with shell-holes where the rain took you up to your armpits, but the Reedshires had tasted the glories of conquest, and there was no holding them back, if, indeed, anyone ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... in a state of torpor till the rising of the stream after the rains enables it to resume its active habits. At this period the natives of the Gambia, like those of Ceylon, resort to the river, and secure the fish in considerable numbers as they flounder in the still shallow water. A parallel instance occurs, in Abyssinia in relation to the fish of the Mareb, one of the sources of the Nile, the waters of which are partially absorbed in traversing the plains of Taka. During the summer its bed is dry, and in the slime at the depth of more ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... this the sled-trail ran, a narrow ribbon of packed footing barely two feet in width. On either side one sank to his knees and deeper in the snow. The stampeders they overtook were reluctant to give way, and often Smoke and Shorty had to plunge into the deep snow and by supreme efforts flounder past. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... as the shark began to flounder about, I noticed that the pilot- fish went away, leaving him alone in his extremity; and on my mentioning this to Mr Marline he took the opportunity of pointing a ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... that can't make up his mind whether to follow or no. For 'twas near day now, an' his face plain at that distance. Fearin' he'd come on again, I pulled hot foot the few steps between me an' home. But when I came to the door, I went cold as a flounder. ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... intention, but he moved a pace forward, and Courthorne touched the horse with his heel. It backed, and then, growing afraid of the blackness about it, plunged, while Winston for the first time saw that there was a gap in the loosely-laid planking close behind it. Another plunge or flounder, and horse and ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... power, And the vessel is completed. Thereupon the ship he launches, Sings the vessel to the ocean, And these words the hero utters: "Like a bubble swim these waters, Like a flower ride the billows; Loan me of thy magic feathers, Three, O eagle, four, O raven, For protection to my vessel, Lest it flounder in the ocean!" Now the sailor, Lemminkainen, Seats himself upon the bottom Of the vessel he has builded, Hastens on his journey homeward, Head depressed and evil-humored, Cap awry upon his forehead, Mind dejected, heavy-hearted, That he could not dwell forever In the castles of ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... fact that the world is full of books of the highest value for cultivation, entertainment, and information, which the utmost leisure we can spare from other pressing avocations does not suffice to give us knowledge of, it does seem to be little less than a moral and intellectual sin to flounder about blindly in the flood of new publications. I am speaking, of course, of the general mass of readers, and not of the specialists who must follow their subjects with ceaseless inquisition. But for most of us who belong to the still comparatively ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... with it," said Frank, "and very good-natured he was to take the monster off my hands,—it had already hugged two soldiers and one groom into the shape of a flounder. I tell you what," resumed Frank, after a short pause, "I have a great mind even now to tell my father honestly ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a third reason that influenced the young navigators in deciding to take the longer course across the Atlantic. This concerned the fogs such as can always be met with off the Newfoundland Banks, and which are often so dense that vessels flounder through them for ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... noisy, and enjoyed to the full the clamours of advertisement, but it was not favourable. The critics laughed it to scorn, and called it a farce and a failure. The Quarterly Review, in the course of a savage diatribe, declared that it was "as dull as ditch-water and as flat as a flounder," and in a graver mood reproved it as a mere "bid for the bigoted voices of Exeter Hall." Some of the criticisms were not wanting in acumen. It was perceived at once that, as Theodora Campion is the heroine of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... by ploughmen's flails as were the pitifully disjointed members of their mangled bodies under the merciless baton of the cross. If any offered to hide himself amongst the thickest of the vines, he laid him squat as a flounder, bruised the ridge of his back, and dashed his reins like a dog. If any thought by flight to escape, he made his head to fly in pieces by the lamboidal commissure, which is a seam in the hinder part of the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... other like incapacity, behind him, as a director of the Poor-Law Board, or inspector-general of gaols, or deputy-assistant-secretary anywhere, and we assent freely to the change that sends this man to the East and leaves us here to flounder on with such aids to our mistakes as a Liberal Government can ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... me hold her in my arms and kiss her," he mused. "When I do that the third time it must be when there will be no remorse to hound me afterward." He looked down the winding Walnut toward the whirlpool. "I'd rather swim that water than flounder here." ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... the boat, and with some difficulty, for the satin train got between her feet, she managed to flounder into the punt. ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... the duck-boards in wet weather. Seeing that the enemy may have fixed rifles trained on you at any bend of the trench, it is unwise to carry a light; and in a dark night and an unaccustomed trench you are almost sure to flounder. ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... appeared and disappeared to leeward; or listened to Job's long tales of adventure up and down the high seas; or fished with hand-lines over the taffrail, happy if they pulled up even a goggle-eyed flounder. Twice they ran into fog, and on those days, when the wet dripped dismally off the shrouds and the watch on deck sang mournful airs in the gray gloom, the two lads settled into big chairs in the cabin, beneath a ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... Van Braam, and furnished him with money for expenses; then disencumbering himself of all superfluous clothing, buckling himself up in a watch-coat, strapping his pack on his shoulders, containing his papers and provisions, and taking gun in hand, he left the horses to flounder on, and struck manfully ahead, accompanied only by Mr. Gist, who had equipped himself in ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... gentlemen and thrice-honored ladies, flounder about in a tangled net of prejudice, of intrigue. We are blinded by conventions, we are crushed by misunderstanding, we are distracted by violence, we are deceived by hypocrisy, until only too often villains receive the rewards of nobility ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... fishes. In Sydney, to Synaptura nigra, Macl.; in Melbourne, to Rhombosolea bassensis, Castln.; in New Zealand, to Rhombosolea monopus, Gunth., and Peltorhamphus novae-zelandiae, Gunth.; in Tasmania, to Ammotretis rostratus, Gunth., family Pleuronectidae. Rhombosolea monopus is called the Flounder, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... for Betty, and the stout boy thought he could do the same. Two or three heavy jumps landed him, not among the bulrushes as he had hoped, but in a pool of muddy water where he sank up to his middle with alarming rapidity. Much scared, he tried to wade out, but could only flounder to a tussock of grass and cling there while he endeavored to kick his legs free. He got them out, but struggled in vain to coil them up or to hoist his heavy body upon the very small island in this sea of mud. Down they splashed again, and Sam gave a dismal ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... convenient benches around the academy stadium we see at once that the track is far from being a hard, well-rolled "cinder path"; on the contrary, it is of soft sand into which the naked foot sinks if planted too firmly, and upon it the most adept "hard-track" runner would at first pant and flounder helplessly. The Greeks have several kinds of foot races, but none that are very short. The shortest is the simple "stadium" (600 feet), a straight hard dash down one side of the long oval; then there is the ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... to induce his mount to do the same thing; but to make it absolutely certain that no unwise flounder on the part of Domino might betray them, he sat upon the horse's head, soothing him by little pats on his ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... us smack smooth fore and aft, When we dash'd on the rock, and we flounder'd on shore, As we sighed for the loss of our beautiful craft, Convinced that the like we should never see more, Says I, "My good fellows," as huddled together, They shiver'd and shook, each phiz black with sorrow, "Remember, it's not to be always foul weather, So with ill-luck ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat |
