Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Shoal   Listen
noun
Shoal  n.  A great multitude assembled; a crowd; a throng; said especially of fish; as, a shoal of bass. "Great shoals of people." "Beneath, a shoal of silver fishes glides."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Shoal" Quotes from Famous Books



... said Lady Godiva, as the feathers fluttered down into the boat and rested on the dead boy's pall. "War among man and beast, war on earth, war in air, war in the water beneath," as a great pike rolled at his bait, sending a shoal of white fish flying along the surface. "And war, says holy writ, in heaven above. O Thou who didst die to destroy death, when will ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... he, still grinning, as was also Adams. "Sure, it's ownly y'r say chris'nin', though it's pricious little av the say there is, be the same token, in this dirthy shoal ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... relative proportions of land and water. The whole surface of the globe is supposed to have an area of about two hundred million square miles. Of these only about fifty millions are dry land. Within the harbor of Nassau the divisions of shoal and deep water presented most singular and clearly defined lines of color, azure, purple, and orange-leaf green,—so marked as to be visible half a mile away. All was beneath a sky so deeply and serenely blue as constantly to recall the ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... caverns the black gaping mouths of cannon. The shore outlines rose about five hundred feet on each side and great batteries and the white tents of some of Kitchener's army were to be seen almost everywhere. There was certainly no doubt about England being at war. As we drew near the breakwater a shoal of paddle wheel tugs rushed out to welcome us with their sirens blowing to pilot us safely into the most noted harbour in the world. From this port sailed such great captains as Drake, Hawkins and Cooke, who first circumnavigated the globe. ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie

... could enquire as to the personal appearance and habits of the latter, a shoal of silver arrow heads passed the boat and flittered into the water with ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... one of the polite towns, went into the country, and preached against the unchristian custom of young men and maidens lying together on a bed. He was no sooner out of the church, then attacked by a shoal of good old women, with, 'Sir, do you think we and our daughters are naughty, because we allow bundling?' 'You lead yourselves into temptation by it.' They all replied at once, 'Sir, have you been told thus, or has experience taught it ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles

... bell doth toll, And the furies in a shoal Come to fright a parting soul, Sweet Spirit, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... excursions with boats borrowed from ships in the port. On July 23rd, with a borrowed boat, we went out when the sea was high, but soon found our boat unmanageable, and at last got into a place where the sea was breaking heavily over a shoal, and the two of the crew who were nearest to me (A. Malkin and Lewis), one on each side, were carried out: they were good swimmers and we recovered them, though with some trouble: the breaker had passed quite ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy

... creak and lurch, the sleigh left the grade, and took the white snow edging the shoal water that led out to the deep green of the middle ice. The ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... shoal of inquiries, and maybe a scandal," I answered thoughtfully. "If Jack has intentionally disappeared for a day or two and all at once finds himself notorious he ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux

... in winter slide. Methinks I hear the music in the boats, And the loud echo which returns the notes; While overhead a flock of new-sprung fowl Hangs in the air, and does the sun control, Dark'ning the sky; they hover o'er, and shroud 29 The wanton sailors with a feather'd cloud. Beneath, a shoal of silver fishes glides, And plays about the gilded barges' sides; The ladies, angling in the crystal lake, Feast on the waters with the prey they take; At once victorious with their lines, and eyes, They make the fishes, and the men, their prize. A thousand Cupids on the billows ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... been forced much further up the beach than before, and she had now in her bilge above nine feet of water, which reached higher than the lower-deck beams. On looking down the stern-post, which, seen against the light-coloured ground, and in shoal water, was now very distinctly visible, we found that she had pushed the stones at the bottom up before her, and that the broken keel, stern-post, and deadwood had, by the recent pressure, been more damaged ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry

... in Bob's pond, and the discovery led the old sailor to speak of these animals that form such a pleasant relish to bread-and-butter; and he told them that one of the best fishing-grounds for them was off the Woolsner Shoal, some four miles further along the beach to the eastwards, while another good place was Selsea ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson

... sleepless vigilance by mysterious sentinels, transformed and spellbound in ocean depths. Tree-fern and hart's-tongue show verdant fronds, flushed with autumnal red or gold, and a dense growth of starry flowers suggests a bed of many-coloured tulips. Dazzling fish dart through the crystal depths. A shoal of scarlet and green parrot-fish pursue a tribe striped with blue and orange. Gold-fish flash like meteors between uplifted spears of blood-red coral, and the glittering scales of myriads, splashed with ruby, or flecked with amethyst, reflect the colours of the gorgeously-frilled and rosetted ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... leave of Keimer as going to see my friends. The governor gave me an ample letter, saying many flattering things of me to my father, and strongly recommending the project of my setting up at Philadelphia as a thing that must make my fortune. We struck on a shoal in going down the bay, and sprung a leak; we had a blustering time at sea, and were oblig'd to pump almost continually, at which I took my turn. We arriv'd safe, however, at Boston in about a fortnight. I had been absent seven months, and my friends had heard nothing of me; for my br. Holmes was ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin

... makes the best of a bad job, without going into an unnecessary tantrum over it. If another member of the club snatches a fish first, the pelican doesn't bother, but devotes his attention to the next that Church throws; a fish in the pouch is worth a shoal in somebody else's. Now and again Peter loses his temper for a moment if the others catch the first snack, and lays about him with his bill—but then, when a fellow's chairman, and a lot of other fellows come snatching the lunch from under his nose—why, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... The southern extremity of a great shoal near the mouth of the Zuider Zee, northeast of the island of Wieringen. "Under the Vlieter" would mean at the east side of this shoal, in the Tesselstroom ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts

... least danger from the vigilant 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 ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... formed by the St. Clair River, which empties into the lake of that name by several mouths, and which forms a bar or shoal on which in its natural state there is not more than 6 or 7 feet of water. This shoal is interposed between the mouth of the river and the deep water of the lake, a distance of 6,000 feet, and in its natural condition was a serious obstruction ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson

... much to give the crew some novel occupation as from any other motive, set the men to work salting and drying the fish, so that we secured three barrels full, as an addition to our ordinary fare, which was very acceptable. The flying fish were pursued by a shoal of dolphins, which continued to play round our ship for several days, and some of these we captured with the line and ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... and head her for St. Andrew's. Fortunately I have been there myself in the Bellevite, and I have been up the harbor and bay in boats, for the yacht, as she was at the time, drew too much water to go into the bay, for it is shoal inside. Come about, Mr. Flint, and make ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... from thee the grace, for me the prize, And what to Love the glory,—when the whole Of the deep stair thou tread'st to the dim shoal And weary water of the place of sighs, And there dost work deliverance, as thine eyes Draw up my prisoned spirit to ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti

... us round to La Brea, and drank in dreamily with our eyes the beauty of that strange lonely place. The only living things, save ourselves, which were visible were a few pelicans sleeping on a skerry, and a shoal of dolphins rolling silently in threes—husband, wife, and little child—as they fished their way along the tide mark between the yellow water and the green. The sky blazed overhead, the sea below; the red rocks and green forests blazed around; and we ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or it may be bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... pretty women. His favourite ejaculation, "Lord!" occurs but once that I have observed in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at least five times in '63; after which the "Lords" may be said to pullulate like herrings, with here and there a solitary "damned," as it were a whale among the shoal. He and his wife, once filled with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms at a marriage, are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord Brouncker's mistress, who was not even, by his own account, the most discreet of mistresses. Tag, rag, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... high, or under ground; And when they join their pericranies, Out skips a book of miscellanies. Hobbes clearly proves that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature; The greater for the smallest watch, But meddle seldom with their match. A whale of moderate size will draw A shoal of herrings down his maw; A fox with geese his belly crams; A wolf destroys a thousand lambs: But search among the rhyming race, The brave are worried by the base. If on Parnassus' top you sit, You rarely bite, are always bit. Each ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... not like accidental waifs that haply meet to part again upon the waves of time, but rather like two happy children playing King and Queen, drifting in a golden boat along the crystal stream of life, never so much as touching on a shoal, but gliding on, sometimes plying silver oars, and sometimes spreading a purple sail to catch the sandal-scented breeze that blows from Malaya loaded with the lazy odour of the South, letting all the hours slip past us ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown

... his utter bewilderment. He must have though me bereft of my senses to be paddling about at that hour of the night. The tide had made, and the Sylph, righting her listed masts, was standing clear of the shoal. The deck was astir, and when the command was given to hoist the sails it was obeyed with an uneasy alacrity. The men worked frantically in a bright, unnatural day, for Lakalatcha was now continuously aflame and tossing up red-hot rocks to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... about him. If they once made good their landing here, it would be difficult to dislodge them. It must all be done from the land side then, for even a 42-gun frigate could scarcely come near enough to pepper them. They love shoal water, the skulks—and that has enabled them to baffle me so often. Not that they would conquer the country—all brag—but still it would be a nasty predicament, and scare the poor cockneys ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... river every five miles, avoiding the "bight" of the great binds and thus escaping the strong current; sometimes she went out and skirted a high "bluff" sand-bar in the middle of the stream, and occasionally followed it up a little too far and touched upon the shoal water at its head—and then the intelligent craft refused to run herself aground, but "smelt" the bar, and straightway the foamy streak that streamed away from her bows vanished, a great foamless wave rolled forward and passed her under ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... through the strait formed by it and the mainland,—and a very beautiful scene it affords,—I was informed by those on board, that a shoal is marked down upon the ship's chart as being in the centre. Having never before heard the slightest allusion to this fact, I intend to ascertain its accuracy, by actual inspection, at ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo

... the shoal. Again and again the fish broke for the deeper water and Lew had to give him line. But each time he stopped the rush and patiently worked the fish back toward the shoal. At last the trout was fairly on the edge of it. Lew began to pull steadily on his line and slid ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss

... seizing the conversation and shoving it out of shoal water. "Go ahead, Wick, and sing something; ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... Sacred Isle, was lifted up from the sea; and in A.D. 19 the island of "Thia" (the Divine) made its appearance. In A.D. 1573 another island was created, called "the small sunburnt island." In 1848 a volcanic convulsion of three months' duration created a great shoal; an earthquake destroyed many houses in Thera, and the sulphur and hydrogen issuing from the sea killed 50 persons and 1000 domestic animals. A recent examination of these islands shows that the whole mass of Santorin has sunk, since its projection ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... river. So far back as the 9th of May 1836, our observer noticed salmon fry descending seawards, and he took occasion to capture a considerable number by admitting them into the salmon cruive. On examination, he found about one-fifth of each shoal to be what he considered sea-trout. Wisely regarding this as a favourable opportunity of ascertaining to what extent they would afterwards "suffer a sea change," he marked all the smolts of that species (about ninety in number) by cutting off the whole of the adipose fin, and three-quarters ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... dissolved, or uncrystallized, they are really separated from each other, like a swarm of gnats in the air, or like a shoal of fish in the sea;—generally at about equal distances. In currents of solutions, or at different depths of them, one part may be more full of the dissolved atoms than another; but on the whole, you may think of them as equidistant, like the spots in the print of your gown. If they ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... in your idea of poor Mylne's poem, which he has addressed to me. The piece has a good deal of merit, but it has one great fault—it is, by far, too long. Besides, my success has encouraged such a shoal of ill-spawned monsters to crawl into public notice, under the title of Scottish Poets, that the very term Scottish Poetry borders on the burlesque. When I write to Mr. Carfrae, I shall advise him rather to try one of his deceased ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... grounded on the sandy shoal of the Dogger, in twenty fathoms of water, and overhead I could see great black shadows ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward

... blessing on men's toil and on the secret purposes of their hearts; the steamer pounded in the dusk the calm water of the Strait; and far astern of the pilgrim ship a screw-pile lighthouse, planted by unbelievers on a treacherous shoal, seemed to wink at her its eye of flame, as if in derision of her ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... the Cut-Through a little ways, and then come about, and back he comes again, never slacking speed a mite, and running close to the shoal as he could shave, and all the time going through the bloodiest kind of pantomimes. And past he goes, to wheel 'round and ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln

... farther to the west he discovered four other islands; afterwards fell in with Maitea, Otaheite, isles of Navigators, and Forlorn Hope, which to him were new discoveries. He then passed through between the Hebrides, discovered the Shoal of Diana, and some others, the land of Cape Deliverance, several islands more to the north, passed the north of New Ireland, touched at Batavia, and arrived in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... crime thus committed did not long remain unpunished, for Gilling's brother, Suttung, quickly went in search of the dwarfs, determined to avenge him. Seizing them in his mighty grasp, the giant conveyed them to a shoal far out at sea, where they would surely have perished at the next high tide had they not succeeded in redeeming their lives by promising to deliver to the giant their recently brewed mead. As soon as ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber

... over the side, to see What kind of a bottom this shoal might be, They saw, in the shadow that lay to the lee, A sight that filled them with horror! The water was clear, and beneath it, there, An oyster lay in its slimy lair, So big, that to tell its dimensions fair Would take from now ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various

... Shoal Creek, about sixteen miles from Fat West, a brother by the name of Haun had built a flour mill. Besides the mill there were a blacksmith shop and half a dozen houses. About thirty families lived here, some of which had just arrived from the Eastern States and were ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson

... admiral's smack was heading to windward in an easterly direction. As the breeze came down on the various vessels of the fleet, they all steered the same course, so that in a few minutes nearly two hundred smacks were following him like a shoal of herring. The glassy surface of the sea was effectually broken, and a field of rippling indigo took the place of ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne

... Charles, before the arrival of Captain Laws. This was a dangerous and desperate adventure, but worth while the undertaking, in avoidance of our subsequent sufferings. Its desperateness consisted in running two miles across shoal ice, thrown up by the high tides of this latitude— and its danger, in the meeting with air holes, deceptively covered by the bed of snow. Speaking circumspectly, yet it must be admitted conjecturally, it seems ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... that I belonged to a family which he knew and liked, and hearing, moreover, of my fervent devotion to modern Italian and French music in particular, he decided that I was the very man for him. He had the whole shoal of Bellini's, Donizetti's, Adam's, and Auber's operatic scores copied out, and I was to give the good people of Riga the benefit of them ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... of living waves that roll On golden sands, Or break on tragic reef and shoal 'Mid fatal lands; O forest wrought of living leaves, Some filled with Spring, Where joy life's festal raiment weaves And all birds sing,— Some trampled in the miry ways, Or whirled along By fury of tempestuous ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson

... against the tide with the fyke. I then untied it, and it went downstream, stake and all. I got it into the boat, rowed up, and set the stake again. Then I tied one end to the stake and got out of the boat myself in shoal water. Then the boat got away in deep water; then I had to swim for the boat. Then I rowed back and untied the fyke. Then the fyke got away. Then I jumped out of the boat to save the fyke, and the boat got away. Then I had to swim again after the boat and row after the fyke, and finally ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various

... he was about when he left Vancouver, Hollister had brought with him a twenty-foot Hudson's Bay freight canoe, a capacious shoal-water craft with high topsides. He slid this off the float, loaded into it sundry boxes and packages, and taking his seat astern, paddled inshore to where the rising tide was ruffled by the outsetting current of ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... Captain Hull, "if these crustaceans do not interest you, it can't be helped; but it would be otherwise if you possessed a whale's stomach. Then what a regale! Do you see, Mrs. Weldon, when we whalers, during the fishing season, arrive in sight of a shoal of these crustaceans, we have only time to prepare our harpoons and our lines. We are certain that the game is ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne

... Anguilla in the West-Indies and sent his Boat on Shore, where his men had the News That he and his People were proclaimed Pirates, which put them into such a Consternation that they sought all Opportunitys to run the Ship on shore upon some reef or Shoal, fearing the Narrator should carry them into some ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various

... mind of cent. per cent., which rises above the constrained mirth of the assembly, will hold the guests so anchored to the consideration of profit and loss, that in vain they spread a free sail—the tide of gayety refuses to float their barks from the shoal beside which they are moored. In their seasons of gayety the French are philosophers, for while they imbibe the mirth they discard the wassail, and wine instead of being the body of their feasts, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... Indec, son of De Domnand, chiefs of the Isles. These two leaders gathered ships from all the harbors and settlements of the Fomorians, from the Hebrides, the Shetlands, and far-distant Norway, so that their fleet was thick as gulls above a shoal of fish along the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston

... you his place at any time. His Wife is really a very nice Lady, and his Boy one of the nicest I have seen these 30 years. He himself sees wonderful things: he saw 2 sharks (supposed by Newson to be Sweet Williams) making love together out of the water at Covehithe; and a shoal of Porpoises tossing up a Halibut into the Air and catching it again. You may imagine Newson's demure face listening to all this, and his comments afterwards. . ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome

... so long as she, the goddess, yet beheld earth and starry heaven and the strong-flowing sea where fishes shoal, and the rays of the sun, and still hoped to see her dear mother and the tribes of the eternal gods, so long hope calmed her great heart for all her trouble.... ((LACUNA)) ....and the heights of the mountains ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... peculiarity of substance, colour, or form, from the stretches of empty space that formed its banks. But presently, as I looked more closely, I saw, rising from its surface, dipping, rising, and dipping again, in a regular rhythm, without change or pause, what I can only compare to a shoal of flying fish. Not that they looked like fish, or indeed like anything I had ever seen, but that was the image suggested by their motion. As soon as I saw them I knew what they were: they were souls; and the river down which they passed was the river of Time; and their dipping in and out ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson

... here on the lookout for his pay for his work on the South Pass of the Mississippi's mouth, has received intelligence from the resident engineer at the jetties that the channel through the shoal at the head of the South Pass is now twenty-two feet deep, and that the least width at which twenty feet depth is found is one hundred and ten feet. The principal works to improve this shoal were constructed during the last six months. The low stage ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various

... our office that day full of the plan for his great scheme—just a quibble of the law and the thing was done. We were all to be made rich and successful by it, he explained. There is no use in describing to you the intricacies of his idea; it was one of those shoal waters in which the honesty of young lawyers can sometimes come to grief. The pursuit of law will winnow out the true from the false; it makes an upright man a hundred times more certain and more proud of his honor: it searches ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs

... seem rather startling to abandon entirely the supposition that the ring is in any sense a continuous body, but there remains no alternative. Look at it how we will, we seem to be conducted to the conclusion that the ring is really an enormous shoal of extremely minute bodies; each of these little bodies pursues an orbit of its own around the planet, and is, in fact, merely a satellite. These bodies are so numerous and so close together that they ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... him to be shipwrecked near Myconos, and while every one else perished, Coiranus alone was saved by a dolphin. And when at last he died of old age in his native country, as it so happened that his funeral procession passed along the seashore close to Miletus, a great shoal of dolphins appeared on that day in the harbor, keeping only a very little distance from those who were attending the funeral of Coiranus, as if they also were joining in the procession ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... mouth. This is called by the Indians, Ta-tzun-in. Ascending it by wading, with considerable difficulty, its bed was seen to be chiefly limestone rock. There are two rivers flowing into Newton Inlet from fifty to seventy-five feet in width, navigable for canoes at high tide about half a mile, when shoal rapids are reached. ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden

... of Gaulus and Melita,[47] which mark the boundary between the Adriatic and Tuscan Seas. There a strong east wind arose for them, and on the following day it carried the ships to the point of Libya, at the place which the Romans call in their own tongue "Shoal's Head." For its name is "Caputvada," and it is five days' journey from Carthage for ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius

... locks are sprent With unreturning autumn's rime, Whose heads, like wind-worn trees, are bent Beneath the savage storms of time— Pray Christ, the Child, to be your guide Past the dim shoal, where shadows bide. ...
— Christmas Sunshine • Various

... more important the ghost the more incumbent is this duty upon him. Noblesse oblige. On the river Olynthiakos[41] in Northern Greece stood the tomb of the hero Olynthos, who gave the river its name. In the spring months of Anthesterion and Elaphebolion the river rises and an immense shoal of fish pass from the lake of Bolbe to the river of Olynthiakos, and the inhabitants round about can lay in a store of salt fish for all their needs. "And it is a wonderful fact that they never pass by the monument of Olynthus. They say that formerly the people ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... the government. Besides, they were hourly in expectation of a reinforcement of 500 men from Lisbon. Meantime the anchorage under Fort Francisco was found inconvenient for so large a ship as the Pedro Primeiro, and the Admiral took her round the great shoal which forms the other side of the harbour, and anchored her between the Ilha do Medo and the main in fifteen fathoms water; where he left her, and returned to the town in the sloop of war Pambinha, in which vessel he could lie close to the city itself. One of his first steps was to substitute ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham

... comfort. Her length was immense, and her draught necessarily very light—not four feet when full loaded; for the Alabama is subject to many vagaries and what was a clear channel yesterday may be only a two-foot shoal to-day. Of course, with solidity and strength sacrificed to this extreme lightness, when the powerful engines are put to any strain, the high, thin fabric thrills from stem to stern with their every puff, ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... shallow shoal waters, and move up and down the coast, during the whole of the open season, in great schools acres in extent. Occasionally their passage may be marked from afar by the flight of hungry sea-fowl hovering and flittering ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... bread, cakes, and a pot full of rice, some rum, half a goat, two great coats, one of which was to lie on, and one to put on at night. I set sail in the sixth year of my reign. On the East side of the isle, there was a large ridge of rocks, which lay two miles from the shore; and a shoal of sand lay for half a mile from the rocks to the beach. To get round to this point, I had to sail a great way out to sea; and here I all but ...
— Robinson Crusoe - In Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin

... boom-foresail and a jib, with the big grey combers curling as they foamed by high above her rail. Then the wind fell, and Dampier, who got an observation, armed his deep-sea lead, and finding shells and shoal water came aft to talk to Wyllard with the strip of ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... in March, 1823. He was provided, in addition to his warships, with a number of barges, furnished with twenty oars apiece, and which were indispensable in following the pirates up the shallow creeks and into the shoal waters where the vessels ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis

... place is very silent, except for the clink of hammers where they are breaking down our wooden walls, and, seaward, the cry and splash of gull and tern dipping for their prey in the shoal of herring-fry which is wandering about the bay. Close inshore a porpoise is wallowing, like the jolly sea-pig that he is, in his berth of glistening water. The wild creatures seem to have grown tamer since there are no strollers to keep them aloof. This morning, as we ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine

... handed it to the other, who thrust it with his own beneath his arm. Then once more the Friar bent his back, and, Robin having mounted upon it, he stepped sturdily into the water and so strode onward, splashing in the shoal, and breaking all the smooth surface into ever- widening rings. At last he reached the other side and Robin leaped lightly from ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle

... mean? Simply this, I think: that the West brings down what it can of the Spirit into the world of thought and passion; brings it down right here upon this bank and shoal of time; but China rises with you into the world of the Spirit. We do not as a rule allow the validity of the Chinese method. We sometimes dub Keats, at his best a thorough Chinaman, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... I've done it many a time—on the chart. I know every bluff and reef and shoal and cay around Andros from ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... Joe." He reached forward and laid a finger on the map. "Here's where we were, or where we ought to have been, when we heard the surf first. According to this we were a good mile from the shore and the only shoal is that one and it's marked six feet at mean low water. There's a black-and-red spar buoy there, as you see, but we haven't sighted it. Now, what I want to know is how the dickens we could have got a mile off our course to starboard. Also, if we are off our ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour

... Plantagenets, by Bishop Stubbs: one of the very few masterpieces among the shoal of little books on great subjects in which a declining literature ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... and the white Hooghly pilots are men at the very top of their profession, and earn some L2000 a year apiece. They are tremendous swells, and are perfectly conscious of the fact, coming on board with their native servants and their white "cub" or pupil. There is one shoal in particular, known as the "James and Mary," on which a ship, touching ever so lightly, is as good as lost. Calcutta, since I first knew it, has become a great manufacturing centre. Lines of factories stand ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... then, with the greater speed, and had soon descended the slope of Aros to the part that we call Sandag Bay. It is a pretty large piece of water compared with the size of the isle; well sheltered from all but the prevailing wind; sandy and shoal and bounded by low sand-hills to the west, but to the eastward lying several fathoms deep along a ledge of rocks. It is upon that side that, at a certain time each flood, the current mentioned by my uncle sets so strong into the bay; a little later, when ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to beat until eight o'clock, P.M., when all the guns having been thrown overboard (except one, retained for signals), and all means taken to lighten her, she began to heave, and in about an hour after she swung off the shoal,—not, however, without ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly

... when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly. If the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch, With his surcease, success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all—here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,— We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases We still have judgement here; that we but teach Bloody instructions, which being taught, return To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice Commends the ingredients of our ...
— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... know, whose concord high Of thought and music lifts the soul Where many a glimmering starry shoal Glides through the ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... series of storms and hurricanes and driven far from her right course. After three months of exertion and suffering the captain was obliged to make for the port of Lisbon. There the ship was revictualled; but, having sailed again, she struck upon a rocky shoal at a distance of three leagues from Lisbon and was totally wrecked. Talon and his companions were fortunately saved, and found themselves back in France at the beginning of ...
— The Great Intendant - A Chronicle of Jean Talon in Canada 1665-1672 • Thomas Chapais

... which had been standing inshore, commenced firing away at the northern forts. Another signal presently went up, and the Agamemnon was seen gliding on at more rapid speed than heretofore towards the shore, some little distance to the north of Fort Constantine, the nearest point which a shoal running off from the land would allow her to reach. A gallant little steamer, the Circassian, was observed leading the way, fearless of the shot which the guns of the fort threw at her. As the Agamemnon passed the Sanspareil, which had ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston

... these efforts, they were being overhauled slowly, but Seymour still held on and did not despair. There was one chance of escape. Right before them, not a half league away, lay a long shoal known as George's Shoal, extending several leagues across the path of the two ships; through the middle of this dangerous shoal there existed a channel, narrow and tortuous, but still practicable for ships of a certain size. He was familiar with its windings, ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... where Hood might choose to attempt to cross, made it impossible for him to cross the Tennessee at any place where it was navigable. But Muscle Shoals is not navigable, and below them again is another shoal which also obstructs navigation. Hood therefore moved down to a point nearly opposite Florence, Alabama, crossed over and remained there for some time, collecting supplies of food, forage and ammunition. All ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... and rubbed his nose against the canoe, and nibbled a lily root before he noticed me. A shoal of minnows were playing among the grasses near by. A dragon-fly stood on his head against a reed—a most difficult feat, I should think. He was trying some contortion that I couldn't make out, when a deer stepped down the bank and never saw me. Doing ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long

... cunning," he has more than once said to me, "at chambers; for I soon saw how to go to work, better than the other pupils. They would be all for the 'heavy papers,' the great cases that came in, not caring for the shoal of small things that were continually appearing and disappearing. Now it seemed to me, that these constituted three-fourths of a lawyer's business, and that to be able to do them, was three-fourths ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various

... expectation to have done this, but only to have landed on the Fly and burned some of their stores; but being come in, we spied those ships, and with our long boats, one by one, fired them, our ships running all a-ground, it being so shoal water. We were led to this by it seems, a renegado captain of the Hollanders, who found himself ill used by De Ruyter for his good service, and so come over to us, and hath done us good service; so that now we trust him, and he himself did ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys

... vessels had reached perhaps within a mile of the pirate sloop before they found the water too shoal to venture any farther with the sail. It was then that the boat was lowered as the lieutenant had planned, and the boatswain went ahead to sound, the two vessels, with their sails still hoisted but empty of wind, ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle

... tiny flower, with the white denticulations for petals and the two bright red dots, the stigmata at the bottom, for stamens. When the grubs, pressed one against the other, with their heads downwards in the fetid soup, make an unbroken shoal, the sight of those breathing cups incessantly opening and closing, with a little clack like a valve, almost makes one forget the horrors of the charnel yard. It suggests a carpet of tiny Sea anemones. The maggot has its beauties ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two, Did the English fight the French,—woe to France! And, the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter through the blue, Like a crowd of frighten'd porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue, Came crowding ship on ship to St. Malo on the Rance, With ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... at least two miles off. I followed them for more than half the distance in a small canoe. They worked most systematically in a semicircle, with intervals of about fifty yards between each, having, I suppose, a large shoal of fish in the centre, for every now and then an otter would disappear, and generally, when it was again seen, it was well inside the semicircle with a fish in its jaws, caught more for pleasure than for profit, as the ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... the 11th, which Cook named Resolution and Doubtful Islands; he believed them to have been discovered by De Bougainville. The following morning at daylight they found themselves almost on the top of what Cook calls "a half drowned island, or rather large coral shoal of about 20 leagues in circuit." In the lagoon which it surrounded they saw a large canoe under sail. The island was named after Furneaux. As they were now in such a dangerous neighbourhood, Cook ordered that at night the cutter with an officer and seven men should keep in advance of the ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson

... was even in those lovely days at Kilkhaven,—merely because no one can build upon it. Ocean and sky remain as God made them. He must love space for us, though it be needless for himself; seeing that in all the magnificent notions of creation afforded us by astronomers,—shoal upon shoal of suns, each the centre of complicated and infinitely varied systems,—the spaces between are yet more overwhelming in their vast inconceivableness. I thank God for the room he thus gives us, and hence can endure to see ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... dead, with the sails above cracking! There was a hullabaloo for a few minutes, now I tell you. Shouts, commands, the grinding of the schooner's keel, the slatting of sails. The Sea Spell had driven so hard and fast upon the shoal that she canted neither to port, or starboard. And although the sea was still so that she would not be beaten by the waves, it looked much to me as though she were piled up on this unfriendly coast for ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster

... returned the cockswain with undisturbed composure; "here is his spout not half a mile to seaward; the easterly gale has driven the creatur to leeward, and he begins to find himself in shoal water. He's been sleeping, while he should have ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper

... Zaire, must pass so close beneath the overhanging boughs of a great lime that the boughs brush their very funnels. Fortunately, the current is never strong here, for the passage is a shallow one. Yoka felt the boat slowing as he reached shoal water, and brought her nearer to the bank of the island. He had reached the great tree, when a noose dropped over him, tightened about his arms, and, before he could do more than lock the wheel, he was jerked from the boat and left swinging ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace

... was on the quarterdeck, leaning against the rail, watching a shoal of flying fish passing at a short distance. In the noise and confusion, caused by the sudden squall, the creaking of cordage, the flapping of sails, and the shouts of the officer to let go the sheets, the fall of the soldier was unnoticed; and Charlie was startled by perceiving, in the water below ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty

... or two afterwards we had a sharp fight in the Basque Roads. A frigate and three brigs came out to meet us. We disabled one of the brigs, drove the frigate on to a shoal, and were on the point of capturing it when two other frigates came out to her assistance, and as we had lost several spars when we ran aboard the first frigate we were obliged to make off. After this we returned to England. Another election was coming on. Cochrane stood again ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty

... blooms the eye rises easily to the forest of jewel-weeds. These at least are rightly, if unconsciously, named. It is not only the bloom but the whole weed that is a jewel when the morning sun is low and the reflected light slides level into the forest among purple stems that shoal into transparent green as they slender toward the leaves. These, too, seem transluscent and glow, and then some sprite seems to have suddenly turned on the jewels. Strange that they did not flash to my eyes even before I came to the place, on my way down the hill. Perhaps it is some trick ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... by a shoal of porpoises, rolling as they went—papas, and mammas, and little children—and all quite smooth and shiny, because the fairies French-polish them every morning; and they sighed so softly as they came by, that Tom took courage to speak to them: ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley

... shaped our course north-by-east. At noon we were in 29 deg. 32' S. Lat.; at night about three hours before daybreak, we again unexpectedly came upon a low-lying coast, a level, broken country with reefs all round it. We saw no high land or mainland, so that this shoal is to be carefully avoided as very dangerous to ships that wish to touch at this coast. It is fully ten miles in length, lying ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres

... is one of the oldest towns in the valley; it stands at the head of navigation on the Sacramento, and was, therefore, a place of importance before the railroad was built. The river here is narrow and shoal, and it is crossed by one of those ferries common where the rapid current, pushing against the ferry-boat, drives it across the stream, a wire cable preventing it from floating down stream. The main street ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... power? What does it matter that you believe in the forgiveness of sins, so long as you do not care a rush whether yours are pardoned or no? And is it anything to you or to God that you believe in the life everlasting, if all your work, and hopes, and longings are confined to 'this bank and shoal of time'? Are you any more a Christian because of all that intellectual assent to these solemn verities? Is not your life like some secularised monastic chamber, with holy texts carved on the walls, and saintly images looking down from glowing windows on revellers and hucksters who defile ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... breaking surf, sand-dunes topped with green merged gradually southward, into strange jade-green hills, low and soft as brushed velvet in the distance. To the North the dunes tapered to a long, narrow shoal over which, as far as the eye could reach, swells of clearest emerald broke into a splendor of ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... smile will sometimes light the eye, and awake the old playfulness of the lip. But what a great and critical sorrow does leave behind is often far worse than the sorrow itself has been. It is a change in the inner man, which strands him, as Guy Darrell seemed stranded, upon the shoal of the Present; which the more he strives manfully to bear his burden warns him the more from dwelling on the Past; and the more impressively it enforces the lesson of the vanity of human wishes strikes the more from his reckoning illusive hopes in the Future. Thus out of ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... should receive The ocean flood; nor firm enough to stand Against its buffets — all the pathless coast Lies in uncertain shape; the land by earth Is parted from the deep; on sandy banks The seas are broken, and from shoal to shoal The waves advance to sound upon the shore. Nature, in spite, thus left her work undone, Unfashioned to men's use — Or else of old A foaming ocean filled the wide expanse, But Titan feeding from the briny depths His burning fires (near to the zone of heat) Reduced ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... on the second of July they found shoal water, where they say[K]: 'We smelled so sweet and strange a smell, as if we had been in the midst of a delicate garden, abounding with all kinds of odoriferous herbs and flowers, so we were assured that the land could not be far distant; and keeping good watch, and bearing but slack ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Silent Navy, it is hardly necessary to say, fairly rose to the occasion, for the Admiral was off under forced draught in the dog-watch. Chancing things, however, when weathering a promontory off Montreuil, he contrived to pile up his craft on a shoal in a bad position, and he would have missed trans-shipment at Boulogne altogether had he not got himself taken off in a passing craft which was under charge of soldier-officers who were likewise making for the packet. So he got across all right in the end and he flashed ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... partake its reign, or to live near it." This is all pretty true, and known to every child rising or risen six, except poor Poietes. He had imagined that there were "many of these animals in this country," that they all went a-fishing together as amicably as five hundred sail of Manksmen among a shoal ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... three-towered cathedral stood in the midst, round which swarmed apparently a multitude of chimney-stacks. A nearer approach showed the chimneys to be small turrets. A pilot was taken on board; for there is a dangerous shoal in the harbour. The appearance of the town as the sun shone upon its white and lofty walls was singularly beautiful. We cast anchor; some officials arrived and demanded a clean bill of health. We had none. They would ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... S.W. by S. by the compass, and soon perceived the sea to break right a-head of us; we immediately sounded, and shoaled our water from thirteen to seven fathom, soon after deepening it again from seventeen to forty-two; so that we went over the end of a shoal, which a little farther to the northward might have been fatal to us. Cape Blanco at this time bore W.S.W. 1/2 S. distant four leagues: But we were still at a loss for Port Desire, it being impossible that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... blew vehemently at south and by east, bringing withal rain and thick mist, so that we could not see a cable length before us; and betimes in the morning we were altogether run and folded in amongst flats and sands, amongst which we found shoal and deep in every three or four ships' length, after we began to sound; but first we were upon them unawares, until Master Cox looking out, discerned, in his judgment, white cliffs, crying Land! withal; though we could not afterward descry any land, it being ...
— Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage to Newfoundland • Edward Hayes

... flight was almost as desperate as the advance. Accompanied by my men and several Indians, we threw ourselves into a narrow path along the river, till we reached the frozen bed of the St. Charles, which we crossed with the greatest difficulty. We had to run two miles over shoal ice formed by the high tides, and encountering numerous air-holes hidden from us by the darkness and the falling snow. After countless hardships and dangers, we succeeded in reaching the opposite bank, whence we could hear the last sounds of battle in the ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance

... again. Another spring came in the tender green of the young leafage, and again they put to sea. So far fortune had steadily befriended them. Now the reign of misfortune began. Not far had they gone before the vessel was driven ashore by a storm, and broke her keel on a protruding shoal. This was not a serious disaster. A new keel was made, and the old one planted upright in the sands ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... antediluvian horse with a small boy astride, and there the boy unhitches the traces from the machine and goes ashore, leaving you with the waves breaking on the steps before your door. You peep out dubiously. A shoal of naked-shouldered men are swimming and splashing in the surf. Some fifty yards away is another school of bathers, whose back hair betrays their sex, and who are clad in garments made like those worn by feminine bathers at Long Branch, etc. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... again By day nor yet by night, While man shall take his life to stake At risk of shoal or main (By day ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling

... gas was not absorbed by caustic potash, but was partly taken up by pyrogallic acid, that is to say, that little or no carbonic acid was present, but that a fair amount of oxygen was present, diluted of course by nitrogen. The exposure of a shoal of the beautiful blue pelagic Siphonophore, Velella, for a few hours, enabled me to collect a large quantity of gas, which yielded from 24 to 25 per cent. of oxygen, that subsequently squeezed out from the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various

... at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two, Did the English fight the French,—woe to France! And the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter through the blue, Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue, Came crowding ship on ship to Saint Malo on the Rance, With ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers

... the fish," said Will; "intestines, don't you call 'em? That's a shoal of small fish come into the harbour, only they're so clear you can't make 'em out; and first one lays hold of one end and runs off with it, and then another. Looks just like little snakes ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn

... Mount, as well as the adjacent shores, were studded not only with canoes, but at the period of our visit the skulls and skeletons were strewed about in all directions.' This method generally prevailed on the neighboring coasts, as at Shoal Water Bay, etc. Farther up the Columbia, as at the Cascades, a different form was adopted, which is thus described ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... and from France was high—approximately twice that of freighting from London to Boston or New York. Navigation on the St. Lawrence was dangerous in those days before buoys and beacons came to mark the shoal waters, and the risk of capture at sea during the incessant wars with England was considerable. The staples most used in the Indian trade—utensils, muskets, blankets, and strouds (a coarse woolen ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... to remember it. You've got to remember the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike. You must ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... 1389. Fernandez Duro (t.v., p. 181) mentions a Spanish ordinance of 22nd February 1674, which authorized Spanish corsairs to go out in the pursuit and punishment of pirates. Periaguas, or large flat-bottomed canoes, were to be constructed for use in shoal waters. They were to be 90 feet long and from 16 to 18 feet wide, with a draught of only 4 or 5 feet, and were to be provided with a long gun in the bow and four smaller pieces in the stern. They were to be propelled by both oars and sails, and were ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring

... snake," cried Rodd excitedly. "I mean, a very large eel, swimming on the top, and he keeps throwing his head about as if he were feeding in the middle of a shoal of fish." ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn

... Shoreward the shoal of mighty shoulders lean Through the long swell of waves, Reaching beyond the sunset and the hollow caves, And the ice-girdled peaks that hold serene Each its own star, far out at sea to mark Thy westward way, O Princess, through the dark. The rose-red sunset dies into the ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean

... Temple, the coffin itself was as a shoal in the Ravi River, splitting the stream into two branches, one on either side of the Dead; and the watchers of the Dead, who were soldiers, stood about It, moving no more than the still flame of the candles. Their heads were bowed; their hands were clasped; their eyes were cast ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... is a shoal sheet of water twenty-two miles long and nearly eight miles wide, a bad place to cross in a small boat in windy weather. We set our sail and sped merrily on, but the tempest pressed us sorely, compelling us to take ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop

... applied the iodoform process to cotton, and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a Cotton King prevented her being a very rich woman. As it was she had a tolerable independence. She came into prominence as one of the more able of the little shoal of young women who were led into politico-philanthropic activities by the influence of the earlier novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward—the Marcella crop. She went "slumming" with distinguished vigour, which was quite usual in those days—and returned from her experiences ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... river bank, and decided that it could be ascended by poling. So from green wood we cut suitable poles of about two inches in diameter and from seven to nine feet in length and knifed them carefully to rid them of bark and knots. Then, for this was a shoal rapids, both bowman and sternman stood up, the better to put the full force of their strength and weight into the work; the children, however, merely knelt to the work of wielding their slender poles; but in deep water, or where there ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... accompanied them appeared running at full speed, and, through their assistance, though not without some difficulty, bloodshed was prevented. Very shortly after this adventure, when the men had just pushed their boat off from a shoal, upon which it had struck, they noticed a new and considerable stream coming from the north, and uniting its waters with those of the Murray. Upon landing on the right bank of the newly-discovered stream, the natives ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... home. As for Randall and the black, they had to tramp; got into some kind of a station on the Papa-malulu side; did very bad business, for the truth is neither of the pair was fit for it, and lived mostly on fish, which was the means of Randall's death. It seems there was a nice shoal in one day, and Papa went after them with the dynamite; either the match burned too fast, or Papa was full, or both, but the shell went off (in the usual way) before he threw it, and where was Papa's hand? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the stream running past him? Do the particles of water, as they brush his sides and fins, cause a sound, as the wind by us? While he lurks beneath a weed in the still pool, suddenly a shoal of roach rush by with a sound like a flock of birds whose wings beat the air. The smooth surface of the still water appears to cover an utter silence, but probably to the fish there are ceaseless sounds. Water-fowl feeding in the weedy corners, whose legs depend down into the ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... a tempestuous wind which made the waves run mountains high and parted the two carracks one from the other. Moreover, from stress of wind it befell that that wherein was the wretched and unfortunate Landolfo smote with great violence upon a shoal over against the island of Cephalonia and parting amidships, broke all in sunder no otherwise than a glass dashed against a wall. The sea was in a moment all full of bales of merchandise and chests and planks, that floated on the surface, as is wont to happen in such cases, and the poor wretches ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... spoke the ship shook again, this time strongly. It was something more than a shudder; the sensation was for all the world as though she had scraped over a shoal of rock or shingle. There was a little clatter below, a noise of broken glass. The watch, who had been dozing on deck, sprang to their feet, and their ejaculations of surprise and fear rolled in a growl among them. The captain ran out of the companionway ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various

... wa'n't over an' above well married, however kind she may see fit to speak. She's been patient an' hard-workin' all her life, and always high above makin' mean complaints of other folks. I expect all this business about the Queen has buoyed her over many a shoal place in life. Yes, you might say that Abby 'd been a slave, but there ain't any ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett

... plunge had been made in water so shoal, that the boat had barely escaped being dashed to pieces on the coral. Had it not been so suddenly relieved from the pressure of near a thousand pounds in weight, it is probable that this calamity would have befallen it, the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various

... success, or to keep silent if it were a failure. He watched the Missisquoi very closely, for his own movements would depend upon hers. There was plenty of water to the northward of the island, but there was a shoal to ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic

... Neighbouring Keys. Green Turtle. Ruins of a Spanish Fort. The Westermost point of Mindanao. Two Proes of the Sologues laden from Manila. An Isle to the West of Sebo. Walking Canes. Isle of Batts, very large; and numerous Turtles and Manatee. A dangerous Shoal. They sail by Panay belonging to the Spaniards, and others of the Philippine Islands. Isle of Mindora. Two Barks taken. A further account of the Isle Luconia, and the City and Harbour of Manila. They go off Pulo Condore to lye there. The Shoals of Pracel, &c. Pulo Condore. The ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various

... ways then the hard one, and he with his hand-shoal, Himself over the sand the sea-plain a-treading, The warths wide away; shone the world's candle, The sun slop'd from the southward; so dreed they their journey, And went their ways stoutly unto where the earls' refuge, The banesman of ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous

... however, we must pause to note that energy and will could do much toward making even a pinnacle rock a naval base; for we see the gigantic fortress of Heligoland erected on what was little but a shoal; and we see the diminutive water areas of Malta and Gibraltar made to hold in safety the war-ships of the ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... west, and everything was tinged with a rosy hue. The water splashed over us, and we were suddenly covered with small silvery waves which when shaken slightly stiffened against our mackintoshes. It was a shoal of very small fish which had had the misfortune to be driven into the current, and which had come to die in the dazzling brilliancy of the setting sun. On the other side there was a small block which looked like ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... cheer, and we responded with three and then we passed out of sight. The settlement, the railway, the people, were gone; the magnificent wilderness was ours. We swept down with a four-mile current between rather low banks, using the oars mainly for guidance, and meeting no difficulty worse than a shoal, on which the boats all grounded for a few moments, and the breaking of his oar by Jones who steered our boat. About noon having run three miles, a landing was made on a broad gravelly island, to enable Andy to concoct a dinner. A heavy ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... Continent 'fiery yet gloomy;' measuring 17 deg. 3' from the meridian of Greenwich. The coast is exceedingly dangerous; consequently shipwrecks are rare. The owners, as their national wont is, have done their best to make it safe. Two lighthouses to the north of the true Cape mark and define a long shoal with a heavy break, the Almadies rocks, a ledge mostly sunk, but here and there rising above the foam in wicked-looking diabolitos (devilings), or black fangs, of which the largest is die-shaped. A third pharos, also brilliantly whitewashed, crowns the ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... (Sardinella Neohowii, Val.) frequents the southern and eastern coast in such profusion that in one instance in 1839, a gentleman who was present saw upwards of four hundred thousand taken in a haul of the nets in the little bay of Goyapanna, east of Point-de-Galle. As this vast shoal approached the shore the broken water became as smooth as if a sheet of ice had been floating below ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... spermaceti whale, which would occasionally show itself at the top, casting up thin jets of brine. The principal bay, that of Finisterra, as far as the entrance, was beautifully variegated by an immense shoal of sardinhas, on whose extreme skirts the monster was probably feasting. From the northern side of the cape we looked down upon a smaller bay, the shore of which was overhung by rocks of various and grotesque shapes; this is called the outer bay, or, in the language of the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... experiences in the eastern archipelago, but no mishaps except that the ship grounded on a rocky shoal near one of the islands. Fortunately there was no leak, and after throwing overboard eight of their cannon, three tons of cloves they had gathered in their voyage through the isles of spices, and many bags of meal, the "Golden Hind" was got afloat again, ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris

... But this interpretation does not reach the climax of absurdity till our Rationalist Punch, by way of signalizing his deliverance from Egyptian bondage, makes Pharaoh and his army forget that the tide ebbs and flows in the Red Sea, raises the tide over a shoal faster than cavalry could gallop from it, gathers an annual crop of twenty millions of bushels of manna from the thorn-bushes of Sinai, and feeds three millions of men, women, and children for forty years upon ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... days the party had completed all preparations and Bivens's big steamer, the Buccaneer, slipped quietly through the Narrows and headed for the Virginia coast, towing a trim little schooner built for cruising in the shoal waters ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon

... really a land of miracles, a man came running up to the encampment with the unexpected and joyful tidings that "millions of sea-cows had come on shore." The crew climbed over the ledge of rocks that flanked their tents, and the sight of a shoal of manatees immediately beneath them gladdened their hearts. These came in with the flood, and were left in the puddles between the broken rocks of the cove. This supply continued for two or three weeks. The flesh was mere blubber, and quite unfit for food, for not a man could retain it on his ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park

... place appeared a likely one for salmon. Immediately on opening the inlet we encountered a rapid current setting outward, and, after rowing a mile and a half to the N.W.b.W., the breadth of the stream varying from one third of a mile to four or five hundred yards, came to some shoal water extending quite across. Landing on the south shore and hauling the boats up above high-water mark, we rambled up the banks of the stream, which are low next the water, but rise almost immediately to the height of about two hundred feet. As we proceeded we gradually ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... an ambush in every thicket, and to regard the broad, tranquil plain as a sailor eyes some shallow and perfidious sea, which, though smooth and safe to the eye, conceals the lurking rock or treacherous shoal. The very name of a Sioux became a watchword of terror. Not an elk, a wolf, or any other animal, could appear on the hills, but the boats resounded with exclamations from stem to stern, "voila les Sioux! voila les Sioux!" (there are the Sioux! there are the Sioux!) Whenever it was practicable, ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving

... few minutes that all his calculations as to his location were upset—the Montana plowed herself to a shuddering halt on a shoal, her bow lifting slightly. And when the engines were stopped she rested there, sturdily upright, steady as an island. But in her saloon the men and women who fought and screamed and cursed, beating to and fro in windrows of humanity like waves in a ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... the pilot assured him that the accident would not subject the vessel to half an hour's delay, for the tide was rising very rapidly. He had run her a little too near a shoal, while the Young America, by keeping in mid channel, had gone clear. There was nothing for the captain to do on deck, and he returned to his class. The Josephine came off the ground within the half hour, and by putting on more sail overhauled the ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic

... great travellers. I have heard that what is called a "shoal" of herrings consists of millions of fish, and takes up a place in the sea larger than the area of London. This fish takes its name from an old word which means an army; and the herring-army has to come a long, long march—if we so speak of a journey through "the paths of the ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham



Words linked to "Shoal" :   water, school, fish, change, shoaly, alter, animal group, body of water



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com