"Cowrie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... except that Kennedy McClure had been seen galloping eastward in frantic search of his carriage and horses. The former had been reported blown to flinders, and his two carefully matched horses killed by the bandits. So he was now riding in his shirt-sleeves, the cowrie shells at his watch fob clanging against the little bundle of keys he wore there. In his mind he was doing sums of which the main issues were, "What is the difference between the fifty pounds I have ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... (often taken for twigs), threads of sacking and other foreign matter, it is very carefully sieved and sorted before passing on to the roasting shop. In this process curios are occasionally separated, such as palm kernels, cowrie shells, shea butter nuts, good luck seeds and "crab's eyes." The essential part of one type of machine (see illustration) which accomplishes this sorting is an inclined revolving cylinder of wire ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... of the American multi-millionaires. They are doomed to carry about with them a huge load of gold which they cannot disperse. They are no wiser than the savages, who hide and hoard their little heaps of cowrie-shells. They might as well have filled their treasuries with flint-stones or scraps of iron. They muster their wealth merely to become its slave. They are rich not because they possess imagination, but because they lack it. Their bank-books are the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... received, because he brought much wealth with him. His old associates flocked around him rejoicing; and he fell into the same courses which had beggared him before. Gambling and debauchery soon blunted his passions, and emptied his purse. Again his boon companions, finding him without a broken cowrie, drove him from their doors, he stole and was flogged for theft; and lastly, half famished, he fled the city. Then he said to himself, "I must go to my father-in-law, and make the excuse that a grandson has been born to him, and that I have come ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... manioc, and near each of these I observed, for the first time, an ugly idol common in Londa—the figure of an animal, resembling an alligator, made of clay. It is formed of grass, plastered over with soft clay; two cowrie-shells are inserted as eyes, and numbers of the bristles from the tail of an elephant are stuck in about the neck. It is called a lion, though, if one were not told so, he would conclude it to be an alligator. It stood in a shed, and the Balonda ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Guinea savage wants to take passage aboard a Qantas airliner, what is the fare in cowrie shells? ...
— A World by the Tale • Gordon Randall Garrett |
