E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • More 'Raft' Quotes from Famous Books

... strong and massive rafts were joined together until they extended two hundred feet into the river, being kept in their place by cables fastened to trees on the bank above them. At the end of this floating pier was placed another raft of immense size, capable of carrying four elephants at a time. A thick covering of earth was laid over the whole, and on this turf was placed. The ...

— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... meat pack slipped, going along one of those high trails, and scared the mule, and in trying to kick himself free the beast fell off the trail—mule and meat both gone. They got tired of carrying their stuff and made a raft to float it down the river, and lost that! Paul has been much better off in camp than he would have been with them. So cheer up, my girl, and think how you'd like to have your bridegroom ...

— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote

... up within ten days like shipwrecks on a raft," Martin Leland said when he managed to make a trip back to the ranch in December. "We're in for a hard winter. I wouldn't be surprised if I couldn't get in again or you get out before well on into February ...

— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... little hatchet cut down trees enough—not apple trees—to make a raft, on which they adventured; but in mid-stream Washington's pole upset him, and he was fain to get ashore on an island. There must they pass the night; and so cold was it, that the next morning they were able to reach the mainland dry shod, on the ice. What was crossing the Delaware (almost ...

— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... spring drive." Maine waters in spring flow under an illimitable raft. Every camp contributes its myriads of brown cylinders to the millions that go bobbing down rivers with jaw-breaking names. And when the river broadens to a lake, where these impetuous voyagers might be stranded or ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... heavy hammer of the cathedral struck one, the first boat emerged from the willows, and darting rapidly forward, headed for the middle of the stream; another and another in quick succession followed, and speedily were lost to us in the gloom; and now, two four-oared skiffs stood out together, having a raft, with two guns, in tow; by some mischance, however, they got entangled in a side current, and the raft swerving to one side, swept past the boats, carrying them down the stream along with it. Our attention was not suffered to dwell on this ...

— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... emergency ration-cask put aboard each, and Mr. MacMasters brought his instruments and papers, taking his place in the stern of the boat. The latter had a small engine, and there was a hawser with which she might tow the raft. ...

— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson

... collect a good crop. It is called "the day of the poor." The goemon grows on rocks at a distance from the shore, and the peasants not having sufficient boats to collect it tie the heaps together with cords on to branches of trees and form a raft, on which the whole family is launched; a barrel is attached at the end, and the unsteady craft often rolls over and its cargo is precipitated into the water. The fine sands of the sea shore are also carted and laid on the heavy lands to divide the soil. Ascending ...

— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser

... turn. But she steadily refused to be separated from Ossoli and Angelo. On a raft with them, she would have boldly encountered the surf, but alone she would not go. Probably, she had appeared to assent to the plan for escaping upon planks, with the view of inducing Mrs. Hasty to trust herself to the care of the best man on board; very possibly, also, she had never ...

— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... hither, Johnny; come hither." The river was wide, but we were hungry. The roastingears looked tempting. We pulled off our clothes and launched into the turbid stream, and were soon on the other bank. Here was the field, and here were the roastingears; but where was the raft or canoe? ...

— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins

... convenient form of rations, since every army travels on its stomach and can't go faster than its impedimenta. The last notable mention of cheese in war was the name of the Monitor: "A cheese box on a raft." ...

— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown

... Vishnu, Father Boushet mentions an Indian tradition, concerning a flood which covered the whole earth, when Vishnu made a raft, and, being turned into a fish, steered it with his tail. Vishnu, like Dagon, was represented under the figure ...

— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent

... to me that the reasonings of the Indians are not always infallible; and if it were not that we shall receive a shower of balls, to force us to stay hidden while the islet takes fire, I should care as little for that burning raft as for a fire-fly in ...

— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid

... waved his hand airily. "Oh, a few retrenchments where things were useless; nothing gained by a raft of idle darkies in the stable—nor by a lot of extra land that might as well be put to work for us in rentals. And if you want this thing ...

— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... said Altman, "why would it not be wise to cross the river at this point, or make the rest of the journey through the Ohio woods? We who know how to swim can take over those who cannot, or better, perhaps, construct a raft upon which to ...

— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis

... to the tune of they-'avn't-found-'im-yet, they-'avn't-found-'im-yet-they 'avn't. The skipper and crew rose, fumbling at his feet for a rope. There did not seem to be much of the Lizzie. She was but a little raft to drift out on those tides which move among the stars. "Now's your chance," said her crew, and I took it, on all fours. The last remnant of London was then pushed from us with a pole. We were launched on night, which had ...

— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... laughed Dick. "It has already struck you that we can fell a few small trees and build a raft on which we can tow a few hundred pounds of ...

— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock

... of the 26th ultimo which was delivered to me by Overseer Burnett on the 5th of this month, who arrived at the moment the first boatload from the camp reached the opposite bank of the Murray. By means of casks we floated the drays over the three rivers and, after two experiments with a raft, both partial failures, and while a third raft was in progress, of a more solid and better construction, we discovered that a canoe, of very large dimensions and paddled by the native boy Tommy, would prove the most expeditious as well ...

— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... said to have originated in the cele- brated French painting by Gericault, "the Wreck of the Medusa," now in the Louvre gallery. The Medusa was a French frigate wrecked off the coast of Africa in 1816. Some of the survivors, escaping on a raft, were rescued by a passing ship after many days of torture. Verne, however, seems also to have drawn upon the terrifying experiences of the British ship Sarah Sands in 1857, her story being fresh in the public mind at the time he wrote. The Sarah ...

— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne

... 'Why, then, to raft the trees together when we get 'em into the water,' was his reply; and in the same breath he jumped on to the trunk, and commenced to notch with his axe as fast as possible along the sides, about two feet apart. Another of his gang followed, splitting off the blocks ...

— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... abbreviated bathing suit, with water wings fastened to her back. She walked rapidly into the sea, and, perforce, he followed. Miss Wilder shouted orders in vain from the shore. The tide was running in, and nearly high, so she was over her depth in a second, but she paddled out toward the distant raft, her head well out of the water, thanks to her wings. Much amused, Wally swam beside her into ...

— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke

... that he is sailing, perhaps without a set course, on an unstable and sinkable raft, must not be dismayed if the raft gives way beneath his feet and threatens to sink. Such a one thinks that he acts, not because he deems his principle of action to be true, but in order to make ...

— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... boyish companions and myself set to work to build a raft for fishing purposes out of some old and discarded blue gum rails which were lying along the bank of the river. Boy-like, we utterly disregarded our parents' admonition to put on our boots, and, aided by a couple of blackfellows, we moved about the long grass on our bare ...

— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... line. We now got our bait ready. On this occasion it was a live tame duck. Passing the bend of the hook round its neck, and the shank under its right wing, we tied the hook in this position with thread. We then made a small raft of the soft pith of the plantain-tree, tied the duck to the raft and committed it to the stream. Holding the rope as clear of the water as we could, the poor quacking duck floated slowly down the muddy current, making an occasional ...

— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... taken up by the rest. There was a chance of life. Devereux gave orders that a raft should ...

— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston

... broke, but I could see that we were on the brink of a deep and broad river, which we were preparing to cross, but how, I could not discover, for I could see no bridge, but only something like a raft moored by the margin of the stream. On this frail craft we embarked, horses, diligence, passengers, and all; and, launching out upon the impetuous current, we reached, after a short navigation, the opposite shore. The river we had crossed was the Po, and the craft which had carried us over ...

— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... a bit of old wreckage," said the other. "Anyway, it wasn't another vessel, and it was too dark for a lumber raft." ...

— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)

... "you and Greg get some of the fellows and rush down as many ties as you can from that pile by the railroad tracks. Dalzell, you and Harry get down at the edge of send him your way. Make a raft by laying four ties side by side, and lash the ends. Do it as quick as a flash. I'll be there ...

— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock

... first deemed totally uninhabited, and filled with the hope that the stranger might be able to give him some information relative to the geographical position of the isle, and even perhaps aid him in forming a raft by which they might together escape from the oasis of the Mediterranean, Wagner proceeded toward the mountains. By degrees the wondrous beauty of the scene became wilder, more imposing, but less bewitching, and when he reached ...

— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... and Their Children Epitaphs for Two Players I. Edwin Booth II. John Bunny, Motion Picture Comedian Mae Marsh, Motion Picture Actress Two Old Crows The Drunkard's Funeral The Raft The Ghosts of the Buffaloes The Broncho that Would Not Be Broken The Prairie Battlements The Flower of Mending Alone in the Wind, on the Prairie To Lady Jane How I Walked Alone in the ...

— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay

... and put it in my mind to go to the bank of the river which ran into the great cavern. Considering its probable course with great attention, I said to myself, "This river, which runs thus under ground, must somewhere have an issue. If I make a raft, and leave myself to the current, it will convey me to some inhabited country, or I shall perish. If I be drowned, I lose nothing, but only change one kind of death for another; and if I get out of this fatal place, ...

— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous

... The Master was wishing Ch'i-tiao K'ai to enter on official employment. He replied, 'I am not yet able to rest in the assurance of THIS.' The Master was pleased. CHAP. VI. The Master said, 'My doctrines make no way. I will get upon a raft, and float about on the sea. He that will accompany me will be Yu, I dare say.' Tsze-lu hearing this ...

— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge

... my life-preserver for several hours," he said, "then I came across a big oak dresser with two men clinging to it. I hung on to this till daybreak and the two men dropped off. When the sun came up I saw the collapsible raft in the distance, just black with men. They were all standing up, and I swam to it—almost a mile, it seemed to me—and they would not let me aboard. Mr. Lightoller, the second officer, was ...

— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various

... gazes on the past, the light spreads not over all the breadth of the waste where nations have battled and argosies gone down,—it falls narrow and confined along the single course we have taken; we lean over the small raft on which we float, and see the sparkles but reflected from the waves ...

— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... hung over the latter, avoided being sucked into the whirlpool, and by-and-by came to land in the island of the nymph Calypso, who kept him eight years, but he pined for home all the time, and at last built a raft on which to return. Neptune was not weary of persecuting him, and raised another storm, which shattered the raft, and threw Ulysses on the island of Scheria. Here the king's fair daughter Nausicaa, going down to the stream with her maidens ...

— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge

... worked diligently with the men to set up some fifty feet of the fence where it parted us from an alley- way, for I wanted a chance to dry some of the boards, which had just been hauled from a raft in the North River. The truckmen had delivered them helter- skelter, and they lay, still soaking, above each other on our ...

— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... Homeward the suitor-train retrace their way." He spake, and turned to Hermes, his dear son: "Hermes, for thou, in this, my messenger Art, as in all things, to the bright-haired nymph Make known my steadfast purpose, the return Of suffering Ulysses. Neither gods Nor men shall guide his voyage. On a raft, Made firm with bands, he shall depart and reach, After long hardships, on the twentieth day, The fertile shore of Scheria, on whose isle Dwell the Pheacians, kinsmen of the gods. They like a god shall honor him, and thence Send him to his loved country in a ship, ...

— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... and fall. But when the winter freshets come on and the snow begins to melt in the spring up in the Yola Bolas, where the San Hedrin has its source, we'll have plenty of water for driving the river. Once we get the logs down to tide-water, we'll raft them and tow them up to the mill. So you see, Bryce, we won't be bothered with the expense of maintaining a logging railroad, ...

— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne

... upon them the boy was being carried down the stream. His peril was extreme, for below as well as above the fire was sweeping down on either side of the mill, and it was a question of minutes, almost of seconds, whether the bridge-raft would pass down the river before the fire struck or whether it ...

— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... witness to such cruelties by an overseer to a slave, that he twice attempted to drown himself, to get out of his power: this was on a raft of slaves, in the Mobile river. I saw an owner take his runaway slave, tie a rope round him, then get on his horse, give the slave and horse a cut the whip, and run the poor creature barefooted, very fast, over rough ground, where small black jack oaks had been cut up, leaving the sharp stumps, ...

— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... to which the above odd name has been given by its inventor, M. Donato Tommasi, of Paris, France, is a combination of a boat wholly submerged with a raft: a connecting link, to borrow the naturalist's expression, between the submerged torpedo boat and the monitor. The advantages which are expected to be realized from this hybrid craft, the inventor describes as follows: "It is evident that a vessel, plunged several yards below the surface of ...

— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various

... information on this subject, states that it is especially in the Southern Moluccas that the placenta is mixed with ashes and hung in a tree. Wider spread is the custom of placing the after-birth on a small bamboo raft in a river "in order that it may be caught by crocodiles, incarnations of the ancestors, who will guard it till the person to whom it has belonged dies. Then the soul of the placenta is once more united with that of the dead man, and together they go to the realms of the dead. During lifetime ...

— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon

... life was marked by a sort of patriarchal simplicity. Manual labor was not yet thought to be degrading. Ulysses constructs his own house and raft, and boasts of his skill in swinging the scythe and guiding the plow. Spinning and weaving were the chief occupations of ...

— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... boys and girls deriving also a little fun from their immersion. Here and there the bathing ghaut is diversified by a burning ghaut, and one may catch a glimpse of the extremities of the corpse twisting among the faggots. Here and there is a boat or raft in which a priest is seated under his umbrella, fishing for souls as men in punts on the Thames fish for roach. And over all is the pitiless sun, hot even now, before breakfast, ...

— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas

... little sooner," observed Boone, musingly, "we'd ha' saved some o' the varmints the trouble of paddling over thar; or ef we only had the means o' crossing now, we'd be upon 'em afore they war aware on't. Howsomever, as it is, I suppose we'll have to make a raft to cross on, and so give the red heathen a ...

— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett

... one in the afternoon, a great sight was to be seen in the middle of the Niemen. A raft had been placed midstream in plain view from both banks of the river. All the rich stuffs that could be found in the little town of Tilsitt had been taken to make a pavilion on a part of this raft for the reception of the Emperors of France and Russia. From one bank Napoleon embarked with Murat, ...

— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand

... weavers, finding the flat and so-called loess territory too confined for their ever-increasing numbers, threw out colonies wherever attraction offered, and wherever the riverine systems gave them easy access; whether by boat and raft; or whether—as seems more probable, owing to the scanty mention of boat-travel—by simply following the low levels sought by the streams, and tilling on their way such pasturages as they found by the river-sides. When it is said that the earliest Chinese we know ...

— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... is near, also. Pa Field-Mouse has built us a small raft of dried mushrooms and sometimes we go sailing across the water. Pa and Nimble-toes are down by the pond, gathering seeds. When they come home, Nimble-toes shall show the dear ...

— The Graymouse Family • Nellie M. Leonard

... get up the stairs today," said Tilly—she was putting her jacket and hat away in her orderly fashion; of necessity her back was to Mrs. Louder—"there was such a raft of people wanting to send stuff and messages to you. You are just working yourself to death; and, mother, I am convinced we ...

— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet

... nature indulged in the vision of a regenerated Europe, divided between himself as emperor of the east and Napoleon as emperor of the west. It is therefore far from surprising that he should have held a private interview with Napoleon, on a raft in the Niemen, which led to the treaty ...

— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... Boisverd, Wright and Delorier took their stations at the four corners, to hold it together, and swim across with it; and in a moment more, all our earthly possessions were floating on the turbid waters of the Big Blue. We sat on the bank, anxiously watching the result, until we saw the raft safe landed in a little cove far down on the opposite bank. The empty wagons were easily passed across; and then each man mounting a horse, we rode through the stream, the stray animals ...

— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... marsh was, indeed, one of the finest views I have ever seen. I suppose Dungeness was fifteen miles away; it lay like a raft on the sea, and farther westward were the hills by Hastings under the setting sun. Sometimes they hung close and clear, sometimes they were faded and low, and often the drift of the weather took them clean out of sight. And all the nearer parts of the marsh were ...

— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... of two companies of the 4th Sikhs, and the Devonshire Regiment Maxim gun, were sent across after much labour by means of a little skin raft that only held two at a time. The near bank was also sungared and held by the 2nd Brigade and the Derajat mountain battery, which at eight hundred yards' range could fire over the heads of those at the bridge-head. Several officers of ...

— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband

... blue summits of those hills before! Flowing yet nearer to him was the noble river Rhine, winding onward to the north, and bearing on its bosom many a little skiff which scudded quickly before the evening breeze, or raft of timber which floated slowly down its stream. How often had the stranger sailed in such little barks upon its surface, or bathed and fished in its waters! At his feet lay the little cluster of cottages which formed the village of Steinheim; and amid its clustering trees and vineyards, ...

— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick

... occasional dip. It meanwhile fairly overtakes and arrests me here as a contributive truth that our general medium of life in the situation I speak of was such as to make a large defensive verandah, which seems to have very stoutly and completely surrounded us, play more or less the part of a raft of rescue in too high a tide—too high a tide there beneath us, as I recover it, of the ugly and the graceless. My particular perspective may magnify a little wildly—when it doesn't even more weirdly diminish; but I read into the great hooded and guarded resource ...

— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... over his subordinates, his mastery of the river; the variegated colours of that lawless, picturesque, semi-barbarous life of the river—all these sweep by us in a series of panoramic pictures as Huck's raft swings lazily down the tawny river, and Horace Bixby guides his boat through the dangers of the channel. Mark Twain is primarily a great artist, only unconsciously a true sociologist. But his power as a sociologist is no less real that it is unconscious, ...

— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... King, seeking to know by what means the sufferings of his people may be relieved, learns that so long as Rishyacringa continues chaste so long will the drought endure. An old woman, who has a fair daughter of irregular life, undertakes the seduction of the hero. The King has a ship, or raft (both versions are given), fitted out with all possible luxury, and an apparent Hermit's cell erected upon it. The old woman, her daughter and companions, embark; and the river carries them to a point not far from the ...

— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... the boat-house well, the pleasant dimness of it on hot summer days; how the varnished boats lay side by side all down its length, and how the light canoes rested against the walls as it were on shelves. How, when the big doors were opened on to the raft and the slowly moving river without, bright circles of sunlight, reflected from the running water, would fly in and dance on wall and roof. She stood there in the dimness, while Maxwell lifted down a large canoe and, opening one of the barred doors, took it out to the water. ...

— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... 26th Septr. 1805 Set out early and proceeded on down the river to a bottom opposit the forks of the river on the South Side and formed a Camp. Soon after our arrival a raft Came down the N. fork on which was two men, they came too, I had the axes distributed and handled and men apotned. ready to commence building canoes on tomorrow, our axes are Small & badly Calculated to build Canoes of the large Pine, Capt Lewis Still very unwell, ...

— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... called now—Twin Spring Mines. Already men were at work on the new lode, and doing placer digging for the free gold in the soil. Wooden rails were laid to the edge of the stream, and over it the small, rude car was pushed with the new ore down to a raft on which a test load had been drifted to the immense crusher at the works on Lake Kootenai. And the test had resulted so favorably that the new strike at Twin Springs was considered by far the richest ...

— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan

... all but totally consumed every stick of timber covering a space of forty-five miles by twenty-five; and the value of what was thus destroyed may be partially estimated, when it is considered that one good raft of timber is worth from three to five thousand pounds. These rafts, which are seen dotted about the lake in every direction, have a very pretty effect, with their little distinguishing flags floating ...

— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... they rode the logs, and when the tide began to come in, they had the best time of all. It picked up the little raft and floated the children, screaming with joy, far up the beach on a ...

— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... far from the truth. The matter really was a new line, invented by M. Jupille, cast a little further than an ordinary one, and rigged up with a float like a raft, carrying a little clapper. The fish rang their own knell as they ...

— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... the wall and took down the banner of St. Pierre Boulain. "St. Pierre is behind us," she explained. "He is coming down with a raft of timber such as we can not get in our country, and we are waiting for him. But each day we must float down with the stream a few miles nearer the homes of my people. It makes them happier, even though it is but a few miles. ...

— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood

... "Lads, I've bad news, bad and good news together. The boats are gone—though who the devil destroyed them we don't know—and now the wireless is destroyed. The boats are a big loss, for now we'll have to rig up some sort of a raft to make shore when we beach the Heron. The busting of the wireless almost balances that loss. Now we're sure they can't slip out any quick wireless call that would bring a dozen ships after us. Bad news and good news together; and here's some more ...

— Harrigan • Max Brand

... After all, am I to believe your unsubstantiated story or the evidence of a whole raft of witnesses, the police detail, the accident squad, and the guys who hauled you out of a burning car before it blew up? As I was saying, how can we credit much of your tale when you raved about one man lifting the car and the other hauling ...

— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... time in hope of being seen by a ship, they made a raft from the remains of the wreck, and eight of the crew set off in it to try to reach Tristan, but were never heard of again, poor fellows. A few weeks later a second and successful attempt was made. The men reached Tristan, but in a very exhausted state. Then the Tristanites, led by Corporal ...

— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow

... use the old wreck was likely to be to him was in affording materials for a raft by which he might find his ...

— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger

... I travelled twenty-three times through various parts of the vast northern woods, between Maine and Alaska, and covered thousands upon thousands of miles by canoe, pack-train, snowshoes, bateau, dog-train, buck-board, timber-raft, prairie-schooner, lumber-wagon, and "alligator." No one trip ever satisfied me, or afforded me the knowledge or the experience I sought, for traversing a single section of the forest was not unlike making one's way along a single street of a metropolis and then trying to persuade oneself ...

— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... ceremonies connected with death we learn very little except that the women discard their arm beads, the mourners don old clothing, and all wail for the dead (pp. 44, 90). Three times we are told that the deceased is placed on a tabalang, or raft, on which a live rooster is fastened before it is set adrift on the river. In the tales the raft and fowl are of gold, but this is surprising even to the old woman Alokotan, past whose home in Nagbotobotan all these rafts must ...

— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole

... situation when on a Sunday at the end of July a Negro boy at a bathing beach near Twenty-sixth Street swam across an imaginary segregation line. White boys threw rocks at him, knocked him off a raft, and he was drowned. Colored people rushed to a policeman and asked him to arrest the boys who threw the stones. He refused to do so, and as the dead body of the Negro boy was being handled, more rocks were thrown on both sides. The trouble thus engendered spread through ...

— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... now." Kittie was off like a flash, and when she came back, there were three or four logs lying ready for use, with some planks and a long pole, and Mr. Bering with coat off, fell to work with a will and such speed, that in ten minutes, a small raft lay in the water, and Mr. Dering was making preparations for his voyage, by pulling off his boots and tucking ...

— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving

... of his staff, the reptiles which infested the island, and then forced the sea to wash away their foul remains. Here, to please his sister, Sainte-Marguerite, a cherry tree burst into full bloom every month; here he threw his cloak upon the waters and it became a raft, which bore him safely to visit the neighbouring island; here St. Patrick received from St. Just the staff with which he imitated St. Honorat by driving all reptiles from Ireland. Pillaged by Saracens and pirates, the island was made all the more precious by the blood ...

— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... powder—aroused no enthusiasm; but the unexpected production of a large tin of Devonshire cream, contributed by Captain Bobby Little, relieved the canned peaches of their customary monotony. Last of all came a savoury—usually described as the savoury—consisting of a raft of toast per person, each raft carrying an abundant cargo of fried potted meat, and provided with a passenger in the shape of ...

— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)

... encounter with the bully, and how I had received the wound. I could not help remarking a strange expression that marked the features of Gayarre as I spoke. He was all attention, and when I told of the raft of chairs, and expressed my conviction that they would not support the steward a single moment, I fancied I saw the dark eyes of the avocat flashing with delight! There certainly was an expression in them ...

— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... poor Sainte-Beuve's funeral. How the little band diminishes! How the few survivors of the Medusa's raft are disappearing! ...

— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... country, and this led to his story. Lukerenga came from the west a long time ago to the River Lualaba. He had with him a little dog. When he wanted to pass over he threw his mat on the water, and this served as a raft, and they crossed the stream. When he reached the other side there were rocks at the landing place, and the mark is still to be seen on the stone, not only of his foot, but of a stick which he cut with his ...

— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... who it is," then suddenly catching herself, turned away. The region in which he struck the Little Tennessee river, was strongly Union, and the people would have betrayed him to a certainty, if they had discovered who he was. The river was guarded at every point, and there was no boat or raft upon it, which was not in possession of the enemy. He was, in this vicinity, joined by some thirty nomadic Confederates, and they set to work and constructed a raft for him to ...

— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke

... boats were taken away from the other side of the river, but these men were so frightened that they ran down the bank till they came opposite the Isle of Orleans. Then making a kind of raft with a few logs they got over to the Island. There they found boats which took them to the city. And they immediately spread the news of what they ...

— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance

... Indian gardens; at eight went on; at ten reached the first portage, passed it in an hour; went on till one o'clock; afterwards passed two other portages of about three hundred yards each; and went on to the great raft of flood wood, being the fourth portage, where we encamped at three o'clock, at its head. Mosquitoes very annoying. Estimate our distance at ...

— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... naturally from the first. They are always on the look-out. This does not mean that they are industrious. I stated in a previous article my belief that as a rule successful men are not particularly industrious. A man on a raft with his shirt for a signal cannot be termed industrious, but he will keep his eyes open for a sail on the horizon. If he simply lies down and goes to sleep he may miss the chance of his life, in a very special sense. The man with the talent ...

— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett

... floated down the Ohio with his father on a raft, which bore the family and all their possessions to the shore of Indiana; and, child as he was, he gave help as they toiled through dense forests to the interior of Spencer county. There, in the land of free labor, he grew up in a log-cabin, with the solemn solitude for his teacher in his meditative ...

— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft

... walking roads as Michelet picturesquely calls them. And strolling on the banks of the canal here you may be startled by an astonishing sight, you see folks walking, or apparently walking, on water. Standing bolt upright on a tiny raft, carefully maintaining their balance, country people are towed from one ...

— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... struck him at that moment. A lieutenant, who had accompanied him, then took the command, and continued to fight the ship. A youth of seventeen, by name Villemoes, particularly distinguished himself on this memorable day. He had volunteered to take the command of a floating battery, which was a raft, consisting merely of a number of beams nailed together, with a flooring to support the guns: it was square, with a breast-work full of port-holes, and without masts—carrying twenty-four guns, and one hundred and twenty men. With ...

— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey

... marine deities were incorruptible. It was not possible to starch the sea; and precisely as the stiffness fastened upon men, it vanished from ships. What had once been a mere raft, with rows of formal benches, pushed along by laborious flap of oars, and with infinite fluttering of flags and swelling of poops above, gradually began to lean more heavily into the deep water, to sustain a gloomy weight of guns, to draw back its spider-like ...

— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... have died of thirst. Moreover, the waters thereabouts are full of sharks, and the evening was so squally that our stranded boat was raised and banged with every wave. We could scarcely move, and the other boat was nowhere in sight. And now it grew dark. At this stage I began to build a raft of spars and old pieces of wood, that might at all ...

— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various

... begin to gather together the pieces of drift-wood that the peaceful waves throw up on to the shore. They are evidently planning to make a raft; but as one of them casts his lazy eyes in the direction in which ours were at first thrown, he exclaims with evident joy, in his native French "Voila les vaisseaux!" or words to that effect, for he ...

— The Junior Classics • Various

... accustomed to run across the Channel, load up with the usual contraband, and then hover about outside the limits of the land. When they were convinced that the coast was clear of any cruisers they would run into the bay and land, sink or raft their ...

— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton

... his operations and bring out the ultimate prosperous result, Jordan threw one-half of his land into market and forced the sale at five dollars an acre. The proceeds of this sale did not last him over six months. Then he got a raft afloat, containing about a thousand dollars' worth of lumber, and sent it off under charge of his overseer, who sold it at Cincinnati, and ...

— Lessons in Life, For All Who Will Read Them • T. S. Arthur

... Stafford and her 3 children were being rowed across the Potomac River to attend a Baptist church in Virginia of which she was a member. Suddenly a wind and a thunder storm arose causing the boat to capsize. My father was fishing from a log raft in the river, immediately went to their rescue. The wind blew the raft towards the centre of the stream and in line with the boat. He was able without assistance to save the whole family, diving into the river to rescue Mrs. Stafford ...

— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Maryland Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... had now to be filled to the depth of three feet with a bed of water, intended to support a water-tight wooden disc, which worked easily within the walls of the projectile. It was upon this kind of raft that the travelers were to take their place. This body of water was divided by horizontal partitions, which the shock of the departure would have to break in succession. Then each sheet of the water, from the lowest to the highest, ...

— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... making at a raft, With little hope in such a rolling sea, A sort of thing at which one would have laughed,[112] If any laughter at such times could be, Unless with people who too much have quaffed, And have a kind of wild and horrid glee, Half epileptical, and half hysterical:— Their ...

— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... (flat and extended, backs upward) evenly and horizontally toward the left, terminating the movement by turning hands almost perpendicularly upward at wrist, thus arresting them suddenly—the ice-raft ...

— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... intimate friend of his. Then he asked me a whole raft of questions about fellows in the neighbourhood I didn't know he'd ever heard of. Say, he wants to go from Leith to ...

— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the strand between the thickets and the sea, reached the inlet at midnight, and again, like a savage, ambushed himself on the bank. Day broke, and he could plainly see the French on the farther side. They had made a raft, which lay in the water ready for crossing. Menendez and his men showed themselves, when, forthwith, the French displayed their banners, sounded drums and trumpets, and set their sick and starving ranks in array of battle. But the Adelantado, regardless ...

— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... the cottage for me, and now all I wanted was to get on board of the Splash. My skiff was destroyed, and my pursuer would not permit me to build a raft. I could have swum off to her; but the water might injure, if not ruin, the priceless document in my pocket. Tom was at my heels, and all I could do was ...

— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic

... white gown pinned very high. She is standing in a pond, with the water well over her knees. One hand keeps her balance with a pole, the other grasps a streamer of water-weed. Floating beyond her upon some kind of raft is a man, bareheaded also, in a white sweater with a rolling collar. His face is shadowed—you can see that his hair, black and straight, falls over his eyes. He is raking up the weed with his hand, his arm bare to the shoulder. Below is written, in a round, ...

— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... the rising waters led Zeke to mount the pilot-house. The lanterns shed a flickering light here, and the youth uttered a cry of joy as his eyes fell on the life-raft. The shout was lost in the hissing of steam as the sea rushed in on the boilers. All the lights were extinguished now, save the running lamps with their containers of oil. Quickly, the noise from the boiler-room ...

— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily

... To reach the Tinguians, it is necessary to have recourse to a slight skiff, that can easily pass through the current and the most shallow parts. My guide and my lieutenant soon contrived to make a small raft of bamboos; when it was finished we embarked, Alila and myself, our guide refusing to accompany us. After much trouble and fatigue, casting ourselves often into the water to draw our raft along, we at length got clear of the first range of mountains, and perceived, in a small plain, the first ...

— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere

... near the fire, from time to time I swept the horizon with my marine glasses; but there was no sign of Kemper; no sail broke the far sweep of sky and water; nothing moved out there save when a wild duck took wing amid the dark raft of its companions to circle low above the ocean and settle at random, invisible again except when, at intervals, its white breast ...

— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... It was midsummer and we were rowing on the river; some thirty boats were crowded together under the bridge, when suddenly one of the occupants of a boat near mine threw up his hands and fell overboard. We immediately began diving for him, but in vain; some hours later the body was found under a raft. ...

— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... goods, forms the sum and substance of the wealth of an inhabitant of the southern land. In Wellesley's Islands, on the north coast of New Holland, the catalogue of a native's riches appears somewhat different, from his maritime position.[66] A raft, made of several straight branches of mangrove lashed together, broader at one end than at the other;—a bunch of grass at the broad end where the man sits to paddle,—a short net to catch turtle, or probably a young shark,—and their spears and paddles seem ...

— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... burn at leisure, they posted away for the river, driving their prisoners before them, and a march of three hours brought them to the mouth of the Mauvaisterre. Here they constructed a "raft", by tying half-a-dozen drift-logs together, and warning them that death would be the penalty of a return, they placed their prisoners upon it, pushed it into the middle of the stream, and set them adrift without oar or pole! Although this seems quite severe enough, ...

— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... of tba varying from one-half to two sacksful is put into a dugout and brought to the spot selected. Everybody comes provided with a fish spear, fishing bow, bolo, boat or raft, and conical traps[60] made for the occasion. The tba is then pounded as it lies in the boat, a little water being added. This process occupies the greater part of an hour, and is a very animated one, everybody being in high hopes of a grand feast. ...

— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... good idea in my head. I see how maybe I could get me and Jim rid of the frauds; get them jailed here, and then leave. But I didn't want to run the raft in the daytime without anybody aboard to answer questions but me; so I didn't want the plan to begin working till pretty late ...

— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... I made me a rough pole of a young tree-plant; and afterward, I lashed the two trees together with my belts and straps, and so had somewhat of a raft. ...

— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... upon a sleek, oily sea, but again it would sink down, settling over the top, shrouding the great yard, and finally frothing over the deck until even the water alongside had vanished from their view and they were afloat on a little raft in an ocean of vapor. A thin cold rain was falling, and the archers were crowded under the shelter of the overhanging poop and forecastle, where some spent the hours at dice, some in sleep, and many in trimming their ...

— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... since abandoned, it was necessary to build a raft of pine-logs wherewith to transport the baggage over the stream. They crossed in safety, and we can imagine that it was with no feelings of regret that they finally lost sight of the stream that had so persistently baffled them in all their attempts ...

— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc

... only a few days since Mother had said, "Never go on the raft, Bobby, unless Father or John is ...

— Bobby of Cloverfield Farm • Helen Fuller Orton

... the seas made him imagine a frightful famine, coming providentially like a thunder-clap to torture the enemy. He honestly believed that ten days of this maritime blockade would convert Germany into a group of shipwrecked sailors floating on a raft. This vision made him repeat his visits to the kitchen to gloat over his ...

— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... authority, which had been disregarded, and the shattered fragment of the Aspasia reassumed their rights of discipline and obedience to the last. In a few hours, sick, disabled, and wounded were all safely landed, and the raft which had been constructed returned to the wreck, to bring on shore whatever might ...

— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... a board raft, ten or twelve feet square. Cut a round hole in the center, eight or ten inches in diameter. Lie down on the raft with the face over the hole, covering the head with a coat or shawl, to exclude the light. ...

— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... seated on the raft's edge, swinging her stockinged legs in the green swells that swept steadily shoreward, modestly admitted that Selwyn was "sweet," particularly in a canoe on a moonlight night—in spite of her weighty mother ...

— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... my soul! Let 'im set sail, I say! Aren't you and me to be shipped on a raft for the English fort at the ...

— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... you had so much energy and strength in your little body," said Lydia, as Jean, with a shriek of enjoyment, drew herself on the raft and wiped ...

— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace

... information, derived through a black, that at a long distance beyond the settled districts some white men were living, and that the black had obtained a portion of their hair. The white men were described as being entirely naked, and as living upon a raft on a lake, supporting themselves by catching fish: that they had no firearms nor horses, but some great animals, which, from the description given by the native, were evidently camels. There could, therefore, be but little doubt as to this being Burke's ...

— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills

... Asia, and it would require no such statement to corroborate the opinion as that of an officer of the Hudson Bay Company, then resident in Ungava bay, who relates that in 1839 an Eskimo family crossed to Labrador from the northern shore of Hudson's straits on a raft of driftwood. Natives cross and recross Bering straits to-day on the ice and in primitive skin canoes, not unlike Cape Cod dories, which have not been improved in construction since the days of prehistoric ...

— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse

... the people who will discourage Mrs. Atterson," thought Hiram. "And he has an axe to grind. If I decide to take the job of making this farm pay, I'm going to have the agreement in black and white with Mrs. Atterson; for there will be a raft of Job's comforters, perhaps when we get settled on ...

— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... achenes, not likely to be recognized by every one. They belong to the arrowhead, Sagittaria, found in shallow ponds or slow streams. They are flattened, and on one edge, or both, and at the apex is a spongy ridge. Very likely, by this time, the reader has surmised that this serves the purpose of a raft to float the small seed within, which would sink at once if separated from the boat that grew on its margins. In this connection may be studied achenes of water plantain, Alisma, bur reed, cat-tail flag, arrow grass, ...

— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal

... employed the interval in causing to be constructed a sort of floating bridge, or long raft, by means of which he hoped to cross the moat, in despite of the resistance of the enemy. This was a work of some time, which the leaders the less regretted, as it gave Ulrica leisure to execute her plan of diversion in their favor, whatever that ...

— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester

... hundred feet long, and one hundred and forty feet in breadth. When in motion, a dozen boats and more precede them, carrying anchors and cables to guide and arrest their course. The navigation of a raft down the Rhine to Dort, in Holland, which is the place of their destination,[4] is a work of great difficulty. The skill of the German and Dutch pilots who navigate them, in spite of the abrupt turnings, the ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various

... on a raft. The pauper has a Boston cracker, resolves to keep it till the multimillionaire is beginning to starve, then make him pay $50,000 for it. Millionaire agrees. Pauper's cupidity rises, resolves to wait and get more; twenty-four hours later asks him a million for the ...

— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... on Monday accept the kind invitation of Commodore Foote, and go on board the Benton, his flag-ship, and make an inspection of the strange-looking craft. It is unlike anything you ever saw at Boston or New York. It is like a great box on a raft. The sides are inclined, made of stout oak timbers and plated with iron. You enter through a porthole, where you may lay your hand upon the iron lips of a great gun, which throws a ball nine inches in diameter. There are ...

— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin

... Emily in former days. It was the nature of the man to attach himself to something. When Emily was torn from him he took a substitute: as a man looks out for a crutch when he loses a leg, or lashes himself to a raft when he has suffered shipwreck. Latude had given his heart to a woman, no doubt, before he grew to be so fond of a mouse in the Bastille. There are people who in their youth have felt and inspired an heroic passion, and end by being happy in the caresses, or agitated ...

— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... away from him, still it is there, and still did he make it. You can't rob him of that, Mr. Harnish, with all your millions. It's the creative joy, and it's a higher joy than mere gambling. Haven't you ever made things yourself—a log cabin up in the Yukon, or a canoe, or raft, or something? And don't you remember how satisfied you were, how good you felt, while you were doing it and ...

— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... Dave, "you and Greg get some of the fellows and rush down as many ties as you can from that pile by the railroad tracks. Dalzell, you and Harry get down at the edge of send him your way. Make a raft by laying four ties side by side, and lash the ends. Do it as quick as a flash. I'll be there by ...

— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock

... reflectively, closing the breech of his gun. He had hauled his boat up an alligator-slide; now he shoved it off the same way, and pulling up his hip-boots, waded out, laid his gun in the stern, threw cartridge-sack and a dozen dead ducks after it, and embarked among the raft of wind-tossed ...

— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers

... the shock of these living battering-rams. But the huge beasts no sooner felt the English musket-balls than they turned round and rushed furiously away, trampling on the multitude which had urged them forward. A raft was launched on the water which filled one part of the ditch. Clive, perceiving that his gunners at that post did not understand their business, took the management of a piece of artillery himself, and cleared the raft in a ...

— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot

... the same at all times, whether it is moving with the scythe on the hill-slopes, or hewing the timber, or steering the raft down the river which is all effervescent with ice; whether it is drinking in the Gasthaus, or making love, or playing some mummer's part, or hating steadily and cruelly, or whether it is kneeling in spellbound subjection in the incense-filled church, or walking in the ...

— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... In urging my raft along the shore line of one of the stagnant lagoons one day I was surprised to find a broad rock jutting out from the shore, its upper surface some ten coprets above the water. Disembarking, I ascended it, and on examination ...

— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce

... the trunks into the water was, thanks to the natural rollers, not so hard as might have been anticipated. Ben and Frank managed the placing of the rollers, which were carried in front of the logs as fast as its hinder end cleared some of them. In this manner their "raft," if such it could be called, was ...

— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... stage of the journey other parties had much more trying experiences than ours. John Whitacre, afterward governor of Oregon, was the head of a party of nine that constructed a raft at The Dalles out of dry poles hauled from the adjacent country. While their stock was started out over the trail, their two wagons were put upon the raft. With the women and children in the wagons, perched on the provisions and bedding, the start ...

— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker

... stream," murmured Jack, with half a shudder, as he looked out upon the prodigious volume rushing southward like myriads of wild horses; "it seems to me no one can swim to the other shore, nor can a raft ...

— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis

... ought to be made an admiral. The crown prince, with peculiar felicity, instantly replied—"If, my lord, I were to make all my brave officers admirals, I should have no captains or lieutenants in my service." This heroic stripling had volunteered the command of a sort of raft, called a praam, carrying twenty-four guns, and a hundred and twenty men; on which, having pushed off from shore, in the fury of battle, he got under the stern of his lordship's ship, below the reach of the stern-chasers, and fired with considerable ...

— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison

... advised the girl, as he worked. "I've got quite a job ahead of me now, for I've got to build us a raft." ...

— The Magic of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... God ascends From his verdant spring to light, And his raft's direction bends At the goddess' word of might,— While the hours, all gently bound, Nimbly to their duty fly; Rugged trunks are fashioned round By her skilled ...

— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... not, undoubtedly Society is an old criminal: not much more advanced than the state of spiritual worship where bloody sacrifice was offered to a hungry Lord. But it has a case for pleading. We may liken it, as we have it now, to the bumping lumberer's raft; suitable along torrent waters until we come to smoother. Are we not on waters of a certain smoothness at the reflecting level?—enough to justify demands for a vessel of finer design. If Society is to subsist, it must ...

— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... aught I know, hundreds of miles from the wild upper sources of the river, passing down, down, between lines of forest, and sometimes a rough clearing, till here it floats by cultivated banks, and will soon pass by the village. Sometimes a long raft of boards comes along, requiring the nicest skill in navigating it through the narrow passage left by the mill-dam. Chaises and wagons occasionally go over the road, the riders all giving a passing glance at the dam, or perhaps ...

— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... out that he had to crawl to the water's edge and beg to be taken on, lest he should perish. The others grumbled, but Sverre would not listen to their complaints but bade them to take the man on. With his extra weight the raft sank till the water reached their knees. Though the raft threatened to go to the bottom Sverre kept a resolute face. A great fallen pine on the other side made a bridge up which the men clambered to safety, Sverre being the last to leave the raft. Scarcely had he done so ...

— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris

... of these men springs naturally from the first. They are always on the look-out. This does not mean that they are industrious. I stated in a previous article my belief that as a rule successful men are not particularly industrious. A man on a raft with his shirt for a signal cannot be termed industrious, but he will keep his eyes open for a sail on the horizon. If he simply lies down and goes to sleep he may miss the chance of his life, in a very special sense. The man with the talent to succeed is the man on the ...

— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett

... warning could reach those engaged in taking measures at Washington to prevent the spread of epidemic and infectious diseases in our stock, it would be "go slow." If the wishes of a few veterinarians are met and the demands of a raft of pauper lawyers and politicians are complied with, it will result in the creation of a half dozen commissions. Each one of them, as previous ones have done, will find sufficient reason for their continuance and reports ...

— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... effects of painting—quadrigae, warriors, arms, armor, vases, streams, all lifelike. Ascending to the hall of French paintings I spent an hour in studying one picture—La Meduse, by Gericault. It is a shipwrecked crew upon a raft in mid ocean. I gazed until all surrounding objects disappeared, and I was alone upon the wide Atlantic. Those transparent emerald waves are no fiction; they leap madly, hungering for their prey. That distended sail is filled with the lurid air. That dead man's foot hangs off in the seething ...

— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... over and over and over again. This concatenation had formed it, or that concatenation; the surrounding phenomena varied, but essentially it was always the same, like a dream place. The question was, would he turn his boat, or raft, or whatever was beneath him, or his own stroke as swimmer, and escape from this glassy place whose currents were yet but tendrils? He could do it; it was the Valley of Decision.... But so often, in all those lives whose bitter and sweet were distilled into this one, he had not done ...

— Foes • Mary Johnston

... be a prophet to be honored on two counts. They did make the trek to the river the next day, and there was a wealth of raft material marking the high-water level of the spring flood. The migrations McNeil had reported were still in progress, and the three men hid twice to watch the passing of small family clans. Once a respectably sized tribe, including wounded men, marched across ...

— The Time Traders • Andre Norton

... the Mobile Mop-Up, and the Far Rockaway Rock and the South Bend Bend. His friends would interfere—or the authorities would. He can go in swimming, it is true; but if he turns over and floats, people yell out that somebody has set the life raft adrift; and if he basks at the water's edge, boats will come in and try to dock alongside him; and if he takes a sun bath on the beach and sunburns, there's so everlasting much of him to be sunburned that he practically amounts to a conflagration. ...

— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb

... whose courtesy was manifest in all his actions, ordered a large raft to be floated in the middle of the river, upon which was constructed a room well covered in and elegantly decorated having two doors on opposite aides, each of which opened into an antechamber. The work could not have been better executed in Paris. The roof was surmounted by ...

— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... incoherently, with hoarse voice and quaking lips. She tried with all her might to free herself from his convulsive clutch—but he clung to her like a dying man would cling to the last breath of life—like a drowning man would cling to the raft on which he ...

— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... the work of unloading the wreck. There was an inlet or mouth of a creek not far from the place where they first landed, and, constructing a raft on the wreck and loading it with arms, provisions, ammunition and tools, they took advantage of the tide to float it in to shore. This was repeated daily for weeks. Clothing, sails, provisions of all kinds, half a hundred guns and as many pistols and cutlasses, with other weapons, tools, books, ...

— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick

... first pursuers, who quickly grew to a thick black fringe around the hill. Shells were falling. The heavens seemed to flower vengefully, with the Campanas knoll as the one focus. The adobe stockade crowning the top was soon packed with fugitives, until those within, like shipwrecked creatures on a raft, barred out those still coming. The whisper spread that in the town Miramon had been taken shot through the cheek after shooting many others. The panic grew. Men knew themselves at bay. They recognized the deathtrap. On the outlying heights the cannon had their range. ...

— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... arranged with Frederick William, by the terms of which he temporarily kept his strong places in Silesia and Pomerania; but his propositions for an alliance were incontinently rejected. Next day there was another meeting on the same raft, but this was tripartite, for the King of Prussia was present. Napoleon was blunt and imperious, reproaching Frederick William with the duplicity of his policy, vindictively (the descriptive word he used himself), and with emphasis, demanding Hardenberg's dismissal. ...

— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... pickled and dried roe of this fish is shipped to Wilmington and to Cincinnati. Wild-fowls abound, and the shooting is excellent. The fishermen say flocks of ducks seven miles in length have been seen on the waters of Bogue Sound. Canvas-backs are called "raft-ducks" here, and they sell from twelve to twenty cents each. Wild geese bring ...

— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop

... feed, seeing we could not remove them at present, we descended safely to our boat and gained the shore without any accident. Then having housed our treasures, we were for putting together a raft of the various planks and barrels that were knocking against the rocks, but as I knew this would take a good deal of time, I thought I would inspect the ship's boats, which, bottom upwards, were drifting about within a few ...

— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat

... She went down within a few minutes, although about a hundred men managed to reach the lifeboats and rafts. The weather was bitterly cold, and only one survivor lived to bring the news. He was picked up on a raft with fourteen dead companions and told an incoherent story that bore little relation to the truth. But it was only too easy to ...

— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... totally uninhabited, and filled with the hope that the stranger might be able to give him some information relative to the geographical position of the isle, and even perhaps aid him in forming a raft by which they might together escape from the oasis of the Mediterranean, Wagner proceeded toward the mountains. By degrees the wondrous beauty of the scene became wilder, more imposing, but less bewitching, and when he reached ...

— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... special category,' replied the other. 'All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes, the pretty ...

— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... cooped up within ten days like shipwrecks on a raft," Martin Leland said when he managed to make a trip back to the ranch in December. "We're in for a hard winter. I wouldn't be surprised if I couldn't get in again or you get out before well on ...

— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... orchards would be heavy with apples; there would be murmurs, and sweet scents; the old castle would stand out clear, high over the woods and the chalky-white river. There would be singing far away, and the churning of a distant steamer's screw; and perhaps on the water a log raft still drifting down in the blue light. There would be German voices talking. And suddenly tears oozed up in her eyes, and crept down through the powder on her cheeks. She raised her veil and dabbed at her face with a little, not-too-clean handkerchief, ...

— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... from that fact that I had somehow drifted further and further away from the coast. There was accordingly nothing to do but wait the chance of being sighted and picked up, and I set to work, as well as I could on my tiny raft, to chafe my limbs and get some warmth into my body. And never in my life did I bless the sun as I did that morning, for when he sprang out of bed in the northeast skies, it was with his full and hearty vigour of high springtide, and ...

— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher

... now?" thought the Candy Rabbit, as he was suddenly awakened by being jiggled and joggled about in the basket. "Am I at sea? Have I been taken on a ship, and am I crossing the ocean?" For that is what the motion was like—just the same as the Lamb of Wheels felt when she was on the raft. ...

— The Story of a Candy Rabbit • Laura Lee Hope

... breakfasts. Once a wide tow of coal-barges, loaded clear down to the gunwales, Gave us the slack of the current, with proper formalities shouted By the hoarse-throated stern-wheeler that pushed the black barges before her, And as she passed us poured a foamy cascade from her paddles. Then, as a raft of logs, which the spread of the barges had hidden, River-wide, weltered in sight, with a sudden jump forward the pilot Dropped his whole weight on the spokes of the wheel just in time to ...

— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... on that bright summer afternoon that our ship would within a week be wrecked among the Dry Tortugas, I should have laughed. Had anyone informed me that I should find myself alone on a raft in the Caribbean Sea, I should have gone ...

— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... on our journey through the great desert of Tartary, and came to the Boristhenes, which separates Tartary from Russia, and which is some miles broad[9]. As it was necessary to pass the river, our Tartars cut down some trees, the stems of which they fastened together into a raft, which was covered over by the branches, and upon which the whole of our baggage was placed. They fastened their horses by the tails to this raft, by which means it was dragged across the river, they themselves swimming along-side of their horses, and holding ...

— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr

... Indians, who had lain in wait for us. One of them fired at Mr. Gist or me, not fifteen steps off, but fortunately missed." The next day they came to a river. "There was no way of getting over but on a raft, ... but before we were half over we were jammed in the ice.... I put out my setting pole to try and stop the raft that the ice might pass by, when the rapidity of the stream threw it with such force against the pole, ...

— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... morning in my own boys' kitchen. Farther in the bush, huts, small patches of cultivation, and smoking ovens, have been found by hunters. There are still three runaways in the woods of Tutuila, whither they escaped upon a raft. And the Samoans regard these dark-skinned rangers with extreme alarm; the fourth refugee in Tutuila was shot down (as I was told in that island) while carrying off the virgin of a village; and tales of cannibalism run ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... dismantle the set, build a raft and set himself and the apparatus adrift upon the water in ...

— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman

... been spent. She walked leisurely, with the sedate tread of an elderly woman, and she carried on her arm a basket. She came down to the harbour; it was crowded with painted junks; her eyes rested for a moment curiously on a man who stood on a narrow bamboo raft, fishing with cormorants; and then she set about her business. She put down her basket on the stones of the quay, at the water's edge, and took from it a red candle. This she lit and fixed in a chink of the stones. Then she took several joss-sticks, held ...

— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... escaping somehow from the catastrophe to the menagerie ship, had swum for the same refuge Jack had chosen. Now it was dragging its brilliantly mottled body, as thick as a man's thigh, up upon the hatchway. The floating "raft" dipped under the great snake's weight, while Jack, literally petrified with horror, ...

— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton

... eight that included my two sisters, another girl, and four young men. The ball was at Big Rapids, which by this time had grown to be a thriving lumber town. It was impossible to get a team of horses or even a yoke of oxen for the journey, so we made a raft and went down the river on that, taking our party dresses with us in trunks. Unfortunately, the raft "hung up" in the stream, and the four young men had to get out into the icy water and work a long time before they could ...

— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw

... of getting to this island, for the sea-maiden would sink each boat and raft that would go on the loch. He thought he would try to leap the strait with the black horse, and even so he did. The black horse leaped the strait. He saw the hind; and he let the black dog after her, but when he was on one side of the island, the hind would be on the other side. "Oh! ...

— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various

... large lumber raft this morning, descending from Pittsburg to Cincinnati. The half-dozen men in charge were housed midway in a rude little shanty, and relieved each other at the sweeps—two at bow, and two astern. It is an easy, lounging life, ...

— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... shadowed slopes and threw belts of light upon the water—and these illuminated spots finely relieved the otherwise sombre depth of colour. Our boat was slow, and we had between two and three hours of unsurpassed scenery before reaching our destination. An immense raft of timber, gathered from the loose logs which are floated down the Lougen Elv, lay at the head of the lake, which contracts into the famous Guldbrandsdal. On the brow of a steep hill on the right lay the little town of Lillehammer, where ...

— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... that should he attempt to make his way overland he would, to a certainty, be re-taken. Finding a piece of wreck, with some broken oars, and other drift-wood, and a coil of rope, he contrived to put together a raft, on which seating himself, he shoved off, expecting to be picked up by some passing vessel. Instead of this, he was—fortunately for himself— discovered by the active coastguardmen, and brought back to prison. Had he succeeded in getting to a distance, in all probability he ...

— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston

... pleaded to deaf ears. But at length his promises of promotion and reward moved the man. "Come" he said "I will do my best," and, rising, led the way to his own house. Here in the inner room was a high machan—a huge bamboo shelf made like a raft and suspended from the roof and reached by a moveable ladder, used for storing all sorts ...

— Bengal Dacoits and Tigers • Maharanee Sunity Devee

... a short distance and concealed ourselves in a deep growth. To the sound of poles and paddles was added the murmuring of guttural voices. Then for a climax a raft struck against the bank and a low voice speaking Shawnee ...

— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter

... it was a bit of old wreckage," said the other. "Anyway, it wasn't another vessel, and it was too dark for a lumber raft." ...

— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)

... strokes and she would reach the boat, rest a moment, then, clinging to it, push it leisurely to shore. Feeling that the danger was over, she hurried on and was just putting up her hands to seize the frail raft and get her breath when Milly, thinking she was to be taken in her arms, leaned forward. In rushed the water, down went the boat, and out splashed the screaming child to cling to Ruth with ...

— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott

... to get on board again before the boat shoved off, resolved to stand by his ship to the last. To secure his safety should the fire-ships grapple the Tourville, he at once began constructing a raft. He had just completed it when an English boat approached, the crew of which were ignorant that the ship was abandoned. Bourgeois hailed her twice, but receiving no reply, fired a musket which he found at the gangway. This was returned, but the intrepid fellow, ...

— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... was the reply. "A number of logs broke loose from the raft and I had a hard time to collect them. There's a heavy ...

— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody

... stole a boat at Green River, Utah, and proceeded down the river. Soon after entering Cataract Canyon, they lost their boat and provisions. Finding a tent which had been washed down the river, they tore it into strips and constructed a raft out driftwood, tying the logs together with the strips of canvas. Days of hardship followed, and starvation stared them in the face; until finally Foote's partner gave up, said he would drown himself. With an oath Foote drew his revolver, saying he had enough of such cowardice ...

— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... On the slow weedy waterway he had floated on his raft coastward over Ireland drawn by a haulage rope past beds of reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs. Athlone, Mullingar, Moyvalley, I could make a walking tour to see Milly by the canal. Or cycle down. Hire some old crock, safety. Wren had one the other day at the auction ...

— Ulysses • James Joyce

... writer has defined it as a sort of transition between land and sea. Another, as an immense crust of earth floating on water. Others, an annex of the old continent, the China of Europe, the end of the earth, and the beginning of the ocean, a measureless raft of mud and sand; and Philip II. called it the country ...

— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various

... reluctantly, remembering the unbroken bill in her "upper drawer." "I do' know's I have a right to send them back. I didn't tell her how many, but—mercy on us!—who'd dream of such a raft! If there's one, there's forty, I ...

— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various

... and all so still... The fountain slobbering its stone basin Is louder than They— Flotsam of the five oceans Here on this raft of the world. ...

— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge

... water as it rolled over our bows in the morning, the schooner was taking her bath in the afternoon, for occasionally, for five minutes at a time, there was nothing seen of her deck, and only the masts and broad white canvas above, like jury-sticks out of a raft. But when she did slide up with her low, long hull shooting clean out of water, till nearly half her keel, with the copper sheathing flashing in the sun, was visible, she looked like a dolphin making a spring after a shoal of flying-fish. And then on her narrow deck we could see a few fellows ...

— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... 5, after having bombarded some of the coast cities of Algeria they found themselves cut off on the east by a French fleet and on the west by an English fleet, but by a very clever bit of stratagem they escaped. The band of the Goeben was placed on a raft and ordered on a given moment to play the German national airs after an appreciable period. Meanwhile, under the cover of the night's darkness the two German ships steamed away. After they had a good start the band on the raft began to play. The British patrols ...

— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... if you'll get a canal boat or a raft," said he, "or, if the children are kept out of sight, I'll strip, ma'm, ...

— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... from there now to Northwest River, and I would only follow the shore of the lake to Northwest River, and besides no mountains to go over. I went about 2 miles and came to a river, which made me feel very bad about it, and I did not know how I could ever get across, and could not make a raft without an axe. I thought I would try any way to make a raft, if I could only get wood to make a raft with. I followed the river up. The banks were so high, and the swift current run so swift along the steep ...

— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)

... form of far, O! far more worth than subtlest imagery of sculptured stone; and the daily, nay, hourly decrease visible in our numbers, visited the heart with sickening misery. This summer extinguished our hopes, the vessel of society was wrecked, and the shattered raft, which carried the few survivors over the sea of misery, was riven and tempest tost. Man existed by twos and threes; man, the individual who might sleep, and wake, and perform the animal functions; but man, in himself weak, yet more powerful in congregated numbers than wind or ...

— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... salt pork and dough cakes; fat and unleavened bread, with whiskey, is their diet. Tea and sugar form an occasional luxury. Up to their waists in snow in winter, and up to their waists in summer and autumn in water, with all the moving accidents by flood and field; the occasional breaking-up of the raft in a rapid, the difficulty of the winter and spring transport of the heavy logs of squared timber out of the deep and trackless woods, combine to form a portion of the hard and reckless life of a lumberer, whose morale is not much ...

— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... space about him. The Nina seemed to quiver, packed and dark with men. His deep voice went on, and they could hear him, but he did not seem to know that they were there. "As though upon a raft, here a thousand leagues in Ocean-Sea! Yet wilt Thou care for thy Good News. I will come to Spain, and I will tell it. Chosen, and almost by very name pointed out in Thy Book! The first Christian shore that I touch I will walk barefoot and in my shirt at the head of twelve ...

— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... there would be no means of obtaining food, and to cross such a district would be certain death. By the rivers, on the other hand, there would at least be no fear of losing their way. The journey could be shortened by using a canoe if they could obtain one, and if not, a raft. They would often find little native villages or huts by the banks, and would be able to obtain fish from them. Besides, they could themselves catch fish, and might possibly even winter in some native village. For all these reasons he had determined on making ...

— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty

... his frail raft, or some spar of his shattered vessel, could not be more at the mercy of wave and wind, than were the two men astride of the capsized canoe. Their situation was indeed desperate. The stroke of a strong sea would be sufficient to swamp their ...

— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid

... they killed one of them and stampeded the cattle. The drovers all ran for their lives. Two of them managed to elude the Indians, and took the road leading east. Our man was one, the other was drowned while crossing the river on a log raft, the rest were never found. Many of the cattle ran wild on the prairies. The Indians used often to kill them and sell the meat to the whites. One of the claims at Traverse de Sioux was for these cattle from the ...

— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various

... ago crossing the Mahawelli river upon a raft which my coolies had hastily constructed, and reaching a miserable village near Monampitya, in the extreme north of the Veddah country. The river is here about four hundred paces wide, and, in the rainy season a fine volume of water rolls along in a rapid stream ...

— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... this to have reached my last proofsheet, but shall have two or three more yet. In a fortnight or three weeks my little raft will be afloat.* Expect nothing more of my powers of construction,—no shipbuilding, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together. I read to some Mechanics' Apprentices a long lecture on Reform, one evening, a little while ago. They asked me to print it, but Margaret ...

— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... been about two hours on the river when he saw a little object floating towards him on the current that instantly caught his eye because it had the look of something fashioned. He paddled to it with a beating heart. It proved to be a tiny raft contrived out of several lengths of stout stick, tied together with strips of rag. On the little platform, out of reach of the water, was tied with another strip a roll of the white outer bark of the ...

— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... occasion some boyish companions and myself set to work to build a raft for fishing purposes out of some old and discarded blue gum rails which were lying along the bank of the river. Boy-like, we utterly disregarded our parents' admonition to put on our boots, and, aided by a couple of blackfellows, we moved about the long grass on our ...

— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... with the ringing of bells and firing of pistols, unheeded. By the time the signal came to clear the course for the crews, the pleasure-craft pushed within the barriers formed a vast, softly undulating raft covering the whole surface of the water, so that you could have walked from the barrier to the shore without dipping foot in the flood. I have suggested that the situation might have had its perils. Any panic must have caused a commotion that would have overturned hundreds ...

— London Films • W.D. Howells

... are right here, Colonel. We ain't got what I wished; but we've taken 'em from friend and foe, and here comes the last of my boys with Major Skeene's big raft and, if I ain't mighty mistaken, with a bag o' charcoal aboard that must ha' caused ...

— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster

... morning, in the rains, he came to the bank of this river, on his way to Lucknow from Jeytpoor, a town which we passed yesterday, and found it so swollen that he was obliged to purchase some large earthen jars, and form a raft upon them to take over himself and followers. While preparing his raft, which took a whole day, he heard that from five to ten persons were drowned, in attempting to cross this little river, every year, and that ...

— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman

... said the captain, "step aboard. You sing like a bird; it's only right you should fly like one." It was obvious that the worthy seaman was making clumsy efforts to be cheerful. "I'll see you in two days, or three at most; we've got a raft ready, you know, in case the fire beats us. But, bless you, I shouldn't be surprised if we have a fire-engine coming through the sky next; there's no knowing what these clever young sparks won't be inventing. God ...

— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang

... deprives him who takes it of his reason, sometimes for ever and sometimes for a year or more. After this, said Kari, he remembered little or nothing, save long travellings in boats and through forests, and then again upon a raft or boat on which he was driven alone, for many, many days, drinking a jar of water which he had with him, and eating some dried flesh and with it a marvellous drug of his people, some of which remained to him in the leathern bag that has power to keep the life in a man for ...

— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard

... snow-white. The stone parapets of bridge and tower shine against the purple of the mountains, which are low in tone, and look like hovering storm-clouds. Across the fields dun oxen pass to their labour; through the shadows peasants go their way to mass; down the river a raft drifts slowly, with the pearly water swaying against the canes; all is clear, tranquil, fresh as ...

— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... the ice had been lodged and detained in great quantities, and the narrow channel which swept round the bend was full of ice, piled one cake over another, thus forming a temporary barrier to the descending ice, which lodged, and formed a great undulating raft, filling up the whole river, and extending almost to the Kentucky shore. Eliza stood for a moment contemplating this unfavourable aspect of things, which she saw at once must prevent the usual ferry-boat from running, ...

— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various

... The Indians, as they came up, stopped for a moment around the body of their slain comrade, and then, with hideous yells, resumed the pursuit. The stream was fringed with a dense growth of cotton-wood trees. Colter rushed through them, thus concealed from observation, and seeing near by a large raft of drift timber, he plunged into the water, dived under the raft and fortunately succeeded in getting his head above the water between the logs, where smaller wood covered him to the depth of ...

— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... that proves to me that the reasonings of the Indians are not always infallible; and if it were not that we shall receive a shower of balls, to force us to stay hidden while the islet takes fire, I should care as little for that burning raft as for a ...

— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid

... piled on the decks to give to the two vessels the appearance of simple fireships. Thirty-two small craft, saturated with tar and turpentine and filled with inflammable materials, were to be sent down the river in detachments of eight every half hour, to clear away if possible the raft above the bridge and to occupy the attention of ...

— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty

... up on our raft twenty old flour-barrels, to be used as leach-tubs. These were set up in a semi-circle round our boiling-place, which was a long stone "arch." A pole and lumber-shed ...

— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various

... picture of a fine large English ship, called the Charles Eaton, which was wrecked in the Southern Ocean. The crew, you see, have made a raft of some of the spars and planks of the ship, and having all got upon it, are about cutting loose from the wreck, with the hope that they may reach one of the ...

— The Young Captives - A Narrative of The Shipwreck and Suffering of John and William Doyley • Anonymous

... in its course, brought up, while the swift running current overflowed it. The four were ankle deep in water. But the rope held. Slowly, but surely, the ice raft yielded to the strain. It came in, out of the rush of the current, into quieter water. It touched the shore—and the yawning brink of the dam was only a few ...

— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith

... China Sea swarms with wandering pirates, and the tribe whose animosity he had earned might be equally noxious to some peaceable fishing community on the coast. Again and again he debated the advisability of constructing a seaworthy raft and endeavoring to make the passage. But this would be risking all on a frightful uncertainty, and the accidental discovery of the Eagle's Nest had given him new hope. Here he could make a determined and prolonged stand, and in the end help must come. ...

— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... the floods in the western country in the spring of 1884, when every brook was a torrent and every river a deluge. Imagine a party of travelers making their westward way on horseback at such a time, before there was even a raft ferry on any river west of the Alleghanies, and when all the valleys would be covered with water. It was by no means unusual for a party to be detained a month waiting for the waters of a large river to subside, and it was a thing at some seasons of daily occurrence for all of them to be soused ...

— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton

... a few days since Mother had said, "Never go on the raft, Bobby, unless Father or John is at the ...

— Bobby of Cloverfield Farm • Helen Fuller Orton

... gunwales, are planks sewed on with the fibres of the cocoa nut, and secured with pegs. These vessels are low, forward, but rise abaft; and, being narrow, are fitted with an outrigger on each side, to keep them steady. A raft, of greater breadth than the canoe, extends over about half the length; and upon this is fixed a shed or hut, thatched with palm leaves. These people, in short, appeared to be dextrous sailors and formidable ...

— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders

... than the sigh of a stray breeze, came from a point far up the stream. He listened and the sound pleased him. The lone, weird note was in full accord with the night and his mood, and presently he knew it. It was some mountaineer on a raft singing a plaintive song of his own distant hills. Huge rafts launched on the headwaters of the stream in the mountains in the eastern part of the state came in great numbers down the river, but oftenest at this time of the year. Some stopped at Frankfort, and others went into the Ohio for ...

— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler

... ceased firing, and dispersed about the neighborhood, butchering cattle and burning the church and a few empty houses. As the tide began to ebb, they sent a fire-raft in full blaze down the creek to destroy the sloops; but it stranded, and the attempt failed. They now wreaked their fury on the prisoner Diamond, whom they tortured to death, after which they all disappeared. ...

— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... reached me, O auspicious King, that the Marid took Gharib and carried him to the Jayhun purposing to cast him therein, but it was grievous to him to drown him, wherefore he made a raft of wood and binding it with cords, pushed it out (and Gharib thereon) into the current, which carried it away. Thus fared it with Gharib; but as regards his people, when they awoke in the morning and went in to do their service to their King, they found him not ...

— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... the lamps of the town singe thy wings. small Moth! Each shall seem all the world to thee, each shall seem as thy grave! Thy heart is a feather blown from one mouth to the other. But be not afraid! For the life of a man is for all loves in turn. 'Tis a little raft moored, then sailing out into the blue; a tune caught in a hush, then whispering on; a new-born babe, half courage and half sleep. There is a hidden rhythm. Change. Quietude. Chance. Certainty. The One. The Many. Burn on—thou pretty flame, ...

— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... immediately gathered round him, and continued in a body above an hour, without seeming to take any farther notice of us. We were more curious than they, and observing them with our glasses from on board the ship, we saw some of them cross the river upon a kind of raft, or catamarine, and four of them carry off the dead body which had been covered by the boy, and over which his uncle had performed the ceremony of the branch, upon a kind of bier, between four men: The other body was still suffered to remain where ...

— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... all was in readiness for a new start, and luckily provisions from the reductions on the Parana arrived. So they embarked again, and on the journey a raft in which a woman and two children were sitting upset, to Montoya's agony, as he knew that 'in that river there are fish that the people call culebras,* which have been seen to swallow men entire, and throw them ...

— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... all the rafts except the one I was upon were swamped, and their luckless crews drowned, without our being able to do anything to help them. Indeed I and my two companions had all we could do to keep our own raft beyond the reach of the giants, but by dint of hard rowing we at last gained the open sea. Here we were at the mercy of the winds and waves, which tossed us to and fro all that day and night, but the next morning ...

— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous

... style of exaggeration; as, for example, when he makes one of his reformers tell a steamboat captain that if he will stop drinking whiskey, he will make a reputation, and "be as famous as the Red River raft or the Mammoth Cave—the only thing of the sort west of the Alleghanies." He describes his people in a way that shows that he has them in the eye of his imagination; as in this portrait of a Mrs. Tappelmine: ...

— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... their journey's end they arrived at the brink of a river which they expected to find frozen over; but they found it full of floating ice instead. Without boat or bridge, there seemed no chance of getting across; but after a while they managed to make a rude raft, and upon this they undertook to push themselves ...

— Strange Stories from History for Young People • George Cary Eggleston

... sincere; but I doubt whether we are to be saved by any amount of vicarious salt water, and, though the philosophers should weep us into another Noah's flood, yet commonly men have lumber enough of self-conceit to build a raft of, and can subsist a good while on that beautiful charity for their own weaknesses in which the nerves of conscience are embedded and cushioned, as in similar physical straits they can upon ...

— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... the sun. If the sap is thoroughly dried out, the cane assumes a permanent yellow colour; but if any is left, the cane darkens when soaked in water. When a large number of bundles has been collected, they are bound together to form a raft. On this a hut is erected, and two or three men will navigate the raft down river to the Chinese bazaar, which is to be found in the lower part of every ...

— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... milk in a red earthen basin. When they had all finished, she whistled again, and bade two or three coil themselves round her arms and neck, while she turned one into a cane and another into a whip. Then she took a stick, and on the river bank changed it into a raft, and seating herself comfortably, she pushed off into ...

— The Olive Fairy Book • Various

... difficulty in crossing the banks of the Ba-Woolima, a narrow, rapid, and deep river, which was then much swollen by the rains, They first endeavoured to throw across trunks of trees, but these were carried away by the stream. They next attempted a raft; but after the logs had been cut, the sick people were not able to drag them to the water side. But the negroes who were with them constructed a bridge in the most ingenious manner. It was formed of two ranges ...

— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park

... from England. On her first departure, which was in March last, she had on board thirty female and ten male convicts; but being obliged to put back to Spithead, to stop a leak which she sprung in her raft port, eight of her ten male convicts found means to make their escape. This was an unfortunate accident; for they had been particularly selected as men who might be useful in the colony. Of the two who did remain, the one was a brick-maker and the ...

— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... the chief in whose house it was held. It had been used sufficiently long, however, to show that it was appreciated by both parents and children, and thus encouraged, Mr. Duncan determined to commence to build a school-house. The wood had arrived in a raft, and a number of Indians were engaged to assist in the building; but scarcely had they begun to carry the wood up the hill, when one of the Indians dropped dead. The news ran through the camp, and great alarm spread on all sides. Mr. Duncan ...

— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock

... Well, I thought you was something or other—they's sech a raft of agents along; though my Mary tells me 'tain't a circumstance to the city—Mate works out in the city. Let me make you acquainted with Mis' Flaherty. She's the lady what lives in Bachelor's Row and takes in ...

— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... midsummer and we were rowing on the river; some thirty boats were crowded together under the bridge, when suddenly one of the occupants of a boat near mine threw up his hands and fell overboard. We immediately began diving for him, but in vain; some hours later the body was found under a raft. ...

— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... and at the same time you were yourself, going about with him. You loved him with a passionate, self-immolating love. There wasn't room for both of you on the raft, you sat cramped up, huddled together. Not enough hard tack. While he was sleeping you slipped off. A shark got you. It had a face like Dr. Charles. The lunatic was running after him like mad, with a revolver. ...

— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair

... even in unhappiness, called aloud for solitude. He must struggle alone through his deep waters: waters of the soul, wherein float neither life-preserver nor raft, rope or even light; neither coral reef nor oozy grave, for such as he. Darkness and struggle alike lasted till the end of his strength; but, with exhaustion and the coming of dawn, came at last one mighty breaker, by which Ivan was thrown ...

— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... on the raft with the boathooks, and crowd the stuff over to the starboard side," said the captain when he had ...

— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic

... for it would take too long, and the ways would be too foul. But why should they not go by water? There was the river at their feet, roaring down in full spate, tumbling the trunks of trees destroyed in last night's storm. Why in the world should they not make a raft of the trees, "and put ourselves to sea"? "I will be one," he concluded, "who will be the other?" The appeal went home to the sailors. An Englishman named John Smith at once came forward, with a couple of Frenchmen "who could swim very well." The Maroons formed into a line beside ...

— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield

... sensation to back up right by might. Four years ago I vowed that some day I'd meet him on equal terms. There's a raft of things on the slate, for he has been unspeakable kinds of a rascal; beating harmless coolies . . . and women. I may not see you again. If the letter of credit turns up, you know what to do with it. I'm keen to get started. Good-by, ...

— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath

... save the brig, the captain and I, with a few men, quietly let down into the water the aft hatch, one of those big doors they cover the hatchways with, and when that was resting on the water it made a very good raft for one man. And I got down on it, with my ...

— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton

... band of hostile Indians was at his heels, and he had to plan some way of crossing the Alleghany. He decided to build a raft, but had only one poor hatchet with which to construct it. The men set to work with this, and labored all day, but night came before the raft was finished. As soon as they could they launched it and tried to steer it across with long poles. When they reached the main channel ...

— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland

... the logs, and when the tide began to come in, they had the best time of all. It picked up the little raft and floated the children, screaming with joy, far up the beach on a ...

— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... Houten's gold sands offered little of allure. On both shores the river seemed exactly as other rivers, except for a small cluster of ramshackle grass huts under a clump of dwarf trees and a rough raft of logs tied with grass ropes to a stake set in the bed of the river itself. Of life there was none visible; but as oars rattled in the boat to swing her inshore, a sleepy native emerged from one of the huts, and his swift cry brought a ...

— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle

... moving with the stream or tied along the shore. They were of logs cut on the upper Amoor, and firmly fastened with poles and withes. An emigrant piles his wagon and household goods on a raft, and makes a pen at one side to hold his cattle. Two or three families, with as many wagons and a dozen or twenty animals, were frequently on one raft. A pile of earth was the fire place, and there was ...

— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox

... me!" said the fox. "Come up to the surface of the water and form a raft that will reach from this island to the mainland. Then I can walk over all of you, and I shall be able ...

— Story Hour Readers Book Three • Ida Coe and Alice J. Christie

... lighting three fires, which, however, were not seen nor taken notice of by those under the command of Cornelis, because they were busy in butchering their companions, of whom they had murdered between thirty and forty; but some few, however, got off upon a raft of planks tied together, and went to the island where Mr. Weybhays was, in order to acquaint him with the dreadful accident that had happened. Mr. Weybhays having with him forty- five men, they all resolved to stand upon their guard, and to defend themselves ...

— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton

... they were tired of bears, and fancied that a whale might rouse them. He turned the table upside down and placed the children in it on three chairs, explaining to them that they were ship-wrecked sailors on a raft, and that they must be careful the whale did not get underneath it and upset them. He draped a sheet over the towel-horse to represent an iceberg, and rolled himself up in a mackintosh and flopped about the ...

— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome

... yellow eyes!" whispered Bob, beginning to bring his gun-stock nearer to his shoulder. "Say, there's a whole raft of ...

— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson

... of the Upper Tigris is the raft of light wood and air-inflated skins which comes down from the north to Samara and Baghdad. On this section of the river there are many shallows, sometimes caused by traces of old rubble weirs. Consequently any kind of craft which drew more ...

— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell

... arrowhead, Sagittaria, found in shallow ponds or slow streams. They are flattened, and on one edge, or both, and at the apex is a spongy ridge. Very likely, by this time, the reader has surmised that this serves the purpose of a raft to float the small seed within, which would sink at once if separated from the boat that grew on its margins. In this connection may be studied achenes of water plantain, Alisma, bur reed, cat-tail flag, arrow grass, burgrass, numerous ...

— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal

... start. First I tried a pontoon bridge, but the stones for the bottom course were so heavy that they sank the pontoons, and I lost a couple of hundred niggers before I saw that it couldn't be done. Then I tried a big raft, but in order to get her to float with the stones I had to use such big logs that she was unwieldy, and before I knew what had struck me I had lost six big dressed stones and another hundred niggers. ...

— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken

... beaver lodges. Its towing power in the water, and that of traction on dry land, is astonishing. The following account shows the coolness and enterprise of the animals, described by a witness to the fact:—The narrator having constructed a raft for the purpose of poling round the edge of the lake to get at the houses of the beaver, which were built in a swampy savannah, otherwise inaccessible, it had been left in the evening moored at the edge of the lake, close to the camp, and about a quarter of a mile ...

— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... suggestion by pleading that such an impulse would, so far as I could judge, be quite in character, but no further argument was needed. I had created a sensation. My feeble straw had suddenly taken the form of a practicable seaworthy raft, big enough to accommodate all the family—with the one exception of Frank, who, as it were, grasped the edge of this life-saving apparatus of mine, and tested it suspiciously. His preliminary and perfectly futile opening to the effect that the ...

— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford

... said, "were rescued from a raft by a Cunarder. Both were pretty well used up, when one saw the vessel and murmured, 'A sail, a sail!' The other who was stretched on the raft revived long enough to exclaim, 'Mein ...

— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher

... to Northwest River, and I would only follow the shore of the lake to Northwest River, and besides no mountains to go over. I went about 2 miles and came to a river, which made me feel very bad about it, and I did not know how I could ever get across, and could not make a raft without an axe. I thought I would try any way to make a raft, if I could only get wood to make a raft with. I followed the river up. The banks were so high, and the swift current run so swift along the steep banks, and the river very deep. I could not drop a log in without ...

— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)

... the boys was a balsa, or raft, made by the Mojaves, of the cane-grass which grew in the river-bottoms to the height of fifteen feet. A large bundle bound at the ends with grass ropes would sustain two men. The boys borrowed one of an Indian girl, who was sitting ...

— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis

... risking their main chance of safety. A few more strokes and she would reach the boat, rest a moment, then, clinging to it, push it leisurely to shore. Feeling that the danger was over, she hurried on and was just putting up her hands to seize the frail raft and get her breath when Milly, thinking she was to be taken in her arms, leaned forward. In rushed the water, down went the boat, and out splashed the screaming child to cling to Ruth with the ...

— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott

... Marshal Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, had perished off the West Orkney Islands on June 5th, through the sinking of the British cruiser Hampshire. The entire crew was also lost, except twelve men, a warrant officer and eleven seamen, who escaped on a raft. Earl Kitchener was on his way to Russia, at the request of the Russian Government, for a consultation regarding munitions to be furnished the Russian army. He was intending to go to Archangel and visit Petrograd, and expected to be back in London by ...

— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... The last temporary raft of a logical moral code goes to pieces at this, and its separated spars float here and there. So I will confess they float at present in my mind. I have no System—I wish I had—and I never encountered a system or any universal doctrine of sexual conduct that did ...

— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... crew from many a craft Goes drifting by on a broken raft Pieced from a vessel that clove the brine Taller ...

— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... in hauling myself along by the line which was still attached to my wrist, and was nearly up to the snow-raft, when the leader turned adroitly round, slipped out of his harness, and once more leered at me with his ...

— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... me—clutched and held on. It was a brave pine log. Could I recover it at this date I would convert it into a flagstaff for the tricolour. It was our raft, our refuge; and it carried us ...

— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... being built by the enterprising Mahmat on a large raft, and he had securely moored it just inside the muddy point of land at the junction of the two branches of the Pantai so as to be out of the way of drifting logs that would no doubt strand on the point during ...

— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad

... in that," promised the man. "The ice is so thick this year, on account of the cold, that you could go close to the edge of the hole, and the ice would not break with you. See, there is a man riding on an ice cake just as if it were a raft of wood." ...

— Daddy Takes Us Skating • Howard R. Garis

... wild animal is much more uniform than in the great raft of "domestic" mongrel specimens which make night hideous with their discordant yowls, although we sometimes see a high bred individual which, if his tail was cut off at half its length, might easily pass as an example of the ...

— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson

... follow with intense interest every movement of the shipwrecked mariner when he first swims to the stranded ship, constructs a raft, and places on it "bread, rice, three Dutch cheeses, five pieces of dried goat's flesh, a little remainder of European corn, and the carpenter's chest." Readers do not accompany him passively as he lands the raft and returns. They work with ...

— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... avoiding the vicinity of English people, Mr. Carson decided not to go to Capri by the ordinary steamer that conveyed pleasure-seekers, but to secure passages in a cargo vessel which was crossing with supplies. To Lorna the mode of conveyance was immaterial; she would have sailed cheerfully on a raft if necessary. She rather enjoyed the picturesque Neapolitan tramp steamer with its cargo of wine barrels and packing cases, and its crew of bare-footed, red-capped seamen, talking and gesticulating with all the excitability of their Southern temperament. The voyage ...

— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil

... impossible for us to carry it so much as fifty yards. What then could we do without a boat? Swimming seemed to be out of the question because of the crocodiles. Also on inquiry I discovered that of the whole party Stephen and I alone could swim. Further there was no wood of which to make a raft. ...

— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard

... want to have the armed heel of the country crush the serpent head of secession, now and forever, so that it shall never again glare with its baleful eyes, or brandish its venomous tongue. Let not the fate and fortunes of this glorious country be committed to the keeping of a clumsy, misshapen raft, compacted of twenty-four or thirty-four logs, good enough to float down a river, but sure to go to pieces when it gets into deep water; Let let them be embarked on board a goodly ship, well found, well fastened, well manned—in ...

— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... of a raft coming down the lake, manned with a rugged set of half-breeds, who had a cask of whiskey on board, and were very ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the line. We now got our bait ready. On this occasion it was a live tame duck. Passing the bend of the hook round its neck, and the shank under its right wing, we tied the hook in this position with thread. We then made a small raft of the soft pith of the plantain-tree, tied the duck to the raft and committed it to the stream. Holding the rope as clear of the water as we could, the poor quacking duck floated slowly down the muddy current, making an occasional vain effort to get free. We saw at a distance an ugly snout rise ...

— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... sunk he cheered his freezing men tossing on an icy sea in an open boat far from land, until he at length perished, his last words those of encouragement. There is Lieutenant S.F. Kalk, who swam from raft to raft encouraging and directing the survivors of the destroyer Jacob Jones after a torpedo had sent that vessel to the bottom. There are those two gunners on the transport Antilles who stood serving their gun until the ship sank and carried them down. There is the freighter Silver-Shell ...

— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry

... make parties to kill them, and who destroy several thousands at one chase: their flesh is considered a great delicacy. These animals migrate, at different seasons; and have the credit of ingeniously ferrying themselves over rivers, by using a piece of bark for a raft, ...

— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley

... down to the river bank and feeble folk were we, That Julie Claire from God-knows-where, and Barb-wire Bill and me. From shore to shore we heard the roar the heaving ice-floes make, And loud we laughed, and launched our raft, and followed in their wake. The river swept and seethed and leapt, and caught us in its stride; And on we hurled amid a world that crashed on every side. With sullen din the banks caved in; the shore-ice lanced ...

— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... raft now signed to Chebron to take up one of the spears; but the lad shook his head and motioned to him to undertake the attack, for he felt that, ignorant as he was of the habits of the animal, it would be folly for him ...

— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty

... delivered to me by Overseer Burnett on the 5th of this month, who arrived at the moment the first boatload from the camp reached the opposite bank of the Murray. By means of casks we floated the drays over the three rivers and, after two experiments with a raft, both partial failures, and while a third raft was in progress, of a more solid and better construction, we discovered that a canoe, of very large dimensions and paddled by the native boy Tommy, would prove the most expeditious as well as a safe mode of shipment for the boxes of value, equipment, ...

— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... its surface; here in single logs, there in raft-like clusters. To run a boat against one of these is attended with danger, and the pilot avoids them. Sometimes one swimming below the surface escapes his eye; and then a heavy bumping against the bows shakes the boat, and startles the equanimity of ...

— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... terrible vengeance, against which precautions were all in vain. Men met each other with secret misgivings, and parted with the same dreadful distrust. The ties of kindred were all broken; brotherly affection died out. Existence was become like the struggle for life upon some shipwrecked raft, where each sought safety by his neighbor's doom! At such a time—with such terrible teachings—children became men in all the sterner features of character: cruelty is a lesson so ...

— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... did not seem to have varied. How I longed for a little breeze that might bring us together! Bertha was on that vessel, trusting, perhaps, entirely to me: and what could I do if some breeze did not bring us together? I looked about for something on which I might float to her; but if I made a raft I was not sure that I could steer or propel it, and I might float away and become a third derelict. Once I thought of boldly springing into the water, and swimming to her; but the distance was considerable, my swimming powers were only moderate, and there might be sharks. The risk was too ...

— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... massacre. On his part, he doubted not that Ribaut was at hand. Marching with a hundred and fifty men, he reached the inlet at midnight, and again, like a savage, ambushed himself on the bank. Day broke, and he could plainly see the French on the farther side. They had made a raft, which lay in the water, ready for crossing. Menendez and his men showed themselves, when, forthwith, the French displayed their banners, sounded drums and trumpets, and set their sick and starving ranks in array of battle. But the Adelantado, regardless of this warlike show, ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... the canvass that it was deemed prudent to place upon her, right towards the Circassian coast, at a rate perhaps of from four to five knots. The gale, too, now gradually subsided, and enabled the half-wrecked people to take more comfortable positions, and Aphiz and Selim to prepare a raft with the assistance of the crew, for it was but too apparent that the schooner must go down before long. Hollow groaning sounds issued from the hatches as she settled lower and lower, and it really seemed ...

— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray

... steamer Farringford, on the upper Missouri, in which my father and mother and myself—then a child two years old—were passengers, I had been committed to a raft formed of a state-room door, and bolstered with pillows to keep me from rolling off. By an accident this frail craft was carried away from the burning steamer, then aground, and I was separated from my father, ...

— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic

... Constructing a rude raft for their supplies and swimming the animals, they reached the other shore some distance below the point of launching with no accident, and that night camped well back from the river on the ...

— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... of them overboard as I could manage for their weight, tying every one with a rope, that they might not drive away. When this was done I went down the ship's side, and pulling them to me I tied four of them together at both ends, as well as I could, in the form of a raft, and laying two or three short pieces of plank upon them, crossways, I found I could walk upon it very well, but that it was not able to bear any great weight, the pieces being too light. So I went to work, and ...

— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... more or less decently clothed in bodies, having been crowded upon the raft, the shore-line was cast off, and she drifted magnificently out into the stream, and stuck fast about a ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... inflammable material, ignited, and sent on their mission but these 'fire-ships' floated harmlessly past the schooners and burnt themselves out. Then for a week the Indians worked on the construction of a gigantic fire-raft, but nothing came ...

— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis

... have found our poor reasonable minds, our wills to live well, ourselves, adrift on a wash of instincts, passions, instinctive prejudices, half animal stupidities. . . . Here we are like people clinging to something—like people awakening—upon a raft." ...

— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... islanders in their brutal drunken sprees. They had talked big, indeed, and made at first a show of resistance; but the general body of the exiles had authorised a powerful force of young and middle-aged men to take them into custody, and convey them on a raft, constructed for the purpose, to an island some ten miles distant. Here the rioters were left with a sufficient supply of provisions; a warning being given them that, should they attempt to return to Comoro, they would be put in irons, and kept in custody till they could be brought up before the ...

— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson

... raw-hide shoes are hell on corns While tramping through the sands, And driving jackass by the tail,— Damn the overland! I would as leaf be on a raft at sea And there at once be lost. John, let's leave the poor old mule, ...

— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various

... sun is getting awfully hot, I vote we get into the shade of those stunted trees, and have a nap till the afternoon. It won't do to begin even to make the raft ...

— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty

... she steadily refused to be separated from Ossoli and Angelo. On a raft with them, she would have boldly encountered the surf, but alone she would not go. Probably, she had appeared to assent to the plan for escaping upon planks, with the view of inducing Mrs. Hasty to trust herself to the care of the best man on board; very possibly, also, she had never learned ...

— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... each, A shrine of rock for every one, Nor paused till in the westering sun We sat together on the beach To sing because our task was done. When lo! what shouts and merry songs! What laughter all the distance stirs! A loaded raft with happy throngs Of gentle islanders! "Our isles are just at hand," they cried, "Like cloudlets faint in even sleeping: Our temple-gates are opened wide, Our olive-groves thick shade are keeping For these majestic forms"—they cried. Oh, then we awoke with sudden start From ...

— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps

... unequal to resisting the enormous pressure that bore upon it from above. It is probable that a cake of an acre's size would have upheld, not only ourselves, but our sleigh and horses, and carried us, like a raft, down the stream; had there been such a cake, free from stationary impediments. Even the girls now comprehended the danger, which was in a manner suspended over us,—as the impending wreath of snow menaces ...

— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... at once, and have a quarrel over the honor; but looks now like I might have to do the grand wading act myself, holding up my clothes-bag and blanket, to keep from getting the same more soaked than they are now. If we could only make a raft like old Robinson Crusoe did, it would be fine. Can we get this cabin roof off, and would it float, do ...

— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter

... most general opinion, however, was that some few escaped the desolating element by one of those means most familiar to the narrator, by ascending some mountain, on a raft or canoe, in a cave, or even by climbing a tree. No doubt some of these legends have been modified by Christian teachings; but many of them are so connected with local peculiarities and ancient religious ceremonies, that no unbiased student can assign them wholly to ...

— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... shipped to Wilmington and to Cincinnati. Wild-fowls abound, and the shooting is excellent. The fishermen say flocks of ducks seven miles in length have been seen on the waters of Bogue Sound. Canvas-backs are called "raft-ducks" here, and they sell from twelve to twenty cents each. Wild geese bring ...

— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop

... suitor-train retrace their way." He spake, and turned to Hermes, his dear son: "Hermes, for thou, in this, my messenger Art, as in all things, to the bright-haired nymph Make known my steadfast purpose, the return Of suffering Ulysses. Neither gods Nor men shall guide his voyage. On a raft, Made firm with bands, he shall depart and reach, After long hardships, on the twentieth day, The fertile shore of Scheria, on whose isle Dwell the Pheacians, kinsmen of the gods. They like a god shall honor him, and thence Send him to his ...

— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... 'Shouldn't have allowed it if I had; but I've seen the corpses. The dacoits had a trick of sending a crucified corpse down the river on a raft, just to show they were keeping their tail up and enjoying themselves. Well, that was the kind of people I had ...

— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling

... me like a good plan," Ree reflected aloud, when he and John were alone. "If we went to General Putnam's settlement we would still feel that we must go up the Muskingum river to reach the Indians and profitable trading, and would have to build a raft or buy a boat to carry our goods. Moreover, people here say that within a few years the country all about Pittsburg will be settled up and that ...

— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden

... flowing to the southward, discharges the waters of the little lake into Grand Lake. George thought, however, that this island was a part of the western boundary of Grand Lake, and he determined to reach it. But how? To swim across was impossible. Well, then, he would build a raft. And, although he had no implements, he did. He hauled together several fallen trees, laid them in a row and bound them at one end with his pack strap and at the other with a piece of our old trolling line. ...

— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace

... to confide to it another of her descendants. During this time the parasite larva hastily descends the abdominal hairs and allows itself to fall on the egg of the Anthophora, to be then borne upon it as upon a raft; its fall must take place at the precise instant which will enable it to embark without falling into the honey, in which just now it would be glued fast, and perish. This series of circumstances results only in the ...

— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... content with commanding the mere edge of the water, he plunged in, and is seen mid-stream, astride upon an inflated skin, quietly pursuing his avocation. [PLATE CXXVI., Fig. 1.] Occasionally he improved his position by amounting upon a raft, and, seated at the stern, with his back to the rower, threw out his line and drew the fish from the water. Now and then the fisherman was provided with a plaited basket, made of rushes or flags, which was fastened round his neck ...

— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson

... Peruvians, and are still retained by the Spaniards over those streams which, from the depth or impetuosity of the current, would seem impracticable for the usual modes of conveyance. The wider and more tranquil waters were crossed on balsas - a kind of raft still much used by the natives - to which sails were attached, furnishing the only instance of this higher kind of navigation among the American ...

— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott

... not a moment to be lost, and Colonel Miller, with no other attendant than myself, ran down to the beach. There we got on a balsa, or raft, which carried us to a launch, whose crew at once took us alongside a ...

— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens

... thus had full satisfaction for the captain's insult. He said he would go by himself, and take a scalp, or leave his own with the savages. The company started for home, and Hughes went up the river three or four miles, then made a raft, crossed the river, and camped for the night. The next day, he found the Indian trail, pursued it very cautiously, and about ten miles from the Ohio, came upon the camp. There was but one Indian in it; the rest were all out hunting. The red man was ...

— Heroes and Hunters of the West • Anonymous

... king ordered rafts to be constructed for the transporting of his men. When the vessels reached the canals, they were submerged, and the waters, swirling round and round as though driven by mill wheels, swept away two hundred men, twenty from each raft. On the third day they set about assaulting the city from the side on which the snakes and scorpions swarmed, but they failed to reach it, and the reptiles killed one hundred and seventy men. The king ...

— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... marsh behind the fort to the hill on the far side. The cannon would sink from their own weight in such a bog, and either horses or oxen would flounder to death in a few minutes. Again, the fool-hardy enthusiasm of the raw levies overcame the difficulty. They built large stone boats, raft-shaped, such as are used on farms to haul stones over ground too rough for wagons. Hitching to these, teams of two hundred men stripped to midwaist, they laboriously hauled the cannon across the quaking moss to the hills commanding the rear of the fort, bombs and balls whizzing overhead ...

— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... kinds of fish the fishermen use hand-nets, which they throw into the sea from the shore; the larger species they kill with lances, one of which Ayd carried constantly with him as a weapon; there is not a single boat nor even a raft to be found on the whole of this coast, but the Bedouins of the eastern coast have a few boats, which may sometimes be seen in the gulf. We saw here a great number of porpoises playing in the water close to the shore. I wished to shoot at one ...

— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... course he can." Thirty-two years ago it was: "Indeed he cannot." And that is to be seen everywhere, all over the world, and not only among those people who were clinging blindly to a blind faith, desperately sticking to it as the only raft which remained for them to save them from being submerged in materialism. It is recognised now on all hands; literature is full of it; and it is not without significance that some months ago The Hibbert Journal—which has in it ...

— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant

... had a superstitious meaning. Nobody liked a ship that was afraid of her element. They wanted an eagerness in her get-away. Or suppose she shot out too impetuously and listed on the ways, ripping the scaffolding to pieces like a whale thrashing a raft apart. Suppose she careened and stuck or rolled over in the mud. Such things had happened and might happen again. The Mamise had suffered so many mishaps that the other ship crews called ...

— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... followed one another with the ringing of bells and firing of pistols, unheeded. By the time the signal came to clear the course for the crews, the pleasure-craft pushed within the barriers formed a vast, softly undulating raft covering the whole surface of the water, so that you could have walked from the barrier to the shore without dipping foot in the flood. I have suggested that the situation might have had its perils. Any panic must have caused a commotion that would ...

— London Films • W.D. Howells

... such gear. It represents a bareheaded young lady in a white gown pinned very high. She is standing in a pond, with the water well over her knees. One hand keeps her balance with a pole, the other grasps a streamer of water-weed. Floating beyond her upon some kind of raft is a man, bareheaded also, in a white sweater with a rolling collar. His face is shadowed—you can see that his hair, black and straight, falls over his eyes. He is raking up the weed with his hand, his arm ...

— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... for carrying coals at Newcastle, &c. be constructed with iron handles. These may be made to hold one and a half, or two tons of coals (either of these weights, it is supposed, might be hoisted into a vessel without difficulty), and be all filled and placed on a raft or punt ready at each depot, thirty to sixty in number, according to its importance, awaiting the arrival of the packet steamer. The moment she comes into port, the punt will be alongside, and the whole will be hoisted in in a few hours, the ...

— A General Plan for a Mail Communication by Steam, Between Great Britain and the Eastern and Western Parts of the World • James MacQueen

... This water's running zwift, and we're making the boat move pretty fast. They can't zwim half as fast as we're going, and they've no horses, and the dogs can't smell on the river, even if they made a raft of the trees they've got cut ...

— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn

... said with a laugh. "We have been down with a raft of timber from the mountains, and are on our way back. That must be our story till we have passed Ratisbon. There is but one objection, and that is a serious one. As raftsmen we should certainly speak the Bavarian dialect, which none of us can do. For that reason I think ...

— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty

... might say. It was at the Three Forks that Colter and Potts, two of the Lewis and Clark men, were attacked by the Blackfeet, and Potts killed and Colter forced to run naked, six miles over the stones and cactus—till at last he killed his nearest pursuer with his own spear, and hid under a raft of driftwood ...

— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough

... gangrene of the penis, caused by a prostatic abscess following gonorrhea. In this case there was thrombosis of the pelvic veins. Hutchinson mentions a man who, thirty years before, after six days' exposure on a raft, had lost both legs by gangrene. At the age of sixty-six he was confined to bed by subacute bronchitis, and during this period his whole penis became gangrenous and sloughed off. This is quite unusual, as gangrene is usually associated with fever; it is more than ...

— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... and nearly three hundred from the nearest settlement, already greatly used up, needing rest and plenty of food; in a country that forbade any extended tramping inland to cut off corners, on a river in most places either too rough for a raft or with too sluggish a current to make rafting pay; and above all, left with a stock of food comprising one quart of good rice, brought back with them, three quarts of mixed meal, burnt flour and burnt rice, a little tea, ...

— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley

... the gods, Calypso set her willing captive adrift on a raft of trees. This raft was shattered in a storm, but Ulysses swam to the island of Phaeacia, where he was rescued by Nausicaa, the king's daughter, and brought to the palace. Thence, in a Phaeacian ...

— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... such cruelties by an overseer to a slave, that he twice attempted to drown himself, to get out of his power: this was on a raft of slaves, in the Mobile river. I saw an owner take his runaway slave, tie a rope round him, then get on his horse, give the slave and horse a cut the whip, and run the poor creature barefooted, very fast, over rough ground, where ...

— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... tranquillity and rolled along in peace, but for the presence of an island, which, growing up in the centre of the expanse, consolidated by the roots of a thousand willows and other trees that delight in such humid soils, and, in times of flood, covered by a raft of drift timber entangled among its trees, presented a barrier, on either side of which the current swept with speed and fury, though, as it seemed, entirely unopposed by rocks. In such a current, as Roland thought, there was nothing unusually formidable; a daring swimmer might easily make ...

— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird

... rule was that if a Jewish traveller died, the physicians took half his property. Petachiah saw through the real danger that threatened him, so he escaped from the perilous ministrations of the royal doctors, had himself carried across the Tigris on a raft, and soon recovered. Clearly, it was imprudent of a Jewish traveller to excite the rapacity of kings or bandits by wearing rich dresses. But it was also desirable for the Jew, if he could, to evade recognition ...

— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams

... time of deep night—while the snow still whipped past in clouds that stung and stifled us—our pan rode breaking water: which hissed and flashed on every hand, the while ravenously eating at our narrow raft of ice. Death waited at our feet.... We stood with our backs to the wind, my sister and I cowering, numb and silent, in the lee of the doctor.... Through the long night 'twas he that sheltered us.... By ...

— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan

... for anybody," said the skipper. "But you can make your mind quite easy: you're as safe aboard my ship as what you would be alone on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic; and as for the mate, he was only chaffing you. Wasn't ...

— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs

... lake, which was fringed with a beach of pure white pebbles, and being well sheltered in the rear by umbrageous trees. The point of rocks close at hand formed a natural jetty, which, Roy observed, would be useful as a landing-place when he got his raft under way; the turf was soft, a matter of some importance, as it was to form their couch at night, and a small stream trickled down from one of the numerous springs which welled up at the foot of the ...

— Silver Lake • R.M. Ballantyne

... of wonder, a wild native Sculled the stranger to the island, On a raft made of rough pine logs. Wild the island: limes and alders In low marshes here were growing; On the shore with pebbles covered, Also stood huge ancient willows; And some scattered huts with thatched roofs. Here in summer, when the salmon Are ...

— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... was a raft built of long bamboo poles lashed together with vines and creepers. It floated just above the surface and was half submerged when loaded. The natives used a most extraordinary contrivance in place of oars. It consisted of a piece ...

— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews

... from which they could not escape. Drake's self-possession alone was unshaken, and, after casting about for some way of reaching safety, he noticed trees floating slowly down the river. With 'the most confident and cheerful expression, he asked: "Who would accompany him to sea on the raft he was about to form with those timbers?"' A sail was 'made of a bisket-sack,' and with 'an oar shaped out of a young tree for a rudder,' they set out to sea, in danger of being swamped by every wave, and often waist-deep in water. After about six hours of extreme peril they sighted ...

— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote

... the day of barge and raft reach its zenith, had heard the first steam packet's shrieking whistle which sounded the death-knell of the ancient order, though the shifting of the trade was a slow matter and the glory of the old did not pass over to the new at once, ...

— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... Wayland. "They'll camp in the timber over there for the night and wait. All right, my friends! You'll not have to wait long; no longer than it takes you, sir, to find our pack mule and the stray bronchs, while I build a raft. We can't cross the lower end for the moraine; and we can't cross the upper end for the ice; and it's too cold to ...

— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... beast gone?" he asked. "I shall be obliged to show him the door, yet, Josephine. You ought to snub him. He's worse than his pictures. Well, you've had a whole raft of ...

— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... way you look at them), I turned me to the lake front of Buffalo, where the steamers bellow to the grain elevators, and the locomotives yell to the coal-shutes, and the canal barges jostle the lumber-raft half a mile long as it snakes across the water in tow of a launch, and earth, and sky, and sea alike are thick ...

— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling

... we met with a serious check. There was no drift, and the stream was still swollen from the summer rains. Drawn up on the opposite bank was a raft, by means of this the prospectors had crossed. We camped and ...

— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully

... its banks. To reach the Tinguians, it is necessary to have recourse to a slight skiff, that can easily pass through the current and the most shallow parts. My guide and my lieutenant soon contrived to make a small raft of bamboos; when it was finished we embarked, Alila and myself, our guide refusing to accompany us. After much trouble and fatigue, casting ourselves often into the water to draw our raft along, we at length got clear of ...

— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere

... into which he had fallen he had cried unto God and been delivered. He believed that he had received God's forgiveness, as he knew that he had received men's forgiveness. Out of the wreck of his former life he had constructed a little raft and trusted to it bearing him safely through what remained of the storm of life. If Felicita had lived he would have remained in the service of his father's old friend, proving himself of use in numberless ways; not merely as an attendant, but in assisting him with the affairs of the bank, with ...

— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... transport, dory, galley, cruiser, ship, barge, bark, brig, bucentaur, skiff, caique, drogher, schooner, cockleshell, vessel, tug, towboat, tow, cog, wangan, ferry-boat, dinghey, argosy, oomiac, junk, longboat, catboat, felucca, cutter, frigate, xebec, tartan, una boat, moses, raft, catamaran, sampan, lifeboat, caravel, trekschuit, masoola, argo, coggle. Associated Words: davits, oar, helm, stern, pilot, rudder, ...

— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... as a drowning man might grasp at a good substantial raft that should come floating ...

— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... detour, encountered the river again higher up. In 1867 James White was picked up below the Virgin River lashed to floating logs. He said that his hunting-party near the head of the Colorado River, attacked by Indians, had escaped upon a raft. This presently broke up in the rapids and his companions were lost. He lashed himself to the wreckage and was ...

— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard

... carried on a one-gun fight at a few cables' distance with some enemy destroyers, who, not knowing what state she was in, sheered off after a few rounds. Shaitan, holed forward and opened up aft, came across the survivors from Gehenna clinging to their raft, and took them aboard. Then some of our destroyers—they were thick on the sea that night—tried to tow her stern-first, for Goblin had cut her up badly forward. But, since Shaitan lacked any stern, and her rudder was jammed hard across where the stern should have ...

— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling

... Magnolia. I wonder how the miles of green marsh through which we pass can seem to you such a dreary waste. To my eye it is all alive with interest. I never tire of watching how the lonely white heron spears his scaly prey, how the clapper-rail floats on his raft of matted rushes, how the marsh-wren jerks his saucy little tail over his bottle-shaped nest, or how with quick and certain stroke the oyster-catcher extracts the juicy "native" from his bivalved citadel. We are now getting above the salt-water line, and on either ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... sat patiently and ponderously upon a wooden sea-chest, alone on the platform, but stacked about by such a miscellany of luggage as gave him no slight resemblance to Crusoe on his raft. Besides parcels, boxes, carpet-bags, canvas-bags, tarpaulin-bags, it included a pile of furniture swathed in straw, a parrot-cage covered with baize, and a stone jar calculated to hold ...

— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... group that had to do with Helen, Franklin, and herself. In London, among all the wider confusions, this smaller but more intense one had not struck her as it did seeing it from a distance. Perhaps it had been because Franklin, among all that glided, had been the raft she stood upon, that, in his company, she had not felt to the full how changed was their relation. His devotion to her was unchanged; of that she was sure. Franklin had not altered; it was she who had ...

— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... many wanderings, and loss, Like to Ulysses on his poplar raft, His treasure hid beneath the tunnelled moss Lest that a thief his labour steal with craft, Up the round hill, sheep-dotted, was his way, Zigzagging where some ...

— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... high points of land near the shore were collected piles bristling with ragged stumps and limbs of trees. The great gnarled branches of forest trees sometimes spread over half the river, while timbers lodging among them formed a sort of raft which kept out of the water the most wonderful things—pieces of furniture, and kitchen utensils which shone in the ...

— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.

... life that it gave him especial pleasure to recall; and that the faculty of receiving such sharp impressions had now died out in himself, but must at my age be still quite lively and active. Then he told me that he had a little raft afloat on the river above the dam which he was going to lend me, in order that I might be able to look back, in after years, upon having done so, and get great pleasure from the recollection. Now, I have a friend of my own who will forgo present ...

— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... were, roaming in the forests and sailing on the mill pond. One day, when there were no boys at hand and several girls were impatiently waiting for a sail on a raft, my sister and I volunteered to man the expedition. We always acted on the assumption that what we had seen done, we could do. Accordingly we all jumped on the raft, loosened it from its moorings, ...

— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... hard as might have been anticipated. Ben and Frank managed the placing of the rollers, which were carried in front of the logs as fast as its hinder end cleared some of them. In this manner their "raft," if such it could be called, ...

— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... capital and inflated with the spirit of speculation, hires a number of hands, and purchases a quantity of provisions (on credit), and betakes himself to the woods. His terms with his men are to feed them, supply them with what necessaries they may require, and pay them when he sells his raft." ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various

... my raft along the shore line of one of the stagnant lagoons one day I was surprised to find a broad rock jutting out from the shore, its upper surface some ten coprets above the water. Disembarking, I ascended it, ...

— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce

... preoccupied by the rites of the Hebrews, imperfectly interpreted the words of the natives, or, as seems more probable, has he added something to the analogies of the woman-serpent, the conflict of two brothers, the cataclysm of water, the raft of Coxcox, the exploring bird, and many other things that teach us incontestably that there existed a community of antique traditions between the nations of the two worlds? Views of the Cordilleras ...

— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt

... the river, booms of logs chained together at the ends had been prepared. Into the enclosure the drive was floated and stopped. Then a raft was formed by passing new manila ropes over the logs, to each one of which the line was fastened by a hardwood forked pin driven astride of it. A tug ...

— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... have been able to get sufficient fuel for our purpose. When they pitched the wood off the rocks into the harbour, it sank immediately, giving them a great deal of trouble to fish it up again. Neither could they raft it as intended, but were compelled to load it into the boats and make several journeys to and fro before all they had cut was shipped. Altogether, I was glad that the wooding had not fallen to my share. On board the ship fishing ...

— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... Tourneville, attended by Hannah Macaulay, walked shorewards from Dunseveric House. It appeared that they were going to bathe, for they carried bundles of white sheets and coloured garments, large bundles well wrapped together and strapped. Hannah Macaulay had, besides, a little raft made of the flat corks which fishermen use to mark the places where their lobster pots are sunk and to float the tops of salmon nets. It seemed as if one of the party were no great swimmer, and did not ...

— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham

... density. And yet—I was not sure. I found myself staring through the black, shiny surface of the window, seeking relief in the obscuring dark. It gave little vision, except its own distorted reflections, but I could distinguish vaguely the outlines of the old mill with the shadowly raft in the high branches and the smudgy round spots that I knew ...

— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... doom. Half a mile below was the fall, and at the side of the fall, went ever and ever around with tremendous violence, the rending fans of the water-mill. Marie knew full well that any drift boat, or log, or raft, carried down the river at freshet-flow, was always swept into the toils of the inexorable wheels. Yet, if she were reckless and without heed a few minutes before, I am told that now she was calm. As she is present, I must refrain ...

— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins

... laid all night before the idols, either to help their sickness or make an end of them. If they do not mend that night, the friends come and sit up with them, and cry for some time, after which they take them to the side of the river, laying them on a raft of reeds, and so let them float down ...

— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr

... boys is 'The Last Cruise of the Spitfire,' by Edward Stratemeyer. There is plenty of adventure in it, a shipwreck, a cruise on a raft, and other stirring perils of the ...

— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic

... more at the cottage for me, and now all I wanted was to get on board of the Splash. My skiff was destroyed, and my pursuer would not permit me to build a raft. I could have swum off to her; but the water might injure, if not ruin, the priceless document in my pocket. Tom was at my heels, and all I could do was ...

— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic

... guilty, made to speak What they will have to fit their tyrannous wreak? When ignorance is scarcely innocence; And knowledge made a capital offence! When not so much, but the bare empty shade Of liberty is raft us; and we made The prey to greedy vultures and vile spies, That first transfix ...

— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson

... from time to time I swept the horizon with my marine glasses; but there was no sign of Kemper; no sail broke the far sweep of sky and water; nothing moved out there save when a wild duck took wing amid the dark raft of its companions to circle low above the ocean and settle at random, invisible again except when, at intervals, its white breast flashed in ...

— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... wide suffrage, a mild penal code, he yet endorsed the saying of an old American author, "A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft that will never sink, but then your feet ...

— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... the Ukika sacrifice or soon afterwards the child's hair is shaved for the first time. By the rich the hair is weighed against silver and this sum is distributed to beggars. It is then tied up in a piece of cloth and either buried or thrown into a river, or sometimes set afloat on a little toy raft in the name of a saint. Occasionally tufts of hair or even the whole head may be left unshaven in the name of a saint, and after one or more years the child is taken to the saint's tomb and the hair shaved there; or if this ...

— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... and to me, and we'll make it all right." On the crests of the swelling waves they swam round the dark bulk of the vessel, and heard plainly the clamor of the men as they embarked in the small boats. Two of them seemed to be fastened together, raft-like, on the starboard side of the yacht, and were quickly filled with men. Prayers and curses were audible, with the loose, wild inflexion of the man who is in the clutch of an overmastering fear. As long as there had been work ...

— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... good raft necessary, axes, hatchets, hunting-knives, nails, one hundred and fifty feet of rope, and two Juneau sleds were purchased. To these were added snow-shoes, a strong duck-tent, fishing-tackle, snow-glasses to protect themselves against snow-blindness, rubber blankets, mosquito-netting, ...

— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis

... directly. It brings into play the associative memory, and involves the recognition of analogies. There is a certain likeness between the flying back of a bough in one's face and the rebound of a bow, between a serpent's tooth and a poisoned arrow, between floating timber and a raft or boat; and water, steam, and electricity are like a horse in one respect—they will all make wheels go ...

— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas

... Merrimac renewed her attack upon the Minnesota, and was completely surprised by the appearance of a small vessel which, in the expressive description of the day, resembled a cheese- box on a raft. She had arrived from New York at the close of the first day's fight. From her turret began a furious cannonade which not only diverted the attack from the Minnesota but after a ferocious contest of many hours practically ...

— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... on the last raft to cross the river. Doctor Carey watched with eager gaze as the last men reached the farther bank. He saw them scrambling up from the water's edge. He saw Thaine turn back to lift up a comrade blinded, ...

— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter

... (Rhizophora), pitahaja (Cactus pitahaja), ceiba (Bombax), tuna (Cactus tuna), hicotea (a tortoise), iguana (Lacerta iguana), manatee (Trichecus manati), nigua (Pulex penetrans), hamaca (a hammock), balsa (a raft; however balsa is an old Castilian word signifying a pool of water), barbacoa (a small bed of light wood, or reeds), canei or buhio (a hut), canoa (a canoe), cocujo (Elater noctilucus, the fire-fly), ...

— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... detained in great quantities, and the narrow channel which swept round the bend was full of ice, piled one cake over another, thus forming a temporary barrier to the descending ice, which lodged, and formed a great, undulating raft, filling up the whole river, and extending almost to the ...

— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... cabin on Last Island might be holding together still. Dan and Neb are knocking a raft together, and if they can make it float they'll go over there and get the little lad off. And if they don't Padre" (the rough old voice trembled),—"if they don't, wal, you are sky pilot enough to know that the little chap has reached ...

— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman

... off their posts, and carry them away to some place which was safe from attack. The roofs are very large, but they are so constructed that they can be taken down in three or four pieces, and each of these may be placed upon a raft made of canoes, and ...

— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... bark, and held together by cords made of grass, and assumed the appearance of meshes worked in the form of a pentagon. Mr. Taw, the pilot of Macquarie Harbour, saw the natives cross the river: on this occasion, a man swam on either side of the raft—formed of the bark of the "swamp tree." The distance between the islets is not sufficient to shut us up to the notion of a local creation.[28] A New Holland woman, taken to Flinders', remembered a tradition, ...

— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West

... one, he would have been unable to manage her. He knew that should he attempt to make his way overland he would, to a certainty, be re-taken. Finding a piece of wreck, with some broken oars, and other drift-wood, and a coil of rope, he contrived to put together a raft, on which seating himself, he shoved off, expecting to be picked up by some passing vessel. Instead of this, he was—fortunately for himself— discovered by the active coastguardmen, and brought back to prison. Had he succeeded ...

— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston

... old raft, lying at one edge of the pond, under the willow tree. "I'll play on the ...

— Bobby of Cloverfield Farm • Helen Fuller Orton

... several axes in reserve, it is doubtful whether they would have been able to get sufficient fuel for our purpose. When they pitched the wood off the rocks into the harbour, it sank immediately, giving them a great deal of trouble to fish it up again. Neither could they raft it as intended, but were compelled to load it into the boats and make several journeys to and fro before all they had cut was shipped. Altogether, I was glad that the wooding had not fallen to my share. On board the ship fishing had been going on steadily most of the day by a few hands told ...

— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... Francois. "I should like to see a canoe made from three trees! Is it a raft you mean, ...

— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... the shore. A multitude of hands went up to shade the eager eyes, and exclamations of wonder burst out from many men at the sight of a crowd of canoes of various sizes and kinds lying close together with the effect as of an enormous raft, a little way off the side of the Emma. The excited voices rose higher and higher. There was no doubt about Tengga's being on the lagoon. But what was Jorgenson about? The Emma lay as if abandoned by her keeper and her crew, ...

— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... in shallow ponds or slow streams. They are flattened, and on one edge, or both, and at the apex is a spongy ridge. Very likely, by this time, the reader has surmised that this serves the purpose of a raft to float the small seed within, which would sink at once if separated from the boat that grew on its margins. In this connection may be studied achenes of water plantain, Alisma, bur reed, cat-tail flag, arrow grass, burgrass, numerous pondweeds, several buttercups, the hop, ...

— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal

... then offered no effective resistance. The obstructions had been opened to remove accumulated raft, and could not be closed; and the fleet moved slowly up to seize the rich prize that lay entirely ...

— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... of the question that the crew of the Brilliant could be allowed to remain on the island. Some of the pirates suggested that they should be put on a raft, towed to leeward of the island, and, when out of sight of it, be cast adrift to float about until they should be picked up or get blown on one of the numerous islands that lay to the southward of the rendezvous. Manton and Scraggs advocated this plan, but ...

— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne

... however, was loyal to his allies until, on the 14th of June, his army was almost annihilated at Friedland. This loss compelled him to enter into negotiations. On June 25, 1807, the two emperors met on a raft at Tilsit. Napoleon was prepared to do almost anything that would induce Alexander to cease interfering in Europe. An offensive-defensive alliance was concluded, whereby Napoleon agreed not to oppose the expulsion ...

— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen

... Rand arose, replaced the book on the shelf, sat down at his desk, and began to unfold papers. "Work!" he said presently, in a dull voice. "Work! That is the straw at which to catch! Perhaps one might make of it a raft to bear one's weight. I have known the day when in work I have forgotten hunger, thirst, weariness, calamity. I have worked at night and grudged an hour to sleep. What I have done, cannot I do again? But I would work better, Tom, if ...

— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... the hold, it appeared to them that the water was rising; if so, the ship must have sprung a serious leak. With the scanty supply of provisions they had obtained, they hurried on deck to report what they had remarked. Considerable progress had been made with the raft, but without food and water it could only tend to prolong their misery. Reuben, with three other men, were therefore ordered below, to get up any more provisions which they could find. They very soon returned with the only things they could ...

— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston

... hour the boat appeared. It came from down the river, propelled close inshore by two members of their own party who had gone to fetch it. At first the travelers thought it a long, oblong raft. Then as it came closer they could see it was constructed of three canoes, each about thirty feet long, hollowed out of tree-trunks. Over these was laid a platform of small trees hewn roughly into boards. The boat was propelled by long, slender poles in the hands of the two men, ...

— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... the banks above and below. Below them was a great lake; beside and above them a swift, deep current broken by rapids. There was no crossing. They tried to gather willow faggots, and bind them into a raft. But the green wood sank so {101} easily that only one man could get upon the raft: to paddle or pole it in the running water was impossible. A line was made of strips of skin, and Richardson volunteered to swim the river so as to haul the raft across with the line. The bitter ...

— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock

... the simpler; as for instance in his taking it from her that Miss Theale then could do nothing for them. He frankly brought out what he had ventured to think possible. "If we can't meet here and we've really exhausted the charms of the open air and the crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, some occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me these two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are so accountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. And it's one more ...

— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... lake bottom selected for a feeding-ground lies at a depth of fifteen or twenty feet below the surface, and is covered with a short growth of algae and other aquatic plants,—facts I had previously determined while sailing over it on a raft. After alighting on the glassy surface, they occasionally indulged in a little play, chasing one another round about in small circles; then all three would suddenly dive together, and then ...

— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... a stone, until he made them sharp like knives. With these, and no other instruments, he cut down some branches of trees, which he joined together with twigs and osiers, and as well as he could made a boat, or rather a raft, with which he crossed over the rivers. Thus he reached the Cape of Golfotriste, as was said before, where he happened to find a certain vessel of pirates who wore great comrades of his own, and ...

— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang

... these men springs naturally from the first. They are always on the look-out. This does not mean that they are industrious. I stated in a previous article my belief that as a rule successful men are not particularly industrious. A man on a raft with his shirt for a signal cannot be termed industrious, but he will keep his eyes open for a sail on the horizon. If he simply lies down and goes to sleep he may miss the chance of his life, in a very special sense. The man with the talent to succeed ...

— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett

... of fish the fishermen use hand-nets, which they throw into the sea from the shore; the larger species they kill with lances, one of which Ayd carried constantly with him as a weapon; there is not a single boat nor even a raft to be found on the whole of this coast, but the Bedouins of the eastern coast have a few boats, which may sometimes be seen in the gulf. We saw here a great number of porpoises playing in the water close to the shore. I wished to shoot at one of them, but was prevented by my companions, ...

— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... where the word [Greek text: tanaaekaes] is borrowed from the usual epithet of swords; "the long edge" is quite inappropriate to a woodcutter's axe. On Calypso's isle Calypso gives to Odysseus a bronze axe for his raft-making. Butcher's work is done with an axe. [Footnote: Iliad, XVII. 520; Odyssey, III. 442-449.] The axes offered by Achilles as a prize for archers and the axes through which Odysseus shot are implements ...

— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... border into Canada, followed by new restrictions, with severe penalties and powers of search hitherto unknown in the law of the United States. On Lake Champlain, on June 13, 1808, a band of sixty armed men fired upon United States troops, and carried a raft in triumph over the border. A prosecution for treason against one of the men involved was ...

— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart

... of the wild animal is much more uniform than in the great raft of "domestic" mongrel specimens which make night hideous with their discordant yowls, although we sometimes see a high bred individual which, if his tail was cut off at half its length, might easily pass as an example ...

— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson

... these were held in great dread, for if swimming became necessary, the plight of the little company, with the thermometer striking steadily below freezing point, would be pitiful indeed. The ranchman was resolved to save his wife and child from such an affliction, by constructing some kind of a raft, though the delay involved in such a work might solve the question of life ...

— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis

... hitching his chair over, shouting, "Movie? Say, Sir Gerald, I supposed of course you had a raft of dames waiting to lead you out to ...

— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... leg directly, and in a little while we got to the shore on a hastily constructed raft. After seeing the foreman safely cared for, and giving Mr. Devlin's manager the facts of the occurrence, more than sated with my morning's experience, I climbed the mountain side, and took refuge from the heat in ...

— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... therefore exerted themselves to the utmost to avoid them; whereas I could see no other way of escape, especially for the lady sitting beside me, than by boarding one of these very rafts. In order to effect this (against the wish of our two oarsmen) I seized with one hand a projecting peg on a raft we were passing and held our little vessel fast, and, while the two rowers screamed that the Ellida would be lost, quickly hoisted the lady out of the skiff on to the raft, across which we walked to the shore, calmly leaving our friends to ...

— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner

... Jock stood up and laughed good-naturedly. "Go to bed and get up steam for to-morrer. When you see the whole collection you'll warm up your ideas. You're a terrible plucky kid to trust your own soul on a trifling little raft like this religion of yours. You better not overload it with more souls, though; the risk's ...

— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... that it would be dangerous to apprize those on the opposite side of the river of their situation, by hallooing, Lewis set himself to work as silently, and yet as expeditiously [124] as possible, and with the aid of his little brother, soon completed a raft on which they safely crossed the Ohio; and made their ...

— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... mangrove, very much dried, and lashed together in two places with the largest ends one way, so as to form a broad part, and the smaller ends closing to a point. Near the broad end was a bunch of grass, where the man sits to paddle; but the raft, with his weight alone, must swim very deep; and indeed I should scarcely have supposed it could float a man at all. Upon one of the rafts was a short net, which, from the size of the meshes, was probably intended to catch turtle; upon another was a young shark; and these, ...

— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders

... not satisfactory, any way you look at them), I turned me to the lake front of Buffalo, where the steamers bellow to the grain elevators, and the locomotives yell to the coal-shutes, and the canal barges jostle the lumber-raft half a mile long as it snakes across the water in tow of a launch, and earth, and sky, and sea alike are ...

— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling

... and boats, big and little, laden with stones and clods of earth. The boats are then attached to the Zinkstuk, and this combined flotilla is so disposed along shore that the current carries it to the place where the Zinkstuk is to be sunk. When the current begins to make itself felt, the raft is loaded by the simple process of heaping the contents of the barges upon the middle of it. The men form in line from the four corners to the centre, and the loads of stone and earth are passed on to the centre of the raft, on which they are flung; then the middle ...

— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... the valley of Raft River, which is tributary to the Snake River, and finally empties into the Columbia, we came to a deep, ditch-like crack in the earth, partly filled with water and soft mud. It was about a rod in width, but so long ...

— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole

... into which we sink, and it is with great difficulty that we make progress. In some places the holes are so deep that we have to swim, and our little bundles of blankets and rations are fixed to a raft made of driftwood and pushed before us. Now and then there is a little flood-plain, on which we can walk, and we cross and recross the stream and wade along the channel where the water is so swift as almost to carry us off our feet and we are in danger every moment of being swept ...

— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell

... sir," was the reply. "A number of logs broke loose from the raft and I had a hard time to collect them. There's a heavy sea runnin' ...

— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody

... took hold of the planks at his side, and they heaved the rude raft into the sea. In an instant she was seized and whirled over the side; she instinctively held her breath, felt a shock, felt herself swallowed up in an awful, fathomless coldness, and then found herself floating below the huge towering hull ...

— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor

... pond. It was Saturday afternoon. The nearest public-house was a mile away. Immunity from interference by the British workman was thus assured. It occurred to me that by placing my three depressed looking relatives on one raft, attacking them myself from another, taking the eldest girl's sixpence away from her, disabling their raft, and leaving them to drift without a rudder, innocent amusement would be provided for ...

— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome

... couldn't bring the kid here—I'm not a horse. So I did the next best thing; I carried him down the old creek bed a ways, to where the water flowed into it. It was flowing easy then. I laced a couple of broken off branches together and made the craziest raft you ever saw. Then I laid the kid on it and held his head and poled with the other hand and that way we got down to the Hudson. I intended to get him to some house down there and then notify camp. He was ...

— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... acquaintances, and just outside Ye Craftsman's Bookshop they ran into Nell Stanley, who they knew had no business at all there on Main Street at this hour of the afternoon. Nell was the minister's daughter, and there were a number of little motherless Stanleys at the parsonage (Amy said "a whole raft of them") who usually needed the older ...

— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose

... things," replied Bobus. "The truest kindness to her is to get afloat away from the family raft as speedily as possible. She has quite ...

— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... stood by without saying a word. At last the father kissed his little girl, and lifted her on to the raft again. ...

— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various

... round two corners, how absorbing to stand and speculate on what might be coming round either corner, and which would yield a vision first! Perhaps there would come along a sandolo rowed by a man standing at the back, his two oars crossed gracefully; perhaps a floating raft with barefooted boys bestriding it; perhaps a barca punted by men in blue blouses, one at front and two at the back, with a load of golden hay, or with provisions for the Ghetto—glowing fruit and picturesque vegetables, or bleating sheep and bellowing bulls, coming to be killed by the Jewish ...

— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... asked. "I shall be obliged to show him the door, yet, Josephine. You ought to snub him. He's worse than his pictures. Well, you've had a whole raft of folks ...

— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... from the island was impossible, for it was four miles from the mainland, and they had no canoes, and the water was literally alive with sharks. Some of them, wild with terror, built a raft out of dead timber, and tried to put to sea. They were seen by the Rossel Islanders, pursued and captured, and slaughtered for the cannibal ovens, which were now never idle. Some poor creatures, who could swim, tried ...

— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke

... that morning. We had driven all day with nothing to eat but a bit of war bread and chocolate, we were black with dust, there was not a crumb in the place that did not belong to the army, and we sat there in the thickening dusk, almost as much adrift as a raft in mid-ocean, ...

— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... that I did not recognise at first what they were. Our English Bladder-worts, as everybody knows, float in stagnant water on tangles of hair-like leaves, something like those of the Water-Ranunculus, but furnished with innumerable tiny bladders; and this raft supports the little scape of yellow snapdragon-like flowers. There are in Trinidad and other parts of South America Bladder-worts of this type. But those which we found to-day, growing out of the damp clay, were more like in habit to a delicate stalk of flax, or even a bent ...

— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... attire, and in Persia the rule was that if a Jewish traveller died, the physicians took half his property. Petachiah saw through the real danger that threatened him, so he escaped from the perilous ministrations of the royal doctors, had himself carried across the Tigris on a raft, and soon recovered. Clearly, it was imprudent of a Jewish traveller to excite the rapacity of kings or bandits by wearing rich dresses. But it was also desirable for the Jew, if he could, to evade recognition as such altogether. Jewish opinion was very sensible on this ...

— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams

... thought you was something or other—they's sech a raft of agents along; though my Mary tells me 'tain't a circumstance to the city—Mate works out in the city. Let me make you acquainted with Mis' Flaherty. She's the lady what lives in Bachelor's Row and takes in boarders and washin's—now, ...

— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... help their sickness or make an end of them. If they do not mend that night, the friends come and sit up with them, and cry for some time, after which they take them to the side of the river, laying them on a raft of reeds, and so let ...

— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr

... a spit of land ran out against the current, and behind its shelter an eddy had collected a mass of uprooted trees and other flood refuse, all matted with green from the growth of wind-borne seeds. It was in reality a great natural raft, built by the eddy and anchored behind the little point. For this Grom headed with new hope. It might be strong enough—parts of it at least—to bear up the three fugitives. But their furious pursuers would surely not venture their giant bulks ...

— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... a battle royal. Whatever the thing was that had felt the spears, it certainly lost no time in showing its resentment. It thrashed the water into furious waves until I momentarily expected the raft ...

— Under the Andes • Rex Stout

... long trips, this one had what was called a "boat-bottom," intended to enable it to remain afloat with its burden in case of an accidental fall into a large body of water. Pludder saw that this fact would enable him to turn the wreck into a raft. ...

— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... improvement in water transportation is the giant raft, Fig. 30. When such a raft is made up, logs of uniform length are placed together, the width of the raft being from sixty to one hundred feet and its length, one thousand feet or more. It may contain ...

— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes

... your 'Robinson Crusoe' and your 'Swiss Family Robinson' and you will know. We must make a kind of raft, so that we can go back and forth to the houseboat without getting wet every time we ...

— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers

... it," said Mulroy. "I see something like a man lying on it, but whether he is dead or alive I cannot say. There is a flag, undoubtedly—but no one waves a handkerchief or a rag of any kind. Surely, if a living being occupied the raft he would have seen the ship by this time. Stay, he moves! No; it must have been imagination. I fear that he is dead, poor fellow. Stand by to ...

— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne

... the yellow eyes!" whispered Bob, beginning to bring his gun-stock nearer to his shoulder. "Say, there's a whole raft of 'em, Frank!" ...

— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson

... the sedge-crowned God ascends From his verdant spring to light, And his raft's direction bends At the goddess' word of might,— While the hours, all gently bound, Nimbly to their duty fly; Rugged trunks are fashioned round By her ...

— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... report, that he picked up Wyckliffe and four men off a raft, about six hours from Hobart. The rescued reported they had been capsized while trying ...

— Australia Revenged • Boomerang

... twelve o'clock, he and Johnnie Jones, dressed in their bathing suits, went in the water. The little boy considered bathing great fun as long as he remained close to shore where the water was shallow but he did not like it so well when Father carried him out to the raft, where the water was so deep that it reached the shoulders of the grown ...

— All About Johnnie Jones • Carolyn Verhoeff

... crossing of the Brigade was a long job, and had to be carefully worked out. The raft held sixty men at a time, or thirty men and three horses; but as horses on a raft in the dead of night were likely to cause a fuss, we left them behind, to follow on in the morning, and crossed without them,—four and a half hours it took; and whilst the men were crossing we tried to ...

— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen

... is said to have originated in the cele- brated French painting by Gericault, "the Wreck of the Medusa," now in the Louvre gallery. The Medusa was a French frigate wrecked off the coast of Africa in 1816. Some of the survivors, escaping on a raft, were rescued by a passing ship after many days of torture. Verne, however, seems also to have drawn upon the terrifying experiences of the British ship Sarah Sands in 1857, her story being fresh in the public mind at the time ...

— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne

... knew of nothing. Gaspard offered to take Veronique on his back and swim with her to a place of safety. Pierre suggested a raft. Cyprien ...

— The Flood • Emile Zola

... be the first to point out to Orion, from Philip's point of view, that life was a post, a duty; and then, if his heart seemed opened to this admonition, then—but no, this must be all that could pass between them—then all must be at an end, extinct, dead, like the fires in a sunken raft, like a soap-bubble that the wind has burst, like an echo that has died away—all over and ...

— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... 1916, two days after the Hampshire went down, eleven men of the cruiser reached the Orkneys, after forty-eight hours buffeting by the waves upon a raft. The body of Colonel Fitzgerald was washed ashore the same day of the sinking, but the sea did not give up Kitchener or any of the ...

— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... all cut away. The vessel was now little better than a raft, and was drifting at the mercy of the ocean currents. For my part I did not much care. I had no desire to go to Manilla or any where else; and the love of life which is usually so strong did not exist. I should have preferred to have been killed or drowned at once. Instead ...

— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... ordered rafts to be constructed for the transporting of his men. When the vessels reached the canals, they were submerged, and the waters, swirling round and round as though driven by mill wheels, swept away two hundred men, twenty from each raft. On the third day they set about assaulting the city from the side on which the snakes and scorpions swarmed, but they failed to reach it, and the reptiles killed one hundred and seventy men. The king desisted from attacking the city, but for the space of ...

— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... 'and there is none other: at the lower end the rocks rise sheer from out the water, and a little further down is a great force thundering betwixt them; so that by no boat or raft may ye come out of the Dale. But the outgate up the water is called the Road of War, as this is named the Path of Peace. But now are all ways ways ...

— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris

... you to do so, the problem might not seem so hard, for there are not so many islands shown. The difficulty is that few maps show all of them, and even on the best of navigating maps there may be one or two that are not charted. The shipwrecked ones, providing they lived to get off on a life raft, or in a boat, might as likely have been driven to one of these little islands, ...

— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose

... right here, Colonel. We ain't got what I wished; but we've taken 'em from friend and foe, and here comes the last of my boys with Major Skeene's big raft and, if I ain't mighty mistaken, with a bag o' charcoal aboard that must ha' ...

— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster

... it does not kill, for he dared not kill him because of his station, deprives him who takes it of his reason, sometimes for ever and sometimes for a year or more. After this, said Kari, he remembered little or nothing, save long travellings in boats and through forests, and then again upon a raft or boat on which he was driven alone, for many, many days, drinking a jar of water which he had with him, and eating some dried flesh and with it a marvellous drug of his people, some of which remained to him in the leathern bag that has power ...

— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard

... who control circumstances, as it is called, are those who have learned to allow for the influence of their eddies, and have the nerve to turn them to account at the happy instant. Mr. Lincoln's perilous task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with his setting-pole where the main current was, and keep ...

— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... again burst out upon us. All we could do, therefore, was to continue going ahead as fast as possible. How thankful we felt that Marian had been sent on before us; for had we been compelled to tow or push the raft, our progress must of necessity have been much slower. We, of course, kept anxiously looking out for her and our father and Arthur, expecting every moment to come upon them; but we had not calculated sufficiently ...

— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston

... in progress. At first he was successful, but one day, while the men were busy laying their bricks in cement one of them drove into the roof, and a deluge of water burst in on them, and although they tried to continue their work on a raft the water prevailed and at last drove them out. They escaped with difficulty up one of the air-shafts. The water having put an effectual stop to the work, the directors felt disposed to give it up, but Stephenson begged for a ...

— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne

... of the speech must be left to the reader, for with the last word some weighty solid crashed against the raft until it trembled throughout. Demedes stopped. Involuntarily his hand sought the dagger; and the action was a confession of surprise. An interval of quiet ensued; then came a trial of the lock—at first, gentle—another, ...

— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... you might say. It was at the Three Forks that Colter and Potts, two of the Lewis and Clark men, were attacked by the Blackfeet, and Potts killed and Colter forced to run naked, six miles over the stones and cactus—till at last he killed his nearest pursuer with his own spear, and hid under a raft of driftwood ...

— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough

... who arrived at the moment the first boatload from the camp reached the opposite bank of the Murray. By means of casks we floated the drays over the three rivers and, after two experiments with a raft, both partial failures, and while a third raft was in progress, of a more solid and better construction, we discovered that a canoe, of very large dimensions and paddled by the native boy Tommy, would prove the most expeditious as well as a safe ...

— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... The captain of a small steamer running between Iquitos and Para, told me that on the preceding trip he had carried to a doctor a boy who had lost his arm from the bite of an alligator, while allowing his arm to hang in the water from a raft. The same captain, however, also informed me that he had been treed by one of these animals and compelled to remain "up a tree" for some time; so that I have some hesitation in quoting him as an authority upon the nature and habits of these alligators. The flesh of young alligators ...

— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various

... child is sublimely made a sacred charge. He is pushed, on a little raft, across broad rivers by the swimming sailors; they carry him by turns through the deep sand and long grass (he patiently walking at all other times); they share with him such putrid fish as they find to eat; they lie down and wait for him when the rough carpenter, ...

— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens

... work of unloading the wreck. There was an inlet or mouth of a creek not far from the place where they first landed, and, constructing a raft on the wreck and loading it with arms, provisions, ammunition and tools, they took advantage of the tide to float it in to shore. This was repeated daily for weeks. Clothing, sails, provisions of all kinds, ...

— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick

... crowded together under the bridge, when suddenly one of the occupants of a boat near mine threw up his hands and fell overboard. We immediately began diving for him, but in vain; some hours later the body was found under a raft. ...

— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... brilliant butterflies, among them a very large metallic green and black species (Ornithoptera priamus) and a large one of a bright blue (Papilio ulyses). The same afternoon we three went out shooting on the lake. Two of the Agai Ambu canoes were lashed together and a raft of split bamboo put across them, and two Agai Ambu men punted and paddled us about. Before starting we had first educated them up to the report of our guns, and after a few shots they soon got over ...

— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker

... impatient shrug. He had forgotten his work while he thought about the girl, and there was much to be done. For one thing, he had come up to see if the smith had tempered some boring tools; and then he must send the Metis river-jacks to float a raft of props down to the mine. Pulling himself together, he set about the work with characteristic energy, but as he walked through the murmuring woods he unconsciously began to sing a romantic ballad he had learned ...

— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss

... Blair's Chronology; that settles it. Adam and Eve, created Friday, October 28th, B. C. 4004. You've been in a ship for a good while, and here comes Mr. Darwin on deck with an armful of sticks and says, "Let's build a raft, and trust ...

— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... transition between the earth and the sea. Another calls it "an immense surface of earth floating on the water." Others speak of it as an annex of the old continent, the China of Europe, the end of the earth and the beginning of the ocean—a huge raft of mud and sand; and Philip II. called it "the country ...

— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... the current, with proper formalities shouted By the hoarse-throated stern-wheeler that pushed the black barges before her, And as she passed us poured a foamy cascade from her paddles. Then, as a raft of logs, which the spread of the barges had hidden, River-wide, weltered in sight, with a sudden jump forward the pilot Dropped his whole weight on the spokes of the wheel just in ...

— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... if we have any real Christianity in us. The old Christ that we trusted at first was able to do for us all that we asked Him to do, but we did not ask Him at first for half enough, and we did not learn at first a tithe of what was in Him. Suppose, for instance, some great ship comes alongside a raft with ship-wrecked sailors upon it, and in the darkness of the night transfers them to the security of its deck. They know how safe they are, they know what has saved them, but what do they know compared with what they will know before the voyage ends of all the reservoirs of power ...

— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... Mines. Already men were at work on the new lode, and doing placer digging for the free gold in the soil. Wooden rails were laid to the edge of the stream, and over it the small, rude car was pushed with the new ore down to a raft on which a test load had been drifted to the immense crusher at the works on Lake Kootenai. And the test had resulted so favorably that the new strike at Twin Springs was considered by far the richest one of ...

— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan

... solved the mystery. It was a rudely built raft with a stool upon it, and upon the stool sat a ragged urchin ten ...

— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various

... my gun with me, as well as some provisions, which, of course, I did not wish to wet; and so I had to consider how I could get them over dry. A raft was the only means, but I reflected that it might prove somewhat difficult to tow. Still, I did not like to be beat, so I made signs to Jerry what I was going to do. With a hatchet which I carried in my belt, and with which I had provided myself to make an arbour for ...

— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... granite buildings would have stifled him; and the zealous Adamses and the high-minded Quincys and Sewalls and all the rest would have bored him horribly. Probably the only item in the whole history of Quincy which would have appealed to Wampatuck in the least would have been the floating down on a raft of the old Hollis Street Church of Boston, to become the Union Church of Weymouth and Braintree in 1810. This and the similar transportation of the Bowditch house from Beacon Street in Boston to Quincy a couple of years later would have fascinated the red man, as ...

— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery

... refused to hear Stallo. They had betrayed little interest in Crookes. At last their universe had been wrecked by rays, and Karl Pearson undertook to cut the wreck loose with an axe, leaving science adrift on a sensual raft in the midst of a supersensual chaos. The confusion seemed, to a mere passenger, worse than that of 1600 when the astronomers upset the world; it resembled rather the convulsion of 310 when the Civitas Dei cut itself loose from the Civitas Romae, and the Cross ...

— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... hand at theorizing than in any necessity to ventilate some previous drifts from the beginning to the end of his book. You never feel yourself in a compact, water-tight boat, obedient to rudder and sail, but at most on a raft, drifting at the absolute gre of the tides, in a certain general direction, no doubt, but with no foresight of the specific intellectual port at which you are to bring up. Occasionally the mist condenses, the rain patters down, you catch a glimpse of far-off mountaintops, and suppose ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... in unhappiness, called aloud for solitude. He must struggle alone through his deep waters: waters of the soul, wherein float neither life-preserver nor raft, rope or even light; neither coral reef nor oozy grave, for such as he. Darkness and struggle alike lasted till the end of his strength; but, with exhaustion and the coming of dawn, came at last one mighty breaker, by which Ivan was thrown high upon the strand ...

— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... way to Trenton or to Philadelphia. In some places the speed is very great, almost equaling that of an express train. The passage of such places as Cochecton Falls and "Foul Rift" is attended with no little danger. The raft is guided by two immense oars, one before and one behind. I frequently saw these huge implements in the driftwood alongshore, suggesting some colossal race of men. The raftsmen have names of their own. From the upper ...

— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... begun upon the construction of a raft, and was not in a home-going mood. Thus encouraged by his young friend the man who mended the boats sat ...

— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell

... MODE OF CAPTURING DUCKS.—On the American rivers, the modes of capture are various. Sometimes half a dozen artificial birds are fastened to a little raft, and which is so weighted that the sham birds squat naturally on the water. This is quite sufficient to attract the notice of a passing flock, who descend to cultivate the acquaintance of the isolated few when the concealed hunter, with his fowling-piece, scatters a ...

— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... the other world existeth. Doubt not, O Krishna, the ancient religion that is practised by the good and framed by Rishis of universal knowledge and capable of seeing all things! O daughter of Drupada, religion is the only raft for those desirous of going to heaven, like a ship to merchants desirous of crossing the ocean. O thou faultless one, if the virtues that are practised by the virtuous had no fruits, this universe then would be enveloped in infamous darkness. No one then would ...

— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... perfect trap," said Meta, trying to squeeze the muddy water from her own dress and Monica's. "I believe it's nothing but a kind of raft, made out of all the dead wood and rubbish that have accumulated in the lake. I expect seeds have blown on to it, and then trees and bushes have sprung up. Now I think of it, I don't believe it was in the same place last year, so it must be able to float. We shall have ...

— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil

... carried out. The wanderers then make a raft on which they embark on a river which plunges into a cavern in the heart of a mountain; and after a time they emerge in the country of Arimaspia inhabited by the Cyclopes; and so on. The Gryphon story also appears in the romance of Huon de Bordeaux, ...

— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... on board a couple of boxes of food and bottles of drinking fluid, a sextant, a cronometer, a gas-meter, a bicycle pump and a few other scientific instruments. Then taking advantage of a roll in the motion of the ship, we launched the raft, lowered ourselves upon a line, and under cover of the heavy dark of a tropical night, we paddled ...

— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... of the waters naught Was seen but here and there unfrequently A frail raft, heaped with languid men that fought Weakly with one another for the grass Hanging about a cliff not yet submerged, And here and there a drowned man's head, and here And there a file of birds, that beat the ...

— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... time, all was in readiness for a new start, and luckily provisions from the reductions on the Parana arrived. So they embarked again, and on the journey a raft in which a woman and two children were sitting upset, to Montoya's agony, as he knew that 'in that river there are fish that the people call culebras,* which have been seen to swallow men entire, and throw them out again with all their bones broken as if it had been done with ...

— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... halted at the village of Sab. We here crossed the great river Sab by means of rafts, the mode of constructing which is certainly very ancient. They consist of leathern bottles, filled with air, fastened together with poles, and covered with planks, reeds, and rushes. Our raft had twenty-eight wind-bags, was seven feet broad, nearly as long, and carried two horse-loads and six men. As our caravan numbered thirty-two loaded animals, the crossing of the river occupied half a day. Four or five ...

— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... moment on the site of the ship-yard from which, in March, 1862, twenty-one years ago, went forth the unmasted and raft-like "Monitor," with its flat decks, its low bulwarks, its guarded mechanism, its heavy armament, and its impenetrable revolving turret, to that near battle with the "Merrimac," on which, as it seemed to us at the time, the destiny ...

— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley

... to buy the turkey—the biggest gobbler he can get, he told me—for Mrs. Judy has a raft of young ones, 'all av thim wid appetites like a famine in ould Ireland,' he ...

— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... and gathering wood and planks from the wrecks, wrought of them the semblance of a boat [to wit, a raft,] and bound it fast with ropes, saying, 'I will embark thereon and fare with this water into the inward of the mountain. If it bring me to the mainland or to a place where I may find relief and safety, [well and good]; else I shall [but] perish, even as my companions have perished.' ...

— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... crossing the banks of the Ba-Woolima, a narrow, rapid, and deep river, which was then much swollen by the rains, They first endeavoured to throw across trunks of trees, but these were carried away by the stream. They next attempted a raft; but after the logs had been cut, the sick people were not able to drag them to the water side. But the negroes who were with them constructed a bridge in the most ingenious manner. It was formed of two ranges of a number of upright forked ...

— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park

... ripped the cover from the coop, and the poor chickens were fluttering away in every direction, being blown by the wind until they looked like feather dusters without handles. The bottom of the coop was made of thick boards, so Dorothy found she was clinging to a sort of raft, with sides of slats, which readily bore up her weight. After coughing the water out of her throat and getting her breath again, she managed to climb over the slats and stand upon the firm wooden bottom of the coop, which supported ...

— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... more than the sigh of a stray breeze, came from a point far up the stream. He listened and the sound pleased him. The lone, weird note was in full accord with the night and his mood, and presently he knew it. It was some mountaineer on a raft singing a plaintive song of his own distant hills. Huge rafts launched on the headwaters of the stream in the mountains in the eastern part of the state came in great numbers down the river, but oftenest at this time of the year. Some stopped at Frankfort, and others went into the Ohio for the cities ...

— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler

... cruelties by an overseer to a slave, that he twice attempted to drown himself, to get out of his power: this was on a raft of slaves, in the Mobile river. I saw an owner take his runaway slave, tie a rope round him, then get on his horse, give the slave and horse a cut the whip, and run the poor creature barefooted, very fast, over ...

— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... less than three hundred yards away. He recognized it as a life raft. Now his spin brought him around to face it, and he saw it was parallelling his course. The ejection of the life raft must have caused the thump he'd heard before ...

— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey

... salambao is a raft of reeds or bamboo; on which is erected an apparatus not unlike the mast and yard of a square-rigged ship. To one end of the yard is attached a net which may be raised from and lowered into the water. This contrivance is called by the natives timba. See full description of the salambao, ...

— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair

... Others seem to exist by the continuance of that first faith alone—a sheer optimism that keeps the courage alive and keen enough to seize hold of the slightest driftwood of opportunity, binding this flotsam into a raft that takes them triumphantly out on the high tide. For all the long drag, the anxiety, the physical strain, the harassment, failure in itself seemed as inherently impossible to Justin as that he should ...

— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... called "the day of the poor." The goemon grows on rocks at a distance from the shore, and the peasants not having sufficient boats to collect it tie the heaps together with cords on to branches of trees and form a raft, on which the whole family is launched; a barrel is attached at the end, and the unsteady craft often rolls over and its cargo is precipitated into the water. The fine sands of the sea shore are also carted and laid on the heavy lands ...

— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser

... point of my argument! A raft was found moored between four of the great pillars in the cistern, and there was a structure on it with furnished rooms. A small boat was used for ...

— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... ship, and found that her stern lay lifted up on the bank. All the ship's provisions were dry, and, being well disposed to eat, I filled my pockets and ate as I went about other things, for I had no time to lose. We had several spare yards and planks, and with these I made a raft. I emptied three of the seamen's chests, and let them down upon the raft, and filled them with provisions. I also let down the carpenter's chest, and some arms and ammunition—all of which, after much labour, I got ...

— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... lined up on the different decks saw life preservers floating by empty, a boat with its keel in the air, and bits of wood belonging to a raft evidently constructed in ...

— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... printing. He was asked if there were any marks made on the rocks in any part of the country, and this led to his story. Lukerenga came from the west a long time ago to the River Lualaba. He had with him a little dog. When he wanted to pass over he threw his mat on the water, and this served as a raft, and they crossed the stream. When he reached the other side there were rocks at the landing place, and the mark is still to be seen on the stone, not only of his foot, but of a stick which he cut with his hatchet, and ...

— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... descent, we had to construct new rafts at the different waterfalls. Sometimes we were carried down the rapids at the rate of ten miles an hour, or more, with considerable risk of destruction to the whole party, for we were always together on one raft." ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various

... dried out, the cane assumes a permanent yellow colour; but if any is left, the cane darkens when soaked in water. When a large number of bundles has been collected, they are bound together to form a raft. On this a hut is erected, and two or three men will navigate the raft down river to the Chinese bazaar, which is to be found in the lower ...

— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... been brought willfully to destruction; Kolina kneeled, crossed herself, and prayed; while Ivan deeply reproached himself as the cause of so many human beings encountering such awful peril. The rockings of their icy raft were terrible. It was impelled hither and thither by even huger masses. Now it remained on its first level, then its surface presented an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, and it seemed about to turn bottom up. All recommended themselves to God, and awaited their fate. Suddenly ...

— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various

... to Pelley River and found Marten very thick, so we concluded to trap there the next winter. We left our outfit here and began the journey down to Dawson, we had to shoot the far famed Whitehorse rapids. there are seven of them and they are about 3 miles long, and run like lightling, we boarded a raft were cut loose by a half breed Mucklock and away we went almost a mile a minute riding on the crest of the rapid rooling river. Here after the passing of the rapids we first met Swift water bill. so ...

— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis

... "We made a raft and crossed the river, but the enemy's matchlock men peppered us so severely that we lost thirty English and fifty Sepoys in getting over. The enemy's entrenchment was not finished, but in front of it was a deep rivulet, which had ...

— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty

... through various parts of the vast northern woods, between Maine and Alaska, and covered thousands upon thousands of miles by canoe, pack-train, snowshoes, bateau, dog-train, buck-board, timber-raft, prairie-schooner, lumber-wagon, and "alligator." No one trip ever satisfied me, or afforded me the knowledge or the experience I sought, for traversing a single section of the forest was not unlike making one's way along a single street of a metropolis and then trying to persuade oneself that ...

— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... an hour, without seeming to take any farther notice of us. We were more curious than they, and observing them with our glasses from on board the ship, we saw some of them cross the river upon a kind of raft, or catamarine, and four of them carry off the dead body which had been covered by the boy, and over which his uncle had performed the ceremony of the branch, upon a kind of bier, between four men: The other body was still suffered to remain where ...

— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... W. Marsh arrived at Mosul on the 20th of March, 1850, going by way of Beirut, Aleppo, Aintab, Oorfa, and Diarbekir; from this last place he floated down the Tigris on a raft supported by inflated goat-skins, in less than four days to his new home. He describes the river as breaking through between bold precipices, and scenery delightfully and unexpectedly romantic. Mr. Schneider was his travelling companion from Aintab to Diarbekir, and ...

— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson

... one's friends, one's loved ones, yea, even one's would-be enemies is equivalent to leaving one's companions on a sinking raft and, without sentiment or remorse, save one's physical ...

— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... spot which he had at first deemed totally uninhabited, and filled with the hope that the stranger might be able to give him some information relative to the geographical position of the isle, and even perhaps aid him in forming a raft by which they might together escape from the oasis of the Mediterranean, Wagner proceeded toward the mountains. By degrees the wondrous beauty of the scene became wilder, more imposing, but less bewitching, and when he reached the acclivities ...

— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... with a large lumber raft this morning, descending from Pittsburg to Cincinnati. The half-dozen men in charge were housed midway in a rude little shanty, and relieved each other at the sweeps—two at bow, and two astern. It is an easy, lounging life, ...

— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... Thomas, commander of the gun crew on the oil-ship Vacuum. When the ship was sunk he cheered his freezing men tossing on an icy sea in an open boat far from land, until he at length perished, his last words those of encouragement. There is Lieutenant S.F. Kalk, who swam from raft to raft encouraging and directing the survivors of the destroyer Jacob Jones after a torpedo had sent that vessel to the bottom. There are those two gunners on the transport Antilles who stood serving their gun until the ship sank and carried ...

— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry

... from the sides of the mountains, which render it impossible to walk along its banks. To reach the Tinguians, it is necessary to have recourse to a slight skiff, that can easily pass through the current and the most shallow parts. My guide and my lieutenant soon contrived to make a small raft of bamboos; when it was finished we embarked, Alila and myself, our guide refusing to accompany us. After much trouble and fatigue, casting ourselves often into the water to draw our raft along, we at length got clear of the first range ...

— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere

... red. How often had the traveller seen such a sunset behind the blue summits of those hills before! Flowing yet nearer to him was the noble river Rhine, winding onward to the north, and bearing on its bosom many a little skiff which scudded quickly before the evening breeze, or raft of timber which floated slowly down its stream. How often had the stranger sailed in such little barks upon its surface, or bathed and fished in its waters! At his feet lay the little cluster of cottages which formed the village of Steinheim; and amid its clustering trees ...

— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick

... took their stations at the four corners, to hold it together, and swim across with it; and in a moment more, all our earthly possessions were floating on the turbid waters of the Big Blue. We sat on the bank, anxiously watching the result, until we saw the raft safe landed in a little cove far down on the opposite bank. The empty wagons were easily passed across; and then each man mounting a horse, we rode through the stream, the stray animals following ...

— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... Spanish batteries, dropped her anchors in mid-channel between Churruca Point and Smith Cay, opened her sea connections, exploded a number of torpedoes hung along her sides at the water-line, and when she sank, hung on to a raft attached by a rope to the sunken vessel. They were rescued from this position by the Spaniards and thrown into Morro Castle, but were treated with the consideration and courtesy to which their gallantry entitled them. On the afternoon of the ...

— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... horrible task was finished. My next work was to look for the ship's boats, but they were gone, as I expected. I could not bear to remain in the ship; it seemed a vast tomb for me. I resolved to make some sort of raft, and depart in it. This occupied two or three days; at length it was completed, and I succeeded in setting ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various

... landed at seven for breakfast, at the old Indian gardens; at eight went on; at ten reached the first portage, passed it in an hour; went on till one o'clock; afterwards passed two other portages of about three hundred yards each; and went on to the great raft of flood wood, being the fourth portage, where we encamped at three o'clock, at its head. Mosquitoes very annoying. Estimate our distance at ...

— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... the present moment the negro was placing in the water a curious-looking little raft that he had brought on one shoulder from its place of concealment. It was something like a flat-bottomed scow, the sides being just high enough to prevent whatever cargo it carried, from ...

— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock

... the lion, and went and dragged the lad to the spring, and dipped him over head and ears in it. So, when he had got his sight again, he went down to the shore and made signs to the lions that they should all lie close together like a raft; then he stood upon their backs while they swam with him to the mainland. When he had reached the shore he went up into a birchen copse, and made the lions lie quiet. Then he stole up to the castle, like a thief, to see if ...

— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... had visited the rude wharf where Jeff Lynn, the grizzled old frontiersman, busied himself with preparations for the raft-journey down the Ohio. Lynn had been employed to guide the missionary's party to Fort Henry, and, as the brothers had acquainted him with their intention of accompanying the travelers, he had constructed a raft for them and ...

— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey

... verse," Don has plaintively observed, "is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the echo." Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will surely come. Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock coats and reading their works aloud to the women's clubs. Don Marquis has no taste for that sort of mummery. But little by little his potent, yeasty verses, fashioned from the roaring loom of every day, are winning their way ...

— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... rescued from a raft by a Cunarder. Both were pretty well used up, when one saw the vessel and murmured, 'A sail, a sail!' The other who was stretched on the raft revived long enough to exclaim, 'Mein Gott! ...

— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher

... finding a human being in a spot which he had at first deemed totally uninhabited, and filled with the hope that the stranger might be able to give him some information relative to the geographical position of the isle, and even perhaps aid him in forming a raft by which they might together escape from the oasis of the Mediterranean, Wagner proceeded toward the mountains. By degrees the wondrous beauty of the scene became wilder, more imposing, but less bewitching, and when he reached the acclivities of the hill, the groves of fruits and copses of ...

— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... canal and the matter would be at an end! So he had resolved in that night of delirium, when he cried out, "Quick, quick! throw all away!" But this was not so easy. He wandered to the quays of the Catherine Canal, and lingered there for half an hour. Here a washing raft lay where he had thought of sinking his spoil, or there boats were moored, and everywhere people swarmed. Then, again, would the cases sink? Would they not rather float? No, this would not do. He would go to the Neva; there would be fewer people there and more room, and it would ...

— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various

... seemed not to dislike us quite so much as before, and he helped the girls into the boat, which was now in the water at the edge of a sort of floating, unsteady raft, with openings in it that you could see the water through. The water was very rough, just like real sea, and not like a river at all. And the boy rowed; he wouldn't let us, although I can, quite well. The boat tumbled and tossed just like a sea-boat. When we were about ...

— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit

... days from laying her keel, and sailed next evening, armed with eighteen twelve-pounders, and fully equipped for service. Two schooners, the Maria, and the Carleton; the Loyal Convert, gondola; the Thunder, a kind of flat-bottomed raft, carrying twelve heavy guns and two howitzers; and twenty-four boats, armed each with a field piece, or carriage-gun, formed, with the Inflexible, a force equal to the service, where but a few days before, the British had scarcely a boat upon the waters. ...

— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler

... or no," she said; "but you are a poor fool. Here you are getting good wages, and having it all to spend on yourself; and you ain't overworked, and you'll find out you'll be overworked and have a whole raft of young ones, and not a cent of wages, except enough to keep soul and body together, and just enough to wear so you won't be took up for going round indecent. I've seen enough of ...

— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... fastened to her back. She walked rapidly into the sea, and, perforce, he followed. Miss Wilder shouted orders in vain from the shore. The tide was running in, and nearly high, so she was over her depth in a second, but she paddled out toward the distant raft, her head well out of the water, thanks to her wings. Much amused, Wally swam beside her ...

— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke

... upon his frail raft, or some spar of his shattered vessel, could not be more at the mercy of wave and wind, than were the two men astride of the capsized canoe. Their situation was indeed desperate. The stroke of a strong sea would be sufficient to swamp ...

— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid

... was like a raft loosely strung together, floating almost on a level of the ocean, and often half submerged, but freighted with inestimable treasures for itself and the world. It needed an unsleeping eye and a powerful brain to conduct her over the quicksands and through the whirlpools of an ...

— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... outermost rafts, when the ropes would be severed, and the floating platform rowed towards the further shore. The elephants, seeing the water all round them, would be seized with a panic, and either jump into the river in their fright and swim by the side of the raft, guided by their Indian riders, or else from sheer terror would remain where they stood, trembling with fear. But though the rafts were to be built without delay, the passage was on no account to be attempted till the signal ...

— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang

... was called the Monitor, and a stranger vessel was never seen afloat. Its hull, which was ironclad, hardly showed above the water, and in the middle there was a large round turret. It looked, said those who saw it, more like a cheesebox on a raft than ...

— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... Mr. Gould tells us, is a raft of weeds and aquatic plants carefully heaped together in a rounded form. The young ones have delicate rose-coloured bills and harlequin-like markings on the body, and rosy-white breasts. "So active and truly aquatic is the dabchick, ...

— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton

... prove it to me!" said the fox. "Come up to the surface of the water and form a raft that will reach from this island to the mainland. Then I can walk over all of you, and I shall be ...

— Story Hour Readers Book Three • Ida Coe and Alice J. Christie

... Felipe and Truxill had brought down to their hut many scores of tortoises, and tried out the oil, when, elated with their good success, and to reward themselves for such hard work, they, too hastily, made a catamaran, or Indian raft, much used on the Spanish main, and merrily started on a fishing trip, just without a long reef with many jagged gaps, running parallel with the shore, about half a mile from it. By some bad tide or hap, or natural negligence ...

— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... of the basest ingratitude had I repined because there was no boat in the ship. Yet for all that I could not but see it was a matter that concerned me very closely. Should the vessel be crushed, what was to become of me? It was easy to propose to myself the making of a raft or the like of such a fabric; but everything was so hard frozen that, being single-handed, it was next to impossible I should be able to put together such a contrivance as would be fit to live in ...

— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... reason to believe that they were conveyed across on rafts; which plan, as it must have appeared the safer before execution, is after it the more entitled to credit. They extended from the bank into the river one raft two hundred feet long and fifty broad, which, fastened higher up by several strong cables to the bank, that it might not be carried down by the stream they covered, like a bridge, with earth thrown upon it, so that the beasts might tread upon it without fear, as over solid ground. ...

— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius

... novel and terrible engine of destruction. The telegraph carried the news everywhere, and in dread and anxiety the people awaited the fate of another day. When morning came at Hampton Roads a small nondescript vessel, looking like an oval raft with a turret, interposed between the Merrimac and its prey. It was the Monitor, the invention of Captain John Ericsson, and it had arrived during the night of March 8. The Monitor had been constructed at Greenpoint, Long Island, and was towed to Hampton Roads by steamers. Her ...

— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann

... of unloading the wreck. There was an inlet or mouth of a creek not far from the place where they first landed, and, constructing a raft on the wreck and loading it with arms, provisions, ammunition and tools, they took advantage of the tide to float it in to shore. This was repeated daily for weeks. Clothing, sails, provisions of all kinds, half ...

— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick

... necessary for the Spaniards to cross in their advance. De Soto, accompanied by Ocali and several of his subjects, was walking on the banks of this stream to select a spot for crossing, by means of a bridge or raft, when a large number of Indians sprang up from the bushes on the opposite side, and assailing them with insulting and reproachful language, discharged a volley of arrows upon them, by which one of the Spaniards ...

— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott

... trial had been making at a raft, With little hope in such a rolling sea, A sort of thing at which one would have laughed,[112] If any laughter at such times could be, Unless with people who too much have quaffed, And have a kind of wild and horrid glee, Half epileptical, and half hysterical:— ...

— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... why should he show readiness of the tongue?' CHAP. V. The Master was wishing Ch'i-tiao K'ai to enter on official employment. He replied, 'I am not yet able to rest in the assurance of THIS.' The Master was pleased. CHAP. VI. The Master said, 'My doctrines make no way. I will get upon a raft, and float about on the sea. He that will accompany me will be Yu, I dare say.' Tsze-lu hearing ...

— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge

... low enough to admit of fording it with a native bullock gharri. A branch of the same stream is crossed in a similar manner, and yet a third river, a few miles farther, has to be crossed on a curious raft made of a number of buoyant earthenware jars fixed in a bamboo frame. A splendid bridge spans the swollen torrent of the more formidable Markunda, and the well-metalled highway now cuts a wide straight swath through inundated jungle. A big ...

— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... when we had finished our inspection, "we've got to get across somehow. I guess we'll have to sail in, the first thing to-morrow morning, and build a raft. These pine-trees down here by the water will cut easy and float well, and there's some comfort in that, anyway. But what I'm after right now is ...

— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier

... people, but there were two pairs of people who become the heroes of this story. One of these is Ben Brace and a sixteen year old boy seaman, whom he had rescued from being eaten by the thirty or so crew members who had found enough spars, timber, sails, ropes and barrels to construct a large raft, though rather badly made, because these men were consoling themselves with a rum-barrel. At a distance floated the ship's gig, with the captain, the mate, the carpenter and three other men. Finally, there is a construction, hardly more than a large barrel, containing Snowball, ...

— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... be lodged hard and fast on a reef or sandspit. I am told the tide is rising. If that is so, our only hope is in the raft which our three allies are now constructing. With a falling tide we might have a breathing-space at low water. ...

— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy

... they ceased firing, and dispersed about the neighborhood, butchering cattle and burning the church and a few empty houses. As the tide began to ebb, they sent a fire-raft in full blaze down the creek to destroy the sloops; but it stranded, and the attempt failed. They now wreaked their fury on the prisoner Diamond, whom they tortured to death, after which they all disappeared. A few resolute men had foiled one of the most formidable ...

— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... wreck farther on to the reef, and the sudden snap broke the rope, as I suppose, and the boat went to sea. I never knew the misfortune till I saw her adrift. I could have got over that by making a raft; but the gale from the north brought such a sea on us. I saw she must break up, so I got ashore how I could. Ah, I little thought to see your face again, still less that I should owe ...

— Foul Play • Charles Reade

... the Falls, an' was a-takin' a raft down the river fur Gibson. Sandy Beale was along o' me, an' I dunno ez ever I enjoyed raftin' more 'n on the first o' thet trip. Doubtless yez all knows what purty raftin' it is in them parts. By gum, it kinder makes a chap lick his lips when he ...

— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... for boys is 'The Last Cruise of the Spitfire,' by Edward Stratemeyer. There is plenty of adventure in it, a shipwreck, a cruise on a raft, and other stirring perils of the deep."—Detroit ...

— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic

... Mountains, with cunning traps made of iron, who sought the beaver of the Whitefish. Him I slew. And there were three men seeking gold on the Whitefish long ago. Them also I slew, and left them to the wolverines. And at the Five Fingers there was a man with a raft and much meat." ...

— Children of the Frost • Jack London

... myself alone upon my impromptu raft—or rather, it had not occurred to me that there might be another than myself upon it; but at this instant, in a momentary lull of the wind, almost by my side I heard a sound that I knew well, and had cause to remember—the tune of the wild ...

— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill

... to take an interest in Jim, so I brought him up into the office and set him to copying circular letters. We used to send out a raft of them to the trade. That was just before the general adoption of typewriters, when they were still in the experimental stage. But Jim hadn't been in the office plugging away at the letters for a month before he had the writer's cramp, and began nosing around again. The first ...

— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer

... the deck, the blades of the propellers, the compartments of the cabins, all formed a sort of raft. When a wounded bird falls on the waves its wings keep it afloat. For several hours Robur and his men remained unhelped, at first on the wreck, and afterwards in the india-rubber boat that had fallen uninjured. A few hours after sunrise they were sighted by a passing ...

— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne

... pack through to Teslin Lake, build a raft there and float down the Hotalinqua into the Yukon and so on to Dawson City, but at Glenora I found a letter from my mother waiting for me, a pitiful plea for me to "hurry back," and as we were belated ...

— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... meal. Being very faint I asked my mistress to give me one spoonful of the meal, but she would not give me a taste. They quickly fell to cutting dry trees, to make rafts to carry them over the river: and soon my turn came to go over. By the advantage of some brush which they had laid upon the raft to sit upon, I did not wet my foot (which many of themselves at the other end were mid-leg deep) which cannot but be acknowledged as a favor of God to my weakened body, it being a very cold time. I was not ...

— Captivity and Restoration • Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

... for long trips, this one had what was called a "boat-bottom," intended to enable it to remain afloat with its burden in case of an accidental fall into a large body of water. Pludder saw that this fact would enable him to turn the wreck into a raft. ...

— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... exclaimed, hoarsely, just as a shipwrecked sailor on a floating raft might cry as an island hove ...

— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne

... insect which lives in the water part of its life and in the air the rest. The mature female mosquito, which does all the biting, searches for water in rain barrels, cans, ditches, ponds, and stagnant swamps where she lays her eggs either in raft-shaped packets or singly. When the wigglers hatch they swim about in the water and feed upon decaying material and microscopic water plants. When the wiggler is full grown it changes to an active pupa which has ...

— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman

... Appalachicola Bay, where, some of us remembered, a newspaper item had said that we had gunboats stationed. The creek that ran through the stockade flowed to the east, and we reasoned that if we followed its course we would be led to the Flint, down which we could float on a log or raft to the Appalachicola. This was the favorite scheme of the party with which I sided. Another party believed the most feasible plan was to go northward, and endeavor to gain the mountains, and thence get ...

— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... our devotion, "There is nothing like it." Now, in all Egypt, and I suppose in all the world there is nothing just like Philae. There are temples, yes; but where else is there a bouquet of gracious buildings such as these gathered in such a holder as this tiny, raft-like isle? And where else are just such delicate and, as I have said, light and almost feminine elegance and charm set in the midst of such severe sterility? Once, beyond Philae, the great Cataract roared down from the wastes of Nubia into the green fertility of ...

— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... his fleet, and has realized the expectations of the country. His personal bravery was demonstrated during the hazardous passage of the forts—while his ship was enveloped in flames, kindled from an opposing fire raft—by his dashing attack on the Chalmette forts near New Orleans, and his speedy reduction of ...

— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... party of French Indians, who had lain in wait for us. One of them fired at Mr. Gist or me, not fifteen steps off, but fortunately missed." The next day they came to a river. "There was no way of getting over but on a raft, ... but before we were half over we were jammed in the ice.... I put out my setting pole to try and stop the raft that the ice might pass by, when the rapidity of the stream threw it with such force against the pole, that it jerked me out into ten feet of water, but I fortunately ...

— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... hollowed out of a single tree; but the pieces which form the gunwales, are planks sewed on with the fibres of the cocoa nut, and secured with pegs. These vessels are low, forward, but rise abaft; and, being narrow, are fitted with an outrigger on each side, to keep them steady. A raft, of greater breadth than the canoe, extends over about half the length; and upon this is fixed a shed or hut, thatched with palm leaves. These people, in short, appeared to be dextrous sailors and formidable warriors; and to be ...

— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders

... some eight years ago crossing the Mahawelli river upon a raft which my coolies had hastily constructed, and reaching a miserable village near Monampitya, in the extreme north of the Veddah country. The river is here about four hundred paces wide, and, in the rainy season a fine volume of water rolls along in a rapid stream toward Trincomalee, at ...

— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... looked upon as a marvel. When near the Western Islands, Mr. Cooper, in his "Naval History" tells, he "fell in with the British frigate Lapwing, 28, Captain Upton which ran for him, under the impression that the gunboat was some wrecked mariners on a raft, there being a great show of canvas and apparently ...

— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various

... grips and fought and floundered till the bed rocked, and the poor little Seraph clung to his pillow as a shipwrecked sailor to a raft in a stormy sea. Exhaustion alone made us stop for breath; still we clung desperately to each other, our small bodies pressed hotly together, Angel's nose flattened against my ear. The Seraph snuggled up to us. "Just you wait"—breathed Angel—his ...

— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche

... our friends in Washington," said old Frisby, whose temper had been soured probably by a neglect to recognize his long services; "and most of them I should by all means insist on sending to the Moon. Every month I would ram a whole raft of them into the Columbiad, with a charge under them strong enough to blow them all to the—But—Hey!—what ...

— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... behind, Well may the heave o' the sea remind. It irks me now, as it troubled me then, To think o' the fate in the madness o' men. If Dick was with Farragut on the night-river, When the boom-chain we burst in the fire-raft's glare, That blood-dyed the visage as red as the liver; In the Battle for the Bay too if Dick had a share, And saw one aloft a-piloting the war— Trumpet in the whirlwind, a Providence in place— Our Admiral old whom the captains ...

— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... founded no less than a hundred monasteries. Fired with missionary zeal, he left his native land to preach to the pagans of Scotland. Tradition says that the rock on which he stood detached itself from the Irish coast and became a raft to bear him across the waters to the island of Lismore, in Loch Linnhe, where he landed. St. Moluag converted the people of the island to Christianity, and then moved into Ross-shire, where he built many churches, dedicating them ...

— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett

... ice, arrested in its course, brought up, while the swift running current overflowed it. The four were ankle deep in water. But the rope held. Slowly, but surely, the ice raft yielded to the strain. It came in, out of the rush of the current, into quieter water. It touched the shore—and the yawning brink of the dam was ...

— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith

... desperadoes entailed the utmost caution and watchfulness in the neighbourhood of the lake. Unfortunately, we nearly succeeded in drowning some young friends of ours, whom we persuaded to accompany us in an attack on the pirates' stronghold. We embarked on a raft used for cutting weeds, but no sooner had we shoved off than the raft at once, most inconsiderately, sank to the bottom of the lake with us. Being Christmas time, the water was not over-warm, and we had some difficulty in extricating our young friends. Their ...

— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... Calypso to bid the nymph release Ulysses, who at once makes his raft and starts on his voyage homeward. In this second part we shall have the entire story of the Hero from the time he leaves Troy, till he reaches Ithaca in the 13th Book. As Telemachus the youth is to have ...

— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... however, was that some few escaped the desolating element by one of those means most familiar to the narrator, by ascending some mountain, on a raft or canoe, in a cave, or even by climbing a tree. No doubt some of these legends have been modified by Christian teachings; but many of them are so connected with local peculiarities and ancient religious ceremonies, that no ...

— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... tale to him, and he took pity on me; he said he was allowed to take a man with his horse and cart, besides himself, and I could go over as the man. And in this way I crossed over on the ferry, which was a sort of raft. When I got into Howden—it was now early morning—it turned out to be the Fair Day. So I wended my way into the fair-ground, thinking that possibly I might meet with some of my former theatrical acquaintances at some of the shows. But I was a doomed man: there ...

— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... the inner room, where was a large-sized figure of Buddha, with the attendant figures at each side called his sons, Buddhavista, meaning "future Buddhas." Driving on, we came to another missing bridge. Here we were taken across on a rude raft, the carriage following, and then the horses. As we drew near Boro Boedor, a feeling of awe came over us, for we were to behold a temple which for centuries had been buried from the sight of man. Indeed, until ...

— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

... wise man, and possessed of every virtue. And I, rejoicing at these things, will do all that thou hast desired of me. I will by my servants cut thee in abundance timber of cedar and timber of cypress, and will bring them down to the sea, and command my servants to construct of them a float, or raft, and navigate it to whatever point of thy coast thou mayest wish, and there discharge them; after which thy servants can carry them to Jerusalem. But be it thy care to provide me in return with a supply of food, whereof we are in ...

— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... with a hundred and fifty men, he reached the inlet at midnight, and again, like a savage, ambushed himself on the bank. Day broke, and he could plainly see the French on the farther side. They had made a raft, which lay in the water, ready for crossing. Menendez and his men showed themselves, when, forthwith, the French displayed their banners, sounded drums and trumpets, and set their sick and starving ranks in array of battle. But the Adelantado, regardless of this warlike show, ordered his ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... a raft and crossed the river, but the enemy's matchlock men peppered us so severely that we lost thirty English and fifty Sepoys in getting over. The enemy's entrenchment was not finished, but in front of it was a deep rivulet, which ...

— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty

... with death we learn very little except that the women discard their arm beads, the mourners don old clothing, and all wail for the dead (pp. 44, 90). Three times we are told that the deceased is placed on a tabalang, or raft, on which a live rooster is fastened before it is set adrift on the river. In the tales the raft and fowl are of gold, but this is surprising even to the old woman Alokotan, past whose home in Nagbotobotan all these rafts ...

— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole

... was the transport the Terrans had cobbled together no earlier than this afternoon, a raft Thorvald had professed to believe would support them to the sea which lay some fifty Terran miles to the west. But now he had to ...

— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton

... crust would stand. The portly Pagan and the Passenger gave us a fine job in one bog, by sinking in close together. Some of us slashed off boughs of trees and tore off handfuls of hard canna leaves, while others threw them round the sinking victims to form a sort of raft, and then with the aid of bush-rope, of course, ...

— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... answering any good purpose, at the same time that we should entangle ourselves in the mushy grounds which had been seen both from Mount Cunningham, Farewell Hill, and our present station; and that therefore we should immediately proceed to construct a raft on which we might transport our provisions and baggage across the river, afterwards taking such a course as we deemed most likely to bring us to the Macquarie river, and so keep along its banks to Bathurst. This work, and the task of getting the ...

— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley

... compassion on me, and put it in my mind to go to the bank of the river which ran into the great cavern. Considering its probable course with great attention, I said to myself: 'This river, which runs thus under ground, must somewhere have an issue. If I make a raft, and leave myself to the current, it will convey me to some inhabited country, or I shall perish. If I be drowned, I lose nothing, but only change one kind ...

— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown

... looked at it, they went on with their mooing and rolling about, quite regardless of it, until Oolalik sent his harpoon deep into the side of one of the cows. Then indeed there was tremendous roaring and confusion, as the whole herd tumbled off the ice raft into the sea. The splash sent a cataract of spray over the Eskimos; and no wonder, for the old bull was full sixteen feet long, with barrel-bulk equal to a hogshead. Some of the others ...

— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne

... it as a sort of transition between the earth and the sea. Another calls it "an immense surface of earth floating on the water." Others speak of it as an annex of the old continent, the China of Europe, the end of the earth and the beginning of the ocean—a huge raft of mud and sand; and Philip II. called it ...

— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... more to take compassion on me, and put it in my mind to go to the bank of the river which ran into the great cave; where, considering the river with great attention, I said to myself, 'This river, which runs thus under ground, must come out somewhere or other. If I make a raft, and leave myself to the current, it will bring me to some inhabited country, or drown me. If I be drowned I lose nothing, but only change one kind of death for another; and if I get out of this fatal place, I shall not only avoid the sad fate of my ...

— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon

... see!" cried Lionel, as I clambered on to the box (which was fastened by a rope to the side of the yacht) and began to cut a hole in the middle. "You're going to make a raft." ...

— The Mysterious Shin Shira • George Edward Farrow

... which all the Indians of that part of the country belonged. The old Indian told Pierre before he started that there was plenty of big timber in the Shipshaw Valley but that he would find it practically impossible to raft it down. Pierre told the lumber company this but they desired him to go anyway, stating that they wished to find out definitely about ...

— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton

... next day I got together driftwood and bound it together in shape of a rough raft with fallen creepers. Then, with a makeshift paddle, I set forth for Nan-Tauach. Slowly, painfully, I crept up to it. It was late afternoon before I grounded my shaky craft on the little beach between the ruined sea-gates and, creeping up the ...

— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... a matter into which no conjecture could enter even slightly had their compelling environment been different. In the city they would have turned their backs and walked away from each other. But two storm-driven men upon a raft don't separate until land is sighted. Gloria, at least, was in her present plight comparable to a shipwrecked sailor of little skill and less resource. Hence, what was to ...

— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... for his conversation. He was learned in the geography of the valley and told us how once the Cohocton River, now merely a decorative stream among willows, was once a serviceable waterway, how it was once busy with mills, and how men used to raft down it as far ...

— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne

... out into the water, the ice had been lodged and detained in great quantities, and the narrow channel which swept round the bend was full of ice, piled one cake over another, thus forming a temporary barrier to the descending ice, which lodged, and formed a great undulating raft, filling up the whole river, and extending almost to the Kentucky shore. Eliza stood for a moment contemplating this unfavourable aspect of things, which she saw at once must prevent the usual ferry-boat from running, and ...

— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various

... words of the Rishis or the conduct of the virtuous as proof, neither this nor the other world existeth. Doubt not, O Krishna, the ancient religion that is practised by the good and framed by Rishis of universal knowledge and capable of seeing all things! O daughter of Drupada, religion is the only raft for those desirous of going to heaven, like a ship to merchants desirous of crossing the ocean. O thou faultless one, if the virtues that are practised by the virtuous had no fruits, this universe then would be enveloped in infamous darkness. No one then would pursue salvation, no one would ...

— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... something slide against me—clutched and held on. It was a brave pine log. Could I recover it at this date I would convert it into a flagstaff for the tricolour. It was our raft, our refuge; and ...

— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... the gloomy place and flies away, which less ethereal wanderers might likewise be fain to do. Now and then the stillness that reigned over that home of malign things was broken by the sound of a boat-horn on a lumber raft floating down the Edisto. ...

— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... Dick. "It has already struck you that we can fell a few small trees and build a raft on which we can tow a few hundred pounds of ice at ...

— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock

... that guided them. Athabasca Landing was the portal through which they passed, and by every northward stream they travelled,—down the Athabasca toward the Mackenzie and up the Athabasca to the Peace, leaving stranded men and stranded boats on every shore. By raft and dug-out, scow and canoe, men essayed to travel rapid waterways who had never handled craft before, and the Indians still point out to you near Grand Rapids on the Athabasca the site of the Mounted Police Station where ...

— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... my lyf in Ioye Displesed hadde un-to thy foule envye, 275 Why ne haddestow my fader, king of Troye, By-raft the lyf, or doon my bretheren dye, Or slayn my-self, that thus compleyne and crye, I, combre-world, that may of no-thing serve, But ever dye, and never ...

— Troilus and Criseyde • Geoffrey Chaucer

... exerted themselves to the utmost to avoid them; whereas I could see no other way of escape, especially for the lady sitting beside me, than by boarding one of these very rafts. In order to effect this (against the wish of our two oarsmen) I seized with one hand a projecting peg on a raft we were passing and held our little vessel fast, and, while the two rowers screamed that the Ellida would be lost, quickly hoisted the lady out of the skiff on to the raft, across which we walked to the shore, calmly leaving our friends to ...

— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner

... Arabs call Bussra. For the smaller kinds of fish the fishermen use hand-nets, which they throw into the sea from the shore; the larger species they kill with lances, one of which Ayd carried constantly with him as a weapon; there is not a single boat nor even a raft to be found on the whole of this coast, but the Bedouins of the eastern coast have a few boats, which may sometimes be seen in the gulf. We saw here a great number of porpoises playing in the water close to the shore. I wished to shoot ...

— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... the West Indies which had just been attacked by the British. The boy's nurse, a coloured woman, had received a fatal wound. The boy is brought up by Dick on board ship, but there are all sorts of misadventures, such as being cast away on a raft, being picked up by what turns out to be a pirate ship, escaping and then being rescued ...

— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston

... instructions of the 26th ultimo which was delivered to me by Overseer Burnett on the 5th of this month, who arrived at the moment the first boatload from the camp reached the opposite bank of the Murray. By means of casks we floated the drays over the three rivers and, after two experiments with a raft, both partial failures, and while a third raft was in progress, of a more solid and better construction, we discovered that a canoe, of very large dimensions and paddled by the native boy Tommy, would prove the most expeditious as well as a safe mode of shipment for the boxes of value, ...

— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... recollection; but by instinct he struck out through the welter of gasping, bobbing heads till he was clear of the clutching menace of the drowning. The Commander, clad simply in his wrist-watch and uniform cap, was standing on the balsa raft, with scores of men hanging to its support. "Get away from the ship!" he was bawling at the full strength of his lungs. ...

— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... began to form into a couple of rafts. The waggon being unloaded, was next rapidly taken to pieces, and the wheels lashed together, while the upper sides and pole being removed, the rest of the vehicle formed a strong and substantial raft. Long poles and paddles having been procured, a portion of the goods were placed on it and the other rafts. Four of the Kaffirs then stepped on the smallest two, having long poles and two paddles, and commenced the passage, shouting loudly as they did ...

— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston

... collected; the oil-casks had been conveyed over the lake in the ferry-boat, and secured within a "boom" composed of four long timbers, lashed together at the ends, forming a square, which was moored close to the Goblins; and a raft had been built, upon which the operations were to ...

— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic

... answered Tom. "We were afraid to tell anyone what we were going to do until we got across the river, and so we had to build a raft." ...

— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop

... been anything but pleasant. The Island of Trn, as has been shown, is a grisly scrap of desert: it has no sweet water; and its three birds would not long have satisfied thirty hungry men. It is far from the mainland; the storm, which lasted through two days, was too violent for raft or boat to live, and at so early a season native craft are never seen on these seas. Briefly, a week might have elapsed before our friends at El-Muwaylah, who were startled by the wildness of the wind, could have learned our plight, or could ...

— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... preceding fall by John Ericsson, in spite of sneers and doubts, a contract was given him in October to construct a vessel after his design. The form of the Monitor is too well known to need description—"a cheese-box on a raft," the name given her in derision, describes her as well as anything. She was launched on the last day of January, and three weeks later was handed over to the Government, but it was not until the fourth of March that her guns were mounted, ...

— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson

... fires, which, however, were not seen nor taken notice of by those under the command of Cornelis, because they were busy in butchering their companions, of whom they had murdered between thirty and forty; but some few, however, got off upon a raft of planks tied together, and went to the island where Mr. Weybhays was, in order to acquaint him with the dreadful accident that had happened. Mr. Weybhays having with him forty- five men, they all resolved to stand upon their ...

— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton

... natural situation she may be said to be at once fortunate and infelicitous: the flatness of the land is not redeemed by fertility, the monotony of the panorama is not broken by mountains; the city rides as a raft upon the waters, so heavily freighted as to run the risk of sinking. And yet I know of no capital more imposing when taken from the strong points of view. Almost beyond parallel is the array of palaces and public buildings which meets ...

— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... Or, better still, if you are ready for whatever adventure may befall on a seldom used trail, descend Dr. Walcott's old trail to the river, and there build a raft (it is perfectly feasible and not too dangerous, unless the river be at the flood) and cross to the other side, letting your horses swim over. Then come out by way of the Tanner Trail, after riding up and down the wide beach and sandy stretches of ...

— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... all speak at once, and have a quarrel over the honor; but looks now like I might have to do the grand wading act myself, holding up my clothes-bag and blanket, to keep from getting the same more soaked than they are now. If we could only make a raft like old Robinson Crusoe did, it would be fine. Can we get this cabin roof off, and would it float, ...

— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter

... wood. With these I fell to work, and flung as many of them overboard as I could manage, tying every one of them with a rope, that they might not drive away. This done, I went down to the ship's side, and tyed four of them fast together at both ends, in form of a raft, and laying two or three short pieces of plank upon them crosswise, I found it would bear me, but not any considerable weight. Upon which I went to work again, cutting a spare topmast into three lengths, adding them to my raft with a great deal of labour and pains. I then considered ...

— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe

... to admit. "Funny I didn't get on to that right away. Means our gent has a raft o' ships comin' an' goin' when he takes a notion to drop over here once in ...

— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb

... good feed, seeing we could not remove them at present, we descended safely to our boat and gained the shore without any accident. Then having housed our treasures, we were for putting together a raft of the various planks and barrels that were knocking against the rocks, but as I knew this would take a good deal of time, I thought I would inspect the ship's boats, which, bottom upwards, were drifting about within a ...

— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat

... everywhere. It costs nothing. Only in the Black Hole of Calcutta or in a broken tunnel shaft do men ever begin to find themselves practically short of that life-sustaining gas, and then they know the want of it far sooner and far more sharply than they know the want of food on a shipwreck raft, or the want of water in the thirsty desert. Yet antiquity never even heard of oxygen. A prime necessary of life passed unnoticed for ages in human history, only because there was abundance of it to ...

— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... just before him, the helpless body of the bowhead whale, the killers darting in a mad melee for its head. Then a figure was literally hurled upon the slippery mass of the mammal, its gray belly plain in the welter, a living raft against which the waves broke ...

— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn

... mile up the shore a spit of land ran out against the current, and behind its shelter an eddy had collected a mass of uprooted trees and other flood refuse, all matted with green from the growth of wind-borne seeds. It was in reality a great natural raft, built by the eddy and anchored behind the little point. For this Grom headed with new hope. It might be strong enough—parts of it at least—to bear up the three fugitives. But their furious pursuers would surely not venture their giant bulks ...

— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... laden with his goods, they would sail homeward. One day they had tarried to raft redwood planks of California from the schooner in the bay to the site of Kivi's new house. So that night in gratitude he would make merry for them. There would be much to eat, and there would be kava in plenty. ...

— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... Trot," he advised the girl, as he worked. "I've got quite a job ahead of me now, for I've got to build us a raft." ...

— The Magic of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... is to me no special category," replied the other. "All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine, and feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes the pretty maid, who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, ...

— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh

... being the great desideratum, I proposed a raft to be hauled from side to side with ropes; whilst the Mandingoes were decidedly of opinion that nothing would answer our purpose but a bridge, which they said they would complete by two o'clock. I set to work with the carpenters ...

— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park

... sound, not more than the sigh of a stray breeze, came from a point far up the stream. He listened and the sound pleased him. The lone, weird note was in full accord with the night and his mood, and presently he knew it. It was some mountaineer on a raft singing a plaintive song of his own distant hills. Huge rafts launched on the headwaters of the stream in the mountains in the eastern part of the state came in great numbers down the river, but oftenest at this time of the year. Some stopped at Frankfort, and others ...

— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler

... how we crosses the Red River on de Red River Raft. Back in them days the Red River was near closed up by dis timber raft and de big boats couldn't git up de river at all. We gits a li'l boat, and a Caddo Indian to guide us. Dis Red River raft dey say was centuries old. De driftwood floatin' down de river ...

— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration

... books like them in the world, send them to me quick." I had to humbly confess to him that if there were any others I had not the good fortune to know of them. What a red-letter-day it is to a boy, the day he first opens "Tom Sawyer." I would rather sail on the raft down the Missouri again with "Huck" Finn and Jim than go down the Nile in December or see Venice from a gondola in May. Certainly Mark Twain is much better when he writes of his Missouri boys than when he makes sickley romances ...

— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... alteration of a word. I have seen such a shipwreck at Drury Lane. Anyone, moreover, who reads any authentic account of actual adventures will perceive at once that those of the Odyssey are the creation of one who has had no history. Ulysses has to make a raft; he makes it about as broad as they generally make a good big ship, but we do not seem to have been at the pains to measure a ...

— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... are right, Saloo. I must take my rifle, but how am I to keep it dry?—there's not time to make a raft." ...

— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid

... Littells had invited their daughters' school friends (and, to quote Bob, there was a raft of them!) to come to Fairfields for the Christmas holidays, and at the close of the first term they bade good-bye to Shadyside and Salsette and took ...

— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson

... his raft now signed to Chebron to take up one of the spears; but the lad shook his head and motioned to him to undertake the attack, for he felt that, ignorant as he was of the habits of the animal, it would be folly for him to engage in such an adventure. The man nodded, for he had indeed been ...

— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty

... away from the path to the very centre of the raft of deals before the chalet. The Swiss couple were gone by that time. We were alone on the raft, so to speak. Mr. Razumov dropped into a chair, let fall his stick, and propped on his elbows, his head between his hands, stared at me persistently, openly, and continuously, ...

— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... four thousand pounds. At the rapids the large rafts are, as it were, unyoked, and divided into small portions, which go down separately. The excitement and motion of such transit must, I should say, be very joyous. I was told that the Prince of Wales desired to go down a rapid on a raft, but that the men in charge would not undertake to say that there was no possible danger; whereupon those who accompanied the prince requested his Royal Highness to forbear. I fear that, in these careful days, crowned heads and ...

— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... last raft to cross the river. Doctor Carey watched with eager gaze as the last men reached the farther bank. He saw them scrambling up from the water's edge. He saw Thaine turn back to lift up a comrade blinded, but not injured, by the smoke of a gun. He ...

— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter

... for see, the roof is bare! The current swept the slippery raft, the maiden is not there! An angel band descended, her lover led the way, And now she joins her loved and lost ...

— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant

... look at my ol' figger-'ead," he was used to saying, with his little eyes widened to excite wonder, "this five year! In p'int o' looks," says he, smirking, vain as you please, "I'm t' windward o' most o' the bullies when I trims my beard. Ah, lad, they's a raft o' bar-maids an' water-side widows would wed ol' Nicholas Top. An' why? 'Tain't money, God knows! for Nicholas Top haves none. Nar a dollar that a lone water-side widow could nose out! An' if 'tisn't money," says he, "why, Lord ...

— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... water down while the work was in progress. At first he was successful, but one day, while the men were busy laying their bricks in cement one of them drove into the roof, and a deluge of water burst in on them, and although they tried to continue their work on a raft the water prevailed and at last drove them out. They escaped with difficulty up one of the air-shafts. The water having put an effectual stop to the work, the directors felt disposed to give it up, but Stephenson begged for a fortnight more. ...

— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne

... naturally, of the series, the simpler; as for instance in his taking it from her that Miss Theale then could do nothing for them. He frankly brought out what he had ventured to think possible. "If we can't meet here and we've really exhausted the charms of the open air and the crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, some occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me these two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are so accountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. And it's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our odious ...

— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... urged them to beat a retreat. Montparnasse himself, who was, perhaps, almost Thenardier's son-in-law, yielded. A moment more, and they would be gone. Thenardier was panting on his wall like the shipwrecked sufferers of the Meduse on their raft when they beheld the vessel which had appeared in sight ...

— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... and started slowly down stream, keeping an eye out for signs. In less than an hour I struck a dim log road which led to the river and there was a "landing," with the usual debris of skids, loose bark, chocks and some pieces of broken boards. It did not take long to construct an efficient log raft from the dry skids, and as I drifted placidly down the deep, wild river, munching the last bit of Johnnycake, I inwardly swore that my next wilderness cruise should be ...

— Woodcraft • George W. Sears