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Jetson   Listen
noun
Jetson, Jetsam  n.  
1.
(Mar. Law) Goods which sink when cast into the sea, and remain under water; distinguished from flotsam, goods which float, and ligan (or lagan), goods which are sunk attached to a buoy.
2.
The act of throwing objects from a ship to lighten the load; jettison (1). See Jettison, 1.
3.
Hence: Anything thrown overboard from a ship, whether floating or not.
4.
Hence: (fig.) Objects scattered about in a disorderly manner; as, he couldn't find his sneakers among the jetsam in his room. (Colloq.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Jetson" Quotes from Famous Books



... relatively shallow water, with seaweeds growing over the bottom, may extend outwards for miles. The nature of the shore varies greatly according to the nature of the rocks, according to what the streams bring down from inland, and according to the jetsam that is brought in by the tides. The shore is a changeful place; there is, in the upper reaches, a striking difference between "tide in" and "tide out"; there are vicissitudes due to storms, to freshwater floods, to wind-blown sand, ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... her spars and rigging, worked up into a raft, floating in the swirl alongside the beach; while on the shore, opposite where she lay, the little company that had been left aboard to take care of her laboured to save such flotsam and jetsam as the surf ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood

... that England perhaps had ever known, when the German armies, having overcome the resistance of Belgium, suddenly swept forward again across France, pushing before them like the jetsam and flotsam on the rim of the advancing tide the allied armies. Often in these appalling weeks, Michael would hesitate as to whether he should go to see Sylvia or not, so unbearable seemed the fact that she did not and ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson

... finally a huge papier-mache globe on which were traced the routes of Mr. Colman Hoyt's four unsuccessful dashes for the North Pole. It depressed me, the sight of this vast lumber-room, this collection of useless flotsam and jetsam, cast up and rejected by the sea of strenuous life. Most moving of all, a broken golf-club standing in a dusty corner, and beside it a wofully scarred and battered ball. I ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen

... many people who came to the back steps after seven. From the front windows could be seen the street and the opposite houses, and on the sills of the windows Sylvia cultivated a few cheap flowers, which were her delight. The room was furnished with all manner of odds and ends, flotsam and jetsam of innumerable sales attended by Aaron. There were Japanese screens, Empire sofas, mahogany chairs, Persian praying mats, Louis Quatorz tables, Arabic tiles, Worcester china, an antique piano that might have come out of the ark, and many other things of epochs which had passed away. Sylvia ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume

... funeral, argued constitutional extravagance. As a final step in her preparation she rubbed her cheeks violently with a rough crash towel, the resulting brilliant complexion successfully obliterating all traces of weariness, the flotsam and jetsam of anxious days and haunted nights. And then with a jauntiness remarkable under the circumstances, Persis departed, resolved by fair means or foul to distract the thoughts of Mrs. Nelson Richards from the occupancy of a reserved apartment in the ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... one of the pictures that will stand out always in my mind. Perhaps it was because I was not yet inured to suffering; certainly I was to see many similar scenes, much more of the flotsam and jetsam of the human tide that was sweeping back and forward over the flat fields of ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... wrote an officer recently, "look upon submarine-hunting as a great game. The only time they are discontented is when a situation which looks like an approaching fight resolves itself into nothing. The seas of the war zone are, of course, filled with all sorts of flotsam and jetsam, and very often that which appears to be a periscope is nothing of the sort. But when a real one comes—then the men accept it ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry

... the popular wood of Vincennes left a certain amount of human flotsam and jetsam lying around under the trees and in the dark shadows, helpless from a combination of wood alcohol and water treated with coloring matter and called "wine." It was Monsieur Podvin's business to hunt these ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray

... merit his position as a shining luminary of the 'Savage and Savile.' Accustomed as he was to watch the ebb and flow of modern literature, he had not yet sighted either the Longford straw or the Adderley cork, among the flotsam and jetsam of that murky tide. And ever and again Sir Morton Pippitt's coarse chuckle, combined with the covert smiles of Sir Morton's 'distinguished' friends, echoed through his mind in connection with the approaching dreaded invasion of Miss Vancourt into the happy ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... worm is at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization accumulates such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions that have no other than a school or examination value. If, as Ruskin says, all true work is praise, all true play is love and prayer. Instil ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... half dozen men who invented ideas, pleasant and otherwise, about the opera, for the morning papers. Mrs. Calcraft was greeted with warmth; like her husband she was a favorite, though an old man grumbled out something about women abusing their privilege. Jetsam, one of her devoted body-guard, gave her a seat, pen and paper, and told her to go ahead; there were plenty of messenger boys in waiting. It was not the first time Tekla had been in the press-room, the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... serve and to be busy, to work out the difficult problem that was presented her with all the accumulated years of study and dreams, philosophy and courage, to help her. Then love had come, sweeping all her old life away before it—the flotsam and jetsam of discouraged years; what was ignoble and sordid and outgrown had still lined the river banks, it was true, but that was carried away now, the man she loved needed her, and by some instinct deeper than any dull male reasoning of his, had drawn her ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris

... port defended by a network of reefs, in which our Sambuk had first taken refuge. The bay-shore bears traces of more than one wreck; and in the graveyard used by the native sailor, an open awning of flotsam and jetsam looks from afar like a tumble-down log-hut. The number of reefs and shoals shown by stripes of vivid green water promised excellent fishing, and failed to ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... a bit of paper on which he has written the information, corks up the flask, and casts it into the sea. If the bottle goes to the bottom, it is in the department of the lagan officer; if it floats, it is in the department of the flotsam officer; if it be thrown upon shore, it concerns the jetsam officer." ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... which in winter becomes terrible. The sea knows not charity. It massacres when it can and adds you to the line of dead things along its edge where you are only remembered by the ebb and flow of the tide. On blue calm mornings, being part of the jetsam, you may glisten in the sun beside a water-logged spar; at night you become a nonentity, of no more consequence along the wavering line of drift than a rotten gull. But if, like Marianne, you have fought skilfully, you may again enter Pont du Sable with a quicker eye, a ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith

... lighthouse, has not a trace of beach. The abrupt, precipitous walls of lava are too bare to feed a tree, so hot is the sun in summer, so heavy is the air with salt. At their base are piles of pebbles that the storm-surf has rolled on high, with a mixture of flotsam and jetsam and dead fish. Scattered around the larger islet lie the Little Columbretas,—the Foradada, piercing the surface of the water like the arch of a submarine temple, and a cluster of barren rocks, bald, sheer-faced, unapproachable, like the fingers of some ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... and I believe for democracy he is unequaled by any Tammany politician: he knows more policemen, dopes, conductors, beggars, chauffeurs, gangsters, bartenders, jobless actors, painters, preachers, anarchists, and all the rest of New York's flotsam and jetsam than any one in the world. He is always the polished gentleman, and yet they take him ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... and saw that from what had been gardened roof-parks, now a welter of strewn earth, the green things had spread till they covered the heaped jetsam with a healing blanket of foliage. Not all the city had been laid waste, however. Here and there, great expanses of the cliff-like structures still stood, undamaged, and in the midst of one of these areas he saw the high-piled edifice to which he had been directed. Its roof was lush ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat

... gone steadily forward. Here and there over the waste where Johnstown stood in its pride black smoke arises from the bonfires on which shattered house-walls, rafters, doors, broken furniture and all the flotsam and jetsam of the ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... on the ocean of commerce—the jetsam and flotsam, of which the law must direct the disposal. The heirs, as they have been called, may come in to the wreck that lies on the shores of time, after the soul has gone to eternity—but law must decide whether these wreckers ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... seventh year of Colonel Mapleson's tenancy of the Academy of Music. He opened his season on November 10, 1884, but before then James Barton Key and Horace McVicker experimented with Italian opera for three weeks at the Star Theater. The organization was composed of operatic flotsam and jetsam, such as is always to be found plentifully in New York after operatic storms in South America or Mexico, and was neither better nor worse than scores of other companies heard here before and since. Like most of these, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... thirty-third day after leaving Trieste, a haze of hills arose from the eastward horizon, and we knew it to be India. Then the blue water waxed green, greenish, and brown, like to liquid mud. The gulls became tamer and more numerous, and jetsam and flotsam drifted past us. We sighted land very early. As we were running in the pilot came alongside, and called up to the captain, "Have you any sickness on board?" The answer was, "Yes." "Then," said the pilot, "run up the yellow flag. I will keep alongside in a boat, and ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... liberty, with its advantages to the individual and corresponding disadvantages for the State. Liberty implies the right to rise by honest endeavour, but does not exclude the possibility of a wilful surrender to slothful inactivity, e.g., the human flotsam and jetsam of British cities, the casual ward and similar institutions. These and other phenomena of life in our islands have aroused bitter contempt among Germans. Contempt has been succeeded by envy and hatred. Rightly or wrongly the German has argued ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... but Paris—after it had beaten and twisted and squeezed that brilliant Southern rag in its great vat for ten years, burned him in all its acids, rolled him in all its mire—relegated him at last to the state of battered flotsam and jetsam, embruted, paralyzed, which had killed his father with grief and compelled his mother to sell everything in her house and to live by domestic service in the well-to-do families of the neighborhood. Luckily, just about the time that that relic of Parisian hospitals, sent back to his ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... as they looked upon the worms that honeycombed their headstones' bases. What thoughts went through Bob Brownley's mind only his Maker knew. For minutes he stood motionless, then he walked on down Broadway. He went into the Battery. The benches were crowded with that jetsam and flotsam of humanity that New York's mighty sewers throw in armies upon her inland beaches at every sunrise: Here a sodden brute sleeping off a prolonged debauch, there a lad whose frankness of face and homespun clothes and bewildered eyes ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson

... things happen in this world occasionally, good as well as bad. There came up a heavy storm, and the next morning, walking with my father on the beach, strewn with deep-sea flotsam and jetsam, we came upon the mast of a ship, water-logged till it had the weight of iron; it might have been, as my father remarked, a relic of the Spanish Armada. And it was covered from end to end with the rarest and most beautiful ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... on runners, or a Noah's Ark whose bulk had been reduced. Jules explained that the logs, laid in that manner, kept the shanty warmer and free from damp. In reply to Hemmingway's suggestion that it was a great waste of material, Jules simply replied that the logs were the "flotsam and jetsam" of the creek from the ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... stopped, that platform of a Paris railway station was turned into a thoroughly English scene. A wave from Great Britain swept over it, a tall and tweedy wave, bearing with it golf clubs and kitbags and every kind of English flotsam and jetsam. All the passengers had lately landed from the foreignest of foreign parts, coral strands, and that sort of remote thing, but they looked as incorruptibly, triumphantly British, every man, woman, and child of them (except a fringe of black or brown servants), as if they ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... head, the heart, the genius of the war. He never, for one moment, changed his course, but kept it fixed upon the Union, no matter what the winds and tides, the currents and cross-currents were. Thus, while so many lesser minds were busy with flotsam and jetsam of the controversial storm, his own serener soul was already beyond the far horizon, voyaging toward the one sure haven for the ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood

... till we should stand upon the spot associated with his crime. Nor did he pursue the subject; but he walked beside me with a firmer step. The call that I had made upon his mind acted like a stimulant, and I could see that he had forgotten his search for worthless jetsam, in a profound, gloomy, and yet stirring train of thought. In three or four minutes we had topped the brae and begun to go down upon Sandag. The wreck had been roughly handled by the sea; the stem had been ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... begun with a gusto. It stirred one's blood. It called—it summoned with such a promise of variety, of adventure, of flotsam and jetsam and shuttlecock of chances, that I, a youth with twenty-one dollars and a half at disposal, all his clothes on his back, a man's weapon at his belt, and an appointment with a lady as his future, forgetful of past and courageous in present, strode ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... Jaundice flavmalsano. Javelin jxetponardo. Jaw makzelo. Jawbone makzelosto. Jay garolo. Jealousy jxaluzo. Jeer mokadi. Jelly gxelateno. Jeopardy dangxero. Jerk ekskuo. Jersey (garment) trikoto. Jessamine jasmeno. Jest sxerci. Jest sxerco. Jesuit Jezuito. Jesus Jesuo. Jetsam fuko. Jetty digo. Jew Hebreo. Jewel juvelo. Jewel-box juvelujo. Jeweller juvelisto. Jewess Hebreino. Jilt koketulino. Jingle tinti. Job tasketo. Jockey rajdisto. Jocose sxercema. Jocular sxercema. Join kunigi. Join hands manplekti. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... to West Ways, the farm Bolter lived on, Mount Dunstan passed two or three of these strays. They were the usual flotsam and jetsam, but on the roadside near a hop garden he came upon a group of an aspect so unusual that it attracted his attention. Its unusualness consisted in its air of exceeding bustling cheerfulness. It was a domestic group of the most luckless type, and ragged, dirty, ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... turn up a large surface of life, rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental elevation and abasement—these are the material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is proper to the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... be of practical value. Great is the rejoicing of those who are benefited thereby; and, for the moment, science is the Diana of all the craftsmen. But, even while the cries of jubilation resound and this floatsam and jetsam of the tide of investigation is being turned into the wages of workmen and the wealth of capitalists, the crest of the wave of scientific investigation is far away on its course over the ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley

... which, on the promise of a reasonable salvage, the natives very honestly brought back, the chests apparently not opened, and some of the wood after it had been built into their houses. But the recovery of jetsam could not affect the result. It was impossible the captain should withstand this partiality of fortune; and with his fall the prosperity of the Marquesas ended. Anaho is truly extinct, Taahauku but a shadow of itself; nor has any new plantation ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... twenty-second of March did we realise fully the vast conception and the extent of the German swoop, and that our Brigade was as jetsam and as flotsam carried along on the mightiest part of ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)

... the driblets of trade among the low music-halls and the cheapest vaudeville houses, where niggardly, gray-haired agents have for two generations sat among their dusty contracts and their rusty pens, haggling over bread-and-water salaries with the jetsam ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... simplest manner possible," he replied. "The moon is now in the third quarter, and the tides are consequently neap-tides. You can see quite plainly the two lines of seaweed and jetsam which indicate the high-water marks of the spring-tides and the neap-tides respectively. The strip of comparatively dry sand between them, over which the water has not risen for several days, is, as you see, marked by only two sets of footprints, and ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman

... as grammar. It is only weighted now by its grotesque and ridiculous spelling—one of the absurdest among all the absurd English attempts at compromise. The pressure of the newer speakers will compel it to make jetsam of that lumber also; and then the tongue of Shelley and Newton will march onward unopposed ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... religion," he said. "The flotsam and jetsam of life have to learn to be men and women first. Some of them are learning to be ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner

... was the greeting this army received on every side. The flotsam and jetsam which swirled along in its eddies or followed in its wake cheered, howled, and danced deliriously; men, women, and children from doorways and galleries raised their voices lustily, and applauded as if at some favorite carnival parade. In ...
— The Net • Rex Beach

... printed in "Flotsam and Jetsam": reprinted, with alterations, as Proem to "Ranolf ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... in contact with a very respectable little French gentleman called Fleurus, who had begun his career as a notary, but, finding that profession unprofitable, had become a hunter of pedigrees and heirs-at-law—for the most part to insignificant legacies, unclaimed stock, and all other jetsam and flotsam thrown up on the shadowy shores of the Court of Chancery. M. Fleurus had not often been so fortunate as to put his industrious fingers into any large pie, but he had contrived to make a good deal of money out ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... you must know, was literally strewed with things out of the Agra; masts, rigging, furniture, tea-chests, bundles of canes, chairs, tables; but of all this jetsam, Dodd's eye had been for some little time fixed on one object: a live sailor drifting ashore on a great wooden case. It struck him after a while that the man made very little way, and at last seemed to go up and down in one place. By-and-bye he saw him nearer and nearer, and recognised ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... ago" means to us so infinitely valuable a possession, we have striven to preserve in print a few of the stories that still remain—flotsam and jetsam saved from the cruel rush of an ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang

... rise two figures: St. Joseph, and an almost life-size, painted statue of the Virgin. There the two stand firmly on their pedestals, their faces raised to God's roof of blue, which never fails. Because their eyes are lifted, they do not see the flotsam and jetsam of shattered stained glass, burnt woodwork, smashed benches, broken picture-frames and torn, rain-blurred portraits of lesser saints. They seem to ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... of the fact that impertinent railroads were beginning to crawl about its feet, and the flotsam and jetsam of the adjacent city were gradually being deposited at its base, it nevertheless reared its granite shoulders proudly and ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... algae, were as keenly my study as if I were a marine zoologist, although I might not perhaps have been able to describe them in scientific language; while, should a stiff south-westerly gale cast up, as it frequently did amongst other wreckage and ocean flotsam and jetsam, fresh oysters torn from carefully cultivated beds further down the coast, none were sooner acquainted with the interesting fact than I, or gulped down the savoury "natives" with greater gusto—opening them skilfully with an old sailor's jack-knife, which was a treasure I had picked ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson

... heal, not harm; We come not to condemn, but reconcile; We come not to compel, but call again; We come not to destroy, but edify; Nor yet to question things already done; These are forgiven; matters of the past; And range with jetsam, and with offal, thrown Into the blind ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson

... or rather perquisites, which flowed originally from the king by grant or usage, and now reserved to the crown by commission. They are of two kinds—viz. the civil, or those arising from wrecks of the sea, flotsam, jetsam, and lagan, royal fishes, derelicts, and deodands, ejectamenta maris, and the goods of pirates, traitors, felons, suicides, and fugitives within the admiralty jurisdiction; and the prize droits, or those accruing in the course of war, comprehending all ships and goods taken without ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... Impenetrable gloom lurks beneath the faces of the cliffs, the mournful howl of the coyotes comes across the plain, and their slinking forms emerge from the shadow of the rocks. There is a shapeless heap, the carcass of some dead mule or ox, some jetsam of the desert, lying near at hand, at which my horse was uneasy as I drew rein in contemplation, and which explains the nearness of the beasts of prey, and the long line of zopilotes, or buzzards, which I had observed ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... them managed to reach the stern of the wreck; others stumbling over flotsam and jetsam on the beach were crawling around, seeking shelter from the blaze of fire that leaped all along the ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson

... relief. Moreover, it may be hoped that the infirm and pauper classes will be henceforward, like the old age pensioners, a diminishing fraction of the population of Ireland. They are, to a large extent, flotsam and jetsam over the sea of Ireland's political troubles. Land agitation, with its attendant vices of restlessness and idleness, the emigration of wage-earners, the discouragement of industry under Governments indifferent to the administration of law and the development of national resources, have all ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... roadstead, another picture of horror rose to the eyes. The shimmering waters of the open sea were loaded with wreckage of all kinds—islands of debris from field and forest and floating fields of pumice and jetsam. As far as the eye could reach, it saw but a field of desolation." The river of Basse-Pointe overflowed with a torrent of black water, which carried several houses away. ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... in the blaze of the sun, the sandy dust was inches deep in the great road, cut by thousands of wheels. Flotsam and jetsam, wreckage, showed more and more. Skeletons of cattle, bodies not yet skeletons, aroused no more than a casual look. Furniture lay cast aside, even broken wagons, their wheels fallen apart, showing intimate disaster. The ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough

... "This flotsam and jetsam of her talk came to me from time to time as confidential asides from the main flow of palaver which rolled along steadily toward the Judge. The Judge, poor fellow, showed plainly the effects of the struggle; so much so, that I suggested a stroll ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald

... an extraordinary room—fit shrine for that household symbol, the big enamelled tin teapot. At the NW. corner is the door to the scullery and to the small walled-in garden which contains—in order of importance—flotsam and jetsam for firewood, old masts, spars and rudders, and some weedy, grub-eaten vegetables. At the top of the garden is a tumble-down cat-haunted linhay, crammed to its leaky roof with fishing gear. No doubt it is the presence everywhere of boat and fishing ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... were turned up in the interval, one beheld the usual spectacle: stretchers, wheeled chairs, crutches, bandaged heads, arms in splints, blind men, men with one arm, men with one leg: rank on rank of war's flotsam and jetsam, British, Australians, New Zealanders, Newfoundlanders, Canadians, come to make merry over the minstrels: in the front row the Colonel and the Matron, with officer patients; here and there an orderly or ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir

... the premature stoppages, the stagnancy, the aimlessness and heartlessness, which are the scandals of the professional ministry and the weakness of the Christian Church in our day. Men who drift into the ministry, as it is certain so many do, become mere ecclesiastical flotsam and jetsam, incapable of giving carriage to any soul across the waters of this life, uncertain of their own arrival anywhere, and of all the waste of their generation, the most patent and disgraceful. God will have no driftwood for His sacrifices, ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker

... children of crime, children of wealth, children that are afraid when they hear their names pronounced by the lips of their mother, children that cower in fear when they hear the footsteps of their brutal father, the flotsam and jetsam upon the rude sea of life, my heart goes out ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... by the tower foot, (Flotsam and jetsam from over the sea, Can the dead feel joy or pain?) And the owls in the ivy blink and hoot, And the sea-waves bubble around its root, Where kelp and tangle and sea-shells be, When the bat in the dark flies silently. (Hark to the wind ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean

... did not appear to recognize him, and neither did the Marquise, if she were one of the young women who had run out to the car. Maybe, if he could escape recognition now, he might escape altogether. Once swept away among the flotsam and jetsam below stairs, he would be both out of sight and out of mind. I did not care about myself now, only for him, and I was beginning to cheer up a little, when I noticed that the other young man was gazing ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... of relics of the world above—some taken from the jetsam of the sea and others taken by exploring parties from Opal during those long glad years when the inner-world was as comfortable as Eden and almost as happy. Gems by the millions, gold and silver coins, trappings inlaid with diamonds, furs, silks, bone instruments and ivory carvings. A Stradivarius ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam

... was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets and his canvas shoes dangling by their knotted laces over his shoulders and, picking a pointed salt-eaten stick out of the jetsam among the rocks, he clambered down the slope of ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... with the unloading of rations, the transports moving here and there far out on the moonlighted sea. Down there were straggler, wounded soldier, teamster, mule-packer, refugee Cuban, correspondent, nurse, doctor, surgeon—the flotsam and jetsam of the battle of ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.

... peaked gable, a chest of drawers which would have set a collector crazy, Chippendale chairs with the seats out, Windsor chairs with the backs broken, gilt mirror frames with no glass in them—boxes—books—bottles—all the flotsam and jetsam of such old establishments. Most of the things had been set back against the wall, but right in the middle of the floor was an object which I took at ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey

... inclusion of any who would be wholly burdens, moral or physical. So it happened that, though misfortune had laid on almost all a heavy hand, the early colonists to Georgia were by no means undesirable flotsam and jetsam. The plans for the colony, the hopes for its well-being, wear a tranquil ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston

... ground of local pride. Shelby became all things to all men. To the club people he was the Club Candidate; to the unclubbed townsfolk he was New Babylon's Candidate; while among the quarry workers and other socially impossible flotsam and jetsam of the voting public other agencies than Mrs. Hilliard's heralded him as the People's Candidate. Yet the fog of ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther

... passes for all, and escorted them via steamer, down the entire Gulf coast, touching at all attractive points, exploring coral islands where myriads of sea birds nested, encircling us with wild screams till the clouds of them well-nigh shut out the sun; then we collected rare shells and flotsam and jetsam from far away lands; one hour, floating over the calm Gulf of Mexico, as smooth as a mirror, then tossed by a sudden tempest far towards the stars, and tumbling down to Davy Jones' locker; now enjoying ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... fixed itself upon the outer edge of the wriggling river life like a coral cell attaching itself to a slow growing atoll. From there he worked his way inshore, crawling over the craft that stretched out from the low banks as a water beetle might move over the flotsam and jetsam caught in the back-water of a sluggish stream. Once in the narrow, crowded streets of the city itself, he roamed aimlessly, open-eyed to its wonders, dreamily observant. Out of the native quarter and into the foreign section he moved, accustoming himself ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... divergence &c 291; aspersion; scattering &c v.; dissemination, diffusion, dissipation, distribution; apportionment &c 786; spread, respersion^, circumfusion^, interspersion, spargefaction^; affusion^. waifs and estrays^, flotsam and jetsam, disjecta membra [Lat.], [Horace]; waveson^. V. disperse, scatter, sow, broadcast, disseminate, diffuse, shed, spread, bestrew, overspread, dispense, disband, disembody, dismember, distribute; apportion &c 786; blow off, let out, dispel, cast forth, draught ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... mute to the boundless west, the sinking sun, the lovers' star. They two—could they two, lying with closed eyes, but drift out over bar, floating away through golds and purples towards the kiss of heaven and sea—flotsam of this earth, jetsam of age-distant shores, each to the other paradise and all in all! How profound the stillness—how deep the fragrance of the lily—what indifference, what quiet as of scorn did the Maker of man, having placed his creature in the lists, turn aside to other spectacles!... Should ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston

... brave battle, and mother and cub would have disappeared, in a few minutes more, under the stealthy, whispering onrush of the flood, had not the whimsical Providence—or Hazard—of the Wild come curiously to their aid. Among the jetsam of those restless Fundy tides almost anything that will float may appear, from a matchbox to a barn. What appeared just now was a big spruce log, escaped from the boom on some river emptying into the bay. It came softly wallowing in, lipped by the little waves, and passed close by the ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... of the Richelieu censitaires, and wood-rangers now grown savage as their captors and loth to leave the wild life into which they had so naturally grown. It was the first reflex of the wave, and even now the bits of flotsam and jetsam of wild life were fain to cling to the Western shore whither they had been carried by the advancing flood. This was the meeting of the ebb with the sea that sent it forward, the meeting of civilized ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... the law which declared forfeit to the feudal lord such goods as, for instance, might happen to fall from a wagon and thereby touch the ground; (3) the abolition of the strand right, which had secured to the owner of the shore land the jetsam and flotsam of wrecked or stranded vessels; (4) the concession of legal procedure to the debtor; (5) liberation from the duel and other forms of the "divine judgment" in legal procedure; (6) the reduction of duties; (7) permission to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various

... prints, strange fishes in glass cases, rods, guns, pipe-racks, curiosities of every kind from various parts of the world—India, the South Seas, Australia, not forgetting London and Paris—and all the flotsam and jetsam of a far-wandered man, who—as the "King" remarked, introducing their autobiographic display with a comprehensive wave of his hand—had, like that other wanderer unbeloved of all schoolboys, the pious AEneas, been so much tossed ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... many dogs hailing from other kennels. He has also been fairly successful with blacks, which, however, have usually been purchased and not bred by him, the two best being Master Reuben, bred by Miss Joan Godfrey, and Jetsam Bowdler, a bitch who has distinguished herself both in the ring and in ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... the new country was as the breath of his nostrils. His bosom swelled with joy as he looked out toward that West which had so long allured him—that West of which he was to be the discoverer. The carousing riffraff of the wharfs, the flotsam and jetsam of the river trade, were to him but passing phenomena. He shouldered his way among them indifferently. He walked with a larger vision before ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough

... stream then, and I wondered how collisions and traffic jams of all sorts could be avoided. I do not know yet; I only know that there is no trouble. Here were empty trucks, speeding back for new loads. And some there were that carried all sorts of wreckage—the flotsam and jetsam cast up on the safe shores behind the front by the red tide of war. Nothing is thrown away out there; nothing is wasted. Great piles of discarded shoes are brought back to be made over. They are as good as new when they come back from ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder

... Anton, as the music ceased, and they found themselves suddenly stranded, like bits of jetsam on a shore. She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... which the wrecks of millenniums have left on the earth—surely there is a call to service that might fire the spirit of the dullest of us.''[110] The obstacles are indeed formidable, but he who can look beneath the eddying flotsam and jetsam of the surface to the mighty undercurrents which are sweeping majestically onward can exclaim ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... struggle between longing and resolution. He had braced his nerves for a long and hungry waiting, but fate had yielded suddenly; the floods had brought her to him,—his flotsam and jetsam more precious than all the guarded treasures of the earth. She had come, with all her girlish, unconscious beguilements, and all her womanly cares and anxieties too. He must strive against her sweetness, while he helped her to bear ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... I lay in my hammock upstairs, however, I heard the old woman as she chafed the warmth back into her, crooning a chorus of, "Eh, the puir lassie! Eh, the bonnie lassie!" from which I gathered that this piece of jetsam was both ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... train. After a heart-rending moment's hesitation she hastened to where a few people were waiting. The gates opened and she was pushed along. It was as if her own will could no longer lead her, as if she were being carried by a strong tide, with other jetsam, towards shores unknown. ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick

... curious currents and counter-currents, as bits of dbris are hurrying upward in the middle of the stream, while similar flotsam and jetsam rush away as rapidly down stream ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase

... chairs, wiped the table mightily; the French cabmen, the Barbary Coast flotsam and jetsam, gazed over their ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin

... (and what reader of Florence Barclay wouldn't prefer Sir Nigel?), was so cultured that he said, "Nobody in the whole world knows it, save you and I," and referred to "flotsam and jetson" as he was swimming out into the path of the rising sun. "Jetsam" is such an ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley

... there had been no wreck, else the coast-guard station, less than a mile away, would have been very busy, and she herself must surely have heard some of the disturbance. No, there had been no wreck, yet all about her lay the wave-sodden flotsam and jetsam of many past disasters. A broken mast stump was imbedded upright in the sand at one spot. In another, a ladder-like pair of stairs, suggesting a ship's companionway, lay half out of the water. Sundry casks and barrels ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman

... showed her his treasures. They climbed the ladder in one corner to the loft where Paul slept. The window of it, small and square-paned, looked seaward, and the moan of the sea and the pipe of the wind sounded there night and day. Paul had many rare shells and seaweeds, curious flotsam and jetsam of shore storms, and he had a small shelf full ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... relics for collectors of such flotsam and jetsam of a ruined dynasty. On August 25, Charles answered Edgar. He is 'sorry that His Majesty is prevented against the most dutiful of sons.' He sends thanks for the engraved stones and the powers of Regency. This might well have been James's last news ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang

... was a melting-pot. Attracted by the prospect of the precious metal that was to be wrung from it, there had drifted into the Valley a flotsam and jetsam, representatives of all nations and of all callings. As was natural, Americans in the majority; but, with them, Englishmen and Frenchmen and Germans and Italians, plus an admixture of Chinamen and Kanakas; also an undesirable element of ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... himself bound by the chains he himself has forged. This is the reason an old man does not like the present times; he has stopped whilst time has advanced, and he is now being carried along like the flotsam and jetsam of a wreck; the very tastes and habits of his contemporaries violently clashing with his beloved past. Speak not to him of progress or evolution, he has brought himself into a state of complete immobility, and ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... of the war were washing up millions of wrecked lives on all the shores; what mattered the flotsam of a conscripted deep-sea Breton fisherman, slowly pining away for lack of all he was accustomed to; or the jetsam of a tall glass-blower from the 'invaded countries,' drifted into the hospital—no one quite knew why—prisoner for twenty months with the Boches, released at last because of his half-paralysed tongue—What ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... Sub-Consciousness—to learn a page of prose, or deposit the memory of a piece of music, which you are forced to play slowly and thoughtfully before the digital dexterity is added to the treasures of your Sub-Consciousness. Under exceptional conditions, exceptional flotsam and jetsam is tossed up into Consciousness, as in the case of that servant girl who spoke Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in her delirium, having unconsciously absorbed the same from overhearing the studies of her learned master ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... tide had not entirely subsided, but there was a perceptible diminution in the height of the waves. Up beyond the water-line lay a fresh installment of jetsam. But, as before, they labored only to save the flotsam. They worked ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore

... utterly disgusted by the flotsam and jetsam in human guise that she found sprawling at the tables, but she ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... and suffering endurable? We must put the very question, What is Judaism? in a new way and in a different spirit. We must have the definite purpose in mind, of so understanding it as to know what to do next, and to strive for that vigorously, so as not to drift like helpless flotsam and jetsam. We need strong beliefs which, as Bagehot puts it, win strong men, and ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... room, where the very cobwebs reeked of Arab history and lawless plans. He sat on the black iron bed, and we grouped ourselves about on chairs that had very likely covered the known world between them. One was obviously jetsam from a steamship; one was a Chinese thing, carved with staggering dragons; the other was made of iron-hard wood that Yerkes swore came ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... a squalid scene—a wide flat area where stakes and floors and frames mingled with all the flotsam and jetsam left by a hurried and profligate populace, moving on to another camp. Daylight found no man there nor any living creature. And all day the wind blew the dust and sheets of sand over the place where had reigned such ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey

... knowledge of the Bible is the shallowness of much of our thinking. If the Bible were needed for nothing else in present literary life, it would be needed for the deepening of literary currents. The vast flood of flotsam and jetsam which pours from the presses seldom floats on a deep current. It is surface matter for the most part. It does not take itself seriously, and it is quite impossible to take it seriously. It does not deal with great themes, or when it touches upon them it deals with them ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee

... twenty yards out and more. The sea had no power, it splashed in weak and hopeless waves, sucked itself away inward, came back again with a little run, and feebly toppled over. The high-water line was shown by a serpentine strip of jetsam winding along the whole of the shore. There was no yellow in the sands; clouds and sunshine struggled overhead, but beneath them all was grey. The wind rustled in the giant grasses like the sound of men on horseback, so that I was continually looking ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... to be seen also the human flotsam and jetsam of this northern country—miners, prospectors, drifters, government employees, and adventurers—all caught here as though in the cleats of a flume, at this focusing-point at the foot of the ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough

... the present notice was picked up at sea, a child, and, under the provisions of maritime law concerning flotsam, jetsam, and lagan, was appropriated by the crew. He then followed their fortunes for several years, with various adventures, among which is the one wherein he is said to have accompanied Arthur Gordon Pym (disguised in the published account of that voyage under the name and appearance ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... in the city where a man may purchase nightly oblivion for the modest sum of two or three annas; and hither come regularly, like homing pigeons at nightfall, the human flotsam and jetsam, which the tide of urban life now tosses into sight for a brief moment and now submerges within her bosom. Halt in that squalid lane which looks out upon the traffic of one of the most crowded thoroughfares and listen, ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.

... the matter of seigneurial rights of flotsam and jetsam were by no means as strict as his master's, especially where Carette was concerned. In his mute, dog-like way he worshipped Carette. In case of need, he would, I believe, have given his left hand in her service; and the right, I think he would have kept ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham

... L15,000 worth of treasure on board, went ashore near Carwar. Before more than half the treasure could be removed in safety to the factory, the Rajah sent down an armed force to seize the ship as jetsam, imprisoned the captain and crew, and laid siege to the factory. So Hamilton was sent down with a small squadron and some troops. Fortunately the factory was exceptionally well provisioned. On the 30th August, the Morning Star, with five gallivats ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph

... contrast, we try to picture the Teutonic peoples always acting together, even through their distant offshoots; or, again, if by a flight of fancy we can imagine the British Government making a wise use of its old soldiers and the flotsam and jetsam of our cities for the formation of semi-military colonies on the most exposed frontiers of the Empire. That which our senators have done only in the case of the Grahamstown experiment of 1819, Russia has done persistently and successfully with materials ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... stray hats were not looked upon as flotsam and jetsam and subject to a too liberal interpretation of the "Losers-weepers- finders-keepers" rule. There was a dead-line for hats beyond which no gentleman would venture, for, after a hat had once blown beyond ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... the compulsion of knowledge a truth of those truths that are too profound to admit of mere external proof. For our reason plays at the edge of the universe as a little child plays at the edge of the sea, gathering from its fringes the flotsam and jetsam of its mighty life. But miles and miles beyond the ken of the eager eye, beyond the reach of the alert hand, lies the whole great secret life of the sea. And if it were all laid bare and spread at the child's feet, how could the little hand suffice to gather its vast treasures, the inexperienced ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... did Burford come back, full of the account of the wreck and of the spoils, and the struggles between the wreckers for the flotsam and jetsam. There was much of savage brutality mated with a cool indifference truly horrible to Anne, and making her realise into what a den of robbers she had fallen, especially as these narratives were diversified by consultations ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge

... out upon the window-sill, watching the darkening sky. A fierce revulsion seized him as he pictured to himself the scene upon which the morning sun would look—the kennels red with blood, the horrors huddled in every corner, all the dreadful jetsam cast up by the ensanguined tide of war. Of necessity, perhaps, must such things be—the endurance of a lesser evil that the greater wrong might be forever blotted out. And yet his heart ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... during the day, and always with the tide, and spending the night on land. By the way, whilst among the islands, I came across, at various times, many sad signs of civilisation, in the form of a lower mast of a ship, and a deck-house, a wicker-basket, empty brandy cases, and other flotsam and jetsam, which, I supposed, had come from various wrecks. After having been absent from my home in Cambridge Gulf, two or three months, I found myself in a large bay, which I now know to be King's Sound. I had come across ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont

... covered her bosom again. The breeze is suddenly gusty. The apple trees in the orchards are shaken and scatter bird-like jetsam in space; and in that bright green paddock yonder the rows of out-hung linen dance in the sunshine. The sky darkens; the wind rises and prevails. It was that very day of the gale. It assaults our two bodies on the flank of the hill; it comes out of infinity and sets roaring the tawny ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... places, of which not a wreck now remains" ("The Origin of Species" (1st edition), page 396.).) were conceded freely, but few, if any, great enough to permit migration of truly terrestrial creatures. The only means of getting across the gaps was by the principle of the "flotsam and jetsam," a theory which Darwin took over from Lyell and further elaborated so as to make it applicable to many kinds of plants and animals, but sadly deficient, often grotesque, in the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... Mariposa Group, Farleys was left to pursue its tranquil way undisturbed by stage or tourist. Still it remains, if stagnant, self-respecting, has a hotel, a post office and a street of stores, along which the human flotsam and jetsam of the mineral belt may drift without exciting comment. A derelict could pass along its wooden sidewalk, drop a letter in the post box, even buy a box of cartridges without attracting notice. And even if he should be noticed, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... disillusions had failed to quench the pity for his unfortunate fellows. He made it a rule on such nights as these, that if, by chance, returning late to his office he should find such a shivering piece of jetsam sheltering in his own doorway, he would give him or her the price ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace

... His other functions must be a tireless activity working towards an end. Everything He calls into being works toward that end, I myself with the rest. I am not a purposeless bit of jetsam flung out on the ocean of time to be tossed about helplessly. God couldn't so will an existence. It would not be in keeping with His economy to have any entity wasted. As Our Lord puts it, the sparrow cannot fall without Him; without Him the lilies ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... for myself over one hundred mavericks. Cattle were so worthless that no one went to the trouble to brand completely; the crumbs were acceptable to me, and, since no one else cared for them and I did, the flotsam and jetsam of the range fell to my brand. Had I been ambitious, double that number could have been easily secured, but we never went off the home range in gathering calves to brand. All the hands on the Edwards ranch, darkies and Mexicans, were constantly throwing into the corrals and pointing out unclaimed ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams

... seen. His conversion was clean-cut, definite and clear; it was of a kind with the conversion of Paul on the way to Damascus. He was an exceedingly intelligent man, and could repeat more classic poetry by heart than any man I have ever known. He came out from that brown mass of human flotsam and jetsam on the Sunday afternoon following his conversion, and told them what had happened ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... hour. The little low-ceilinged room, with its square window, into which he took her, was filled with the flotsam and jetsam of his roving life—things beautiful and odd and strange beyond all telling. The things that pleased Rachel most were two huge shells on the chimney piece—pale pink shells with big crimson ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... wreck must have been above all estimate in value. How much 'Jetsam' there may be we cannot tell, but what we have seen is all 'Flotsam,' and will float and find its way in enriching influence to a thousand ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... jetsam of advanced European thought are eagerly sought and treasured up. "The New Republic" and "The Epic of Hades" are on every drawing-room table. One must speak of nothing but the latest doings at the Gaiety, the pictures ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

... to-morrow, choose! The road these others tread Is littered deep with jetsam and the bones Of their dishonored dead. What altruism for defeat atones? Have ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... he caught sight from the window of immense stores of war—German waggons with their military destinations still marked in chalk, painted guns of all calibres, drums of barbed wire, higgledy-piggledy truck-loads of scrap, all sorts of flotsam and jetsam of the great conflict. All useless, done with, never to be thought of again, so the world hoped, in the millennium that was to be brought about by the League of Nations. Yet it seemed impossible. In wayside camps, at railway stations, he saw troops ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... knew no better! Nevertheless, it is the unavoidable destiny of Jonahs to be cast overboard sooner or later. Or shall we try the experiment of hiding our Jonah in a safe place, that none may lay hands on him to make jetsam of him? Let us, then, with equal forethought and wisdom, lash ourselves to the anchor, and await, in pious confidence, the certain result. Perhaps our suspicious passenger is no Jonah after all, being black. For ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... and my little boy and my belongings away comfortably, but the road was rough and the coach swayed, and I gave it up. There were passengers on top of the coach, and passengers inside the coach. One woman who was totally deaf, and some miners and blacksmiths, and a few other men, the flotsam and jetsam of the Western countries, who come from no one knoweth whence, and who go, no one knoweth whither, who have no trade or profession and are ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes

... against the clever interpretation of this woman whom he assailed. He had no defense to offer. He did not care to meet her gaze just then, since he was learning to respect her as one wronged, where he had regarded her hitherto merely as of the flotsam and jetsam of the criminal class. So, he avoided her eyes as she stood by the window regarding him quizzically. In a panic of confusion quite new to him in his years of experience, he pressed the button on ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... letter for you." She went to the pigeon-holes on the wall that held the flotsam and jetsam of unclaimed mail, and brought him a square, blue linen ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... fathers' footsteps; little children who run away when they only hear their names called by the lips of a mother; little children—the children of poverty, the children of crime, the children of brutality, wherever they are—flotsam and jetsam upon the wild, mad sea of life—my heart goes out to them, ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll

... that look of angry disgust with which Mr. Lovel surveyed it. Curtains and carpet were something the worse for wear, the old-fashioned furniture was a little sombre; but the rich binding of the books and a rare old bronze here and there redeemed it from commonness—poor jetsam and flotsam from the wreck of the great house, but enough to give some touch of ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... was a curious background to his thoughts. Some part of his earlier life seemed stirred up in the man. The one selfishness permitted to rank as a virtue in his sex was alive. His heart had ceased to throb with the loiterers, the flotsam and jetsam of the gutters. For the moment he was cast loose from the absorbed and serious side of his career. A curious wave of sentiment had enveloped him, a wave of sentiment unanalysable and as yet impersonal; he walked as a man in a dream. For the first time he had seen ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... which, on the promise of a reasonable salvage, the natives very honestly brought back, the chests apparently not opened, and some of the wood after it had been built into their houses. But the recovery of such jetsam could not affect the result. It was impossible the captain should withstand this partiality of fortune; and with his fall the prosperity of the Marquesas ended. Anaho is truly extinct, Taahauku but a shadow of itself; nor ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... cockle-shells in a hurricane. Their haunts knew them no more, and before he could realize his personal concern with catastrophic events Bobby became a disconsolate wanderer in search of the flotsam and jetsam which were all that ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson

... watch at the ebb and flow The tides of the public thought— Flotsam or jetsam floating in ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher

... set apart, indeed, by any legal formula, but by a natural law of classification which seems to be inherent in the universe. It was a curious and motley crowd—a little dull, perhaps, but orderly, well-behaved, and self-respecting, with here and there part of the flotsam and jetsam of a great city, a ragged, sodden, hopeless wretch wending his way about with the ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... protest That our commission is to heal, not harm; We come not to condemn, but reconcile; We come not to compel, but call again; We come not to destroy, but edify; Nor yet to question things already done; These are forgiven—matters of the past— And range with jetsam and with offal thrown Into the blind sea of forgetfulness. [A pause. Ye have reversed the attainder laid on us By him who sack'd the house of God; and we, Amplier than any field on our poor earth Can render thanks ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... remark expressed volumes. We knew that most of the poor creatures "had no papa and didn't know where mamma lived," that they were mere jetsam and flotsam thrown up on this quiet shore from the waves of the great ocean of London and forgotten by all the world save those whose business it was to pay and to receive the twenty pounds a year which was their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... the trench with the help of the sacks, of weapons, and of the backs that are piled up there. In the bottom of the ravine the soil is shot-churned, crowded with jetsam, swarming with prostrate bodies. Some are motionless as blocks of wood; others move slowly or convulsively. The barrage fire continues to increase its infernal discharge behind us on the ground that we have crossed. But where we are at the ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... into the various doors of the huge hostelry, for the evening trains were depositing the flotsam and jetsam ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... wreckage; disaster, destruction, ruin, subversion, miscarriage. Associated Words: salvage, flotsam, jetsam, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... prudence," he might have said the same of his own. He stood aloof from life and said things about it. He had no wife, no child, no business, no home—he dared not venture boldly into the tide of existence—he stood forever on the bank, and watched the current carrying its flotsam and jetsam to the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... all scattered at the time of the winding up of the farm estate, and the only jetsam that Philip inherited out of it was an annotated copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Young's Travels in France, a copy of The Newcomes, and the first American edition of Childe Harold. Probably these odd volumes ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... Alf Jetsam is a little boy who is cast ashore from a wreck on the coast of England. He is adopted and brought up by a kind old fisherman and his wife. Eventually he goes to sea, and after many voyages finds his parents. The story of his adventures ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... pledge and to keep it, if only temporarily, but I think that we ourselves got most out of the work, both in pleasure and uplift. I recall one clergyman, one doctor, and many men from the business world and clerk's life in the flotsam and jetsam. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... time again. He could not remain still. The first great fury of the storm had passed. It had swept him up, weak and nerveless, on the beach of retrospect; among the wreck of past hopes; the flotsam and jetsam ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson

... the twelve o'clock brace, pinned it in place again and saw one of his tools floating to the right of his head. He gathered it in and swept his tiny flash around in search of other jetsam from his tool kit. He collected a wrench and the skittish flashlight, started toward the last brace between him and the ladder, and felt his legs go limp. He wasn't particularly alarmed about it; his arms and vision failed him too, ...
— Tight Squeeze • Dean Charles Ing

... but the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow — not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs — but had a keener instinct, an intenser ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... tail, in right of his wife, but under his father, would he be able to grant leases for more than twenty-one years? and, if so, to whom would the right of trover belong? As to flotsam and jetsam—there was a little property, Mr Critic, on the sea-shore—that was a matter that had to be left unsettled at the last. Such points as these do take a long time to consider. All this bewildered the doctor sadly, and Frank himself began ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope

... found bottom upwards—a wreck, with its side stove in, entangled in a mass of flotsam and jetsam which had gathered in one of the side eddies below ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed

... that followed the tempest—that morning, rainy and gray—when, walking by the heavy, leaden sea, he had found a body at his feet and recognized it as that of an old sailor, the father of a family, who had been lost at sea three days before—mournful jetsam, stranded in the wrack and foam, so heart-rending to see, with the gray hair of the drowned full of ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee

... day of Joe Lathrop's valuable time went to waste while he was out trying to find some one to fill Robinson's place. His first attempt was made at the gate of the factory, where the sea of the unemployed threw up its flotsam and jetsam. But finishing piano frames is rather a fine job and none of the willing and eager applicants there could fill the bill. Joe then made the round of two or three employment agencies who had helped him out in previous similar emergencies. This time, however, they ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... there at all) I cordially hated the Strand. But the Embankment I regarded as one of the most romantic thoroughfares in London; and many a score of articles (which brought me money) do I owe to the inspiration of that broad, darkling, river-skirted road, and the queer human flotsam and jetsam one ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... the day, or to his promises of puffs for herself "when old Brown or Smith are out of the office" (the managing and the city editors both being jealous of him, and blue pencilling him just for spite); and if Mr. Flotsam does not, without leave, bring up and present his chum, Mr. Jetsam, the ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris

... waif, such a jetsam and flotsam of the world's flowing tide, want with a home? Really, my dear boy"—or madam, if the speaker happened to be of the gentler sex—"if ever you have occasion to see me, I am sure to be at one ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice

... hundred yards down the sea-front, where the black shadows of the native houses overhung the beach, the lighted windows gleamed softly like flakes of mica. The fishermen were burning seaweed and jetsam for ashes which would be used as fertilizer. Tongues of fire were flickering skywards. It was a blue night. The sky was deep blue, and the sea an oily greenish blue. Blue flames of salt danced and vanished over the blazing heaps. The savage figures squatting round the fires were dressed in tunics ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... their father's footsteps; little children who run away when they only hear their names called by the lips of another; little children—the children of poverty, the children of crime, the children of brutality wherever you are—flotsam and jetsam upon the wild, mad sea of life, my heart goes out to you, one and all. I tell you the children have the same rights that we have, and we ought to treat them as though they were human beings; and they should ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... examining magistrate of all the jetsam from the sea that is washed from anywhere ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange

... of what may be seen in Trafalgar Square. But with early autumn and the shortening days and the steadily increasing pressure of that undercurrent of want and misery through which strange flotsam and jetsam come to the surface, one saw, on the long benches or crouched on the asphalt pavement, lines of men and women sitting silently, making no appeal to passers-by, but, as night fell, crouching lower in their thin garments or wrapping old placards or any sack or semblance of covering ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell

... was emblematic of our modern world in which haphazardness has replaced order, Fillmore Street may be likened to a back eddy of the muddy and troubled waters, in which all sorts of flotsam and jetsam had collected. Or, to find perhaps an even more striking illustration of the process that made Hampton in general and Fillmore Street in particular, one had only to take the trolley to Glendale, the Italian settlement on the road leading to the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... soul, as in the depths of the ocean, a state of eternal calm. Around it the waves of unrest may surge and roar but there peace reigns. In that sanctuary the tides are born and, in their appointed time, swelling and rising, they carry the poor jetsam and flotsam of life ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... my way, fathead!" she hissed and went on for the shore under her own steam at about forty knots an hour. I was washed up myself, along with a quantity of other jetsam, a few minutes later, to be met by a small furious man with a heliotrope complexion and white spats who wagged bunches of typescript under my nose and informed me that I had absolutely ruined about twenty million ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various

... dispersion; disjunction &c. 44; divergence &c. 291; aspersion; scattering &c. v.; dissemination, diffusion, dissipation, distribution; apportionment &c. 786; spread, respersion[obs3], circumfusion[obs3], interspersion, spargefaction[obs3]; affusion[obs3]. waifs and estrays[obs3], flotsam and jetsam, disjecta membra[Lat], [Hor.]; waveson[obs3]. V. disperse, scatter, sow, broadcast, disseminate, diffuse, shed, spread, bestrew, overspread, dispense, disband, disembody, dismember, distribute; apportion &c. 786; blow off, let out, dispel, cast forth, draught ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... bed was a large box of tinselled Christmas-tree decorations and another of pink-and-white popcorn—the flotsam and jetsam of which strewed the counterpane and the floor to its farthest corners, mingled with scraps of glittering paper, an acreage of which surrounded a table in the centre of the room that was adorned with mucilage pot and scissors. ...
— The Blossoming Rod • Mary Stewart Cutting

... Letters of Junius, or on which side of Whitehall Charles I. was beheaded; for if you do you will be considered a bore—and that is something too dreadful for you at your tender age to understand." For these last two stories I by no means vouch. They belong to the flotsam and jetsam of ephemeral gossip. But the following, which I regard as eminently characteristic, I had from ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... flourishing brazenly within a stone's throw of Broadway, and it is counted one of the sights of the city. Upon entering, one may pass through a saloon where white-aproned waiters load trays and wrangle over checks, then into a ball-room filled with the flotsam and jetsam of midnight Manhattan. Above and around this room runs a white-and-gold balcony partitioned into boxes; beneath it are many tables separated from the waxed floor by a railing. Inside the enclosure men in street-clothes and smartly gowned girls with enormous hats revolve ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach



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