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Mussel   Listen
noun
Mussel  n.  
1.
(Zool.) Any one of many species of marine bivalve shells of the genus Mytilus, and related genera, of the family Mytidae. The common mussel (Mytilus edulis), and the larger, or horse, mussel (Modiola modiolus), inhabiting the shores both of Europe and America, are edible. The former is extensively used as food in Europe.
2.
(Zool.) Any one of numerous species of Unio, and related fresh-water genera; called also river mussel. See Naiad, and Unio.
Mussel digger (Zool.), the grayback whale. See Gray whale, under Gray.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mussel" Quotes from Famous Books



... you Sir, was't not the Wise-woman of Brainford? Fal. I marry was it (Mussel-shell) what would you with her? Simp. My Master (Sir) my master Slender, sent to her seeing her go thorough the streets, to know (Sir) whether one Nim (Sir) that beguil'd him of a chaine, had the ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... sessile life. In the shell-fish, on the other hand, the principle of armour-plating has its greatest development. It is assuredly a long and obscure way that leads from the ancestral type of animal we have been describing to the headless and shapeless mussel or oyster. Such a degeneration is, however, precisely what we should expect to find in the circumstances. Indeed, the larva, of many of the headless Molluscs have a mouth and eyes, and there is a very common type of larva—the trochosphere—in ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... stand our friend in his own fashion, but he says they care not the value of an empty mussel-shell for the French, and no more for the Dey of Algiers than I do for the Elector of Hanover. He has told them that M. l'Abbe and Mademoiselle are brother and daughter to a great Bey—but it is little they care for that. Holy Virgin, they took Mademoiselle for ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge

... water and keeping them there for a minute or more at a time." He later discovered that the ducks had large mussels attached to their tongues, and that they were trying to get rid of them by drowning them. The birds had discovered that the salt-water mussel cannot live in fresh water. Now am I to accept this story without question because I find it printed in a book? In the first place, is it not most remarkable that if the ducks had discovered that the bivalves could not live in fresh water, they ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... course up to the north, and in two or three miles it ran into a most picturesque and romantic glen, which had now a rushing torrent roaring through its centre. Here no doubt some permanent water exists, as we not only saw great quantities of mussel shells at deserted native camps, but Alec Ross saw a large rocky water reservoir in the glen, in which were quantities of good-sized fish. The camels could not pass through this glen, it was too rocky; they therefore had to travel along the top of a precipice of red and white granite. ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... by the bank of the river he noticed a pile of empty shells of the fresh-water Mussel, or Clam. The shells were common enough, but why all together and marked in the same way? Around the pile on the mud were curious tracks and marks. There were so many that it was hard to find a perfect one, but when he did, remembering the Coon track, he ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... men, who are always studying new plans, have thought of a wonderful way in which to let the fish help in carrying on this work. They obtain the mussel eggs, and when they are hatched place them in the pools with the fish from the overflowed lands. The tiny mussel larvae attach themselves to the fish and are carried to the rivers and ponds with the fish. Soon they are ready to drop to the bottom ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory

... curly pearly Mussel-shells while bright Frightened minnows darting, parting, Scurry out ...
— Child Songs of Cheer • Evaleen Stein

... they's built like half circle. I grows big 'nough to hoe and den to plow. We has to be ready for the field by daylight and the conk was blowed, and massa call out, 'All hands ready for the field.' At 11:30 he blows the conk, what am the mussel shell, you knows, 'gain and we eats dinner, and at 12:30 we has to be back at work. But massa wouldn't 'low no ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration

... everybody knows the mussel (Mytilus: see Fig. 5), the soft clam, the round clam, and the oyster, as these are sought for food; but there is a multitude of smaller bivalves which are not so well known. The sea-snails best known on the coast north of Chesapeake Bay are the whelk (Buccinum: ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America

... detailed, calculated to induce in the lions aversion to the subject that had been treated. The Christian woman or child, it will be observed, who was to form the corpus vile of these ingenious experiments, was not considered, except, indeed, as the fisherman considers the mussel or the sand-worm ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard

... position is a landmark visible from many different parts of the county, and which is celebrated in John Imlah's song, "O gin I were where Gadie rins,'' and Foudland (1529). The chief rivers are the Dee, 90 m. long; the Iyon, 82 m.; the Ythan, 37 m., with mussel-beds at its mouth; the Ugie, 20 m., and the Deveron, 62 m., partly on the boundary of Banffshire. The rivers abound with salmon and trout, and the pearl mussel occurs in the Ythan and Don. A valuable pearl in the Scottish crown is said to be from the Ythan. Loch Muick, the largest of the few lakes ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... streets, and an open space at the most elevated part. All round there were many farms, surrounded by palings. Two spies were posted, who warned the natives, and they all fled. The Spaniards found in their houses several kinds of fish, roasted and wrapped in plantain leaves, and a quantity of raw mussel in baskets, as well as fruits and flowers hung on poles. Near, there was a burial place. They also found a flute and certain small things worked out of pieces of marble and jasper. As they heard drums and shells sounding, and a great murmuring noise, ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge

... a morsel of our rest. It is incumbent on us to be misers of it. Travelling is not good for us—we travel so seldom. If the Sun be Hell, it is not for the fire, but for the sempiternal motion of that miserable Body of Light. How much more dignified leisure hath a mussel glued to his unpassable rocky limit, two inch square! He hears the tide roll over him, backwards and forwards twice a-day (as the d——d Salisbury Long Coach goes and returns in eight and forty hours), but knows better than to take an outside night-place a top on't. He is the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... afterward caused me much self-reproach. Moira had more than once told me that food had mysteriously disappeared from a cave in which she kept a store of meat for our use, and she showed me where the rocks in front of this cave had been scraped of seaweed and mussel-shells as though by the passage of some cumbersome body. But I gave no heed to her anxieties, and although she urged me to shift our camp I would not leave the beacon lest a ship might pass during ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... microscope having a 1/4-inch or 1/6-inch objective. Very fine cilia may be seen by gently scraping the roof of a frog's mouth (the cells figured are from this source), or the gill of a recently killed mussel, and mounting at once in water, or, better, in a very weak solution ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... to supply the deficiency. They fastened a limpet to the end of their lines, and, heaving it into deep water, the fish readily gorges it; when, before he can bring it up again, they pull him out, and thus they get their fish without losing their mussel. ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson

... for the fastidious feet of noble dames, who are the finishing bits of life and colour in the exquisite scene. Even the ribbed sand is not smooth enough; a boarded way has been fixed from the casino to the mussel banks, whither the dandy resorts to play at mussel gathering, in a nautical dress that costs a sailor's income. The great and rich have planted their Louis XIII. chateaux, their 'maisons mauresques' and 'pavillons a la renaissance,' so closely over the available slopes, round ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn

... six hours, we encamped beside a small watercourse near Mussel Brook, the thermometer at four P.M. being as high as 95 degrees. In the evening, the burning grass became rather alarming, especially as we had a small stock of ammunition in one of the carts. I had established our camp to ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... to recent researches it appears that they are not altogether safe articles of diet. Many cases of severe and extensive sickness have been traced to the use of clams and oysters. Investigations made to ascertain the cause show the poisonous part of the mussel to be the liver. Rabbits and other small animals inoculated with the poison died in one or two minutes. Not all mussels are thus poisonous, but inasmuch as there is an abundance of wholesome food, ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... lot of mussel shells in my boat for Mr. Blennerhatchet. Would you like to see 'em? 'Union-idea,' he says they are. He's a queer customer, ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable

... New birds. Reach Hopeless. Progress of boats arrested. Reconnoitre the river. Prospect from View Hill. Preparation for pedestrian excursion. Leave Reach Hopeless to explore the upper part of the river. Native village. Squall. Mussel Bend. Meet Natives. Successful fishing. Party distressed. Thirsty Flat. Tortoise Reach. Singular appearance of the ranges. Effect of the great heat. One man knocked up. Approach of natives. Preparation for defence. Appearance of the natives. Move further up the river. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... The mussel, kupang (mytilus), rimis (donax), kapang (Teredo navalis), sea-egg, bulu babi (echinus), bia papeda (nautilus), ruma gorita (argonauta), bia unam (murex), bia balang (cuprea), and many others may be added to the list. The beauty of the madrepores and corallines, of ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... polished by being plunged for a little time in dilute nitric acid, then rubbed down with sand paper or fine emery and oil, finished with "Water-Ayr" or "Snake-stone," and finally polished with putty-powder and oil. A mussel-shell treated in this manner makes a most beautiful object, coming out purple, with streaks ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... tell you, and he said if I would forgive him he would take me to the sunset. So the next evening when I was sitting on the Striped Rocks the oldest Twin came sailing over the sea in an enchanted boat and I got in her. The boat was all pearly and rainbowy, like the inside of the mussel shells, and her sail was like moonshine. Well, we sailed right across to the sunset. Think of that, teacher, I've been in the sunset. And what do you suppose it is? The sunset is a land all flowers. We sailed into a great garden, and the clouds are beds of flowers. We sailed into a great harbor, ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... discover no evidence of this fact, except in the united testimony of the inhabitants, that one little rocky shoal, now exposed, was formerly covered with water. At the island of S. Maria (about thirty miles distant) the elevation was greater; on one part, Captain Fitz Roy found beds of putrid mussel-shells STILL ADHERING TO THE ROCKS, ten feet above high-water mark: the inhabitants had formerly dived at lower-water spring-tides for these shells. The elevation of this province is particularly interesting, from its having been the theatre of several ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... larvae in this final stage, in most of the genera, have increased many times in size since their exclusion from the egg; for instance, in Lepas australis, from .007 to .065, or even to .1 of an inch. They are now much compressed, nearly of the shape of a cypris or mussel-shell, with the anterior end the thickest, the sternal surface nearly or quite straight, and the dorsal arched. Almost the whole of what is externally visible consists of the carapace; for the thorax and limbs are hidden and enclosed by its backward prolongation; and even at the anterior end ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... stream thirty-one inches, and the speed of the current two and one-tenth miles to the hour. The first four miles of the infant's course is swift and crooked, over a bed of red sand and gravel, thickly interspersed with mussel and other small shells, and bordered with reeds. Through these, at two points, we beat our way on foot, dragging the canoes through unmade channels. Indeed, nearly all of these first four miles demanded frequent leaps from the boats to direct their swift and crooked ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... the water very clear, introduce a small-sized fresh-water mussel. Give him at least two inches of sand, in depth, in a corner of the tank, to burrow in, but watch him well, for if he dies without your knowledge your aquarium ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... a simple mosquito, a single one, which the doctor, though much bitten, had the pleasure of catching. As a conchologist, he was less fortunate, and he was obliged to content himself with a sort of mussel and some bivalves. ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne

... pictures. And on the reverse side of these sheets was a layer as of coagulated blood; this was the charred remnant of the mysterious world of cupboards and chimney-corners, the fauna of the fireplace, that had filled the children's sleep with dreams, and in the little mussel-shaped bodies was contained the concentrated exhalation of the poor man's night! And now the "Ark" must have been hot right through to the ground, for the rats were beginning to leave. They came in ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... softness. Think of a fellow being so scared that he goes and shuts hisself up and drinks hisself into a state o' muddle so as not to know what's going on. Why, if one's got to be drowned, one wants to make a bit of a fight for it. Never say die, my lad. Life in a mussel, you know. Oh, there's no harm in old bile-the-pot, only I shouldn't like to depend on him in a row, though he could do us ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn

... part," went on Jimmy seriously, "my potations were moderate. After trying the first oyster, I was sober enough to let the others alone. Then came on the alleged mussel-soup. I tried it and laid down my spoon. . . . Do you happen to know, Otty, which develops the quicker typhoid or ptomaine? and if they are, by any chance, mutually exclusive? Farrell ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... you ever eat a mussel? Well, we did, at Shelbyville. We were camped right upon the bank of Duck river, and one day Fred Dornin, Ed Voss, Andy Wilson and I went in the river mussel hunting. Every one of us had a meal sack. We would feel ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins

... poplar. The floor was paved with the seeds of the wild grape, and beautifully carpeted with the lichens from the beech and maple trees. The beds were made of a great variety of mosses, woven together with the utmost delicacy of workmanship. There was a bath-tub made of a mussel-shell, ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston

... who had shown symptoms of disease. In a very short time we had not a single person on the sick-list. We had also plenty of other kinds of fresh provisions, among which may be mentioned a species of shellfish resembling the mussel in shape, but with the taste of an oyster. Shrimps, too, and prawns were abundant, and albatross and other birds' eggs with dark shells. We took in, too, a plentiful stock of the flesh of the hog which I have ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... before. Their association had been of the most offhand and informal character. As a boy of fifteen he had carried her, a girl of eleven, over many a snowbank their first winter of school in the Prairie Home school district. They had herded cattle together, waded the shallow ponds and hunted for mussel shells, and until this year they had seen each other daily. This year Luther had taken a man's place in the fields and the girl had seen him at rare intervals. She was not conscious of the change which ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... in his review of the work accomplished by this body, writes, INTER ALIA:—"The important distinction between the extermination of a species and the destruction of a fishery should be noted. In the case of fixed animals like the sponge, the mussel, and the oyster, the colonies or beds may be practically exterminated, exactly as a forest may be cut down. The preservation of the oyster beds is a matter of vital importance to the United States, for oyster fishing unsupported by oyster culture will, within a short period, ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)

... you,' answered the girl, taking the lid from the box, and at the very bottom lay a scrap of a cloak, a mussel shell, and two fish scales. Two drops of water were glistening on the cloak, and these the girl shook on the ground. In an instant the garden and lawn and everything else had vanished utterly, as if the earth had opened and swallowed them up, and as far as the eye could ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various

... the Itch.] It is a speedy Cure of the Itch, to take Coudouro giddi, a fruit of a Tree in form somewhat like a Mussel but bigger. This fruit they cut in slices and fry it in Coker-nut oyl. And with this ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox

... which the ships lay at anchor. A visit was afterwards paid to them on shore. Their dwellings were of framework, covered with the skins of beasts. Their food appeared to be mussels and other shell-fish. All their houses were of bark neatly sewn together. Their knives were formed of mussel-shells of great size, and were so sharp that they could cut the hardest wood with them, as well as bone, out of which they made the fizgigs ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith

... kind of mussel; I never had confidence enough to taste of them," laughed the doctor. "The condiments are in the cup, I suppose. Do you ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic

... man," cried Captain Lawrence. "You a sailor, too. There's life in a mussel, Solly. A man's never dead with us till he is over the side with a ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn

... Alfred de Mussel's description of a similar experience of his own, after his rupture with George Sand, which occurred in Venice in 1834 during the ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... look around; But he felt new joy his bosom swell, When glittering on the shadowed ground He saw a purple mussel-shell; Thither he ran, and he bent him low, He heaved at the stern and he heaved at the bow, And he pushed her over the yielding sand Till he came; to the verge of the haunted land. She was as lovely a pleasure-boat As ever fairy had paddled in, For she glowed with purple ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... guns! what'll sicknify their guns, my lort, when I'll have cot a hold o' the craturs themsels in my hants?" and he held out his enormous brown paws as if to certify their power. "I'll crush the podies like a mussel shells." ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various

... exclaimed Junkie, almost whimpering, as he held up the handle of his knife in one hand, and in the other a mussel with a broken ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne

... in toil for the mere pleasure of learning? He must be a madman who, without the lure of profit, lends an ear to the blandishments of knowledge. Let us retreat into our shell, close our lid to the importunities of the light and lead the life of a mussel. There lies the secret of happiness. This philosophy is not mine. My curiosity sees in a stage accomplished no more than the preparation for a new stage towards the retreating unknown. My partner, therefore, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... move just as if they were alive. All the fish, big and little, glide among the branches just as, up here, birds glide through the air. The palace of the Merman King lies in the very deepest part; its walls are of coral and the long pointed windows of the clearest amber, but the roof is made of mussel shells which open and shut with the lapping of the water. This has a lovely effect, for there are gleaming pearls in every shell, any one of which would be the pride of ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... coming to her and displaying her palm full of sea treasures. "See the colours of those bits of shell—that's a bit of a mussel; and that is a piece of a snail shell, I think; and aren't those little ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner

... was with them. At the village there were a number of men, women, and children. Although as completely naked as the others we had met, the members of this band were more ornamented with beads, and wore earrings made from the inside of mussel-shells or very big snail- shells. They were more hairy than the ones we had so far met. The women, but not the men, completely remove the hair from their bodies— and look more, instead of less, indecent in consequence. ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... mentions pearls being found in the counties of Caernarvon and Cumberland, and in the British sea. Mr. Pennant, in his "Tour in Scotland in 1769," takes notice of a considerable pearl fishery out of the fresh- water mussel, in the vicinity of Perth, from whence 10,000l. worth of pearls were sent to London from 1761 to 1764. It was, however, almost exhausted when he visited the country. See also the fourth volume of Mr. Pennant's ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... day to my father's little garden, and seeing there a minute duckling covered with soft yellow hair, growing out of the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant that bore as its flowers a crop of little mussel shells of a deep red colour. I know not what prodigy of the vegetable kingdom produced the little duckling; but the plant with the shells must, I think, have been a scarlet runner, and the shells themselves the papilionaceous blossoms. I have a distinct recollection, too,—but ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... injury. His legs were crossed, and the arms and fingers stretched out straight on either side. Had it not been for the light which struck down on the head, the body lay in so natural a position that the man might have been supposed to be asleep. Close by was a small heap of limpet and mussel shells, and within his reach were two bottles—one was empty, but the other was full of water. Another object attracted their attention. It was a piece of slate, on which were scratched several zigzag marks, ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston

... gloatingly, almost too absorbed t o glance off his work; "it's Ballyclavvy, the way it did be in the school readin'-book at Duffclane. There's the Roossian guns" (he pointed to a row of black-mouthed mussel-shells, mounted on periwinkle carriages), "and here's the sides of the valley I'm makin'; long and narrer it was. Just step round and look at it from where I am, Micky, but don't be clumpin' your fut on ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various

... long time comin down de riber, and we had to fite de Injuns long time at de place dey calls Mussel Shoals. Some ob de boats got on de ground, and one on em we had to leave wid de hogs on it. De bullets come from the Injuns so hot dat we all had to get out into de water and go to anudder boat and get away from dar. Dem was the wust ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... palace they found a lovely boat waiting for them. It was a great purple mussel-shell, lined with pearl, and cushioned with softest moss. In this Patty told the mice to seat themselves, and then, kissing them all, she bade them good-bye, and touched the shell with her silver wand. Up floated the strange boat, up and up, while the children leaned over ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards

... once—just once—I ate some, which made two mistakes on my part, one financial and the other gustatory. They were not particularly flavorous oysters as we know oysters on this side of the ocean. The French oyster is a small, copper-tinted proposition, and he tastes something like an indisposed mussel and something like a touch of biliousness; but he is sufficiently costly for all purposes. The cafe proprietor cherishes him so highly that he refuses to vulgarize him by printing the asking price on the same menu. A person in France desirous ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... prevented the escape of the waters, which filled the reservoir more or less completely according to the season. It never became empty, and several species of shellfish flourished in it—among others, a kind of large mussel which the inhabitants generally used as food, which with dates, milk, oil, coarse bread, a few vegetables, and from time to time a fowl or a joint of meat, made up their scanty fare. Other things were of the same primitive character. The tools found in the village are all of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... bass afore, Perfesser. You ez up to their ways ez a mus'rat to a mussel, er a kingfisher to a minner," exclaimed Tim admiringly, as he loosened the troll from a two-pound bass. "Hit's p'intedly a pity you're out uv your head ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... once; he ain't ever been again, nor told how he was treated, that's sure. They live queer, too. She don't ever make pies, ner p'serves, ner any kind of sauce. 'N' old Martin, he's childish now. He always was as close-mouthed as a mussel. Nobody ever knew whether he liked such ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich

... to Mamsell. "I have brought something for you," said he, "something which I hope may find a place in the work-box—a man made of very small mussel-shells; ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen

... owre her thrizzle, Her mutchkin stoup as toom's a whissle: An' damn'd excisemen in a bussle, Seizin' a stell, Triumphant crushin't like a mussel Or lampit shell. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... probably not have been worth mentioning, except as a novelty, if they had come from oysters alone. The Virginia oyster pearl lacks luster. But the mussel, particularly the one found in the James river, yields an iridescent pearl of ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton

... any day of the year. Crows even, and vultures, as well as aquatic birds, detach the shell-fish from the rocks, and mount with them into the air: shells thus carried are said to be frequently found on the very summit even of the Table Mountain. In one cavern at the point of Mussel Bay," he adds, "I disturbed some thousands of birds, and found as many thousands of living shell-fish scattered on the surface of a heap of shells, that for aught I know, would have filled as many thousand wagons." The story, therefore, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various

... was now low enough for mussel gathering and Saxon accompanied the men out the north wall. Hall had several sacks to fill. A rig was coming for him in the afternoon, he explained, to cart the mussels back to Carmel. When the sacks were full they ventured further among ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... Out of the nacre of any mussel or oyster shell you might cut, at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat circular disks of the prettiest color and luster. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of shell is used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... as happy as he did on that never-to-be-forgotten day when they found their first lovely pearl in a mussel taken ...
— With Trapper Jim in the North Woods • Lawrence J. Leslie

... willow-bark, puffed from a hundred pipes. Conspicuous at this pow-wow was Tecumseh, who across his close-fitting buckskin hunting jacket, which descended to his knees and was trimmed with split leather fringe, wore a belt of wampum, made of the purple enamel of mussel shells—cut into lengths like sections of a small pipe-stem, perforated and strung on sinew. On his head he wore ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey

... element in architecture, the covering of everything with plates of metal. It was from [218] Phoenicia that the costly material in which early Greek art delighted actually came—ivory, amber, much of the precious metals. These the adventurous Phoenician traders brought in return for the mussel which contained the famous purple, in quest of which they penetrated far into all the Greek havens. Recent discoveries present the island of Cyprus, the great source of copper and copper- work in ancient times, as the special mediator between the art of Phoenicia ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... Chief Black Bear took certain treasures that he gave to the four little Bunkers who visited his wikiup. He even sent some fresh-water mussel shells, polished like mother-of-pearl, to the absent Margy and Mun Bun, of whom Cowboy ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope

... conquered by a secret expedition from Turkestan, requires a more correct edition of the original of Marco Polo to render intelligible. We can suppose a tribe of Indians or Blacks not far from Gombroon, to have been under the rule of a mussel man Sultan, and conquered or subverted by a Tartar expedition from Touran, or the north of Persia: But this remains a ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr

... the old bear-yard, among tall rose-trees which would soon be in bloom, a merry company of men were sitting around a table which stood in the angle of a quick-set hedge beside a path graveled with white stones and bordered with mussel-shells. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett

... round their waist and a lavish display of stout little legs, the urchins wage their mimic warfare with the sea. Meanwhile the scientific section is encamped upon the rocks. With torn vestments and bruised feet the votaries of knowledge are peeping into every little pool, detecting mussel-shells, picking up seaweed, hunting for anemones. A shout of triumph from the tiny adventurer who has climbed over the rough rock-shelf announces that he has secured a prize for the glass jar at home, where the lumps ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... it to his own entire satisfaction, that the shell in which his pearls had been found, was properly a mussel, and not an oyster; and having also, by Arthur's help, resolved his doubts and difficulties, touching divers other knotty points in conchology; successively raised and canvassed the grave and edifying questions— whether there actually were ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer

... which extended to Aberdour. I could not go so far alone, but had frequent opportunities of walking there and gathering ferns, foxgloves, and primroses, which grew on the mossy banks of a little stream that ran into the sea. The bed of this stream or burn was thickly covered with the freshwater mussel, which I knew often contained pearls, but I did not like to kill the creatures ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... beach a dry flat opened out, reached only by gales and the highest of the spring tides, a wilderness of fine sand, hot and deep, its surface studded with the opaque blue of round pebbles and mussel shells. It looked too arid to support life, but sea-rocket with fleshy emerald stems and lilac flowers was scattered about. Nothing moved in the waste but an impulsive small butterfly, blue as a fragment of sky. The silence of the desert was that of ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson

... the muskrat was really doing. It had been swimming in the lake—for muskrats are good swimmers—when it had found a fresh-water mussel, which is like a clam except that it has a longer shell that is black instead of white. Muskrats like mussels, but they cannot eat them ...
— The Curlytops on Star Island - or Camping out with Grandpa • Howard R. Garis

... of a smaller bunch; the large one is then spread out to form the basket, while the smaller answers the purpose of a handle. Their apparent use is, to bring shell fish from the mud banks where they are to be collected. The large heaps of mussel shells that were found near each hut proclaimed the mud banks to be a principal source of food. The most scrupulous examination of their fire places discovered nothing, except a few bones of the opossum, a squirrel, and here and there those of a small kangaroo. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... (i.e. creatures of the mussel, cockle, and oyster class, which receive their name from the body being protected by a double shell, one valve of which is placed on each side) have their two shells united by one or two powerful muscles, which pass directly across ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... and hope that it was because the professor trod at that moment on the edge of a very sharp mussel, and hurt one of his corns sadly, that he answered quite sharply, forgetting that he was a scientific ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester

... that I had already taken up my quarters on board, insisted on my occupying a chamber in his country-house in the Serra Allegri. Besides this, he introduced me to several families, where I passed many very pleasant hours, and had the opportunity of inspecting some excellent collections of mussel-shells and insects. ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... harbour is blue and calm, with little winds and ripples purring over it, and the mainland shores look like long blue lands where fairies dwell. Away out over the bar, where the big ships go, it is always hazy and pearl-tinted, like the inside of the mussel shells. Claude says he is going to sail out there when he grows up. I would like to too, but Claude says I can't because I'm a girl. It is dreadfully inconvenient to be a ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... saltpetre. I intended to have moved on to Gregory Creek this afternoon, but took the precaution to send my stockman to see in what state the water was. He reports the water in the creek to be quite salt, and many of the small fish dead; he also found some very perfect fossil shells, the mussel and oyster; they have now become a solid limestone; they were found in a ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart

... foot it briskly along the shore till they have left most of the promenaders behind. On and on they go till they get to the low rocks, and the smooth yellow sands strewn with mussel and cockle shells; and then they sit down to rest, and listen to ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... and contains various interesting buildings, including a cathedral and castle; is connected with the mainland on the E. by a six-arched bridge, and by an ancient aqueduct on the W.; some textile manufactures are carried on, and oyster and mussel fisheries and fruit-growing are important; as the ancient Tarentum its history goes back to the time when it was the chief city of Magna Graecia; was captured by the Romans in 272 B.C., and after the fall of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Entranced, we paddle on until we leave behind all trace of ocean swell, and if the tide be low so that old sea-soaked snags are seen upon the shore, and boulders thick with barnacles and varied coloured sea-weeds in shades of brown and red, and here and there great clusters of blue mussel shells, these all, if the water be calm and undisturbed by wind, are mirrored on the surface of the stream, forming pictures most rare and beautiful. Thus for hours with ever fresh delight we thread the calm passage-ways between those isles. Beachlets of white sand and powdered shells are ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael

... fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polype. We dissect a star-fish, an earth-worm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a cray-fish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a cod-fish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled dissectors, but to give ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... and off go the shell-gatherers in their canoes, taking the dogs along with them. For these are starving, too, and must forage for themselves. This they do most effectually, running hither and thither over the reef, stopping now and then to detach a mussel or limpet from its beard-fastening to the rock, crunch the shell between their teeth, and ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid

... way. Ho led away a nice girl of this parish, an industrious mussel-gatherer. And he then had a wife and large family of his own, of which the poor thing knew nothing. Her father nearly killed him; and I was compelled (very much against my will) to inflict a penalty. Cadman is very shy of Flamborough ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... moss, and flowers and trees with curiously crooked branches, both green and yellow, white and red, and there were also little fountains which sprang up from the most beautiful snail-shells, and fell into bright mussel-shells, and at the same time made a most delightful music, which ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various

... an animal which belongs to a much lower class of mollusca—namely, to the class called Lamellibranchiata, from the plate-like (or lamellar) structure of the gill. To that class also belongs the scallop (Pecten), the mussel (Magilus), the fresh-water mussel (Anodon), the razor-shell (Solen), the cockle (Cardium), species with a long fleshy tube such as Mya, stone-perforating shells such as Pholas, and the well-known wood-boring "ship-worm" (Teredo)—which is no "worm" at ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... kindness entertained him, giving him certain skins of wild beasts, which may be rich furs, tobacco, turtles, hemp, artificial strings colored, chains, and such like things as at the instant they had about them. These are a fair-conditioned people. On all the sea-coast along we found mussel shells that in color did represent mother-of-pearl, but not having means to dredge, could not apprehend further knowledge thereof. This main is the goodliest continent that ever we saw, promising more by far than we any way did expect; for it ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various

... is by budding and grafting. The stocks on which the different varieties are grafted are raised from stones. Mr Pearson states that six kinds of stocks are used in the best nurseries—i.e. the common plum, the Brussels, the Mussel, the Brompton, the Damas Noir or St Julien, and the Myrobalan. The secret of success is to work the stock with a variety which is of common parentage. Nearly all plums will grow upon the common plum stock, though some of them thrive much ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum

... and entirely bewildered, Friedel dipped his finger in the pearl mussel shell of holy water over their bed, and crossed his own brow and his brother's; then, carrying their shoes, they crossed their mother's chamber, and crept down stairs. Ebbo muttered to his brother, "Stand thou still there, and pray the saints to keep ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... from a species of mussel. If made of the hard mussel he lives long—it is difficult for him to die. But if he happens to be made of the poisonous mussel, he is fragile, easily upset, and does not ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner

... curved, round handle, about six inches long. They were made of very hard wood, and were much too heavy to wield with one hand. I also found a number of fishing lines, made from grass, with hooks attached of various sizes, made from mussel shells. ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray

... since European occupation, violent earthquake shocks have resulted in considerable elevations of certain parts of the coast. After the great earthquake of 1835 Captain Robert FitzRoy (1805-1865) of H.M.S. "Beagle" found putrid mussel-shells still adhering to the rocks 10 ft. above high water on the island of Santa Maria, 30 m. from Concepcion, and Charles Darwin declares, in describing that disaster, that "there can be no doubt that the land round the bay of Concepcion ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... of treading out eels from the brook with his feet and catching them with his hands. And every ship brought in either cod-hooks and lines, mackerel-hooks and lines, herring-nets, seines, shark-hooks, bass-nets, squid-lines, eel-pots, coils of rope and cable, "drails, barbels, pens, gaffs," or mussel-hooks. ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... idea of a subterranean granary, for which the old houses of the earliest Britons have been mistaken; but, nevertheless, it belonged to a house. On the floor of this we find charred bones, and enormous heaps of oyster and mussel shells. Stone handmills, too, denote the use of corn; though from the character of the ancient Flora, vegetable forms of food must have been rarer ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... great number of black swans and pelicans, the last standing high upon their legs above the remains of Regent's lake. We found the water perfectly sweet even in this shallow state. It abounds with the large freshwater mussel which was the chief food of the natives at the time ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... occur in one of the pinnas, the interior of which is sooty, shot with iridescent purple, and since the pearl, whether produced by oyster, mussel, pinna, or window-shell, is generally more brilliant than the containing shell, that of the black pinna, with the high lights of its environment concentrated, may be a gem of surpassing novelty and beauty. But the habitual product of this pinna is small, dull, mud-tinted or brown, and of no value ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... the bow of mist that a sturgeon leaves when he makes his leap; and after, to kindle his darkened flame-wood lamp at a meteor spark. The fairy bows, and without a word slowly descends the rocky steep, for his wing is soiled and has lost its power; but once at the river, he tugs amain at a mussel shell till he has it afloat; then, leaping in, he paddles out with a strong grass blade till he comes to the spot where the sturgeon swims, though the watersprites plague him and toss his boat, and the fish and the leeches bunt and drag; ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... weed; and little Jacob saw another, and then he saw a crab drop from the weed that Captain Solomon was holding, and the crab was just the color of the weed, too. And they amused themselves for a long time with hunting for the queer fishes and crabs and shrimps, and something that was like a mussel, but it wasn't just like one, either. And they found a place in the weed where were some little balls. And they opened the balls, and little Sol said he'd bet that they were where some animal laid its ...
— The Sandman: His Sea Stories • William J. Hopkins

... time for me to be on land, for in the moonlight, which bathed everything in silver, were to be seen troops of fays hurrying to the festival. Some sailed along the shore in mussel shells, others were on the backs of black swans whose bills looked like coral, and others were skimming along with their own gauzy wings, or lolling luxuriously on the feathers ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays

... answered the man nearest to him, "but she's bin called to a wreck in Mussel Bay, an' that brig will be all right or in Davy Jones's locker long afore th' lifeboat 'ud ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... went, too, for Captain Jim took charge of Dick frequently, in order to set her free. They went boating on the harbor and up the three pretty rivers that flowed into it; they had clambakes on the bar and mussel-bakes on the rocks; they picked strawberries on the sand-dunes; they went out cod-fishing with Captain Jim; they shot plover in the shore fields and wild ducks in the cove—at least, the men did. In the evenings they rambled in the low-lying, daisied, shore fields ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... dried in the sun, and stored for use. The seed is ground into flour, and made into a kind of porridge. The women of the Shir tribe are very clever at manufacturing baskets and mats from the leaf of the dome palm. They also make girdles and necklaces of minute pieces of river mussel shells threaded upon the hair of the giraffe's tail. This is a work of great time, and the effect is about equal to a ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... way of a thought was that he was different from his parents—that they couldn't see, nor hear, nor make a noise as he could. He could remember sitting comfortably in the mud at low tide and being convulsed with laughter at his mother's efforts to find a fat mussel that was within a few inches of her hand. He said that within a small radius his parents had made paths, by constant peregrinations in search of food, that had become so familiar to them that they could move hither and thither, hand in hand, ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... gone to the sandhills. Their habitations are very numerous on the creek so they must be pretty strong in number here. Lots of fish still in the holes; appear to be multa multa principally. We got some from the two natives at our first camp on the creek, and lots of mussel ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay

... altogether. Even the willows were fewer and stunted, and the highest thorn bush was not above his chest. His vessel was now more exposed to the wind, so that he drove past the banks and scattered islands rapidly, and he noticed that there was not so much as a crow on them. Upturned mussel-shells, glittering in the sunshine, showed where crows had been at work, but there ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... of the Oyster Merchants' and Planters' Association claims to have discovered a means of purifying polluted mussels. To ascertain if a mussel requires to be purified examine the whites ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various

... or two after, Patsy had gone out with her books and Stair was getting ready to follow her to the seaward looking side of the Isle, when Eben called him to the window of the kitchen which overlooked the long ridge of sand, shingle, and razor-like mussel shells which in the deeps of the ebb, constituted a practicable pathway ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett

... intents and purposes there were two tanks, the division between them lying about eighteen inches under water. But the division was neither straight nor exactly level. It zig-zagged this and that way like the key-track in a maze, and was more beset with slippery pitfalls than a mussel-shoal at ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy

... pile of mussel, winkle, and shore-crab shells, and the backbone of what had been a stranded fish, close to the mouth of the hole, showed the rat's account-book to date; but there was a line to be drawn even in this trade. That dawn—if you could call the gray dark of a ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... deserves the name of land, As but the offscouring of the British sand; And so much earth as was contributed By English pilots when they heaved the lead; Or what by the ocean's slow alluvion fell, Of shipwrecked cockle and the mussel-shell; This indigested vomit of the sea Fell to the Dutch by just propriety. Glad then, as miners who have found the ore, They, with mad labour, fished the land to shore: And dived as desperately for each piece Of earth, as if't had been of ambergris; Collecting ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... to habitation or occupancy, mean mussel shells; animal bones; burned or worked stones; broken pottery; wrought objects of bone or shell; flint implements, chips, or spalls; ashes; charcoal; in short, the material ordinarily found on the site of an Indian village, some or all of which are to be seen where the caverns have ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... folk-lore of other peoples. The legend of the Men who travelled round the World is based on a conception of the world as round. There is the tradition of a deluge, but here supported by geological evidence which is appreciated by the natives themselves: i.e. the finding of mussel shells on the hills far inland. The principle of the tides is recognized in what is otherwise a fairy tale; "There will be no more ebb-tide or flood if you strangle me," says the Moon Man ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown

... on my clothes, which were woven from strands of seashell tissue. More than once their composition provoked comments from Conseil. I informed him that they were made from the smooth, silken filaments with which the fan mussel, a type of seashell quite abundant along Mediterranean beaches, attaches itself to rocks. In olden times, fine fabrics, stockings, and gloves were made from such filaments, because they were both very soft and very warm. So the Nautilus's ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... handsome young man, but they went, and left him alone by the sea. As he was standing on the shore and thinking of what he should do, there came three fishes swimming by, none other than those he had set free. The middle one had a mussel in his mouth, and he laid it on the strand at the young man's feet; and when he took it up and opened it there was the gold ring inside! Full of joy he carried it to the King, and expected the promised reward; but the King's daughter, proud of her high birth, despised him, ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm

... solemnity: the procession of the medicine-men and the bedaubed and befeathered warriors; the drumming, the dancing, the stamping; the wild lamentation of the women, as they gashed the arms of the young girls with sharp mussel-shells and flung the blood into the air with dismal outcries. A scene of ravenous feasting followed, in which the French, released from durance, were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... he didn't publish a book of his sporting reminiscences; it would be so interesting. She didn't remember till afterwards that he had given her two fat volumes on the subject, with his portrait and autograph as a frontispiece and an appendix on the habits of the Arctic mussel. ...
— Reginald • Saki

... go to press we receive word through Policeman Michael O'Toole that the well-known mussel-dredger and boatman, Samuel Fliggis (Long Sam), while dredging for mussels last night just below the bridge, recovered the body of Henry ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler

... had in Puddleby in those days. One was Joe, the mussel-man, who lived in a tiny hut by the edge of the water under the bridge. This old man was simply marvelous at making things. I never saw a man so clever with his hands. He used to mend my toy ships for me which I sailed upon ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting

... may use a pointed stick on the floor of one of these half caves and unearth, as I have done, numerous potsherds, mussel shells, bone awls, flint arrow-heads, split bones of large game animals, and the burnt wood of centuries of camp-fires which tell the tale of the first lean-to shelter used by ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard

... inches has been found inside a codfish at Newcastle. We expect that if the truth was known the mussel snapped at the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various

... you down at the back of an old harbour pier; thirty feet of grey and brown boulders, spotted aloft with bright yellow lichens, and black drops of tar, polished lower down by the surge of centuries, and towards the foot of the wall roughened with crusts of barnacles, and mussel-nests in crack and cranny, and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... provide, but I told her I wood ruther do it myself; and she said I guess He's doin it threw you, so at last she forkt up, and I went home at 6 o'clock, but I tell you I had a prety tuf day. Say how is your mussel? Have you enny brothers and sisters? I have five, they are Amanda aged 16, Cecilia aged 10, Myra-Louise aged 7, Molly aged 6, and Heloise aged 5. I come between the fust too. Dad wanted to call Heloise Omeega after Alfred and Omeega in the Bibel, ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell

... b'ah meat fit to eat? Well, I reckon not! Besides, what she can do to most anything is simply enough to scare you. She can take common crawfish, like the niggers catch all around here—and a shell off of a mussel, and out of them two things she makes what she calls a 'kokeeyon of eckriveese,' and—say, man! You bet your bottom dollar Madame Delchasse ain't going to get away from here. Don't matter a damn if she ain't ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough

... of the nacre of any mussel or oyster-shell you might cut, at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat circular discs of the prettiest colour and lustre. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of shell is used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster becoming itself an unwilling modeller, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... presently she reconnoitered and said that the coast was clear, and put me on my car, with minute directions for finding my new home.... It is easy and comforting to believe that there is, literally, no place like home, no other place. I shall call my landlady Mrs. Mussel,—it suits her so perfectly, the way she clings to her drab background, and closes up with a snap at every approach. I daresay she means well. It is necessary to believe that she does. She states that she sets only a plain home table ... and there ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... (duly noted in The Daily Graphic of the 30th ult.) of "seven pearls of excellent quality" by an Aberavon labourer in a mussel stranded by the tide has led to an extraordinary influx of visitors to that quiet seaside resort. Costers have been arriving at the rate of several hundreds a day, attracted by the prospect of finding the raw materials for the indispensable decoration of their costumes, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various

... kept for an indefinite period. When required for use the meal is mixed with water, made into a thin cake or damper, and baked in the ashes. Prepared in this way the cake resembles a coarse ship's biscuit. In other parts, the beans are scraped by means of mussel-shells into a vermicelli-like substance, prior to soaking in water. Our blacks have a more ingenious method of preparation, and employ a specially formed culinary implement, which is used for no other purpose. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... new country, Tom, where there are no very well educated people, and because you don't know how much there is to learn in the world. If these Indians ever get quiet, I hope to learn a good deal more every year than I know now. But it's time to see about our mussel bake. Run to the look-out, Tom, and then we can all go down and ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston

... although eating everything offered them, became miserably poor in a comparatively short time. The only denizen of the pool that I actually saw was a lobster, who came out from under a stone as I approached, in the hope, I was told, that I was going to give him a mussel. ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker

... too lat to send Jerrymier yet. But aw tell thi Mistress Whitin says ther isn't sich a shop, an they nivver had a mussel i' ther haase sin they wor born nor for years ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley

... "The mussel question is of a great deal more interest than you think. I'm not sure, of course, but there are signs of a pearl-fever, and if there is one, you'll certainly see something doing. The Mississippi and Ohio were like a ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... man's palsied eagerness was pitiful. Sitting down in the sand as quickly as his stiff limbs would let him, he poked a large rock-mussel from out of the coals. The heat had forced its shells apart, and the meat, salmon-colored, was thoroughly cooked. Between thumb and forefinger, in trembling haste, he caught the morsel and carried it to his mouth. ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London

... and showed them to the wise man. He said: "Of the three great pearls one is a divine wishing-pearl of the third class, and two are black dragon-pearls of medium quality. Of the seven smaller pearls two are serpent-pearls, and five are mussel-pearls. The remaining pearls are in part sea-crane pearls, in part snail and oyster-pearls. They do not approach the great pearls in value, and yet few will be found to equal them ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various

... buoys, a section of a hen-coop, a bottomless chopping tray, a drift-wood stump with ten fantastic roots sending up blue and green flame, a portion of the wheel of an outworn cart, some lobster shells, the eyes glowing, some mussel shells, light green, and seaweed over ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... heaps attract attention, and it was reserved to our own generation, so interested in all that relates to the past, to recognize their true significance. Steenstrup noticed, in the north of Europe, that these mounds consisted nearly entirely of the shells of edible species, such as the oyster, mussel, and LITTORINA LITTOREA; that they were all those of adult specimens, but not all subject to similar conditions of existence or native to the same waters. The kitchen-middings, or heaps of kitchen refuse — such was the name given to these shell-mounds — could ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... water mussel used to be found in Fisher's Pond on Colden Common, bordering on Otterbourne, and the green banks were strewn with shells left by the herons, but the pond is fast drying up and the herons have been driven away ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... hawthorn may be observed by our young readers among that beautiful collection of the hawthorn family and its affinities, which flourish on the north side of Kensington Gardens.] were voted delicious, and the pure water most refreshing, that they drank, for lack of better cups, from a large mussel-shell which Catharine had picked up among the weeds ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... fellow and left him alone on the shore. There he stood thinking and wondering what he could do, when all of a sudden he saw three fishes swimming along, and recognised them as the very same whose lives he had saved. The middle fish held a mussel in its mouth, which it laid at the young man's feet, and when he picked it up and opened it, there was ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various

... the lanes, The valves of nacre of a mussel-shell, Behold, a pearl! shaped like the burnished bell Of some strange blossom that long afternoons Of summer coax to open: all the moon's Chaste lustre in it; hues that only dwell With purity.... It takes me, like a spell, ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein

... of man as a seeker, we are not separating him from the rest of living things. All life seeks, and the more mobile a living thing is the more it seeks. A sessile mussel chained to a rock seeks little but the fundamentals of nutrition and generation and these in a simple way. An animal that builds habitations for its young, courts its mate, plays, teaches and fights, may do nothing more than seek nutrition and generation, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... we very frequently meet with fossils in the state of "casts" or moulds of the original organic body. What occurs in this case will be readily understood if we imagine any common bivalve shell, as an Oyster, or Mussel, or Cockle, embedded in clay or mud. If the clay were sufficiently soft and fluid, the first thing would be that it would gain access to the interior of the shell, and would completely fill up the space between the valves. The pressure, also, of the surrounding ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... mussel is crooked inside and rough outside . it is only when we hear its deep note after blowing into it that we can begin to esteem it at its true value.—(Ind. Spruche, ed Bothlingk, ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... corporation became very wealthy and powerful. Then it was that it began to abuse its power, working often against the best interests of the inhabitants of the Pacific slope. In some cases, as in the eviction of the people who were settlers in the Mussel Slough District, it was guilty of extreme cruelty and injustice, such as is almost certain to bring its own punishment. But in reckoning with the Southern Pacific, for so the company is now called, the people of California should be careful to look ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini

... against her, heeling before the wind right down to her gunwale and leaving behind her a long furrow in the sea. High above the deck of this magnificent vessel, between two curved iron pillars, Hrolfur's boat hung like a tiny mussel shell. ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various

... instincts of all living matter are self-preservation and the propagation of the species. The instinct for self-preservation causes a plant to turn away from cold and damaging winds toward the life-giving sun; the inert mussel to withdraw within its shell; the insect to take flight; the animal to fight or to flee; and man to procure food that he may oppose starvation, to shelter himself and to provide clothes that he may avoid the dangers of excessive cold and heat, to combat death from disease ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... highest and steepest parts of the mountain chain may be found marine petrifactions of every variety—the sea-hedgehog, the oyster, the mussel, and the star-fish; and in the beds of trachytic rock, deposited in such order that one might fancy they had been placed there by a careful and tasty housewife, are layers of the most curious shells, univalve, bivalve, sublivalve and multivalve, madrepors, and shapeless ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle

... always showed upon the surface after a shower of rain had been evaporated by the sun. This efflorescence, together with sand and other impurities, was scraped from the earth with large mussel shells. It was then placed in earthen-ware vessels containing about five gallons. There were pierced with holes in the bottom, which were covered with a wisp of straw as a strainer. The jars, being full of salt and ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker

... carefully look'd into, and discharg'd from that part which is call'd the Beard, and also particular care must be taken to examine whether there are any Crabs in them, for they are very poisonous, and as they lie in the Mouth of the Mussel, may easily be discover'd; they are commonly as large as a Pea, and of the shape of a Sea-Crab, but are properly Sea-Spiders: the Mussels however where you find them, are not unwholesome, and it is only the eating of this little Animal, which has been the occasion of People's swelling ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley

... some other priests and ladies nearly related to them partook. Before the dinner proper came sea-hedgehogs; fresh oysters as many as the guests wished; large mussels; sphondyli; fieldfares with asparagus; fattened fowls; oyster and mussel pasties; black and white sea-acorns; sphondyli again; glycimarides; sea-nettles; becaficoes; roe-ribs; boar's-ribs; fowls dressed with flour; becaficoes; purple shell-fish of two sorts. The dinner itself consisted of sow's ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... now descried some of them at a distance, who fled on our approach. We came to a spot which they had just quitted and observed the marks of children's feet. The ground was covered with freshwater shells of the sort found in the rivers of England and Scotland and called the horse mussel, having sometimes ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee

... all time feedin' us. Us had bread and milk for breakfas', and dinner wuz mos'ly peas and cornbread, den supper wuz milk and bread. Dere wuz so many chilluns dey fed us in a trough. Dey jes' poured de peas on de chunks of cornbread what dey had crumbled in de trough, and us had to mussel 'em out. Yessum, I said mussel. De only spoons us had wuz mussel shells what us got out of de branches. A little Nigger could put peas and cornbread away mighty fast wid ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration

... stones—all these seemed made to give pleasure and occupation for the boy's thoughts, and he had an intelligent mind; many great talents lay dormant in him. How readily he remembered stories and songs that he heard, and how dexterous he was with his fingers! With stones and mussel-shells he could put together pictures and ships with which one could decorate the room; and he could make wonderful things from a stick, his foster-mother said, although he was still so young and little. He had a sweet voice, and ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen



Words linked to "Mussel" :   freshwater clam, pelecypod, thin-shelled mussel, mytilid, shellfish, edible mussel, pearly-shelled mussel, freshwater mussel, zebra mussel, lamellibranch



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