barnacle-shells

Updated: May 23, 2025

A fragment of some ship; its gay green paint and half-effaced gilding contrasting mockingly with the long ugly feathered barnacle-shells, which clustered on it, rotting into slime beneath the sun, and torn and scattered by the greedy beaks of the ravens. In what tropic tornado, or on what coral-key of the Bahamas, months ago, to judge by those barnacles, had that tall ship gone down?

Charles Kingsley - Prose Idylls, New and Old