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See him in his last voyage, beating about the rocks and shoals of an unknown archipelago, overtaken by West India hurricanes, almost engulfed in waterspouts, scudding under bare poles amid perilous breakers, blinded by lightning, deafened by incessant peals of thunder, his crazy little barks tossed about like cockle-shells in the raging waves, his anchors lost, his worm-eaten vessels as full of holes as a honey-comb, two caravels abandoned, and the two remaining run ashore at Jamaica, where Columbus built huts on their decks to shelter his forlorn crew.
Two of these cockle-shells still moved up and down under the black, mountainous side of the ship, and the officer whose duty it was to see the passengers off was visibly restless.
In the Mall both Charles and his brother, the Duke of York, joined in the Court game of Palle Malle, when a ball was struck with a mallet through an iron ring down a walk strewn with powdered cockle-shells. At a later period the Mall was the most fashionable promenade in London.
Upon the swelling bust, that seems fit harbor for a hero's heart, there lies the collar of an order composed of cockle-shells; and this is all the ornament given to the figure. The hands are clasped across a sword laid flat upon the breast, and placed between the legs.
In that brief phrase could be summed up Bobby's entire philosophy, and when he suddenly had to face a state of things which from one moment to another swept away the groundwork upon which his life reposed, it is no wonder that he felt himself "knocked out." With incredible velocity his friends were caught up and whirled in every direction like cockle-shells in a hurricane.
You linger, looking upon the stream of fading sunlight that plays across the rapids, and down into the shadow of the depths below, lit up with their clouds of spray; yet farther down, your sight swims upon the black eddying masses, with white ribbons streaming across their glassy surface; and your dizzy eye fastens upon the frail cockle-shells their stout oarsmen dwindled to pygmies that dance like atoms upon the vast chasm, or like your own weak resolves upon the whirl of Time.
Seawards one looked over a goods-siding, where there stood a few wagons of cockle-shells and a cinderpath esplanade on to a vast plain of mud. It could not be beautiful. A plain of mud could not be beautiful. Yet the mind could dwell contentedly on this new and curious estate of nature, this substance that was neither earth nor water, this place that was neither land nor sea.
But as a thresher pertinaciously pursues a whale till it has destroyed it, so did the little gig follow the large brig, which looked large enough to destroy a hundred such pigmy cockle-shells. Jack felt that everything depended on his coolness and the steadiness of his aim. Aided by Terence, well did he do his work.
Scarcely had we reached there when a cyclone struck the river below, and traveling up its entire length, leveled every standing object upon its banks, swept the houses along like cockle-shells, uprooted the greatest trees and whirled them down its mighty current catching here and there its human victims, or leaving them with life only, houseless, homeless, wringing their hands on a frozen, fireless shore with every coal-pit filled with water, and death from freezing more imminent than from hunger.
Twelve cockle-shells and a half- penny china figure were ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf. Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead of sawdust contained sea-shells. And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an article to itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text.
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