fishguts

Updated: May 1, 2025

On looking up they fancied they saw something red at the very top of the tree, so they made the boy climb up, and he forthwith cried out that here, too, there was a great bunch of red hair stuck to some leaves as if with pitch, but that it was not pitch, but something speckled red and white, like fishguts; item, that the leaves all around, even where there was no hair, were stained and spotted, and had a very ill smell.

Wilhelm Meinhold - Mary Schweidler, the amber witch : the most interesting trial for witchcraft ever known, printed from an imperfect manuscript by her father, Abraham Schweidler, the pastor of Coserow in the island of Usedom / edited by W. Meinhold ; translated from the German by Lady Duff Gordon.

I say to you this is the hardest and cruellest country ever created, and a man like me's no more good here than the muck the parin's and stale fishguts and other leavin's that knocks about a harbour and washes against the walls. I'll tell you the only use I'll have been here, doctor, when my end comes: I'll dung some bit o' land for 'em with my moulder and rot. That's all.

Henry Handel Richardson - Australia Felix