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Updated: May 1, 2025
The whole house was constantly in a state of inundation, under the discipline of mops and brooms and scrubbing brushes; and the good housewives of those days were a kind of amphibious animal, delighting exceedingly to be dabbling in water insomuch that an historian of the day gravely tells us, that many of his townswomen grew to have webbed fingers like unto a duck; and some of them, he had little doubt, could the matter be examined into, would be found to have the tails of mermaids; but this I look upon to be a mere sport of fancy, or, what is worse, a wilful misrepresentation.
"I never could swim the way I do if they weren't webbed." "Can you swim better than Paddy the Beaver?" asked Peter. "I should say I can. If I couldn't, I guess I would go hungry most of the time," replied Little Joe. "Why should you go hungry? Paddy doesn't," retorted Peter. "Paddy doesn't live on fish," replied Little Joe. "I do and that's the difference.
The neck is partly bare, and very extensible; the bill long, and hooked at the end; the feet small, and webbed. The body of the male is entirely black, while the hen has the head and neck white. It is probably a different species from the frigate-bird, or sea-hawk, of the Eastern tropical seas.
The garden shimmered in a silver mist from the canal, the broad grass plots, the clipped hedges, the cones and spikes of yew, the tall, feathery chrysanthemums, the trailing bowers and arches, were netted and laced and webbed with the silver mist. Down at the bottom of the path the forms of John and the three women showed blurred and insubstantial and still.
On the counter of the stall plucked fowls showed their strained fleshy breasts; pigeons, crowded on osier trays, displayed the soft bare skin of innocents; ducks, with skin of rougher texture, exhibited their webbed feet; and three magnificent turkeys, speckled with blue dots, like freshly-shaven chins, slumbered on their backs amidst the black fans of their expanded tails.
During these excursions, we might suppose some varieties, which had the skin of the webbed intervals of their toes less developed, to succeed best in walking on the land, and in the course of several generations they might exchange their present gait or manner of shuffling along and jumping by aid of the tail and their fin-like extremities, for feet better adapted for running.
The river was quite narrow here, and on either side were long lines of pleasure-boats moored to the bank, and an occasional flat tied-up for the night, with its big brown sails, looking like webbed wings, hoisted to dry.
What a pity! Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones.
She stood upright, her great legs bowed; the monstrous slit of a mouth slightly open, revealing a row of white teeth sharp and pointed as lancets; the paw resting on the girl's shoulder, half covering its silken surface, and from its five webbed digits long yellow claws of polished horn glistened against the delicate texture of the flesh.
But to the progenitor of the upland goose and of the frigate-bird, webbed feet no doubt were as useful as they now are to the most aquatic of existing birds.
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