Where ye are, there must always be dregs at hand, and much that is
spongy, hollow, and compressed: it wanteth to have freedom.
When the tide is rising, and advancing on land, it is not prudent to bring the vessels too close inshore, for, if the wind is fresh, the prows are buried in the sand; and the sand of that coast is
spongy; it receives easily, but does not yield so well.
It was a wild, forsaken road, now winding through dreary pine barrens, where the wind whispered mournfully, and now over log causeways, through long cypress swamps, the doleful trees rising out of the slimy,
spongy ground, hung with long wreaths of funeral black moss, while ever and anon the loathsome form of the mocassin snake might be seen sliding among broken stumps and shattered branches that lay here and there, rotting in the water.
A little beyond the ruins about the smashed handling-machine I came upon the red weed again, and found the Regent's Canal, a
spongy mass of dark-red vegetation.
At first, Toby with a degree of fastidiousness that seemed to me ill-timed, was for picking out the minute particles of tobacco with which the
spongy mass was mixed; but against this proceeding I protested, as by such an operation we must have greatly diminished its quantity.
Then he went back to the carcass of the elephant, which had fallen only about a hundred feet from the edge of the forest; he next proceeded adroitly to cut off the trunk, which might have been two feet in diameter at the base; of this he selected the most delicate portion, and then took with it one of the animal's
spongy feet.
Mile after mile of stunted trees: some hewn down by the axe, some blown down by the wind, some half fallen and resting on their neighbours, many mere logs half hidden in the swamp, others mouldered away to
spongy chips.
From the old and sprouting nuts she took the solid,
spongy centres and turned them into salads.
The water, which was clear enough on the open sandy side, where the sun shone, looked black and poisonous opposite to me, where it lay deeper under the shade of the
spongy banks, and the rank overhanging thickets and tangled trees.
It looked rather
spongy and soppy, I thought, as I carried my eye over the great dull waste that lay across the river; and I could not help wondering, if the world were really as round as my geography book said, how any part of it came to be so flat.
There were other lumps and festoons and things like decayed tree-trunks studded on the face of the rock, the old combs of past years, or new cities built in the shadow of the windless gorge, and huge masses of
spongy, rotten trash had rolled down and stuck among the trees and creepers that clung to the rock- face.
There were four protruding fingers and a horrid red,
spongy surface where the thumb should have been.