oyster-shells

There are liquid clays, springs, hard rocks, and those soft and deep quagmires which special science calls moutardes. 59 The pick advances laboriously through the calcareous layers alternating with very slender threads of clay, and schistose beds in plates incrusted with oyster-shells, the contemporaries of the pre-Adamite oceans.

Les Miserables 2008

That pile of oyster-shells which is called a library is disgusting even to think of.

Les Miserables 2008

Dirty they were then, though the weather was very dry, for oyster-shells, fish heads and bones, potato-skins, and cabbage-stalks littered the roads; but dirty was a word which does not give the faintest description of the almost impassable state in which I found them, when I waded through them ankle-deep in mud some months afterwards.

The Englishwoman in America 2007

Here are dust-heaps in which pigs with long snouts are ever routing — here are lean curs, wrangling with each other for leaner bones — here are ditches and puddles, and heaps of oyster-shells, and broken crockery, and cabbage-stalks, and fragments of hats and shoes.

The Englishwoman in America 2007

A fall of snow had thawed, and mixing with the dust, store-sweepings, cabbage-stalks, oyster-shells, and other rubbish, had formed a soft and peculiarly penetrating mixture from three to seven inches deep.

The Englishwoman in America 2007

“Pearls live in oyster-shells,” he answered, conceitedly.

A Daughter of Eve 2007

Alice: ‘and they only give them oyster-shells in there — so you see he’s very hungry and thirsty.

Through the Looking Glass 2003

Moreover, a vein of the red variety, about three kilometres long by twenty-five to thirty metres broad, lies to the south-east near a gypsum hill: the latter also yields the crystallized salt which so often accompanies sulphur, and heaps of gigantic half-fossilized oyster-shells are strewed about it.

The Land of Midian 2003

Your laughter would be justified by the fact that all experience tends to show that oyster-shells are formed by the agency of oysters, and in no other way.

Autobiography and Selected Essays 2003

I turned then towards the east and saw the light bloom over the desert with the nacreous glow of pearly oyster-shells.

River God Smith, Wilbur, 1933- 1993