Crossword-Solution: COCKLESHELLS 12 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 23

But our lives have been nothing if not a continuous defiance of what you can do and what you may hold; a spiritual and material defiance carried on in our plucky cockleshells on and on beyond the successive provocations of your unreadable horizons." Ah, but the charm of the sea! Oh, yes, charm enough.

Each year saw more of their silver cockleshells putting out from port, and the cheeks of those who blew the sails more violently distended.

The speech, however, jingled very familiarly on Villon's ear, for the man was talking in the amazing jargon which the worshipful company of cockleshells had devised for the better furtherance of their thievish purposes, and it appealed to Villon as intimately as a song that is learned in childhood.

Through quiet alleyways, cloaked and cowled figures came stealing, six in number--men with pilgrims' cloaks about their shoulders, and pilgrims' hoods upon their heads--men who carried cockleshells upon the sleeves of their gabardines--all converging through the dark walks of the garden to a common centre, and that centre the grassy space before the king's watch tower.

Their present representative failed not to follow the same line of humour, exhibiting pig's bones for relics, and boasting the virtues of small tin crosses, which had been shaken in the holy porringer at Loretto, and of cockleshells, which had been brought from the shrine of Saint James of Compostella, all which he disposed of to the devout Catholics at nearly as high a price as antiquaries are now willing to pay for baubles of similar intrinsic value.