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More "Chaff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should correspond to what they show in front, then the rebel force must muster several hundreds of thousands. Such large numbers they have not, and I am sure that four-fifths of their whole force constitutes their vanguard, and behind it the main body is chaff. The rebels treat us ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... chaff Chris, but he had slipped away at the first words of the explanation. Soon he reappeared with an armful of dry wood. His face was still ashen, but his ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... policemen mounted the box of the hansom, amid the "chaff" of the crowd, and the cab started. A few hats were raised in George's neighbourhood, and there was something of ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with all necessaries in hand to bake bread for their men. The respective husbands and sons squatted around on their heels, languidly smoking their pipes and urging their women to be quick. A deal of good-natured chaff seemed to take place during this daily operation, but the women were quite in earnest and took themselves and the process very seriously. They seemed much concerned if one piece got too much burnt ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... had taken too much wine, and thus had forgotten that he was a gentleman; and what happened in consequence of his forgetfulness. Little things, of no importance whatever to the world, yet with now and then a grain of wheat among the chaff. Thus Blondel ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True
... High above them, scarcely visible in the dusk, an English aeroplane droned back from its reconnaissance, and once there was the order given to scatter over the fields as a German Taube passed across them. This caused much laughter and chaff among the men, and Michael heard one say, "Dove they call it, do they? I'd like to make a pigeon-pie of them doves." Soon they scrambled back on to the road again, and the interminable "Tipperary" was resumed, in whistle and song. Michael remembered how Aunt ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... noon-time before Barton actually rallied his aching bones, his dizzy head, his refractory inclinations, to meet the fluctuant sympathy and chaff that awaited him down-stairs in every nook and corner of the ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... the cell for this other bed. "Come," said he, "you must not chaff the officers. The governor will serve you out enough without your giving ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... pagan peoples sever Railway line and telegraph Thou shalt keep thy staunch endeavour, Thou shalt scatter us like chaff. Still, O goddess of the Prussians, Thou shalt sound thy trump of tin Undeterred by rude concussions While the Frenchmen hail the Russians On ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... particles, and dexterously catching it again in their bowls, as it came down, or allowing it to fall on blankets or hides spread on the ground at their feet, in a manner very similar to the ancient method of separating the grain from the chaff. ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... foregoing natural outgrowths of the Nibelungen saga are the modern dramas and poems founded upon it since the time of the romanticists at the beginning of the nineteenth century.[7] Nearly all of these have already vanished as so much chaff from the winnowing-mill of time: only two, perhaps, are now considered seriously, namely, Hebbel's Die Nibelungen and Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen. Hebbel in his grandly conceived drama in three parts follows ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... be!' said Jasper. 'There's a man in my house that writes poetry, and don't they chaff him! And this must ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... weary and disheartened that his pride was failing him, and he was ready to plead for the chance of a little rest. Therefore he opened the door, and invited the landlady to enter in the most conciliating manner. But no such poor chaff would be of any avail with one of Mrs. Gruppins' experience, and looking straight before her, as if addressing no one ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... gauntlet of cheer and chaff from the noisy inmates of the many Bakele villages, and worried by mangrove-flies, we held our way up the muddy and rapidly narrowing stream, whose avenues of rhizophoras and palms acted as wind-sails; when the breeze failed the sensation was stifling. Lyamba (Cannabis ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... did, sir," answered Joe, in much lower tones than my own, obviously with the intention of putting me on my guard. "You see, sir, them chaps for'ard are pretty cute; they're too old birds to be caught with chaff; and I knew that if I was to get on the blind side of 'em, it'd have to be by means of throwin' you into a genuine, downright passion with me. Besides, if you'll excuse me for sayin' of it, Captain Saint Leger, you ain't much of ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... middle Atlantic division Early Genesee Giant, Jones Winter Fife, and Fultz are chiefly grown. In the Southern States Fultz, Fulcaster, Purple Straw, and May are foremost. In the north central group of States Early Red Clawson, Poole, Dawson's Golden Chaff, Buda Pest, and Fultz are common. In the Dakotas and Minnesota Scotch Fife and Velvet Blue Stem (both spring wheats) are generally planted. In Kansas and Texas and the adjacent locality the principal varieties are Turkey, Fulcaster, and Mediterranean (all winter wheats). In California and the ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... his "third floor back"; had breakfasted and dined with two old maids, their scrawny niece, and a muscular young stenographer who shouted militant suffrage and was not above throwing a brickbat whenever the occasion arrived. There was a barmaid or two at the pub where he lunched at noon; but chaff was the alpha and omega of this acquaintance. Thus, Thomas knew little or ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... infantry bugles above us on the hill—side, and we could see them suddenly start from their lair, and form; while between us and the clearing morning sky, the cavalry, magnified into giants in the strong relief on the outline of the hill, were driven in straggling patrols, like chaff, over the summit—their sabres sparkling in the level sunbeams, and the reports of the red flashes of their pistols ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... things right:— night brands and chokes as if destruction broke over furze and stone and crop of myrtle-shoot and field-wort, destroyed with flakes of iron, the bracken-stems, where tender roots were sown, blight, chaff and waste of darkness to ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... sickle, and sometimes by an instrument which produces the effect of shears. Threshing consists in beating the ears with thick sticks to loosen the husks, after which the padi is carried in baskets to platforms ten feet above the ground, and is allowed to fall on mats, when the chaff is driven away by the wind. It is husked by a pestle, and it requires some skill to avoid crushing the grain. All these operations are ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... heard when William tried to unharness the pony. I cultivated in myself whatever amused her in me; I drew out whatever amused her in William; I never let slip any of the things that amused her in herself. 'Chaff' is a great bond; and I should have enjoyed our bouts of it even without Mary's own special obbligato. She used to call me (for I was very urban in those days) the Gentleman from London. I used to call her the Brave Little ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... creation to which Lee Haines had to listen, impatient, sifting the chaff from the grains of truth. Down upon Alder, exactly at midnight, had ridden a cavalcade headed by that notorious, half-legendary man-slayer, Dan Barry—Whistling Dan. While his crew of two-score hardened ruffians held the doors and the ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... all the while it is the word that he is intent upon. You may trace his reading by some fine word that has not escaped him, but has been garnered for use when his fan has been quick to purge away the chaff of commonplace. He is thus fastidious and alert in many languages. You wonder at the delicacy of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhyme in the Anglo-Norman of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the brief verse of Peire de Bergerac, or touches sensitively a word whereby Dante has ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... to do, Anthony unwillingly crossed the yard, and stepped into the pleasant, whitewashed gloom of the chicken house. Loose chaff was scattered on the floor, and whitewashed boxes lined the walls. An adjoining shed held the roosts, which a few murmuring fowls were looping ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... family, the zinc-worker, who was already pretty lazy, had got to the point of never touching a tool. When tired of doing nothing, he sometimes let himself be prevailed upon to take a job. Then his comrade would look him up and chaff him unmercifully when he found him hanging to his knotty cord like a smoked ham, and he would call to him to come down and have a glass of wine. And that settled it. The zinc-worker would send the job to blazes and commence a booze which lasted days and weeks. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... look across the ages and the beacon-moments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... magnificent ceremony with which they were removed from the cemetery of the Madeleine to the Abbey of St. Denis,—when the escape of Napoleon from Elba in February,1815, scattered the royal family and their followers like chaff before the wind. The Duc d'Angouleme, compelled to capitulate at Toulouse, sailed from Cette in a Swedish vessel. The Comte d'Artois, the Duc de Berri, and the Prince de Conde withdrew beyond the frontier. The King fled from the capital. The Duchesse d'Angouleme, then at Bordeaux ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... science which alone was to be handled, and that with as much brevity and simplicity as possible. The Greek literature was doubtless made use of, but only to furnish some serviceable maxims of experience culled from the mass of chaff and rubbish: it was one of Cato's commonplaces, that "Greek books must be looked into, but not thoroughly studied." Thus arose those household manuals of necessary information, which, while rejecting Greek subtlety and obscurity, banished also Greek acuteness and depth, but through ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Winslow, who was not used to being ignored in this fashion. Besides, as a general rule, he had been quite good friends with Mrs. Pennington's hired girls. She had had three strapping damsels during his sojourn in Riverside, and he used to sit on this very doorstep and chaff them. They had all been saucy and talkative. This girl was evidently ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... time, the first shots were fired. The marines armed with binoculars were not unduly elated by any one shot, but merely reported progress in a characteristic American fashion—that is, by a system of chaffing. This provided tonic, and presently the bullets crept in so close to the marks that all chaff was forgotten. Sometimes it took an hour, or even two, to bring down a single man; but no matter how long the time necessary might be, the Americans stayed patiently with their man until the sniper's life's blood was drilled out of him by these thin pencils of Lee straight-pull bullets. Once, and ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... taken this prudent resolution, when another wave, more huge than the last, thundered down on the raft, scattering her timbers, as the wind scatters a heap of chaff. Odysseus clung fast to one beam and, mounting it, sat astride as on a horse, until he had stripped off his clothes. Then he bound the veil round him, flung himself head foremost into the billows, and swam lustily ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... wooden vat of about 50 to 60 gallons capacity, standing upright, the bottom of which is covered with a little rye flour and wheat bran—the poor use chaff of rye—upon which hot water is poured. The water becomes acidulated in about 24 hours and tastes like water mixed with vinegar. A little clean rye straw is placed inside of the vat, in front of the ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... Mormonism, out of its range; and it does, and always has done, just as good service for any one of the other religions as it does for ours. It is a free-for-all, go-as-you-please argument; but it is the sort of chaff they feed theological students on—and they sift it over for women. It is pretty light diet when it gets ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... can we glean in this vile age Of chaff, although our gleanings be not grist. I must not quite omit the talking sage, Kit-Cat, the famous Conversationist, Who, in his common-place book, had a page Prepared each morn for evenings. 'List, oh, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floor; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... fire made against an iron back in the great hall. Houses, often of gentry, were built of a heavy timber frame, filled up with lath and plaster. People slept on rough mats or straw pallets, with a round log for a pillow; seldom better beds than a mattress, with a sack of chaff ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and within sits a grave man in old German costume, who from a large sack before him takes handsful of grain, and liberally casts it about him. This is the sower, but the grain is in this instance only chaff. Now follow heavy instruments of husbandry—ploughs and harrows—while rakes, scythes, and reaping-hooks form a picturesque trophy behind them. A shout of laughter greets the next figure in the procession, for it is no other ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... and magnetism which dashed itself into the crowd like a spark of electricity, knocking men from off their feet, and driving the Truth into them as if by a charge of a powerful explosive. He told them that the spiritual grain was to be gathered into the garners, while the chaff was to be consumed as if by a fiery furnace; that the axe was to be laid to the root of the trees which brought not forth good fruit. Verily, the "Day of Jehovah," long promised by the prophets, was near to hand ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... his first one wide of the plate. O'Leary laughed, and nodded his head, as though to tell the pitcher he was too old a bird to be caught with such chaff. ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... four or five years, practically all of these lands are washed away and as farm lands they are abandoned. Not only are the hillside lands unprotected from the beating rains and flowing streams, but the bottom or lowlands are not properly drained, and the sand washed down from the hill, the chaff and raft from previous rains soon fill the ditches and creeks and almost any ordinary rain will cause an overflow ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... ring yet—the wedding-ring, darling; but I ha' got money to buy it—ten pound; it does seem a sight of riches. Let's go down to Higgins' and change the notes, Bet. We can get the ring there." Bet did not object—she turned at once in the right direction, walking so fast that Will began to chaff her. ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... setting forth of a higher truth; and sorrow, distress, and adversity being the appointed means for the separating in men of whatever in them was light, trivial, and poor from the solid and the true, their chaff from their wheat, [Footnote: Triticum itself may be connected with tero, tritus; [so Curtius, Greek Etym. No. 239].] he therefore called these sorrows and trials 'tribulations,' threshings, that is, of the inner spiritual man, without which ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... mean to save the workman many a "bob". But, lessening his chance of toping ale, The Witler tells his pals the saddest tale. Bacchus for his true friend mistaketh me, Then step I from his side, down topples he, And "Traitor!" cries, and swears I did but chaff, And the Teetotallers hold their sides and laugh, And chortle in their joy, and shout, and swear That GRANDOLPH GOODFELLOW's a spirit rare. But room, old boy, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... laughed at such a notion. "Depend on it, as soon as the troops and militia can be collected, the slaves will fly from them as chaff before the wind, or will, if they resist, to a man be cut to pieces," he observed. "It will be a bad look-out for us, I confess, for we shall become bankrupt; but our estates will remain, and we must procure fresh labourers from other countries, ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... be over thirty masters," returned Pocket more pointedly than before. He was not going to stand chaff about his public school from ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... have been that a tide had rushed in and wiped away even the prints of Esther's little feet. It might have been that a wind blew in at the windows of his mind and beat its great wings in the corners of it and winnowed out the chaff. As he saw life then his judgments softened and his irritations cooled. Nothing was left but the vision of life itself, the uncomprehended beneficence, the consoler, the illimitable beauty we look ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... saw this ram still battering the same place, and that the wall would quickly be thrown down by it, he resolved to elude for a while the force of the engine. With this design he gave orders to fill sacks with chaff, and to hang them down before that place where they saw the ram always battering, that the stroke might be turned aside, or that the place might feel less of the strokes by the yielding nature of the chaff. This contrivance very much delayed ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... depths of the sea, reining back its foaming waves as a rider his white-maned steed; giving to the thirsty—water from the rock, to the hungry—bread from the skies, and scattering the foes of Israel before them, as chaff is driven by the wind. I have heard of the sun's fiery chariot arrested in its course by the voice of a man, speaking with authority given to him by an inspiring Deity. Tell me what is the name ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... features and fulness of cheek, And his starven hands grew plump and sleek. But for all sign of wealth he wore He swaggered neither less nor more. He talked the stuff he talked before, And bragged as he had bragged of yore, With his Yankee chaff and his Yankee slang, And his Yankee bounce and his Yankee twang. And, to tell the truth, we all held clear Of the impudent little adventurer; And any man with an eye might see That, though he bore it merrily, ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... spoke dully. He had changed once more; he affected a sort of harshness towards the young man. He teased him cruelly about his plans, his hopes of success, as though he were trying to chaff himself, now that he had recovered himself. He set himself coldly to destroy his faith in life, his faith in art, his faith in himself. Bitterly he gave himself as an example, speaking of his actual ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... of them to Apollo, who received them very graciously, and resolved to make the Author a suitable Return for the Trouble he had been at in collecting them. In order to this, he set before him a Sack of Wheat, as it had been just threshed out of the Sheaf. He then bid him pick out the Chaff from among the Corn, and lay it aside by it self. The Critick applied himself to the Task with great Industry and Pleasure, and after having made the due Separation, was presented by Apollo with the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... and new rum; pease-pudding and chaff-biscuits,' said the manager, taking a whiff at his pipe to keep it alight, and returning to ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... He knew that the selectmen would be obliged to clear the street of the obstruction, but a display of loyalty to the king might possibly inure to his benefit. Boys on their way to school began to chaff the informer. ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... lighted up in the conversation. John could hear something of their conversation, which was somewhat noisy. They were talking in that strain of objectless question and answer which may be stupid to idiocy or clever to the verge of wit, according to the talkers. Joe called it "chaff." ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... Wherever the meat came from it could be masticated with some effort. In Barclay's boarding-house, in Williamstown, we had to take a spell in the middle of a mouthful. I have seen steak there that would have pauled a chaff-cutter. In the dining-room at Salthouse Lane there lived the wildest, most eccentric clock I ever saw in all my travels. It had a most remarkable way of striking quite peculiar to itself. We used ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... Rinaldo and Dudon fight; then friendship make, And to each other fitting honour pay. Agramant's host the united champions break, And scatter it, like chaff, in disarray. Brandimart wages war, for Roland's sake, With Rodomont, and loses in the fray. This while, for good Baiardo, with more pain, Contend Rinaldo and ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the logic-chaff is all laid long since, the question is substantial, not formal. If the Teutsch Ritterdom was actually at this time DEAD, actually stumbling about as a mere galvanized Lie beginning to be putrid,—then, sure enough, it behooved that somebody should bury it, to avoid pestilential effects ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... rather! Chaff, because I'm so tall and thin. Bracy, you're not half such a boy as the Captain. You don't think I'm wild and ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... blew away the chaff from her handful of beans. The spring breeze blew the chaff back again, and sifted it over her face and shoulders. She rubbed it out of her eyes impatiently, and happened to notice old Peggy holding her ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... in the dense ranks, but picking out the smaller parties of the enemy—that is to say, mobs not more than double our own strength; and when we could get within striking distance they were punished and scattered like chaff before the wind, in spite of the scattered volleys they sent at us before ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... morning, his five tentmates fell to catechising him as to his pensive mood, and their catechism was largely intermingled with chaff. ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... newspaper writer commented that a "consensus of opinion among biologists" would probably rate Dr. Loeb as a man of lively imagination rather than an inerrant investigator of natural phenomena, he felt called to chaff the consensus idea. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... ever been a result of persecution that the persecuted cause has made progress—naturally so, for trial and suffering winnow out the chaff and leave the good seed to flourish with increased vigour. Few false professors attended those midnight meetings, which were so full of joy and danger, and none of these ever got the length of Ranavalona's fiery stakes or ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... leave the bench for their chamber, the crowd in court give way outright to joy. Every face is bright; every heart is light; jokes go round, and there is great "chaff" of the crown officials, and of the "polis," who, poor fellows, to tell the truth, seem to be as glad as the gladdest in the throng. Five o'clock arrives—half-past five—the jury must suavely be out soon now. At a quarter ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... elective rank of captain of his company, and contrived to maintain some sort of order in that, doubtless brave, but undisciplined body. He saw no fighting, but he could earn his living for some months, and stored up material for effective chaff in Congress long afterwards about the military glory which General Cass's supporters for the Presidency wished to attach to their candidate. His most glorious exploit consisted in saving from his own men a poor old friendly Indian who had fallen among them. A letter of credentials, ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... that as the down noon express was leaving H—— yesterday a lady! (God save the mark) attempted to force herself into the already full palatial car. Conductor Slum, who is too old a bird to be caught with chaff, courteously informed her that the car was full, and when she insisted on remaining, he persuaded her to go into the car where she belonged. Thereupon a young sprig, from the East, blustered like a Shanghai rooster, and began to sass the conductor with his chin ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... explained. "You need not believe me if you don't like. I don't care, since I have done what I wanted to. Bar chaff, Henry, I am telling you the truth. The girl appears to be a young woman of decision. She explained at once her circumstances, and it struck us both that to go through the ceremony of marriage would smooth all our difficulties. We can easily get ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... Huckaback; he was found in the streets, overpowered by the forbidden juice, after having beaten many of your highness's subjects, and the cadi would have administered the bamboo, but he was as a lion, and he scattered the slaves as chaff, until he fell, and could not rise again. I have taken him from the cadi, and brought him here. He speaketh but the Frankish tongue, but the sun who shineth on me knoweth I have been in the Frank country; and Inshallah! ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... the Professor relapsed into his former tone of dry chaff. The Father could not quite make up his mind whether Guildea was feeling unusually grave or unusually gay. As the two men drew near to Hyde Park Place their conversation died away and they walked forward silently in ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the slightest intention of yielding; her mind and her feet were braced against any divergence from the straight road now; but the man Janet Payne had called Gregory Jessup said something that scattered her resolutions like so much chaff. ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... brother—or was it an uncle? Anyhow, he popped the question, and Miss Avery, she said 'No.' Just imagine, if she'd said 'Yes,' she would have been Charles's aunt. (Oh, I say,—that's rather good! 'Charlie's Aunt'! I must chaff him about that this evening.) And the man went out and was killed. Yes, I'm certain I've got it right now. Tom Howard—he was ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... 1. The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after they have been separated from the printed portion. Also called {selvage} and {perf}. 2. obs. The confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or paper tape; this has also been called 'chaff', 'computer confetti', and 'keypunch droppings'. This use may now be mainstream; it has been reported seen (1993) in directions for a card-based voting ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... 'That's a quare un!' she thought, but she found him handsome all the same, and, retreating behind the beer-taps, she eyed him surreptitiously. She was a raw country lass, not yet stript of all her natural shyness, or she would have begun to 'chaff' him. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Of heaps of "vacant chaff well-meant for grain," If, like the pious spouse of Jerry Cruncher, You "flop," and, camel-wise, won't rise again To bear big burdens that strength staggers under, On ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... The peasants chaff Slimak for living in exile like a Sibiriak.[1] It is true, they say, that he lives nearer to the church, but on the other hand he has no one ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... they tramped slowly forward. The darkness grew more intense, and the chaff and laughter—for the soldiers, elated by success, had hitherto shown no sign of fatigue—died gradually away. Nothing was to be heard but the clang of accoutrements, the long rumble of the guns, and the shuffle of weary feet. Men fell in the ranks, overpowered ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... this side of Jordan. Wal, that might be a little child, we'll say; if there's a thing handsomer than a field o' wheat, it's a little child. But bimeby comes reapin' and all, and then the trouble begins. First, it's all in the rough, ain't it, chaff and all, mixed together; and has to go through the thresher? Well, maybe that's the lickin's a boy's father gives him. He don't like 'em,—I can feel Father Belfort's lickin's yet,—but they git red of ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... agree on the idea of the divine; but no, that is not the question—the chaff must be separated from the good grain. The supernatural is miracle, and miracle is an objective phenomenon independent of all preceding casuality. Now, miracle thus understood cannot be proved experimentally; and besides, the subjective ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was thus in two minds, Neptune sent a terrible great wave that seemed to rear itself above his head till it broke right over the raft, which then went to pieces as though it were a heap of dry chaff tossed about by a whirlwind. Ulysses got astride of one plank and rode upon it as if he were on horseback; he then took off the clothes Calypso had given him, bound Ino's veil under his arms, and plunged into ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... to the Resident and his party. The shouts of laughter proceeding from their corner of the house announced that business was over, and that chaff and fun, so dear to the heart of every Kanowit, was being carried on with great gusto. As we arrived and stood by the group, one of their number (evidently a privileged buffoon) begged to be allowed to speak ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... from the grain of that name, which abounds in the rivers and marshy lands. This plant is described as growing about two feet above the water, resembling European oats, and is gathered by the savages during the month of September. The ears are dried, separated from the chaff, and prepared for food either by pounding into meal, or simply boiling the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Don't chaff. Present company always excepted. I wasn't thinking about you. But I say, didn't he take it all in as innocent as could be about uncle setting him adrift out ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... small, poor bunches. The bunches selected are freed from all bruised berries. The stems of the bunches are then dipped in melted wax. After this treatment they are packed in layers of finely cut, soft chaff, made from clean, bright, fragrant oat straw. The chaff serves to keep the berries and clusters well apart, and also to keep out the air, which otherwise would soon wilt the fruit. Packed in this way the grapes reach distant markets ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... the O'Reagans of Castle Reagan, or the D'Arcy de Montmorenci, or the Montescudi di Bajocchi. Among this set there was much merry-making when the news from the Dolph household sifted down to them from the gossip-sieve of the best society. They could not very well chaff young Dolph openly, for he was muscular and high-tempered, and, under the most agreeable conditions, needed a fight of some sort every six months or so, and liked a bit of trouble in between fights. But a good deal of low and malicious humor came his way, from one source or another, and he, with ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... yourselves that the doctrines of the cross are really irrational and absurd, and that you are doing right in opposing and deriding them? Recollect, I pray you, with whose word you are contending;—whose wisdom you are despising! Let the chaff contend with the tempest, and the stubble with the devouring flame; let the glow-worm despise all the lamps of heaven;—but Oh, let not a worm contend with Omnipotence; let not dim reason reject all the splendours of the Sun of righteousness. The redemption of the soul is precious—Its rescue ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin
... will keep on bringing pretty girls into camp—that is, I scarcely think it will grow into a steady habit," he said, and met her eyes so steadily that she dismissed all idea of any heart interest in the girl. "But I'd rather 'Tana didn't hear any chaff of that sort. You know what I mean. The boys, or any one, is like enough to joke about it at first; but when they learn 'for keeps,' that I'm not a marrying man, they'll let up. As she grows older, there'll be enough boys to bother her in camp without me. All I want is to see that she is looked ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... like chaff upon the wind before him, and impregnable Sicilian castles fall into his power by impossible feats of arms, or incredible stratagems. A Greek empress, "the mature Zoe," as Gibbon calls her, falls in love with him, and ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... "Notes and Observations on the Ionian Islands." "The grain is beaten out, commonly in the harvest field, by men, horses, or mules, on a threshing-floor prepared extempore for the purpose, where the ground is firm and dry, and the chaff is separated by winnowing."—Wilkinson, ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... than was absolutely necessary,—Disko did not wish to spend a week hunting for his cable,—but scuttled up into the wind as the Carrie passed within easy hail, a silent and angry boat, at the mercy of a raking broadside of Bank chaff. ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... Chorus of Chaff from the bridges and terraces as they pass. 'Ullo, 'ere comes another boat-load! 'Igher up, there!... Four-wheeler!... Ain't that toff in the tall 'at enjoyin' himself? Quite a 'appy funeral! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... days; but they told me, as near as I can now remember, "We regret to leave you, but we have to obey orders." The most ignorant private in the whole army saw everything that we had been fighting for for four years just scattered like chaff to the winds. All the Generals resigned, and those who did not resign were promoted; colonels were made brigadier-generals, captains were made colonels, and the private soldier, well, he deserted, don't you see? The private soldiers of the Army of Tennessee ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... breath. "Well, Leonard, you fooled me. I believed all this chaff you've been giving me about not ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... entertaining as Rabelais tells us they were in his time. Then he 'amused himself much with the boatmen, and above all with those of Chauny in Picardy—wonderful chatterboxes, and great at bandying chaff on the subject of green monkeys.' There is no lack of boatmen now at Chauny, though the railway has taken away much of their living; but the glory of the green monkeys, I fear, has departed. In the days of Gargantua, the Chaunois were as famous as the Savoyards now are, for wandering over France ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... same in diameter. Then the rice is heated over a fire-place, and emptied into the hole while it is hot. A young man, having washed his feet and put on a new pair of moccasins, treads upon it until all is hulled. The women then pour it upon a robe and begin to shake it so that the chaff will be separated by the wind. Some of the rice is browned before ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... feet, and when it had passed there was not one scrap of that dry alfalfa hay where I'd thrown it. I found my hat a mile distant. My nostrils and ears and eyes and mouth were literally loaded with dirt and fine hay chaff. And my hair! Heavens!" She put her hands to it. "I usually wear it in braids, you know, but to-day I thought I'd be smart and perk up a bit. Now I'll have to 'go to the ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... some sense one of opposition and contrast. I think we are put on the right track for understanding the solemn words of this text if we remember the great saying of John the Baptist, where, in precisely similar fashion, there are set side by side the two conceptions of the chaff being cast into the unquenchable fire (the same expression as in our text), and 'He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... However, he continued the work till the evening, and brought his soldiers back into their camp. The next morning a gentle breeze at first arose, and moved the lightest parts of the earth, and dispersed it about as the chaff before the wind; but when the sun got higher, and the strong, northerly wind had covered the hills with the dust, the soldiers came and turned this mound of earth over and over, and broke the hard clods in pieces, whilst others on horseback ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... when the snow melts in the mountains, the Rio Grande is flooded to its full capacity, often overflowing its banks in marshy regions. The first bridge built by the railway company at this point was of wood, which was swept away like chaff by the next flood of the river. The present substantial iron structure bids fair to last for many years. The river, such as it is, belongs to the two nations, the boundary agreed upon being the middle of ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... the villagers, most of their gear, and most of the day were required to get us down. They were a poor and wretched folk, their food difficult even for the stomach of a sea-cuny to countenance. Their rice was brown as chocolate. Half the husks remained in it, along with bits of chaff, splinters, and unidentifiable dirt which made one pause often in the chewing in order to stick into his mouth thumb and forefinger and pluck out the offending stuff. Also, they ate a sort of millet, and pickles of astounding variety and ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... thicken; Cuckoo, nightingale, no art Of yours my heart can quicken! Morfydd, not thy haunting kiss Or voice of bliss can save me From the spear of age whose chill Has quenched the thrill love gave me. My ripe grain of heart and brain The sod sadly streweth; Its empty chaff with mocking laugh The wind of death pursueth! Dig my grave! O, dig it deep To hide my sleeping body, So but Christ my spirit ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... figured by the three mirrors, imparts to them a wonderful brightness and beauty. The eye-piece is Jesus Christ, and He, looking from outside through Himself into the kaleidoscope, finds perfect all our works. But, should we leave that ineffable abode of Love, He would see but the rags and chaff of ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... details of cleaning. For a pleasing appearance the seed heads must be gathered before they become the least bit weather-beaten. This is as essential as to have the seed ripe. Next, the seed must be perfectly clean, free from chaff, bits of broken stems and other debris. Much depends upon the manner of handling as well as upon harvesting. Care must be taken in threshing to avoid bruising the seeds, particularly the oily ones, by pounding ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... beside him from somewhere in the darkness. The tip of her little finger barely touched his hand as she stood there, leaning against the railing and firing back some "chaff" into the darkness. There came a lull in the chatter and Joe was feeling a bit mollified. Suddenly, before he realized it, the crowd was leaving, and one by one they filed past him, each bidding good-night. There was ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... way of truce, served out the liquor from an eighteen-gallon cask, and sucked it up himself like the sole of an old shoe. Then Caesar said grace, and the company fell to. Such noise, such sport, such chaff, such laughter! Everything was a jest—every word had wit in it. "How are you doing, John?"—"Haven't done as well for a month, sir; but what's it saying, two hungry meals make the third a glutton."—"How are you doing, Tom?"—"No time to get a right mouthful for myself Caesar; kept so busy ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... when we went into the tap-room on Wednesday, some of his companions were chaffing Crockett about a certain Nancy Webb, and the chaff went home, as was plain to see. The woman, then, who could most easily entice Sammy Crockett away was Nancy Webb. I resolved to find who Nancy Webb was and ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... France, Colonel," replied La Corne de St. Luc, scornfully, "that 'King's chaff is better than other people's corn, and that fish in the market is cheaper than fish in the sea!' I believe it, and can prove it to any gentleman ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... us all! Who else like you Could sift the seed corn from our chaff, And make us, with the pen we knew, Deathless ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... there rose so wild a yell Within that dark and narrow dell, As all the fiends from heaven that fell Had pealed the banner-cry of hell! Forth from the pass in tumult driven, Like chaff before the wind of heaven, The archery appear: For life! for life! their flight they ply— And shriek, and shout, and battle-cry, And plaids and bonnets waving high, And broadswords flashing to the sky, Are maddening in the rear. Onward they drive in dreadful ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... become the object of a passion to a man of splendid genius, who has made her his own and in doing so has made her the world's. There is no better reading at Venice therefore, as I say, than Ruskin, for every true Venice-lover can separate the wheat from the chaff. The narrow theological spirit, the moralism a tout propos, the queer provincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in a mountain of flowers. One may doubtless be very happy in Venice without reading ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... men, and nations, have passed by, Like leaves upon an autumn's dreary sky; Like chaff upon the ocean billow proud, Like drops of rain on summer's fleecy cloud; Like flowers of a wilderness, Vanished ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... tenant, farmer or grantee of landed estate.—By this division it fancies that it has respected lawful ownership by overthrowing illegitimate property, and that in the feudal scheme of obligations, it has separated the wheat from the chaff.[2221] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... days grew shorter and the evenings cool, the smoke of the big thrasher streaked the harvest field, and the wagons went jolting between humming separator and granary, until the later was gorged to repletion and the wheat was stored within a willow framing beneath the chaff and straw that streamed from the chute of the great machine. Winston had around him the best men that dollars could hire, and toiled tirelessly with the grimy host in the whirling dust of the thrasher and amid the sheaves, wherever another ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... adverse comments on the absent bridegroom flowed pretty freely. This should have been the merriest time of the evening—the merriest time, in fact, of all the three festive days—the time when one was allowed to chaff the bride and to make her blush, to slap the lucky bridegroom on the back and generally to allow full play to that exuberance of spirits which is always bubbling up to the surface out of a Magyar ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... he went with a friend to call on an older acquaintance, named Smoot, who was almost as dry a joker as himself, but Smoot had more of this world's goods than the young legislator-elect. Lincoln began at once to chaff his friend. ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... but was silent. He knew that if he protested again the young Philadelphians would chaff him without mercy, and he knew at heart also that Tayoga's statement about him was true. He remembered with pride his defeat of St. Luc in the great test of words in the vale of Onondaga. But Wilton's mind quickly turned to another subject. He seemed to exemplify ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... were left galloping, Joris and I, Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh, 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff; 40 Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, "for Aix is ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy—chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man—I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and physical ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... The boys turned to chaff Chris, but he had slipped away at the first words of the explanation. Soon he reappeared with an armful of dry wood. His face was still ashen, but his teeth ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... of pages of such "chanting" with its grain of wheat hid in a bushel of chaff. We refer to it here not because it is worth reading but to record the curious fact that many European critics hail it as typical American poetry, even while we wonder why anybody should regard it ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... is not binding) and other minor ceremonies with zest. After all had been well and duly gone through, the bride and bridegroom were conducted to an inner apartment. Susil underwent the customary "chaff" from the ladies, which he bore with great good humour and was at last left alone with his young companion for life; while some of the fair guests sang wedding songs to the intense delight of their friends. Nor were the men-folk idle. They sat down to a sumptuous feast prepared ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... was usually freed from chaff by the simple process of throwing it into the air when a brisk wind was blowing, but we saw several hand winnowing machines which were exceedingly ingenious and very effective. The wheat was ground between two ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... many times the good and bad will hold; But what consumes the chaff will only cleanse ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dispense with them. Our food was abominably bad; the sheep we purchased were little better than London cats; and as no flour-mill is to be found in Abyssinia, far less any bakers, we were obliged to purchase the grain, beat it to remove the chaff, and grind it between two stones—not the flat grinding-stones of Egypt or India, but on a small curved piece of rock, where the grain is reduced to flour by means of a large hard kind of pebble held in the hand. It was brown bread with a ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... a little, "I knew I ought not; but they said I was afraid of a gun, and that I had no money. Now I see that was chaff, but I didn't ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... none my fortunes be, This or that man's fall I fear not; Him I love that loveth me, For the rest a pin I care not. You are sad when others chaff, And grow merry as they laugh; I that hate it, and am free, Laugh and weep as ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... anxious to learn, and flushed so pink, that his education was cut short, and he was left to his own devices by every one except the Senior Subaltern, who continued to make life a burden to The Worm. The Senior Subaltern meant no harm; but his chaff was coarse, and he didn't quite understand where to stop. He had been waiting too long for his company; and that always sours a man. Also he was in love, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... fingers with it, after I'd taken Tod Sloan's bridle off," she answered, "There was a sticky mess of hay and chaff on them from the bit, and I remember wiping it off ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... anecdotal conversation. What a marvelous memory! He knew something of every country from the inside. He had been brought at various times during his long diplomatic career into contact with most of the interesting people in the world. He knew well how to separate the grain from the chaff according to the tastes of his listener. The pathos of his present position appealed to her irresistibly. The possibilities of his life had been so great, fortune had treated him always so strangely. The greatest of his schemes ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lamp of evil-doers put out"? And how often doth "ruin" overwhelm them? How oft are they as stubble before the wind, And as chaff ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... spears went everywhere through the host, urging them to fight, and roused the dread battle-cry. So they were rallied and stood to face the Achaians: and the Argives withstood them in close array and fled not. Even as a wind carrieth the chaff about the sacred threshing-floors when men are winnowing, and the chaff-heaps grow white—so now grew the Achaians white with falling dust which in their midst the horses' hooves beat up into the brazen heaven, as fight was joined again, and the charioteers wheeled round. Thus bare they ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... amid mild chaff, to be greeted in Rommany by the suspected policeman, and to accept a glass of the ale, which had rained as it were from heaven into this happy family. These basketmakers were not real Gipsies, but churdi or half-bloods, ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... betimes the luxury of it. But we had much discourse for all that, and I learnt many interesting things from this old trader, who seemed taciturn in our little crowd, but was, in reality, a tower of intelligent silence beat about by a flood of good-humoured chaff and loquacity. ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... was not Captain Dacres who had anticipated that pleasure, for while responding with the best grace he could command to the chaff and banter which began to be darted at him, he was consigning Miss Fisher, and more especially the effusive Doady, to every depth between this world and the ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... came half a dozen great boatloads of armed Spaniards, who landed upon the Turtle's Back and sent the Frenchmen flying to the woods and fastnesses of rocks as the chaff flies before the thunder gust. That night the Spaniards drank themselves mad and shouted themselves hoarse over their victory, while the beaten Frenchmen sullenly paddled their canoes back to the main island again, and the Sea ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... itself a fresh channel, and when the waters sank we saw, to our astonishment, that the old river-bed had become merely that of an insignificant stream.... The stream rolled over and tore up the soft, wet ground like chaff, so that it was dangerous to go near the brink. While we were all quiet, we heard under our feet a sudden gurgling and stirring, which betrayed the working of the disturbed water. Suddenly our jagger, ever on the look-out, called loudly, and pointed to a singular and unshapely object, ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... themselves and came towards the group of likely youths. These wavered a little, were silent, sniggered, stood their ground—the khaki-clad figures passed among them. Hackneyed words, jests, the touch of flattery, changing swiftly to chaff—all the customary performance, hollow and pathetic; and then the two figures re-emerged, their hands clenched, their eyes shifting here and there, their lips drawn back in fixed smiles. They had failed, and were trying to hide it. They must not show contempt—the young ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... comfortably filling his pipe, "the daughter, Miss Kirkby, was awfully good fun; so fresh, so perfectly natural and innocent, don't you know, and yet so extraordinarily sharp and clever. She had some awfully good chaff over that Scotch scenery before those Scotch tourists, do you remember? And it was all so beastly true, too. Perhaps ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... it would do him good to have his tongue slit," said Crayshaw, "but there's no need. When I torment him and chaff him, ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... of Audrey, Sara, and Garth had joined the main party now, and Garth was shaking eager, outstretched hands and laughingly tossing back the shower of chaff which greeted ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... or the cover is drawn without a find, you are always sure of having your spirits raised by the cheerful sunrise: by the time you get home, tired and spattered, the ladies are down stairs ready to make pretty exclamations over the brush or to chaff you pleasantly for your want of success; and then there is just time to get your hair brushed and your clothes changed before the mingled aromas of fried sausage and old Java put the keen edge on your already ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... by Jove, your Ladyship means!" shouts Mr. Slang. "No, no, old birds are not caught with chaff. Thrum, old boy, let's have some ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... preparations for the future were seriously begun; and now the drama proceeded apace, with Barnes, the moving spirit. Despite his assertion that he was no scholar, the manager's mind was the storehouse of a hundred plays, and in that depository were many bags of gold and many bags of chaff. From this accumulation he drew freely, frankly, in the light-fingered fashion of master playwrights and ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... left galloping, Joris and I, Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh; 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff; Till over by Delhem a dome-spire sprung white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, "for Aix ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... mystic light was not seen, darkness brooded over the sanctuary as at other times. Moreover, among the emblems of Dionysus was the winnowing-fan, that is the large open shovel-shaped basket, which down to modern times has been used by farmers to separate the grain from the chaff by tossing the corn in the air. This simple agricultural instrument figured in the mystic rites of Dionysus; indeed the god is traditionally said to have been placed at birth in a winnowing-fan as in a cradle: in art he is represented as an infant so cradled; and from these traditions ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... few months to England, to allay the threatened famine there; and the animals in the country were starving from the deficiency of all kinds of grain. The pastures, we could ourselves see, were dry, and in many parts burnt to chaff, while the present summer beginning with oppressive heat, and the preceding one having been equally unfavourable to the pasturage, the scarcity of food was severely and fatally ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... details of his early lack of financial success being published, and the whole dismissed with the comprehensive remark: "a very prolific person, this friend of yours, Punch!—editor of thirteen periodicals, and lessee of a theatre into the bargain, and all total failures!" After heavy-handed chaff he proceeds to abuse Mark Lemon, up and down, in similar terms; and with a view to show that others write verse as bad as his, reprints the weakest lines in his "Fridolin" and "The Rhine-boat." In the course of his ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... might not feel uncomfortable and "out of it." He would lie back in the carriage, his big face flushed and his eyes bright with pleasure, an arm round each of his companions, and when he was not kissing them, he would be bawling out some song, or, at stations, hanging half out of the window to chaff the porters and the station-master. "Get all you can," he would say, "and do without ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... percolate; others softening marble, for pillows and pin-cushions; others petrifying the hoofs of a living horse, to preserve them from foundering. The artist himself was at that time busy upon two great designs; the first, to sow land with chaff, wherein he affirmed the true seminal virtue to be contained, as he demonstrated by several experiments, which I was not skilful enough to comprehend. The other was, by a certain composition of gums, minerals, and vegetables, outwardly applied, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... tea, ignoring them, while Bill entertained the Gilsons and Saxtons with Rabelaisian stories of threshing-time when shirts prickly with chaff and gritty with dust stuck to sweat-dripping backs; of the "funny thing" of Milt and Bill being hired to move a garbage-pile and "swiping" their employer's "mushmelons"; of knotting shirts at the swimming-hole so that the bawling youngsters had to "chaw beef"; of drinking beer in the livery-stable ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... man of action, Mr. Crow began operations at once. He went home and for nearly an hour worked over the list of subscribers to the fund, aided by his wife and daughters. Among them they separated the wheat from the chaff. At least twenty per cent. of the contributors were set aside in a separate group and labelled "no good." Ten per cent. were designated as "fairly good," and the remainder as "good." It must not be assumed that the division had anything to do with ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... your King I have got five hundred men like these. We will die, but we will never surrender. And tell your King another thing; that I will have him chained with my dog inside of half an hour." And when the King heard that he did not dare to meet them, and his army fled before them like chaff before the wind, and within twenty-four hours he had that King chained with his dog. That is the kind of zeal we want. "We will die, but we will never surrender." We will work until Jesus comes, and then we ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody
... recognized as the product of a long line of erroneous theory and zigzag development, but the wheat has largely been sifted and the chaff thrown to the winds of antiquity. Its therapeutic and psychological value is duly recognized ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... he observed, "that king's chaff is better than other folk's corn; but I think that canna be said o' king's soldiers, if they let themselves be beaten wi' a wheen auld carles that are past fighting, and bairns that are no come till't, and wives wi' their rocks and distaffs, the very wally-draigles ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of Americans have been driven at bay by an overwhelming number of Mexicans or greasers, who have suddenly found themselves attacked by a party of howling Comanches. The latter have scattered the Mexicans like chaff, the Americans acting the part of spectators until the rout was complete, when the Comanches turned about and sailed into the Americans. The Kiowas, Comanches, Apaches, Mexicans and Americans afforded just the elements for a complication ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... the senses, gratification of the palate, in short, all the grosser tastes. All that is not only like savages, but like animals. They are merry and contented at the prospect of a savory meal, and they are fond of playing tricks on each other—both sexes chaff and tease constantly. I believe that the development of our larger brain is the intellectual work of man during hundreds and thousands of years, and it would gratify me to see it raised to a still greater state ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... flower and dust, in chaff and grain, He binds Himself and dies! We live by His eternal pain, ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... all that. Pretends to turn up his nose at the theatre and says people make too much fuss about art [the Count is extremely indignant]. But thats only his modesty, because art is his own line, you understand. Mind you dont chaff him ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... caught with such chaff, I told him, through Bombay, if he would consider the ten brass wires final, I would give them, and then go to his palace, not otherwise. He acceded to this, but no sooner got them, than he broke his faith, and said ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... and insufficient. However, sir, I accept your remarks in the same friendly spirit as, I am sure, you have offered them. Permit me, at the same time, as one many years your senior, to say that, in considering your proposals, I shall separate the chaff—of which there is a good deal—from the wheat—of which there is some little; the latter I shall gather into my mind's garner, and I trust it will fall on good soil." I took the old gentleman's hand and shook it warmly, and, as he retired, I made up my mind ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... impossible a few hours before, seemed now a faint reflection of what must soon be reality. I looked round for her, but I could not see her. I started to walk across the room, threading my way through the merry company, who danced no longer, but stood about in groups, bandying chaff and compliments. Engrossed with one another, they hardly remembered to give me passage. Presently I came on William Adolphus, making himself very agreeable to ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... yet laitered a beaker to drain, Then reeled to the linhay for more, When the candle-snoff kindled some chaff from his grain - Flames spread, and red vlankers, wi' might and wi' main, And round beams, thatch, and ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... midst of the company, and told them that Thundel, a savage giant with two heads, had heard of the death of his two kinsmen, and was come to take his revenge on Jack; and that he was now within a mile of the house; the people flying before him like chaff before the wind. At this news the very boldest of the guests trembled; but Jack drew his sword, and said: "Let him come, I have a rod for him also. Pray, ladies and gentlemen, do me the favour to walk into the garden, and you shall soon behold the giant's ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... went about, pretending to examine the several Madonnas, and speaking rubbish about them, while he stood stoopingly in the midst of them like the little withered old man he looked. When I had emptied myself of my chaff, I perceived that the ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... took more than a fair share of the blame, saying he ought to have been more careful; but he was rather distressed when he found that he had a black eye, and that it could not be well before the cricket match, when the boys would be sure to chaff him. ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... amused Keith's acquaintance hugely. Whenever he appeared he was deluged with chaff, all of which he took, good naturedly. He was considered, in a moment of aberration, to have bought an exceedingly doubtful equity. Some thought, he must have a great deal of money, arguing that only the ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... mood was one to which chaff did not commend itself. He snatched his hand from beneath the Doctor's fingers, and picked up some letters ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... speedily to pay his humble homage at his august master's throne, of which he begged leave to be counted the most loyal and constant defender. Such a WARY old BIRD as King Padella was not to be caught by Master Hogginarmo's CHAFF and we shall hear presently how the tyrant treated his upstart vassal. No, no; depend on's, two such rogues do not trust ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was commissioned by the Emperor to decorate with the Iron Cross of the first class, discomfited the Chancellor's attempt to chaff him. "I am authorized," said Bismarck, "to offer you one hundred thalers instead of the cross." "How much is the cross worth?" asked the soldier. "Three thalers." "Very well, then, your highness, I'll take the cross and ninety-seven thalers." ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... in diameter and usually of plaited rattan strips with a rim of thicker rattan. It is held in both hands and by a series of shuffling motions, which are better seen than described, accompained[sic] by a peculiar movement of the thumb of the left hand, the chaff and the little broken fragments of rice are thrown off into another receptacle for the ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... as he made it, that it was not a very able retort, but he was feeling too limp for satisfactory repartee. Criticisms in the Bureau, dealing with his alleged solidity of skull, he did not resent. He attributed them to man's natural desire to chaff his fellow-man. But to be unmasked by the general public in this way was another matter. It struck at ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... to escape and subsequently to be placed under the protection of Augustus. Cato thought that a proper man ought to study oratory, medicine, husbandry, war, and law, and was at liberty to look into Greek literature a little, that he might cull from the mass of chaff and rubbish, as he affected to deem it, some serviceable maxims of practical experience, but he might not study it thoroughly. Varro extended the limit of allowed and fitting studies to grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music, medicine, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... could not be rallied. The moment was full of significance, and I beheld these failures with breathless suspense. In five minutes the pursuers would gain the creek, and in ten, drive our dismayed battalions, like chaff before the wind. I hurried to my horse, that I might be ready to escape. The shell and ball still made music around me. I buckled up my saddle with tremulous fingers, and put my foot upon the stirrup. But a cheer recalled me and a great clapping of hands, as ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... thus cruelly taunting his sensitive rival, I shall simply say that Liszt had not the slightest recollection of ever having imitated Chopin's playing in a darkened room. There may be some minute grains of truth mixed up with all this chaff of fancy—Chopin's displeasure at the liberties Liszt took with his compositions was no doubt one of them—but it ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... disputatious and learned associates that not one of them stood up to plead for the life of Socrates now? Why, the first breath of adversity had blown them away as though they were but mist; and, with these false friends scattered like the coward chaff they were, grim old Socrates ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... The Trinity, truly received, would harmonize science, faith, and vital piety. The Trinity, as it now stands in the belief of Christendom, at once confuses the mind, and leaves it empty. It feeds us with chaff, with empty phrases and forms, with no real inflowing convictions. It seems to lie like a vessel on the shore, of no use where it is, yet difficult to remove and get afloat; but when the tide rises, and the vessel floats, it will be able to bear to and fro ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... by hand with flails, or, if the family had a cow or two (and the tax lists indicate that they did), the grain was separated by driving the livestock around and around over the unbundled straw. Finally, the chaff was removed by throwing the grain into the air while the breeze was flowing. The grain was then ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... boat came alongside just then, and the men passed down their "dunnage" into her amid a brisk fire of good-humoured chaff from their shipmates, and such enquiries as: "Hello, Jim, haven't you got so much as a monkey or a parrot to cheer us up with?" and so on. Then they followed their belongings down the side, and ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... of a knife, flicked out its internal arrangements with a third, and case it into a blood-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped from under his hands as though they were facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them from the vat and thrust them under a thing like a chaff-cutter, which, descending, hewed them into unseemly red gobbets ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... Adrian," he said. "Mr Fordyce and I croak too much. Still, you will find a grain or two of sense among the chaff, as Jack ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... he had been in trouble. He had a red cotton handkerchief tied under his chin, and the genial humor that usually makes his aged face its dwelling-place had given way to an expression of grim melancholy. The young men about the office were inclined to chaff him, but his look of sullen ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... the letter, which generally contained a request of some kind. This request would be surrounded and enveloped in so many words, and often inserted amidst so many odd reasons and excuses, that Mr. Horner (the steward) would sometimes say it was like hunting through a bushel of chaff to find a grain of wheat. Now, in the second column of this book, the grain of meaning was placed, clean and dry, before her ladyship every morning. She sometimes would ask to see the original letter; ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... And the cricket drew forth a feeler and said: 'Take this, my preserver, 'twill bring you aid; should any thing ever prove troublesome, burn this in the fire and I will come.' Then Rasalu laughed with a great big laugh, 'I thank you, weakling! But none of your chaff! You couldn't help me I'll go bail.' So he rode on careless o'er hill and dale, a glittering knight in his shining mail, till he came to the city of King Surkap, whom he'd sworn to kill with his sword so sharp. Now as he rode through ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... loose women. She had striven with all her might that such a one should not be allowed to take her daughter from her, and had striven in vain. He had succeeded;—but his character was not changed by his success. Did she not know him to be chaff that must be separated by the wind from the corn and then consumed in the fire? His character was not altered because that human being whom she loved the best in all the world had fallen into his power. He was not the less chaff,—the ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... he, "a stranger in this great city—to set me a-finding what I never knew? A grain of wheat in a barn full of chaff, mayhap—a needle in a truss of hay—anything I might find but what was sheer impossible. And now am I like to be thrown to the dogs, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... give me the shivers. My heart yearns toward that beautiful young creature, and I believe she is as innocent as my baby. It is a burning shame to send her here, unless there is no doubt of her guilt. Judge Dent is too shrewd an old fox to be baited with chaff, and I am satisfied from what he told you, that he believes her statement. There is nothing I would not do to comfort her, but I would rather have my ears boxed than witness her suffering. The day I carried to her a change of clothes, until her own ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... resolved this charming day In the open field to stray, And have no roof above my head But that whereon the gods do tread. Before the yellow barn I see A beautiful variety Of strutting cocks, advancing stout, And flirting empty chaff about; Hens, ducks, and geese, and all their brood, And turkeys gobbling for their food; While rustics thrash the wealthy floor, And tempt all to ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... the joyous chaff as it fluttered round her, not half understanding it any more than if it had been a strange tongue, and not always guessing the cause of the fits of laughter, chiefly at Lord Ivinghoe's misadventures, over which his little sister and his father were well pleased to tease ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... essentially expressive of national character. English humour, like American and French, has its own flavour; it lacks the high and extravagant fantasy that is so exhilarating in America; it avoids the subtlety of France; it is essentially a laughing humour. The Englishman, who cannot stand chaff himself, always laughs at others. It is curious that while an Englishman's conventions rest upon dislike of what is odd and fantastic—precisely the two most well-known sources of humour—he yet ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... condition to which hardly any series of misfortunes could have reduced the Duchess of Omnium,—but inclined to quiescence by feelings of penitence. She was less disposed than heretofore to attack him with what the world of yesterday calls "chaff," or with what the world of to-day calls "cheek." She would not admit to herself that she was cowed;—but the greatness of the game and the high interest attached to her husband's position did in some ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... discernment &c (intelligence) 498; acuteness, penetration; nuances. dope [Slang], past performances. V. discriminate, distinguish, severalize^; recognize, match, identify; separate; draw the line, sift; separate the chaff from the wheat, winnow the chaff from the wheat; separate the men from the boys; split hairs, draw a fine line, nitpick, quibble. estimate &c (measure) 466; know which is which, know what is what, know 'a hawk from a handsaw' ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... not drink. He was a very safe man in the field. He did not lie outrageously in selling his horses. He did not cheat at cards. As long as he had a drop of drink left in his flask, he would share it with any friend. He never boasted. He was much given to chaff, but his chaff was good-humoured. He was generous with his cigars. Such were his virtues. That he had no adequate means of his own and that he never earned a penny, that he lived chiefly by gambling, that he had no pursuit in life but pleasure, that he never went ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... overdone. Macgregor, after all, was not quite sure about Christina. She laughed at so many things. He was to meet her at seven, and of late he had lost sleep wondering how she would receive his first appearance in the kilt. He dreaded her chaff more than any horrors of war ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... is not the sinners' end— Like the light chaff are they, Which when the softest winds arise, Are quickly ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... happens to be reading worthy of careful consideration?" Not necessarily, by any means. The production of thought parallels the production of grain. An acre of ground, that yields thirty bushels or eighteen hundred pounds of wheat, may easily grow two whole tons of straw and chaff. These latter are absolutely necessary to the formation of the wheat kernel; yet the consumer usually has little use for them; he gets past them to the grain with the least possible delay, often ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... through the depths of the sea, reining back its foaming waves as a rider his white-maned steed; giving to the thirsty—water from the rock, to the hungry—bread from the skies, and scattering the foes of Israel before them, as chaff is driven by the wind. I have heard of the sun's fiery chariot arrested in its course by the voice of a man, speaking with authority given to him by an inspiring Deity. Tell me what is the name of ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... home from school Look in at the open door; They love to see the flaming forge, And hear the bellows roar, And catch the burning sparks that fly Like chaff from a threshing-floor. ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... through them for increasing the happiness of others! These humble but portly representatives of political literature are the log-books of the ship of state. They chart and chronicle the currents and winds along its course, so that from the mass of chaff a grain of guidance may be painfully winnowed out for the benefit of its next voyage, or for the voyages of other craft floundering on the same perilous and baffling sea. Everything comes pat to a log-book. As endless is the medley of memoranda in blue-books. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... said George. "Sometimes, when I listen to the preachers, I get so befuddled and mixed up that there's nothing but a big pile of chaff, with now and then a few stray grains of truth, and the parson keeps the air so full of the dust and dirt that you'd rather he wouldn't hunt for the grain of truth at all. Then I'm an infidel. And again I see something like that last night, and I believe it must be true. And then ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... foam, and far as the eye could pierce through the gloom, not another prahu was in sight. The tempest had scattered far and wide the barks of the fierce warriors as the summer breeze would the light chaff. The working of the vessel, as she was tossed up and down by the waves, caused her to leak most alarmingly, and all hands were set to work to bale her out. In this we of course very willingly joined, ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... the utmost pains with his charger. As long as the war lasted, he looked upon him as his fellow-helper in all emergencies and fed him carefully with hay and corn. But when the war was over, he only allowed him chaff to eat and made him carry heavy loads of wood, subjecting him to much slavish drudgery and ill-treatment. War was again proclaimed, however, and when the trumpet summoned him to his standard, the Soldier put on his charger ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... honourable Roman, when he reflected on the fearfully rapid decline of the nation since that great age. Then the Italian slaves stood like a wall against the veterans of Hannibal; now the Italian militia were scattered like chaff before the bludgeons of their runaway serfs. Then every plain captain acted in case of need as general, and fought often without success, but always with honour; now it was difficult to find among all the officers of rank a leader of even ordinary efficiency. Then ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... it almost makes me laugh To see men leaving the golden grain, To gather in piles the pitiful chaff That old Peter Lombard thrashed with his brain, To have it caught up and tossed again On the horns of the Dumb ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... lovely in temper, rigid in etiquette, learned in precedence, an oracle in court traditions, a terror to the young maids-of-honor, and always quarrelling with her own sisters, younger, fairer, poorer than herself. Her mind and will were as active as in her girlhood, but they ground chaff instead of wheat. Whether her sisters should dine at the Queen's table, when she never had; who should be her trainbearer at the royal marriage; whether the royal Spanish father-in-law, on the same occasion, should or should not salute the Queen-mother; who, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... have kind impulses in this direction. When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horsechestnuts, I own I enter into Nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... is fair—and though I buy this Knowledge at the vast Price of all my Repose; yet I must own, 'tis a better Bargain than chaff'ring of a Heart for feign'd Embraces—Thou hast undone me—yet must have my Friendship; and 'twill be still some Ease in this Extreme, to see thee yet ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... and fled panic-struck in all directions, at the first sight of their terrible foe. Two Spaniards lost their lives and two thousand Netherlanders. It was natural that these consummate warriors should despise such easily slaughtered victims. A single stroke of the iron flail, and the chaff was scattered to the four winds; a single sweep of the disciplined scythe, and countless acres were in an instant mown. Nevertheless, although beaten constantly, the Netherlanders were not conquered. Holland and Zealand ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... believe it reached him afore he saw my uncle at all; so she was brought home* that day, and, on the Thursday night after, I, my father, uncle, and several other friends, went there and made the match. She had sixty guineas, that her grandfather left her, thirteen head of cattle, two feather- and two chaff-beds, with sheeting, quilts, and blankets; three pieces of bleached linen, and a flock of geese of her own rearing—upon the whole, among ourselves, it wasn't aisy ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... interpretations. No doubt, on the whole, Nature protects her best. But it would not be difficult to bring together an array of facts as striking as those produced by the evolutionists in favor of their theory, to show that sexual selection is by no means always favorable to the elimination of the chaff, and the preservation of the wheat. A natural attraction, independent of strength or beauty, is an unquestionable element in this problem, and its action is seen among animals as well as among men. The fact that fine progeny are not infrequently the offspring ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... Nicholas. But there was no need of words to tell what was in the mind of Nicholas II; that had been made quite evident by the new laws and the new Ministry. Before the Duma lay the heavy task of continuing the Revolution, despite the fact that the revolutionary army had been scattered as chaff is ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... the introduction that Wm. Gatewood writes a more cautious letter upon the subject than his son Silas. "It is not a very easy matter to catch old birds with chaff," and I presume if Silas had the writing of his letter over again, he would not be so free in telling all he knew, and even more, for the sake of making out a strong case. The object of his writing such a letter will doubtless be understood ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... natives joined the movement, and troops had to be sent to suppress the rising. Having assumed the title of King of the Tagalogs, he pretended to have direct heavenly support, telling the ignorant masses that he was invulnerable and that the soldiers' bullets would fly from them like chaff before ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... upon the pale-faces as the natural friends and benefactors of his species. Until within the last few years, no pen has ventured to write impartially of the Indian character, and no one has attempted to separate the wheat from the chaff in the generally received accounts which have come down to us from our forefathers. The fact is that the Indian is very much what his white brother has made him. The red man was the original possessor of this continent, ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... ancient controversies. The "drum ecclesiastic" of the seventeenth century would sound a mere lullaby to us. Here and there a priest or a belated dissenting minister may amuse himself by threshing out once more the old chaff of dead and buried dogmas. There are people who can argue gravely about baptismal regeneration or apostolical succession. Such doctrines were once alive, no doubt, because they represented the form in which certain still living ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Hardly had the crowd begun to assemble next night before he appeared once more upon the barrel and began to read with the same monotonous vigour, tripping over words! muddling up sentences, but still boring along through chapter after chapter. Laughter, threats, chaff—every weapon short of actual violence—was used to deter him, but all with the same want of success. Soon it was found that there was a method in his proceedings. When silence reigned, or when the conversation was of an innocent nature, the reading ceased. A single word of blasphemy, ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... white sunlight. Under the gas-lamps who shall tell diamond from paste? Bring it into the sunlight: does it stand that test? Then it is good. And the children! they are the waiting earth on which we fling our store. Is it chaff and dust or living seed? Wait and watch. I shower my thoughts over our Paul, Mrs. Kelver. They seem to me brilliant, deep, original. The young beggar swallows them, forgets them. They were rubbish. Then ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... may tell you much that is clearly and ludicrously irrelevant, or untrue, on account of inaccuracy of observation, confusion of cause and effect, or a mental color-blindness produced by the disease itself. But these things can all be brushed aside like the chaff from the wheat if checked up by the picture of the disease ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... or will he have her fast and tight? And in the former case, the bats are tearing their legs off for just number nought. And in the latter, there 's a wicket down, and what you may call a widower walking it bat on shoulder, parted from his mate for that mortal innings, and likely to get more chaff than consolation ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... say what is true. Besides, Cleon shall not be able to accuse me of attacking Athens before strangers;(1) we are by ourselves at the festival of the Lenaea; the period when our allies send us their tribute and their soldiers is not yet. Here is only the pure wheat without chaff; as to the resident strangers settled among us, they and the citizens are one, like the straw ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... dares to talk of party, And the coming President, When the rebels threaten 'bolder raids,' And all the land is rent? How dare we learn 'they gather strength,' by every telegraph, If an army of a million could have scattered them like chaff! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the curate in The Mother is again reminiscent of Harte's technique. Like Dickens and like Bret Harte, Duncan was a frank moralist. His chief concern was in winnowing the souls of men and women bare of the chaff of petty circumstances which covered them. His stories all contain at least a minor chord of sentiment, but are usually free from the sentimentality which mars some of Harte's sketches. He is not ashamed to employ pathos, but his tragic situations are rarely overstrained and ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... working in the same field and the experienced master passed over to the neophyte the yellow papers and mildewed volumes in, which he was digging, with suggestions as to how I might get out of the chaff the wheat that I wanted. He invited me to his home at Bromley in Kent, where he allowed me to read the proofs of the volume in his own great series which was just then in press. It related to matters that were vital to my purpose and I had the rare pleasure of reading ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... had become of his disputatious and learned associates that not one of them stood up to plead for the life of Socrates now? Why, the first breath of adversity had blown them away as though they were but mist; and, with these false friends scattered like the coward chaff they were, grim old Socrates turned to Xanthippe ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... of meaning is only disguised by different modes of expression, and when the term has been closely sifted, to their mutual astonishment both parties discover the same thing lying under the bran and chaff after this heated operation. Plato and Aristotle probably agreed much better than the opposite parties they raised up imagined; their difference was in the manner of expression, rather than in the points discussed. The Nominalists ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... and agent, even in 1904, still has a few of the patriarchal attributes in the eyes of the tenants. But to sift wheat from chaff is easier than to sift truth from the lying blandishments ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... rail to Malbourne. Everard asleep; manly, cheerful, intellectual, healthy in body and mind. Cyril awake; consumed by unspeakable sorrow. Everard wakes; Cyril suddenly becomes gay in response to his friend's high spirits. They chaff each other. Cyril preaches to Everard, when Henry scolds him for fasting, and his laxity of faith and practice. They pass Belminster, when Cyril betrays unconscious ambition at Everard's jesting prophecy that he would preach as bishop ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... against all manner of friction. The continual pain I felt made me fretful, and my peevishness was increased by the mortification of my pride in seeing those miserable wretches, whom a hard gale of wind would have scattered through the air like chaff, bear those toils with alacrity under which I ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... not,' Charley said. 'We should never hear the end of it; they would chaff us out ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... for their part, though seeing Franklin as a fair object for chaff, conceived of him as wholly suitable. Though they chaffed him, they never did so to his disadvantage, and they were respectful spectators of his enterprise. They had the nicest sense of ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... us gather up the sunbeams Lying all along our path; Let us keep the wheat and roses Casting out the thorns and chaff. ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... Indian muchacha was seated at the metate (hand-mill), which is one of the most important articles of the Californian culinary apparatus. While the muchacha ground, or rather crushed, the wheat between the stones, the ranchera, with a platter-shaped basket, cleansed it of dust, chaff, and all impure particles, by tossing the grain in the basket. The flour being manufactured and sifted through a cedazo, or coarse sieve, the labour of kneading the dough was performed by the muchacha. An iron plate ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... That's subject to no academic rule; You may find it in the jeering of a jest, Or distil it from the folly of a fool. I can teach you with a quip, if I've a mind; I can trick you into learning with a laugh; Oh, winnow all my folly, and you'll find A grain or two of truth among the chaff! ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... of the French, among whom God was disregarded or forgotten; and, elevated by the importance of his subject, he described the Almighty as mustering his wrath to descend on that nation, and disperse it as chaff in a whirlwind. He called on them to look towards their home of England, and to see with what eager devotion the inhabitants worshiped the golden image of Commerce, and laid the tribute of all their thoughts ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... purpose in this diatribe and consider Doria's object in choosing him for a confessor, Brendon, while swift enough to regard the attack on Jenny as foul and false, yet did not hesitate to believe that which his own desire drove him to believe. He sifted the grain from the chaff, doubtfully guided by his own passion, and saw the Italian's wife free. But he could not see her false. He scorned the baleful picture that Giuseppe had painted and guessed that his purpose was to cut the ground from under ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... is preaching from unworthy motives and modes of work which offend our tastes and prejudices, and that there are types of evangelistic earnestness which have errors mixed up with them, are we inclined to say 'Nevertheless Christ is proclaimed, and therein I rejoice, Yea, and will rejoice'? Much chaff may be blended with the seeds sown; the chaff will lie inert and the seed will grow. Such tolerance is the very opposite of the carelessness which comes from languid indifference. The one does not mind what a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in this fashion. Besides, as a general rule, he had been quite good friends with Mrs. Pennington's hired girls. She had had three strapping damsels during his sojourn in Riverside, and he used to sit on this very doorstep and chaff them. They had all been saucy and talkative. This girl was ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... as flowers, little windfallen apples and pears, acorns, etc., or heaps of hay, straw or cut grass. As we wandered about the gardens—for we were left to do exactly as we liked—I got quite accustomed to seeing her hunt out and tread upon such things, and used to chaff her about it. At that time I was—as I am still—fond of lying at full length on a thick hearthrug before a good fire. One evening as I was lying in this way and we were alone, A. crossed the room to reach ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... not mean to pain, but only to chaff, your brave daughter. I think that Monsieur Scott is most fortunate in having a friend, a beautiful friend, so loyal to him, and so jealous of his fair fame. But to pass to other matters. Have you had visits from any emissaries of the ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... raced over the open ground in a mad dash toward the Belgian line; and as they charged, the rapid-fire guns of the great forts poured forth their answer. Great holes were cut in the German columns, and men and horses were mowed down like chaff. ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... for the shreds of Austria she desired—Tyrol, Dalmatia, Istria, and Albania. Rumania and Greece had joined with Servia and bound the Balkans into a temporary brotherhood. Together with Russia and Italy at Haskoi they had scattered the crazy Turkish army like chaff and swarmed on to the Bosphorus. The allied fleet drove a withering wedge of steel and fire through ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... another, an' they had it painted red, white and blue, an' sent it lapt up i' silk paper. Old Duke wor ommost malancholy when he saw it, but Mary nobbut laft, an started on an' blackleeaded it, an' in a varry little time he wor set i'th' 'Quiet Corner,' wi as handsome a peg leg as tha'd wish to see. They chaff him a gooid bit abaat weddin Mary, but he taks it all i' gooid part, an' they've sent all sooarts o' presents to him. One day last week they sent him a creddle, an' Mary wor soa mad wol shoo gate th' blocker an' wor baan to ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... may seem, it was indeed Lady Clare. But oh, who would have recognized in this skeleton, covered with a rusty-black skin and tousled mane and forelock in which chaff and dirt were entangled—who would have recognized in this drooping and rickety creature the proud, the dainty, the exquisite Lady Clare? Her beautiful tail, which had once been her pride, was now a mere scanty wisp; and ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... days of the Australian diggings 'Joe' was the warning word shouted out when the police or gold commissioners were seen approaching, but is now the chaff ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Selborne with a smile. And all the while it is the word that he is intent upon. You may trace his reading by some fine word that has not escaped him, but has been garnered for use when his fan has been quick to purge away the chaff of commonplace. He is thus fastidious and alert in many languages. You wonder at the delicacy of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhyme in the Anglo-Norman of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the brief ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... than those who had followed it all their lives, he had a most unlucky propensity to put his devices into execution, and as his information was, for the most part, picked up from the column headed "varieties," in the county newspaper, where of course there is some chaff mingled with the grain, and as the figments in question were generally ill understood and imperfectly recollected, it is really surprising that the young gentleman did not occasion more mischief than actually occurred by the quips and quiddities which he ...
— Aunt Deborah • Mary Russell Mitford
... with dimes on the eyes walking, To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning, Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going, Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving, A few idly owning, and they ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... change of mounts. On such occasions he always received the unwelcome and unasked advice of the other boys, but as most of the boys were expert at that business there was slight chance for railing and chaff. But if for any reason he should get the laugh from his companions he always took it in the same spirit in which it was given, only waiting his chance to get even, and such a chance was not long in coming. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... making brave attempts to hide it under a fire of jocose criticism. It was plain, however, that morally 'Bert held the upper hand. Whilst they had been playing silly games around the Quay, he had walked to St Martin's and done the real thing. No amount of chaff could hide that his had been the glory of the initiative. Indeed, he showed less of annoyance with his critics than of boredom with 'Biades, who, whichever way his big brother turned, revolved punctually as a satellite, ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... the wealth ye cannot use, And lack the riches all may gain,— O blind and wanting wit to choose, Who house the chaff and burn the grain! And still doth life with starry towers Lure to the bright, divine ascent!— Be yours the things ye would: be ours The ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... and Montagu took the first turn at the oars, while Wildney steered. Graham's "crabs," and Wildney's rather crooked steering, gave plenty of opportunity for chaff, and they were full of fun, as the oar-blades splashed and sparkled in the waves. Then they made Jim sing them some of his old sailor-songs as they rowed, and joined vigorously in the choruses. They had arranged ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... and laughed, and they passed on together with careless jesting and friendly chaff. Saltash had always been kind to young Bernard Brian. The boy had been a helpless cripple in his childhood, and he had developed a keen appreciation for all kindness during those days which nothing could now efface. Whatever Saltash's morals, he was a friend, and as such Bunny never failed ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... ambition to win the rich master of Ellsworth made her sweep aside like chaff every obstacle she found in her way, and on leaving Richmond, a cold and cruel letter went to Vernon Ashley, breaking their engagement, with the lying excuse that she had been mistaken in her feelings, and found she did not ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... he said. "Mr Fordyce and I croak too much. Still, you will find a grain or two of sense among the chaff, ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... clouds and darkness enveloped the little nation, and when the snake was on the point of seizing it, a hurricane arose from the four corners of the world, covering the snake as clothes cover a man, and blew it to bits. The fragments scattered hither and thither like chaff before the wind, until not a speck of the monster was to be found anywhere. Then the cloud and the darkness vanished from above the little nation, the splendor of the sun again ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... he had never ceased to wonder what there had been in him to win the love of a woman like her, or to regret that fate had not taken him instead of her. Heaven knows his calling had been risky enough. But—that was how things went sometimes—the wheat was taken and the chaff remained. ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... not an hour of it but is trembling with destinies,—not a moment of which, once past, the appointed work can ever be done again, or the neglected blow struck on the cold iron. Take your vase of Venice glass out of the furnace, and strew chaff over it in its transparent heat, and recover that to its clearness and rubied glory when the north wind has blown upon it; but do not think to strew chaff over the child fresh from God's presence, and to bring the heavenly colors back to him—at ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... something of every country from the inside. He had been brought at various times during his long diplomatic career into contact with most of the interesting people in the world. He knew well how to separate the grain from the chaff according to the tastes of his listener. The pathos of his present position appealed to her irresistibly. The possibilities of his life had been so great, fortune had treated him always so strangely. The greatest of his schemes had come so near to success, ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hurt. We shall then destroy their bastilles, so that they will have no place of shelter to fly back to; and then we shall fall upon them hip and thigh on the south side, and drive them before us as chaff before the wind. They must needs then disperse themselves altogether, having no more cover to hide themselves in; so will the enemies of the Lord be dispersed, and the ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... reasons best known to herself Miss Hastings put off from day to day this final expedition until Blair began to chaff ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... company, and told them that Thundel, a savage giant with two heads, had heard of the death of his two kinsmen, and was come to take his revenge on Jack; and that he was now within a mile of the house, the people flying before him like chaff before the wind. At this news the very boldest of the guests trembled; but Jack drew his sword, and said, "Let him come, I have a rod for him also. Pray, ladies and gentlemen, do me the favour to walk into the garden, and you shall soon behold the ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... I think is certainly the case with blackbirds and others that are known to fight for the youngest and handsomest females. One of each pair being already an 'old bird,' will be competent to instruct its younger partner (not only in the futility of 'chaff,' but) in the selection of a site for a nest and how to build it; then, how eggs are hatched and young ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... not keep Smugg's secret; I felt under no obligation to keep it. He deserved no mercy, and I exposed him at breakfast that very morning. But I could not help being a little sorry for him when he came in. He bent his head under the shower of reproach, chaff, and gibing; he did not try to excuse himself; he simply opened his book at the old place, and we all shouted the old ode, substituting "Betsa" for "Pyrrha" wherever we could. Still, in spite of our jocularity, we all felt ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... told him he might still address me as an unmarried lady, though if I hadn't been so particular, I'd had good chances of matrimony. He was polite enough: "He couldn't look at me and doubt me." But I were not to be caught with such chaff from such a fellow as him, and so I told him; and, by way of being even, I asked him after his father (who I knew had turned him out of doors), as if they was the best friends as ever was. So then, to spite me—for you see we were getting savage, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... out of the liquor traffic? I have done all I could to induce him to abstain, and he has abstained several months at a time and then suddenly like a flash of lightning the temptation returns and all his resolutions are scattered like chaff before the wind. I have been blamed for living with him, but Miss Belle were you to see him in his moments of remorse, and hear his bitter self reproach, and his earnest resolutions to reform, you would as soon leave a drowning man to struggle alone in the water as to forsake him in his weakness ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... wrinkle of his mates' faces. It was not long also before we had exhausted almost every topic of conversation; that is why we were most of the time silent, unless we were chaffing each other; but one cannot always find something about which to chaff another man, especially when that man is one's mate. Neither were we much given to finding fault with one another; how, indeed, could one of us poor devils be in a position to find fault with another, when we ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... partially roused, he drives across the street to us. DAUBINET directs him, and on we go, lumbering and rattling through the town, meeting only one other voiture, whose driver appears infinitely amused at his friend having obtained a fare. Some chaff passes between them, which to me is unintelligible, and which DAUBINET professes not to catch, but I fancy, whatever it is, it is not highly complimentary to our cocher's fares. In one quarter through which we drive, they are setting up the booths ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... be profane, because his father's friends bored him by their solemnity. He was flippant, because they were dull; careless, because they were cautious; and fast, because they were slow. He had an eye for the weak points of things. He delighted in what is called "chaff." He affected to regard all things with indifference, and was tolerant of everything except what he was pleased to denounce as shams. Upon this point he would occasionally become very warm. If his sense of truth and honour were touched, he became ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... fine fellows, though Joe had had a college education, while Jock claimed only to have been dragged up in the bush. Three times a day, about an hour before their own meals, they weighed out for the horses the rations of chaff, oats, hay, linseed and so forth, and issued them to fatigues from the troops, the service corps and the mounted machine-gunners, who came slipping and sliding along the deck in ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... the limitations of the human individuality.' Thus, in our discrimination of so-called inspired literature, language or thoughts, we must learn that whatever is opposite God, the universal idea of goodness, is the chaff that must be blown away. In other words it is the assumption of mortal thought instead of absolute knowledge of ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... given the quantity of wheat per acre, the weight of straw cut close to the ground to the acre, and also that of the chaff. These researches show, that from ninety-three to one hundred and fifty pounds of soluble flint are required to form an acre of wheat; and I will add from my own investigations, that three-fourths ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... ahead of the blast as if on wings, then, dropping to the surface of the snow, opened out, whereupon some twisting current bore it aloft again, and it swooped down the hill like a great bat, followed by a wail of despair from the owner. Other loose articles on the top of the load were picked up like chaff—coffee pot, frying pan, and dishes—then hurtled away like charges of canister, rolling, leaping, skipping down into the swale ahead, then up over the next ridge and out of sight. But the men were too fiercely beset ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... always existed between him and Lois. He hated fuss; and his other sisters were tiresomely fussy and maddeningly disingenuous. In half an hour Lois had learned all she cared to know of the family history. She merely dipped into the bin, brought up a handful of wheat, blew away the chaff, eyed the remaining kernels with a sophisticated eye, and tossed ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... going to be driven by work, nor aristocracy neither. It's a creepin' in on us, though, like the snake in the garden, just to make folks think they can get more comfort out of fixin's than they can out of the good old truths. I can't be fed on chaff; ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... each end of the trap with it, if a box trap, and put two or three drops on the bridge, leaving the paper or rag in the trap. Of whatever kind the trap is, it should be scented; but once in a twelvemonth will be sufficient. Then throw some chaff mixed with a little wheat about the bottom of the trap, in order to deceive the rats; for they are very sagacious, and will not enter a suspicious place. This will be necessary to be done only at the first time ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... of chaff, I tell you,' said Mr F.'s Aunt, glaring round Flora on her enemy. 'It's the only thing for a proud stomach. Let him eat up every morsel. Drat him, give him a meal ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... whether there is an American plow in Spain, much less a steam plow. Sowing and reaping machines are here unknown, and grain is tread out by oxen and mules just as it was in Scripture times, and cleaned by women, who toss it in the air to scatter the chaff. Everything is primitive and Oriental ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... Darius. Upon his crown, In the midst of the barn-yard, he came down, In a wonderful whirl of tangled strings, Broken braces and broken springs, Broken tail and broken wings, Shooting-stars, and various things, Barn-yard litter of straw and chaff, And much that wasn't so sweet by half. Away with a bellow fled the calf; And what was that? Did the gosling laugh? 'Tis a merry roar from the old barn door, And he hears the voice of Jotham crying, "Say, D'rius! how do you like flyin'?" Slowly, ruefully, where ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... There, in 1856, we find him in "a terribly busy state, finishing up engines for innumerable gunboats and steam frigates for the ensuing campaign." From half-past eight in the morning till nine or ten at night, he worked in a crowded office among uncongenial comrades, "saluted by chaff, generally low, personal, and not witty," pelted with oranges and apples, regaled with dirty stories, and seeking to suit himself with his surroundings or (as he writes it) trying to be as little like himself as possible. His lodgings were hard by, "across a dirty ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the old school—Voltaire of the new. The wit of the one arose from an exuberance of enjoyment—of the other, from an excess of indifference, real or assumed. Voltaire had no enthusiasm for one thing or another: he made light of every thing. In his hands all things turn to chaff and dross, as the pieces of silver money in the Arabian Nights were changed by the hands of the enchanter into little dry crumbling leaves! He is a Parisian. He never exaggerates, is never violent: he treats things with the most ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... in the mountains of chaff there may be a grain worth preserving, as where I read that at Haddon Hall the old lady who showed the house, and who boasted that her ancestors had been servitors of the possessors of it for more than three hundred years, pointed out to me the portrait of one of them, who had been "forester," ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... as well as beneficial practices a man can have is to take fifteen minutes to an hour each day and devote the time to sizing up things, to planning the day's work for the morrow, to threshing the wheat from the chaff, to reviewing the accomplishments ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... resembles the image, whose form was terrible, but the gold, and silver, and brass, and iron of which rested upon feet of clay. And a stone smote the feet of clay; and the iron, and the brass, and the silver, and the gold, were broken in pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors, and the wind ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... solemn religious chaff; the Shaykh had doubtless often dipped his hand abroad in such dishes; but like a good Moslem, he contented himself at home with wheaten scones and olives, a kind of sacramental food like bread and wine in southern Europe. But his retort would be acceptable to the True ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... themselves outflanked and helpless on the road against the Virginian horsemen, who could ride across country. Kenly had just made a second stand, when down came the Virginians, led by Colonel Flournoy at racing speed over fence and ditch, scattering the Federal cavalry like chaff before the wind and smashing into the Federal infantry. Two hundred and fifty really efficient cavalry took two guns (complete with limbers, men, and horses), killed and wounded a hundred and fifty-four of their opponents, and captured ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... was taking shape when young Strangeways, who was willing to exchange chaff with Gussie Moy, but was gentleman enough to feel the indecorum of the whole thing, moved across to his sister, and muttered, "I say, Con, they are getting up that stupid trick of election of a queen of beauty. ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Turning at once, his party joined them, and fell upon the advancing enemy. Taken wholly by surprise, when they believed that victory was won, the two or three hundred men who had passed the abattis were swept before the crowd of peasants like chaff. The latter, pressing close upon their heels, followed them through the gaps that ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... vocation render good service to the community. I am strongly disposed to believe there are very few debates in Parliament so important to the public welfare as a really good picture. I have also a notion that any number of bundles of the driest legal chaff that ever was chopped would be cheaply expended for one really meritorious engraving. At a highly interesting annual festival at which I have the honour to assist, and which takes place behind two fountains, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... bodies for each other, shown when charged with electricity. If charged with electricity of the same sign they repel each other. If with opposite they attract each other. The classic attraction and subsequent repulsion of bits of straw and chaff by the excited piece of amber is a case of electrostatic attraction and repulsion. (See Electricity, Static—Electrostatics—Coulomb's Laws of Electrostatic Attraction ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... remarked Hsueeh P'an vehemently, "the primary idea I had in view was to ask you to come out a moment sooner and I forgot to respectfully shun the expression. But by and bye, when you wish to chaff me, just you likewise allude to my father, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the forces of Revolution spent themselves and Metternich drove the rebels before him, as the hurricane blows chaff. Order was re-established in Vienna and in the ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... the idea of making straight for any particular opening in the dense ranks, but picking out the smaller parties of the enemy—that is to say, mobs not more than double our own strength; and when we could get within striking distance they were punished and scattered like chaff before the wind, in spite of the scattered volleys they sent at us ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... observed that latterly he had been singly devoted to Amleth. The young man's reply was apt. Not to seem forgetful of his informant's service, he said that he had seen a certain thing bearing a straw flit by suddenly, wearing a stalk of chaff fixed in its hinder parts. The cleverness of this speech, which made the rest split with laughter, rejoiced the heart ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... he might as well have followed the proverbial needle in the haystack. Hundreds of cabs, carts, busses, and waggons were passing the Clarendon. He assaulted and stopped four wrong cabs, endured a deal of chaff, and finally returned to the ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... were counsels of captains and doctors. Soldier stomachs that could tackle mule and horse meat could stand any load, said the boys, and loaded accordingly. Cheer and laughter and merry-making, fun and chaff and jollity, ran through the ranks, where all, but another sun agone, was silence and despond. The rough campaign was practically over. Only scattered bands of hostiles remained, in this part of the country at least. Rest and recuperation for those "tatterdemalions" would be the enforced order ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... prodigiously, for practically all Riseholmites now were at some stage of instruction, with the exception of Hermy and Ursy, who pronounced the whole thing "piffle," and, as gentle chaff for Georgie, sometimes stood on one leg in the middle of the lawn and held their breath. Then Hermy would say One, Two, Three, and they shouted "Om" at the tops of their discordant voices. Now that the Guru was practically interned in The Hurst, they had actually never ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... had a carriage to herself. She settled herself comfortably in a corner—it was good to be coming home, even as things were. The day was very sunny and still. The blue sky was slightly misted—a yellow haze which smelt of chaff and corn smudged together the sky and the marsh and the distant sea. The farms with their red and yellow roofs were like ripe apples lying in ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... very wise saying: 'Here is a man trying to fill a bushel with chaff. Now if I fill it with wheat first, it is better than to fight him.' This apothegm contains in it the whole of what I would say on the subject ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fine ice cut their faces like knives; or again, on still, sharp days, when the touch of metal was like the bite of fangs and echoes filled the valley to the brim with an empty clanging. But they were no ordinary fellows—no chaff, to drift with the wind: they were men toughened by exposure to the breath of the north, men winnowed out from many thousands of their kind. Nor were they driven: they were led. Mellen was among them constantly; so was the soft-voiced smiling Parker, not to mention O'Neil with his ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... some lucky prediction that we shall conquer? But I have shaken the oracle books till there is only chaff in them. Or a bribe to Adeimantus and his fellows? But gold can buy only souls, not courage. Or another brave speech and convincing argument? Had I the tongue of Nestor and the wisdom of Thales, would those doltish ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... who are so protected by society as to have dismissed all thought of self-defense, the whole force of whose life is turned to peaceful pursuits. These arrogant conspirators against government, with Chinese vanity, believed that they could blow away these self-respecting citizens as chaff from the battlefield. Few of them are left alive to ponder their mistake! Here, then, are the roots of this civil war. It was not a quarrel of wild beasts, it was an inflection of the strife of ages, between power and right, between ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... When a newspaper writer commented that a "consensus of opinion among biologists" would probably rate Dr. Loeb as a man of lively imagination rather than an inerrant investigator of natural phenomena, he felt called to chaff the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... American home or how much the common interests of mankind will be helped! What a blessing is wealth when rightly used! True society looks inwardly and not outwardly, and all that does not belong to it falls away as does wheat fanned by a sheet; the trash and chaff being ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... understood to mean the wooden pavement. Things went much more smoothly wherever it was established. He contended for the abolition of nose-bags, which he designated as an intolerable nuisance; urged the prohibition of chaff with oats, as unfit for the use of able-bodied horses; and indeed evinced the truth of his professions, that he 'yielded to no horse in an anxious desire to promote the true interests of the horse-community.' An OLD ENGLISH HUNTER impressed upon the young delegates the good ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... deficiencies are worse than handicaps to an editor. They are absolute disqualifications. An editor's first duty is to discriminate, to sift, to winnow the few grains of wheat out of the bushels of chaff that come to his mill. Editors must have a very keen sense of the fitness of things. It is true that the discriminating reader of newspapers and magazines may be tempted to feel at times that this sense of the fitness of things is very rare in ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... naturally from the first. Had he been unfortunate enough to have had an educated taste, we should have had a series of poems from which, as from his letters, we could sift here and there a kernel from the mass of chaff. Coleridge's youthful efforts give no promise whatever of that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest, tenderest, most original and most purely imaginative poems of modern times. Byron's "Hours ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... grown, I have observed already how many things I wanted, to fence it, secure it, mow or reap it, cure or carry it home, thresh, part it from the chaff, and save it. Then I wanted a mill to grind it, sieves to dress it, yeast and salt to make it into bread, and an oven to bake it in; and all these things I did without, as shall be observed; and yet the corn was an inestimable comfort and ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... differs from epoch to epoch, but it does not differ much. And we may be perfectly sure that our own age will make a favourable impression upon that excellent judge, posterity. Therefore, beware of disparaging the present in your own mind. While temporarily ignoring it, dwell upon the idea that its chaff contains about as much wheat as any similar quantity of chaff ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... in my doubt concerning the usefulness of his persistence in re-writing, by my regret that he destroyed so many of his romances, as not worthy of him. "King's chaff is better than other folk's corn" says our proverb. In his day, I bored him by pressing him to write more, and more rapidly; he never could have been commonplace, he never could have been less than excellent. But his conscience was adamant: no man was less of an improviser, as, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... magnitude of the powers which had made him their puppet; of the utter futility of the efforts that he or any other man could make against them. They were like elemental, cosmic forces; they held all the world in their grip, and a common man was as much at their mercy as a bit of chaff in a tempest. ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... a tale before," Masters answered, with a sneer. "Job Masters is too old a bird to be caught by such chaff. I'll take my risks, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the room, "you have been—we are fire-brands plucked from the burning. You have said all that any one could have said; yes, and done all that could be done; never repeated any malicious speech, selected all the wheat that could be culled from the chaff. You have softened my obdurate heart. I have done wrong; you have shown me to the way of return. If Jessie will come forward and forgive and ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... friends remain,' That 'Loss is common to the race'— And common is the common-place, And vacant chaff well ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... headmaster always sent a notice round, just before the match, to be read to every form, that the boys were desired not to indulge in any "ironical cheering" at Lord's; this was his euphemism for what we called "chaff," and I fear that on this occasion the warning was disregarded even ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... hatchets. This was drawn by two horses or oxen over the bundles of corn laid on the ground, until the whole of the corn was separated from the straw. It was then thrown up into the air by means of shovels, so that the chaff might be separated from the grain ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... indeed, sometimes a subject of chaff in my family when Cromer was staying with us at Newlands that he would begin ten or twelve sentences in the course of a Saturday to Monday visit with: "Strachey, you and I have been absolutely right from beginning to end." And so I believe we were, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... argue, not to overcome an opponent, but to make truth evident. Minds in debate should resemble flails on the threshing floor, that labour not to overcome each other, but to separate the solid grains from the chaff and straw. ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... rush made inside the shack, each seeming desirous of being the first to render Bumpus assistance. All but the scoutmaster entered in this promiscuous way, and Thad was too wise a bird to be caught with chaff. What if this should be some sort of a trap, into which the rest of the boys were rushing headlong? He did not stop to consider how they might be caught, but made up his mind that it was policy on his part to stand guard there ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... way in the back numbers of Punch. But, if we may be permitted the slang, the type itself is anything but "a back number." Du Maurier's work bids fair to live in the enjoyment of many generations, from the fact that its chaff, for the most part, is directed against vanities that recur in human nature. Mr. James tells us that the lady of whom we write "hesitates at nothing; she is very modern. If she doesn't take the aesthetic line more than is necessary, she finds it necessary to take it a little; for if we are to ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... /n./ 1. The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after they have been separated from the printed portion. Also called {selvage} and {perf}. 2. obs. The confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or paper tape; this has also been called 'chaff', 'computer confetti', and 'keypunch droppings'. This use may now be mainstream; it has been reported seen (1993) in directions for a ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... know not how the subject could be better illustrated, than by separating the wheat from the chaff in Madame Necker's book; place them in two heaps, and then summon the reader to choose; giving him first a near-sighted glass to examine the two;—it might be a Christian, an astronomical, or an artistic glass,—any kind of good glass to obviate acquired defects in the eye. ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... he gives seems to entail a set of conditions that everybody knows: "Now," Maury says, "if bits of cork or chaff, or any floating substance, be put into a basin, and a circular motion be given to the water, all the light substances will be found crowding together near the center of the pool, where there is the least motion. Just ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Agricultural Ant, which not only lays up stores of grain, but prepares the soil for the crop; plants the seed (of a certain plant called ant-rice); keeps the ground free from weeds; and finally reaps the harvest, and separating the chaff from the grain, packs away the latter, and throws the chaff outside of the plantation. In "Wood's Bible Animals" you can read a full account of this ant, and I think that after hearing of its exploits, we can believe almost anything that we hear ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... facts of life he found. The full ripe grain he winnowed from the chaff; And in the pine tree,—rent by lightning round, He saw God's ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... 22. Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink: 23. Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him! 24. Therefore as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust: because they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel. 25. Therefore is the anger of the Lord kindled against ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... pieces, and were only too eager awaiting the command "fire." But when it did come the result was telling—men falling on top of men, rear rank pushing forward the first rank, only to be swept away like chaff. Our batteries on the hills in rear and those mounted on our infantry line were raking the field, the former with shell and solid shot, the latter with grape and canister. Smoke settling on the ground, soon rendered objects in front ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... of a rich blackguard) faring with her battered fineries and upon her homely errand, across the plains of ocean, and past the gorgeous scenery of dawn and sunset; and the ship's company, so strangely assembled, so Britishly chuckle-headed, filling their days with chaff in place of conversation; no human book on board with them except Hadden's Buckle, and not a creature fit either to read or to understand it; and the one mark of any civilised interest being when Carthew ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on Ceres' sacred floor, the swain Spreads the wide fan to clear the golden grain, And the light chaff, before the breezes borne, Ascends in clouds from off the heapy corn; The grey dust, rising with collected winds, Drives o'er the barn, and whitens all the hinds: So white with dust the Grecian host appears. From trampling steeds, and thundering charioteers; The dusky clouds from labour'd ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... of once more getting to work had put Arizona in high good temper, and he took his comrades' rough chaff good-naturedly, giving as good as he got, ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... said Lord James, gripping the bony hand of Griffith. "Don't let Tom chaff you. My ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... James was bored intensely by the dull routine of regimental life in time of peace; it was a question of performing day after day the same rather unnecessary duties, seeing the same people, listening to the same chatter, the same jokes, the same chaff. And added to the incurable dulness of the mess was the irksome feeling of being merely an overgrown schoolboy at the beck and call of every incompetent and foolish senior. Life was too short to waste in such solemn trifling, masquerading in a ridiculous costume ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... monument for my mother—is he coming home? Oh, I am so glad!' Harold exclaimed, and his handsome face lighted up with childish joy, as he put the telegram in his pocket and started For Tracy Park, wondering if he should encounter Tom, and thinking that if he did, and Tom gave him any chaff, he should lick ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... this and was not surprised thereat. He believed that he was too old a bird to be caught with such chaff. The manner in which he could defeat the purpose of Lone Wolf was by direct fight, or by forcing him into a combat which would anticipate the intention of the Apache. He preferred the latter course, and he made the effort in ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... directly practical element in science which alone was to be handled, and that with as much brevity and simplicity as possible. The Greek literature was doubtless made use of, but only to furnish some serviceable maxims of experience culled from the mass of chaff and rubbish: it was one of Cato's commonplaces, that "Greek books must be looked into, but not thoroughly studied." Thus arose those household manuals of necessary information, which, while rejecting Greek subtlety and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the chaff nor of the stre* *straw Make so long a tale, as of the corn. What should I tellen of the royalty Of this marriage, or which course goes beforn, Who bloweth in a trump or in an horn? The fruit of every tale is for to say; They eat and drink, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Nov 4, '88. DEAR WILL,—I received your letter yesterday evening, just as I was starting out of town to attend a wedding, and so my mind was privately busy, all the evening, in the midst of the maelstrom of chat and chaff and laughter, with the sort of reflections which create themselves, examine themselves, and continue themselves, unaffected by surroundings —unaffected, that is understood, by the surroundings, but not uninfluenced by them. Here was the near presence ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hope 'twon't disappoint you! There's a good deal of rubbish here, but a scattering of grain among the chaff. Ah, messieurs! Good-evening!" ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... moment and to bewilder him by the most unexpected sensational news. And how well this last detail depicted the fellow, a queer mixture of dignity and impudence, of mischief and simplicity, of smiling chaff and disconcerting charm, a sort of hero who, while conquering kingdoms by most incredible adventures, amused himself by mixing up the letters on his name so as ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... "Don't mind Burt's chaff," he said. "This is merely a map of the farm, and we are doing a little planning for our spring work—deciding what crop we shall put on that field and how treat this one, etc. You can see, Amy, that each field is numbered, and here in ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... really is a great moral force, for if he were insincere and not irreproachable his daughters would be the first to take up a sceptical attitude to him, for daughters are like sparrows: you don't catch them with empty chaff.... A man can deceive his fiancee or his mistress as much as he likes, and, in the eyes of a woman he loves, an ass may pass for a philosopher; but a daughter is ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... to us and say: 'Pray, help us, gentlemen!' and we'll tell them: 'Let us have room for our work! Rank us among the builders of this same life!' And as soon as they do this we, too, will have to clear life at one sweep of all sorts of filth and chaff. Then the Emperor will see with his clear eyes who are really his faithful servants, and how much wisdom they have saved up while their hands were idle. ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... or husk the grain after it has been carried into the nest. All during the harvesting I observed workers bringing chaff from the nest and carrying it some distance away. It is said by Texan observers that the harvesters of that state bring the grain to the surface and dry it, if, perchance, it becomes wet. I have never observed this myself, but accept it ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... be found in harvest taller than their fruitful neighbours; but the ear is never filled, never ripened, and the reaper gets nothing in his arms but long slender straw adorned at the top with graceful clusters of empty chaff. The roots of the thorns drank up the sap of the ground, while their branches veiled off the sunlight, and thus the good seed, starved beneath and overshadowed above, although it started fair in spring, produced nothing ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Cyrebion, or 'Light-as-Chaff', was the nickname of Epicrates, Aeschines' brother-in-law (not the Epicrates of Sec. 277). as a reveller, no doubt in some Dionysiac revel, in which it was not considered decent to take part without a mask. (The original purpose ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... MAYBLOOM, and not in that of HERMIONE. Indeed, I have reason to know that, after the guests had departed, poor SOPHY had to endure from her sister a dreadful scene, the harsh details of which have not yet faded from her memory. And then I remembered, too, how it was a matter of family chaff against HERMIONE that once, not very long after she had entered upon her teens, she had sobbed convulsively through a whole night, because she had discovered that her juvenile arms were thin and mottled, and she imagined that she would ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... part, as haps alway, Will faintly take to fleeing, A lion's heart have I to-day For Kaiser Henry's seeing. The wheat springs forth, the chaff's behind;[12] Strike harder, then, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... conquers Heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have Food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have Light, have Guidance, Freedom, Immortality?—These two, in all their degrees, I honor: all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... controversies. The "drum ecclesiastic" of the seventeenth century would sound a mere lullaby to us. Here and there a priest or a belated dissenting minister may amuse himself by threshing out once more the old chaff of dead and buried dogmas. There are people who can argue gravely about baptismal regeneration or apostolical succession. Such doctrines were once alive, no doubt, because they represented the form in which certain still living problems had then to present themselves. They now require to be stated ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... English irreverently call 'chaff' enters largely as an element into Irish life; and when Walpole stigmatised the habit to Joe Atlee as essentially that of the smaller island, he was not far wrong. I will not say that it is a high order of wit—very elegant, or ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... shadow of a big black-looking vessel which loomed large through the fog, and to and from which men were coming and going as usual. With several of these the old woman interchanged some good-humoured chaff as she settled herself in her place, and bade me sit ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... whose uneventful career has repeatedly been explored in every nook and cranny, with any hope of adding materially to the tale of mere fact. One who gleans after Minor and Weltrich and Wychgram will find little but chaff, and I have tried to avoid the garnering of chaff. One of my chief perplexities, accordingly, has been to decide what to omit. If there shall be those who look for what they do not find, or find what they did not expect, I can only say that the question of perspective, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... crews mingled, passing some ten minutes in talk and in good-humored chaff. But at last Dick broke away and drew out from the canoe talk as he saw Laura, Belle, Susie and the other girls awaiting them at a point farther up ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... gives consent. And if it wasn't that the present Pope, being a horrid Radical, would be sure to blackball me as an honest Tory, I would send him a copy of my Opera Omnia, requesting his Holiness to say, by return of post, whether I ranked amongst the chaff winnowed by St. Peter's flail, or had his gracious permission to hold myself amongst the pure wheat gathered into the Vatican garner.] which index, continually, she is enlarging by successive supplements, needs also an Index Expurgatorius for the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... impatiently—and did they not let the others know how impatiently!—waited with all necessaries in hand to bake bread for their men. The respective husbands and sons squatted around on their heels, languidly smoking their pipes and urging their women to be quick. A deal of good-natured chaff seemed to take place during this daily operation, but the women were quite in earnest and took themselves and the process very seriously. They seemed much concerned if one piece got too much burnt or ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... writing home. A few wrote with an eye to the publication of their letters in their town Press. When these newspapers were subsequently received by the Battalion, the scribes came in for a good deal of chaff. Private E. St. I. Bilston of "C" Company made little essays into verse—some of the results appearing in the Perth and Kalgoorlie Sunday papers. At times writing paper was very scarce, and the New Zealand Divisional Sanitary Officer complained that he was unable to continue ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... basis as a starting-point. They may tell you much that is clearly and ludicrously irrelevant, or untrue, on account of inaccuracy of observation, confusion of cause and effect, or a mental color-blindness produced by the disease itself. But these things can all be brushed aside like the chaff from the wheat if checked up by the picture of the disease in ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... questions pertinent to the time, nay, which the time forces upon us, and about which we should be well agreed. A new age of persecution has arisen, and the church is about to be sifted, and the wheat separated from the chaff—the first to be gathered into the garners of God, the last to be burnt up in fire unquenchable. Now is it to be proved who are Christ's, and who are not—who will follow him bearing their cross to some new Calvary, and who, saving their lives, shall yet lose them. Who knows ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... fled like chaff before the wind, while Di, full of remorseful zeal, charged at the kettles, and wrenched off the potatoes' jackets, as if she were revengefully pulling her own hair. Laura had a vague intention of going ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... have lost all its spring, nowadays," Mr. Jarvis went on, mournfully. "We do well, of course, because we couldn't help doing well, but we plod along more like a machine. It was different altogether in the days when Mr. Weatherley used to bring out the morning orders himself and chaff us about selling for no profit. You ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reticence and pose, was wholly free from solemnity, and when he heard or saw what was ludicrous was not afraid to laugh at it. Sir Robert Peel was an excellent hand at what our fathers called banter and we call chaff. A prig or a pedant was his favourite butt, and the performance was rendered all the more effective by his elaborate assumption of the grand seigneur's manner. The victim was dimly conscious that he was being laughed at, but comically ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... and how fragile she was. He had never noticed before that she was so sensitive to trifles, though it was notorious that nobody could safely discuss Cyril with her in terms of chaff. He was really astounded at that youth's carelessness, shameful carelessness. That Cyril's attitude to his mother was marked by a certain benevolent negligence—this Matthew knew; but not to have written to her with the important news concerning Mrs. Scales was ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... so queer," said the lad, taking out and examining one of his mushrooms. "I just came out for a walk, and to pick some of these to have cooked for breakfast; and just as I've got a nice basketful, I come upon you fellows, and you begin to chaff and play larks, and the next moment I might have been knocking all the skin off my knuckles against Distin's face, if I hadn't backed out—like a coward," he added, ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... It had been give and take 'twixt him and Toomey ever since the discovery that each had served in the cavalry. Beaten thus far in the battle of chaff, the conductor tried another as he ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... that all the Negroes from whom any assistance could reasonably be expected, behaved like so many Heroes of Antiquity; risking their lives and limbs for us and our property, while their own poor houses were flying like chaff before the hurricane. There are few White people here who can say as much for their Black dependents; and the force and value of the relation between Master and Slave has been tried by the late ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... she known it, Kingozi was getting what he required. Information came to him a word now, a word then; promises came to him in single phrases lost in empty gossip. He collected what he wanted grain by grain from bushels of chaff. The whole sum of his new knowledge could have been expressed in a paragraph, took him a week to get, but was just what he wanted. If he had asked categorical questions, he would have received lies. If he had attempted to hurry matters, ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... know so much about that," replied MacGregor confidently. "The fellows up at Umfuli often used to chaff me, saying that I had eyes like a cat. Believe I have. At any rate I'll risk it, and if I'm not back an hour before ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... ommost malancholy when he saw it, but Mary nobbut laft, an started on an' blackleeaded it, an' in a varry little time he wor set i'th' 'Quiet Corner,' wi as handsome a peg leg as tha'd wish to see. They chaff him a gooid bit abaat weddin Mary, but he taks it all i' gooid part, an' they've sent all sooarts o' presents to him. One day last week they sent him a creddle, an' Mary wor soa mad wol shoo gate th' blocker an' wor baan to chop it into ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... that all these events lie in the realm of chance and error! It is, however, just this which proves that the important thing is not what happens, but what is willed. Accordingly, let the incidents of life be left to the play of chance and error, to demonstrate to man that he is as chaff before the wind. ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... sir," answered Joe, in much lower tones than my own, obviously with the intention of putting me on my guard. "You see, sir, them chaps for'ard are pretty cute; they're too old birds to be caught with chaff; and I knew that if I was to get on the blind side of 'em, it'd have to be by means of throwin' you into a genuine, downright passion with me. Besides, if you'll excuse me for sayin' of it, Captain Saint Leger, you ain't much of a hactor, sir; you're altogether too ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... light complexion, blue eyes, and about twenty-three years of age. He was much lamented by his many friends. His fall, shocking as it was to the command, being our first fatal casualty, only seemed to nerve the men for bold revenge. And we had it. Like chaff before the whirlwind the outpost was quickly scattered, and the whole regiment entered upon its first charge with a will, a charge which continued for several miles with wild excitement. Picket reliefs and reserves were swept away like forest ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... described at length in the Vita Endei (VSH, ii, 71-2). We are there told that he was seven years in Aran, serving faithfully in the monastic threshing-barn, so that in the chaff-heaps it would have been impossible to discover a single grain; and that the walls of his threshing-barn were still standing in Aran when the hagiographer wrote. He then saw the vision of the tree, which, however, ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... his logic, his wit? What had become of his disputatious and learned associates that not one of them stood up to plead for the life of Socrates now? Why, the first breath of adversity had blown them away as though they were but mist; and, with these false friends scattered like the coward chaff they were, grim old Socrates ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... a hollow in the ground, which was filled with water. Beside it lay a pile of bait and husks and chaff; and she bade them make the most of these. "We have had a severe snow-winter this year, on the island," she said. "The peasants who own us came out to us with hay and oaten straw, so we shouldn't starve to death. And this trash is all there is left ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... he made it, that it was not a very able retort, but he was feeling too limp for satisfactory repartee. Criticisms in the Bureau, dealing with his alleged solidity of skull, he did not resent. He attributed them to man's natural desire to chaff his fellow-man. But to be unmasked by the general public in this way was another matter. It struck at the root ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... ... it's night now. (Reading, feverishly) "The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn
... the position of the sun in winter: It moves to the south because of the cold which drives it into the warm parts of the heavens over Libya. Or listen to Saint Augustine's speculations: "Who gave to chaff such power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it ripens green fruit? Who can explain the strange properties of fire itself, which blackens all that it ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... girl who did this movement with peculiar grace. She wore a black velveteen dress, although it was very hot weather, and I called her "Hamlet." I used to chaff her about wearing such a grand dress at rehearsals, but she was never to be seen in any other. The girls at the theater told me that she was very poor, and that underneath her black velveteen dress, which she wore summer and winter, she had nothing but a pair of stockings and a chemise. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... it's simply bad taste in me to chaff him, Tavy. But you're wrong. This man takes more trouble to drop his aiches than ever his father did to pick them up. It's a mark of caste to him. I have never met anybody more swollen with the pride ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... bell, they should be required to hasten, without a moment's delay, to their head-quarters. A mob could hardly be gathered and commence work before this solid body of disciplined, reliable men would be upon them. These five hundred men would scatter five thousand rioters like chaff before them. It would be more efficient than two entire regiments, even if assembled, and would be worth more than the whole military of the city for ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... be involved in purely domestic disputes among Catholic theologians or to be guided by the advice of those who sought to secure peace by means of dishonourable compromises, the Fathers of Trent set themselves calmly but resolutely to sift the chaff from the wheat, to examine the theories of Luther in the light of the teaching of the Scriptures and the tradition of the Church as contained in the writings of the Fathers, and to give to the world a clear-cut exposition of the dogmas that had been attacked by ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... early Franciscans was, as was that of St. Paul, Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And in a book intended primarily for young readers of the Church of England, it is perhaps allowable to suppress features which would perplex youthful minds before they have the power of discriminating between the chaff and the wheat; while it is not thereby intended to deny that they really existed. The objectionable side of the teaching of the medieval Church of England has been dwelt upon with such little charity, by certain Protestant writers, that their youthful readers ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... towns, there is, or used to be, a delicate Christmas custom of offering to a lady a brooch or a pair of earings in a truss of hay. The house-door of the person to be complimented is pushed open, and there is thrown into the house a truss of hay or straw, a sheaf of corn, or a bag of chaff. In some part of this "bottle of hay" envelope, there is a "needle" as a present to be hunted for. A friend of mine once received from her betrothed, according to the Christmas custom, an exceedingly large brown paper parcel, which, on being opened, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... have utterly failed. What couldst thou have done?—nay, or the Christian Probus? But I will not taunt thee. I will rather hope. The wind became more and more violent. The sand was driven before it like chaff. Sometimes the tempest immediately around us would abate, but it only served to fill us with new apprehensions, by revealing to us the tossings of this great deep, in the distance. At one of these moments, as I was taking occasion to speak a word of comfort to the half dead mother, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... have not troubled each other for a long time. I suppose I am fortunate in being left alone." She was silent a few minutes, and then she told him kindly: "Hal says they always chaff you about marrying an heiress, for the sake of being rich without any need to work; but take my advice, and don't force the hand of Fate before she has had time to give you good things in her ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... up the sunbeams Lying all around our path; Let us keep the wheat and roses, Casting out the thorns and chaff; Let us find our sweetest comfort In the blessings of to-day, With a patient hand removing All the ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... house, with machinery for extracting the juice from the cane, the refining rooms, the places where it is dried, etc., all on a large scale. If the hacienda is, as here, a coffee plantation also, then there is the great mill for separating the beans from the chaff, and sometimes also there are buildings where they make brandy. Here there are four hundred men employed, exclusive of boys, one hundred horses, and a number of mules. The property is generally very extensive, containing the fields of sugar-cane, plains for ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... and twisted by a terrible squall; here and there, between the distorted stalks, the muddy earth of the rice-swamp was visible; there were even little pools of water, produced by bits of the transparent lacquer on which tiny particles of gold seemed to float about like chaff in a thick liquid; two or three insects, which required a microscope to be well seen, were clinging in a terrified manner to the rushes, and the whole picture was no ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... intention of yielding; her mind and her feet were braced against any divergence from the straight road now; but the man Janet Payne had called Gregory Jessup said something that scattered her resolutions like so much chaff. ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... Gulls dipped and screamed over the wake of the ferryboat that carried the Pages to Oakland, and after the warm cabin and the heated train, they all shivered miserably as they got out at the appointed corner. Oakland looked bleak and dreary, the wind was blowing chaff and papers against ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... ape-man was down and a dozen black soldiers were upon his back. When he regained consciousness he found himself securely bound, as was Werper also. The Belgian officer, success having crowned his efforts, was in good humor, and inclined to chaff his prisoners about the ease with which they had been captured; but from Tarzan of the Apes he elicited no response. Werper, however, was voluble in his protests. He explained that Tarzan was an English lord; but the ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that the historian who comes after him will sift the wheat from his chaff, and leave him no better reputation than that of the quarry from which the marble of the statue comes. He must tell a consecutive story, but must eschew all redundancy, furnish no more supports for his bridge than its stability requires, prune ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the little lady should have his own bed—a chaff- stuffed mattress, covered with a woollen rug, in the recess behind the projecting hearth—a strange luxury for a farm boy; and Doll yielded very unwillingly when he spoke in a tone that savoured of command. ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lives, and out of our united efforts to advance it will grow a firm, indissoluble union. Now, then, Germans! Be resolved, all of you, to attain the same goal, and your will shall be a storm-wind scattering like chaff whatever is old and rotten. In your struggle for a free country, you will have as allies the army of mighty minds that have suffered for right and liberty in the past. Now you are split up into tribes and clans, held together only by the bond of language and a classic literature. You ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... while the iron was hot: hence his visit to Grey Abbey. His pretended ignorance of the young man's death, when he found he could not see Miss Wyndham, was a ruse; but an old bird like Lord Cashel was not to be caught with chaff. And then, how indelicate of him to come and press his suit immediately after news of so distressing a nature had reached Miss Wyndham! How very impolitic, thought Lord Cashel, to show such a hurry to take possession of the fortune!—How completely ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... occasional words of wisdom that fell from the lips of the few far-seeing statesmen of the South, were as chaff before the storm of Disunion raised by the turbulent Fire-eaters, and were blown far from the South, where they might have done some good for the Union cause, away up to the North, where they contributed to aid the success of the contemplated Treason and Rebellion, ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... "That's right; chaff away," cried Smith. "Look at the place we're in! There isn't a sign of a town. What would bring ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... American did not fit into her niche at Pendlemere without encountering a certain amount of what her schoolmates considered necessary discipline for a novice. She had to go through an ordeal of chaff and banter. She was known by the sobriquet of "Stars and Stripes", or "The Yank", and good-natured fun was poked at her transatlantic accent. She took it good-temperedly, but with a readiness of repartee that laid ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... into the various houses in search of relics. As elsewhere, we were impressed with the independent bearing and freeness of the Zapotec woman. She talks with everyone, on any subject, shrewdly. She loves to chaff, and is willing to take sarcasm, as freely as she gives it. In one house we had a specially interesting time, being shown a lot of things. The woman had some broken pottery figures of ancient times, but also produced some interesting ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... red to the ears, not knowing whether it were wiser for a lady's-maid to run away, or to take the rough chaff good-humouredly, and make the best of it. I fluttered, undecided, never thinking of the old adage concerning the woman ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... up, you see! Fellow you call the gyp wanted to make me believe you were out—thought I looked too like a governor to be let in, I suppose; but it wouldn't do, sir; old birds are not to be caught with chaff; and he spoke with an air of such intense honesty that I felt sure he was lying, and told him so.—Don't get up, boy, don't get up; you look as jaded as a hunted antelope. Why, you've never touched your breakfast; ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... laboriously conquers the Earth, and makes her man's. A second man I honor, and still more highly: him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but the bread of life. These two in all their degrees I honor; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth. We must all toil, or steal (howsoever we name our stealing), which ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... the whole force of whose life is turned to peaceful pursuits. These arrogant conspirators against government, with Chinese vanity, believed that they could blow away these self-respecting citizens as chaff from the battlefield. Few of them are left alive to ponder their mistake! Here, then, are the roots of this civil war. It was not a quarrel of wild beasts, it was an inflection of the strife of ages, between power and right, between ambition and equity. ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... this people out of Egypt, making a path for them through the depths of the sea, reining back its foaming waves as a rider his white-maned steed; giving to the thirsty—water from the rock, to the hungry—bread from the skies, and scattering the foes of Israel before them, as chaff is driven by the wind. I have heard of the sun's fiery chariot arrested in its course by the voice of a man, speaking with authority given to him by an inspiring Deity. Tell me what is the name of the ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... Autumn breeze's bugle sound, Various and vague the dry leaves dance their round; Or, from the garner-door, on ether borne, The chaff flies devious from the winnow'd corn; So vague, so devious, at the breath of heaven, From their fix'd ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... reached them were true, given to the company of loose women. She had striven with all her might that such a one should not be allowed to take her daughter from her, and had striven in vain. He had succeeded;—but his character was not changed by his success. Did she not know him to be chaff that must be separated by the wind from the corn and then consumed in the fire? His character was not altered because that human being whom she loved the best in all the world had fallen into his power. He was not the less chaff,—the ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... be likened to men reaping wheat, of which the Purists take the fine flour, and the Sensualists the chaff and straw, but the Naturalists take all home, and make their cake of the one, and their couch ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... prospective departure,—at least they affected to be,—and were variously sprawled about the parlor when Mrs. Clancy descended, and the inflamed condition of her eyes and nose became apparent to all. There was much chaff and fun, therefore, when Mrs. Rayner finally appeared, over the supposed affliction of the big Irishwoman at the prospect of parting with her patroness. Miss Travers saw with singular sensations that both the captain ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... alone, and overhearing a loud burst of laughter at the fore part of the steamer, Nigel went forward to see what was going on. He found a group of sailors round his comrade Moses, apparently engaged in good-natured "chaff." ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... cut down into it and scrape out all de char, and den put de rice in dere and beat and poun' it with a pestle till we had all de grain beat out de heads. Den we'd pour de rice out on a cloth and de chaff and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... the most fulsome prayers. And Hogginarmo promised speedily to pay his humble homage at his august master's throne, of which he begged leave to be counted the most loyal and constant defender. Such a WARY old BIRD as King Padella was not to be caught by Master Hogginarmo's CHAFF and we shall hear presently how the tyrant treated his upstart vassal. No, no; depend on't, two such rogues ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... twelfth century, meets the undiscerning critic more than half-way. Let none judge, he writes, till he be capable of separating the grain from the chaff; 'for the fool makes haste to condemn, and the ignorant only pretends to know all things, and muses on the wonders that are ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... not misfortune that teaches us our friends. Now are we sifted and the chaff is known! ... LeVal! ... But ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... here; no earth Mocked for its gifts; but Ceres' festive grove: With willow wickerwork 'twas set around, New cups of clay by revolutions shaped Of lowly wheel. For honey soft, a bowl; Platters of green bark wickerwork, a jar Stained by the lifeblood of the God of Wine; The walls around with chaff and spattered clay Were covered. Flanging from protruding nails Were slender stalks of the green rush; and then Suspended from the smoky beam, the stores Of this poor cottage. Service berries soft, Entwined in fragrant wreaths hung down, Dried savory and raisins ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... said Panton warmly, "it is too bad. I was disposed to chaff you, Lane, because you threw the hatchet a little about your adventures. It would be madness to cross ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... passed along Till that eventful day When all the labor of our hands Like chaff was swept away: We saw our home made desolate, Our pleasant cottage sold; Men called us poor, but we were rich In better ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... need all the strength; the plant and tuber are tender, and a little frost will kill the vines and cause the potatoes to decay. They may be kept for use until January by packing, when dug in a warm day, in the soil in which they grew;—kept through winter, packed in straw or chaff, in boxes that will contain about two or three bushels each, and kept in a room with a fire: the room should be at a temperature of from forty to sixty degrees; fifty-five is best, though seventy will not destroy them; more or less ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... figures—officers, men who had been at the front—detached themselves and came towards the group of likely youths. These wavered a little, were silent, sniggered, stood their ground—the khaki-clad figures passed among them. Hackneyed words, jests, the touch of flattery, changing swiftly to chaff—all the customary performance, hollow and pathetic; and then the two figures re-emerged, their hands clenched, their eyes shifting here and there, their lips drawn back in fixed smiles. They had failed, and were trying to hide it. They must not show contempt—the young slackers might yet come ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... palate, in short, all the grosser tastes. All that is not only like savages, but like animals. They are merry and contented at the prospect of a savory meal, and they are fond of playing tricks on each other—both sexes chaff and tease constantly. I believe that the development of our larger brain is the intellectual work of man during hundreds and thousands of years, and it would gratify me to see it raised to a still greater ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... was known as the "Laundryman," a name in which respect was mixed with chaff. Ernestine did not care. She knew that she had "made good," and it was pleasant. She could afford now to have a home of her own, and so she had installed herself in this apartment, far out of the dirt and the noise in which she had lived her life. She filled it with a strange ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... to give. "But if we would follow the Lord in these days," he wrote to a friend, "we must evidently be prepared to renounce all things for His sake and cast out all these heathen worries for dross and chaff with which we as ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... in civilian attire had captured two of the balls one afternoon and was flying at his most vigorous speed for another. Primrose had paused for a moment while her brother stopped to chaff a companion. The ball rolled swiftly along, and from some slight inequality in the ice deflected. The arm was outstretched to catch it, and she could not quite remember afterward whether she had stooped, but he came against her with sufficient force to knock her over. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... lie like sheaves upon our fields; the ruins of your castles fly like chaff beneath the flail of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... this time he no longer knew. She never spoke of it to him; never nowadays complained of loneliness. When he saw her she appeared to be cheerful. But this very cheerfulness made him uneasy, and at times, through the murk of the chaff of wheat, through the bellow of the Pit, and the crash of collapsing fortunes there reached him a suspicion that all was ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... their rock as our rock; how else shall a thousand fly before one, and two put ten thousand to the flight! I dreamed it in the visions of the night, and the voice said, 'Habakkuk, take thy fan and purge the wheat from the chaff, that they be not both consumed with the fire of indignation and the lightning of fury.' Wherefore, I say, take this Henry Morton—this wretched Achan, who hath brought the accursed thing among ye, and made ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... they will here," said Nancy. "Everybody chaffs everybody else in this house pretty freely. What you must do is to chaff back; but if you don't feel equal to that just at first, just grin, and let them think you ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... And I do these wild things in sheer despite, And play the fooleries you catch me at, In pure rage! The old mill-horse, out at grass After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so, Although the miller does not preach to him The only good of grass is to make chaff. What would men have? Do they like grass or no— May they or may n't they? all I want's the thing Settled forever one way. As it is, 260 You tell too many lies and hurt yourself: You don't like what you only like too much, You do like what, if given you at your word, You find ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... dull, but the powerful bending gondoliers urging their frail craft along with tremendous strokes in unison were a magnificent spectacle. The excitement was intense towards the end, but there was no close finish. Between the races the exchange of chaff ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... him that the corn and the chaff had to be separated; as yet both were lying in one heap, right up to the roof. Hans began to take up a little and sift it in his hands, but he soon saw that this would never do. He soon thought of a plan, however; he opened both barn-doors, and then lay down at one end and ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... of the trees, and every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit will be hewn down and cast into the fire. The threshing-floor will be thoroughly purged, and the wheat will be gathered into the garner, while the chaff will be ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... the self-applied test of courage which swept away so much chaff. According to Deuteronomy xx. 8, the standing enactment was that such a proclamation as that in verse 3 should precede every battle. Much difficulty has been raised about the mention of Mount Gilead here, as the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... he felt would be a way of pain, and probably sorrow, yet he could not stop her. All the experience of his life was worthless to her. All that he knew of men, all that he feared of her lover, were as chaff in the scales ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... undo it. What we have to do now is to fight for our lives. Even if these poor devils have right on their side, it is not a matter to stop and discuss, now. So keep your breath for fighting. I doubt not that we shall soon scatter them like chaff." ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... from the chaff. By the "wheat," in the view of this writer, is meant the aggregate of those who persevered in their recusant policy up to the practical result of secession. All who stopped short of that consummation, (on whatever plea,) are the "chaff." The writer is something of an incendiary, or something of a fanatic; but he is consistent with regard to his own principles, and so elaborately careful in his details as to extort admiration of his energy and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... newspaper at Washington. By extending the laws of Georgia over the country and people of the Cherokees, the constitution, laws, and treaties, of the United States, were quoad hoc set aside. They were chaff before the wind. In pursuance of these laws of Georgia, a Cherokee Indian is prosecuted for the murder of another Indian, before a state court of Georgia, tried by a jury of white men, and sentenced to death. He applies to a chief justice of the Court of the United States, who issues ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... correlations and individual traits? It seems almost surprising that this overwhelmingly rich harvest of prescientific psychology has never been examined from the standpoint of scientific psychology, and that no one has sifted the wheat from the chaff. The very best would be not only to gather such material, but to combine the sayings of the naive psychologists in a rounded system of psychology. In all ages they surely must have been among the best observers of mankind, as even what is not ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... the gold remains. Of course a pleasant breeze, that will carry away the dust, is a great assistance to the operation. Sometimes two men have a hide or a blanket, with which they throw up the dirt. The process is very similar to the ancient method of separating grain from chaff. The miner who devotes himself to dry washing must be very particular to take only rich dirt, so he scrapes the bed-rock carefully. He never digs very deep—not more than twenty feet; and when he goes beyond seven or eight feet he "coyotes," or burrows after the pay-dirt. He may coyote ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell
... behind him, and showed him tripping lightly over a bullock's broad back. Then he was up on the manger-edge, had paused to make sure, and was down in the manger, picking up crumbs and dust of linseed-cake and chaff. Three mice were doing the same thing, but fled at his approach; but he did not trouble about that, for the cattle had not left even him and his wife a full meal, having blown what was left of the chaff away, and licked up practically all of the cake-crumbs and dust. However, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... away to titter, forgot Lake's grapes; so he helped himself, and leaning against the table, looked superciliously upon Sir Harry, who was not to be deterred by the drowsy gaze of contempt with which the captain retorted his angry 'chaff.' ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... absurd at times,' said Scott. 'You see I didn't know much about milking or babies. They'll chaff my head off, if the tale ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... not quite sure about Christina. She laughed at so many things. He was to meet her at seven, and of late he had lost sleep wondering how she would receive his first appearance in the kilt. He dreaded her chaff more than any horrors of war that lay ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... it up; for they're too poor, and the times is hard, and the agent's harder than the times: there's two of them, the under and the upper; and they grind the substance of one between them, and then blow one away like chaff; but we'll not be talking of that, to spoil your honour's night's rest. The room's ready, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... visits to Burra, seems to have considered it quite unnecessary to inquire whether they were true or false before committing them to paper; and apparently from a desire to make out a case of oppression, he has been ready to receive all that could help to it without separating the chaff ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... his hand in that he adopted a tone of serious chaff to Mr. Norbury, such as some people think a well-chosen one towards children, to their great embarrassment. He replied to that most responsible of butlers with some pomposity of manner. "The question before the house," said ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... He did not lie outrageously in selling his horses. He did not cheat at cards. As long as he had a drop of drink left in his flask, he would share it with any friend. He never boasted. He was much given to chaff, but his chaff was good-humoured. He was generous with his cigars. Such were his virtues. That he had no adequate means of his own and that he never earned a penny, that he lived chiefly by gambling, that he had no pursuit in life ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... ye go tell your Aunt Mary I have been in an eelevator handlin' grain, and I'm covered wi' fine dust and chaff that sticks me. I canna come until I've had a bath, and put on clean clothing. Tell her ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Persia, Phœnicia, and Syria, from Greece and Egypt, and from the Holy Books of the Jews. Hence we are called Knights of the East and West, because their doctrines came from both. And these doctrines, the wheat sifted from the chaff, the Truth separated from Error, Masonry has garnered up in her heart of hearts, and through the fires of persecution, and the storms of calamity, has brought them and delivered them unto us. That God is One, immutable, unchangeable, infinitely just and good; that Light will finally ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... at her worst has always been better—she always will be better—than her enemies allow. The same is true of preaching. Still it is wise to ask ourselves, when a criticism is laid against either Church or preacher, whether there may not be a grain or two of truth to the bushel of chaff. It would be a misfortune if in our contempt for this same chaff we should lose the corn hidden there. Where there is smoke it is well to remember there is always, at least, a smoulder of fire. Grant ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... leaving him dark as to their distinctive qualities applied remedially. What should he do? Run with the prescription to old Taylor in the next street, a chemist of forty years? Alas! at his tender age he had not omitted to chaff that reverend rival persistently and publicly. Humble his establishment before the King Street one? Sooner perish drugs, and come eternal cricket! And after all, why not? Drummer-boys, and powder-monkeys, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Jacob, and ye men of Israel; I will help thee, saith the Lord, and thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel. Behold I will make thee [make thee to be] a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them: and thou shalt rejoice in the Lord, and shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel." ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... glory is past, Vanished and fled for ever. Homeless and scattered, thy race is cast Like chaff in the breath of the sweeping blast, To rally or ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... in spite of his assertion, earlier on, that he "preferred his own company," he seemed thoroughly to enjoy the little home-like diner a trois. There was something about the cosy room and the gay, good-humoured chaff and laughter of brother and sister which conveyed a sense of welcome—partaking of that truest kind of hospitality which creates no special atmosphere of ceremony for a guest but encompasses him with a frank, ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... explained a little more it went away, and we turned the handle of the chaff-cutting machine, and nobody got hurt, though the head HAD said we should cut our fingers off ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... our conversation while Dennis idly examined the knife, opening it and studying the blade absently. Presently Fuller, noticing his absorption, began to chaff him about it. ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... idea of making straight for any particular opening in the dense ranks, but picking out the smaller parties of the enemy—that is to say, mobs not more than double our own strength; and when we could get within striking distance they were punished and scattered like chaff before the wind, in spite of the scattered volleys they sent at us ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... dreams were scatter'd, As chaff is toss'd by the wind, The faith has been rudely shattered That listen'd with credence blind; Things were to have been, and therefore They were, and they are to be, And will be;—we must prepare for The doom we ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... become when he is minded to play White of Selborne with a smile. And all the while it is the word that he is intent upon. You may trace his reading by some fine word that has not escaped him, but has been garnered for use when his fan has been quick to purge away the chaff of commonplace. He is thus fastidious and alert in many languages. You wonder at the delicacy of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhyme in the Anglo-Norman of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the brief verse ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... Why were they kept lying there in idleness? Why were they not pushed forward to do their part? They looked into each other's faces. God! They were three hundred now; they could sweep aside like chaff that fringe of red skirmishers if only they got the word! With hearts throbbing, every nerve tense, they waited, each trooper crouched for the spring. Officer after officer, unable to restrain his impatience, strode ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... was tolerably wide, and ran round the whole of the building, at about every six feet it was broken by spaces of about ten paces. The fire was spreading and growing, and glowing sparks flew round him and his companion like chaff from the winnowing fan. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of their leader the whole fighting class, weighing some ten tons in battle trim, vanished like chaff before the spirit of one Freshie co-ed. By twos and threes they slouched away, trying to ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... recognizing his despoiler of old, abuses as a shameless thief, taunting him with the helpless way in which all his boasted power is tied up with the laws and bargains recorded on the heft of his spear, which, says Alberic truly, would crumble like chaff in his hands if he dared use it for his own real ends. Wotan, having already had to kill his own son with it, knows that very well; but it troubles him no more; for he is now at last rising to abhorrence of his own artificial power, and looking to the coming ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... at me reproachfully. I was about to say that "Blackman's Warbler" was the local name for the Chiff-chaff in our part of Flint, when the Authority ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... gone. The pity of it, the grief of it; all that she held dearest; her fine and confident steadfastness; the great love that had brought such happiness into her life—that had been her inspiration, all torn from her and tossed aside like chaff. And her patient—Ferriss, the man who loved her, who had undergone such suffering, such hardship, who trusted her and whom it was her duty to nurse back to life and health—if he should perish for want of her ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... deeds in the body reach over into another life in another world, determining there our eternal state of happiness or pain, that is the most momentous fact conceivable. It is the only momentous fact; all others are chaff and rags. A man who, believing it to be a fact, does not make it the one purpose of his life to save his soul and the souls of others that are willing to be saved is a fool and a rogue. If he think that any part of this only needful work can be done by turning a newspaper into ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... things right— night brands and chokes, as if destruction broke over furze and stone and crop of myrtle-shoot and field-wort, destroyed with flakes of iron, the bracken-stone, where tender roots were sown blight, chaff, and wash of darkness ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... the fantastic contents of his mind, odd vagaries, recondite trash, and all. He was always getting away from Farquharson, but, then, he was unfailingly bound to come back to him. We had only to wait and catch the solid grains that now and then fell in the winnowing of that unending stream of chaff. It was a tedious and exasperating process, but it had its compensations. At times Leavitt could be as uncannily brilliant as he was dull and boresome. The conviction grew upon me that he had become a little ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Paterfamilias, sitting in the family pew, is not so enamoured of that idea of accomplishing those threescore years and ten which the young parson, fresh from Cambridge, is describing as such a lucky number in life's lottery. The attempt to paint it so is well-meaning, no doubt, 'the vacant chaff well meant for grain;' and it is touching to see how men generally (knowing that they themselves have to go through with it) are wont to portray it in ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... in which Raleigh lived, and the element in which he moved. This sort of talk is happily dying out just now; but no one can approach the history of the Elizabethan age (perhaps of any age) without finding that truth is all but buried under mountains of dirt and chaff—an Augaean stable, which, perhaps, will never be swept clean. Yet I have seen, with great delight, several attempts toward removal of the said superstratum of dirt and chaff from the Elizabethan histories, in several articles, all evidently from the same pen (and that ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... any good. Allan was very sorry for Tom, and took more than a fair share of the blame, saying he ought to have been more careful; but he was rather distressed when he found that he had a black eye, and that it could not be well before the cricket match, when the boys would be sure to chaff him. ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... must think of Neolithic man noticing the big seeds of this Hermon grass, gathering some of the heads, breaking the brittle spikelet-bearing axis in his fingers, knocking off the rough awns or bruising the spikelets in his hand till the glumes or chaff separated off and could be blown away, chewing a mouthful of the seeds—and resolving to ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... to like to talk to me," he answered simply. "She seems to me to have rather a remarkable mind, Doctor Mary." (She was "Doctor Mary" to all the Old Place party now, in affection, with a touch of chaff.) ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... that sort of a tale before," Masters answered, with a sneer. "Job Masters is too old a bird to be caught by such chaff. I'll take my risks, gentlemen. I'll ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... What follows? Chaff follows, a kind of intimacy, a supper, perhaps, after the play, if an actor seems to be good company. This is quite natural; the most modish young gallants are not so very dainty as to stand aloof from any amusing company. They found it among prize- fighters, when Byron was young, and extremely ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... Even if I do encounter it, no misfortune will happen unto me but such as is common unto men. Of all the souls of this generation, the number that will sift through the meshes of the years is infinitesimately small. The overwhelming majority of names will turn out to be chaff, and be blown away. I shall be forgotten, but I shall be forgotten in very good company. The greater part of my kin-folk and acquaintance, your own self, my critic, and your family and friends, will go down in the same darkness which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... find it in the jeering of a jest, Or distil it from the folly of a fool. I can teach you with a quip, if I've a mind; I can trick you into learning with a laugh; Oh, winnow all my folly, and you'll find A grain or two of truth among the chaff! ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... than ever also. It was on July 12 that I said to a sister, being led to it by the certain prospect of one of the dear labourers in the Orphan-Houses going to leave; "Well, my soul is at peace. The Lord's time is not yet come, but, when it is come, He will blow away all these obstacles, as chaff is blown away before the wind." It was only ONE QUARTER OF AN HOUR after, when the following paper was put into my hands, whereby I obtained power ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Third Part • George Mueller
... expect me to enter any free-for-all inebriates' competition—you know that, 'Gene! It may have been a little extreme as a joke; but if you'd laughed it off as you always do, nobody would have thought anything of it except to chaff you about it. But what do you do? You make as serious a thing of it as if you hadn't been trotting with our crowd for five years or so. You set this old—my learned friend from the West—briefing it up, and you ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... that ran through the lower ground over the entire property, and even to the topmost storey of his house. He laid a light tramway across the widest part of his estate, and sent the labourers to and fro their work in trucks. The chaff-cutters, root-pulpers, the winnowing-machine—everything was driven by steam. Teams of horses and waggons seemed to be always going to the canal wharf for coal, which he ordered ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... I'm too old a bird to be caught with chaff. It's a dirty shame, of course, about this man Henderson, but I'm not running the criminal jurisprudence ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... in mind of what the divine Miss HARLOWE once said to me, talking of friendship, and what my friendship to you required of me: 'Depend upon it, Mr. Belford,' said she, 'that one day you will be convinced, that what you call friendship, is chaff and stubble; and that nothing is worthy of ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... be abused with all the calumnious epithets which the ingenuity of angry men can devise, because he is exercising that ingenuity the possession of which on his part is the foundation of fox-hunting. There you will remain, nursing your horse, listening to chaff, and hoping. But even when the fox does go, your difficulties ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... She needed no encouragement for when she was once on a subject she generally threshed it so thoroughly that nothing but chaff remained. ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... to find and fall into his place in the procession, and we turn off to secure our seats in the grand stand. But before we take them I must go and look at the wheelbarrow and spade, and above all at the "first sod." For some weeks past it has been a favorite chaff with us Maritzburgians to offer to bring a nice fresh, lively sod down with us, but we were assured D'Urban could furnish one. Here it is exactly under the triumphal arch, looking very faded and depressed, with a little sunburned grass growing feebly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... or of such princely estates as Eumaeus managed in the Ionian seas. Flaxman has certainly not given him the look of a large proprietor in his outlines: his toilet is severely scant, and the old gentleman appears to have lost two of his fingers in a chaff-cutter. As for Perses, who is represented as listening to the sage,[A] his dress is in the extreme of classic scantiness,—being, in fact, a mere night-shirt, and a tight ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... there is an ant called by him the Agricultural Ant, which not only lays up stores of grain, but prepares the soil for the crop; plants the seed (of a certain plant called ant-rice); keeps the ground free from weeds; and finally reaps the harvest, and separating the chaff from the grain, packs away the latter, and throws the chaff outside of the plantation. In "Wood's Bible Animals" you can read a full account of this ant, and I think that after hearing of its exploits, we can believe almost anything ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... Irishman a latherin' away with both arms, as if he was tryin' to thrash out wheat, and see how bothered he looked, as if he couldn't find nothin' but dust and chaff in the straw? Well, that critter was agin the Bill, in course, and Irish like, used every argument in favour of it. Like a pig swimmin' agin stream, every time he struck out, he was a cuttin' of his own throat. He then blob blob ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... "Oh, stop your chaff! No, but I daresay Kharrak Singh has insisted on coming, and she has sent him in a closed howdah, so as to be safer. He was uncommon set on coming with me. I wouldn't hear of it, but he may have teased her into ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... which were springing up again in the minds of his father and mother, intercepting the little significant glances which passed between them when Mary went away on some errand and he told her not to be long, when they exchanged gentle chaff, or she arranged the cushions under his head. The neighbours had asked to visit him, but this he resolutely declined, and appealed to ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... once there rose so wild a yell Within that dark and narrow dell, As all the fiends from heaven that fell Had peal'd the banner-cry of Hell! Forth from the pass, in tumult driven, Like chaff before the wind of heaven, The archery appear; For life! for life! their plight they ply, And shriek, and shout, and battle-cry, And plaids and bonnets waving high, And broadswords flashing to the sky, Are maddening ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... kept the chink, And all the cash Collectors; With hundreds of that class, so kindly credulous, Without whose help, no charlatan alive, Or Bubble Company could hope to thrive, Or busy Chevalier, however sedulous— Those good and easy innocents in fact, Who willingly receiving chaff for corn, As pointed out by Butler's tact, Still find a secret pleasure in the act Of being pluck'd ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the product of a long line of erroneous theory and zigzag development, but the wheat has largely been sifted and the chaff thrown to the winds of antiquity. Its therapeutic and psychological value is duly recognized ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... very admirable book:—whereupon the god asked him for the beauties of the work. He replied that he only busied himself about the errors. On hearing this, Apollo, handing him a sack of unwinnowed wheat, bade him pick out all the chaff for his reward. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that," interposed Benjamin, with a knowing smile. "Who will ever know the difference if a quarter part of the total weight is chaff and clay? It will all grind up into excellent flour, and when the soldier eats his barley bread or his rye loaf it will taste all the better to him. There is nearly half a million florins' clear profit in the transaction, at ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... True it is, that their great size sometimes defeats its object—the valuable portion of the material is sometimes buried under the comparatively worthless heap that surrounds it—the golden grains lost amid the chaff. But in a case of this kind, the error of redundancy is one on the safe side; let a subject in all its bearings be thoroughly and fully brought up, and it is the fault or failing of him who sets about the study of it, if he is appalled at the amount of information on which he has to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... law courts, the King's Bench and the Court of Common Pleas, are of less direct historical value than those of the Chancery and the Exchequer. Extraordinarily bulky, they require a good deal of sifting to sort the wheat from the chaff. As yet a very small proportion of them has been printed, and few have even been calendared. A brief index of them has been compiled in the useful List of Plea Rolls (1894, P.R.O. Lists and Indexes, No. iv.). Of the various types of these records the FEET OF FINES ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... and arithmetic. I frequently astonished or appalled the literary men and artists who were my father's guests. I hated being continually asked what I should like to be when I grew up, and the slightest chaff threw me into a perfect paroxysm of passion. Whilst, however, I was resentful of the authority of others, I was greatly inclined to exercise authority myself—to such a degree, indeed, that my father's servants generally spoke of me as "the young master," ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... that I am bodied forth under the character of Harry Benson, and am, in consequence, a handsome young man, who can do a little of every thing instead of——but never mind what; your actor has not yet sufficient standing to come down before the footlights, and have his little bit of private chaff with the audience. Only this will I say, so help me N. P. Willis, I mean to go on with these sketches till they are finished, provided always that Fraser will take them so long and that you continue to read them, or fall into a sweet and soothing slumber over ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... with a sheet under coverlets made of dagswaine or hopharlots, (I use their own terms,) and a good round log under their head instead of a bolster. If it were so, that the father or the goodman of the house had a matrass or flock-bed, and thereto a sack of chaff to rest his head upon, he thought himself to be as well lodged as the lord of the town, so well were they contented. Pillows, said they, were thought meet only for women in childbed. As for servants, if they had any sheet above ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... near the ships as possible. In fact it was actually under the shadow of a big black-looking vessel which loomed large through the fog, and to and from which men were coming and going as usual. With several of these the old woman interchanged some good-humoured chaff as she settled herself in her place, and bade ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... household, turned the conversation to something else—especially to Nora's first attempts at golf, in which he had been her teacher. Nora, whose reasonableness was abnormal, very soon took the hint, and after five minutes' "chaff" with Winnington, to whom she was devoted, she took up her work and went ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the way. Other laborers stood at the back part of the thresher, where the straw came out, and, with pitch-forks in hand, tossed it about until the foundation for a stack was formed. Then they stood on the stack, rising higher as it rose, trampling the straw and pitching it into place. The chaff and dust flew upon them until their faces, their hat-brims, and the shoulders of their colored shirts were covered, and the perspiration streamed from every pore. No wonder that the wives and mothers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... That to dyscerne I purpose not to dele Soo large by my wyll it longeth not to me were hit dreme or vysyon for your owne wele All that shall hit rede here rad or se Take thereof the best & let the worst be Try out the corne clene from the chaff And then may ye say ye ...
— The Assemble of Goddes • Anonymous
... All this was only chaff and fun, for all the fairies were in good humor. They were only talking, to fill up the interval until the ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... his hands became a far-reaching club. And, swinging it like a fiercely driven flail, he rushed into the crowd of savages, scattering them like chaff in a gale. The smashing blows fell on heads that split under their superlative force, and the ground about him became like a shambles. In a moment he discovered another figure in the shadowy darkness, fighting in a similar fashion, and he knew by the crude, disjointed oaths which ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... not a brilliant man, but he had a fine instinct for other people's corns and prejudices. Everybody agreed that his remarks were able; there were no dissenting voices. He concluded with an apt and solemnly impressive reference to the wheat and the chaff, the garnering and the casting into furnace, leaving the application concerning the deceased wholly to his audience. That completed his success. When he sat down there was a ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... won't for he is shaking his head and pointing at me and here they come. The farmer is holding out his hand as if he had something in it for me to eat. Oh, no, Mr. Farmer, I am too old a goat to be caught with chaff. However, I will stand still on this side of the stream and ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... Mrs. Wilcox a brother—or was it an uncle? Anyhow, he popped the question, and Miss Avery, she said 'No.' Just imagine, if she'd said 'Yes,' she would have been Charles's aunt. (Oh, I say,—that's rather good! 'Charlie's Aunt'! I must chaff him about that this evening.) And the man went out and was killed. Yes, I'm certain I've got it right now. Tom Howard—he was the last ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... pleaded that before God. But he would not, he could not, for his conscience was under convictions, the awakenings of God were upon him; wherefore his privileges melt away like grease, and fly from him like the chaff of the summer threshing-floor, which the wind taketh up and scattereth as the dust; he therefore lets all privileges fall, and pleads only that he us ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... to live in a house which had a door opening to the cloisters. The boys retorted. The worst they gave Mr. Ketch was "chaff;" but his temper could bear anything better than that, especially if it was administered by ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... slaves into the United States Territories. And now there was some inconsistency in saying that the decision was right, and saying, too, that the people of the Territory could lawfully drive slavery out again. When all the trash, the words, the collateral matter, was cleared away from it, all the chaff was fanned out of it, it was a bare absurdity,—no less than that a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has a lawful right to be. Clear it of all the verbiage, and that is the naked truth of his proposition,—that a thing may be lawfully driven from the place ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... near. To his actual deeds were added many legends, and stories imported from English books, till the man's name was wrapped around by amazing web of history. I may, some day, sift the grain from the chaff, and make a book. There is certainly fact enough there, from which to ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... which he could only escape by charging through the ranks of his enemies. He did it nobly. With a roar that rebounded from the face of the high cliff and echoed through the valley like a peal of thunder, he sprang out and rushed at the savages in front, who scattered like chaff right and left. But at the same instant fifty blow-pipes sent their poisoned shafts into his body, and, after a few convulsive bounds, the splendid monarch of the American forests fell dead on the ground. The black jaguar is a somewhat rare animal, and is very ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... came out behind him, and showed him tripping lightly over a bullock's broad back. Then he was up on the manger-edge, had paused to make sure, and was down in the manger, picking up crumbs and dust of linseed-cake and chaff. Three mice were doing the same thing, but fled at his approach; but he did not trouble about that, for the cattle had not left even him and his wife a full meal, having blown what was left of the chaff away, and ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... Sir Richard often used to chaff her about her faulty English and spelling. Several correspondents have mentioned this. She used to retort good-humouredly by flinging in his face some ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... that is planted by the rivers of water,' which spreads its foliage and bears its fruit, and year after year flings a wider shadow upon the grass, and lifts a sturdier bole to the heavens. Separated from Him they are like the chaff, which has neither root nor ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Badawi not only always tells the truth, a perfect contrast with the townsfolk; he is blunt in speech addressing his Sultan "O Sa'd!" and he has a hard rough humour which we may fairly describe as "wut." When you chaff him ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... were astonished. Then some began to bully and try and stop him; others stood up for him. But the battle was won. The better minded boys saw what cowards they had been to give up what they knew was right for fear of chaff—one by one they gradually followed his example, and before that lad left school it was the rule and not the exception for the ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... the forest up, And like a chief in battle fall,—not yet. The lightnings pour not down, from ragged holes In heaven, the torment of their forked tongues, And, like fell serpents, dart and sting,—not yet. The winds awake not, with their awful wings To winnow, even as chaff, from out their track, All that withstandeth, and bring down the pride Of all things strong ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... dashed between them, cutting down the gunners as they stood. We saw them riding through the guns, as I have said; to our delight we saw them returning, after breaking through a column of Russian infantry, and scattering them like chaff, when the flank fire of the battery on the hill swept them down. Wounded men and dismounted troopers flying towards us told the sad tale—demi-gods could not have done what they had failed to do. At the very moment when they were about to retreat a regiment ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... General Gatacre, a man who bore a high reputation for fearlessness and tireless energy, though he had been criticised, notably during the Soudan campaign, for having called upon his men for undue and unnecessary exertion. 'General Back-acher' they called him, with rough soldierly chaff. A glance at his long thin figure, his gaunt Don Quixote face, and his aggressive jaw would show his personal energy, but might not satisfy the observer that he possessed those intellectual gifts which qualify for high command. At the action of the Atbara ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Russia have already frequently attempted to sow discord in these good and sincere relations, but such efforts are vain. The Russian truth-loving national soul, sensitive of any display of mendacity or insincerity, was able to sift the chaff from the wheat, and faith in our friends is unshaken. There is not a single cloud on the clear horizon of our lasting allied harmony. Heartfelt greetings to you, true friends, rulers of the waves and our companions in arms. May victory ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... knowing anything about her, merely pick up their idea of her character from the rabble. We once entertained the same rabble idea of her; but having read her works—for we really have read them—we now regard her with great respect. However, there is a great abundance of chaff and straw to her grain; but the grain is good, and as we do not eat either the chaff or straw if we can avoid it, nor even the raw grain, but thrash it and winnow it, and grind it and bake it, we find it, after undergoing this process, not only ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... you to this gentleman, Lord Blackadder. Perhaps some of you know him. At any rate you've heard of him. We had a difference of opinion, and I was compelled to administer chastisement." A lot of impudent chaff followed. ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... the liquor traffic? I have done all I could to induce him to abstain, and he has abstained several months at a time and then suddenly like a flash of lightning the temptation returns and all his resolutions are scattered like chaff before the wind. I have been blamed for living with him, but Miss Belle were you to see him in his moments of remorse, and hear his bitter self reproach, and his earnest resolutions to reform, you would ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... I'm sure you never looked half so respectable in all your life before. Now, good-bye, Toad, and good luck. Go straight down the way you came up; and if any one says anything to you, as they probably will, being but men, you can chaff back a bit, of course, but remember you're a widow woman, quite alone in the world, ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... pew-holders of fashion, who live sumptuously, ride sumptuously to church of a Sunday, and meekly enjoy a sumptuous sermon for appearance sake, will, so long as you pass unheeded the haunts of vice, fall as chaff before the wind. You must make "early education" more than the mere motto of future happiness; you must go undaunted into the avenues of want and misery, seek out the fallen child, forbear with her, and kindly teach her how much good there is ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... was long after noon-time before Barton actually rallied his aching bones, his dizzy head, his refractory inclinations, to meet the fluctuant sympathy and chaff that awaited him down-stairs in every nook and corner ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... you went aft an' turned in, an' that's what's the matter," he repeated, giving me a nudge in the ribs, while he added more earnestly: "And, if I was you, my boy, I wouldn't mention a word of it to another soul, or the hands 'll chaff the life out of you, an' you'll wish ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... whom I knew well in my childhood's days and, after a few minutes' stay, got up to depart, I grabbed his hand and said, "Oh, won't you stay and have a talk?" He, very nicely, stayed on, and we did have a delightful talk; but Victor Ormonde, who happened to be present, has never ceased to chaff me about it. When we dine with them and get up to go he says in thrilling accents, with an absurdly sentimental air, "Oh! won't you ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... rest upon his voluminous works. With his peculiar method of approaching problems there was bound to be an inordinate amount of chaff mixed with the grain, and he used no winnowing machine. His simplicity and transparent honesty induced him to include everything, in fact he seemed to glory in the number of false trails he laboriously followed. He ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... a great prize in Meshach Browning's account of himself, and have been disappointed. Not that some very fair grains of wheat may not be had for the winnowing, but the proportion of chaff is disheartening. Meshach has been edited, and has not come out of that fiery furnace unscathed. Mr. Stabler has not let him come before us in his deerskin hunting-shirt, but has made him presentable by getting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... literature: 'Of course, you who have so many books are going in for being a doctor,' says Socrates, and then he adds, 'there are so many books on medicine, you know.' As Dyer remarks, whatever the quality of these books may have been, their number must have been great to give point to this chaff."—Aequanimitas, WILLIAM OSLER, M.D., F.R.S., ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... is recognized as the product of a long line of erroneous theory and zigzag development, but the wheat has largely been sifted and the chaff thrown to the winds of antiquity. Its therapeutic and psychological value is ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... them in to these, and so not only shutting them out from others, but mounting guard at the fence, walking round and round outside it, to see they didn't escape, and admiring them, talking to them, through the rails, in mere terms of chaff, terms of chucked cakes and apples—as if they had been antelopes or zebras, or even some superior sort of performing, of dancing, bear. It had been reserved for Basil French to strike her as willing to let go, so to speak, a pound or two ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... She was coming home one summer evening, and a gang of corner-loafers stopped her and demanded money to buy beer, as is their custom. Before she had time to be frightened, Mr. Smith appeared,—whence, she knew not,—scattered the gang like chaff, and collaring two of the human hyenas, kicked them, with deliberate, ponderous, alternate kicks, until they writhed in ineffable agony. When he let them crawl away, she turned to him and thanked him warmly, looking very ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... with me! Take your chaff to the goslings. I tells you I can't do without that 'ere lad. Every ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is drawn without a find, you are always sure of having your spirits raised by the cheerful sunrise: by the time you get home, tired and spattered, the ladies are down stairs ready to make pretty exclamations over the brush or to chaff you pleasantly for your want of success; and then there is just time to get your hair brushed and your clothes changed before the mingled aromas of fried sausage and old Java put the keen edge on your already ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... middle of the forests, like wild beasts, I smote. Their carcasses filled the Tigris, and the tops of the mountains. At this time the troops of the Akhe,[4] who came to the deliverance and assistance of Comukha, together with the troops of Comukha, like chaff I scattered. The carcasses of their fighting men I piled up like heaps on the tops of the mountains. The bodies of their warriors, the roaring[5] waters carried down to the Tigris. Kili Teru son of Kali Teru, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... 'twon't disappoint you! There's a good deal of rubbish here, but a scattering of grain among the chaff. ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... answered him, spurring their horses and flying down on us. The arrow shafts rattled on the bow staves as Olaf's vikings made ready, and I cried to my spearmen to stand steady, for it seemed as if that thundering charge must sweep the crouching lines like chaff before it. And as it came we were silent, and no spear wavered in all the long hedge to right and ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... by the English schoolmaster, who knows as little of Sanscrit as of Erse Scottis or gaelic; calls England an island! and wishes to teach everyone "The ode to a Skylark," "Silas Marner,"[19] and "Tom Browne's Schooldays." (My own dear countrymen you will not be taken in by this chaff for ever, will you?) Why not study Campbells tales in gaelic, or Sir David Lindsay, or the Psalms ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... the justice to say that her absence, while it increases my domestic peace and happiness, increases my cares also. What with the children, the housekeeping, the thought for mother's little comforts and the concern for father's, I am like a bit of chaff driven before the wind, and always in a hurry. There are so many stitches to be taken, so many things to pass through one's brain ! Mother says no mortal woman ought to undertake so much, but what can I do? While Ernest ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... flowers grouped closely together to form one or more spikelets. The spikelets themselves may be either solitary or clustered. The individual flowers are covered by glumes and are arranged spirally on the axis. As the fruit matures, the glumes of the flowers become the "chaff" of ...
— Philippine Mats - Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1 • Hugo H. Miller
... give it up; for they're too poor, and the times is hard, and the agent's harder than the times: there's two of them, the under and the upper; and they grind the substance of one between them, and then blow one away like chaff; but we'll not be talking of that, to spoil your honour's night's rest. The room's ready, and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... DEAR WILL,—I received your letter yesterday evening, just as I was starting out of town to attend a wedding, and so my mind was privately busy, all the evening, in the midst of the maelstrom of chat and chaff and laughter, with the sort of reflections which create themselves, examine themselves, and continue themselves, unaffected by surroundings —unaffected, that is understood, by the surroundings, but not uninfluenced by them. Here ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... characters. Husbands of mine, in short, whose influence over me has, I am proud to say, set death and burial at defiance. Between them they have made my mind the mind of a man. I judge for myself. The opinions of others (when they don't happen to agree with mine) I regard as chaff to be scattered to the winds. No, Catherine, I am not wandering. I am pointing out to a young person, who has her way to make in the world, the vast importance, on certain occasions, of possessing an independent mind. If I had been ashamed to listen behind ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... Don't cry, gran'pa. She'd chaff you worser 'n us! We're only poor little innocent boys. We don't know ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... that the logic-chaff is all laid long since, the question is substantial, not formal. If the Teutsch Ritterdom was actually at this time DEAD, actually stumbling about as a mere galvanized Lie beginning to be putrid,—then, sure enough, it behooved that somebody should bury it, to avoid pestilential effects ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... beast before it is sent to market, costing from 10 to 12 pounds. When sold, the bullocks average 24 or 25 pounds. Thus the cake and the meal equal the whole difference between the buying and selling price, so that all the roots, chaff, and attendance go entirely to the account of manure. These three items, together with the value of pasturage for the months the cattle may lie in the fields, from October to May inclusive, could hardly amount to less than 5 pounds per beast, which, for 170, would be 850 pounds. ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... says: And here's the reason why I tell thus much I, now mature man, you anticipate, May blame my Father justifiably For letting me dream out my nonage thus, And only by such slow and sure degrees Permitting me to sift the grain from chaff, Get truth and falsehood known and named as such. Why did he ever let me dream at all, Not bid me taste the story in its strength? Suppose my childhood was scarce qualified To rightly understand mythology, Silence at least was in his power to keep: I might have—somehow—correspondingly— Well, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... been chiefly introduced for the purpose of guarding our readers against some political sophisms, or to correct some hasty error. But happily, in the writings to which we have devoted our time and attention, the chaff and dross lie so open to view, and are so easily separated from purer matter, that a hint is sufficient to protect the most incautious from harm. Accordingly, in our notes and prefaces we have confined ourselves to simple and succinct histories of the respective works under consideration, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... distil it from the folly of a fool. I can teach you with a quip, if I've a mind; I can trick you into learning with a laugh; Oh, winnow all my folly, and you'll find A grain or two of truth among the chaff! ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Lincoln was called upon by the opponents of this repeal to reply, and he did so with a power which he never surpassed and had never before equalled. All other issues which had divided the people were as chaff, and were scattered to the winds by the intense agitation which arose on the question of extending slavery, not merely into free territory, but into territory which had been declared free by solemn compact. Lincoln's speech occupied more than three hours in delivery, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... entering a Carthusian monastery) ebbing out of the educational and academical town of Cracow spread itself over several provinces. It spread itself shallow but far-reaching. It stirred up a mass of remonstrance, indignation, pitying wonder, bitter irony, and downright chaff. I could hardly breathe under its weight, and certainly had no words for an answer. People wondered what Mr. T. B. would do now with his worrying nephew and, I dare say, hoped kindly that he would make short work of ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person—having neither to weigh thought nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... for life, Archbishop. Just you tell me where you want a church built and I'll see that it's done. Of course I don't mind your chaff—I'm dead in earnest and ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... States will be treated with similar completeness by writers of these countries. The perusal of the present volume will enable us to form an opinion of the merits or demerits of the Socialistic theories and practical plans, and make it possible for us to separate the grain from the chaff, the wisdom from the folly, in the teachings of the Socialists. Thus we shall be able to see which of their complaints and proposals are justified and practical, and which are ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... with. Hence, from the very nature of things and men, the situation is one to develop pathos, humor, comedy, and tragedy, as the great "human sifting machine" works away at separating the wheat from the chaff. The tragedy comes in the case of the excluded, since the blow falls sometimes between parents and children, husband and wife, lover and sweetheart, and the decree of exclusion ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... "you see the powers above are on our side; the arrows of Horam are as chaff on the plain, and as the dust which penetrates not the garments of the traveller. Halt not, therefore, but join your arms to the defender and supporter of ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... think of it—we might both of us have had lots of allocations. These are not the times to conceal hereditary distinctions. But now comes the serious work. We must have one or two men of known wealth upon the list. The chaff is nothing without a decoy-bird. Now, can't you help ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... achievement that way is that at quarter sessions I once convicted a boy of stealing a parcel of cocks and hens."] He must have possessed the gift of going at once to the very root of the matter, and of sifting the corn from the chaff to a most unusual degree; for his Draft gives the substance of the criminal law of England, down to its minute working details, in a compass which, by comparison with the original, may be regarded as almost ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... the wheat is cut, and the new grains are threshed out from the husks which are called chaff. The tall stems make straw. The grains are ground into flour by the miller. We use flour for making bread, cakes, ...
— Chambers's Elementary Science Readers - Book I • Various
... slight breeze, Chaeremon floated through the clear air, far lighter than chaff, and probably would have gone spinning off through ether, but that he caught his feet in a spider's web, and dangled there on his back; there he hung five nights and days, and on the sixth came down by a strand ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... all my harvest-hope I have Nought reaped but a weedie crop of care, Which when I thought have thresht in swelling sheave, Cockle for corn, and chaff for barley bare." ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... published and approved in the Telegraph, the administration newspaper at Washington. By extending the laws of Georgia over the country and people of the Cherokees, the constitution, laws, and treaties, of the United States, were quoad hoc set aside. They were chaff before the wind. In pursuance of these laws of Georgia, a Cherokee Indian is prosecuted for the murder of another Indian, before a state court of Georgia, tried by a jury of white men, and sentenced to death. He applies to a chief justice of the Court ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... belonged, returning from liberty on shore, was heard saying to another with drunken impressiveness, "Remember, our motto is, 'Patriotism and laziness.'" Of course, this went round the ship, greatly delighting on both counts our marine officers, and became embodied in the chaff that passed to and fro between the two corps; of which one saying, "The two most useless things in a ship were the captain of marines and the mizzen-royal," deserves for its drollery to be committed to writing, now that mizzen-royals have ceased to be. ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... much of each other in the big city. Their meetings were rare, and, so far as I can make out, for the most part accidental. But, as I said before, my oldest inhabitant is somewhat hazy, and excruciatingly prolix; his chaff is in the proportion of some fifty to one of his wheat. I've given a good deal of time to this case already, you see, Mr. Hawkehurst; and you'll find your work very smooth sailing compared to what ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... the sea? O God! thy justice makes the world turn pale, When on the armed fleet, that royally Bears down the surges, carrying war, to smite Some city, or invade some thoughtless realm, Descends the fierce tornado. The vast hulks Are whirled like chaff upon the waves; the sails Fly, rent like webs of gossamer; the masts Are snapped asunder; downward from the decks, Downward are slung, into the fathomless gulf, Their cruel engines; and their hosts, arrayed In trappings ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... Harriet Twistleton? An uncommon fine girl, you know. But I wasn't going to be caught like that. I'm very fond of Harriet,—in my way, you know; but they don't catch an old bird like me with chaff." ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... not ask superfluous questions. You might as fitly paint Dame Venus freckled, As fancy Punch will stoop to being "heckled." I have no "Programmes," I. My wit's too wide To a wire-puller's "platform" to be tied. I know what's right, I mean to see it done, And for the rest good-tempered chaff and fun Are my pet "principles"—till fools grow rash From toleration, then they feel the lash. I am a sage, and not a prig or pump, Therefore I never canvas, spout or stump, I'm Liberal—as the sunlight—of all Good, Which to Conserve I strive—that's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... carnations instead of violets for Belle Proctor's dinner Tuesday," said Bess, with covetousness in her eyes as she watched Matthew begin to unload his wheat. I wonder what Matthew's man, Hickson, at one twenty-five a month, thought of his master's coat when he began to brush the chaff ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... curate, and Henry Everard, M.D., going by rail to Malbourne. Everard asleep; manly, cheerful, intellectual, healthy in body and mind. Cyril awake; consumed by unspeakable sorrow. Everard wakes; Cyril suddenly becomes gay in response to his friend's high spirits. They chaff each other. Cyril preaches to Everard, when Henry scolds him for fasting, and his laxity of faith and practice. They pass Belminster, when Cyril betrays unconscious ambition at Everard's jesting prophecy that he would preach as bishop in the cathedral. Asceticism ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... miles Worson went on very well, at an easy gait, without apparent fatigue, for he had really great powers of endurance and was not sufficiently intoxicated to enfeeble them. The three men in the wagon kept a short distance in the rear, giving him occasional friendly "chaff" or encouragement, as the spirit moved them. Suddenly—in the very middle of the roadway, not a dozen yards from them, and with their eyes full upon him—the man seemed to stumble, pitched headlong forward, uttered a terrible cry and vanished! He did not fall ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... of Revolution spent themselves and Metternich drove the rebels before him, as the hurricane blows chaff. Order was re-established in Vienna and in ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... times. Moreover, among the emblems of Dionysus was the winnowing-fan, that is the large open shovel-shaped basket, which down to modern times has been used by farmers to separate the grain from the chaff by tossing the corn in the air. This simple agricultural instrument figured in the mystic rites of Dionysus; indeed the god is traditionally said to have been placed at birth in a winnowing-fan as in a cradle: in art he is represented as an infant so cradled; and from these traditions and representations ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... butler and he had the sensation of chaff scattering before a strong wind. In truth Mrs. Oglethorpe was an impressive figure and quite two inches taller than himself. He could only stare at her in helpless awe, the more so as he had recognized ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... be possible to agree on the idea of the divine; but no, that is not the question—the chaff must be separated from the good grain. The supernatural is miracle, and miracle is an objective phenomenon independent of all preceding casuality. Now, miracle thus understood cannot be proved experimentally; and besides, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... knew the real trouble with Niggertown was it had adopted the white village's estimate of it. The sentiment of the white village was overpowering among the imitative negroes. The black folk looked into the eyes of the whites and saw themselves reflected as chaff and skum and slime, and no human being ever suggested that they ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... fulsome prayers. And Hogginarmo promised speedily to pay his humble homage at his august master's throne, of which he begged leave to be counted the most loyal and constant defender. Such a WARY old BIRD as King Padella was not to be caught by Master Hogginarmo's CHAFF and we shall hear presently how the tyrant treated his upstart vassal. No, no; depend on't, two such rogues do not ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this till the landlord had almost forbidden him the place. Albina herself, too, advised him to come as seldom as possible. She considered that as long as she was a barmaid she must be friendly, and not too sensitive to the chaff of the guests; and if it pained him to see this, it was better that he should remain away. And with an ardent glance she added that when she was his wife he would have her all to himself. Heimert had constrained himself to ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... might have served as models for goddesses stood, pitch-fork in hand, removing the chaff. The breeze blowing through it would catch the wisps and send them dancing in the air, while the great generous streams of golden grain flowing from the machine seemed like ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... kind impulses in this direction. When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horsechestnuts, I own I enter into Nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... credit as open and even- down truth; but as to whether Taffy's master's nick-nackets be true or false, every one is at liberty, in this free country, to think for himself. Old sparrows are not easily caught with chaff; and unless I saw a proper affidavit, I would not, for my own part, pin my faith to a single word of them. But every man his ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... always been woman's mission. But whenever he sees one of these new citizens, or hears fresh stories of their address and ability, Mr. Punch is proud and delighted. Perhaps in the past, even in the present, he may have been, or even still is, a little given to chaff Englishwomen for some of their foibles, and even their aspirations. But he never doubted how splendid they were at heart; he never for a moment supposed they would be anything but ready and keen when the hour of ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... dry rejoinder caused was interrupted by the waitress bringing out tea; and these Hillsborough worthies felt bound to chaff her; but she, being Yorkshire too, gave them as good as they brought, ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... the shivers. My heart yearns toward that beautiful young creature, and I believe she is as innocent as my baby. It is a burning shame to send her here, unless there is no doubt of her guilt. Judge Dent is too shrewd an old fox to be baited with chaff, and I am satisfied from what he told you, that he believes her statement. There is nothing I would not do to comfort her, but I would rather have my ears boxed than witness her suffering. The day I carried to her a change of clothes, until her own could be washed, and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... bound together, and a rough but effective gag in his mouth. Suspicious at first only of a practical joke on the part of some of their number, they liberated him to the running accompaniment of jest and chaff. As soon as he was free, he struggled to his feet and, ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... furnace many times the good and bad will hold; But what consumes the chaff will only cleanse the gold. R. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... into me deepest, however, was the look of nearly every one of the judges. Had they been dressed as longshoremen, one would still have known them for possessors of the judicial temperament—men born to hold the balances and fitted and trained to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. So many eagle-beaked noses, so many hawk-keen eyes, so many smooth-chopped, long-jowled faces, seen here together, made me think of what we are prone to regard as the highwater period of American statesmanship —the ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... into a hopper, below which a series of four or five fans, G, is arranged one below the other. By passing down through these fans the cane is separated from the lighter leaves, much as grain is separated from chaff. The leaves are blown away, and finally taken from the building by an exhaust fan. This separation of the leaves and other refuse is essential to the success of the sugar making, for in them the largest part of the coloring and other deleterious ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... stretch his limbs. The bed was wretched, merely a wooden frame fastened to the wall, so that it could not be moved, which rendered it extremely difficult to bleed him, or to assist him in any way, as he could neither turn nor raise his head an inch from the pillow, or rather sack of chaff, upon which he was laid. This was so full of dust that it made him cough. I soon removed it, and got a cushion out of the carriage instead. We had a clean blanket from Brussels, and at first we put clean sheets on every day. But ...
— A Week at Waterloo in 1815 • Magdalene De Lancey
... on a trot round a centre, a woman holding the reins, and another, or a girl or two, with whips drive; the men supply and clear the floor; other parties are dressing, by throwing the corn into the air for the wind to blow away the chaff. Every soul is employed, and with such an air of cheerfulness, that the people seem as well pleased with their labor, as the farmer himself with his great heaps of wheat. The scene is uncommonly animated and ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... a woman who had three daughters, two of whom were so unlucky that nothing ever succeeded with them, all their projects went wrong, all their hopes were turned to chaff. But the youngest, who was named Nella, was born to good luck, and I verily believe that at her birth all things conspired to bestow on her the best and choicest gifts in their power. The Sky gave her the perfection of its light; Venus, matchless beauty of form; Love, the first dart of ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... cases very unsuitable, uncalled for, and insufficient. However, sir, I accept your remarks in the same friendly spirit as, I am sure, you have offered them. Permit me, at the same time, as one many years your senior, to say that, in considering your proposals, I shall separate the chaff—of which there is a good deal—from the wheat—of which there is some little; the latter I shall gather into my mind's garner, and I trust it will fall on good soil." I took the old gentleman's hand and ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... food daily consumed by an elephant in captivity is calculated at 200 lbs; besides thirty-six pails of water. It consists of turnips, rice, chaff, bran, hay, and sea biscuit. Straw is allowed for his bed, which is generally consumed before morning; besides which, when they are in menageries they receive no small quantity of dainties from visitors. I never could enter the Rotunda in the Paris menagerie, without being furnished with ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... then," said Harris, replying in his gruffest voice, "for I'm in a mortal bit of a hurry, and I'm in no humor to listen to no chaff, so get away." ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... him at dinner at Sir John McDonald's, then adjutant-general, a very kind and excellent friend of mine. Mrs. Norton and Lord C——, who were among the guests, both came late, and after we had gone into the dining-room, where they were received with a discreet quantity of mild chaff, Mrs. Norton being much too formidable an adversary to be challenged lightly. After dinner, however, when the men came up into the drawing-room, Theodore Hook was requested to extemporize, and having sung one song, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Chapeau, "how Cathelineau led a few of the townsmen against a whole regiment of soldiers, and scattered them through the town like chaff." ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... anxiety. We dared not speak of our feelings, for fear of frightening our young companion, who pressed close up to me. Amidst the universal destruction going on, it only needed a branch driven by the squall to dislodge our shelter, for us to be swept away like chaff before the wind. I had witnessed many a hurricane, but this ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... to feed the birds is almost an art in itself. A winter lunch counter spread with suet, nuts, hemp seed, meat, and crumbs will attract nuthatches, chickadees, downy and hairy woodpeckers, creepers, blue jays, etc. Canary seed, buckwheat, oats and hay-chaff scattered on the ground beneath will provide an irresistible banquet for other feathered boarders. A feeding place of this sort can be arranged for convenient observation from a window, and afford no end of diversion and instruction. But whether close to home or far afield, the great secret ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... his pride was failing him, and he was ready to plead for the chance of a little rest. Therefore he opened the door, and invited the landlady to enter in the most conciliating manner. But no such poor chaff would be of any avail with one of Mrs. Gruppins' experience, and looking straight before her, as if addressing no one in particular, she ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... "Thus this globe," he says, "when brought rather near drops of water causes them to swell and puff up. It likewise attracts air, smoke, etc."(9) Before the time of Guericke's demonstrations, Cabaeus had noted that chaff leaped back from an "electric," but he did not interpret the phenomenon as electrical repulsion. Von Guericke, however, recognized it as such, and refers to it as what he calls "expulsive virtue." "Even expulsive virtue is seen in this globe," he says, "for ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Oh! he was a very dirty, wretched man himself, but he must have had a kind heart. He took me by the hand and made me carry his broom and brushes. Nobody took much notice of us, the dawn was only just breaking, and the passages were very dark and deserted; only once some soldiers began to chaff him about me: 'C'est ma fille—quoi?' he said roughly. I very nearly laughed then, only I had the good sense to restrain myself, for I knew that my freedom, and perhaps my life, depended on my not betraying ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... cheek, And his starven hands grew plump and sleek. But for all sign of wealth he wore He swaggered neither less nor more. He talked the stuff he talked before, And bragged as he had bragged of yore, With his Yankee chaff and his Yankee slang, And his Yankee bounce and his Yankee twang. And, to tell the truth, we all held clear Of the impudent little adventurer; And any man with an eye might see That, though he bore it merrily, He recognised the ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... see that to accept blindly what you are told is not half so great as to sift it all, and to separate the chaff from the wheat, and to find the kernel of truth in the shell of tradition?" Elisabeth had not talked to Alan Tremaine for over a year without learning his tricks of thought and even of expression. "Don't you think that it is better to believe a little ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... cheiromancy here, Lady Windermere; it is the only subject that Arthur does not like people to chaff about. I assure you he is ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... I know my time for skirmshander (chaff) is over, and I must steer a straighter course; but don't you fear, Jack ashore is a very different craft from what he is with blue water under his keel. I had a long talk with Uncle last night and got my orders; I won't forget 'em nor all I owe him. As for you, I'll name my first ship as I say, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... burn, lads," said Trapper Jim, who certainly enjoyed hearing the boys chaff each other in this way. "And everybody keep away from that side of the house where the ...
— With Trapper Jim in the North Woods • Lawrence J. Leslie
... motion, and, the animal being partially roused, he drives across the street to us. DAUBINET directs him, and on we go, lumbering and rattling through the town, meeting only one other voiture, whose driver appears infinitely amused at his friend having obtained a fare. Some chaff passes between them, which to me is unintelligible, and which DAUBINET professes not to catch, but I fancy, whatever it is, it is not highly complimentary to our cocher's fares. In one quarter through which we drive, they are setting ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... they did in the first instance at the sawdust. When they get tired of soot (which they will in time) you must procure some soft tissue paper and cut it fine, and use that in the same way as the sawdust and the soot. You can also use light chaff or hay ...
— Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher - After 25 Years' Experience • Ike Matthews
... ordinary type, appear fifty per cent, more manly than they really were—the young old Hosack with his groomlike face and immaculate clothes, the burly Howard Cannon, who retained a walrus mustache in the face of persistent chaff, and Noel d'Oyly, who when seen with his Junoesque wife made the gravest naturalists laugh at the thought of the love manners of ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... promulgated fixing the composition of horse chaff. The approach of the pantomime season is thought to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... atheistical principles of the French, among whom God was disregarded or forgotten; and, elevated by the importance of his subject, he described the Almighty as mustering his wrath to descend on that nation, and disperse it as chaff in a whirlwind. He called on them to look towards their home of England, and to see with what eager devotion the inhabitants worshiped the golden image of Commerce, and laid the tribute of all their thoughts on its altars; ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... but a Chapel of Ease. But some spiritual paralysis seemed to have befallen our pastor; for, though many faces turned toward him, full of the dumb hunger that often comes to men when suffering or danger brings then nearer to the heart of things, they were offered the chaff of divinity, and its wheat was left for less needy gleaners, who knew where to look. Even the fine old Bible stories, which may be made as lifelike as any history of our day, by a vivid fancy and pictorial diction, were robbed of all their charms by dry explanations ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... the Thursday night after, I, my father, uncle, and several other friends, went there and made the match. She had sixty guineas, that her grandfather left her, thirteen head of cattle, two feather- and two chaff-beds, with sheeting, quilts, and blankets; three pieces of bleached linen, and a flock of geese of her own rearing—upon the whole, among ourselves, it wasn't aisy to ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... I have got matters pretty straight. The question is, whether the Baron will accept my last message as chaff, or resent it. Let me see, how does it read—"It is suggested, for the President's consideration, that rumours uncorrected or unexplained acquire almost the force of admitted truth." Quite so—so they do. Let me see—"That any want of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... knew. Then there were rides in the country with Grant's staff. Lincoln in his tall hat and frock coat was a marked and curious figure on a horse. He had once, by the way, insisted on riding with Butler, catechising him with remorseless chaff on engineering matters and forbidding his chief engineer to prompt him, along six miles of cheering Northern troops within easy sight and shot of the Confederate soldiers to whom his hat and coat identified him. But, however odd a figure, he impressed Grant's officers as a good and bold horseman. ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... soldiers were upon his back. When he regained consciousness he found himself securely bound, as was Werper also. The Belgian officer, success having crowned his efforts, was in good humor, and inclined to chaff his prisoners about the ease with which they had been captured; but from Tarzan of the Apes he elicited no response. Werper, however, was voluble in his protests. He explained that Tarzan was an English lord; but the officer only laughed at the assertion, ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the penitentiary, it's easy to say but hard to do. So much time, seemingly, has to be wasted in profitless study to find a few kernels amid much chaff. Napoleon said at one point that the trouble with books is that one must read so many bad ones to find something really good. True enough but, even so, there are perfectly practical ways to advance rapidly without undue waste ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... usually of plaited rattan strips with a rim of thicker rattan. It is held in both hands and by a series of shuffling motions, which are better seen than described, accompained[sic] by a peculiar movement of the thumb of the left hand, the chaff and the little broken fragments of rice are thrown off into another receptacle for the ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... King went gathering Wessex men, As grain out of the chaff The few that were alive to die, Laughing, as littered skulls that lie After lost battles turn to ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... impatiently!—waited with all necessaries in hand to bake bread for their men. The respective husbands and sons squatted around on their heels, languidly smoking their pipes and urging their women to be quick. A deal of good-natured chaff seemed to take place during this daily operation, but the women were quite in earnest and took themselves and the process very seriously. They seemed much concerned if one piece got too much burnt or ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... is her merry laugh! So wondrous is her power That listening grief would stop and chaff With her ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... by the group on the veranda, not heeding their chaff and once outside the grounds, Jim said, "Are you sure you want to ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... staying in the house." "Va bene, va bene," Giorgio would mutter. He obeyed. The Signori Inglesi would require their midday meal presently. He had been one of the immortal and invincible band of liberators who had made the mercenaries of tyranny fly like chaff before a hurricane, "un uragano terribile." But that was before he was married and had children; and before tyranny had reared its head again amongst the traitors who had imprisoned ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... About the fourth day after her sister had left, I got my hands on her thigh. On Sunday when all were at church: to blind my mother I had gone out, but went home directly, and into the kitchen to resume my baudy chaff, I forgot all about her sister, got to kissing and trying to feel her. I was long in the kitchen with my prick out, sometimes hanging, sometimes standing stiff, trying to induce her to let me, but it was of no use. Her cap was off, her ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... and wanting wit to choose, Who house the chaff and burn the grain; Who hug the wealth ye cannot use, And lack the riches all may gain. ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... spite of his assertion, earlier on, that he "preferred his own company," he seemed thoroughly to enjoy the little home-like diner a trois. There was something about the cosy room and the gay, good-humoured chaff and laughter of brother and sister which conveyed a sense of welcome—partaking of that truest kind of hospitality which creates no special atmosphere of ceremony for a guest but encompasses him ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... know—or, rather, I do know what he would think, if he heard another man use, in the presence of a woman, the kind of language which he habitually employs. However, I said nothing. I had a motive for allowing the chaff ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... last the supposed coexistence of Mind and matter and the mingling of good and evil have re- sulted from the philosophy of the serpent. Jesus' demon- 269:6 strations sift the chaff from the wheat, and unfold the unity and the reality of good, the unreality, the nothing- ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... good, and a little evil, to see only the evil and the falsehood, to the utter exclusion of the truth and the good. All men whose minds are sufficiently laborious or acute to love the reading of metaphysical inquiries, will by the same labour and acuteness separate the chaff from the corn—the false from the true. It is the young, the light, the superficial, who are easily misled by error, and incapable of discerning its fallacy; but tell me, if it is the light, the young, the superficial, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... up at a stand he had never been on before: it was time to give Diamond his bag of chopped beans and oats. The men got about him, and began to chaff him. He took it all good-humouredly, until one of them, who was an ill-conditioned fellow, began to tease old Diamond by poking him roughly in the ribs, and making general game of him. That he could not bear, and the tears came in his ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... see, that by doing so, the first principles of philosophy are violated; and many well meaning persons are, by this inverted state of public opinion, insensibly drawn away from the more valuable food provided for them as responsible and immortal beings, to feed on the mere chaff and garbage of temporal and sensual enjoyments; or the more valuable, but still temporary crumbs of the intellectual table. That this practical abuse of acknowledged truths should be found among the ignorant and the depraved, might perhaps be expected; ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... his staff of Mamre oak, A knotted shepherd-staff that's broke The skull of many a wolf and fox Come filching lambs from Jesse's flocks. Loud laughs Goliath, and that laugh Can scatter chariots like blown chaff To rout: but David, calm and brave, Holds his ground, for God will save. Steel crosses wood, a flash, and oh! Shame for Beauty's overthrow! (God's eyes are dim, His ears are shut.) One cruel backhand sabre cut— ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... hatred of slavery, to show the utter fallacy of basing national reconstruction upon the votes of returned rebels, and rejecting loyal black men; making (after all the blood poured out like water, and wealth scattered like chaff) a return to the old idea that a white rebel is better or of more account in the body politic than a loyal black man.... Moses, the meekest man on earth, led the children of Israel over the Red Sea, but was not permitted to see them settled in Canaan. Mr. Lincoln has led up through another Red Sea ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... potent chemicals fearlessly administered, leaving him dark as to their distinctive qualities applied remedially. What should he do? Run with the prescription to old Taylor in the next street, a chemist of forty years? Alas! at his tender age he had not omitted to chaff that reverend rival persistently and publicly. Humble his establishment before the King Street one? Sooner perish drugs, and come eternal cricket! And after all, why not? Drummer-boys, and powder-monkeys, and other ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... let the quantity usually allotted for a meal be mixed, consisting, for the first week, of three parts of milk and one part of hay-tea. The only nourishing infusion of hay is that which is made from the best and sweetest hay, cut by a chaff-cutter into pieces about two inches long, and put into an earthen vessel; over this, boiling water should be poured, and the whole allowed to stand for two hours, during which time it ought to be ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... Till that eventful day When all the labor of our hands Like chaff was swept away: We saw our home made desolate, Our pleasant cottage sold; Men called us poor, but we were rich In ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... To some women, as they advance in years, an inability of separating chaff from earnest becomes more pronounced, and the uppermost wish of her mind at present was to see a real attachment between Bertie and Cecil. Albert Du Meresq was only her half-brother; but he had become her charge in infancy under terrible circumstances, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... relative clause. He was a typical back-blocker, dry and wiry, nasally cocksure, insolently cool, a fearless hand with horse, man, or woman. He was a good friend to Hack when there was no third person of his own kidney to appreciate the overseer's conception of friendly chaff. They were by themselves now, yet the last speech drew from Radford ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... pretends to be a missionary for Israel, and who brings forward the apocryphal book of Enoch, has been among my people in my absence, and many have been led after him. How humbling is this to them and to me! Lord, what is man! This may be blessed, 1st, to discover chaff which we thought to be wheat; 2nd, to lead some to greater distrust of themselves, when their eyes are opened: 3rd, to teach me the need of solidly instructing those who seem to have grace ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... the strong man shot down with all his eager blood hot within him, by men as hot-blooded as himself. But once when the old doctor's eye caught the up-turned, straining gaze of the father Darley, seeking with all his soul to find a grain of holy comfort in the chaff of words, his conscience smote him. Had he nothing to say that should calm anger and revenge with spiritual power? no breath of the comforter to soothe repining into resignation? But again the discord between the laws of man and the laws of Christ stood before him; and he gave up the attempt ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Morfydd, not thy haunting kiss Or voice of bliss can save me From the spear of age whose chill Has quenched the thrill love gave me. My ripe grain of heart and brain The sod sadly streweth; Its empty chaff with mocking laugh The wind of death pursueth! Dig my grave! O, dig it deep To hide my sleeping body, So but Christ my spirit keep, ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... usually freed from chaff by the simple process of throwing it into the air when a brisk wind was blowing, but we saw several hand winnowing machines which were exceedingly ingenious and very effective. The wheat was ground between two circular stones ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... conjugial love?" But the angelic spirits replied, "Think more profoundly, weigh the matter well in your minds, and you will perceive, that your love of the sex is a love extra-conjugial, and quite different from conjugial love; the latter being as distinct from the former, as wheat is from chaff, or rather as the human principle is from the bestial. If you should ask the females in heaven, 'What is love extra-conjugial?' I take upon me to say, their reply will be, 'What do you mean? What do you say? How can you utter ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
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