"Sickle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that a brute should have her woman's innocence to sully and destroy. His love of the woman disappeared in his desire to save, the idea which she represented at that moment; and lost in sentiment he stood watching the white sickle of the moon over against the dim village. The leaves of some pollarded willows whitened when the breeze shot them up to the light, and a moment after became quite distinct in the glare and the steam of an approaching engine. He ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... needs a teacher to admonish him That flesh is grass! that earthly things, but mist! What are our joys, but dreams? And what our hopes? But goodly shadows in the summer cloud? There's not a wind that blows, but bears with it Some rainbow promise. Not a moment flies, But puts its sickle in the fields of life, And mows its thousands, with ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... I tell it you? Well, listen. I dreamt I was standing in a meadow, and all round me was rye, so tall, and ripe as gold!... and I had a reddish dog with me—such a wicked dog; it kept trying to bite me. And I had a sickle in my hands; not a simple sickle; it seemed to be the moon itself—the moon as it is when it's the shape of a sickle. And with this same moon I had to cut the rye clean. Only I was very weary with the heat, and the moon blinded me, and I felt lazy; and cornflowers ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... to reknit the relations among the peoples, must turn their hopes towards the other generation, that of those who bleed in the armies. May they be preserved! They have been ruthlessly thinned out by the sickle of war. They might even be annihilated if the war should be prolonged and extended, as may happen, for all things are possible. Mankind stands, like Hercules, at the parting of the ways. One of these ways leads (if Asia takes a hand in the game, and accentuates yet further the characteristics ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... on a fire. He then caused enclosures to be made, fields to be ploughed and sown, pleasant wooden houses to be built, bees to be sheltered and encouraged, and schools to be erected where song and music were taught. O a truly great man was Hu Gadarn! though a warrior, he preferred the sickle and pruning hook to the sword, and the sound of the song and lute to the hoarse blast ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... apposition with some other nominative word, adding to the meaning of that word: "The reaper Death with his sickle keen." ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... a while amongst the bushes, peered without conviction into a ditch or two. There was not a sound: patches of slime glimmered feebly amongst the reeds. Slowly we trudged back, drooping under the thin sickle of the moon, and I heard him mutter to himself, "Himmel! Zwei und dreissig Pfund!" He was impressed by the figure of my loss. For a long time we had ceased to hear ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... preferred it, in his own dominions. Many, in consequence of this, migrated to Seville and other cities of Andalusia, where they were settled on estates which had been confiscated by the inquisitors; who looked forward, no doubt, with satisfaction to the time, when they should be permitted to thrust their sickle into the new crop of heresy, whose seeds were thus sown amid the ashes of the old one. Those who preferred to remain in the conquered Moorish territory, as Castilian subjects, were permitted the free enjoyment of personal rights and ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... no! it is an ever fixed mark That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:— If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... assortment of garden seeds, on my dog-trains, all the way to Norway House. I harnessed eight dogs to my plough, and ploughed up my little fields; and, after making a harrow, I harrowed in my wheat with the dogs. The first year I had thirty bushels of beautiful wheat. This I cut with a sickle, and then thrashed it with a flail. Mrs Young sewed several sheets together, and one day, when there was a steady, gentle breeze blowing, we winnowed the chaff from the wheat in the wind. There were no mills within hundreds of miles of us; so we merely cracked the wheat in a hand coffee-mill, ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... easily at this season. First find the stars [eta] and [omicron] Leonis, the former forming with Regulus (now lying towards the south-west, and almost exactly midway between the zenith and the horizon) the handle of the Sickle in Leo, the other farther off from Regulus towards the right, but lower down. Now sweep from [omicron] towards [eta] with a low power.[6] There will be found a sixth-magnitude star about one-fourth of the way from [omicron] to [eta]. South, following this, will be found a group of four stars, ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... on the evening of the 15th Nisan, even though it were a Sabbath. It must always have been gathered from a fresh harvest cultivated even in the Sabbatical year. The reapers asked these questions three times of those who were witnesses, "Has the sun gone down?" "With this sickle?" "Into this basket?" "On this Sabbath [first day of the Passover]?" "Shall I reap?" After the witnesses answered these questions the sheaf was reaped. It was finally ground into flour, and a handful of it mixed with frankincense was burned on the ...
— Hebrew Literature
... supreme Evil, God. Lo, I say unto both, I am neither; But greater than either; For meeting and mingling in Me they become neither evil nor good; Their cycle is rounded, they know neither hunger nor food, They need neither sickle nor seed-time, nor root nor fruit, They are ultimate, infinite, absolute. Therefore I say unto all that have sinned, East and West and South and North The wings of my measureless love go forth To cover you all: they are free as the wings of ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke: How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bow'd the woods beneath ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... who toiled throughout the day At sport or work, and had their fill of sound, The jest and laughter that we mate with play, The beat of hoofs, the mill-wheel grinding round, The anvil's note on summer breezes borne, The sickle's sweep in fields of ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... field, rejoicing mickle To see a sword that so surpass'd his sickle." Harrington's Ariosto, B. xiii: see Singer's Shak., Vol. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... cakes fur 'em, sixteen of 'em; an' Dickison the undertaker's tellin' all over they got the best quality shroud he carries. Well, you'll find it all in the Biweekly, under Death's Busy Sickle. Jim Bisbee shore set a store by Matty oncet she was dead. It was a grand affair, Delia. Not but what we've had some good ones in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... contrast with the old days of household economies, the days of the ox-chain, the sickle, and the leach-tub. All of these, some happily and some unhappily, have been swept away by the besom of Progress. But in any case life was too serious in those days for effeminate luxury, or for aught but proper pride in defending the country, and in work well done. And it is just this ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... on the fields, like a shimmering coat of varnish; the world was bathed in the light of a pale, wan moon. The forest-trees stood out here and there in blue points, like teeth. Large and brilliant the stars looked down, and above the milky way, veiled in vapours, hung the sickle of ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest." The import of the saying seems to be that while months would elapse before the wheat and the barley were ready for the sickle, the harvest of souls, exemplified by the approaching crowd, was even then ready; and that from what He had sown the disciples might reap, to their inestimable advantage, since they would have wages ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... which at first did not seem very well adapted to any purpose; and yet, although mere fragments, they had every appearance of having been purposely shaped, and not of accidental resemblances to a hook or sickle blade. When I got home I read that perfect specimens, mine being certain pieces of the same form, had been found off in Norway; and Professor Nilsson, who has carefully studied the whole subject, says they are fish-hooks made ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... times She can glean wool to twist her rhymes; Morning and noon and eve supply To her their fairest tints for dye, But ever through her twirling thread There spires one strand of warmest red, Tinged from the homestead's genial heart, The stamp and warrant of her art; With this Time's sickle she outwears, And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... haste slowly, Than to antedate your day; The farmer waits for the sunshine, To transmute the grass to hay. When the fields are ripe for harvest Fear neither the heat or rain, But thrust in your sharpened sickle, ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... the terrific meaning of my sleepless nights, my troubled thoughts, my strange inquietude? Fiercely I strode along, heedless whither I was going, till I found myself suddenly on the borders of the desolate Campagna. A young moon gleamed aloft, looking like a slender sickle thrust into the heavens to reap an over-abundant harvest of stars. I paused irresolutely. There was a deep silence everywhere. I felt faint and giddy: curious flashes of light danced past my eyes, and my limbs shook like those of a palsied ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... mounds lifted a huge black-muzzled head, decorated with an enormous pair of sickle-shaped horns that stretched right back to the shoulders. He stared with great sullen eyes and trotted a few paces towards them; one after another, the rest lifted their heads and stared too. Closer drew the horsemen at their steady, silent jog, the ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... gather to them to be ordered there under their leaders of scores and half- hundreds and hundreds; and even so they did. But the banners of the Dale without the Burg were the Bridge, and the Bull, and the Vine, and the Sickle. And the Shepherds had three banners, to wit Greenbury, and the Fleece, and ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... reached a farmhouse set close to the road, with a barn on the other side. At a grindstone a tall, thin boy was sharpening a sickle. ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... ere that gulf can be recross'd, How large a space of fleeting life is lost: Yet there, by time, their bosoms shall be changed, And strangers once shall cease to sigh estranged, But jocund in the year's long sunshine roam, That yields their sickle twice its harvest home. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... forest. All the afternoon they wandered about, until black night encompassed them. A dismal storm arose of wind and rain, mingled with snow. They were drenched to the skin, and their garments froze around them. In the darkness they could find no shelter. They had no weapons, but each one a small sickle to cut thatch. They had no food whatever. They heard the roar of the beasts of the forests. They supposed it to be the roaring of lions, though it was probably the howling of wolves. Their only safety ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... prevailed. The English had settled on the fertile lands along the bay and up the many rivers, the musket had largely given place to the plough and the sword to the sickle and the hoe, and trustful industry had succeeded the old martial vigilance. The friendliest intercourse existed between the settlers and the natives. These were admitted freely to their houses, often supplied with fire-arms, employed in hunting and fishing, and looked ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... no time of life pleasanter than that in which serene old age reviews the exploits and the prodigies of boyhood. Ah, my gay fellows, harvest your crops diligently, that your barns and granaries be full when your arms are no longer able to wield the sickle! ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... the field was ripe, and blessed are ye, for ye did thrust in the sickle, and did reap with your might, yea, all the day long did ye labor; and behold the number of your sheaves! And they shall be gathered into the garners, ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... art old, relinquish childishness, and leave it to the young to indulge in play and merriment. Expect not the sprightliness of youth from the aged; for the stream that ran by can never return. Now that the corn is ripe for the sickle, it rears not its head as when green and shooting. The season of youth has slipt through my hands; alas! when I think on those heart-exhilarating days! The lion has lost the sturdy grasp of his paw: I must now put up, like a ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... asked the Ghurka to show me his knife, but he would not. The Ghurka knife is a weapon of wonderful grace. It is short and sharpened on both edges, while it is broad and curved almost to the angle of a sickle. It is used in a flat sweeping movement, which, when wielded by an expert, severs a limb or a head at one blow. I was told that at twenty yards, when they ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... Hydra many-necked Flickering its dread tongues. Of its fearful heads Some severed lay on earth, but many more Were budding from its necks, while Hercules And Iolaus, dauntless-hearted twain, Toiled hard; the one with lightning sickle-sweeps Lopped the fierce heads, his fellow seared each neck With glowing iron; the monster ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... by roses and ribbons, an oblique cross of roses lying on a bed of ivy, a basket made of ivy and autumn leaves, holding a sheaf of grain and a sickle of violets, an ivy pillow with a cross of flowers on one side, a bunch of pansies held by a knot of ribbon at one corner, a cross made of ivy alone, a "harvest-field" made of ears of wheat, are some of the many new funereal designs which break the monotony ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... one of the richly-fed fields of his neighbour, he would cast an envious glance over the hedge, and say, "So far and no farther?" for he would have liked to have had the whole under his plough. And so in the autumn, when he gathered his own scanty crop and had to stop his sickle short of the close ranks of his neighbour's corn, he would cry, "All this, and none of that?" and go home ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... carry out this order was a man such as those whom Louis XI. had employed fifty years earlier to destroy the feudal system, and Robespierre one hundred and fifty years later to destroy the aristocracy. Every woodman needs an axe, every reaper a sickle, and Richelieu found the instrument he required in de Laubardemont, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... before I read your destiny, I will. You have a large mole beneath your right shoulder. (Lucy starts.) You have a scar on your instep by falling over a sickle in your infancy. Nay, more. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... Bright morning. Sickle moon just hiding in a red cloud, and the morning stars just vanished in light. But we've had nearly three weeks of dark weather, so we mustn't think it poor Coniston's ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... and Sewell looked over his shoulder at the house, now black in the twilight, on the crest of the low hill across the hollow behind them. "I declare," he said, "the loneliness of that place almost broke my heart. There!" he added, as the faint sickle gleamed in the sky above the roof, "I've got the new moon right over my left shoulder for my pains. That's what comes ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... village blacksmith shop, and are of the rudest, most awkward description. They plow with a crooked stick, they dig ditches with their fingers, and carry everything that has to be moved in little baskets on their heads. The harvesting is done with a primitive-looking sickle, and root crops are taken out of the ground with a two-tined fork with a handle only a foot long. The Hindu does everything in a squatting posture, hence he uses only short-handled tools. Fifty or seventy-five cents each would easily replace the outfit of three-fourths of ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... round their necks, with numerous arm, leg, and ear rings of the same material. Their weapons were war-axes of various shapes, and clubs. Into many of their knob-sticks were inserted pieces of iron resembling a sickle, but more curved, sometimes to a circle, and sharp on the outside. They appeared more rude and barbarous than the tribes around us, the natural consequences of the warlike life they had led. They were suffering dreadfully from want; even ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... It is coming, perhaps sooner than we expect, perhaps not for many weary months. But the reaper is even now sharpening his sickle in ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... their stern old mountains we have met them in their pride, And rolled from Buena Vista back the battle's bloody tide; Where the enemy came surging swift, like the Mississippi's flood, And the reaper, Death, with strong arms swung his sickle red with blood. ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... all afternoon, until at dusk they came to Chipping Norton across the fields, a short cut to where the thin blue supper-smoke curled up. The mists were rising from the meadows; earth and sky were blending on the hills; a little silver sickle moon hung in the fading violet, low in the western sky. Under an old oak in a green place a fiddler and a piper were playing, and youths and maidens were dancing in the brown light. Some little chaps were playing blindman's-buff near by, and ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... "Where the sickle blades have been, Nannette, gathering ears of corn, Passes bending down, my queen, To the earth where ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... twice, for no obvious reason, he drew aside the tent flap and looked out. The sky was cloudless and darkly blue, and a sickle moon gleamed in it, keen and clear with frost. Below, the hills were washed in silver, majestic, but utterly cheerless; and lower still the serrated tops of the rigid firs cut against the dreary whiteness. After each glimpse of them, Carroll ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... used t' this kind uv a sickle," said D'ri, as he felt the edge of his sabre, "but I 'll be dummed ef it don't seem es ef I 'd orter be ruther dang'rous with ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... with dishevelled hair, calls with terrific charms upon her three hundred Gods, upon Erebus, chaos, and the three-faced Hecate. She sprinkles around the waters of Avernus, and adds certain herbs that had been cropped by moonlight with a sickle of brass. She brings with her the excrescence which is found upon the forehead of a new-cast foal, of the size of a dried fig, and which unless first eaten by the mare, the mother never admits her young to the nourishment of her milk. ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... is now crest will soon be trough. Such conditions demand forbearance and mutual sympathy. Some men are born with little and some with large skill for acquiring wealth, the two differing as the scythe that gathers a handful of wheat differs from the reaper built for vast harvests and carrying the sickle of success. For generations the ancestors back of one man's father were thrifty and the ancestors back of his mother were far-sighted, and the two columns met in him, and like two armies joined forces for a vast campaign for wealth. Beside him is a brother, whose thoughts ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the sea between which lies the city's long but narrow peninsula. To the steersman it shows a skyline serrated by steeples, fronted by sea, flanked southward by sea, backgrounded by an estuary, and looped about by a sickle of wooded islands. This same scene, so far as city and nature go, was beheld by the crowds that swarmed East Battery, a flagstone marine parade along the seaward side of the boulevard that faces Sumter; that filled the windows and even the housetops; ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... the country of the Hyperboreans, by Hercules, and planted in Olympia, where it was sacredly preserved to furnish garlands for the victors in the games. The leaves were cut from the tree by a boy chosen for the purpose. He gathered the leaves by means of a golden sickle, which was set apart expressly to this use. When the time arrived for the crowning of the victor, the candidate was brought forward in presence of a vast concourse of spectators, and placed upon a tripod, which was originally formed of bronze, but in subsequent ages was wrought ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... mail, Clings the cooled wax, and hardens to a scale. Swift, at the well known call, the ready train, (For not a buz boon Nature breathes in vain,) Spring to each falling flake, and bear along Their glossy burdens to the builder throng. These with sharp sickle or with sharper tooth, Pare each excrescence, and each angle smooth, Till now, in finish'd pride, two radiant rows Of snow white cells one mutual base disclose. Six shining panels gird each polish'd round, The door's fine rim, with waxen ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... intelligence, some glimmer Of clear light through these dark shadows:— Deity, unknown and hidden, God or Word, whate'er thou beest, Of Thyself the great beginner, Of Thyself the end, if, Thou Being Thyself beyond time's sickle, Still in time the world didst fashion, If Thou 'rt life, O living spirit, If Thou 'rt light, my darkened senses With Thy life and light enkindle!— (The voices of two spirits are heard from within, one ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... the sun, And let its glory rest there till it charm Forth from its womb, as flowers from the cold ground, All lovely thoughts and high imaginings That shed sweet perfume o'er the waste of life. And when the sickle of autumnal time Gathereth in the harvest of ripe thought, ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... barrier stayed them. Rounding this point, lo, your boat swayed instantly to the left: a gentle surf-wave took possession of you, and irresistibly bore you towards a yellow sand beach, which curved inward like a reaper's sickle, not more than a quarter of a mile long, from the handle to the shining point; smooth and glistening, strewn with polished pebbles and tiny shells, it seemed some half-hidden magic beach on which shallops of fairies might any moment come to ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... should abandon this other source of aid. Even that must go, if all other sources should fail him; but he would fain have that untouched, if it were possible. Oh, that that old man in Westmoreland would die and be gathered to his fathers, now that he was full of years and ripe for the sickle! But there was no sign of death about the old man. So his fingers released their hold on the letter, and he stood looking ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... carried upon an inclined endless apron, up to a platform 10 feet high, where a workman pushes it into the pulverizing mill, the construction of which is seen from the accompanying cut. The vertical shaft b is armed with sickle-shaped knives, d, which revolve between and cut contrary to similar knives c, fixed to the interior of the vessel. The latter is made of iron, is 3-1/2 feet high, 2 feet across at top and 1-1/2 feet wide at the bottom. From the base of the machine at g, the perfectly pulverized ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... west and by north, by south and by east, Show thyself like a beast. Goodman Harvest, yeoman, come in and say what you can. Boom for the scythe and the sickle there. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... should fall around us in such awful numbers as we attain middle life. What a field of battle it is!" Nor had another month quite passed before he lost, in Mrs. Macready, a very dear family friend. "Ah me! ah me!" he wrote. "This tremendous sickle certainly does cut deep into the surrounding corn, when one's own small blade has ripened. But this is all a Dream, may be, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... ports of Dellys and Bougie were their sea-cities, and gave the French infinite trouble: the plain between the two is the great wheat-growing country, where the Kabyle farmer reaps a painful crop with his saw-edged sickle. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... pony, he took me by the hand and said, 'The blessing of our Master be with you, young man! My hours are like the ears of the latter harvest, and your days are yet in the spring; and yet you may be gathered into the garner of mortality before me, for the sickle of death cuts down the green as oft as the ripe, and there is a colour in your cheek, that, like the bud of the rose, serveth oft to hide the worm of corruption. Wherefore labour as one who knoweth not ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... harvest moon was shining full upon the bosom of Teviot, and glittering upon the rustling leaves of the woods that overhang her banks, and pouring a flood of more golden light upon the already golden grain that waved—ripe for the sickle—along the margin of the lovely stream, the stars, few in number, but most brilliant, had taken their places in the sky; the owl was whooping from the ivied tower; the corn-craik was calling drowsily; now and then the distant baying of a watch-dog startled the silence, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... faithfully. "Sic-semper-Cerberus-Sic!" My right hand stole to my hip, a short sharp bark, and the treacherous cacique fell over with a crimson stain on his forehead. At the same moment a weird, uncanny yelp pierced the night, and a tremendous shaggy phantom cloud obscured the slender sickle of the moon. Terrified, the Indians screamed "El Perro! El Perro de la Malinche!" and shrilly the voices of frightened squaws took up the refrain, "Perro! ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... before, right away to the battery, in the elusive twilight, a sky of smoked crystal—through which stars began to show faintly, points of cold blurred light—above the gloom of the ilex trees to the west, and in the south, above the indistinguishable sea, the slender moon hanging upright, silver and sickle-shaped. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... creature, are common to the popular fancy. In Japan, the kappa, half monkey half tortoise, which seizes children bathing in the rivers, as real to millions of the native common folk as is the shark or porpoise; the flying-weasel, that moves in the whirlwind with sickle-like blades on his claws, which cut the face of the unfortunate; the wind-god or imp that lets loose the gale or storm; the thunder-imp or hairy, cat-like creature that on the cloud-edges beats his drums in crash, roll, or rattle; the earthquake-fish or subterranean bull-head or ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... prosperity purer and more enduring than that which it protected before; that it may win parted friends from their alienation; that it may inspire hope, and inaugurate universal liberty; that it may say to the sword, "Return to thy sheath"; and to the plow and sickle, "Go forth"; that it may heal all jealousies, unite all policies, inspire a new national life, compact our strength, purify our principles, ennoble our national ambitions, and make this people great and strong, not for agression ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... the present melancholy instance, the wife of Lot was cut off as in a moment: she was ripe for the sickle, and justice delayed not to gather her into the storehouse of wrath; she cumbered the ground by her impieties, and was worthy of no additional cultivation. Here we behold an awful specimen of the obstinacy of sinners, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... history, ceased to be exclusively a manual art. Up to that time the typical agricultural laborer had been a bent figure, tending his fields and garnering his crops with his own hands. Before the war had ended the American farmer had assumed an erect position; the sickle and the scythe had given way to a strange red chariot, which, with practically no expenditure of human labor, easily did the work of a dozen men. Many as have been America's contributions to civilization, hardly any have exerted greater influence in promoting human welfare ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... in peaceful campaigns of seed-time and harvest, develop new treasures. Great interests are introduced. The gold of field, orchard, and harvest falls into the hands of the industrious farmers. These are the men whose only weapons are scythe and sickle. They are the real Fathers of the Pacific. Roving over the interior, the miners leave a land as nearly ruined as human effort can render it. In the wake of these nugget-hunters, future years bring ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... our lot to wield The sickle in the ripened field; Nor ours to hear, on summer eves, The reaper's song ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... to. Before that day scarcely a soul had been seen near her father's house for weeks. When a noise like the brushing skirt of a visitor was heard on the doorstep, it proved to be a scudding leaf; when a carriage seemed to be nearing the door, it was her father grinding his sickle on the stone in the garden for his favourite relaxation of trimming the box-tree borders to the plots. A sound like luggage thrown down from the coach was a gun far away at sea; and what looked like a tall man by the gate at dusk was a yew bush cut into ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... Danaides, and of the tower of Danae and golden shower; the birth of Perseus connecting this legend with that of the Gorgons and Graiae, who are the true clouds of thunderous ruin and tempest. I must, in passing, mark for you that the form of the sword or sickle of Perseus, with which he kills Medusa, is another image of the whirling harpy vortex, and belongs especially to the sword of destruction or annihilation; whence it is given to the two angels who ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... James applies this principle to the claims of manual laborers—of those who hold the plough and thrust in the sickle. He calls the rich lordlings who exacted sweat and withheld wages, to "weeping and howling," assuring them that the complaints of the injured laborer had entered into the ear of the Lord of Hosts, and that, as a result of their oppression, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... straight furrow, an even fence, planting and tending crops, trimming and grafting trees, caring for stock, and handling plane, auger and chisel. Each one must select his wood, cure, fashion, and fit his own ax with a handle, grind and swing it properly, as well as cradle, scythe and sickle. They must be able to select good seed grain, boil sap, and cure meat. They must know animals, their diseases and treatment, and when they have mastered all he can teach them, and done each thing properly, they may go for their term ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... its shivering women in stoveless hovels attempt to defend themselves about their domestic toil with coarse homespun shawls and slat-bonnets. In an age that has harnessed mechanism, beast, and steam to the plow, scythe, sickle and flail, these owners of mountains of iron and mines of power still indolently vex a grudging soil with tools of such barbaric simplicity that their intrusion is scarcely more than ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... elderly driver, singing to himself, drew up abruptly at the sight of the two under the pine-tree, then drove toward them, the wheels of the cart jolting cheerfully over the cradling graves. He had a sickle in his hand, and as he clambered down from the seat, he ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... flowing crops bent, With their fulness content; And many a sickle was sent Into the rustling fields, While the gay reaper wields The bounty which God yields In his goodness to man. But as I heard these reapers sing, Thought not Death's reaper would bring To me sorrow so soon; Thought not he would come and ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... them distinctly. In reality they are set as close to each other as can be, but putting them as close as I can, you get a or b, Fig. 5, for the rough section of the wing, thick towards the bird's head, and curved like a sickle, so that in striking down it catches the air, like a reaping-hook, and in rising up, it throws off the air ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... it, children dear? We think it is August because we hear The swing of the sickle, restless and slow, And that's a sign of ...
— All Round the Year • Edith Nesbit
... who took the aggressive and, after a couple of feints, he reared and struck high for the face, just grazing the cheek of the older bull and pulling out several of the stiff bristles on which his teeth happened to close, springing back in time to escape the double sickle-stroke of the sea-catch. The old bull roared loudly and sprang forward, getting a firm hold of the younger by the skin behind the muscles of the shoulders. But he was a second too late, for as he closed his grip, the smaller fighter shifted ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... horizontal bands of red (top) and black with a centered yellow emblem consisting of a five-pointed star within half a cogwheel crossed by a machete (in the style of a hammer and sickle) ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... There was also a rude crucifix, from which I gather that this is a Roman Catholic family. There were two teapots of tea on a chair, a big tub of pommeloes on the floor, and a glazed red earthenware bowl full of ripe bananas on another chair. A sort of sickle, a gun, and some bullock gear hung against the wall. In the middle of the room there was a sort of trap in the floor, and there was the same in two other apartments. Through this all rubbish is conveniently dropped. A woman brought in a cocoa-nut, and poured the milk into a ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... a Reaper, whose name is Death, And, with his sickle keen, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... His love we will sing, Who sendeth the rain Upon the young grain. Full soon all around The sickle will sound, And home the bright ...
— The Pedler of Dust Sticks • Eliza Lee Follen
... proved his blade on bucklers, South went through the land to whet Brand that oft hath felled his foeman, 'Gainst the forge which foams with song;[48] Mighty wielder of war's sickle Made his sword's avenging edge Hard on hero's helm-prop rattle,[49] Skull of Weatherlid ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... dark. The lights of Yarmouth sprang into being, a cluster of lambent orange points studding the dim coast of the Island. One by one the stars twinkled out in the dusky sky, and a waning moon, thin and frail like a worn sickle, flung a quivering ribbon of silver across ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... girls on their heads were flat, wooden trays, square at each end: once poised on the head, they balanced themselves, and were carried around without a fall. This carrying on the head, by the women, from an eight-gallon barrel of wine down to a sickle or pocket handkerchief, helps to give them their straight forms and fine carriage of head, neck, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... crook, tenaculum, peavey, clives, agraffe, fluke, pot-hook, cant-hook, cleek, trammel, cottrel; snare, decoy, trap; bill-hook, sickle. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... cabin, where, by the sweat of his parent's brow, as a labourer in the fields, the ill-fated hero of this story was scantily fed and clothed, until maturer years enabled him to relieve the old man's hand of the spade and sickle, and in turn ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... reared on high, But all about and around him goes up a bitter cry From the iron men of Atli, and the bickering of the steel Sends a roar up to the roof-ridge, and the Niblung war-ranks reel Behind the steadfast Gunnar: but lo! have ye seen the corn, While yet men grind the sickle, by the wind-streak overborne When the sudden rain sweeps downward, and summer groweth black, And the smitten wood-side roareth 'neath the driving thunder-wrack? So before the wise-heart Hogni shrank the champions of the East, As his great voice shook the timbers in the hall of Atli's feast. ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... interesting remarks on manures, the mixing of soils and other agricultural topics (see also GEOPONICI.) Greek husbandry had no salient characteristics. The summer fallow with repeated ploughing was its basis. The young crop was hoed, reaping was performed with a sickle, and a high stubble left on the ground as manure. The methods of threshing and winnowing were the same as those in use in ancient Egypt. Wheat, barley and spelt were the leading crops. Meadows were pastured rather than mown. Attica ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... do?" said Trizio, wiping the dew off his sickle. "Who knows aught of us? Who cares? If the rich folks want the river they will ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... rice he lay, His sickle in his hand; His breast was bare, his matted hair Was buried in the sand. Again, in the mist and shadow of sleep, He saw his ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Although a female moderately fickle, Will hardly leave you (as she 's not your wife) For any length of days in such a pickle. To strive, too, with our fate were such a strife As if the corn-sheaf should oppose the sickle: Men are the sport of circumstances, when The circumstances seem the sport ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... yet Living chant there; the chorus so rapidly wearing weak! Samson's axe is rapid; one head per minute, or little less. The chorus is worn out; farewell for evermore ye Girondins. Te-Deum Fauchet has become silent; Valaze's dead head is lopped: the sickle of the Guillotine has reaped the Girondins all away. 'The eloquent, the young, the beautiful and brave!' exclaims Riouffe. O Death, what feast is ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... red rivulets trickle, Men fall by thy hands swift and lithe, As corn falleth down to the sickle, As grass falleth down to the scythe, Thine arm, strong and cruel, and shapely, Lifts high the sharp, pitiless lance, And rapine and ruin and rape lie Around thee. The Furies advance, And Ares ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... wandering about the chamber, "I have too much at stake to call out fledglings for a sop to injured pride. No, Mr. Renault, I shall first take vengeance for a deeper wrong—and the north lies like an unreaped harvest for the sickle that Death and ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... as the autumn of '69 crept over the woods in flame and russet, and the sound of the sickle was in folks' ears, the life at Great Keynes was far more tranquil than we should fancy who look back on those stirring days. The village, lying as it did out of the direct route between any larger towns, was not so much affected by the gallop of the couriers, or ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... fertile region appear doubly so. Not since the plains of middle India had we seen anything forming so fine a rural picture as this. Though it was only the last of February the clover fields were being mowed, and a second crop would follow; the barley and wheat were nearly ready for the sickle, while the peas and beans, both in full blossom, were picturesque and fragrant. As we progressed through this attractive region the pastures became alive with sheep, goats, many ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... those rare periods when the air is so miraculously clear as to produce the effect of no air—rendering impossible the slightest optical illusion—that our eyes can see things as they really are. So pure was the atmosphere to-day, that, at meridian, the moon, although a thin sickle, three days distant from the sun, shone ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... the galley skimmed to and fro among the anchored fleet, now running free like a white-winged gull, anon close-hauled, the razor bows cleaving a path through the dancing water in a little sickle of creaming foam. ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... in their shields they weave, And shape the casque, and in the mould prepare The brazen breastplate and the silver greave. Scorned lie the spade, the sickle and the share, Their fathers' falchions to the forge they bear. Now peals the clarion; through the host hath spread The watch-word. Helmets from the walls they tear, And yoke the steeds. In triple gold arrayed, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... of him—how he harassed the Romans before Gamala and, with his followers, burned their camp one night and well nigh destroyed them; and how, when he goes into the fight, the Roman javelins drop off without harming him; and how, when he strikes, the Romans fall before his blows like wheat before a sickle." ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... finding the Pole, we are brought into the body of the Lion. This group will be recognised by the star of the first magnitude called Regulus. It is one of a series of stars forming an object somewhat resembling a sickle: three of the group are of the second magnitude. The Sickle has a special claim on our notice because it contains the radiant point from which the periodic shooting star shower known as the Leonids diverges. Regulus lies alongside the sun's highway through the stars, at a point which ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... from Chango-khang by the Chachoo, which cuts a deep east and west trench along the base of Kinchinjhow, and then turns south to the Tunguchoo. The course of the Chachoo, where it turns south, is most curious: it meanders in sickle-shaped curves along the marshy bottom of an old lake-bed, with steep shelving sides, 500 to 600 feet deep, and covered with juniper bushes.* [These, which grow on an eastern exposure, exist at a higher elevation than any other bushes ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... graceful feathers in its tail. He saw the frigate bird soaring high above the island. The number and beauty of the humming-birds amazed Robinson. They were of all colors. One had a bill in the shape of a sickle. The most brilliant of them all was ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe - for American Boys and Girls • Samuel. B. Allison
... in which were represented all its various instruments—a sledge similar to those in use at present, a man sowing grain by the side of a canal, from the borders of which the inundation is beginning to retire, a field of corn reaped with a sickle, and fields of rice with men watching them. In a fourth chamber was a figure clothed in white, playing on a richly ornamented harp, with ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... tell of peace. Here and there, as we passed over the land, we had evidences of this in burned homesteads and trampled fields, which had been hurriedly reaped of their golden store as if by the sword rather than the sickle. As we drew near to the front these signs of war became ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... Bernices form a rich group; the sickle in Leo, the seven stars in Ursa Major, and those in Cassiopeia and Aquila are familiarly known to all observers. Besides these, there are many other groups and aggregations of stars which adorn the celestial vault and enhance the ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... a Cheyletus-like mite, said to have been "extracted from the human face" in New Orleans. The body is oblong, square behind; the head is long and pointed, while the maxillae end in a long, curved, toothed, sickle-like blade. That this creature has the habits of the itch mite is suggested by the curious, large, hair-like spines with which the body and legs are sparsely armed, some being nearly half as long as the body. These hairs are covered ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... in the spring-time of life, you must not murmur when autumn gives you a harvest of thorns and thistles. If you sow tares in your field, you must not expect to find corn there when you put in your sickle to reap. You can take back your morning salutation. It is not a 'merry Christmas' to you or to me; and I think we are both ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... ornaments and the choice of weapons. The majority of the men did carry curve-pointed swords, though those were broader and heavier than those the Terran had seen ashore. But several had axes with sickle-shaped heads, whose points curved so far back that they nearly met to form ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... high in the sunset glory gleamed a silver sickle, reaping roses. It was the heather moon, and I cried out to Sir S. as I saw it, "Wish—wish! Your first sight of the heather moon, and over our right shoulders for luck! Whatever ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... sheep often weighed less than two ounces. Farm implements were few and clumsy. The wooden ploughs only scratched the ground. Harrowing was done with a hand implement little better than a large rake. Grain was cut with a sickle, and grass was mown with a scythe. It took five men a day to reap and bind the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... of his small half-hidden eyes. These features seem to mark him to the casual observer as a dull animal, yet in reality he is very active and bright, and when at home displays his marvellous genius in many ways! His upturned hands become powerful shovels, and by the aid of an extra bone, the sickle, which belongs to the inside of the thumb, he is enabled to work like an athlete. His velvet-like hair stands straight up, like the pile on velvet, and his tiny eyes are so hidden by hair that they ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... fact. In some of our modern varieties we have by breeding colored them nearly alike. The original chicken is colored much like the common Leghorns. Shades of red and yellow decorate his neck and back, while the flight feathers of his wings and of his tail and the sickle feathers which ornament the rear of his back and hang over his tail are lustrous dark green. The hen meanwhile is very much less brilliant in her contrasts. I shall speak more fully ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... Other versions: Van Sickle. Riverside reader, 2nd. (Adapted.) Compare with Little red hen in Blaisdell. Child life, in tale and fable. 2nd reader. Lansing. Rhymes and stories. ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... plowed field, where as yet there was nothing to be seen. Any farmer, on viewing it, would have said that Jason must wait weeks before the green blades would peep from among the clods, and whole months before the yellow grain would be ripened for the sickle. But by and by, all over the field, there was something that glistened in the moonbeams like sparkling drops of dew. These bright objects sprouted higher and proved to be the steel heads of spears. Then there was a dazzling gleam from a vast number of polished brass helmets, ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... it for a scythe or sickle to cut it down: and all I could do was to make one as well as I could, out of one of the broad swords, or cutlasses, which I saved among the arms out of the ship. However, as my first crop was but small, I had no great difficulty to cut it down: in short, I reaped it my way, for ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... was fickle, Was that great oak tree, She was in a pretty pickle, As she well might be - But his gallantries were mickle, For Death followed with his sickle, And her tears began to trickle For her great oak tree! Sing hey, Lackaday! Let the tears fall free For the pretty little flower and the ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... no pelf or harm, By red Priapus sentinelled; By his huge sickle's formidable charm The ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... go, because he had no shirt. It was this energetic woman, with a babe but three weeks old, who cut a web from the loom and sat up all night to make a shirt for the soldier. August came, the wheat was ripe for the sickle. Her husband was gone, the neighbors also. Six miles away was a family where she thought it possible she might obtain a harvest hand. Mounting the mare, taking the babe in her arms, she rode through the forest only to find that all ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... number of the harlequin fish, a circumstance almost proving that this was a tributary to the Maran. We found this day a new narrow-leaved TRISTANIA[*], thirty feet high, with bark thick, soft, and fibrous. A smooth narrow-leaved variety of ACACIA HOLOSERICEA was loaded with spikes of crooked sickle-shaped pods. Among the herbage was observed the TEUCRIUM ARGUTUM of Brown; and the XEROTES LEUCOCEPHALA grew in the light dry sand. Novelty in the plants, animals, and fishes, was now to be expected; the weather was cool and pleasant, and our travelling equipment tolerably efficient. ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... Tour has been telling us about the elaborate New Year's ceremonies once held at Chartres, by the Druids. The mistletoe was cut by the eubage, with a golden faucelle, or sickle, belonging to one of the Druidesses and then distributed to the people. The eubage was, it appears, a combination of priest and bard whose pleasing task it was to cut the throats of the human victims offered upon the Druidical altar of sacrifice. This distribution ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... him, striving in vain to quench With turban, veil, torn shreds of gown, stained hands, The black blood's sickening gush. He never spoke, Never rewarded with one glance of life The passion in her eyes. He met his end Even as beneath the sickle the full ear Bows to ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... is heavy and weary With the weight of a weary soul; The mid-day glare grows dreary, And dreary the midnight scroll. The corn-stalks sigh for the sickle, 'Neath the load of their golden grain; I sigh for a mate more fickle — Thou comest not ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... the dells The fairy heralds rang blue-bells, And even as they rocked and rang Into the lists, full-armed, there sprang Autumn, his helm the harvest moon, His sword a sickle, the gleaner's tune His hymn ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... rapidly faded. A keen, damp, north-east wind swept over the earth; thin, black, ragged clouds flitted before it, like uneasy ghosts. A stray star twinkled here and there in the firmament, and the sickle-shaped moon hung in the west. But the light of those pale luminaries was wan and fitful. They seemed to be aware of the hopelessness of their struggle, and to mourn in anticipation of the moment when they should faint in fight, and unrelieved ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... corn, and the men bound up the sheaves. The strokes of the sickle were timed by the modulation of the harvest-song, in which all their voices were ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... that the time for finishing them off had arrived. Then the war-cry rang out, and with one splendid dash the Zulus were amongst the densest mass of their foes. Nothing could withstand the fury of their onslaught and the Makalakas tell under their spears like corn to the sickle. ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... a good heart and a poetic imagination, made his life joyous and the world beautiful; till at length Death cut down the sweet, blue flower, that bloomed beside him, and wounded him with that sharp sickle, so that he bowed his head, and would fain have been bound up in the same sheaf with the sweet, blue flower. Then the world seemed to him less beautiful, and life became earnest. It would have been well if he could have forgotten the past; that he might not so mournfully have lived ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... less, there was so much of her, and it was all arranged as perfectly as if she were about to be photographed. No normal woman, merely sitting down, with no other object than to be comfortable, would curve the tail of her gown round in front of her like a sickle; or have just the point of one shoe daintily poised on a footstool; or the sofa-cushions at exactly the right angle behind her head to make a background; or the finger with all her best rings on it, keeping the place in ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... We envy him not his vapours, his terrors, or his shameless greed of reward. Why, then, doth he envy us our wealth, our success, our gaiety, our content? He raves. He is haunted. What is man but as grass, and the flower of grass? Come the sickle, he is clean gone. I can but repeat it, sir, our poor neighbour was crazed: 'tis Christian in ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... that my hint will be acted on; by next season, the Cornish antiquaries will be puzzling their musty brains over marks of "druidical" tools; essays will appear, to demonstrate that the chippings were accomplished by the consecrated golden sickle; the rock will be proved to have been quarried at Normandy, and ferried over; facsimiles of the cuts will be lithographed; and the Innkeeper of the "First and Last house in England" will gratefully present a piece of plate (a Druid "spanning" [consider Ezekiel's "putting ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... autumn harvest are being gathered in. Acre upon acre of the early-sown rice falls before the sickle. The threshing-floors once again become the scene of animation. The fallow fields are being prepared for the spring crops and the sowing of ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... of the love that broods o'er every living thing. He watched the shepherd bring His flock at sundown to the welcome fold, The fisherman at daybreak fling His net across the waters gray and cold, And all day long the patient reaper swing His curving sickle through the harvest-gold. So through the world the foot-path way he trod, Drawing the air of heaven in every breath; And in the evening sacrifice of death Beneath the open sky he gave his soul to God. Him will I trust, and for my Master take; Him will I follow; and for his dear sake, ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... gather slowly and with almost an apologetic air, as if it regretted the painful duty of putting an end to the perfect summer day. Over to the west beyond the trees there still lingered a faint afterglow, and a new moon shone like a silver sickle above the big barn. Sally came out of the house and bowed gravely three times for luck. She stood on the gravel, outside the porch, drinking in the sweet evening scents, ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... fruitful beauty glides between And robs me of his countenance, I will Ne'er hate her, but yield up my borrowed sheen To make her hallowed nights more hallowed still. Burn then, my pale and vestal flame, make fair The nuptials of the amorous Earth with night! My sickle reaps the lurking stars in air, My argent shield hangs lucent on the height. Yet he that chafes and wounds the Earthen shores, And flees though she embrace—the yearning Sea,— Is shackled by my smiling ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... could see nothing but the jagged teeth of whitish rock, and the green swelling stems of the plantain, from ten to fifteen feet in height, and as large as a man's leg, or larger. The stalks of the plantain are juicy and herbaceous, and of so yielding a texture, that with a sickle you might entirely sever the largest of them at a single stroke. How such a multitude of succulent plants could find nourishment on what seemed to the eye little else than barren rock, I could ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... air The maniac bells of War. There will be little of sleeping to-night; There will be wailing and weeping to-night; Death's red sickle is reaping to-night: ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... enables him in a shorter time to impart a higher stamp to his surroundings. He attacks the prairie with a plough unimagined by his predecessor; cuts his wheat with a cradle—or, given a neighbor or two, a reaper—instead of a sickle; sends into the boundless pasture the nucleus of a merino flock, and returns at evening to a home rugged enough, in unison with its surroundings, but brightened by traits of culture and intelligence which must adhere to any menage of to-day and were out of reach of any of the olden time. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... punishment: "Because of the wrath of the Lord, it shall not be inhabited, but it shall be wholly desolate. Every one that goeth by Babylon shall be astonished, and hiss at all her plagues. Cut off the sower from Babylon, and him that handleth the sickle in the time of harvest. I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water. And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah: it shall never be inhabited, neither dwelt in from generation to ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Ciccio where he was weeding armfuls of rose-red gladioli from the half-grown wheat, and cutting the lushness of the first weedy herbage. He threw down his sheaves of gladioli, and with his sickle began to cut the forest of bright yellow corn-marigolds. He looked intent, he seemed ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... plains of Mount Oliphant began to whiten, and Robert was summoned to relinquish the pleasing scenes that surrounded the grotto of Calypso, and, armed with a sickle, to seek glory by signalising himself in the fields of Ceres.' Though Robert Burns never perpetrated anything like this, his models were not without their pernicious effect on ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... purpose, but probably likewise for fighting. In one of the sand- wasps (Ammophila) the jaws in the two sexes are closely alike, but are used for widely different purposes: the males, as Professor Westwood observes, "are exceedingly ardent, seizing their partners round the neck with their sickle-shaped jaws" (5. 'Modern Classification of Insects,' vol. ii. 1840, pp. 205, 206. Mr. Walsh, who called my attention to the double use of the jaws, says that he has repeatedly observed this fact.); whilst the females use these organs ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... then, what steps have trod thy border! Here On thy green bank, the woodmann of the swamp Has laid his axe, the reaper of the hill His sickle, as they stooped to taste thy stream. The sportsman, tired with wandering in the still September noon, has bathed his heated brow In thy cool current. Shouting boys, let loose For a wild holiday, have quaintly shaped Into a cup the folded linden leaf, And ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... a prancing Steed, Denbigh[b] a Neptune with his three-fork'd Mace: Flintshiere[c] a Workmayd in her Summers weed, With Sheafe and Sickle (with a warlick pace) Those of Caernaruon not the least in speed, Though marching last (in the mayne Armies face) Three golden Eagles in their Ensigne brought, Vnder which oft braue Owen ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... name is lost to Sorrow, And Pain is Rapture tuned more exquisitely soft. Here the Pilgrim reposes the world-weary limb, And forgets in the shadow, cool-breathing and dim, The load he shall bear never more; Here the mower, his sickle at rest, by the streams Lull'd with harp strings, reviews, in the calm of his dreams The fields, when the harvest is o'er. Here, He, whose ears drank in the battle roar, Whose banners streamed upon the startled wind A thunder-storm,—before ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... of all the poison-plants and the blood of all the creatures that feed upon them had grown thick and strong,—about the time when the second mowing was in hand, and the brown, wet-faced men were following up the scythes as they chased the falling waves of grass, (falling as the waves fall on sickle-curved beaches; the foam-flowers dropping as the grass-flowers drop,—with sharp semivowel consonantal sounds,—frsh,—for that is the way the sea talks, and leaves all pure vowel-sounds for the winds to breathe ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... grows on the grave lands, if not fed off, is also cut and saved for fuel. We saw several instances of this outside of Shanghai, one where a mother with her daughter, provided with rake, sickle, basket and bag, were gathering the dry stubble and grass of the previous season, from the grave lands where there was less than could be found on our closely mowed meadows. In Fig. 85 may be seen a man who has ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... the heights and listening with the ear of a hunter to every noise. In the third field to which he came he found a woman about thirty years old, with bent back, hoeing the ground vigorously, while a small boy with a sickle in his hand was knocking the hoarfrost from the rushes, which he cut and laid in a heap. At the noise Hulot made in jumping the hedge, the boy and his mother raised their heads. Hulot mistook the young woman for an old one, naturally enough. Wrinkles, coming long ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... have begun to ripen, and the corn will soon be ready for the sickle; of this fact our forefathers were reminded by the Lammas Festival, which was celebrated on the first of this month. Lammas is a shortened form of the word Loaf-mass, or feast of the loaf. A loaf of bread was made of the first-ripe corn, and used in Holy Communion on this ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... ways before him. Yet he knew he would be carried on to London. He watched the sea-ways closing up. The shore came round. The high old houses stood flat on the right hand. The shore swept round in a sickle, reaping them into the harbour. There the old Victory, gay with myriad pointed pennons, was harvested, saved ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... again until evening. Then, lifting your bent body with pain and difficulty, you will look to see how little you have done, and that the field has widened and now stretches away before you to the far horizon. And in despair you will cast the sickle away and abandon ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... will think of how we stood shoulder to shoulder, in that great battle which thy wise words planned, Macumazahn; of how thou wast the point of the horn that galled Twala's flank, Bougwan; whilst thou stood in the ring of the Greys, Incubu, and men went down before thine axe like corn before a sickle; ay, and of how thou didst break that wild bull Twala's strength, and bring his pride to dust. Fare ye well for ever, Incubu, Macumazahn, and Bougwan, my ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... crop on the roofs, the harvest of which will fall to the neighboring sparrows, has carried my thoughts to the rich crops which are now falling beneath the sickle; it has recalled to me the beautiful walks I took as a child through my native province, when the threshing-floors at the farmhouses resounded from every part with the sound of a flail, and when the carts, loaded with golden sheaves, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... front, laying waste the land of the Philistines," says the figurative Antonio Agapida, "Queen Isabella followed his traces as the binder follows the reaper, gathering and garnering the rich harvest that has fallen beneath his sickle. In this she was greatly assisted by the counsels of that cloud of bishops, friars, and other saintly men which continually surrounded her, garnering the first fruits of this infidel land into the granaries ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... trees sweeps like a huge sickle across space. An acrid smell of cold decay rises on the night. The wind wails its threnody ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... language of prophecy, if we consider the human race as the objects of the harvest and vintage, admits no augmentation of terror. "And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat, like unto the Son of Man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle. And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice, to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle and reap: For the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe. And he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... of a forest, stands between it and the water it is slowly but surely approaching. The fate of this solemn wood is sealed. Anon the mightiest among these mighty trees will fall like grain before the sickle of ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... blade on bucklers, South went through the land to whet Brand that oft hath felled his foeman, 'Gainst the forge which foams with song (1); Mighty wielder of war's sickle Made his sword's avenging edge Hard on hero's helm-prop rattle (2), Skull of Weatherlid ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... breach, the sturdy monk quashed and felled them down with blows, saying, These men have had confession and are penitent souls; they have got their absolution and gained the pardons; they go into paradise as straight as a sickle, or as the way is to Faye (like Crooked-Lane at Eastcheap). Thus by his prowess and valour were discomfited all those of the army that entered into the close of the abbey, unto the number of thirteen thousand, six hundred, twenty and two, besides the women and little ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... appearance. Birds of the hawk and raven families are common. The waters swarm with numerous varieties of duck. It surprises us at this utmost distance from the maritime border to see flocks of Arctic gulls circling around the low sand-hills, and sickle-bill curlews wheeling high in air above their broods. Before we get far into this region we shall notice that one of its most typical features is the alkali-pool. Every few miles we come to a shallow basin of stagnant water saturated with salts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... triumphs of her worth, NATURE herself invites the REAPERS forth; Dares the keen sickle from its twelvemonth's rest, And gives that ardour which in every breast From infancy to age alike appears, When the first ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... of the steps, one of her maidens put into her hand a sacred knife or sickle, which, as Otare informed us had a blade of gold, and a handle of opal. The woman then retired, and we saw her stand erect for a moment in the full blaze of the mellow sunlight, with her golden hair falling about her in a kind of glory, and ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... out with his comrades to the forbidden meadows of the King, to get grass for the horses; but he never took a sickle with him, but pulled all the grass with his hands, and gathered himself as much as ten men together could mow. When the other grooms saw this they were amazed at his strength. His fame at length reached the King's daughter, the fair Drushnevna, who went to see him: ...
— The Russian Garland - being Russian Falk Tales • Various
... roads in particular cleared of all possibility of concealment or shelter. Seen from above, the effect of this wreckage was grotesque. Young woods had been destroyed whole-sale by dragging wires, and the spoilt saplings, smashed or uprooted, lay in swathes like corn after the sickle. Houses had an appearance of being flattened down by the pressure of a gigantic finger. Much burning was still going on, and large areas had been reduced to patches of smouldering and ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells |
