"Barbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had been added to the Maltese Cross outfit, he found, since the preceding autumn. It was George Myers, whom he had met on the ride down the river from Lang's. Roosevelt had purchased five hundred dollars' worth of barbed wire and George was digging post-holes. He was a boyish and attractive individual whom the wanderlust had driven westward from his home in Wisconsin. His honesty fairly leaped at you out ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... kind of bouquet of flames shot forth from the crater, the brilliancy of which was visible even through the vapors. Thousands of luminous sheets and barbed tongues of fire were cast in various directions. Some, extending beyond the dome of smoke, dissipated it, leaving behind an incandescent powder. This was accompanied by successive explosions, resembling the discharge of ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... best temper Milan could afford, together with a trusty war-horse, which he entreated him to use upon the field of battle; for Bertha had not omitted to intimate Count Robert's want of the means of knightly equipment. The horse was brought before the pavilion accordingly, completely barbed or armed in steel, and laden with armour for the knight's body. Godfrey himself put the bridle ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Meriones shot forth a deadly shaft, And smote Phylodamas, Polites' friend, Beneath the jaw; the arrow pierced his throat. Down fell he like a vulture, from a rock By fowler's barbed arrow shot and slain; So from the high tower swiftly down he fell: His life fled; clanged his armour o'er the corpse. With laughter of triumph stalwart Molus' son A second arrow sped, with strong desire To smite Polites, ill-starred Priam's son: But with a swift side-swerve did he escape The ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... eyes lifted themselves not up again. The colour rose, and spread, and deepened, and her head only bent lower down over the paper. That thrust was with a barbed weapon. And there was a profound hush, and a bended head and a pained brow, till a hand came gently between her eyes and the paper and occupied the fingers that held it. It was the same hand that her fancy had once seen full ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... to Cuba this time I had read in our newspapers about the Spanish trocha without knowing just what a trocha was. I imagined it to be a rampart of earth and fallen trees, topped with barbed wire; a Rubicon that no one was allowed to pass, but which the insurgents apparently crossed at will with the ease of little girls leaping over a flying skipping rope. In reality it seems to be a much more important piece of engineering ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... they dug, each side laboring everlastingly to find the other's listening places and to blow them up by means of mining, so that the earth became a very rat-run. Above-ground, where were only ruin and barbed wire, there was no sign of activity, but only a great stench that came from bodies none dared bury. We were thankful that the wind blew oftenest from us to them; but whichever way the wind blew Ranjoor Singh knew no rest. He was ever ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... barbed hooks was torn out of my heart; and the question then was, how the inward sanative power of youth could be brought to one's aid? I really put on the man; and the first thing instantly laid aside was the weeping and raving, which I now regarded ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... everything was ready. He even knew the number of German batteries that will be opposed to us; he also knew just what regiments hold the line opposite. He said that along the whole length of our front line steps had been cut in the trenches so that we can climb out easily. The barbed-wire entanglements have had little lanes cut through them every few feet so we can get through without ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay
... freshly vaccinated, pocket in his shirt, musket on his shoulder, ready to do anything, from squirrel hunting up to manslaughter in the first degree. He felt that with a single rush he could carry away two spans of barbed-wire fence without scratching himself. If too short-sighted to see the enemy, he would go nearer; if lame, he would make this an excuse to disobey an order to retreat; if he had but one stocking, he would take it off his foot in wet weather and wrap it around the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Griffen entered the dining room, withdrawing with some effort the iron-barbed arrow which stuck in the back of the chair, he exclaimed with surprise, "There is a paper attached to the feather of this arrow!" Then, unfolding it, he read these words, written in a large and bold hand: "Warning number one, ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... reign of terror in the coke regions. Secretly, and while peace negotiations were being purposely prolonged, Frick supervised the military preparations, the fortification of the Homestead Steel Works, the erection of a high board fence, capped with barbed wire and provided with loopholes for sharpshooters. And then, in the dead of night, he attempted to smuggle his army of hired Pinkerton thugs into Homestead, which act precipitated the terrible carnage of the steel workers. ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... thin and spare Was idle mail 'gainst the barbed air, For it was just at the Christmas time; So he mused, as he sat, of a sunnier clime, And sought for a shelter from cold and snow In the light and warmth of long ago; He sees the snake-like caravan crawl O'er the edge of the desert, black and small, Then nearer and nearer, till, one ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... dress, dight[obs3], drape, robe, enrobe, attire, apparel, accounter[obs3], rig, fit out; deck &c. (ornament) 847; perk, equip, harness, caparison. wear; don; put on, huddle on, slip on; mantle. Adj. invested &c. v.; habited; dighted[obs3]; barbed, barded; clad, costume, shod, chausse[Fr]; en grande tenue &c. (show) 882[Fr]. sartorial. Phr. "the soul of this man ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... British statesman in the House of Commons, in 1917, said it was bliss to be alive, and to be young was very heaven. Some millions of young men died before Armistice Day, 1918. Since then there has been great work clearing away barbed-wire entanglements along the old front. But it seems to be a nightmare task: entanglements multiply upon us faster than we can clear the old ones away. You cannot get across Europe because of the obstructions: ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... turned herself quickly about and joyfully began to retrace her steps. Why, then, was it that in the course of a few minutes more her voice suddenly broke into a wild, unearthly shriek, which ringing with terror burst the bounds of that dungeon-like room, and sank, a barbed shaft, into the breasts of those awaiting the result of her doubtful adventure, at either end of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... gone and the Klondiker, still somewhat sober, began to babble again of Milly, Kraft whispered into his ear such a polite, barbed insult relating to people who were miserly with their funds, that the miner crashed down handful after handful of silver and notes, calling for all the fluids in the world ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... growing naturally in the form of a barb. Two dozen arrows for each constituted their initial equipment, but they cut a considerable quantity of spare reeds and thorns, and wound quite a large skein of silk to bind the barbed heads with, as they were quite prepared to lose several of their arrows at the outset, and accordingly made ample provision for their replacement, which could be done at odd moments, while working their ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... whether in a parliamentary manner or not I am unable to say. Here we should have discussed the matter at length if it had taken us until midnight, or adjourned over until next day, "the spinsters and widows" having been the target for all our barbed arrows until ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... yet spare him the bitter pang of bereavement. As yet my flight, I was sure, was undiscovered. I could go back and be his comforter—his pride; his redeemer from misery, perhaps from ruin. Oh, that fear of his self-abandonment—far worse than my abandonment—how it goaded me! It was a barbed arrow-head in my breast; it tore me when I tried to extract it; it sickened me when remembrance thrust it farther in. Birds began singing in brake and copse: birds were faithful to their mates; birds were emblems of love. What ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... whispers of her young maids of honor, "Really, Aimee, he looks so young! One would never surmise," were more galling in their intended consolation, more revealing in their betrayal of her friends' own shrinking from that arrogant, dandified old man than the barbed dart of the uncaring, inquisitive, "How do you find him, my dear? He has the ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... beyond. He could see the lines of buildings packed close together, as though huddling up for companionship in that wide, lonesome world of grass. He could see the acres and acres of corrals, outlying, a rampart to the ranch buildings. Then, beyond that, the barbed wire fencing, miles and miles of it. He could see horsemen moving about, engaged upon their day's work. He could hear the lowing of the cattle in the corrals. As Thorpe had said, he had grown up to cattle. Cattle ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... throwing-stick, but throughout the remainder of Torres Strait bows and arrows are the chief weapons. The bows, which are large and powerful, are made of split bamboo, and the arrows of a cane procured from New Guinea, afterwards headed with hard wood variously pointed and sometimes barbed. The Kowraregas obtain bows and arrows from their northern neighbours, and occasionally use them in warfare, but prefer the spears which are made by the blacks of the mainland. We saw three kinds of spear at Cape York; one is merely a sharpened stick used for striking fish, ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... her action with a charming glance, one in which all the woman in her was uppermost, and one which made Monsieur d'Agreste's pale cheeks flush like a boy's. He was a philosopher and a scientist; but all his science and philosophy had not saved him from the barbed shafts of a certain mischievous little god. He, also, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... court through the midst of the forest of Cannock, meeting him at Rotford bridge upon his coming, and at Hopwas bridge on his return. In which forest the earl might, if he pleased, kill a deer at his coming, and another at his going back: giving unto Loges each time he should so attend him a barbed arrow. Hugo de Loges granted to William Bagot all his lands in Sow, to hold of him the said Hugo and his heirs, by the payment of a pair of white gloves at the feast of St. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... the temples to the mouth. Their ears, frightfully distended, held dangling to them disks of wood and plates of gum copal. They were clad in brilliantly-painted cloths, and the soldiers were armed with the saw-toothed war-club, the bow and arrows barbed and poisoned with the juice of the euphorbium, the cutlass, the "sima," a long sabre (also with saw-like ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... revenge for what he had made her suffer. He felt himself flush and he knew that she knew that her little barbed shaft had struck home. ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... a pleasant companion as all persons know who have had any experience with it. Its needles are not only very sharp, but also finely barbed, and they penetrate and cling fast like a burr the moment that they are touched. Cowboys profess to believe that the plant has some kind of sense as they say that it jumps and takes hold of its victim before it is touched. This action, however, is only true in the ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... went out again with them in the boats for a short time to see them spear salmon. A man holding a large torch made of strips of resinous wood stood in the bow of the boat, and on either side of him stood an Ostjak holding a long barbed spear. In a short time there were swirls on the surface of the river. These increased till the water round the boat seemed to boil. The Ostjaks were soon at work, and in half an hour twenty fine salmon were lying ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... Men's brains out, and to kill them outright after they are wounded; and they are certainly well contrived things for this purpose. Besides these Weapons they Throw stones and Darts; the Darts are 10 or 12 feet long, are made of hard wood, and are barbed at one end. They handle all their Arms with great Agility, particularly their long Pikes or Lances, against which we have no weapon that is an equal match except ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... to condole with me. Every word of sympathy was a barbed arrow. I could bear it no longer. Conscience stung me not to madness, but confession. I repelled sympathy—I solicited denunciation. I told them I was my brother's murderer. I forced my confession on every one who would hear it. Then it became rumored about ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... of what trivial and, heaven forgive them both, of what dismal order? Most of all, meanwhile, he felt the dire penetration of two or three of the words she had used; so that after a painful minute the quaver with which he repeated them resembled his-drawing, slowly, carefully, timidly, some barbed dart ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... Rehab Shop, followed only by Lecky. All about, the sun shone down upon buildings with a remarkably temporary look about them, and on lawns with a remarkably lush look about them, and signboards with very black lettering on gray paint backgrounds. There was a very small airfield inside the barbed-wire fence about the post, and elaborate machine-shops, and rows and rows of barracks and a canteen and a USO theatre, and a post ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Of all my prayers! [Turning to PHAEDRA again.] Nay, hear thou shalt, and be, If so thou will, more wild than the wild sea; But know, thou art thy little ones' betrayer! If thou die now, shall child of thine be heir To Theseus' castle? Nay, not thine, I ween, But hers! That barbed Amazonian Queen Hath left a child to bend thy children low, A ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... ordinary retail houses would show—we pause for a while at the excellent collection of native tools and implements, and the weapons employed in war and the chase by the aboriginal inhabitants—wooden spears of the grass tree, and, among many others barbed for fishing and variously notched for war, one which does not belong to Australia, but has evidently been brought from the Philippines, and should not have been included. The same might be said of several Fijian clubs and a Marquesas spear barbed with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... mind there flitted impossible plans to be tried if we landed in Boche territory. After setting fire to the machine we would attempt to hide, and then, at night-time, creep along a communication trench to the enemy front line, jump across it in a gap between the sentries, and chance getting by the barbed wire and across No Man's Land. Or we would steal to the Somme, float down-stream, and somehow or other pass the entanglements placed across the river by the enemy. Wouff! wouff! Archie was complicating ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... spring cold-snap was on, and the wildness of the scene was painted in a temperature of thirty below zero. Woven cloth was not in evidence. Furs and soft-tanned leather clad all alike. Boys passed with bows in their hands, and quivers of bone-barbed arrows; and many a skinning-knife of bone or stone Smoke saw in belts or neck-hung sheaths. Women toiled over the fires, smoke-curing the meat, on their backs infants that stared round-eyed and sucked at lumps of tallow. Dogs, full-kin to ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... perpetual word-battle as that amid which Shakespeare lived from the age of twenty, might have rivalled Shakespeare's own; which even now asserts its force by a hundred little never-to-be-forgotten phrases scattered through his poems, which stick, like barbed arrows, in the memory of every reader. And as for his tenderness—the quality without which all other poetic excellence is barren—it gushes forth toward every creature, animate and inanimate, with one exception, namely, the hypocrite, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... some old foreshadowing in older times—was full-formed now, and spoke out plainly, moving him too much, and threatening to grow too strong for his composure. Because the face was abroad, in the expression of defeat and persecution that seemed to encircle him like the air. Because it barbed the arrow of that cruel and remorseless enemy on which his thoughts so ran, and put into its grasp a double-handed sword. Because he knew full well, in his own breast, as he stood there, tinging the scene of transition before him with the morbid colours ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... him away from the girls with barbed wire. You know that kind of young fellows—a kind of a mixture of fools and angels—they rush in and fear to tread at the same time; but they never fail to tread when they get the chance. He was always on hand when 'a joyful occasion was had,' as the morning paper ...
— Options • O. Henry
... backbone, so that it was in two flaps. Then taking the large hook, he passed it in at the tail, drew the pilchard carefully up the shank, and then held up the hook for Arthur to see, with the broad flaps hanging down on either side of the curve and barbed point. ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... stretched their hand in friendship to the stranger, and clasped to their bosoms the daughter of the Saxon? Which of the two is feared?—the empty water-course of summer, or the channel of the headlong winter torrent?—A maiden smiles at the summer-shrunk brook while she crosses it, but a barbed horse and his rider will fear to stem the wintry flood. Men of Mathravel and Powys, be the dreaded flood of winter—Gwenwyn, son of Cyverliock!—may thy plume be the ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... wrathful yet inquiring eye. A moment only. Sniffing the air and lashing his tail, the noble bovine rushes forward and engages the picadores; the little pennants of the national colours, which, attached to a barbed point, have been jabbed into his back by an unseen hand as he passed the barrier, fluttering in the wind created by his rush. Furiously he charges the picadores. If they are clever they goad him to madness with their lances, keeping him at bay; if he is resolute down go horse and man—both results ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... there, shaking her fist—a composite picture of supplicating Justice and accusing Truth. She had forgotten that the man before her was sick—dying; that he must have suffered terribly in spirit as well as body; and that her words were so many barbed shafts striking at his soul. She remembered nothing save the thing against which she was fighting: the hard, merciless possession of money and the ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... evening before attending a watermelon recital in the country, and having contributed a portion of his clothing to a barbed-wire fence and the balance to an open-faced Waterbury bull-dog, some one asked him what he thought of ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... speak more plainly. You have, no doubt, a vague picture in your mind of a certain gentleman of the highest descent who is popularly credited with the possession of horns, hoofs, and a barbed tail?" ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... three-quarters of a mile from the headquarter camp, and commanding it. This post was held by Captain Kirke with forty garrison artillery to work the big gun, and seventy Liverpool infantry. In spite of the barbed-wire entanglements, the Boers most gallantly rushed this position, and their advance was so rapid, or the garrison so slow, that the place was carried with hardly a shot fired. Major Cotton, who commanded the main lines, found himself deprived in ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cut for the boats, and here progression was slower still as the rope had to be abandoned, and the pole called into requisition, so that it was nearly dark when we reached Ganderbul. Passed a number of men wading in the water up to their necks, and spearing the ground with poles armed with a single barbed spike. Although this seems an insane way of attempting to catch fish, their boat was well laden with a small species of trout, and I saw several drawn from the water impaled and wriggling upon the sharp point. Sreenuggur seen in the distance at the extremity of ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... action, but we cannot blot the memory of the cruel words from our minds, or from the mind of the person,—perhaps a mere acquaintance, oftener bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,—in whose heart the barbed arrows of our eloquence rankle for months and years. The dear friend may forgive freely and fully the bitter censure or unjust reproof, but a scar is left which, if touched in a moment of inadvertence, will pulse and throb with ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... a yell an' she says she kept on givin' yells for one solid hour, an' no one come. She says as no words can ever tell how awful it was, for every yell sent a pain like barbed wire lightnin' forkin' an' knifin' all ways through her. No one heard her, for the blacksmith was shoein' a mule on one side of her an' Gran'ma Mullins an' Lucy was discussin' Hiram on the other. You know what a mule is to shoe, ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner
... Macfarlane helped him through the barbed wire, and he set off, making a wide detour behind the houses that faced the river, meaning to join the Indians ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... to the sympathizing women, "weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children." As though he had said, "You have a right to weep; weep, then, in that great catastrophe which is coming, when barbed affliction shall pierce your hearts, and the dearest ties shall be cut in sunder. Those ties are tender; those ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... they're not all down there," growled Ned. But his barbed wit failed to penetrate the tough skin ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Ozarks • Frank Gee Patchin
... itself, no composite is slow in seizing it. The vigorous elecampane, rearing its fringy, yellow disks above lichen-covered stone walls in New England, the Virginia rail fence, and the rank weedy growth along barbed-wire barriers farther west, now bids fair to ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... take off the holly wreath, for her head throbbed with a heavy pain that forbade hope of sleep that night. Looking at the little chaplet so happily made, she saw that all the berries had fallen, and nothing but the barbed leaves remained. A sudden gesture crushed it in both her hands, and standing so, she gathered many a scattered memory to ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... numerous dusky bars: the bill is black, but the gape and within yellow; the sides of the mouth furnished with bristles, as in other goat-suckers; besides which, at the base of the bill are ten or twelve erect stiff bristles, thinly barbed on their sides, and standing perfectly upright as a crest, giving the bird a singular appearance: the legs are weak, longer than in most of the tribe, and of a pale ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... of the Rappahannock, the travelers' boat grounded upon sand, with the tide at ebb. Awaiting the water that should lift them off, the fifteen began with their swords to spear the fish among the reeds. Smith had the ill luck to encounter a sting-ray, and received its barbed weapon through his wrist. There set in a great swelling and torment which made him fear that death was at hand. He ordered his funeral and a grave to be dug on a neighboring islet. Yet by degrees he grew better and so out of torment, ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... which men would come for no legitimate purpose; a place which the hounded bear and deer had avoided even when hard driven, and inviting only to copperhead, skunk, and fox. About it lay "laurel-hells" thick-matted and gnarled, briars that were like entanglements of barbed wire, and woods so black of recess that bats flew through their corridors of pine at midday. But these men had cut, and used familiarly, tortuous and hidden zig-zags of entry and exit, and they ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... 'tis said, Whene'er the snow came feathering down, Four barbed steeds,—from the Bull's head, Carried thy ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... epoch in hunting-life. It embraces thousands of centuries. The appearance of arrow-heads indicates the invention of the bow, and the rise of man from a defensive to an offensive mode of life. The introduction of barbed arrows shows how inventive talent was displaying itself; bone and horn tips, that the huntsman was including smaller animals, and perhaps birds, in his chase; bone whistles, his companionship with other huntsmen or with his dog. The scraping-knives of flint indicate ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... the farmer's eye it was "shiftless" (the New Englander's bogy). The other side of the road he had "improved;" it gloried in what looked at a little distance like a single-file procession of glaring new posts, which on approaching were found to be the supports of one of man's neighborly devices—barbed wire. Rejoicing in this work of his hands on the left, he longed to turn his murderous weapons against the right side. He was labored with; he bided his time; but I knew in my heart that whoever went there next summer would find that picturesque road bristling with barbed wire on both ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... was a fascinating sight. Few things could be finer than to see him snatch away a barbed-wire entanglement of blackberry-bushes, clutch a three-inch thorn sapling with his hairy left, and with one swing of his terrible right cut the taproot through. I had figured that it would take a month to clear away that mess along the brook, but ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... know. Wants to look over his nearest jay neighbor, I should imagine, and see what sort of a curio he is. He thinks it may be necessary to put up barbed wire ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... should grow thicker. She walked briskly along, the track in front of her looking quite plain for several yards, though the sea below was completely hidden. She recognised many familiar points en route, the bank where the spleenwort grew, the ruined shed, a supposed relic of smuggling days, the barbed-wire fence, the group of elder trees, and the blackberry bank. When she came to the slanting gorse bushes which overhung the path, she knew she had reached the beginning of St. Morval's Head, and that she must ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... everybody heard it," said Jane. Mechanically she withdrew the bolt of the gate, which forthwith collapsed in a tangle of barbed wire. Tramping over this snare, Jane faced the doctor as he wiped his brows. "I aint much hand with children," she reminded him. "You better send ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... straggling along the other side of the green—more or less parallel to your breastwork, with white sandbags crowning it like an irregular coping; the inevitable stumpy stakes and masses of rusted barbed wire in front. You might watch it for an hour and the only sign of life you would see would be a blue whiff of smoke from some black tin chimney stuck up behind it. If you fire at the chimney probably it will be taken down. The other day, chancing to look into a ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... usually annuals. Inflorescence is usually a spike-like panicle. Spikelets are 1- to 2-flowered, jointed on very short pedicels which bear persistent scabrid or barbed bristles (modified branchlets). There are four glumes. The first glume is the shortest, equal to about half the length of the third, membranous, 3- to 5-nerved. The second glume is equal to or shorter than the fourth, ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... up the pavement and turned left at the narrow drive that led between barbed-wire fences toward the Hauptman farmhouse, five hundred yards or so from the farm road. The fields on his left belonged to Marie's father, he knew. He was getting close—close to home and woman ...
— The Hoofer • Walter M. Miller
... whenever he found the right box. But on April 28, the two methods were again employed, the first in the initial series and the second in a final series of trials. The animal's persistent attempts to raise the doors gave the experimenter so much trouble that on April 29 barbed wire was nailed over the windows of the entrance doors with the hope that it might prevent him from working at them. But he quickly learned to place his fingers between the barbs and raise the doors as effectively ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... of spear blades made by Baliwang. The one most common is called "fal-feg'." It is a simple, single-barbed blade, and ranges from 2 inches to 6 inches in length. This style of blade is the most used in warfare, and the smaller, lighter blades are considered better for this purpose ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... he slakes his thirst The rivers dwindle, and he thinks to draw The depths of Jordan dry. Wilt cast thy hook And take Leviathan? Wilt bind thy yoke Upon him, as a vassal? Will he cringe Unto thy maidens? See the barbed spear The dart and the habergeon, are his scorn. Sling-stones are stubble, keenest arrows foil'd, And from the plaited armor of his scales The glittering sword recoils. Where he reclines, Who is so daring as to rouse him up, With his cold, stony heart, and ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... bitter thoughts against Phil. Acton worked "the-no-good-to-try" dodge carefully and artistically; he never actually said his lie openly, or Phil would have nailed it to the counter, but, like a second Iago, he dropped little barbed insinuations here, little double-edged sayings there, until Biffenites to a man believed there would be a repetition of the "footer" cap over again, and the school generally drifted back to aloofness as ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... most hateful of insects. These the traveller cannot avoid coming in contact with while brushing through the forest. They get inside his dress, often in great numbers, and insert their proboscis deeply, but without pain. Buried head and shoulders, and retained by its barbed lancet, this tick can only be extracted with great force, and the ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... would precipitate their decision. Obscurely, besides, through a hint which had reached me, I guessed what this decision was likely to be, and it took the very worst shape it could have taken. All this increased my agitation from hour to hour. But all this was quickened and barbed by the certainty of so immediately meeting Lady Carbery. To her it was, and to her only, that I could look for any useful advice or any effectual aid. She over my mother, as in turn my mother over her, exercised considerable influence; ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... pelted us. It is impossible—at all events for me—to describe a charge. Speaking for myself, always my brain seemed to snap. It was simply a rush in a mad line—or as much of a line as could be kept—towards the enemy's barbed wire entanglements, which our guns had blown to smithereens in preparation for the assault. We scrambled on to their parapet, each getting at the first man he could touch. When we had taken their position (we didn't always) we might have to wait some time till our artillery had shelled ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... bamboo, and a more hateful insect I never encountered. The traveller cannot avoid these insects coming on his person (sometimes in great numbers) as he brushes through the forest; they get inside his dress, and insert the proboscis deeply without pain. Buried head and shoulders, and retained by a barbed lancet, the tick is only to be extracted by force, which is very painful. I have devised many tortures, mechanical and chemical, to induce these disgusting intruders to withdraw the proboscis, but in vain. Leeches* [I cannot but think that the extraordinary abundance of ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... than Methuselah because she knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of. Then he mentioned a number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by saying, "What did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?" ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... had been no great outburst of despair, no whirlwind of stormy grief, no loud tempest of anguish and tears, Robert took no comforting thought from the unnatural stillness. He knew enough to know that Sir Michael Audley went away with the barbed arrow, which his nephew's hand had sent home to its aim, rankling in his tortured heart; he knew that this strange and icy calm was the first numbness of a heart stricken by grief so unexpected as for a time to be rendered ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... purpose that the division itself exists; it must lie below the 'barbed-wire fence,' somewhere across the line. To speak precisely, Division Street appears to start at Chatham Square, and it runs eastward to Grand Street. We will take the Third Avenue Elevated to Chatham Square, and then ask a policeman. Nothing ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the kopjes, I suggested to a friend that we should go to the farm in front of us, where none of us had been since Olifantsnek was in possession of the enemy. We had to ford a donga closed in by barbed wire. When we got to the farm, we were told that the enemy had not been there, with the exception of a khaki who had lost his way. He had taken six eggs from a nest in a kraal and swallowed them greedily, and had then passed on to the garden without speaking ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... her disharmony. And I, who in wanton Paris had passed as an innocent child through a hotbed of sensuality and a hailstorm of seduction, on a single twilight eve in London had four or five encounters the particulars of which remained in my memory as barbed arrows remain imbedded in the flesh, smarting and itching and burning like the thorny fibres of cactus or sweetbriar seed with which one has come ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... the streets were howling mobs, every constable was on duty. The hall was stormed and when Lloyd George appeared on the platform he faced turmoil. Hundreds of men carried sticks, clubs and bricks covered with rags and fastened to barbed wire. When he rose to speak Bedlam let loose. Jeers, catcalls and frightful epithets rained on him and with them rocks and vegetables. He removed his overcoat and stood calm and smiling. When he raised his voice, however, the grand assault was made. Only a double cordon of constables ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... to having more elaborately barbed points, are further embellished by incised decorations the entire length of the shaft. These incisions consist simply of a series of lines into which dirt has been rubbed so that they offer a striking contrast to the white surface of ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... a Company of Manchesters, sent from Divisional Reserve. I moved to the left. An officer suddenly jumped the parapet and shouted 'Come on, the 17th!' I followed him along with about twenty others. But we found the barbed wire impossible to cut through and he gave us the ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... high above the level of the adjoining fields, it runs literally "as straight as an arrow" through the heart of the grassy Midlands. And what a rare hunting country it passes through! We saw but one short piece of barbed wire in our journey of over forty miles. Now that farming is no longer remunerative, the whole country seems to be given up to hunting. Depend upon it, it is this sport alone that circulates money ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... rather wreck the Empire than work honestly and fairly with Labour. There are not only parish boundaries, but park boundaries and class and sect boundaries. You will find the Bocking-Braintree line too at a dozen points on a small scale map of Europe.... These Braintree-Bocking lines are the barbed-wire entanglements between us and the peace of the world. Against these entanglements in every country the new spirit struggles in many thousands of minds. Where will it be strongest? Which country will get clear first, get most rapidly to work ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... possibly occasion—spurred desire to act of his own initiative and keep the high priest in his place—impelled the Maharajah in that minute. Men said afterward that Jaimihr had whispered to him advice which he knew was barbed because it was his brother whispering, and that he promptly did the opposite; but, whatever the motive, he drew himself up in all his jewelled splendor and demanded: ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... impunity, however clear might seem the outlook. I felt as if my very thoughts were in danger from her intuition, and scarcely dared breathe my intentions to the walls, lest the treacherous breeze should carry them to her ears and awaken that formidable antagonism which in her case was barbed with a power which might easily make the most daring quail. And yet she must be braved; for not to save his life could I let such an appeal as he had made me go unanswered; no, though I knew the possibility remained of its being ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... there, and spend the money that their children want for bread, and multitudes of boys and girls of the age of my own. In Paris and other European cities, at least the great fisher of souls baits with something attractive, but in these gin shops men bite at the bare, barbed hook. There are no garlands, no dancing, no music, no theatricals, no pretence of social exhilaration, nothing but hogsheads of spirits, and people going in to drink. The number of them that I passed ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... answered coolly, with a smile, Felling a seam with utmost care, meanwhile. "The caustic tongue of Vivian Dangerfield Is barbed as ever, for my sex, this morn. Still unconvinced, no smallest point I yield. Woman I love, and trust, despite your scorn. There is some truth in what you say? Well, yes! Your statements usually hold more or less. Some women write weak letters—(some men do;) Some ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... baby. Bless me, you old rascal, you have never known any innocence; the allowance bestowed on you when you came into the world was bound to come to the top some day; but it was buried so deep that it is only now reappearing at the age of sixty-six. Fished up by love's barbed hook.—This phenomenon is seen ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... strong hand as well as true aim that sent this arrow," said the young man, drawing the shaft out of the animal's brain, in which the barbed point, coming off, remained behind, "and I must furnish ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... strong gouge-like portion, and (2) a pair of darts of marvellous delicacy. These darts we cannot see in position because they lie on the other side of the gouge-like piece. But to the left you will notice a long sword-like blade, drawn separately, with a curiously crooked handle and a sharp barbed point. This is one of the pair of darts. Those who have had the misfortune to be stung may be interested to know that this painful wound was inflicted thus: When the bee alighted on you, he first thrust through the skin this hard, pointed gouge; then one of the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... are often more virulent than those of wasps, and attended with more painful effects. The sting being barbed, it is always left in the wound. When therefore a person is stung by a bee, the sting should be instantly extracted, or it will communicate more of its poison, according to the time it is permitted to remain. It should be carefully pulled out with a steady hand, for if any of it break ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... gathered up into a knot behind; and with his bow, each man carried a quiver with thirty or forty arrows partially drawn out. Besides these, each held in his hand two or three arrows for instant service. Their arrows are barbed with a very clear translucent stone, a species of opal, nearly as hard as the diamond; and, shot from their long bow, are almost as effective as a gunshot. In these Indians, I was forcibly struck by an expression of countenance resembling that in a beast of prey; and all their ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... the conflict had come. It was no longer to be a duel at a distance—no more a contest between rifle-bullets and barbed arrows; but the close, desperate, hand-to-hand contest of pistol, knife, ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... without really knowing whether they're in love or not—mistake the gregarious habit for the mystic fire of Hymen's torch, the pangs of a bad digestion for the barbed arrows from ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Black Rim country there is such a place,—a wide, rough, sage-grown expanse where cattle and horses and sheep scarce know the look of barbed wire, and where brands are still the sole mark of ownership. Set down between high mountain ranges, remote, sufficient unto itself, rudely prosperous, the Black Rim country has ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... place within the range of the Paris forts. Work on the entrenched lines connecting the forts is actively carried out and is said to give every satisfaction. The positions, believed to be impregnable, are strengthened by ingenious arrangements of barbed wire. It is reported that some of this barbed entanglement contains live wires fed by the ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... with broad porches and wide windows; further down the coulee, at the base of a gentle slope, were the sheds, the high, round corrals and the haystacks. Great, board gates were distributed in seemingly useless profusion, while barbed wire fences stretched away in all directions. A small creek, bordered with cottonwoods and scraggly willows, wound ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... weak man with his Faith equivocated: Fraudful, beneath the self-same roofs he raised Altars to Christ and idols. By degrees That Truth he mocked forsook him. Year by year His face grew dark, and barbed his tongue though smooth, Manner and mind like grass-fields after thaw, Silk-soft above, yet iron-hard below: Spleenful that night at Sebert's blithe discourse He answered thus, with seeming-careless eye Wandering from wall to roof: ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... next few months we moved from one village to another in the neighbourhood of Skegness. "We dug miles of trenches along the coast—we erected barbed wire entanglements for the sea to play with—we patrolled bleak stretches of coast day and night, and in all sorts of weather—we watched patiently for spies and Zeppelins, and we were disappointed. Nothing happened; the ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... notion of fencing a hog corral with sod walls, he made a spiritless beginning on the structure—merely to "show his temper," as she put it—but in the end he went off quietly to town and bought enough barbed wire to complete the fence. When the first heavy rains came on, and the pigs rooted down the sod wall and made little paths all over it to facilitate their ascent, he heard his wife relate with relish the story of the little pig ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... second addition, a barbed-wire-enclosed building called The Cage, where prisoners where first received ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... of a spear, to which a long rope is attached. This spear is hurled at the whale by a sailor who stands in the bow of the boat; it has a barbed end, like that of a fish-hook, and if it once gets into the flesh of a whale it will hold fast, and the struggles of the great fish cannot ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 19, March 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... could neither eat, nor sleep, nor rest. Her temples throbbed, her eyes ached; every nerve was a barbed wire; her soul was manacled by promises; she would not use her reason; the fever in her veins was not to be quelled, and the one agitating relief to her physical suffering was a constant perusal of David ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... government, once so sacred for the sublime and pathetic scenes enacted there during the famous siege and in the magistracy of Peter van der Werff, was accordingly enclosed by a solid palisade of oaken planks, strengthened by rows of iron bars with barbed prongs: The entrenchment was called by the populace the Arminian Fort, and the iron spear heads were baptized Barneveld's teeth. Cannon were planted at intervals along the works, and a company or two of the Waartgelders, armed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... glass. Beyond the corner of the wall, a sunlit notice-board amidst green and yellow branches reared itself above the rich tones of the first fallen leaves and announced that "Trespassers in these Woods will be Prosecuted." The dark shadow of a gap in the hedge threw a stretch of barbed wire into relief. ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... fish for breakfast, as Mammy would have nothing to do with it. She obeyed with alacrity, pleased to have something to do. As she looked upon the speckled beauty she thought how like an arrow it appeared; its long, lithe body resembling the smooth shaft; the head and gills the barbed point; and the spreading tail the feathered end. She wondered if there was a meaning in all this, or was it merely ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... the barbed dart from his arm and poured a powerful antiseptic into the open wound, unmindful of the pain. As best he could, he disinfected his other cuts and bandaged them. Ora had raised herself and now sat there, swaying weakly and regarding ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... that too, I thought it would send me mad, I longed to kill myself to get out of it. But, in an attack, when you've seen your own jolly pals, who have lived in the trenches with you, bleeding and tattered, spatchcocked against barbed wire, and had to leave them sticking to it, their eyes haunt you, your blood gets up, you long for a hundred hands to shoot with, instead of only two. When you've seen the result of Prussian militarism on decent German soldiers, you know that it's your duty ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... shorter time, and with less expenditure of ammunition. Butterface, too, gained much credit by the prompt manner in which he split the skull of one animal with an axe. Even Oblooria, the timid, rose to the occasion, and displayed unlooked-for heroism. With a barbed seal-spear she stood up and invited a baby walrus to come on—by looks, not by words. The baby accepted the invitation—perhaps, being a pugnacious baby, it was coming on at any rate—and Oblooria gave it a vigorous dab on the nose. It resented the insult by shaking its head fiercely, ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... altogether the most effective spreaders of civilization we had. They went clothed in steel and equipped with sword and lance and battle-axe, and if they couldn't persuade a person to try a sewing-machine on the installment plan, or a melodeon, or a barbed-wire fence, or a prohibition journal, or any of the other thousand and one things they canvassed for, they ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... for instance, many families draw their entire income from them. A few have been planted at Sidi Mansur and elsewhere near Gafsa, but they are unprotected and liable to be trodden down in their early years, or eaten. Barbed wire, herald of civilization, is almost ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... had the privilege of experiencing it, in however slight a degree, forget the sweet affectionateness which, in spite of an occasional irritability and over-sensitiveness, was at the root of Mr. Lowell's character. Corrupt politicians disliked him and feared the barbed arrows of his indignant wit; but he goes to the grave mourned by all that is best in America, and he takes with him the heart-felt regard as well as the admiration, of this elder branch of our common ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb |
