"Mowing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... day Geraint and Enid left the wood, and they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the meadows. And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the water. And they went up out of the river by a steep bank, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck; and he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... a continuous wood. The oaks and chestnuts, though too young to form a complete arch, cross their green branches, and cast a delicious shadow. For it is in the shadow that we enjoy the summer, looking forth from the gateway upon the mowing grass where the glowing sun pours down his ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... there is very little money about Cumberland. The money is not like our English money. An English guinea is L 1 3s. 4d. In Nova Scotia money a dollar is equal to 5 shillings, and a pistereen is a shilling. In haying time men have 3 shillings a day for mowing. The mosquitos will bite them very often so that they will throw down their scythes and run home, almost bitten to death, and there is a black fly worse than all the rest. One is tormented all the summer with mosquitos, and almost frozen to death in the ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... lent a sturdy helping hand in gathering in the harvest. It delighted him to be able, as of old, to reach up and put the sheaves on the top of the well-loaded waggons, and to find that he could still wield a scythe with the same vigorous strokes, mowing the scanty second crop of grass on the mountain meadows just as close to the ground as ever. While Klitzing lay down after his exertions and rested his weary limbs, Vogt would spend hours over such field-work; and the fatigue ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... fretting his brave heart away, am I to be dragged forth to make part of a pageant for the entertainment of his jailers? I would sooner have the lowest cell in the dungeon—aye! and starve and stifle for lack of food and air, than be forced to deck myself out in borrowed bravery, and sit mowing and smiling in a gay pavilion, and clap hands in transport over the fine cavalier airs of the man ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... women under competent gang leaders. The workers were housed in an empty country house and the War Office provided bedding. The Y.W.C.A. undertook the catering at the request of the Corps. The work, which was a great success, consisted in pulling, gating, wind mowing, stocking ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... has tramped all over the mountain back of the town after wild strawberries, followed the peasants to the mowing, and gone to many a fete in the village. We are fortunate to have ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... summer day, and the mowers in their shirt-sleeves, mowing with long scythes, out in the meadow: I was with my mother, as she passed by them, knitting. Outside the fence lay a half-bare rocky hill, behind which my mother had a bench. Above this on a stony heap grew raspberry-bushes, and beside them stood a few small birch-trees. ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... in husbandry may be divided: 1st, into those who are able to perform the full work of a man; that is, what can be done by a person from twenty-one years of age to fifty. I know no husbandry-work (mowing hardly excepted) that is not equally within the power of all persons within those ages, the more advanced fully compensating by knack and habit what they lose in activity. Unquestionably, there is a good deal of difference between the value of one man's labour and that of another, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... French, and as the French passed them in flank, the mitrailleuses opened fire; at the same moment the Germans suddenly fired a scattering rifle volley. Attacked in front and on the flank, every Frenchman but one was hit, and sixty dead still lay in a row across the field as if cut down by a mowing machine. The sole survivor of the fatal cross-fire was a boy with a tiny black moustache. Undaunted, he had charged alone in among the Germans and had received many bayonets in his heroic body. He lay on his back among the German cartridges fifty yards ahead ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... old-fash'ned odds an' ends o' knowledge, that you can take my meaning almost afore I start to speak. An' that's a great comfort to a man o' my age. It'll be terrible hard, when I wants to talk, to begin at the beginning every time. There's that old yarn o' mine about Hambly's cow an' the lawn-mowing machine—I doubt that anybody 'll enjoy it so much as you always do; an' I've so got out o' the way o' telling the beginning—which bain't extra funny, though needful to a stranger's understanding the whole joke—that I 'most forgets how ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... they are often valuable ones. They grow rapidly and rank, making a large bulk of humus, without the expense of seeding. If they are not allowed to go to seed so as to scatter the seed about the farm, they often make the best of cover crops. This necessitates a mowing in September. Weeds are plants out of place, and when these plants are in place they are not necessarily weeds, as they have then ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... me in every need," he went on. "Mowing the deep green grass in spring, or driving oxen, or cutting a clean furrow with the plough in heavy soil, or building houses and ships, or doing smith's work with gold and bronze and grey iron—they ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... went Sinfiotli through the earth, mowing the war swathe and wasting the land, and passing but little time in song and laughter in his father's hall. So went his days in warfare and valour, and yet his end was not glorious, for he drank of the poisoned cup given him by the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... de la Revolution a gruesome engine they called the guillotine was levelling all things, and fast establishing the reign of absolute equality. But with all the swift mowing of its bloody scythe, not half so fast did it level men as Mademoiselle de Bellecour's thoughts were doing ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... upon the right, and so horrible a smell issued from it that they were driven back from it. The lamp which Simon held forward showed a monkeylike creature mowing and grimacing in the corner, man or woman none could tell, but driven crazy by loneliness and horror. In the other cell was a graybearded man fettered to the wall, looking blankly before him, a body without a soul, yet with life still in him, ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... time to the organ. "It's a grand notion, to think of him sitting here in the gloom, with that great musical instrument towering above him, whence he sends forth the voice of gladness, almost of song to his people, while they are mowing the grass, binding the sheaves, or gazing abroad over the stormy ocean in doubt, anxiety, and fear. 'There's the parson at his bells,' they would say, and stop and listen; and some phrase might sink into their hearts, waking some memory, or giving birth ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... lecherousness of her soul ought to be cooled by outrage to her face. When he had done this, he said he left her choice free in the matter she had asked about. Then he went quickly back to the town and plunged into the densest of the fray, mowing down the opposing ranks as he gave blow for blow. Passing the sleeping-room of Bjarke, who was still slumbering, he bade him wake up, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... should have seen the place before he began his operations, to do him justice ; there was then nothing else but mauvaises herbes; now, you must at least allow there is a mixture of flowers and grain! I wish you had seen him yesterday, mowing down our hedge—with his sabre, and with an air and attitudes so military, that, if he had been hewing down other legions than those he encountered—ie., of spiders—he could scarcely have had a mien more tremendous, or have demanded an arm more mighty. Heaven knows, I am "the most contente ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... born at the little village of Barton in Norfolk, at the time the guns at Balaclava were mowing down our red coats and tars, where my father had a small house facing the Broad. It was a comfortable old two-storied building, with a thatched roof, through which a couple of dormer windows peered out, like two eyes, over the beautiful green lawn which sloped to the reed-fringed ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... treading lightly, Scattergood went about acquiring what he needed. His method was not direct approach. He went to the owners of that land with proffers to sell, not to buy. To Landers, who owned the marsh on both shores of the river, he tried to sell the newest development in mowing machines, and his manner of doing so was to hitch to the newly arrived machine, haul it to Landers's meadow—where the owner was haying—drag it through the ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... is not an unmixed evil in that it is compelling the introduction of improved machinery, such as mowing machines, binders. On many a farm only scythes ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... to speak kindly to him, for she knew he was always in difficulties. Bill Nye was that contradiction a strong man without work. He wanted to engage for mowing. Bill Nye was a mower at Coombe, and his father, Bill Nye, before him, many a long year before he was discovered ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... a fertile valley, in which there were many trees, chiefly willows of enormous size. Grass grows abundantly between the trees, and its luxuriance is not diminished by cattle or interfered with by mowing. Arriving upon the shores of an irregular lake, of vast extent, the whole party embarked in yachts, and proceeded to a bridge which is thrown across the narrowest part of the lake, and beyond which it appeared to ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... and, although every year one-third of the land was left "fallow" (uncultivated) in order to restore its fertility, the yield per acre was hardly a fourth as large as now. Farm implements were of the crudest kind; scythes and sickles did the work of mowing machines; plows were made of wood, occasionally shod with iron; and threshing was done with flails. After the grain had been harvested, cattle were turned out indiscriminately on the stubble, on the supposition that the fields were common ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... had not then come into general use. All the mowing was done with scythes, and the raking with hand rakes and "loafer" rakes. Generally, all hands would be busy for three hours every bright afternoon, raking the grass which had been cut down in the forenoon. The Old Squire and the Elder commonly raked side by side, and often fell into argument ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... young living as I lie, I seem to move with them in harmony,— A fourth is mowing, and that ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... laid his galley alongside of the treasure-ship of the Turkish fleet, a vessel, on account of its importance, doubly manned and armed. Impatient that the Crescent was not lowered, after a few broadsides, he sprang on board the enemy alone, waving an immense two-handed sword—his usual weapon—and mowing a passage right and left through the hostile ranks for the warriors who tardily followed the footsteps of their vehement chief. Mustapha Bey, the treasurer and commander of the ship, fell before his sword, besides many others, whom ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that afternoon, in fact, Mr. Hackley had been out upon a reluctant stint of lawn-mowing, reluctant because he hated all work with a Titanic hatred and sedulously cultivated the conviction that his was a delicate health. In view of the magnificent windfall in connection with the killing of his dog, it had not been his design to accept any more retainers for a long ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... motor-lorries and cars. These warehouses furnish everything that an agricultural people starting life afresh can require—food, clothes, blankets, beds, mattresses, stoves, kitchen utensils, reapers, binders, mowing-machines, threshing-machines, garden-tools, soap, tooth brushes, etc. If you can conceive of yourself as having been a prosperous farmer and waking up one morning broken in heart and dirty in person, with your barns, live-stock, daughters, sons, everything gone—not a penny ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... own accounts, Will's feats of strength as a younger man, in the way of reaping, mowing, &c., were remarkable; and there was one great story, with much in it about "goolden guineas," of the wonderful sale of corn that he effected for one of his masters. At the rectory gatherings on Christmas night Will was one of the principal singers, his chef-d'oeuvre "Oh! silver [query ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... faint, ripping noise mounted to Gabriel—a sound for all the world like the tearing of stout canvas. Then followed a chattering racket, something like distant mowing-machines at work; and now all blent to a steady, determined uproar. Gabriel almost thought to hear, as he launched his own projectile, far sounds as of the shouts and cries of men; but of this he could not ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... "I do not love it. I can fight—any man can fight who has not white blood—and ours has been a fighting house; but mowing men down by thousands, cutting their throats, burning towns, and desolating villages filled with maddened men and shrieking women and children, does not set my blood in a flame as it does the blood of a man who is born for victorious ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... they followed the waggon track, or South Road, for about half a mile. It crossed meadows parted by low hedges, and they remarked, as they went, on the shortness of the grass, which, for want of rain, was not nearly fit for mowing. Last year there had been a bad wheat crop; this year there was at present scarcely any grass. These matters were of the highest importance; peace or war, famine or plenty, might depend upon the weather of the next ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... continued long at a time. To-day this fallacy is beginning to be generally recognized. Go into any farming district, and you will find that the farmer's sons who are regularly engaged in one kind of labor all day, as ploughing, planting, mowing, are great, awkward, heavy-mannered youths, while his daughters are, in comparison, easy in their movements and agreeable in their address; and simply because, though their labor has been as unremitting, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... would astonish a Californian. The plows are patterned very much after those that were used by Boaz and other large farmers in the days of the Patriarchs; the scythes are the exact originals of the old pictures in which Death is represented as mowing down mankind; the hoes, rakes, and shovels would be an ornament to any museum, but are entirely indescribable; and as for the wagons and harnesses—herein lies the superior genius of the Russians over all the races of earth, ancient or modern, for never were ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... and John-a-stile for the baylive [sic] of Withernam, cum privilegio perennitatis; and are to be sold at the sign of the crab-tree-cudgel in Thwackcoat Lane. A sentence. Martin hangs fit for my mowing. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... have the crop put up in heaps, usually called "cocks," but sometimes called "coils," before the second night arrives after the mowing of the clover; and in order to accomplish this, it may be necessary to work on until the shades ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... marvel at the detail of these 1893 photographs. Signs and flags are easily read. The only technical flaw is the long exposure to produce the crisp detail and depth of field. Occasionally the moving leg of a pedestrian is blurred. Find the man mowing the grass in plate 63. Click "Back" on your browser to ...
— Official Views Of The World's Columbian Exposition • C. D. Arnold
... from it, that I have been mowing down a great deal more, Edward, and it is almost ready to carry away. Poor Billy has had hard work of it, I assure you, since he came back, with ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... poor but that he may venture to entertain the hope of being through them aided and relieved. Public opinion is in America the mightiest organ of justice—shielding no one, from the president to the simplest citizen, and proceeds, mowing, casting down, or grinding to powder all things which oppose it ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... back, if you asked her; wouldn't she? I think it would be a charity. Put it to her as an opportunity. She'd drop anything she might be about for an opportunity. I wonder if she ever goes back upon her tracks and finishes up? She's something like a mowing machine: a grand good thing, but needs a scythe to follow round and pick out ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... warm July day—a fine hay day—and the people of Mill Crossing are taking advantage of the occasion. They are turned out en masse. Mowing machines are called into active service, and the new inventions—reapers, binders, etc.—are also at hand. The farmers of this favored locality are pretty well to do, and conspicuous among the number is ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... Everything is kept up with a strenuous virtue that imparts an air of self-respect to the landscape, which the bleaching and blackening stone walls, wandering over the hill-slopes, divide into wood lots of white birch and pine, stony pastures, and little patches of potatoes and corn. The mowing-lands alone are rich; and if the New England year is in the glory of the latest June, the breath of the clover blows honey—sweet into the car windows, and the fragrance of the new-cut hay rises hot from the heavy swaths that seem to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wits:—bless thee, good man's son, from the foul fiend! Five fiends have been in poor Tom at once; of lust, as Obidicut; Hobbididence, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder; Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing,—who since possesses chambermaids and waiting ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... have done our full share in the way of industrial inventions since we have become a nation. The four elements have all accepted the American as their master. The great harvests of the earth are gathered by his mowing and reaping machines. The flame that is creeping from its lair to spring at the roofs of the crowded city is betrayed to its watchful guardians by the American telegraphic fire-alarm, and the conflagration that reddens the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... geraniums and fuchsia With never a happy weed between. There's a neat little grass plot, bald in places, And very dusty to touch; A respectable man comes once a week To keep the garden weeded and swept, To keep it as we don't want it kept. He cuts the grass with his mowing-machine, And we think he cuts it too much. But even on the lawn, all dry and gritty, The daisies play about. They are so brave as well as so pretty, You cannot keep them out. I love them, I want to let them grow, ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... Agatha told Mary she might go, and she stepped out through the open window just as she was—pinafore and all. For a few minutes she walked about the grass watching a gardener who was mowing it. She looked on whilst he swept the grass he had cut into a basket and emptied the basket into a wheel-barrow. Then he wheeled the barrow to an iron gate, and having passed through the gate, ...
— The Bountiful Lady - or, How Mary was changed from a very Miserable Little Girl - to a very Happy One • Thomas Cobb
... Dad and Dave in the paddock mowing lucerne. Jack sinking post-holes for a milking-yard close to the house. Joe at intervals stealing behind him to prick him with straws through a rent in the rear of his patched moleskins. Little Bill—in readiness to ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... will!" Bobby cried. "The mowing-machine makes a terrible clatter. And we'll have to quit the neighborhood in a hurry when we hear it, for it moves fast, and cuts ...
— The Tale of Bobby Bobolink - Tuck-me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... irritable people, ignorant, and improvident, who could think of nothing but the grey earth and black bread; a people who were crafty, but were stupid about it, like the birds, who, when they want to hide themselves, only hide their heads. They would not do the mowing for you for twenty rubles, but they would do it for six liters of brandy, notwithstanding the fact that with twenty rubles they can buy eight times as much. What vice and foolishness! Nevertheless, one feels that the life of the peasant has a great deal of depth. It makes ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... and then climbed to the plateau. There the land was cultivated, and the musical note of a cock turkey that hailed my coming from afar, as he swaggered in front of his harem on the march, led me to a spot where a man was mowing, and he told me where I should find the Tarn, which he, like all other people in the country, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... I; 'Friend! hae ye been mawin, [Good-evening, mowing] When ither folk are busy sawin?' [sowing] It seem'd to mak a kind o' stan', But naething spak; At length says I, 'Friend, wh'are ye gaun? ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... as they ran, doubtless following the instructions of their officers. This was bound to be of advantage to them, since the fire of the enemy could not cut them down as ripe grain falls before the scythe of the reaper or the revolving knives of the modern mowing machine. ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow
... harrows of the latest pattern, and was suddenly reminded that for a long time he had been thinking of getting a new reaper. Gazing fondly at his good-looking son, he pictured him sitting on a fine, red-painted reaper, cracking his whip over the horses, and mowing down the thick, waving grass, as a war hero mows down his enemies. And as he stepped into the office he seemed to hear the clicking noise of the reaper, the soft swish of falling grass and the shrill chirp and light flutter of frightened birds ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... grasses that may be gaining a foothold. Watering is dangerous, unless carefully and regularly done during the summer, the evening being the best time. Merely wetting the surface by sprinkling encourages shallow rooting and therefore rapid drying out. Regular mowing ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... called; a wood-pigeon was cooing from the first elm-tree in the field, and how the daisies and buttercups had sprung up after the last mowing! The wind had got into the sou' west, too—a delicious air, sappy! He pushed his hat back and let the sun fall on his chin and cheek. Somehow, to-day, he wanted company—wanted a pretty face to look at. People treated the old as if they wanted nothing. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to charge the fees that those fellows do. If a specialist stung you for a hundred-dollar consultation-fee and told you to go to New York to duck Dave's nagging, you'd do it, to save the hundred dollars! But you know me—I'm your neighbor—you see me mowing the lawn—you figure I'm just a plug general practitioner. If I said, 'Go to New York,' Dave and you would laugh your heads off and say, 'Look at the airs Will is putting on. What does ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... a field-glass to his eyes with trembling hands, and watched the cruel mowing of the blue flowers. Sometimes he recognized a man that he knew, and saw him die for his country. Three times he saw John St. John in the forefront of the battle. The first time he was riding a glorious black ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... the grass does in spite of the ill-treatment it suffers at the hands, and mowing-machines, and vestries of man. His ideal of grass is growth that shall never be allowed to come to its flower and completion. He proves this in his lawns. Not only does he cut the coming grass-flower off by the stalk, but he does not allow the mere leaf—the blade—to perfect itself. ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... of hayfield on the further side of the road, she heard a voice singing. A young man, tall and well made, was mowing in a corner of the field. The swathes fell fast before him: every movement spoke of an assured rejoicing strength. He sang with the sharp stridency which is the rule in Italy—the words clear, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the great blue eyes were half concealed by the long lashes. She made her way to the wicket-gate at the far end of the green, to a winding path through a wood which led to the rose-garden below, and gave a start of pretended surprise when Tom Burney broke off from his task of mowing the grass paths which separated the beds, with an ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... West Riding were a rough set. Their occupation consisted in shearing or cropping the wool on the face of cloths. They used a large pair of shears, which were so set that one blade went under the cloth while the other worked on its upper face, mowing the fibers and ends of the wool to a smooth, even surface. The work was hard and required considerable skill, and the men earned about twenty-four shillings a week, a sum which, with bread and all other necessities of life at famine prices, barely sufficed ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... you, they are fine soldiers, and brave men too, or at least they seem brave; but it's discipline does it. They are just like machinery. Once when I was right in the middle of it, they attacked in close formation, and we turned our machine-guns on 'em. Ever seen a mowing machine in a wheat field? ever seen the wheat fall before the knives? Well, that's how they fell. Hundreds upon hundreds; but still they came on. Just as fast as one lot was killed, the others, knowing that they were ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking
... in reality," said Hester. "It looks like a waste of life, that mowing down of our best years by a relentless passion which itself falls dead on the top of them. But it is not so. Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence which will risk nothing, and ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... first thing? To the barn, the great cavernous barn, its huge doors now wide open, the stalls vacant, the mows empty, the sunlight sifting in through the high shadowy spaces. How much his life had been in that barn! How he had stifled and scrambled mowing hay in those lofts! On the floor he had hulled heaps of corn, thrashed oats with a flail—a noble occupation—and many a rainy day had played there with girls and boys who could not now exactly describe the games or well recall what exciting ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... it difficult to keep from bursting into laughter. The large ground-floor room was a frenzy of brawling, yelling, shouting Nationalist guards trying to capture the giant cadet. Astro was standing in the middle of the floor, swinging his great hamlike fists methodically, mowing down the guards like tenpins. Two of them were on his back, trying to choke him, while others crowded in from all sides. But they could not bring the cadet down. Astro saw Connel, shook ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... began to retreat, we forgot our hunger, thirst, fatigue, and wounds, and thought of nothing but victory and pursuit. Our scanty cavalry followed them up close, dealing destruction around them on every side; and our faithful allies fought like lions, mowing down all before them with the arms which the enemy threw away to facilitate their flight. On the return of our cavalry from the pursuit, we gave humble thanks to God for our unexpected victory and miraculous ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... method of cultivation or a new variety of grain, or the invention of an agricultural implement interests all alike. The farmer engaged in planting his corn knows that for miles around all other farmers are similarly employed; if he is cutting his hay or harvesting his grain, hundreds of other mowing machines and harvesters are at work ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... the use of the destitute, or for refilling the communal stores, or for using the produce at the religious festivals. The irrigation canals are digged and repaired in common. The communal meadows are mown by the community; and the sight of a Russian commune mowing a meadow— the men rivalling each other in their advance with the scythe, while the women turn the grass over and throw it up into heaps— is one of the most inspiring sights; it shows what human work might be and ought to be. The hay, in such case, is divided ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... long black canoes, high-ended like beaked predatory monsters, dimly looming in the light of a slow fire where sat an ancient of the tribe of Somo at his interminable task of smoke-curing a bushman's head. He was withered, and blind, and senile, gibbering and mowing like some huge ape as ever he turned and twisted, and twisted back again, the suspended head in the pungent smoke, and handful by handful added rotten punk of wood ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... Daisy pondered and pondered and could make nothing of. They walked on, Mr. Randolph making observations and giving orders now and then to workmen. Here a man was mowing under the shrubbery; there the gardener was setting out pots of greenhouse flowers; in another place there were holes digging for trees to be planted. Daisy went musing on while her father gave his orders, and when they were again safe out of hearing ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... world beside! Drawing down and down, to greet Cottage clusters at our feet,— Every scent of summer tide,— Flowery pastures all aglow (Men and women mowing go Up and down them); also soft Floating of the film aloft, Fluttering of the leaves alow. Is this told? It is not told. Where's the danger? where's the cold Slippery danger up the steep? Where yon shadow fallen asleep? Chirping ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... the lawn mower. Uncle thought that was fine. You see work and I never had hitched very well together. But I thought that would be some fun. So I started in mowing the yard the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys with the Texas Rangers • Frank Gee Patchin
... hastily pushed back and the patter of little feet and the rustle of sarongs, which led X. to infer that there had been some sort of a retreat. Then a flurried native appeared, he seemed a kind of gardener hastily fetched from his duties, possibly the mowing machine, and pouring forth words in a strange dialect he pointed wildly to another flight of steps and another door. Following this menial, a veritable deus ex machina, X. was led down those palatial steps and up another flight ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... Many advise the mowing off of the old foliage after the fruit has been gathered. I doubt the wisdom of this practice. The crowns of the plants and the surface of the bed are laid open to the midsummer sun. The foliage is needed to sustain or develop the roots. In the case of a few petted and valuable plants, it ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... cultivation is performed with very primitive implements, the ordinary old-fashioned plough being furnished with a share resembling the broad flattened lance-head of a harpoon, which penetrates the earth horizontally. Of late years, however, a constantly increasing number of improved ploughs, reaping, mowing, and steam threshing machines have come into use. In 1873, according to Consul Vivian's report, there were about 185,000 native ploughs against about 38,000 imported ones; but even then already there were nearly three times as many steam as there were horse threshing machines ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... banks of the Merrimac, a few miles from the sea, went out into his meadow with his scythe to cut grass. He took his gun along with him to shoot a bear if he saw one in his corn, or an Indian if one made his appearance. He leaned his gun against a tree, and went on with his mowing, not knowing that an Indian was crawling through the tall grass toward him. The Indian reached the tree, seized ...
— Harper's Young People, August 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... some of that money goes to pay the expenses of the agency, some for food, some to pay clerks and blacksmiths, some to buy mowing-machines, wagons, harness, and rakes, and some to buy the cattle which have been issued ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... a quantity of peasants who were mowing rye; they had formed themselves into two rows, were wiping their scythes, and so let his Majesty ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Appendix - Frederick The Great—A Day with Friedrich.—(23d July, 1779.) • Thomas Carlyle
... (Takes bone in both hands and looks up and down the length of it) If 'tain't my ole mule! This sho was one hell of a mule, too. He'd fight every inch in front of de plow ... he'd turn over de mowing machine ... run away wid de wagon ... and you better not look like you wanter ...
— The Mule-Bone: - A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts • Zora Hurston and Langston Hughes
... content. Linnet came in softly once in a while to look at her with anxious eyes and to ask, "How do you feel now?" Her mother wandered in and out as if she could rest in nothing but in looking at her, and her father had given her one of his glad kisses before he went away to the mowing field. Several village people having heard of the accident through Hollis and the doctor had stopped at the door to inquire with a sympathetic modulation of voice if she were any better. But the safe feeling ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... men, closely directed, was galling to our soldiers, but the 30th native infantry took them, at the point of the bayonet, and as they retreated, twelve guns which were previously moved up to within three hundred yards, opened a deadly fire of canister, mowing down the fugitives in a manner which even those engaged in deadly strife thought it awful to witness. To complete the horror of this flight, her majesty's 63rd, who moved up to the support of the 30th native infantry, pursued ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... less creditable arts, Nor hast a will to work, preferring much By beggary from others to extort Wherewith to feed thy never-sated maw. Then answer, thus, Ulysses wise return'd. Forbear, Eurymachus; for were we match'd In work against each other, thou and I, 450 Mowing in spring-time, when the days are long, I with my well-bent sickle in my hand, Thou arm'd with one as keen, for trial sake Of our ability to toil unfed Till night, grass still sufficing for the proof.— Or if, again, it were our task to drive ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... that they no longer seriously tax the land. The wisdom of the work done on the fence rows is now apparent. The ploughing and seeding made it easy to keep the brush and weeds down; hay gathered close to the fences more than pays us for the mowing; and we have no tall weed heads to load the wind with seeds. This is a matter which is not sufficiently considered by the majority of farmers, for weeds are allowed to tax the land almost as much as crops do, and yet they pay ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... stretches of smooth, rich land just everlastingly ram the spurs into you and keep your brain galloping. Mine is goin' night and day. The prairies are a new thing and you've got to tackle 'em in a new way. I tell you the seeding and planting and mowing and reaping and threshing is all going to be done by machinery and horses. The wheel will be the foundation of ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... field occupations. Then wearers were digging potatoes, pulling beets, following the harrow (in one instance a thorn-bush drawn by a cow), and stirring the wet, new-mown grass. I believe the pantaloons were doing the mowing. But I looked in vain for any Maud Mullers in the meadows, and have concluded that these can be found only in New England hay-fields! And herein is one of the first surprises that await one on visiting the ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... This food, of so poor a quality, far from strengthening the citizen accustomed to agricultural labor, disheartens him and makes him ill, the result being that the hay cannot be got in good time for lack of hands."—At Champs, "the crop of hay is ready for mowing, but, for want of food, the laborers cannot ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... centre. They were completely taken by surprise, having heard nothing of what was going forward, and offered hardly any resistance to the Spanish soldiers, who followed up the discharge of their pieces by rushing upon them with their swords and mowing them down ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... there the next day, pretending he wanted Luke to come and help about some mowing that was in hand. Luke's wife said that her husband had not been out of bed for two days, with a hurt he got on the cars the Saturday before. Then Will offered to go in and see if he could not do something for him; but Mrs. Potter said that he was asleep, and, having had a wakeful night, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... three quarters of an inch wide. It had a long slender handle, which took apart for packing, and was put together with the greatest ease. It was, in short, a lawn-mower for the masculine growth of which the proprietor wishes to rid his countenance. The mowing operation required no glass, could be performed with almost reckless boldness, as one cannot cut himself, and in fact had become a pleasant amusement instead of an irksome task. I have never used any other means of shaving from that day to this. I was so pleased ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... that lodged the due inertia in every creature, the conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed? Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each, is the pride of opinion, the security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the absurdities of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not one has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that made things cohere with this ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... you see me contriving in my little gardens, Christy Mahon, you'll swear the Lord God formed me to be living lone, and that there isn't my match in Mayo for thatching, or mowing, or shearing a sheep. ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... parched—and why? 'Twas all in the hand of God. Isak mowed his bits of meadow; there was little grass on them for all he had manured them well that spring. He mowed and mowed on the hillsides, farther and farther out; mowing and turning and carting home loads of hay, as if he would never tire,—for he had a horse already, and a well-stocked farm. But by mid-July he had to cut the corn for green fodder, there was no help for it. And now all ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... ended, and the green mowing fields began, stood Mrs. Bickford's house, looking down the road with all its windows, and topped by two prim chimneys that stood up like ears. It was placed with an end to the road, and fronted southward; you could follow a straight path from the ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... a day when the Spaniards made a new attack and gained another portion of the city. There the people were huddled together like sheep in a pen. We strove to defend them, but our arms were weak with famine. They fired into us with their pieces, mowing us down like corn before the sickle. Then the Tlascalans were loosed upon us, like fierce hounds upon a defenceless buck, and on this day it is said that there died forty thousand people, for none ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... above the thick grass and carrying their fairy lamps into the lower branches of the feathery elms. "Haying" would begin next morning, and he would be wakened by the sharpening of scythes and the click of mowing machines. He would like to work in the Hamilton fields, he thought, knee-deep in daisies,—fields on whose grass he had not stepped since he was a boy just big enough to go behind the cart and ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Jerry was taking his time about mowing the lawn, and wishing there was stuff to put on grass to make it stop growing instead of all that fertilizer his father put on to make it grow, when his mother called and asked him to run to the store for a package of raisins. She wanted to make raisin sauce for the ham ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... for it weighs forty-four pounds to the bushel. The people were very much amused to see me gin so long, and wondered that I had the strength for it. You know they consider us rather effeminate in regard to strength, but I did not find it nearly so hard work as I supposed. It is not half as hard as mowing. ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... the summer Miriam and he went over the fields by Herod's Farm on their way from the library home. So it was only three miles to Willey Farm. There was a yellow glow over the mowing-grass, and the sorrel-heads burned crimson. Gradually, as they walked along the high land, the gold in the west sank down to red, the red to crimson, and then the chill blue ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... them all; and immediately he opened the gates and pushed back the bars, and led in Priam, and the splendid gifts upon the car. But when they reached the lofty tent of Achilles which the Myrmidons had reared for their king, lopping fir timbers; and they roofed it over with a thatched roof, mowing it from the mead, and made a great fence around, with thick-set stakes, for their king: one bar only of fir held the door, which, indeed, three Greeks used to fasten, and three used to open the great fastening of the gates; but Achilles even alone used to ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... thundering roar rose above the storm, filling the air, and shaking the solid earth till it trembled beneath our horses' feet, as if upheaved by a volcano. Nearer and nearer the sound came, till it seemed that all the legions of darkness were unloosed in the forest, and were mowing down the great pines as the mower mows the grass with his scythe. Then an awful, sweeping crash thundered directly at our backs, and turning round, as if to face a foe, my horse, who had borne the roar and the blinding flash till then unmoved, ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... supported by Villette, advanced to the attack, covered by the tremendous fire from his artillery. The British had no adequate force of artillery to reply to the iron storm, and the balls swept through their lines, mowing down their ranks, and causing great loss. The regiments in reserve lay down to avoid the iron shower, while the Rangers and 48th prepared to resist the French when ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... is one of grief, to see from the window how the gardener was mowing down all the daisies, and there were so many, in the grass; and yet another is of a high, grassy, sunny field with a little stream running far down below. It was not really far and there was nothing particularly ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... you never touch the 'after-feed.' Then he throws up both eyes and hands, and affects to look aghast at the mistake. 'Really,' he says, 'I shall soon become us much of a boor as the people of this country. I hear nothing now but mowing, browsing, and 'after-feed,' until at last I find myself using the latter word for 'dessert.' He says it prettily and acts it well, and although his wife has often listened to the same joke, she looks ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... winter's sleet and snowing, Gone the spring-time's bud and blowing, Gone the summer's harvest mowing, And again the fields are gray. Yet away, he's away! Faint and fainter hope is growing In the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Word. None can resist the wisdom and the Spirit by which he speaks. The Wind of God took possession of Charles G. Finney, an obscure country lawyer, and sent him through New York State, then through New England, then through England, mowing down strong men by his resistless, Spirit-given logic. One night in Rochester, scores of lawyers, led by the justice of the Court of Appeals, filed out of the pews and bowed in the aisles and yielded their lives ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... battles with a front of hundreds of kilometers, lasting weeks without respite day or night, fought by millions of men. Never in its worst nightmares had hallucinated imagination conjured up the progress made in the art of mowing down human lives. The German Army, to which the German Nation has never refused anything, either moral support or money, the nerve of war, has been able to profit by all this progress, to reduce to a formula the violence which drives ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... a case of transfixion of the chest in a youth of eighteen. After mowing and while carrying his scythe home, the patient accidentally fell on the blade; the point passed under the right axilla, between the 3d and 4th right ribs, horizontally through the chest, and came out through corresponding ribs of the opposite side, making a small opening. He fell to the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... "that you who speak this and myself were to be tried at any taskwork: that I had a good crooked scythe put in my hand, that was sharp and strong, and you such another, where the grass grew longest, to be up by daybreak, mowing the meadows till the sun went down, not tasting of food till we had finished; or that we were set to plough four acres in one day of good glebe land, to see whose furrows were evenest and cleanest; or that we might have ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... brook, if one followed a path through mowing-fields from Farmer Ellison's, and crossed a little foot-bridge over the brook, he would come eventually upon a house, weather-beaten and unpainted, small and showing every sign of neglect. The grass grew long in the dooryard. A few hens scratched the weeds in what once might have been flower-beds. ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... strove to capture the guns; which were firing case and shrapnel into them, at a distance of thirty yards, mowing them down in hundreds. Not even would this terrible slaughter have checked them, had not the 2nd Punjaub Cavalry most gallantly charged them, ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... suppose it was to become as dark as the grave, and Varney was to enter with his scythe, that he talks of, and begin mowing about our legs." ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... vulgar citizens of this reign, Sir John Lawrence (Grocer), mayor in 1664, stands out a burning and a shining light. When the dreadful plague was mowing down the terrified people of London in great swathes, this brave man, instead of flying quietly, remained at his house in St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, enforcing wise regulations for the sufferers, and, what is more, himself seeing them executed. He supported ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... rustics mechanical improvements forced their way, and gradually attained, in the implements for ploughing, sowing, mowing, reaping, thrashing, the perfection of ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... The castle, and the dewy woods, and hunt And hound, and morn on those delightful hills In Ader-baijan. And he saw that youth, Of age and looks to be his own dear son,[195-22] Piteous and lovely, lying on the sand, Like some rich hyacinth which by the scythe Of an unskillful gardener has been cut, Mowing the garden grassplots near its bed, And lies, a fragrant tower of purple bloom, On the mown, dying grass—so Sohrab lay, Lovely in death, upon the common sand. And Rustum gazed on him with grief, and said:— "O Sohrab, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... removal of thatch, but prohibit new cottages from being roofed with that material. There is, however, another cause for the disappearance of thatched roofs, which form such a beautiful feature in the English landscape. Since mowing-machines came into general use in the harvest fields the straw is so bruised that it is not fit for thatching, at least it is not so suitable as the straw which was cut by the hand. Thatching, too, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... them around the shoulders, the rank, tough grass held them by the ankles, impenetrable walls of brambles rose before them and blocked their way, while all the time the foliage was fluttering down about them, clipped by the gigantic scythe that was mowing down the wood. Another man was struck dead beside them by a bullet in the forehead, and he retained his erect position, caught in some vines between two small birch trees. Twenty times, while they were prisoners in that thicket, did they ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... meant if his bones was sore he better go somewheres like that. So the little lady tried to not laugh on acct. of me being a stranger but she couldn't hardly help from busting out and then I smiled at her back and after that Carson might as well of been mowing the lawn out in Nobody's Land. I felt kind of sorry the way things broke because here he is a man without no home ties and of course I have all ready got a wife but Miss Moselle didn't have no eyes for him and that's the ...
— The Real Dope • Ring Lardner
... down the country, joyfully sowing their seed. It was the beginning of summer, the time when everybody in Umbria is out of doors mowing or turning the grass. The customs of the country have changed but little. Walking in the end of May in the fields about Florence, Perugia, or Rieti, one still sees, at nightfall, the bagpipers entering the fields as the mowers seat themselves upon the hay-cocks for their evening meal; ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... mowing on alone, listening as in a dream to that subtle something in the swish of the scythe that makes one seek to know the song it is singing ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... black cows in burnt wood when one attains to the enjoyment of his love. I had a consultation upon this point with my masters the clerks, who for resolution concluded in frisesomorum that there is nothing like to mowing in the summer, and sweeping clean away in water, well garnished with paper, ink, pens, and penknives, of Lyons upon the river of Rhone, dolopym dolopof, tarabin tarabas, tut, prut, pish; for, incontinently after that armour begins to smell ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... is that every man, equipped as he is with so many modern scientific appliances and tools, is multiplied four or five times. He is equal to that number of men in his capacity to do things as compared with the men of fifty or seventy years ago. The farmer, with his mowing-machine, his horse-rake, his automobile, his tractor engine and gang ploughs or his sulky ploughs, his hay-loader, his corn-planter, and so on, does the work of many men. Machinery takes the place of men. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... side. Next he strikes Lichas, cut from his mother already dead, and consecrated, Phoebus, to thee, since his infancy was granted escape from the perilous steel. Near thereby he struck dead brawny Cisseus and vast Gyas, whose clubs were mowing down whole files: naught availed them the arms of Hercules and their strength of hand, nor Melampus their father, ever of Alcides' company while earth yielded him sore travail. Lo! while Pharus utters weak vaunts the hurled javelin strikes on his shouting ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... have seen that. He had a straight ball, shoulder high, level as a stretched string, and fast. He had a jump ball, which he evidently worked by putting on a little more steam, and it was the speediest thing I ever saw in the way of a shoot. He had a wide-sweeping outcurve, wide as the blade of a mowing scythe. And he had a drop—an unhittable drop. He did not use it often, for it made his catcher dig too hard into the dirt. But whenever he did I glowed all over. Once or twice he used an underhand motion and sent in a ball that fairly swooped up. It could ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... guano, in my garden, the past season, and found the beds thus dressed stood the extreme drought better than other parts of the garden. One more case of my own and I am done. In 1851, I sowed about 90 lbs. of guano, on a piece of meadow or mowing ground, covering a little more than half an acre, from which the timothy and clover was nearly gone; I took 3 lands across the lot, leaving about 20 feet between each land. Where the guano was sown, the ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... heard a strange cry behind a part of the wall which I had not visited, and hastening thither, I found a miserable object in rags, seated upon a stone. It was a maniac— a man about thirty years of age, and I believe deaf and dumb; there he sat, gibbering and mowing, and distorting his wild features into various dreadful appearances. There wanted nothing but this object to render the scene complete; banditti amongst such melancholy desolation would have been by no means so much in keeping. But the maniac, on his stone, in the rear of the wind-beaten ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... casts aside an ill-fitting glove, she threw aside her pouts, looking up at him with a flash of dainty mimicry. "Hear the fiery Thor! Take notice that I shall bear all down before me like a man mowing ripe corn. You cannot guess how much warlikeness I have caught from my Valkyria." She glanced back where the girl in the short tunic stood drawing on her gloves, a ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... any agriculturist. It gives the modes of preparation, and the effects of all kinds of manures; the origin, texture, divisions, and description of every variety of soil; the economy of sowing, reaping, and mowing, irrigation, and draining; cultivation of the grasses, clovers, grains, and roots; Southern and miscellaneous products, as cotton, hemp, flax, the sugar cane, rice, tobacco, hops, madder, woad, &c.; the rearing of fruit—apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, &c.; ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... his side of the wall. The two tea-houses stood therefore back to back with nothing but the wall between them. Now, one warm summer evening Mr. Jenkins-Smith—Rosamund could remember his name, though she had not thought of him for years—had been busy watering his flowers and mowing his lawn. He had worked really hard, and when the evening began to close in he thought he would go into the tea-house and have a rest. On each side of the curly-legged tea-table of unpolished wood ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... clear sky. The Russians admired and revered their beards. They were time-honored and sacred in their eyes. To lose them was like losing their family trees and patents of nobility. But Peter was without reverence for the past, and his word was law. He had ordered a mowing and reaping of hair, and the harvest must be made, or worse might come. General Shein, commander-in-chief of the army, was the first to yield to the imperative edict and submit his venerable beard to the indignity of ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... air is damp and heavy, swallows frequently hawk for insects about cattle and moving herds in the field. My farmer describes how they attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the meadow with a mowing-machine. It had been foggy for two days, and the swallows were very hungry, and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of his machine was heard, the swallows appeared and attended him like a brood of hungry ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... first days of the hay-harvest, Peer lay out on a sunny hillside with his head resting on a haycock, watching his people at work. The mowing machine was buzzing down by the lake, the spreader at work on the hill-slopes, the horses straining in front, the men sitting behind driving. The whole landscape lay around him breathing summer and fruitfulness. And he himself lay there sunk in his ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... He paused while he made a rapid mental calculation of the distance, and of what a horse may endure. "Three hours. Will my girl be brave enough to stay here three hours? I'll call the man who was mowing—if I can find him. But that will take minutes. Three hours—and you won't weaken, ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... her white chair, with her cheek on her hand and her elbow on the window-ledge, looking out across the pleasant swell of grass to where they were cutting the first hay in old Mr. Holabird's five-acre field, the click of the mowing-machine sounding like some new, gigantic kind of grasshopper, chirping its tremendous laziness upon the lazy air, when mother came in from the front hall, through her own room and saw ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... I'd plenty to do, and I could turn me hands to most things, though I do say it. There weren't a man in the parish as could beat I at mowing or putting a hackle on a rick, though I do say it. And I could drive a straight furrow too. Heavy work it were. The soil be stiff clay, as ye knows, zur. This Vlemish clay be very loike it. Lord, what a mint o' diggin' we 'ave done in they trenches to be sure. And bullets ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... through constant muscular effort, develops in the country boy much greater lung power than is developed in the city youth, and his outdoor work tends to build up a robust constitution. Plowing, hoeing, mowing, everything he does on the farm gives him vigor and strength. His muscles are harder, his flesh firmer, and his brain-fiber partakes of the same superior quality. He is constantly bottling up forces, storing up energy in his brain and muscles which ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... love her as she deserves, but I will try to make her happy." So, turning the vessel's head, he made once more for Brittany, and there he found that an earl called Grip was making great war upon King Howell, and was getting the mastery. So Sir Tristram joyfully went to the king's aid, and after mowing down Grip's knights right and left, he killed the earl himself, ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... simplicity of the common people. They own a subdued and unostentatious strength, are humble and ignored, are walked upon, unnoticed, rarely thought about and never praised; they are cut off in early youth by mowing machines; yet their pain in fading is unreported, their little sufferings unsung. They cling to earth, and never aspire to climb, but they hold the sweetest dew and nurse the tiniest little winds imaginable. ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... had finished their ale, the afternoon was getting on, and the constable rose to go back to his work; while old Simon declared his intention of going down to the hay-field, to see how the mowing was getting on. He was sure that the hay would never be made properly, now that he couldn't be about as much ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... and shallow in the midsummer droughts, she saw that the big locust was long past blossoming, but some elderberry bushes, in full bloom, made the air heavy with acrid perfume; the grass, starred by daisies, and with here and there a clump of black-eyed Susans, was ready for mowing, and was tugging at its anchoring roots, blowing, and bending, and rippling in the wind, just as it had that other day!... "And I sat right here, by the tree," she said, "and he lay there—I remember the exact place. And he ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... veins of the summer were hot and swollen, and the juices 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 ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... believed in everything blindly; Hor had reached even an ironical point of view of life. He had seen and experienced much, and I learnt a good deal from him. For instance, from his account I learnt that every year before mowing-time a small, peculiar-looking cart makes its appearance in the villages. In this cart sits a man in a long coat, who sells scythes. He charges one rouble twenty-five copecks—a rouble and a half in notes—for ready money; four roubles if he gives credit. All the peasants, of course, take ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... himself, "you forgot that it is a luxury, an undeserved bliss, if it even comes once to a man. It was not complete, it was not genuine, you say; but prove your right to full, genuine happiness Look round and see who is happy, who enjoys life about you? Look at that peasant going to the mowing; is he contented with his fate?... What! would you care to change places with him? Remember your mother; how infinitely little she asked of life, and what a life fell to her lot. You were only bragging it seems when you said to Panshin that you had come back to Russia to cultivate the soil; ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... farmer's boys employed, some at hoeing and others at mowing, in the same field, remarked that they were a hoe-mow-geneous set ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... the Maubecs of Dentdulynx, once the possessors of four duchies, sixty counties, and six hundred and twelve marquisates, baronies, and viscounties, he did not possess as much land as he could cover with his hand, and would not have been able to cut a single day's mowing of forage off his own domains. As to his getting a single rush from a land-owner or a merchant, that would have been quite impossible, for everybody except the Ministers of State and the Government officials knew that it would be easier to get blood from a stone ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... return to it, preferred the alternative of staying at home and mowing the lawn or drinking raspberry vinegar on its own beflagged verandah; looking forward in the afternoon to the lacrosse match. There was nearly always a lacrosse match on the Queen's Birthday, and it was the part of elegance to attend ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the parcel post, the rural free delivery, better roads, and the automobile, are rapidly transforming rural life in this country. In several regions, especially in the Mississippi Valley, a farmer who has no telephone is in a class by himself, like one who has no mowing-machine. Thus the latest returns from Iowa, taken by the census as far back as 1907, showed that seventy-three per cent of all the farms—160,000 out of 220,000—had telephones and the proportion is unquestionably greater now. Every other farmhouse from the Atlantic to the ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... summer, all your airy grasses Whispering and bowing when the west wind passes,— Happy lark and nestling, hid beneath the mowing, Root sweet music in you, to the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... them plenty of rich food, and, when the "perpetual" flowering section has done blooming, cut back each shoot to about two or three buds from its base. Small pieces of grass will periodically need mowing, and this ought to be done with a proper mowing-machine, as a pair of shears invariably causes an irregular and jagged after-growth. All unsightly vegetation, such as dead leaves or flowers, dried up stems, &c., must be promptly ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... or during its existence as a sod, not taking into account any manure spread upon it during the winter previous to its breaking for corn. But the rule is not to break a grass sod when it is fairly heavy. The years of mowing are arranged in the crop-rotation to provide for as many harvests as promise immediate profit. On some land this is two years, and not infrequently it is three. Where farms are difficult of tillage, it is a common practice to let timothy stand until the sod is so thin ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... sweeping up, as at Upper Tooting; one wonders why. The governors of the city will not succeed in making the Via Appia look busy, or its stripped stones suggestive of a thriving commerce. Again, at the cemetery within the now torn and shattered Aurelian wall by the Porta San Paolo, they are often mowing of buttercups. "A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread," says Shelley, whose child lies between Keats and the pyramid. But a couple of active scythes are kept at work there summer and spring—not that the grass is long, for it is much overtopped by the bee-orchis, but ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... any way?" asked Ben, who would rather have been set to mowing the big field than ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... adversary, perceiving that extraordinary means were necessary to make the desired effect, calling on his men to follow him, put spurs to his horse and rushed into the thickest of the battle. His soldiers did not shrink; they pressed on, mowing down the foremost ranks, whilst he, by a lucky stroke of his sabre, disabled the sword-arm of the Russian standard-bearer and seized the colors. His own troops seeing the standard in his hand, with one accord, ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... peasants grazed their cattle in our pasture and even in our garden, drove our cows and horses into the village and then came and asked for compensation. The whole village used to come into our yard and declare loudly that in mowing we had cut the border of common land which did not belong to us; and as we did not know our boundaries exactly we used to take their word for it and pay a fine. But afterward it appeared that we had ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... staircase, and steps out and spies me at the work with my old scythe, and come across to me, and says he, "Why, Thomas," says he, not knowin' of my name, "Why, Thomas," says he, "you look like old Time himself a mowing of us all down," says he. "For sure, my lord," says I, "your lordship reads it aright, for all flesh is grass, and all the glory of man is as the flower of the field." He look humble at that, for, great man as he be, his earthly ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... scale is cheaper than on the small; this is as true of agriculture as of other industries. The large farmer has one fixed and one movable steam-engine of his own; he has his own drills, threshing and winnowing machines, reaping and mowing machines. The petty proprietor may hire these, but at a dear rate, and few of them can work to any advantage on his small patches of corn. The large farmer has large fields; he saves area as against the petty proprietors; he has fewer headlands ...
— Speculations from Political Economy • C. B. Clarke
... blazing ball their sight Sears with excess of light; Or through dun sand-clouds the blue scimitar's edge Slopes down like fire from heaven, Mowing them as the thatcher mows ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... be crouching at your gun Traversing, mowing heaps down half in fun: The next, you choke and clutch at your right breast— No time to think—leave all—and off you go ... To Treasure Island where the Spice winds blow, To lovely groves of mango, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... people err by applying repression to both classes alike. They repress equally the expression of love and of hatred, of pity and of anger. Such forget one great law, as true in the moral world as in the physical,—that repression lessens and deadens. Twice or thrice mowing will kill off the sturdiest crop of weeds; the roots die for want of expression. A compress on a limb will stop its growing; the surgeon knows this, and puts a tight bandage around a tumor; but what if we put a tight bandage about the heart and lungs, as some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... country-women to make stocking yarn. But its most profitable industry is the manufacture of oak staves for molasses hogsheads, which are exported to the West Indies. One of the elders of this society, Hewitt Chandler, a man of uncommon mechanical ingenuity, and the inventor of a mowing-machine which was made here for some years, has contrived a way of bending staves without setting them up in the cask, which saves much time and labor, and makes this part of their business additionally profitable. ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff |
