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More "Broomstick" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... across it looking for adventures. One of them carried a broom, and when he saw the rocking-horse he said nothing, but broke off the handle from the broom and thrust it between his braces and his shirt on the left side. Then he mounted the rocking-horse, and drawing forth the broomstick, which was sharp and spiky at the end, said, "Saladin is in this desert with all his paynims, and I am Coeur de Lion." After a while the other boy said: "Now let me kill Saladin too." But Blagdaross in his wooden heart, that exulted with thoughts ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... about five feet apart and four feet to the crotches. Across them lay a green stick (lug-pole) somewhat thicker than a broomstick. Now cut three or four green crotches from branches, drive a nail in the small end of each, or cut a notch in it, invert the crotches, and hang them on the lug-pole to suspend kettles from. These pothooks are to be of different length so that the kettle can be adjusted to different heights ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in Cranford, after tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... indeed. A poor, broken thing! And there don't seem to be anybody to look after them. Mrs. Fotheringham is about as much good as a broomstick. Every family ought to keep a supply of superfluous girls. They're like the army—useless in peace and indispensable in ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... (suppose that of a witch, riding on the conventional broomstick) is suspended by fine threads or wires on the screen remote from the spectators. Behind this are ranged, one behind the other, and at right angles to the screen, a row of lighted candles. Being all in the same line, they throw one shadow only ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... surely to make some use of her power and come out and carry me home on her broomstick steed," she answered, looking up at me with ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... of governors and ladies glitters across the small, sad New England world, whose very baldness jeers it to scorn—there is the same fateful atmosphere in which Goody Cloyse might at any moment whisk by upon her broomstick, and in which the startled heart stands still with ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... Knowles was often seen in a high wind riding off on a broomstick. It ought to have been a strong broomstick, for she ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May
... Ages were absurd enough, even when they were brutally and bloodily in earnest, and when their surroundings of castles and donjons, savage landscapes and half-savage peoples, were in keeping; but those doings gravely reproduced with tinsel decorations and mock pageantry, by bucolic gentlemen with broomstick lances, and with muffin-rings to represent the foe, and all in the midst of the refinement and dignity of a carefully-developed modern civilisation, is absurdity ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Three other boys were engaged in the fascinating game of blowing bubbles—one making the lather, another blowing the bubbles, while a third was trying to catch them. There were also three more boys—one of them apparently pretending to be a witch, as he was riding on a broomstick, while another was giving a companion a donkey-ride upon his back. All had the appearance of little cupids or angels and looked so lifelike and happy that we almost wished we were young again and could join them ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... must be dished at one. Where's this vexatious turnspit gone? 40 Unless the skulking cur is caught, The sirloin's spoiled, and I'm in fault.' Thus said: (for sure you'll think it fit That I the cook-maid's oaths omit) With all the fury of a cook, Her cooler kitchen Nan forsook. The broomstick o'er her head she waves; She sweats, she stamps, she puffs, she raves. The sneaking cur before her flies: She whistles, calls; fair speech she tries. 50 These nought avail. Her choler burns; The fist and cudgel threat by turns; With hasty stride she presses near; He slinks aloof, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... present. Yet the ridicule is not fully deserved, for the facts are there, though the explanation is wrong; for even the two points, which are usually considered the ultimate proof of the absurdity and incredibility of the whole system—the flying on a broomstick through the window or up the chimney, and the transformation into animals—are capable of explanation. The first can be accounted for when the form of early mound-dwellings is taken into consideration, and when it is remembered that among savage tribes there are often taboos connected with the door, ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... an acrobat is the ambition of almost every boy. There have been few who did not dream, while doing those stunts in the haymow on Mother's broomstick, of the glory that should be theirs when they grew up and performed in ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... Jove, Mrs. Green, he was a damn lucky fellow to be able to do it," cried Vane, taking the kindly old hand in both his own. "If I wasn't afraid of him coming for me with a broomstick, I'd do the same myself. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... tell her, and is making herself only fit to be a soldier's wife. She might have had the pick of all the young Quakers in Philadelphia; but you should have seen her turn up her pretty nose at them. "'A Quaker indeed!' quoth the little puss; 'I'd as lief marry a broomstick with a turnip for a head! Give me a man who is a man, not a ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Brown. And he did. And, surely enough, when the broomstick was held crosswise in front of him, up rose Toby on his hind legs, just as when Mr. Tallman had told ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue and Their Shetland Pony • Laura Lee Hope
... little more than synthesized fear.... I venture that many a vote for prohibition comes from gentlemen who look longingly through swinging doors—and pass on in propitiation of Satan and their alert consorts, the lake of brimstone and the corrective broomstick.... ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... by everybody for his cruelty to American prisoners in his charge. Mrs. Day had often seen him. He stormed, and swore, and tugged in vain at the halyards, for they had become entangled; and Mrs. Day applied her broomstick so vigorously that the blustering Provost-Marshal was finally compelled to beat a retreat, leaving the American flag floating in triumph in the crisp November air over ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... down! were I to wing as many daily as would fill a dearborn, Dame wouldn't be satisfied—not that she's avaricious—but den she must have something or somebody to snarl at, and I'm the unlucky dog at whom she always lets fly. Now, she got at me mit de broomstick so soon as I got back again; if I go home again, she will break my back. Tunner wasser! how sleepy I am—I can't go home, she will break my back—so I will sleep in de mountain to-night, and to-morrow I turn over a new leaf and drink ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... century, are no mysteries for us. The Egyptian ancestors of that mysterious people of Indian origin, the gypsies of the present day, simply used to drug their clients with hashish, a practice that fully accounts for broomstick rides and flights up the chimney, the real-seeming visions, so to speak, of old crones transformed into young damsels, the frantic dances, the exquisite music, and all the ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... sent the healthful tempest And scatter'd all these pestilential vapours! But that we owed them all to yonder Harlot Throned on the seven hills with her cup of gold, I will as soon believe, with kind Sir Roger, That old Moll White took wing with cat arid broomstick, And raised the last ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... drest by one: Where is that cur—(and I am loth To say that Betty swore an oath)— The sirloin's spoiled: I'll give it him!"— And Betty did look fierce and grim. Bob, who saw mischief in her eye, Avoided her—approaching nigh: He feared the broomstick, too, with physics ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... Yvon would cry. "You are exquisite this morning! Your eyes are like stars on the sea. Come, then, angelic Rock, Rocher des Anges, and waltz with your Ste. Valerie!" And he would take Abby by the waist, and try to waltz with her, till she reached for the broomstick. I have told you, Melody, that Abby was the homeliest woman the Lord ever made. Not that I ever noticed it, for the kindness in her face was so bright I never saw anything but that; but strangers would speak of it, and Yvon himself, before he heard her speak, made a little face, I remember, that ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... April when there were no cockle-burs. She forthwith nailed a horseshoe on the door to keep the witches out, and she never liked the shawl so well after she had projected a mental picture of a lady wearing it, riding on a broomstick, and sporting also a long ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... close at home, a capcine plaster wouldn't be in it. Then, when he comes home, a little the worse for wear, she ups an' reproaches 'm, which, God knows, that ain't no time to argue with a man. You don't want to argue with a fella when he's so. You just want to tellm'. Tell'm with the help of a broomstick if you want to, but tell'm, or leave'm alone. An' it's bad for the childern—all this is—it's bad for Cora an' Francie. What idea'll they get o' the holy estate o' matrimony, I should like to know? That the man has the upper hand? That's a nice notion for ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... entirely discredit its sublime teachings; and yet some of these very persons find little difficulty in believing that an old woman can transform herself into a hare, and wing her way through the air on a broomstick. What contracted notions such persons must have of the almightiness of the Deity, and of the infinite depth of meaning of the following and like passages of Scripture: The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handy work. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... also remembered that this wooden frame was much taller than any of the long procession of frames which followed it, and that, from a hole in the right side thereof, protruded a fist about the size of the boy Bog's, clutching a broomstick, with which the inmate kept a semblance of order among the wilful and eccentric occupants of the frames behind him. "Oh, yes; I have seen you very often, Bog. How do you like ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... his crest fell, his tail drooped to the ground, or curled between his legs, he sneaked about with a gallows air, casting many a sidelong glance at Dame Van Winkle, and at the least flourish of a broomstick or ladle he would fly to the door ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... handle to it, and tries to cut the apple, but I could only make a mark on it such as you see on a hot-cross-bun. Then I looked at the blade of the knife, and it were just like silver, but were as blunt as a broomstick. However, I tried again, but it wouldn't cut; so I axes a tall chap in livery as stood behind my chair if they'd such a thing as a butcher's steel in the house, for I wanted to put an edge to my knife. Eh, you ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... supposed to come down the chimney, our stockings were pinned on a broomstick, laid across two chairs in front of the fireplace. We retired on Christmas Eve with the most pleasing anticipations of what would be in our stockings next morning. The thermometer in that latitude was often twenty ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... 'I'll see if he's willin' to say anyting to-night.' And down he set into a chair. Well, you'd have died! In a bit his head and legs begun to jerk like he had St. Vitus dance, and then he straightened out, stiff as a broomstick. It was the silliest thing ever I seen. I felt real sorry for Doc, he was so dead ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... track of Burns, the Gray Dragon dashed up and down short, steep, switchbacked hills (which must have tried any steed of ancient days except a witch's broomstick) and whisked us into Sanquhar, the "sean cathair" or "old fortress" of earliest Gaelic times, now snappily called "Sanker." There Queen Mary rested, going to Dundrennan after the terrible battle of Langside; there Prince Charlie marched; and there was a monument of granite ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... call Nature, and of all the laws which concern our bodies, and rule the conditions of life in this world. It's a hobby of mine, Mr. Dacre, and I'm afraid I ride my hobbies rather like a witch on a broomstick. But a man must deal according to his lights and his conscience; and if I am intrusted with the lad's education for a while, it will be my duty and pleasure to instruct him in religious lore and natural science, so far as his age allows. To teach him to know his Bible (and I wish ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... than ever, sat watching the proceedings with extraordinary unconcern. He had never been heard openly to express his disbelief in witches, but had often cut such jokes at their expense as left it to be inferred; publicly stating on several occasions that he considered a broomstick an inconvenient charger, and one especially unsuited to the dignity of the female character, and indulging in other free remarks of the same tendency, to the great ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... possessed this power and would execute it. Another thought it an insult to the majesty of the people to hold out the idea that it may be necessary to execute the laws at the point of the bayonet. "If an old woman," cried a disgusted member of the minority, "was to strike an excise officer with a broomstick, forsooth the military is to be called ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... wid yees agin," remarked Tim, as he replenished his own. "The pipe is very soothin' to one's faalings after sevare labor, as me brother's wife used to say after whacking a few hours wid her broomstick—what is your opinion upon ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... more of 'em in it. There's an old woman. One never hears of these things till the mischief's done; all sorts of defects are found out in the stable door after the horse is stolen; there's an old woman turns up now. An old woman who seems to have been flying into town on a broomstick, every now and then. She watches the place a whole day before this fellow begins, and on the night when you saw him, she steals away with him and holds a council with him - I suppose, to make her report on going off duty, and be damned ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... her potent broomstick, behind the hedge of evergreens that shut off the backyard from our garden, in the wake of father and Jenny, who, being more speedy in their movements, were already out ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... can win and wear her," replied Springall. "Come, come, Master Bob, you're mazed by some devilry or other; the wind's in your teeth; you've been sailing against a norwester, or have met with a witch on a broomstick the other side of this old oak: Serves an oak right to wither up—why wasn't it made into a ship? But here's to Barbara Iverk, the fair maid ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... a convenient form of easel, made of four uprights. The main front uprights are of strips 5/8" x 1-1/4", and the rear uprights are of 1/2" x 1" material. A thin broomstick will serve as the pivot bar for the upper end. The rest is made of two strips, each 1/2" x 1", nailed together to form an L, and nails or wooden pins will serve to hold the rest in any desired position. The front uprights should be at least 5 ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... important, the lady who drove up in the open cab did not notice that he was even more solemn than usual. When she appeared, he gave one more glance at the spot he had been sweeping, and then grounded his broom like a musket, folded his hands on the end of the broomstick and looked at her as if he wondered what on earth had brought her to the palace at that moment, and wished that she would take herself off again ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... him. A generation had apparently risen that knew not Petit Patou. His heart sank. The heat of the footlights shimmered like a furnace and smote him with sudden lassitude. He began his tricks. Took his tiny one-stringed broomstick handled fiddle and played it with his hands encased in grotesquely long cotton gloves. Presently, with simulated impatience, he drew off the gloves, threw them, conjurer fashion, vanishing into the air, and then resumed his violin to find himself impeded now ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... he thought the family were out of hearing, he would grow very animated and declamatory. But Rose, who also had hopes, though perhaps faint, for my salvation, would suddenly rush into the room with the carpet broom, and drive him out, with threats of Miss Aglae, and the broomstick. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the interested Channing, "that jumping over a broomstick was the accepted form of marriage in ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... happened. Something fantastic, inconceivable. I am in a condition to be surprised at nothing. If a witch on a broomstick rode in through my open window and lectured me on quaternions, I should accept her visit as ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... old woman on a broomstick in Mother Goose," Mrs. Buck informed the hen and then since there was no hurry about the potatoes she fell to dreaming again. It was very peaceful on the shady porch with that whirlwind of a Judy gone for several ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... that he'd purchase hosts Of squibs and sweets to mess the pantry; That horrid boy, and broomstick-ghosts On timid JANE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various
... to be regretted that he did not write an account of his travels in France; for as he is reported to have once said, that 'he could write the Life of a Broomstick[1155],' so, notwithstanding so many former travellers have exhausted almost every subject for remark in that great kingdom, his very accurate observation, and peculiar vigour of thought and illustration, would have produced a valuable ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... tongue? The moment Wolf entered the house, his crest fell, his tail drooped to the ground, or curled between his legs, he sneaked about with a gallows air, casting many a sidelong glance at Dame Van Winkle, and at the least flourish of a broomstick or ladle, he would fly to the door ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... an aged married man! Oh, if I had been there with my broomstick," cried Anastasia, "I'd have given a cadence, and spinning ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... was all, I suppose, part of that odd hatred that she has of Peter's earlier life and earlier friends. She has never met the man Brant, but I think that she fancies that he is going to swoop down one of these days and carry Peter off on a broomstick or something. She gave in about the name—indeed I have never seen Peter more determined—but I think, nevertheless, that she broods over it and remembers it. My dear, I am as sorry for her as I can be. There she stands, loving Peter with all her heart and soul, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... used to play at cricket In the bye-streets years ago, With a broomstick for a bat, a coat for wicket? Now the Bobbies hunt them so! The old ladies grumble at their skipping; The old gents object to their tip-cat; So they squat midst slums that shine like dirty dripping, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... place,' he said to himself, as the house grew plainer; 'rebuilt at the worst time, by a man with no more taste than a broomstick. Still, he was the sixteenth owner, from father to son. ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... they had seen nobody, nor had they heard any unusual sound. For his part he believed there was magic in it, and that some of the old Indian witches had spirited the prisoner up the chimney, and flown away with him on a broomstick. ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... seemed to have poured around him. Uncas again, he crawled on all fours from chair to divan to stool to the fallen log which the adults thought was an easy chair. He stuck his head from behind it and sighted along the broomstick-musket at his father. He'd shoot that white man dead and then take his scalp. He giggled at that, because his father really didn't have ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... Agrippa's came very near an equally bad end. The magician was in the habit of enchanting a broomstick into a servant to do his housework, and when it was done, turning it back to a broomstick again and putting it behind the door. This young student had overheard the charm which made the servant, and one day in his master's absence, wanting a pail of water he said ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... scratched out the texts which were written round the church, and scribbled profane scraps of songs and plays in their place. They set the organ playing to pot-house tunes. Instead of being decently asked in church, they were married over a broomstick. But, of all their whims, the use of the new patent steel-traps was ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of sunlight shot across the room. "By my soul! it's clearing off. Is this her work also? Has she swept away the clouds with her broomstick? And there goes the dinner-bell, too;" and he went to his room two steps at a time, as he had done ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... lodgers; the elder because I suspect him; the youngster, because he is too pretty. They neither of them seem to me to keep Christian company. The boy is ever staring at the moon, the stars, and the clouds, like a wizard watching for the hour when he shall mount his broomstick; the other old rogue certainly makes some use of the poor boy for his black art. My house stands too close to the river as it is, and that risk of ruin is bad enough without bringing down fire from heaven, or the love affairs of a countess. I ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... Do you not know that it is the awful magic mountain where the old witch who eats little children dwells?—and do you not know that she rides on a broomstick. I may need one to follow her, in case ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... story. Little Juozapas, who was near crazy with hunger these days, had gone out on the street to beg for himself. Juozapas had only one leg, having been run over by a wagon when a little child, but he had got himself a broomstick, which he put under his arm for a crutch. He had fallen in with some other children and found the way to Mike Scully's dump, which lay three or four blocks away. To this place there came every day many hundreds ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... disreputable folds along with her, one end always projecting "to give it fresh air." Every phase of childhood represents to the philosopher something in the history of the race. From the new-born baby which can hang easily by one hand from a broomstick with its legs drawn up under it, the whole evolution of mankind is re- enacted. You can trace clearly the cave-dweller, the hunter, the scout. What, then, does Wriggly represent? Fetish worship—nothing else. The savage chooses some most unlikely thing and ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sometimes classed as one) exhibit a command of lyric metre hardly inferior to the command displayed in that masterpiece. In fact, if ever there was a poet who could write, and write, perhaps beautifully, certainly well, about any conceivable broomstick in almost any conceivable manner, that poet was Drayton. His historical poems, which are inferior in bulk only to the huge Polyolbion, contain a great deal of most admirable work. They consist of three divisions—The Barons' Wars in eight-lined ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... of water and a broomstick he beat out the fire, and went for a run to warm up. But when he came back there was more wind, so that he could not keep warm in the tent, and more rain, so that he could not find shelter in the woods. In the end he discovered a ruined barn, in a corner ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... between any of the classes of his work, whether it range from the first volume of Modern Painters to Verona in time, or from The Seven Lamps of Architecture to Unto This Last in subject. If anybody ever could "write beautifully about a broomstick" he could: though perhaps it is a pity that he so often did. But this faculty, and the entire absence of bashfulness which accompanied it, are no doubt grand accommodations for letter-writing; and the reader of Mr. Ruskin's letters gets the benefit of both very ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... his faithful spouse by the broomstick wedding would finish the evening on their terrace, a broad white roof ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... an enchanter. What though the tale of The Magic Flute is foolish beyond words. Who cares for the tale? Who thinks of the tale? It is only the wand in the hand of the magician. Though it be but a broomstick, it will open all the magic casements of earth and heaven, it will surround us with the choirs invisible, and send us forth into green pastures ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... legerdemain to invoke things out of the air, or to make a dry branch bud and blossom before the eyes. I must look into my heart and write, or remain dumb. Robert Louis Stevenson said one should be able to write eloquently on a broomstick, and so he could. Stevenson had the true literary legerdemain; he was master of the art of writing; he could invest a broomstick with charm; if it remained a broomstick, it was one on which the witches might carry you through the air at night. Stevenson ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... whom I have mentioned more than once, is an odd figure, with his bluff, red face,—coarsely red,—set in silver hair,— his clumsy legs, which he moves in a strange straddle, using, I believe, a broomstick for a staff. The breadth of back of these fat men is truly ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spectacle of villagers dancing upon the village green! And Mrs. Robson carefully picked out in the chorus the stout sister of a former servant who had worked for her mother! And the wicked old witch swept from the wings on the traditional broomstick! From that moment until the final transformation scene, when scintillating sea-shells yielded up one by one their dazzling burdens of female loveliness and a rather Hebraic Cupid descended from an invisible wire to wish everybody a happy New-Year in words appropriately rhymed, ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... out to see Donner Lake, which reposes between Summit, the highest point on this trip across the Great Divide, and Truckee. We were in a sleigh drawn by a team of huskies: real Alaskan dogs. I have ridden pretty much everything from a broomstick to a bronco, but this was my first experience with huskies. I thought it was going to be hard work for the dogs, but they frolicked about in the snow with their pink tongues out, showing all their teeth as though ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... and large round gingerbread cookies, and brown sticky squares of what was known in all circles in Elgin as taffy. She came, it was understood, with the dawn; with the night she vanished, spending the interval on a not improbable broomstick. Her gingerbread was better than anybody's; but there was no comfort in standing, first on one foot and then on the other, while you made up your mind—the horses were spirited and you could eat them a leg at a time, but there was ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... think I should like my windows Egyptian, with hieroglyphics, sir; storks and coffins, and appropriate moldings above: I brought some from Fountains Abbey the other day. Look here, sir; angels' heads putting their tongues out, rolled up in cabbage leaves, with a dragon on each side riding on a broomstick, and the devil looking on from the mouth of an alligator, sir.[32] Odd, I think; interesting. Then the corners may be turned by octagonal towers, like the center one in Kenilworth Castle; with Gothic doors, portcullis, ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... dogs caught hold of the hare by its hind quarters, but it escaped down the drain, and Squire Russell, instantly opening the old beldame's door, found her rubbing the part of her body corresponding to that by which the hound had seized the hare. Squire Caryll, however, declined to be hard on the broomstick and its riders, as the following entry in the records of the Court Leet, held for the Hundred of Dumford in 1747, shows:—"Also we present the Honble. John Caryll, Esq., Lord of this Mannor, for not having and keeping a Ducking Stool within the said Hundred of Dumford according ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... "but you have not been false, and I am not going to let you say so. If you don't promise not to, I will tell Mr. Ludlow myself that you were always perfectly true, and you couldn't help being true, any more than a—a broomstick, or anything else that is perpendicular. ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... into the current. I might not get my salmon; but it was worth the price of fly and leader just to raise him from the deeps and see his terrific rush downstream, jumping, jumping, as if the witch of Endor were astride of his tail in lieu of her broomstick. ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... the troops, the old woman within it actively dispensing her incantations and calling down the powers of witch-craft upon Hereward's head. Unfortunately for her, Hereward tried against her sorcery of the broomstick the enchantment of the brand, setting fire to the tower and burning it and the sorceress within it. We could scarcely go back to a later date than the eleventh century to find such an absurdity as this possible, but in those days of superstition even such a man as William the Conqueror ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... anybody we ought to be out at Riverdale Park, perhaps. Riverdale Park!" she repeated, with scornful emphasis. "There isn't any river; there isn't any dale; there isn't any park. Nothing but a lot of wooden houses scattered over a flat prairie, and a few trees no bigger than a broomstick, and no more leaves on them either. In the morning the men all rush for the train, and the rest of the day the nurse-girls trundle the babies along the plank walks, while 'society' amuses itself. Society consists of Mrs. ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... aunt's bedroom and Uncle Hiram and Uncle Jabez were pulling sticks in a corner while the other men sat tipped against the wall watching and making playful comments—all save my Uncle Peabody, who was trying to touch his head to the floor and then straighten up with the aid of the broomstick. ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... glazed window between the bed-room and the now unused dining room beyond. Just who were the housebreakers no man present could say; but Mistress McGann that afternoon communicated her suspicion to her sore-headed spouse, and did it boldly and with the aid of a broomstick. "It's all along," she said, "av your shtoopin' to dhrink wid them low lived salvages at Hay's. Now, what ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... fire he has a cinder; Auld Tubalcain's fire-shool and fender; That which distinguished the gender O' Balaam's ass: A broomstick o' the witch of Endor, Weel shod ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... proper array of men and buckets and brooms would cleanse it, therefore every man and woman on the streets, grave doctors of divinity, stately Mr. Dombey, Flora McFlimsey and Edmund Sparkler, should each shoulder broomstick or bucket, and plunge pell mell into the reeking filth. This argument proceeds upon the assumption that Christians can purge amusements only by using them in the forms and with the appliances attendant upon the world's ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... was completely relieved after the expulsion of a small piece of trouser-cloth which had been pushed into the bladder at the time of the accident. Post reports the case of a young man who, in jumping over a broomstick, was impaled upon it, the stick entering the anus without causing any external wound, and penetrating the bladder, thus allowing the escape of urine through the anus. A peculiar sequela was that the man suffered from a calculus, the nucleus ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... competent to do it. This person is Mlle. Celestine Crepineau, an old maid between thirty-seven and forty-nine years of age. She was tall and thin, and had all her life rejoiced at this, for she had a form three fingers in diameter. True, a broomstick can be grasped between the thumb and index finger, and yet is not very graceful. Let not any one think, though, in spite of this infantine vanity, that Mlle. Crepineau was of those virgins whom the Bible condemns as foolish about their beauty. She was a prudent honest-minded girl, the heart ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... lightning), cried the vrouw. "There's my best cap, that cost twenty guilders, utterly ruined." Then she bravely ran for the broomstick. ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... marry her without making her his wife," said the priest. "He will jump over a broomstick with her and will ask me to help him,—so that your feelings and hers may be spared for a week or so. Mrs. O'Hara, he is a villain,—a vile, heartless, cowardly reprobate, so low in the scale of humanity that ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... one is her runabout. The big red one is a touring broomstick, high power and very fast; you can hear her ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... and she hoped for a backward look before he turned in at the door. But he was absorbed in sailing a broomstick across Aunt Melvy's pathway, causing her to drop her basket and start after him ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... Of course, if Ed Brians and Archie Blair and J. P. Thornton, and a few other fanatics like that, are bound to meddle with other people's consciences, I suppose we'll just have to let them do it. 'If it plazes her, it don't be hurtin' me,' as Mike Cassidy said when Judy hammered him with the broomstick. I hope ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... times when I love to gallop through history on Sir Walter's broomstick. At other hours it is pleasant to sit in converse with wise George Eliot. From her garden terrace I look down on Loamshire and its commonplace people; while in her quiet, deep voice she tells me of the hidden hearts that beat ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... black, steadfast, all-seeing eyes; to feel those smooth, soft, all-soothing hands; to hear, across one's sleep, that three-footed step—the flat-soled left foot, the tiptoe right, and the padded end of the broomstick; and when one is so wakeful and restless and thought-driven, to have another's story given one. God, depend upon it, grows stories and lives as he does herbs, each with a mission of balm to ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... I, master!" was the reply. "But you had as well ask had I seen a witch riding across the moon on a broomstick. We have no been asleep to ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... kilted up her petticoats and started to run home; but she had only gone a little way when she heard the witch-woman coming after her on her broomstick. Now the apple tree she had helped to stand straight happened to be quite close; so she ran ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... could blast the corn with mildew and lame the oxen in the plough, that she could smite her persecutors with pains and sickness, that she could rouse storms in the sky and strew every shore with the wrecks of ships and the corpses of men, that as night gathered round she could mount her broomstick and sweep through the air to the witches' Sabbath, to yield herself in body and soul to the demons of ill. The nascent scepticism that startled at tales such as these was hushed before the witness of the Bible, for to question ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... Silverton; frame house and a log house (can live in either); log barn; 20 acres in cultivation; 60 acres timber land; balance pasture land; well watered. We will sell this place for $1575. Will throw in a cook stove and all the household furniture, consisting of a frying-pan handle and a broomstick; also a cow and a yearling calf; also one bay heifer; also 8400 lbs. of hay, minus what the above-named stock have consumed during the winter; also 64 bushels of oats, subject to the above-mentioned diminution. ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... floor of the Smith building, adjoining us, had their own way of teasing them. Late at night, when everybody would be lying down, and out of the way of shots, a window in the third story would open, a broomstick, with a piece nailed across to represent arms, and clothed with a cap and blouse, would be protruded, and a voice coming from a man carefully protected by ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... sets his back up. Dry smug as can't 'andle a gun, I'll bet Marlboro' 'Ouse to a broomstick, and ain't got no notion of Fun. "Loves the Moors much too well for to carry one;" that's wot he says, sour old sap Bet my boots as he can't 'it a 'aystack at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... card to admire it further, and she scrutinized closely the funny old witch riding on a broomstick, after the ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... such a supposition. To Bob, at that time, it seemed that if ever any one did in reality have dealings with the evil one, that one was the old hag behind him. To him she seemed a witch; he thought of her as a witch; and if she had at that time put on a peaked hat, straddled a broomstick, and flown off through the air, it would ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... warrant she is not afraid. So much the worse for her. Mayhap she's gone riding on a broomstick herself. How is ...
— Giles Corey, Yeoman - A Play • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... suspiciously. "Yew ain't a-gwine ter make a fool o' yerself, an' jump over the broomstick ag'in?" For Blossy's old suitor, Samuel Darby, had made one of his semiannual ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... expeditions to the street, accompanied by gaunt, starved companions, whom he had picked up in his wanderings, and he would stand complacently by while they bolted the contents of his plate of food in a violent hurry and in dread of dispersion by a broomstick or a shower of water. I was sometimes tempted to say to Gavroche, 'A nice lot of friends you pick up,' but I refrained, for, after all, it was an amiable weakness: he might have eaten his ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... something in it, if it really gives you pleasure,—I daresay there is; we're so confoundedly uppish in the way we look at things. If either of them had a particle of drawing or a scrap of taste, if both of them weren't as bare as a broomstick of the least vestige of gift, or any suspicion of knowledge, there might be a good deal to say for them! Only, my dear Miss Bretherton, you see it's really not a matter of opinion; I assure you it isn't. I could prove to you as plain as that two and two make four, that Halford's ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Belle O'Neill—"put straws into the cow's teats, an' let the milk run, while he laid out on the grass an' slep', and Miss Pray found it out and flailed him with the broomstick?" ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... the ring seem to run into one another, and at very short intervals you catch a glimpse in the mirror of a young woman, in a familiar looking Norfolk jacket, sitting with her elbows as far behind her as if held there by the Austrian plan of running a broomstick in front of the arms and ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... greatest readiness was everywhere manifested to render all possible assistance. In the Fischergasse, I saw them taking provisions to the people in boats; one man even fastened a loaf of bread to the end of a broomstick and reached it across the narrow street from an upper story window, to the neighbor opposite. News came that Hausen, a village towards the Taunus, about two miles distant, was quite under water, and that the people clung ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... tongue by vipers hissed, Or of the frosty heights unsealed, Or of the vain who simple speech distort, Or of the vapours pointing on to nought Along cold skies; though sharp and high thy pitch; As when sole homeward the belated treads, And hears aloft a clamour wailed, That once had seemed the broomstick witch Horridly violating cloud for drought: He, from the rub of minds dispersing fears, Hears migrants marshalling their midnight train; Homeliest order in black sky appears, Not less than in the lighted village steads. So do those half-illumed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... still the servant of a musketeer, when once the blood mounted to his fat cheeks, seized a broomstick and ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... seeing a witch, not mounted on a broomstick, but on the respectable household cat, changed for that night into a flying fury; finally, along with my brothers, being captured, washed, and dressed, to join with other spirits worse than ourselves in "dooking" ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... in a free, easy, confidential way. Why, one night—don't ye remember?—when he came home, carryin', mebbee, more canvas than was seamanlike, and you shet him out the house, and laid for him with a broomstick, or one o' them crokay mallets, I disremember which, and he kem over to me, ole Captain Dick, and I sez to him, sez I, 'Why, Roger, them's only love pats, and yer condishun is such ez to make any woman mad-like.' Why, Lord bless ye! there ain't enny of them mootool differences you and him ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... were more afraid of the Devil and of witches than they are now, they liked to have a priest or a minister somewhere near to scare 'em off; but nowadays, if you could find an old woman that would ride round the room on a broomstick, Barnum would build an amphitheatre to exhibit her in; and if he could come across a young imp, with hoofs, tail, and budding horns, a lineal descendant of one of those "daemons" which the good people of Gloucester fired at, and were fired at by "for the best part of a month together" ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and down and round and round, faster and faster, growing smaller every second, until at last she was nothing but her real self, an ugly shriveled witch running round and round on a broomstick. With a loud shrill scream she mounted into the air and was away out of sight in an instant, leaving everybody staring open ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn
... said, "Surely that Vanessa must be an extraordinary woman that could inspire the Dean to write so finely upon her." Mrs. Johnson smiled, and answered that "she thought that point not quite so clear; for it was well known the Dean could write finely upon a broomstick."—JOHNSON: Life ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... overtaken by old Fuss that I darted into the woods whenever a wayfarer approached. But my fears were needless, for so alarmed had the witch been at the threats of the boatmen that she disappeared suddenly. Some said they saw her flying over the woods on a broomstick, with all her wretched rags and tags fluttering behind her like the tail ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... you have, Kitten. Wait until you see the old fairy godmother unload her pumpkin. Or did she carry the dress on a broomstick? I forget the details. At any rate, while I'm thinking of a way to appease the wrath of Jane's father by not dishonoring his scholarship, it is the very least you can do to get ready for the dance. I know where you can hire a love of a dress—lots of girls do it—" as Sally drew up a little, ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... opium-pipe, may easily make a day memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. A coarser satirist than Emerson indulged his fancy in "Meditations on a Broomstick," which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification. Meditations on a "Shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something could be made of it. A poet must select, and if he stoops too low he cannot lift the object he would ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... have been made, had the authorities upon the subject been investigated with only slight attention. No feature of the crime of witchcraft is better attested than this; and the modern witch of story-books is still represented as riding on a broomstick—a relic of the enchanted rod with which the devil used to provide his worshippers, upon which to come to his sabbaths.[1] One of the charges in the indictment against the notorious Dr. Fian ran thus: "Fylit for suffering ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... concerning the peculiarities of witches, and the best methods of prosecuting and burning them. But the strega, though not as a rule dangerous to mankind, provided she be not disturbed or insulted, has the same supernatural power of transit on a broomstick that is possessed by her northern sister. On many a dark night have the peasants crossed themselves with fear on hearing the witches flying through the storm-vexed air to keep their unholy tryst beside the famous walnut tree of Benevento, which ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... disgusting and scandalous piece of gossip. In some strange way a garbled account of his marriage has come in from Boston, and Dodge, with that infernally suggestive way of his, was cackling about Roger's "jumping over the broomstick" with a "handsome gypsy" and letting his relatives believe the thing was serious in order to ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... says Mrs. Chichester, leaning forward. As I have hinted, she would have flirted with a broomstick. "And you, who are ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... chairman's indigestion had vanished with his sudden assumption of responsibility, and he showed no trace of drink in his bearing. Beneath a lamp one was binding four-foot lengths of cotton tent-rope to a broomstick for a knout, while others, whom Lee had appointed, were drawing lots to see upon whom would devolve the unpleasant duty of flogging the captive. The matter-of-fact, relentless expedition of the ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... meditate the most expeditious means for their expulsion. In order to this, she had provided herself with a long and deadly instrument, with which, in times of peace, the chambermaid was wont to demolish the labours of the industrious spider. In vulgar phrase, she had taken up the broomstick, and was just about to sally from the kitchen, when Jones accosted her with a demand of a gown and other vestments, to cover the half-naked ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... fret and take on dreadful oneasy; says he, 'I hope Jane won't be abed, 'cause if she is she'll act ugly, I do suppose.' I had heerd tell of her afore; how she used to carry a stiff upper lip, and make him and the broomstick well acquainted together; and, says I, 'Why do you put up with her tantrums, I'd make a fair division of the house with her, if it was me; I'd take the inside and allocate her the outside of it pretty quick, that's a fact.' Well, when we came to the house, there was no light in it, ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... causing the death of the Willey family, was more detailed. This event has been thrillingly described by Thomas Starr King. The irrepressible small boy wanted to "go to meeting" on Sunday. Being told that he could not, he cried himself to sleep. When he awoke he mounted his "horse,"—a broomstick,—and cantered up the road for a half mile. Captured by a lady, he resisted vigorously, while she pointed to the waters running in white streams down the hills through the flooded meadows and telling ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... you guys who live in the city all your lives and don't know the butt from the barrel of a gun an' never straddled anything more like a horse than a broomstick. Ye're juss made to be sheep. No wonder they have to herd you round like calves." Meadville got to his feet and went unsteadily to the rail, keeping, as he threaded his way through the groups that covered the transport's after ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... "Absalom and Achitophel," "The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock." There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on the Taking of Namur" and "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse"; Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Swift's "Meditation on a Broomstick"; mock-heroics, like the "Dunciad" and "MacFlecknoe" and Garth's "Dispensary," and John Phillips' "Splendid Shilling" and Addison's "Machinae Gesticulantes"; Prior's "Alma," a burlesque of philosophy; Gay's "Trivia" and "The Shepherd's ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... mother says threateningly, "Your 'will' is in your mother's pocket." It is in her pocket that she carries the rope for whipping the child. Another locution is, "Your will is in the corner" (i.e. the corner of the room in which stands the broomstick) (431. II. 81). ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... you severely that this nose is far longer than the classic rule admits, and this arm has not the swelling proportions of life,—never seeing, that, though another statue was indeed designed for an Antinoues, this was never meant to be anything but a broomstick dressed in your grandfather's cloak, with a lantern in a pumpkin for a head. Oh, the dreariness of having to explain pleasantry! of appending to your banter Artemas Ward's parenthesis, "This is a goak"! of dealing with people who do not know ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... How this man felt When he began to melt; Whether he wore his human form and face With any extraordinary grace; If many mortals fell As victims to the spell; Or if, As he stood, stark and stiff, With a bare broomstick in his arms, And not a trace of transcendental charms, That man of snow Grew wise enough to know That the Brook's hopes were but a Poet's dream, And well content to be again a stream, On the first sunny day, Flowed quietly away; Or what the end was—You must ask the Poet, ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... idiot. You're a scorpion—a brimstone scorpion! You're a sweltering toad. You're a chattering clattering broomstick witch that ought to be burnt!" gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair. "My dear friend, will you ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the grace of Galileo's speech and presence put the abstract Ricci in the shadow. The right man can make anything interesting, just as Dean Swift could write an entrancing essay with the broomstick as a central theme. The man's the thing, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... know where all the brats offa junk heaps that witches use in their doin's gets to in the end? Watch the chimney! Maybe it flew outa there on a broomstick. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... unless your back is proof against a broomstick," answered Fairfield, coarsely. "I tell my servant to treat all who call in ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... riches, and wit, hopped in malevolently upon her crutch and shouted in a disagreeable falsetto: 'He shall have all these, to be sure, but he shall have a poor digestion and the gout!' and whirled away on the evening wind astride her broomstick." ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... to reputation, admitting that he had assisted "a sight of couples over the broomstick," adding, however, that the knack had its drawbacks. There were many door-stones in Zorra that he dared not cross. And he wagged his head over Timmins's case, wisely, as a lawyer ponders over the acceptance of a hopeless ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... old acquaintances of theirs! There—grinning and brandishing his stick—was the Little Black Man who had worried Rudolf many a night as far back as he could remember. There was the Old Witch on the Broomstick, whom Ann had often described to him. There again, were other Bad Dreams that made the children almost smile as they remembered certain exciting times. The Angry Farmer—Rudolf had seen him before; he remembered his fierce expression, ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... see," said the Old Senior Surgeon, cocking his head thoughtfully, "there was the business-like little party on a broomstick, carrying grit—plain grit." ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... Morris," said Flatt, "I'd shut up. A man who lets his wife lick 'un, and is afeared to go home because she'd pull his hair or broomstick 'un, shouldn't talk to other men about being cowards. I'd like to see my ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... Why should not a broomstick form the subject of a poetical effusion, when the material of the broom itself is so often used in schools to stimulate ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... deyse'ves. Cindy tuk ter Skundus ez much ez Skundus tuk ter Cindy, en' bimeby Skundus axed his marster ef he could marry Cindy. Marse Dugal' b'long' ter de P'isbytay'n Chu'ch en' never 'lowed his niggers ter jump de broomstick, but alluz had a preacher fer ter marry 'em. So he tole Skundus ef him en' Cindy would 'ten' ter dey wuk good dat summer till de crap was laid by, he'd let 'em git married en' hab a ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... further declared that then, dashing down the lane it came to the gate which shut it off from the road, and took the gate in a flying leap. But the animal never came down again. It was getting quite dark then, but she could still plainly see that a witch was upon its back, belaboring it with a broomstick. And she knew very well who that witch was. It was the "spectre" of Dulcibel Burton—for it had a scarlet bodice on, just such as Dulcibel nearly always wore. They two—the mare and its rider—went off sailing ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... in two words," replied Wamba—"'Pax vobiscum' will answer all queries. If you go or come, eat or drink, bless or ban, 'Pax vobiscum' carries you through it all. It is as useful to a friar as a broomstick to a witch, or a wand to a conjurer. Speak it but thus, in a deep grave tone,—'Pax vobiscum!'—it is irresistible—Watch and ward, knight and squire, foot and horse, it acts as a charm upon them all. I think, if they ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... to life's complications, and every new power to increase life's hustling; so that, unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead of the better. It is so much easier, apparently, to repeat the spell (once the magician has spoken it) which causes the broomstick to fetch water from the well, as in Goethe's ballad, than to remember, or know, the potent word which will put a stop to his floodings; that, indeed, seems reserved to the master wizard; while the tiros of life's magic, puffed up ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... for bread, could blast the corn with mildew and lame the oxen in the plough, that she could smite her persecutors with pains and sickness, that she could rouse storms in the sky and strew every shore with the wrecks of ships and the corpses of men, that as night gathered round she could mount her broomstick and sweep through the air to the witches' Sabbath, to yield herself in body and soul to the demons of ill. The nascent scepticism that startled at tales such as these was hushed before the witness of the Bible, for to question the existence of sorcerer or daemoniac seemed questioning ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... of the Ascension in Transylvania. After morning service the girls of the village dress up the Death; they tie a threshed-out sheaf of corn into a rough copy of a head and body, and stick a broomstick through the body for arms. Then they dress the figure up in the ordinary holiday clothes of a peasant girl—a red hood, silver brooches, and ribbons galore. They put the Death at an open window that ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... muckle wi' heaven, I doubt, considering wha I carry ahint me—and as for hell, it will fight its ain battle at its ain time, I'se be bound.—Come, naggie, trot awa, man, an as thou wert a broomstick, for ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and demanded his money. The butcher thought it was a joke, but the peasant said, "Jesting apart, I will have my money! Did not the great dog bring you the whole of the slaughtered cow three days ago?" Then the butcher grew angry, snatched a broomstick and drove him out. "Wait a while," said the peasant, "there is still some justice in the world!" and went to the royal palace and begged for an audience. He was led before the King, who sat there with his daughter, and asked him what injury he had suffered. "Alas!" ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... you, my young Master. I never set foot in such a thing in my life, nor never will by my good will. I like the feel of a horse under me well enough; but that finicky gingerbread thing, all o'er gilding—I'd as soon go on a broomstick. ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... greetings past, Edward learned from her that the dark hag, which had somewhat puzzled him in the butler's account of his master's avocations, had nothing to do either with a black cat or a broomstick, but was simply a portion of oak copse which was to be felled that day. She offered, with diffident civility, to show the stranger the way to the spot, which, it seems, was not far distant; but they were prevented by the appearance of the Baron of Bradwardine in person, who, summoned by David ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the coldest places known! Perhaps he has found a cheerful and comfortable summer home, bright and bracing, somewhere near the North Pole, on which somebody will find him, may be, one of these days, quietly perched, preening himself, and looking at a distance like a bit of red cloth on a broomstick. If he has found a cozy spot away up there, he's smarter than any Arctic explorer I ever ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... the cottager could stay him the statesman proceeded to enter the cottage. As soon as he had opened the door a broomstick fell upon his shoulders and a ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... a witch, not mounted on a broomstick, but on the respectable household cat, changed for that night into a flying fury; finally, along with my brothers, being captured, washed, and dressed, to join with other spirits worse than ourselves in "dooking" for apples and eating ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... the matter of war, did he confine himself to his own kind. His huge strength and indomitable courage made him the match of almost anything that moved. Long Kirby once threatened him with a broomstick; the smith never did it again. While in the Border Ram he attacked Big Bell, the Squire's underkeeper, with such murderous fury that it took all the men in the room to pull ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... inconceivable. I am in a condition to be surprised at nothing. If a witch on a broomstick rode in through my open window and lectured me on quaternions, I should accept her visit ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... mount the shining leather seat of his latest purchase and circle the kitchen table (Boof scampering alongside), the priest would look on with genuine interest, though the pretend-bicycle was the same broomstick which, on other occasions, galloped the floor as a dappled ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... her pretty card to admire it further, and she scrutinized closely the funny old witch riding on a broomstick, after the ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... bloodily in earnest, and when their surroundings of castles and donjons, savage landscapes and half-savage peoples, were in keeping; but those doings gravely reproduced with tinsel decorations and mock pageantry, by bucolic gentlemen with broomstick lances, and with muffin-rings to represent the foe, and all in the midst of the refinement and dignity of a carefully-developed modern civilisation, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the sitting-room, Zo had tried the bedroom next. She now returned to Ovid, dragging after her a long white staff that looked like an Alpen-stock. "What's this?" she asked. "A broomstick?" ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... made the body of the snow man and a smaller ball was his head. They made him arms, too, and stuck a broomstick through one so that he looked, a little way off, as though he were carrying ...
— Sunny Boy and His Playmates • Ramy Allison White
... that one hour after the thing was born the happy father was caught by the doctor and nurse seeing if it could hold its own weight up on a broomstick, like a monkey. She says he was acutely distressed when these authorities deprived him of the custody of his child. Wouldn't that fade you? Trying to see if a baby one hour old could chin itself! Quite all you would ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... however, wholly prepared for what happened next. The man in green, riding the frail topmost bough like a witch on a very risky broomstick, reached up and rent the black hat from its airy nest of twigs. It had been broken across a heavy bough in the first burst of its passage, a tangle of branches in torn and scored and scratched it in every direction, a clap of wind and foliage ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... a story. Little Juozapas, who was near crazy with hunger these days, had gone out on the street to beg for himself. Juozapas had only one leg, having been run over by a wagon when a little child, but he had got himself a broomstick, which he put under his arm for a crutch. He had fallen in with some other children and found the way to Mike Scully's dump, which lay three or four blocks away. To this place there came every day many hundreds of wagonloads of garbage and trash from the lake front, where ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... may be pardoned if, as he passes, he touches his forehead with three fingers of his right hand and murmurs: "Allah il Allah!" Some such exorcism seems to be needed to ward off the evil spirits that one would think must cluster around the ponderous structure, perching, perhaps, like the broomstick riders of Salem, on ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... her broomstick. Then, slinging all the empty bags across it, and balancing the cat on the other end, she ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... mother disappeared, with her potent broomstick, behind the hedge of evergreens that shut off the backyard from our garden, in the wake of father and Jenny, who, being more speedy in their movements, were already ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... you recollect they used to play at cricket In the bye-streets years ago, With a broomstick for a bat, a coat for wicket? Now the Bobbies hunt them so! The old ladies grumble at their skipping; The old gents object to their tip-cat; So they squat midst slums that shine like dirty dripping, Not knowing what the dickens to be at. And the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... sometimes return from his expeditions to the street, accompanied by gaunt, starved companions, whom he had picked up in his wanderings, and he would stand complacently by while they bolted the contents of his plate of food in a violent hurry and in dread of dispersion by a broomstick or a shower of water. I was sometimes tempted to say to Gavroche, 'A nice lot of friends you pick up,' but I refrained, for, after all, it was an amiable weakness: he might have eaten his ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... a little. The flax is not nearly ready for spinning yet; can a bride forget her attire? Besides, how can we be—" she paused, and let her silence fill the gap, "when I know we neither of us know any ceremony more dignified than hopping over a broomstick?" ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... said Mr. Brown. And he did. And, surely enough, when the broomstick was held crosswise in front of him, up rose Toby on his hind legs, just as when Mr. ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue and Their Shetland Pony • Laura Lee Hope
... tongue, you consarned old coot you! I tell you there's your hat, and there's the door: be off with yerself, quick metre, or I'll give ye a h'ist with the broomstick. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... contrary, he spoke of him as a "very clever and nice man, as much so as anybody need to live with;" but of his wife he could not speak so favorably; indeed, he described her as a most tyrannical woman. Said Elijah, "she would make a practice of rapping the broomstick around the heads of either men, women, or children when she got raised, which was pretty often. But she never rapped me, for I wouldn't stand it; I shouldn't fared any better than the rest if I hadn't been resolute. I declared ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the shape of a hare, milking the cows dry in the meadows belonging to the convent; that she used to perform as an actress on the boards of Drury Lane theatre in London, and, on the very same night, return upon a broomstick to Wuerzburg, and afflict the young ladies with pains in all their limbs. Upon this evidence she was condemned, and burned alive in ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... from the vineyard). We were watching her riding up to the moon on your broomstick, Giuseppe. You will never ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... started out to see Donner Lake, which reposes between Summit, the highest point on this trip across the Great Divide, and Truckee. We were in a sleigh drawn by a team of huskies: real Alaskan dogs. I have ridden pretty much everything from a broomstick to a bronco, but this was my first experience with huskies. I thought it was going to be hard work for the dogs, but they frolicked about in the snow with their pink tongues out, showing all their teeth as though they were laughing ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... lady who drove up in the open cab did not notice that he was even more solemn than usual. When she appeared, he gave one more glance at the spot he had been sweeping, and then grounded his broom like a musket, folded his hands on the end of the broomstick and looked at her as if he wondered what on earth had brought her to the palace at that moment, and wished that she would take herself off again as ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Riverdale Park, perhaps. Riverdale Park!" she repeated, with scornful emphasis. "There isn't any river; there isn't any dale; there isn't any park. Nothing but a lot of wooden houses scattered over a flat prairie, and a few trees no bigger than a broomstick, and no more leaves on them either. In the morning the men all rush for the train, and the rest of the day the nurse-girls trundle the babies along the plank walks, while 'society' amuses itself. Society consists of Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Alice Robinson. On Wednesday, ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... whizzed by again, in the other direction, but lower and slower. It made a gigantic but erratic circle beyond the sheds and swooped back. It looked nothing like a helicopter. It looked like a Hallowe'en decoration of a woman on a broomstick. As it came nearer, Hanson saw that it was a woman on a broomstick, flying erratically. She straightened out ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... blow with her broomstick, and struck Master Hardy on the nose, from which the blood flowed freely. This, however, only made him the more determined, and in a few minutes the poor old woman's arms were secured as ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... A broomstick dost thou not at least desire? The roughest he-goat fain would I bestride, By this road from our goal ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... seemed covered with mere scratches and blotches. The boy laughingly exclaimed, "Who could ever read such writing as that?" Zelter rose and came to the piano to look at this curiosity. "Why, it is Beethoven's writing; one can see that a mile off! He always wrote as if he used a broomstick for a pen, then wiped his sleeve ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... Quest"—or in the "Legends of the Province House", where the courtly provincial state of governors and ladies glitters across the small, sad New England world, whose very baldness jeers it to scorn—there is the same fateful atmosphere in which Goody Cloyse might at any moment whisk by upon her broomstick, and in which the startled heart stands still with ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... because a proper array of men and buckets and brooms would cleanse it, therefore every man and woman on the streets, grave doctors of divinity, stately Mr. Dombey, Flora McFlimsey and Edmund Sparkler, should each shoulder broomstick or bucket, and plunge pell mell into the reeking filth. This argument proceeds upon the assumption that Christians can purge amusements only by using them in the forms and with the appliances attendant upon the world's abuse of them. This is assuming ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... was the reply. "But you had as well ask had I seen a witch riding across the moon on a broomstick. We have no been asleep to dream ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... Montchevreuil was a very honest man, modest, brave, but thick-headed. His wife was a tall creature, meagre, and yellow, who laughed sillily, and showed long and ugly teeth; who was extremely devout, of a compassed mien, and who only wanted a broomstick to be a perfect witch. Without possessing any wit, she had so captivated Madame de Maintenon, that the latter saw only with her eyes. All the ladies of the Court were under her surveillance: they depended upon her for their ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... of fashion," observes Lady Mary, in a letter to her daughter, when spicy gossip about her doings abroad had been circulated in London, "or I should expect to have it deponed, by several credible witnesses, that I had been seen flying through the air on a broomstick." ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... bearings; they are Lancasterian to the backbone; they are exceedingly indignant against heretics; they burn the Lollards; they have places in the household of Queen Joan, who was called a witch,—but a witch is a very good friend when she wields a sceptre instead of a broomstick. And in proof of its growing importance, the House of Vipont marries a daughter of the then mighty House of Darrell. In the reign of Henry V., during the invasion of France, the House of Vipont—being afraid of the dysentery which carried off more brave ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unlooked-for predicament. Would she be doing wrong if she took the brother and sister away without saying anything to the mother who did not know her own children any longer? She might speak to Mrs. Burnett, but how about that broomstick? For a moment she stood irresolute, scratching her head thoughtfully. Then with characteristic energy and decision, she grabbed Rivers with one hand and Fern with the other, and trotted off down the street, saying ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... inspire the Dean to write so finely upon her." Mrs. Johnson [Stella] smiled, and answered "that she thought that point not quite so clear; for it was well known the Dean could write finely upon a broomstick."' Johnson's Works, viii. 210. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... her mother did not want her to take part and that she did not care to herself, as she was to have the fun of entertaining them all at her house, and moreover, she "couldn't act any more than a broomstick." ...
— A Dear Little Girl at School • Amy E. Blanchard
... frame was much taller than any of the long procession of frames which followed it, and that, from a hole in the right side thereof, protruded a fist about the size of the boy Bog's, clutching a broomstick, with which the inmate kept a semblance of order among the wilful and eccentric occupants of the frames behind him. "Oh, yes; I have seen you very often, Bog. How do you like the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... the third floor of the Smith building, adjoining us, had their own way of teasing them. Late at night, when everybody would be lying down, and out of the way of shots, a window in the third story would open, a broomstick, with a piece nailed across to represent arms, and clothed with a cap and blouse, would be protruded, and a voice coming from a man carefully protected ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... from a barrel hoop and a piece of mosquito netting, to which he nailed an old broomstick for a handle. And for the first few days when he started making his new collection he didn't visit the swimming hole once. When his father asked him to do a little work for him—such as feeding the chickens, or leading ...
— The Tale of Betsy Butterfly - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... expedition on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, in 1812 or 1813, Lord Byron wrote his well-known stanzas. "By the god of war!" said Sir Peter to his sailors, "I'll make you touch your hat to a midshipman's coat, if it's only hung on a broomstick to dry!" ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... her 'Somnambulist' gained a prize, Miss Ries left Moscow for Paris, but on her way stayed in Vienna, studying under Professor Hellmer. One year later, at the Vienna Spring Exhibition, she exhibited her 'Die Hexe.' Here is no traditional witch, though the broomstick on which she will ride through the air is en evidence. She is a demoniac being, knowing her own power, and full of devilish instinct. The marble is full of life, and one seems to feel the warmth of her delicate, powerfully chiselled, ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... if he was among us; but I believe we all allow we are sinners more or less, and after all do daily the things we should not do. Still if anybody wanted my help, I should hate to have 'em chase me with a broomstick, for I couldn't do a thing for 'em if they did; and if we think anybody is going into a ditch of a wrong idee, we'd better not scare 'em to death hollerin at 'em, it would be apt to send 'em in head first, while if we could kinder creep along behind, ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... Wait until you see the old fairy godmother unload her pumpkin. Or did she carry the dress on a broomstick? I forget the details. At any rate, while I'm thinking of a way to appease the wrath of Jane's father by not dishonoring his scholarship, it is the very least you can do to get ready for the dance. I know where ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... dem down! were I to wing as many daily as would fill a dearborn, Dame wouldn't be satisfied—not that she's avaricious—but den she must have something or somebody to snarl at, and I'm the unlucky dog at whom she always lets fly. Now, she got at me mit de broomstick so soon as I got back again; if I go home again, she will break my back. Tunner wasser! how sleepy I am—I can't go home, she will break my back—so I will sleep in de mountain to-night, and to-morrow I turn over a new leaf and drink ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... will!" shouted Jack, jumping over a chair and upsetting the knife-board, and all the knives which the cook had just been cleaning; and this provoked her so, that she caught up the broomstick, and ran after him, and fell over the wash-tub herself; so Jack got off safe. ...
— Baby Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... and do whatever you're told, you shall sleep in a proper bedroom, and have lots to eat, and money to buy chocolates and take rides in taxis. If you're naughty and idle you will sleep in the back kitchen among the black beetles, and be walloped by Mrs. Pearce with a broomstick. At the end of six months you shall go to Buckingham Palace in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the King finds out you're not a lady, you will be taken by the police to the Tower of London, where your head will be cut off as a warning ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... a broomstick form the subject of a poetical effusion, when the material of the broom itself is so often used in ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... wear, she ups an' reproaches 'm, which, God knows, that ain't no time to argue with a man. You don't want to argue with a fella when he's so. You just want to tellm'. Tell'm with the help of a broomstick if you want to, but tell'm, or leave'm alone. An' it's bad for the childern—all this is—it's bad for Cora an' Francie. What idea'll they get o' the holy estate o' matrimony, I should like to know? That the man has the upper hand? That's a nice notion ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... itself an abuse,) sinless? I am aware, that Prof. Hodge says, that it was so: and, when he classes despotism and slavery with adiaphora, "things indifferent;" and allows no more moral character to them than to a table or a broomstick, I trust no good man envies his optics. May I not hope that you, Mr. Smylie, perceive a difference between despotism and an "indifferent thing." May I not hope, that you will, both as a Republican and a Christian, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... of the fair-haired lady? No one knows. At the cry of Yvon she disappeared; but it was said that a wretched old hag was seen flying on a broomstick over the castle walls, chased by the dogs; and it was the common opinion among the Kervers that the fair-haired lady was none other than the witch, the godmother of the giant. I am not sure enough of the fact, however, to dare warrant it. It is ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... shrugged her small shoulders,—"well, Mr. Helbeck can't break my neck, so I'm dreadfully afraid I shall annoy him—dreadfully, dreadfully afraid! But I'll try not. You see, what we've got to do, is just to get Augustina well—stand over her with a broomstick and pour the tonics down her throat. Then, Fricka, we'll go our way and have some fun. ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "We'll jump the broomstick in about a month from now," Dad said, full of satisfaction for his business stroke. "I aim to settle down and quit ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... boatmen, like the necromancer's student who set the broomstick to bringing water, but could not remember the spell to stop it, find that it is unsafe to set great agencies at work without the power of controlling them. Last May, for instance, occurred a pond-fresh, long to be remembered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... with a smile of satisfaction at that fact. "What do you think of me now?" it seemed to ask. "Am I the sort of woman to turn your back on, and neglect?—a woman who at once becomes as stiff as a broomstick?" ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... people were more afraid of the Devil and of witches than they are now, they liked to have a priest or a minister somewhere near to scare 'em off; but nowadays, if you could find an old woman that would ride round the room on a broomstick, Barnum would build an amphitheatre to exhibit her in; and if he could come across a young imp, with hoofs, tail, and budding horns, a lineal descendant of one of those "daemons" which the good people of Gloucester fired at, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... disappeared one night about three years ago. There was at once great excitement in the neighbourhood, because it was rumoured that the faeries had taken her. A villager was said to have long struggled to hold her from them, but at last they prevailed, and he found nothing in his hands but a broomstick. The local constable was applied to, and he at once instituted a house-to-house search, and at the same time advised the people to burn all the bucalauns (ragweed) on the field she vanished from, because bucalauns are sacred to the faeries. They spent the whole night ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... not know that it is the awful magic mountain where the old witch who eats little children dwells?—and do you not know that she rides on a broomstick. I may need one to follow her, in case she has ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... I get here to see you? Astride a broomstick? I have no horses of my own, and Nicholas won't take me with him when he goes out. He says I must stay at home to amuse Sarah. Send your horses for me and I shall ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... a woman should exhibit an overgrown broomstick when an Italian train passes a flag station, any more than I know why, when a squad of Paris firemen march out of the engine house for exercise, they should carry carbines and knapsacks. I only know ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... water and a broomstick he beat out the fire, and went for a run to warm up. But when he came back there was more wind, so that he could not keep warm in the tent, and more rain, so that he could not find shelter in the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... merried state, and it suits me. Men-folks is like pickles, some; women-folks is the brine they're pickled in; they don't keep sweet without 'em. Besides, it's terrible lon'some on a farm, now I tell ye, with none but hired help, and them so poor you can't tell 'em from the broomstick ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... eyed her suspiciously. "Yew ain't a-gwine ter make a fool o' yerself, an' jump over the broomstick ag'in?" For Blossy's old suitor, Samuel Darby, had made one of his ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... arms, and so fearful was I of being overtaken by old Fuss that I darted into the woods whenever a wayfarer approached. But my fears were needless, for so alarmed had the witch been at the threats of the boatmen that she disappeared suddenly. Some said they saw her flying over the woods on a broomstick, with all her wretched rags and tags fluttering behind her like the ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... must be drest by one: Where is that cur—(and I am loth To say that Betty swore an oath)— The sirloin's spoiled: I'll give it him!"— And Betty did look fierce and grim. Bob, who saw mischief in her eye, Avoided her—approaching nigh: He feared the broomstick, too, with physics As dread as ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... either); log barn; 20 acres in cultivation; 60 acres timber land; balance pasture land; well watered. We will sell this place for $1575. Will throw in a cook stove and all the household furniture, consisting of a frying-pan handle and a broomstick; also a cow and a yearling calf; also one bay heifer; also 8400 lbs. of hay, minus what the above-named stock have consumed during the winter; also 64 bushels of oats, subject to the above-mentioned diminution. If sold, we shall have left on our hands one of the ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... to find you at last. I have been hunting up and down along the cliffs for the last hour or more, till I began to fear that you must have been carried off by a Barbary corsair, or spirited away on the end of Mother Shipton's broomstick." ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... frequently made of a bright-coloured fabric. This is their every-day dress, and thus habited the men work with square-bladed spades resembling our own, whilst those of the women have handles as long as a broomstick and bent spade-or heart-shaped blades. The gala or holiday dresses of the peasantry are very handsome, each district having its own peculiar costume, but of these we will say a few words hereafter. Sometimes, as one walks ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... he was dealing with, he might not have been quite puzzled; but to apply logic here, as he was attempting to do, was like—not like attacking a fortification with a penknife, for a penknife might win its way through the granite ribs of Cronstadt—it was like attacking an eclipse with a broomstick: there was a solution to the difficulty; but as the difficulty itself was deeper than he knew, so the answer to it lay higher than he could reach—was in fact at once grander and finer than he was ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... green and full of sap to be easily mastered; and she was in a very bad temper. Good day, Great-Aunt,' I said, I am your Great-Niece Viola.' I have no more use for great nieces,' she snapped, than for little ones.' And she continued to tussle with the broomstick and took no further notice of me. Then I went into the Hovel, where a fire burned on the hearth, and I took out my tools and fashioned a bit on the hob; and when it was ready I took it to her and said, This will teach it its manners'; and she put the bit on ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... the servant of a musketeer, when once the blood mounted to his fat cheeks, seized a broomstick and began ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... creature, gender feminine, number singular, person first, case always possessive, that's the standard bearer; a broomstick from the top of which floats a petticoat, that's the standard. Under that standard march in the U.S. at least 20,000,000 feminines, and—horrible to relate—gal children are ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... conversation, some one said, "Surely that Vanessa must be an extraordinary woman that could inspire the Dean to write so finely upon her." Mrs. Johnson smiled, and answered that "she thought that point not quite so clear; for it was well known the Dean could write finely upon a broomstick."—JOHNSON: Life ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... up and down and round and round, faster and faster, growing smaller every second, until at last she was nothing but her real self, an ugly shriveled witch running round and round on a broomstick. With a loud shrill scream she mounted into the air and was away out of sight in an instant, leaving everybody staring ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn
... too, everything seemed alive—even sticks and stones; and the broomstick I made into a gun seemed to have a life or kind of a memory of somethin'. And when I told Mr. Miller this he says, you're a savage, or you've been one in some other life, or else maybe you're repeatin' the life of a savage, and he ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... mother-o'-pearl handle to it, and tries to cut the apple, but I could only make a mark on it such as you see on a hot-cross-bun. Then I looked at the blade of the knife, and it were just like silver, but were as blunt as a broomstick. However, I tried again, but it wouldn't cut; so I axes a tall chap in livery as stood behind my chair if they'd such a thing as a butcher's steel in the house, for I wanted to put an edge to my knife. Eh, ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... to the least knowing what he meant. To lean so much as a broomstick, it seemed, against that tottering ruin would infallibly ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... buggettas should follow you to the sacred precincts of the home circle send your mother-in-law out with the broomstick, and may a kind Heaven help those who ...
— Get Next! • Hugh McHugh
... witch, and offered me half of your broomstick to New York, I don't know but I should take it;—that is, if there was room on it ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... sentence. An ounce of alcohol, or a few whiffs from an opium-pipe, may easily make a day memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. A coarser satirist than Emerson indulged his fancy in "Meditations on a Broomstick," which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification. Meditations on a "Shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something could be made of it. A poet must select, and if he stoops too low he cannot lift the object he ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... enjoying those blessings. But at that time we were out of 'em. You can't appreciate home till you've left it, money till it's spent, your wife till she's joined a woman's club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... got me at it, and I had just as leave bet it all; but I know you fellars with the store clothes on haint got that much; and I knows you darnt bet a dollar—if you did, the old woman would broomstick yer." ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... windows Egyptian, with hieroglyphics, sir; storks and coffins, and appropriate moldings above: I brought some from Fountains Abbey the other day. Look here, sir; angels' heads putting their tongues out, rolled up in cabbage leaves, with a dragon on each side riding on a broomstick, and the devil looking on from the mouth of an alligator, sir.[32] Odd, I think; interesting. Then the corners may be turned by octagonal towers, like the center one in Kenilworth Castle; with Gothic doors, portcullis, ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... alluded to the well-known feats of the weird sisterhood on the broomstick; but it is affirmed that on these occasions the spirit left its earthly abode, the body being previously anointed with the ointment we have described. We cannot better illustrate this question (the possibility of which has ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... treadmill of labor alone. The child needs to learn to work; but along with his work must be the opportunity for free and unrestricted activity, which can come only through play. The boy needs a chance to be a barbarian, a hero, an Indian. He needs to ride his broomstick on a dangerous raid, and to charge with lath sword the redoubts of a stubborn enemy. He needs to be a leader as well as a follower. In short, without in the least being aware of it, he needs to develop himself through his own activity—he ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... broomstick-steed's assistance? The sturdiest he-goat I would gladly see: The way we take, our goal ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... Nicholas was supposed to come down the chimney, our stockings were pinned on a broomstick, laid across two chairs in front of the fireplace. We retired on Christmas Eve with the most pleasing anticipations of what would be in our stockings next morning. The thermometer in that latitude was often twenty degrees below zero, yet, bright ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... it was worth the price of fly and leader just to raise him from the deeps and see his terrific rush downstream, jumping, jumping, as if the witch of Endor were astride of his tail in lieu of her broomstick. ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... Mrs. Green, he was a damn lucky fellow to be able to do it," cried Vane, taking the kindly old hand in both his own. "If I wasn't afraid of him coming for me with a broomstick, I'd do the same myself. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... bottom stair to laugh for a second, then she handed the General to Pip. "To-morrow," she said, standing up and hastily smoothing the rich hair that the General's hands had clutched gleefully—"to-morrow I shall beat every one of you with the broomstick." ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... such a fog. Two paces away from the curb a headlight became an effulgence. Indeed, there were a thousand lights jammed in the street, and the fog above absorbed the radiance, giving the scene a touch of Brocken. All that was needed was a witch on a broomstick. He counted five vehicles, and stopped. The ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... the established habits, especially when, as in the present case, the balance of convenience is decidedly on the part of fashion. The ordinary custom among well bred persons, is as follows:—soup is taken with a spoon. Some foolish fashionables employ a fork! They might as well make use of a broomstick. The fish which follows is eaten with a fork, a knife not being used at all. The fork is held in the right hand, and a piece of bread in the left. For any dish in which cutting is not indispensable, the same arrangement is correct. When you have ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... wrists tied together with a handkerchief, and his legs secured just above the ankles with another handkerchief; his arms are then passed over his knees, and a broomstick is pushed over one arm, under both knees, and out again on the other side over the other arm. The "cocks" are now considered ready for fighting, and are carried into the center of the room, and placed opposite each other with their ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... nobody, nor had they heard any unusual sound. For his part he believed there was magic in it, and that some of the old Indian witches had spirited the prisoner up the chimney, and flown away with him on a broomstick. ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... there was too many of 'em, as me brother used to say when his wife tuk her broomstick ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... chieftainess—if you have, you must be aware that it is impossible for any one to refuse her request, as she has more of the angel in face and temper than any one alive; so that if she had asked me to write a ballad on a broomstick I must have attempted it. I began a few verses, to be called the Goblin Page; and they lay long by me, till the applause of some friends whose judgement I valued induced me to resume the poem; so on I wrote, knowing no more than the man in the moon how I was to end. At length the story appeared ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... yerself whin ye say it!" Mrs. Cullen agreed. "Right the very night the poor soul died, he was hollerin' how the big black snake and the little black man wit' the gassly white forehead a-pokin' it wit' a broomstick had come fer um. 'Fright 'em away, Flora!' he was croakin', in a v'ice that hoarse an' husky 'twas hard to make out what he says. 'Fright 'em away, Flora!' he says. ''Tis the big, black, ugly-faced snake, as black as a black stockin' ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... he will marry her without making her his wife," said the priest. "He will jump over a broomstick with her and will ask me to help him,—so that your feelings and hers may be spared for a week or so. Mrs. O'Hara, he is a villain,—a vile, heartless, cowardly reprobate, so low in the scale of humanity that I degrade myself by spaking to him. ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... Irishman, detested by everybody for his cruelty to American prisoners in his charge. Mrs. Day had often seen him. He stormed, and swore, and tugged in vain at the halyards, for they had become entangled; and Mrs. Day applied her broomstick so vigorously that the blustering Provost-Marshal was finally compelled to beat a retreat, leaving the American flag floating in triumph in the crisp November air over ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... piousest elders an' deacons is had so many widders show up at dey funer'ls dat de chu'ches is most of 'em passed a law dat dey compelled to wait a year or so an' give all dese heah p'omiscu'us widders time to marry off—an' save scandalizement. An' Pompey an' Sophy-Sophia dey didn't have no mo'n a broomstick weddin' nohow—but of co'se dey did have de broomstick. I'm a witness to dat, 'caze dey borried my broom—yas, 'm. Ricollec', I had one o' dese heah green-handle sto'e brooms, an' Pompey he come over to my cabin ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... some outside person, desperately frightened. It was a new terror, different from anything that he had known before. It was as though a huge giant had suddenly lifted him up by the seat of his breeches, or a witch had transplanted him on to her broomstick and carried him off. It was as unusual ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... "That came within an inch of my nose—I do wish you'd be careful!" Kathie and the twins were playing house, holding lively conversations in a high key, while Alan paid them repeated visits, prancing around the room, and to their door, on a broomstick, which was his fiery steed, and to control which required both voice and whip; Nannie was hunting through our pile of violin music for a certain duet to play with Max when he got home; and in the midst of ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... Farintosh's Groom of the Stole, don't you know, to stand, or if I could sit, in the back seat of the box, whilst his Royal Highness made talk with the Beauty; to go out and fetch the carriage, and walk downstairs with that d—— crooked old dowager, that looks as if she usually rode on a broomstick, by Jove, or else with that bony old painted sheep-faced companion, who's raddled like an old bell-wether. I think, Newcome, you seem rather hit by the Belle Cousine—so was I last season; so were ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... all about you—the idyllic world where the marvellous child, Mozart, reigns like an enchanter. What though the tale of The Magic Flute is foolish beyond words. Who cares for the tale? Who thinks of the tale? It is only the wand in the hand of the magician. Though it be but a broomstick, it will open all the magic casements of earth and heaven, it will surround us with the choirs invisible, and send us forth into green pastures and by the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... His name is Peter McDonald, and he is considerable well to do in the world. He is a Highlander; and when young went out to Canada in the employment of the North-west Fur Company, where he spent many years, and married, broomstick fashion, I suppose, a squaw. Alter her death he removed, with his two half-caste daughters, to St John's, New Brunswick; but his girls I don't think were very well received, on account of their ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Pasiegos, (52) are the best cudgel-players in Spain, and in the world. Francisco held in his hand part of a broomstick, which he had broken in the stable, whence he had just ascended. With the swiftness of lightning he foiled the stroke of Chaleco, and, in another moment, with a dexterous blow, struck the sword out of his hand, sending it ringing against ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... who swallowed long pieces of raw pork the whole of the day, and towards evening were, from repletion, hanging their heads over the sides of the canoe and quite ill. They had been regaled with pork and whisky going up; we gave them salt fish and a broomstick by way of variety on their return, and they behaved very well ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... imaginable. His anecdotes were ever welcome, and the smallest incident, embellished by his wit and fancy, and told in his rich brogue, which he loved, were always sufficient to adorn a tale. He was rare company, and though, perhaps, he could not, like Swift, have written eloquently on a broomstick, he could always talk delightfully on any ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... Town gaol, taken on the Shannon, exhibited these feats of quickness and strength. He would spring up into the air five feet, and reel round and round, with uncommon rapidity. He threw a broomstick, at twelve yards distance, through a hole in the sentry box, of but little larger diameter; and a lath, cast at thirty yards, pierced a hat through and through. They used no throwing stick, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... people to hold out the idea that it may be necessary to execute the laws at the point of the bayonet. "If an old woman," cried a disgusted member of the minority, "was to strike an excise officer with a broomstick, forsooth the military is to be called out to ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... great discharge ensues wash it off sound parts, and grease them to prevent the skin coming off. Don't believe in what is called "proud flesh." The granulations of new flesh are always called so, and burnt off as fast as they grow by corrosive sublimate or "oils as'll cut a broomstick in two." ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... I got hold of a broomstick, and gave her a good lesson, in order to get something for the ten sequins which I had been foolish enough to pay in advance. But I have broken none of her limbs, and I took care to apply my blows only on her posteriors, on which spot I have no doubt that all the marks may be seen. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... "Patrona mia, you should have seen this paladin," he continued, coming forward. "Why, Orlando was never half so furious as he when he stood there telling them what manner of dirt they were, and bidding them to bed ere he drove them with a broomstick." ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... animated and declamatory. But Rose, who also had hopes, though perhaps faint, for my salvation, would suddenly rush into the room with the carpet broom, and drive him out, with threats of Miss Aglae, and the broomstick. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... one half-asleep. "Who? The great Objectionable himself? How did you inveigle him here? By nothing short of witchcraft, I will swear. Those pale eyes of yours are rather witch-like, do you know? Did you fly over on a broomstick to ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... of a witch, riding on the conventional broomstick) is suspended by fine threads or wires on the screen remote from the spectators. Behind this are ranged, one behind the other, and at right angles to the screen, a row of lighted candles. Being all in the same line, they throw one shadow only on the screen. The figure ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... gayly-flowered draperies at her waist, a little old lady with a tall black, sugar-loaf hat, a great white ruff around her neck and little red shoes with bright silver buckles on them—a little old lady who carried a black cat perched on one shoulder and a broomstick in one hand. ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... New England village until he came to a cottage where an old lady lived. All of the villagers were scared to death, and some of them started to get their shotguns and rifles with which to kill Mr. Bruin. But the old lady had her own idea of what to do. She grabbed up a broomstick and began to hammer that bear right on his nose, and would you believe me? Mr. Bruin got so scared that he ran away and then went straight back to his keeper and allowed himself to ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... were you, Morris," said Flatt, "I'd shut up. A man who lets his wife lick 'un, and is afeared to go home because she'd pull his hair or broomstick 'un, shouldn't talk to other men about being cowards. I'd like to ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... stickth her tail up; do me good to zee un! Now thiccy trough, thee zany, and tak thee girt legs out o' the wai. Wish they wud gie thee a good baite, mak thee hop a bit vaster, I reckon. Hit that there girt ozebird over's back wi' the broomstick, he be robbing of my young zow. Choog, choog, choog! and a drap more left in ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... is there?" roared the water-carrier; "is it you, ye bankrupt vagabonds, who have annoyed me? Begone; or by the sword of the Prophet, I'll impale you all three on my broomstick." ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... Still, she went out into the byre, but when she got there, she couldn't get on at all with the pitchfork, it was so big. The birds said the same to her as they had said to her step-sister, and told her to take the broomstick, and toss out a little dung, and then all the rest would fly after it; but all she did with the broomstick was to throw it at the birds. When she came to milk, the kine were so unruly, they kicked and pushed, and every time she ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... be regretted that he did not write an account of his travels in France; for as he is reported to have once said, that 'he could write the Life of a Broomstick[1155],' so, notwithstanding so many former travellers have exhausted almost every subject for remark in that great kingdom, his very accurate observation, and peculiar vigour of thought and illustration, would have produced a valuable ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... around, and there he was, his head literally lost in a sea of red and yellow ribbons. With a shout of rage, she seized the broomstick, and hurried after the thief. But before she could reach him, Jocko had mounted two flights of stairs, leaped out on the porch, and climbed up to the roof of ...
— The Nursery, April 1878, Vol. XXIII. No. 4 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... thinking of a broomstick marriage. Trust me. We are still legally married, and if I should try to sneak out of my obligations to you by this performance, I should still be liable in the eyes of the law for your debts. Let ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... sanctity conferred on God's angels was wings, and the ability to fly. If we come down to the mythology of more recent times we find our pious ancestors in New England thoroughly convinced that the witches they flogged and hanged were perfectly able to navigate the air on a broomstick—thus antedating the Wrights' experiments with heavier-than-air machines by ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... threateningly, "Your 'will' is in your mother's pocket." It is in her pocket that she carries the rope for whipping the child. Another locution is, "Your will is in the corner" (i.e. the corner of the room in which stands the broomstick) (431. II. 81). ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... the party. One never knew just how she would come, on wings, or on a broomstick. This time she came walking, and dressed in a short red gown and a white apron. Her kind eyes twinkled as she gave her ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... that," said another sapient of the same profession—"Robin Oig is no the lad to leave any of them, without tying Saint Mungo's knot on their tails, and that will put to her speed the best witch that ever flew over Dimayet upon a broomstick." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in Cranford, after tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... profession, or if he is bid to discourse for the pleasure of readers in the Underground Railway, I fear he will often have to forget Mr. Pater. It may not be literature, the writing of causeries, of Roundabout Papers, of rambling articles "on a broomstick," and yet again, it may be literature! "Parallel, allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden"—Mr. Pater charges heavily against these. The true artist "knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to which any diversion, literally, ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... eyes are like stars on the sea. Come, then, angelic Rock, Rocher des Anges, and waltz with your Ste. Valerie!" And he would take Abby by the waist, and try to waltz with her, till she reached for the broomstick. I have told you, Melody, that Abby was the homeliest woman the Lord ever made. Not that I ever noticed it, for the kindness in her face was so bright I never saw anything but that; but strangers ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... Women are Cleopatras until they are thirty, then they are old witches with broomstick propensities! Don't interrupt me. Don't speak ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... was thought to be in his cheek, and London was written on his heart. When Stella was told that Dean Swift had composed a poem, not in honour of her, but of Vanessa, she replied, with exquisite feminine amenity, that it was well known that the Dean could be eloquent over a broomstick. If he that night extolled Bristol above her other rivals, it would be said of him that he was a verbose individual, who had called in past years Leeds a beautiful and inspiring city, Liverpool a rising ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs
... "She rode in on a broomstick—she crept in through the keyhole. Where's the fire? Let's take her downstairs, and ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... he with his pack of presents. Such a grin! but then so pleasant You would never think to fear him; And you can not, must not hear him. He's so particular, you know, He'd just pick up his traps and go If but one little eye should peep That he thought was fast asleep. Searching broomstick, nails, and shelf, Till he finds the little stocking— Softly lest you hear his knocking— Smiling, chuckling to himself, He fills it from his Christmas store, And out he slips to ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... win and wear her," replied Springall. "Come, come, Master Bob, you're mazed by some devilry or other; the wind's in your teeth; you've been sailing against a norwester, or have met with a witch on a broomstick the other side of this old oak: Serves an oak right to wither up—why wasn't it made into a ship? But here's to Barbara Iverk, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... of a union suit (Munsing or any other standard brand), corset, brassiere, chemise, underpetticoat, overpetticoat, long black skirt, long black stockings, shoes, black waist and shawl, with a pointed witch's hat and a broomstick. The "modern" witch's costume is much simpler and inexpensive in ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns swings under a window from the end of a broomstick; there is a blacksmith's forge and then a wheelwright's, with two or three new carts outside that partly block up the way. Then across an open space appears a white house beyond a grass mound ornamented by a cupid, his finger on his lips; two brass vases ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... it! Don't let it bite me!" cried the old gentleman rabbit, and he tried to get out of the way, but he slipped on his broomstick crutch and fell down, and a piece of prickly holly fell on him and tickled him so that ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis
... where all the brats offa junk heaps that witches use in their doin's gets to in the end? Watch the chimney! Maybe it flew outa there on a broomstick. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... a jolly young chap who looked thoroughly well in his smart uniform; tall, broad-shouldered, strong of limb, with full ruddy face and black moustache; a fellow all the women ran after; was such as he to belong solely to a broomstick like his wife? It would be a sin and a shame! Lucky for her that she was ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... knows on, an' we would take it kindly if you'd consent to stop there with us, an' continue to be our queen, so as we may all stick together an' be rightly ruled on the lines o' lovin' kindness,"—("With a taste o' the broomstick now an' then," from Teddy). "If your majesty agrees to this, we promise you loyal submission an' sarvice. Moreover, we will be glad that your brother, Mister Dominick, should be prime minister, an' Mister Otto his scritairy, or wotever else ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... Halloween the teacher had distributed pictures of a witch on a broomstick, with a cat at her side, riding toward the moon. Each child was called upon for an original poem on this picture. One boy ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... an angel's blessing when she looked out between the flags and rose branches, drinking in the words "I love you," as a flower drinks in dew. Now the pale radiance on the mountains was to Mary's eyes wicked, wicked as a white witch fallen from her broomstick. All the world was wicked in its weary pallor; and the dark windows of far-off, moon-bleached villas were like staring ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
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