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More "Sickle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ripeneth, and if he shall perceiue that the hull of the eare beginneth to open, and that the blacke toppes of the Corne doth appeare, he may then be assured that the Corne is fully ripe, and ready for the Sickle, so that instantly he shall prouide his Reapers, according to the quantitie of his graine: for if hee shall neglect his Rye but one day more then is fit, it is such a hasty graine, that it will shale forth ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... pays" of France, I had imagined myself to have been a courteous, a grateful, and, under all points of view, an ORTHODOX Visitor. It seems however, from the language of the French Typographer, that I acted under a gross delusion; and that it was necessary to have recourse to his sharp-set sickle to cut away all the tares which I had sown in the soil of his country. Upon the motive and the merit of his labours, I have already given my unbiassed opinion.[A] Here, it is only necessary to observe, that I have not, consciously, falsified his opinions, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... common cocks are kept, I want to know, if the tail sickle-feathers and saddle-feathers of one which had succeeded in getting wives were cut and mutilated and his beauty spoiled, whether he would continue to be successful in getting wives. This might be tried ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... years back. Then, when I have built me a house, furrowed my acres with my martial plough-share (for to that, it appears, my sword must come), and reaped my harvest with my own hands (it will be hard work to beat my horse-pistols into a sickle), then, Edith—" ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... and go to work. There are in the private membership of our churches and in the ministry a great many men who are dead, but have never had the common decency to get buried. With the harvest white and "lodging" for lack of a sickle, instead of lying under the trees criticising the sweating reapers who are at work, let us throw off our own coat and go out to see how good a ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... the steps, one of her maidens put into her hand a sacred knife or sickle, which, as Otare informed us had a blade of gold, and a handle of opal. The woman then retired, and we saw her stand erect for a moment in the full blaze of the mellow sunlight, with her golden hair falling about her in a ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... heart and soul in the richest raw material. They were full-grown, ripened specimens of aboriginal life. They had a plump berry, as the farmers say, and came to the sickle without cockle, or rust, or weevil, or smut. They were as thrifty vines, and needed only to be trimmed and trained. They were as virgin gold in the bullion, and wanted to be melted and minted into coin. They were as ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... was fickle, Was that great oak tree, She was in a pretty pickle, As she well might be - But his gallantries were mickle, For Death followed with his sickle, And her tears began to trickle For her great oak tree! Sing hey, Lackaday! Let the tears fall free For the pretty little flower and the great ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... will I accuse thee of the seeds thou hast sown: the harvest is gathered and the sickle is broken. Abjure thy dark Galdra [95], and turn as I to the sole light in the future, which shines from the tomb of the ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by the solace of his own calm thoughts Upheld, he duteously pursued the round Of rural labours: the steep mountain side Ascended with his staff and faithful dog; The plough he guided and the scythe he swayed, And the ripe corn before his sickle fell Among the jocund reapers. For himself, All watchful and industrious as he was, He wrought not; neither field nor flock he owned; No wish for wealth had place within his mind, No husband's love nor father's hope or care; Though born a younger brother, need was none That from the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... obliged to separate the feathers by white spaces, to show you them distinctly. In reality they are set as close to each other as can be, but putting them as close as I can, you get a or b, Fig. 5, for the rough section of the wing, thick towards the bird's head, and curved like a sickle, so that in striking down it catches the air, like a reaping-hook, and in rising up, it throws off ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... of red (top) and black with a centered yellow emblem consisting of a five-pointed star within half a cogwheel crossed by a machete (in the style of a hammer and sickle) ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... fears of the observers. Two shields, it was said, in a certain camp, sweated blood. Some people were reaping, and bloody ears of grain fell into the basket. This, of course, must have been wholly imaginary, unless, indeed, one of the reapers had cut his fingers with the sickle. Some streams and fountains became bloody; and, finally, in one place in the country, some goats turned into sheep. A hen, also, became a cock, and a cock changed to ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... reflective properties of the face of the diversified country he traversed. Over Battersea and Wandsworth—this was in 1826—there were white sheets spread over the land, which proved to be corn crops ready for the sickle. Where crops were not the ground was darker, with, here and there, objects absolutely black—in other words, trees and houses. Then he mentions the river in a memorandum, which reads strangely to the aeronaut who has made the same night voyage in these latter days. The stream was crossed ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... all the creatures that feed upon them had grown thick and strong,—about the time when the second mowing was in hand, and the brown, wet-faced men were following up the scythes as they chased the falling waves of grass, (falling as the waves fall on sickle-curved beaches; the foam-flowers dropping as the grass-flowers drop,—with sharp semivowel consonantal sounds,—frsh,—for that is the way the sea talks, and leaves all pure vowel-sounds for the winds to breathe over it, and all mutes to the unyielding earth,)—about this time of over-ripe midsummer, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... stared up at a cloudless heaven where rode the moon, a silver sickle; and gazing thither, he remembered that some one had predicted a fine night later, and vaguely wondered ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... grain and hay to the barn or the stacks when it was ready; but there were no patent rakes or mowing or reaping machines for them to draw. All the wheat, and a good deal of the other grain, was cut down with the old-fashioned hook or sickle, the reapers stooping low to their work. It was tedious and exhausting labour, and slow, too. Shenac's "faculty" and perfect health stood her in good stead at this work as at other things. She tired herself thoroughly every day, but she was young and strong; and though the summer ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... flying up. "Have a lad and a lass passed by this way?" said he. "Yes," replied the old man, "they have."—"Was it long ago?" asked the she-dragon's husband.—"It was while this wheat was being sown," replied the old man.—"Oh!" thought the dragon, "this wheat is ready for the sickle, they couldn't have been this way yesterday," so he turned back. Then the she-dragon's daughter turned herself back into a maiden and the old man into a youth, and off they set again. But the dragon ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... whose name is Death, Who with his sickle keen, Cuts the bearded grain at a breath, And the ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... Adam and Eve went down to the land of black mud and came near to the wheat God had showed them and saw that it was ripe and ready for reaping, they did not have a sickle to reap it with. So they readied themselves, and began to pull up the wheat by hand, until ...
— First Book of Adam and Eve • Rutherford Platt
... our lot to wield The sickle in the ripened field; Nor ours to hear, on summer eves, The ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... aside and gave up her place to the children. Her expression was noble, like a queen rebuked before her people. There was comfort in that, too. A great, solemn, mutual understanding drew this death-bed group together. Within the sickle's compass so they stood: the woman God gave this man to found a home; the son who inherited his father's gentleness and purity of purpose; the fair flower of the generations that father's sacrifice had helped him win; the bud of promise on the topmost bough. Those astonished eyes shed ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... wet soil, and the fields in which the grain is raised, sometimes called "paddy" fields, are periodically irrigated. Before ripening, the water is drained off, and the crop is then cut with a sickle, made into shocks, stacked, threshed, and cleaned, much like wheat. The rice kernel is inclosed within two coverings, a course outer husk, which is easily removed, and an ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... at the tip of the Bear's nose. A clearly defined semicircle begins at [o] and ends in the pair [i] and [k] at the extremity of the Bear's right fore paw. This group of stars resembles a sickle. Note little Alcor close to Mizar. This star was used by the Arabs as a test ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... stood like Ruth amid the wheat, With ready hand and sickle keen, And looked on all with aspect sweet; For where she only thought to glean, She found a harvest round ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke: How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bow'd the woods beneath their ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... wasps (Ammophila) the jaws in the two sexes are closely alike, but are used for widely different purposes: the males, as Professor Westwood observes, "are exceedingly ardent, seizing their partners round the neck with their sickle-shaped jaws" (5. 'Modern Classification of Insects,' vol. ii. 1840, pp. 205, 206. Mr. Walsh, who called my attention to the double use of the jaws, says that he has repeatedly observed this fact.); ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... flock are feeding among the blackened stumps of the uncleared chopping: those timbers have lain thus untouched for two long years; the hand was wanting that should have given help in logging and burning them up. The wheat is ripe for the sickle, and the silken beard of the corn is waving like a fair girl's tresses in the evening breeze. The tinkling fall of the cold spring in yonder bank falls soothingly on the ear. Who comes from that low-roofed ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... sought to marry Danae; failing in his suit, and to compel her to submission, he ordered Perseus off to fetch him the head of the Medusa; who, aided by Hermes and Athena, was successful in his mission, cut off the head of the Medusa with the help of a mirror and sickle, brought it away with him in a pouch, and after delivering and marrying Andromeda in his return journey, exposed the head before Polydectes and court at a banquet, which turned them all into stone, whereupon he gave the Gorgon's ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Daisy and Preston were very busy the whole morning till luncheon- time. After Daisy's dinner, however, her mind took up its former subject of interest. She went to Joanna, and was furnished with a nice little sponge-cake and a basket of sickle pears for Molly Skelton. Daisy forgot all about tableaux. This was something better. She ordered the pony- chaise and got ready ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... today and joy tomorrow But wafts the airy soul aloft; The very name is lost to Sorrow, And Pain is Rapture tuned more exquisitely soft. Here the Pilgrim reposes the world-weary limb, And forgets in the shadow, cool-breathing and dim, The load he shall bear never more; Here the mower, his sickle at rest, by the streams Lull'd with harp strings, reviews, in the calm of his dreams The fields, when the harvest is o'er. Here, He, whose ears drank in the battle roar, Whose banners streamed upon the startled wind A thunder-storm,—before ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... before noticed, now showed forth. It was as if the picture had taken shape and substance again beneath the influence of the summer heat. You could sea a nymph with arms thrown back and pliant figure on a bed of flowers which had been strewn for her by young cupids, who, sickle in hand, ever added fresh blossoms to her rosy couch. And nearer, you could also see a cloven-hoofed faun who had surprised her thus. But Albine repeated, 'No, she is not like me, she is ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... is a basin shaped like a sickle. On the west the mountain wall of the Saguenay protects it. The eastern curve is sheltered by vast sand lanes, scoured from the sea bottom and whirled upward by some mighty eddy in geologic ages. To the north are mountains of stone, their gray surface flecked ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... spray across the grass. Everywhere the darkness grew murmurous with sounds, vague as wind-blown voices; sweet as the call of children from some hill-top where the stars are very near, and the new moon's sickle flashes ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... lifted a huge black-muzzled head, decorated with an enormous pair of sickle-shaped horns that stretched right back to the shoulders. He stared with great sullen eyes and trotted a few paces towards them; one after another, the rest lifted their heads and stared too. Closer drew the horsemen at their steady, silent jog, the horses ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... character, a good heart and a poetic imagination, made his life joyous and the world beautiful; till at length Death cut down the sweet, blue flower, that bloomed beside him, and wounded him with that sharp sickle, so that he bowed his head, and would fain have been bound up in the same sheaf with the sweet, blue flower. Then the world seemed to him less beautiful, and life became earnest. It would have been well if he could have forgotten the past; that he might not so mournfully ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... by instructing the man to tell a falsehood. But behold, a miracle! For by the power of the Infant Saviour, in the space of a single night, the seed sprung up into stalk, blade, and ear, fit for the sickle. And next morning the officers of Herod came up, and inquired of the husbandman, saying, "Have you seen an old man with a woman and a Child travelling this way?" And the man, who was reaping his wheat, in great ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... into sweet night; the young and star-attended moon glittered like a sickle in the deep purple sky; of all the luminous host, Hesperus alone was visible; and a breeze, that bore the last embrace of the flowers by the sun, moved languidly and fitfully over ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... Casting up their accounts that there are a Number which Deservs to be Put on y^e C^r Side. But money getting being Mankinds Universal harvest I find as many Reapers as one would wish to see in Such an Open Field for every one to have a fare Sweep with the Sickle which as frequently cuts your purse Strings as anything Else, their Rakes are Most Excellent nothing is lost for want of geathering & you may depend on it their Bins are so Close that But a trifle of what they Put in ever Comes ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman
... that, the wrong thing being done, an inward good would result, and it does not; for even if the immediate object be secured, other results, all unforeseen, force themselves on us which spoil the hoped for good. The sickle cuts down tares as well as wheat, and the reaper's hands are filled with poisonous growths as well as with corn. There is a revulsion of feeling from the thing that before the sin was done attracted. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... tell you how important that is. There is one man, old General Van Sickle, who has had considerable training in these matters. He's ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... brute should have her woman's innocence to sully and destroy. His love of the woman disappeared in his desire to save, the idea which she represented at that moment; and lost in sentiment he stood watching the white sickle of the moon over against the dim village. The leaves of some pollarded willows whitened when the breeze shot them up to the light, and a moment after became quite distinct in the glare and the steam of an approaching engine. He might go ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... gate. The clouds had broken in the west and a soft golden radiance suffused the row of maples that lined the fence along the street, and the swelling branches gleamed with promise. Over toward the east a patch of blue sky appeared, and then the tip of a sickle moon thrust itself through and floated entire for a moment on a tiny azure lake. A little breeze came round the corner of the porch from the sunset. It was as soft and warm as an unspoken promise, and it flipped back skirt hems and twisted ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... shop, and are of the rudest, most awkward description. They plow with a crooked stick, they dig ditches with their fingers, and carry everything that has to be moved in little baskets on their heads. The harvesting is done with a primitive-looking sickle, and root crops are taken out of the ground with a two-tined fork with a handle only a foot long. The Hindu does everything in a squatting posture, hence he uses only short-handled tools. Fifty or seventy-five ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... and her companion were on the point of disappearing in a doorway fifty yards down Sickle Street. ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... passed, what a view presents itself! The long perspective of the bay, the densely wooded hills and lower slopes teeming with agricultural produce, rich corn-fields, ripe for the sickle; picturesque dwellings, hid in shadowy foliage, and flowers and fruit trees, to which the purity and rarity of the atmosphere lend a brilliancy of colouring and distinctness of outline, impossible to describe; the clear blue water, with here and there a quaint and curious-looking junk, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... invented these things besides:—when the river has become full and the plains have been flooded, there grow in the water great numbers of lilies, which the Egyptians call lotos; these they cut with a sickle and dry in the sun, and then they pound that which grows in the middle of the lotos and which is like the head of a poppy, and they make of it loaves baked with fire. The root also of this lotos is ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... the roofs, the harvest of which will fall to the neighboring sparrows, has carried my thoughts to the rich crops which are now falling beneath the sickle; it has recalled to me the beautiful walks I took as a child through my native province, when the threshing-floors at the farmhouses resounded from every part with the sound of a flail, and when the carts, loaded with golden sheaves, came in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... way will not do. Sweeping changes, in these last days, have come over the commercial, academic, and social world. We do not go back to the hand-loom, the hand-sickle, the hand-press. What is true of these aspects of life is true of the spiritual training. It must be larger, freer, grander, than before. Time was when a theologian, it was thought, must be separated from the world—an ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... sea-space. Siegmund wanted to flee. He yearned to escape down the open ways before him. Yet he knew he would be carried on to London. He watched the sea-ways closing up. The shore came round. The high old houses stood flat on the right hand. The shore swept round in a sickle, reaping them into the harbour. There the old Victory, gay with myriad pointed pennons, was harvested, saved for ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... the silver sickle of that month Became her golden shield, I stole from court With Cyril and with Florian, unperceived, Cat-footed through the town and half in dread To hear my father's clamour at our backs With Ho! from some bay-window shake the night; But all was quiet: from the bastioned walls Like threaded ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... other monasteries, which were built on the summit of the mountain, being before much distressed for want of water. In that of St. Clement, situate on the bank of a lake, a Goth, who was a monk, let fall the head of a sickle into the water as he was cutting down thistles and weeds in order to make a garden; but St. Maur, who with St. Placidus lived in that house, holding the wooden handle in the water, the iron of its own accord swam, and joined it again, as St. Gregory relates. St. Benedict's reputation ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... conversely that in the insects characters useful to them and not merely to the plants would have originated. For a long time it seemed as if an exception to this rule existed in the case of the fertilisation of the yucca blossoms by a little moth, Pronuba yuccasella. This little moth has a sickle-shaped appendage to its mouth-parts which occurs in no other Lepidopteron, and which is used for pushing the yellow pollen into the opening of the pistil, thus fertilising the flower. Thus it appears as if a new structure, which is useful only to the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... August). "It is a tremendous consideration that friends should fall around us in such awful numbers as we attain middle life. What a field of battle it is!" Nor had another month quite passed before he lost, in Mrs. Macready, a very dear family friend. "Ah me! ah me!" he wrote. "This tremendous sickle certainly does cut deep into the surrounding corn, when one's own small blade has ripened. But this is all a Dream, may be, and death will ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... ten labourers. It was he who ploughed and sowed and reaped, and if, as happened occasionally, it was needful to get the work done quickly, the brownie called in some of his friends, and as soon as it was light a host of little dwarfs might have been seen in the fields, busy with hoe, fork or sickle. But by the time the people were about all was finished, and the little ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... with evergreens. A more barbarous form of these rejoicings took place among the rude peoples of the north where great blocks of wood blazed in honor of Odin and Thor, and sacrifices of men and cattle were made to them. Mistletoe was cut then from the sacred oaks with a golden sickle by the Prince of the Druids, between whom and the Fire-Worshippers of Persia there was an affinity both in character ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... the dams, and it is soon dried by the great heat of the sun. At the time of the rice harvest the fields have much the same appearance as our wheat and barley fields, and indeed are uniformly covered with a still more brilliantly golden hue. The sickle is not used in reaping the rice, but instead of it a small knife, with which the stalk is cut about a foot under the ear; this is done one by one, and the ears are then bound in sheaves, the tenth of which is the pay of the mower. The paddee, which is the ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... round him like a gust of wind or fire, and there was no such creature in the world. My wonder was, not that he was so suddenly dispatched, but that any head was left unreaped, within a radius of fifty yards of that tremendous sickle. ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... hearing San Vicente preach on the ugliness of the demon, prayed God that a devil be shown him in order to fight. It happened that a poor, old woman was passing who was dumb from birth, was very ugly and poorly dressed, and had sickle in her hand. The lad, thinking that she was the devil, furiously assailed her, and taking away her sickle, cut off her hands, her ears, and her nose. The afflicted woman shouted but as she was dumb she could not make herself understood and only ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out ev'n to the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... and reddish purple, numerous, about 1/2 in. long, clustered in racemes from the leaf axils. Calyx 2-lipped, corolla papilionaceous, the broad standard petal turned backward, the keel sickle-shaped; stamens within it 9 and 1. Stem: From tuberous, edible rootstock; climbing, slender, several feet long, the juice milky. Leaves: Compounded of 5 to 7 ovate leaflets. Fruit: A leathery, slightly curved pod, 2 to 4 ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... Clement that he said that he should be worshipped of all men as God, and that he might do all that he would. And he said yet more: When my mother Rachel commanded me that I should go reap corn in the field, and saw the sickle ready to reap with, I commanded the sickle to reap by itself alone, and it reaped ten times more than any other. And yet he added hereto more, after Jerome, and said: I am the Word of God, I am the Holy ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... picture of Crary in his capacity of a militia brigadier at the head of his legion on parade day, with his "crop-eared, bushy-tailed mare and sickle hams—the steed that laughs at the shaking of the spear, and whose neck was clothed with thunder," and likened Crary to Alexander the Great with his war- horse, Bucephalus, at the head ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy chronicles; Such whose supine felicity but makes In story chasms, in epochas mistakes, O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down, Till with his silent sickle they are mown," ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... She was seated, leaning forward; her head was turned towards the right, so that her face appeared in profile. She was in extremely low evening-dress of an aquamarine shade, flowered with gold. Her shoulders were sickle-shaped and gleamed like the half-crescent of a young moon. From her throat, which was full and white, hung a splendid string of tan-colored pearls. But it was the slope of her jaw, the way her ears set back, and the rounded strength of her head that gave to ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... observation. The changes in her form, from that of a round full moon when she is near superior conjunction to the gibbous, and finally the half-moon phase as she approaches her eastern elongation, followed by the gradually narrowing and lengthening crescent, until she is a mere silver sickle between the sun and the earth, form a succession of ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... Bright morning. Sickle moon just hiding in a red cloud, and the morning stars just vanished in light. But we've had nearly three weeks of dark weather, so we mustn't think it poor ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... Herberts presented a most lively appearance; for a large number of country girls, and active young men, were engaged in them. They reaped the fields in those days with the sickle; and had not come to our own times, when the work is mostly done by a machine, and all the music, poetry, and pleasure, seem to have gone out of the operation. Harvest-time used to be of all the year the most merry and joyous. Masters and men were then on the ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... With broad and bird-like wing. The air re-echoes forth a song Of full and perfect bliss, Where happy lovers roam along, And melt into a kiss. But Summer bursts upon the world, With views of waving grain, Beneath the sweating sickle hurled, Upon the fragrant plain. The warm, long day calls forth at length, The storm's electric fire, That shatters the oak's imperial strength, And bids the shrubs expire. The cloud rolls off—and ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... on forest and field. The weeks passed; summer sped to autumn, the ripe corn bowed to the sickle. The Convent's lands were rich and heavy, virgin soil reclaimed; and the Prior, watching the last great wain piled high with wealth of golden treasure, saw ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... short journey thro' the vale of life: Watchful attends the cradle and the grave, And passing generations longs to save: Last, dies himself: yet wherefore should we mourn? For man must to his kindred dust return; Submit to the destroying hand of fate, As ripen'd ears the harvest-sickle wait.[41] ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... a while amongst the bushes, peered without conviction into a ditch or two. There was not a sound: patches of slime glimmered feebly amongst the reeds. Slowly we trudged back, drooping under the thin sickle of the moon, and I heard him mutter to himself, "Himmel! Zwei und dreissig Pfund!" He was impressed by the figure of my loss. For a long time we had ceased to hear the mate's whoops ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... flexible pearly armor, the skull-strip helmets. Though there were individual differences in ornaments and the choice of weapons. The majority of the men did carry curve-pointed swords, though those were broader and heavier than those the Terran had seen ashore. But several had axes with sickle-shaped heads, whose points curved so far back that they nearly met to form ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... lost in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy chronicles: Such, whose supine felicity but makes In story chasms, in epoch's mistakes; O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down, Till, with his silent sickle, they are mown. 110 Such is not Charles' too, too active age, Which, govern'd by the wild distemper'd rage Of some black star infecting all the skies, Made him at his own cost, like Adam, wise. Tremble, ye nations, which, secure before, Laugh'd at those arms that 'gainst ourselves ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... golden shower; the birth of Perseus connecting this legend with that of the Gorgons and Graiae, who are the true clouds of thunderous ruin and tempest. I must, in passing, mark for you that the form of the sword or sickle of Perseus, with which he kills Medusa, is another image of the whirling harpy vortex, and belongs especially to the sword of destruction or annihilation; whence it is given to the two angels who gather for destruction the evil harvest and evil ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... are fickle, That love is sorrow, that life is care, And the reaper Death, with his shining sickle, Gathers ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... they wandered, and dance to the music of revolutionary songs which some of them sang. Sometimes the gardeners who worked there hurried up to join them in this dance, and to encircle the prisoners in their wild evolutions. One of these people displayed his sickle to the king one day, and swore that he would cut off the head of the queen with it. And when, after their sad walk, they had returned to the Temple, they were received by the sentinels and the turnkey with ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... hackles. The plumage is gold or silver, spangled, every feather being of a golden orange, or of a silver white, with a glossy jet-black margin; the cocks have the tail folded like that of a hen, with the sickle feathers shortened straight, or nearly so, and broader than usual. The term hen-cocks is, in consequence, often applied to them; but although the sickle feathers are thus modified, no bird possesses ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... your own heels and putting your knees into your armpits. In this position Peelajee can spend the day with much comfort, which is a wonderful provision of nature. At the present moment he also is engaged in the operation of weeding. In his right hand is a small species of sickle called a koorpee, with which he investigates the root of each weed as a snipe feels in the mud for worms; then with his left hand he pulls it out, gently shakes the earth off it, and contributes it to a small heap beside him. When he has cleared ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... ambush by the thousand, opened up its machine-gun fire. Demetrio's men fell like wheat under the sickle. ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... is sweet in love, the fairest among women, a maid whose like none has seen. Blacker is her hair than the darkness of night, blacker than the berries of the blackberry bush (?). Harder are her teeth (?) than the flints on the sickle. A wreath of flowers is each of her breasts, close nestling on her arms." Wiedemann, who quotes this, adds: "During the whole classic period of Egyptian history with few exceptions (such, for example, as the reign of that great innovator, Amenophis IV) the ideal alike for the male and the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the whole seven were going out for a long expedition, they said to their aunt, 'Dear aunt, if a baby sister comes into the world to-day, wave a white handkerchief, and we will return immediately; but if it is only a boy, just brandish a sickle, and we will go on with ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... now saw the checkerboard before him. He commented on various positions that were favorable or unfavorable, on moves that were not safe to make. He then saw a dagger lying on the checker-board, an object belonging to his father, but transferred to the checker-board by his phantasy. Then a sickle was lying on the board; next a scythe was added; and, finally, he beheld the likeness of an old peasant mowing the grass in front of the boy's distant parental home. A few days later I discovered the meaning of this series of pictures. Disagreeable family relations had made the boy nervous. It ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... lion in the vicinity, he would sit dreaming for hours amongst the rock tombs at full noon or fall of evening or by the light of the sickle-moon; a perfectly absurd proceeding where big game is concerned. Food or sleep meant nothing to him, so that his usual good-temper was sharpened and his undoubted good looks enchanced by a certain romantic gauntness under the cheek-bone. ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... Seville and other cities of Andalusia, where they were settled on estates which had been confiscated by the inquisitors; who looked forward, no doubt, with satisfaction to the time, when they should be permitted to thrust their sickle into the new crop of heresy, whose seeds were thus sown amid the ashes of the old one. Those who preferred to remain in the conquered Moorish territory, as Castilian subjects, were permitted the free enjoyment ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... counties, a rural district had its harvest operations affected by continuous rains. The crops being much laid, wind was desired in order to restore them to a condition fit for the sickle. A minister, in his Sabbath services, expressed their want in prayer as follows:—"O Lord, we pray thee to send us wind; no a rantin' tantin' tearin' wind, but a noohin' (noughin?) soughin' winnin' wind." More expressive words than these could not ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... son living along with her. He went out every morning through the trees to get sticks, and one day as he was lying on the ground he saw a swarm of flies flying over what the cow leaves behind her. He took up his sickle and hit one blow at them, and hit that hard he left no ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... to see poor Everett's body, lyin' in a foot o' drifted snow. It looked like a girl of fifteen—not a hair on the little fellow's face. He'd been shot through the temple, but the Malo'ts had left their mark on him. Stalky unbuttoned the tunic, and showed it to us—a rummy sickle-shaped cut on the chest. 'Member the snow all white on his eyebrows, Tertius? 'Member when Stalky moved the lamp and it looked ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... discover thy enemy, and the darkness of midnight shall not protect thy rest. Thou shalt plant in terror, and I will reap in blood; thou shalt sow the earth with corn, and I will strew it with ashes; thou shalt go forth with the sickle, and I will follow after with the scalping-knife; thou shalt build, and I will burn,—till the white man or the Indian perish ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... pearl, who is dead; his pearl has fallen in the grass, and he has been unable to find it; he cannot tear himself away from the spot where she had been. He entered in that arbour green; it was August, that sunny season, when the corn has just fallen under the sickle; there the pearl had "trendeled doun" among the glittering, richly-coloured plants, gilly-flowers, gromwell seed, and peonies, splendid in their hues, sweeter in their smell.[581] He sees a forest, rocks that ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... employed in agriculture. Crops were cut with scythe and sickle, while old scythe-blades fastened at one end of a wooden bench did duty to cut turnips in slices to feed the cattle, and farm work generally was largely ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... voice was wanting to the house; and the absence of his merry whistle seemed to make Sir Marmaduke's heart sink like lead as he donned his heavy boots, and went forth in the silver dew of the summer morning to judge which of his cornfields would soonest be ready for the sickle. Until this expedition of his sons he had, for more than fourteen years never been alone in those morning rounds on his farm; and much as he loved his daughters, they seemed to weigh very light in the scale compared with the sturdy heir who ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thrashing the wheat in this locality. That consists of cutting it with the sickle and having the women and children glean. The main crop is scattered on the floor, as it is called, being a hard piece of ground near the house, and then the wheat is treaded out by a pair of donkeys attached to a roller about as big as our garden roller. After it is out of ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... watching Lubin, however, for Lubin was part of the garden, and all his associations with him were pleasant. The scent of the flowers and the grass possessed him. The sun was far from setting, and a young crescent moon was hovering high in the heavens, looking like a silver sickle against the blue. From the distant church came the sound of bells ringing for even-song, faint as horns of elf-land, through the still air. He felt that he would like to lie there always—just resting, and drinking in the ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... slightly increasing her speed, and did not see the dark figure of the man by the fence. A hood was drawn to her eyes and a fold of her cloak covered her chin. He could see now only a wisp of face like a sickle of a silver moon, and the feeling that disturbed him in the day did not return to him. He again imagined her cold and hard, a woman of middle age, battered by the world, an adventuress who did not fear to go forth in the night upon what he ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... down Duke-street, then the Coleshill road at the A B house. From thence down the meadows, to Cooper's mill; up the river to the foot of Deritend bridge; and then turn sharp to the right, keeping the course of a drain in the form of a sickle, through John a Dean's hole, into Digbeth, from whence we set out. In marching along Duke-street, we leave about seventy houses to the left, and up the river Rea, about four hundred more in Deritend, reputed part of Birmingham, though not ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... effort to elude a demonstrative cabman near the corner of one of the main thoroughfares, the brown pony brought the wheels of the vehicle into collision with a lamp-post. That lamp-post went down before the shock like a tall head of grain before the sickle. The front wheels doubled up into a sudden embrace, broke loose, and went across the road, one into a greengrocer's shop, the other into a chemist's window. Thus diversely end many careers that begin on a footing of equality! The hind-wheels ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... almost reached the sheltered bay, We could see father stand Upon the little jetty here, His sickle in his hand; The houses white, the yellow fields, The ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... her veils concealed, What heavenly reaper, when the day was done And harvest gathered in, had idly thrown That golden sickle on the ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... she struggled forward through the extinguished beauty of the world. A thin white sickle of a moon painted on the sky looked cynically down at her. Stumbling, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... the boatbuilder's letter, and a sickening fear of something, she knew not what, crept into the heart of Katherine and spoiled for her the glory of that winter afternoon. The sun went down in flaming splendours of crimson and gold, a young moon hung like a sickle of silver above the dark pine forest, and everywhere below was the white ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... 'has thrust his sickle into another field of slaughter, and will not draw it out till he swims in Christian blood, as once before in Syrian. God help these poor souls.' 'What, Isaac, was the manner of her death, if you ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... but the jagged teeth of whitish rock, and the green swelling stems of the plantain, from ten to fifteen feet in height, and as large as a man's leg, or larger. The stalks of the plantain are juicy and herbaceous, and of so yielding a texture, that with a sickle you might entirely sever the largest of them at a single stroke. How such a multitude of succulent plants could find nourishment on what seemed to the eye little else than barren rock, ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... He appeared to have little affection for his mother and still less for his father, with whom he had come to blows on one occasion. At the age of twenty, in a quarrel with some companions, one of them struck him with a sickle and fractured his skull. He had been convicted several times of ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... casual observer as a dull animal, yet in reality he is very active and bright, and when at home displays his marvellous genius in many ways! His upturned hands become powerful shovels, and by the aid of an extra bone, the sickle, which belongs to the inside of the thumb, he is enabled to work like an athlete. His velvet-like hair stands straight up, like the pile on velvet, and his tiny eyes are so hidden by hair that they ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... the roads in particular cleared of all possibility of concealment or shelter. Seen from above, the effect of this wreckage was grotesque. Young woods had been destroyed whole-sale by dragging wires, and the spoilt saplings, smashed or uprooted, lay in swathes like corn after the sickle. Houses had an appearance of being flattened down by the pressure of a gigantic finger. Much burning was still going on, and large areas had been reduced to patches of smouldering and sometimes ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... they taught the people to believe that oaks on which it was seen growing were to be respected, because of the wonderful cures which the priests were then able to effect with it, particularly of the falling sickness. The parasite was cut from the tree with a golden sickle at a high and solemn festival, using much ceremonial display, it being then credited with a special power of "giving fertility to all animals." Ovid said, "Ad ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... person appears in it. Let the end come as it may, here I am ready to profit by it: here I am, facing both ways, with perfect ease and security—a moral agriculturist, with his eye on two crops at once, and his swindler's sickle ready for ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... far away up the rippling river on which the white swan floated—Montsalvat, the land of eternal dawn, where all things remained for ever young, and the flowers and the corn grew always and never faded nor fell to the sickle. It is the land Mignon aspired to—"Oh let me for ever then remain young"—the impossible dream of poets and millions of men and women who were not poets: Nirvana, with a difference; that realm in which, tired with the struggles and fights in the devious ways of this dark ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... excrescence, which, though often used in time of peace, would be dropped, like the limb of a shell-fish, the moment it was assailed; time is too precious, and the harvest of living extravagances nods too heavily to my sickle, that I should blunt ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... patience and love. Well, my child, if you go on sowing this seed in your garden now, in the spring-time of life, you must not murmur when autumn gives you a harvest of thorns and thistles. If you sow tares in your field, you must not expect to find corn there when you put in your sickle to reap. You can take back your morning salutation. It is not a 'merry Christmas' to you or to me; and I think we are both ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... say less, there was so much of her, and it was all arranged as perfectly as if she were about to be photographed. No normal woman, merely sitting down, with no other object than to be comfortable, would curve the tail of her gown round in front of her like a sickle; or have just the point of one shoe daintily poised on a footstool; or the sofa-cushions at exactly the right angle behind her head to make a background; or the finger with all her best rings on it, keeping the place ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... punishment: "Because of the wrath of the Lord, it shall not be inhabited, but it shall be wholly desolate. Every one that goeth by Babylon shall be astonished, and hiss at all her plagues. Cut off the sower from Babylon, and him that handleth the sickle in the time of harvest. I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water. And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah: it shall never be inhabited, neither dwelt in from generation to generation; but wild beasts of the deserts ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... west and north and south for land, and always there was only the weary waste of waters. And as the sun rose, they hardly dared open their eyes to the unbroken rim of blue-grey that circled them like a steel prison. They saw the thin edge of the moon grow to full blaze and then fade to a corn sickle again as days and nights grew to weeks and a ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... manner, he waited his time for making his entry into Peru. He suffered his communications to do their work in the minds of the people, and was careful not to thrust in the sickle before ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... treatise on the form and material of the sickle used by the Welsh Druids in cutting the mistletoe,' being a series of quotations in Arabic, Hindoo, Greek, German, and Gaelic, cemented together by thin lines of English. This is a stock job which ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... melancholy instance, the wife of Lot was cut off as in a moment: she was ripe for the sickle, and justice delayed not to gather her into the storehouse of wrath; she cumbered the ground by her impieties, and was worthy of no additional cultivation. Here we behold an awful specimen of the obstinacy of sinners, the effect of disobedience, and the determination of ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... he knows not how. [4:28]The earth produces spontaneously, first the stalk, then the head, then the full wheat in the head. [4:29]And when the wheat delivers itself, he immediately sends out the sickle, because the harvest has come. [4:30]And he said, To what shall I liken the kingdom of God? or with what parable shall I present it? [4:31]It is like a mustard seed, which when sown in the earth is the least of all ...
— The New Testament • Various
... that have long toiled in the five acre. Under the crescent moon, in those mild September evenings, the old superstitions of the Saxon Druids are repeated, while many a beautiful Norma, crowned with vervain and mistletoe, a gleaming sickle in her hand, and her eyes filled with the prophetic light of love, reigns a queen over the honest loving hearts of swains who lay at her feet the brightest wisps of the upland. And the humble Ruth is there, too, with her sweet patient face, and her timid ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... Coma Bernices form a rich group; the sickle in Leo, the seven stars in Ursa Major, and those in Cassiopeia and Aquila are familiarly known to all observers. Besides these, there are many other groups and aggregations of stars which adorn the celestial vault and enhance ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... with the hum of labour; trees bend beneath the thick clusters of rich fruit which bow their branches to the ground; and the corn, piled in graceful sheaves, or waving in every light breath that sweeps above it, as if it wooed the sickle, tinges the landscape with a golden hue. A mellow softness appears to hang over the whole earth; the influence of the season seems to extend itself to the very wagon, whose slow motion across the well-reaped field, is perceptible ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... has the appearance represented in the following figure. The spots resemble two eyes and the sketch of a nose; resulting in a vague human figure, as indicated on the lower disk. Others see a man carrying a bundle of wood, a hare, a lion, a dog, a kangaroo, a sickle, two heads embracing, etc.[13] But generally speaking, there is a tendency to see a ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... harvest comes apace; Ripen our spirits by thy grace, That we may calmly meet the blow The sickle gives to ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... character long familiar to Canada. All emigrants with families were to be carried thither at the King's expense; and every settler was to receive in free gift a gun, a hoe, an axe, a ploughshare, a scythe, a sickle, two augers, large and small, a sow, six hens, a cock, six pounds of powder, and twelve pounds of lead; while to these favors were added many others. The result was that twelve families were persuaded to go, or about a twentieth part of the number ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... nothing happens to the sea. Nothing happens to the sky. The sun comes up from the east and goes down to the west. The moon grows from a sickle to an arc lamp, and comes later and later until she is lost in the light as other things are lost in the darkness. After the typhoon, the flying-fish glitter in the sunshine like birds. It's amazing how they get ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... tips of the spruce, now seen to be rather close at hand, shone a slender, silver crescent moon, darkening, hiding, shining again, climbing until its exquisite sickle-point topped the trees, and then, magically, it cleared them, radiant and cold. While the eastern black wall shaded still blacker, the park blanched and the border-line opposite began to ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... motion in the Heaven, The wind doth chase the flag upon the tower, Fast sweep the clouds, the sickle[34] of the moon, Struggling, darts snatches of uncertain light; No form of star is visible! That one White stain of light, that single glimmering yonder, Is from Cassiopeia, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... that the time for finishing them off had arrived. Then the war-cry rang out, and with one splendid dash the Zulus were amongst the densest mass of their foes. Nothing could withstand the fury of their onslaught and the Makalakas tell under their spears like corn to the sickle. ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... a long, long sleep, and in the sleep dreams of her father standing with his face to the foe and sweeping them down with his long sword as a sickle sweeps corn—of her father felled by the pilgrim knave, dying upon the floor of his own house, and saying "God will guard you. His will be done." Dreams of Godwin and Wulf also fighting to save her, ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... the field with splendid determination. "It was the onset of battle," said a Federal officer present, "with the good order of a review." But the iron hail of grape and canister, laying the ripe wheat low as if it had been cut with a sickle, and tossing the shocks in air, rent the advancing lines from end to end. Hundreds fell, hundreds swarmed back to the woods, but still the brigades pressed on, and through the smoke of battle the waving colours led the charge. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... women reaped the corn, and the men bound up the sheaves. The strokes of the sickle were timed by the modulation of the harvest-song, in which all their voices were united.' Johnson's Works, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... sustained by the company were great: the cold destroyed the stock, and their crops often perished from moisture. On the Hampshire Hills many hundred lambs died in a night. Sometimes the season never afforded a chance to use the sickle: in the morning the crop was laden with hoar frost, at noon it was drenched with the thaw, and in the evening covered with dews; and thus rotted on the ground. The agent, however, did not despair, and the company anticipated a dividend in ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... own money and our men Shall a dreadful war begin. Between the sickle and the suck All England shall have ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... the Maiden sung As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work, And o'er the sickle bending; I listen'd till I had my fill; And, as I mounted up the hill, 30 The music in my heart I bore, Long after it ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... the Titans of old. That colossus, gold-armoured, stupendous, Perched high on the "Privilege" ramparts, and bastioned by big bags of bullion, Is "Capital"; he's the new Jove, and each Titan would treat as his scullion, But look at the huge Hundred-Handed One, armed with the scythe and the sickle, The hammer, the ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... the wild strains of Homeric song and mystic rites of Chaldea and Babylon, and the sacred chant of Isis. The Voodoo danced to the rattle of shells and antelope hoofs before the shrines of Ethiopia's dark woman, crowned with the sickle moon, and vast multitudes knelt and lay prostrate before the car of Juggernaut and the passing image of Pracriti of Asia, the many-breasted, ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... Voice which says to everything: "Dream what you will, I'll make you bear your seed. And, having borne, the sickle comes among ye And takes your stalk." The rich and sappy greens Of spring or June show life within the loins, And all the world is fair, for now the plant Can drink the level cup of flame where heaven Is poured full by the sun. But when the blossom Flutters its colors, then it takes the cup And ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... the shield, the spear, and the javelin, while the long-bow, once so formidable, is now rarely drawn, except by those who cater for sensation-journals. The king's-arm and artillery of the last war cannot stand before the Minie rifle and Whitworth cannon any more than the sickle can keep pace with the McCormick reaper, or the slow coach with the railway-car or the telegraph. Mail-clad steamers, impervious to shells and red-hot balls, and almost, if not quite, invulnerable by solid shot and balls from rifled cannon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... rivulets trickle, Men fall by thy hands swift and lithe, As corn falleth down to the sickle, As grass falleth down to the scythe, Thine arm, strong and cruel, and shapely, Lifts high the sharp, pitiless lance, And rapine and ruin and rape lie Around thee. The Furies advance, And ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... but she did not tell her of the long, brisk twilight, mid-day, and moonlight walks she and the baronet took on deck. How, leaning over the bulwarks, they watched the sun set, round and red, into the sea, and the silver sickle May moon rise, like another Aphrodite, out of the waves. She did not tell her, how they sat side by side at dinner, how he lay at her feet, and read aloud for her, in sheltered sunny nooks, how uncommonly friendly and confidential they became altogether, in these first half-dozen days out. People ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... in deep sleep and night; thick darkness lyes And hatcheth o'er thy people— But hark! what trumpet's that, what angel cries Arise! Thrust in thy sickle! ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... thou hast a care for thy looks, and now for {the art of} pleasing; now thou combest out thy stiffened hair with rakes, {and} now it pleases thee to cut thy shaggy beard with the sickle, and to look at thy fierce features in the water, and {so} to compose them. Thy love for carnage, and thy fierceness, and thy insatiate thirst for blood, {now} cease; and the ships both come and go in safety. Telemus, in the mean time arriving at the Sicilian AEtna, Telemus, the son of Eurymus, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... east to south-west like a scorpion's tail. The natural sea-wall, at once dangerous and safety-giving, protects, to the south and south-east, diabolitos of black rock visible only at high tide: inshore the sickle-shaped breakwater runs by east to south-west, becoming a "sandy hook," and enclosing a basin whose depth ranges from seven to twelve fathoms. Its approach from the south is clean; and the western opening is protected ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... coast, as we swept round, was a vast golden sickle in the early morning light; and everything was so beautiful that the door of my heart swung wide open. No arm would have been strong enough to push it shut, not even Mrs. Senter's. Instead of feeling angry with her, as we drew near Bideford, I was grateful for the adventure ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... used t' this kind uv a sickle," said D'ri, as he felt the edge of his sabre, "but I 'll be dummed ef it don't seem es ef I 'd orter be ruther dang'rous with thet air ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... by brothers' hands? Our glebes have been fattened with the bodies of the slain? On those fields where, with the lark carolling overhead, the peasant drives his ploughshare, other steel than the sickle has glanced, and other shouts have risen than those of happy reapers bearing some blushing, sun-browned maid on their broad shoulders at the Harvest Home. The tall gray stones, the hoary cairns, tell how on other ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... last of the Druidesses of Sein, tall in stature, her eyes blue, with long fair floating hair, dressed in a short black tunic, without sleeves, bearing a golden sickle suspended from a brazen girdle, and crowned with a branch of oak. Here King Arthur was brought by Merlin to recover of his wounds. The inhabitants of the island were celebrated for their ferocity ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... on that sickle thing which you left lying about after cutting the grass,' said Winifred, looking into his face with bitter accusation as ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... degrees of fear, attach unfounded value to trivial circumstances; give occasion to our early prejudices and antipathies; and thus embarrass the happiness of our lives. A copious and curious harvest might be reaped from this province of science, in which, however, I shall not at present wield my sickle. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... wind whispers At the end of summer, When the barley harvest Ripens to the sickle, Who can ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... to our own day to see how changes take place. The writer has cut grain with the old-fashioned sickle, the scythe, the cradle, and the reaper, and has lived to see the harvester cut and thresh the grain in the field. The Egyptians use until this day wooden ploughs of an ancient type formed from limbs of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... The elder brother smiled when he heard that, and thought to himself, "Good God, what a blockhead that brother of mine is! He will never be good for anything as long as he lives. He who wants to be a sickle must bend ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... tears that came into his eyes, and the feeble light which came from the sky, had permitted him to search for it. Very soon he had to confess that he was unable to see a wink, and became angry with the moon, who showed her pointed sickle on the edge of a cloud. He reproached her and heaped bitter invectives on ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... fool: though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come, Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out e'en to the edge ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... Time's fool: though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come, Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out e'en to the ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... ring of his cheery voice was wanting to the house; and the absence of his merry whistle seemed to make Sir Marmaduke's heart sink like lead as he donned his heavy boots, and went forth in the silver dew of the summer morning to judge which of his cornfields would soonest be ready for the sickle. Until this expedition of his sons he had, for more than fourteen years never been alone in those morning rounds on his farm; and much as he loved his daughters, they seemed to weigh very light in the scale compared with the sturdy heir who loved every acre with his ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a sickle against a tree, with its blade projecting; then, standing in front of the blade, hold a handful of reeds across it with both hands, one hand on either side of the blade; pull it towards you, and the reeds will be cut through; ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... in the socket of the riveted, very long, securely placed spears; as high as [1]two[1] cubits was each citadel from the ground; as long as a warrior's spear was the height of each battle-hurdle; as sharp as charmed sword was the blade of each sickle on the sides and the flanks of each of [2]Badb's hurdles;[2] on each of the three stout and hard battle-hurdles they are to be found. Four dark, yet gleaming, well-adorned doors were on each battle-wheeled tower of the three royal wheeled-towers ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... especially to the northern peoples, to the region of the good, green grass. She is the true grazing animal. That broad, smooth, always dewy nose of hers is just the suggestion of green sward. She caresses the grass; she sweeps off the ends of the leaves; she reaps it with the soft sickle of her tongue. She crops close, but she does not bruise or devour the turf like the horse. She is the sward's best friend, and will make it thick ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... mar you and break, And there is none evil but I, the supreme Evil, God. Lo, I say unto both, I am neither; But greater than either; For meeting and mingling in Me they become neither evil nor good; Their cycle is rounded, they know neither hunger nor food, They need neither sickle nor seed-time, nor root nor fruit, They are ultimate, infinite, absolute. Therefore I say unto all that have sinned, East and West and South and North The wings of my measureless love go forth To cover you all: they are free as the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... dingy yellow to a pale green and pale blue, above which came the depth of the blue night, in which rayed resplendent the evening star. Below the star and nearer to the west, lay, very thin and very long, the sickle of the new moon. If death be what it looks to the unthinking soul, and if the heavens declare the glory of God, as they do indeed to the heart that knows him, then is there discord between heaven and earth such as no argument can harmonize. ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... the noon Being enamoured of a damask rose Forgets to journey westward, till the moon The pale usurper of its tribute grows From a thin sickle to a silver shield And chides its loitering car—how oft, in ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... good store of them in Mr. Randolph's library, and Daisy and Preston were very busy the whole morning till luncheon- time. After Daisy's dinner, however, her mind took up its former subject of interest. She went to Joanna, and was furnished with a nice little sponge-cake and a basket of sickle pears for Molly Skelton. Daisy forgot all about tableaux. This was something better. She ordered the pony- chaise and got ready ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... animal and impatiently awaits his turn: "Be quick, while the farmer is not there." They run the risk of a beating for a potful of milk. The weeks pass, the corn has ripened, the harvest begins. The fellahin, armed with a short sickle, cut or rather saw the stalks, a handful at a time. As they advance in line, a flute-player plays them captivating tunes, a man joins in with his voice marking the rhythm by clapping his hands, the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... camp one night and well nigh destroyed them; and how, when he goes into the fight, the Roman javelins drop off without harming him; and how, when he strikes, the Romans fall before his blows like wheat before a sickle." ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... their final consolidation into a single kingdom. It was, however, a work of time, for the turbulent spirit of the Northmen required long and judicious treatment to make them lay down the sword, and take up the spade and sickle. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... Ib No. 169. 'My earlier predecessors had the whole field of life before them, untrodden and unsurveyed; characters of every kind shot up in their way, and those of the most luxuriant growth, or most conspicuous colours, were naturally cropt by the first sickle. They that follow are forced to peep into neglected corners.' The Idler, No. 3. 'The first writers took possession of the most striking objects for description, and the most probable occurrences for fiction.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... who proved his blade on bucklers, South went through the land to whet Brand that oft hath felled his foeman, 'Gainst the forge which foams with song;[48] Mighty wielder of war's sickle Made his sword's avenging edge Hard on hero's helm-prop rattle,[49] ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... How does he prove his assumption? He simply appeals to what he calls "the natural light," which is for him a source of all sorts of information which cannot be derived from experience. This "natural light" furnishes him with a vast number of "eternal truths", these he has not brought under the sickle of his sweeping doubt, and these help him to build up again the world he has overthrown, beginning with the ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... was drawn back, and Wyllard, who lay facing the opening, could see a triangular patch of dim blue sky with a sharp sickle moon hanging low above a black fir branch. The night was clear and still, but now and then among the stunted trees there was a faint elfin sighing that quickly died away again. While still determined, Wyllard was moodily discouraged, ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... of character, a good heart and a poetic imagination, made his life joyous and the world beautiful; till at length Death cut down the sweet, blue flower, that bloomed beside him, and wounded him with that sharp sickle, so that he bowed his head, and would fain have been bound up in the same sheaf with the sweet, blue flower. Then the world seemed to him less beautiful, and life became earnest. It would have been well if he could have forgotten the past; that he might ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... anything forming so fine a rural picture as this. Though it was only the last of February the clover fields were being mowed, and a second crop would follow; the barley and wheat were nearly ready for the sickle, while the peas and beans, both in full blossom, were picturesque and fragrant. As we progressed through this attractive region the pastures became alive with sheep, goats, many camels, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... it for a scythe or sickle to cut it down: and all I could do was to make one as well as I could, out of one of the broad swords, or cutlasses, which I saved among the arms out of the ship. However, as my first crop was but small, I had no great difficulty to cut it down: in short, I reaped it my way, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... in that Delphic cave Where young Apollo prophet first became, Verona, Mantua were not sole in fame, But Florence, too, her poet now might have: But since the waters of that spring no more Enrich my land, needs must that I pursue Some other planet, and, with sickle new, Reap from my field of sticks and thorns its store. Dried is the olive: elsewhere turn'd the stream Whose source from famed Parnassus was derived. Whereby of yore it throve in best esteem. Me fortune thus, or fault perchance, deprived Of all good fruit—unless eternal Jove Shower on my ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... her woman's innocence to sully and destroy. His love of the woman disappeared in his desire to save, the idea which she represented at that moment; and lost in sentiment he stood watching the white sickle of the moon over against the dim village. The leaves of some pollarded willows whitened when the breeze shot them up to the light, and a moment after became quite distinct in the glare and the steam of an approaching engine. He might go and tell Willy all about it; he would ask him to ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... she threw down her work,—some handkerchief for her shoulders, perhaps, or yet a banner for those unrisen men of Rome, I said,—a white silk square on which she had wrought a hand with a gleaming sickle, reversed by tall wheat whose barbed grains bent full and ripe to the reaper, and round the margin, half-pictured, wound the wild hedge-roses of Paestum. She threw it down and came toward me in haste, and drew me through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... gave up her place to the children. Her expression was noble, like a queen rebuked before her people. There was comfort in that, too. A great, solemn, mutual understanding drew this death-bed group together. Within the sickle's compass so they stood: the woman God gave this man to found a home; the son who inherited his father's gentleness and purity of purpose; the fair flower of the generations that father's sacrifice had helped him win; the ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... wilderness. The little flock are feeding among the blackened stumps of the uncleared chopping: those timbers have lain thus untouched for two long years; the hand was wanting that should have given help in logging and burning them up. The wheat is ripe for the sickle, and the silken beard of the corn is waving like a fair girl's tresses in the evening breeze. The tinkling fall of the cold spring in yonder bank falls soothingly on the ear. Who comes from that low-roofed ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... Rebekah rushed to raise her lord, Kneeling beside him, striving in vain to quench With turban, veil, torn shreds of gown, stained hands, The black blood's sickening gush. He never spoke, Never rewarded with one glance of life The passion in her eyes. He met his end Even as beneath the sickle the full ear Bows to its death—so ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... forward through the extinguished beauty of the world. A thin white sickle of a moon painted on the sky looked cynically down at her. Stumbling, shivering, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... Behold, the field was ripe, and blessed are ye, for ye did thrust in the sickle, and did reap with your might, yea, all the day long did ye labor; and behold the number of your sheaves! And they shall be gathered into the garners, that they ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... herself to the matter-of-fact people by her usefulness, and makes her uselessness adored by poets, artists, and all lovers in all lands; lends herself to every symbolism and to every emblem; is Diana's bow and Venus's mirror and Mary's throne; is a sickle, a scarf, an eyebrow, his face or her face, and look'd at by her or by him; is the madman's hell, the poet's heaven, the baby's toy, the philosopher's study; and while her admirers follow her footsteps, and hang on her lovely looks, she knows how to keep her woman's secret—her other side—unguess'd ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Polydectes, who sought to marry Danae; failing in his suit, and to compel her to submission, he ordered Perseus off to fetch him the head of the Medusa; who, aided by Hermes and Athena, was successful in his mission, cut off the head of the Medusa with the help of a mirror and sickle, brought it away with him in a pouch, and after delivering and marrying Andromeda in his return journey, exposed the head before Polydectes and court at a banquet, which turned them all into stone, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Maiden sang As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work, And o'er the sickle bending;— I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... barn floor is cleared for the dance of the weary feet that have long toiled in the five acre. Under the crescent moon, in those mild September evenings, the old superstitions of the Saxon Druids are repeated, while many a beautiful Norma, crowned with vervain and mistletoe, a gleaming sickle in her hand, and her eyes filled with the prophetic light of love, reigns a queen over the honest loving hearts of swains who lay at her feet the brightest wisps of the upland. And the humble Ruth is ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... plumes in the pride of civilisation. The ruined castles on the crags and the new villages on the lowlands told their own story of Turkish and Algerine piracy, now doomed to the limbo of things that were. In the evening we were safely anchored within the zancle (sickle) of Messina-port, whose depth of water and circular shape have suggested an old crater flooded. It was Sunday, and we were greeted with the familiar sounds, the ringing of cracked bells, the screaming of harsh, hoarse voices, a military band and detached musical performances. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... "beau pays" of France, I had imagined myself to have been a courteous, a grateful, and, under all points of view, an ORTHODOX Visitor. It seems however, from the language of the French Typographer, that I acted under a gross delusion; and that it was necessary to have recourse to his sharp-set sickle to cut away all the tares which I had sown in the soil of his country. Upon the motive and the merit of his labours, I have already given my unbiassed opinion.[A] Here, it is only necessary to observe, that I have not, consciously, falsified his opinions, or undervalued ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... to begin again at sunrise to toil and sweat again until evening. Then, lifting your bent body with pain and difficulty, you will look to see how little you have done, and that the field has widened and now stretches away before you to the far horizon. And in despair you will cast the sickle away and abandon ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... in on itself in a curving mass at the back. Over it the frost had raised a crisp web of hair that covered its solid smoothness like a net. Anne's head was the head of a hunting Diana; it might have fitted into the sickle moon. ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... is one Voice which says to everything: "Dream what you will, I'll make you bear your seed. And, having borne, the sickle comes among ye And takes your stalk." The rich and sappy greens Of spring or June show life within the loins, And all the world is fair, for now the plant Can drink the level cup of flame where heaven Is poured full by the sun. But when the blossom Flutters its colors, then it ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... further through his chosen vessel, refers to the harvest of the tare class, saying, "The harvest of the earth is ripe. And he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth; and the earth was reaped." (Revelation 14:15,16) This gathering of the elements of Christendom, the vine of the earth, and the reaping of it for destruction, is now in progress. It is one feature of the Lord's work, which proves his ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... silt. Some islets had already been absorbed in the advancing shoreline, and the same fate awaited others.[808] Farther up this western coast of Greece, the island of Leukas has been converted into a peninsula by a sickle-shaped sandbar extending across the narrow channel.[809] Nature is working in its leisurely way to attach Sakhalin to the Siberian coast. The strong marine current which sets southward from the Okhotsk Sea through the Strait of Tartary carries silt from the mouth of the heavy laden ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... hogs and cattle turned into fields of ripe wheat, for lack of laborers to gather it in. The fertile soil had given Illinois five million bushels of wheat, and it was too much. It was more than the sickle and the scythe could cut. Men toiled and sweltered to save the yellow affluence from destruction. They worked by day and by night; and their wives and children worked. But the tragic aspect of the grain crop is this—it must be gathered quickly or it breaks down and ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... "Where the sickle blades have been, Nannette, gathering ears of corn, Passes bending down, my queen, To the earth where ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... advanced, it breathed and belched forth tongues of flame; its nostrils seemed to breathe death and destruction, and the Huns, terrified by its appearance, were mown down like corn falling to the reaper's sickle. ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... jasper, which at first did not seem very well adapted to any purpose; and yet, although mere fragments, they had every appearance of having been purposely shaped, and not of accidental resemblances to a hook or sickle blade. When I got home I read that perfect specimens, mine being certain pieces of the same form, had been found off in Norway; and Professor Nilsson, who has carefully studied the whole subject, says they are fish-hooks made of flint, the largest being bone. Hooks of exactly the same pattern ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... a care for thy looks, and now for {the art of} pleasing; now thou combest out thy stiffened hair with rakes, {and} now it pleases thee to cut thy shaggy beard with the sickle, and to look at thy fierce features in the water, and {so} to compose them. Thy love for carnage, and thy fierceness, and thy insatiate thirst for blood, {now} cease; and the ships both come and go in safety. Telemus, in the mean time arriving ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest." The import of the saying seems to be that while months would elapse before the wheat and the barley were ready for the sickle, the harvest of souls, exemplified by the approaching crowd, was even then ready; and that from what He had sown the disciples might reap, to their inestimable advantage, since they would have wages for their hire and ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... lazy ages lost in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy chronicles; Such whose supine felicity but makes In story chasms, in epochas mistakes, O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down, Till with his silent sickle they ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... have begun to ripen, and the corn will soon be ready for the sickle; of this fact our forefathers were reminded by the Lammas Festival, which was celebrated on the first of this month. Lammas is a shortened form of the word Loaf-mass, or feast of the loaf. A loaf of bread was made of the first-ripe ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... Horn, No more shall wake them from their lowly Bed. For them no more the blazing Hearth shall burn, Or busy Houswife ply her Evening Care: No Children run to lisp their Sire's Return, Or climb his Knees the envied Kiss to share. Oft did the Harvest to their Sickle yield, Their Furrow oft the stubborn Glebe has broke; How jocund did they they drive their Team afield! How bow'd the Woods beneath their sturdy Stroke! Let not Ambition mock their useful Toil, Their homely Joys and Destiny obscure; ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... there is the entire tradition of the Danaides, and of the tower of Danae and golden shower; the birth of Perseus connecting this legend with that of the Gorgons and Graiae, who are the true clouds of thunderous ruin and tempest. I must, in passing, mark for you that the form of the sword or sickle of Perseus, with which he kills Medusa, is another image of the whirling harpy vortex, and belongs especially to the sword of destruction or annihilation; whence it is given to the two angels who gather for destruction the evil harvest ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... living among the woods, and her only son living along with her. He went out every morning through the trees to get sticks, and one day as he was lying on the ground he saw a swarm of flies flying over what the cow leaves behind her. He took up his sickle and hit one blow at them, and hit that hard he left no ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... formerly occupied; and then we returned to the shore and visited the garden, which had been formed in a small natural clearing within about a quarter of a mile of the house. Here we found a goodly patch of wheat, almost ready for the sickle: a large plot of potatoes, which, my father said, grew but indifferently well in that climate; a few other English vegetables, some yams, and several fruit-trees of various kinds, including the very useful bread-fruit, ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... beyond average men, he wanted. Consequently, the world never before beheld such a scene of massacre as his 'Paradise Lost' exhibited. He laid himself down to his work of extermination like the brawniest of reapers going in steadily with his sickle, coat stripped off, and shirt sleeves tucked up, to deal with an acre of barley. One duty, and no other, rested upon his conscience; one voice he heard—Slash away, and hew down the rotten growths of this abominable amanuensis. ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... associations with him were pleasant. The scent of the flowers and the grass possessed him. The sun was far from setting, and a young crescent moon was hovering high in the heavens, looking like a silver sickle against the blue. From the distant church came the sound of bells ringing for even-song, faint as horns of elf-land, through the still air. He felt that he would like to lie there always—just resting, and drinking in the beauty of ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... slopes or plains he will sometimes observe a dozen yokes of oxen ploughing abreast. The laborers probably chose this contiguity for the sake of company across the wide fields. If the grass or grain is to be cut, it is by both men and women armed with a rude sickle only. It is seldom you meet either man or woman on foot upon the roads; men scarcely ever. Donkeys are about as numerous as men, and their ludicrous bray salutes your ear wherever the human animal is to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... red (top) and black with a centered yellow emblem consisting of a five-pointed star within half a cogwheel crossed by a machete (in the style of a hammer and sickle) ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... is nodding on valley and plain, To the scythe and the sickle its treasures must yield; Through sunshine and shower we have tended the grain; 'Tis ripe to our hand!—to the field—to the field! If the sun on our labours too warmly should smile, Why a horn of good ale shall the long hours beguile. Then, a largess! a largess!—kind stranger, ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... the soul gropes instinctively in search of some sign of a shielding arm and a watchful power. The Bible, the Crucifix, a cheap little charm—any of these may bring comfort to the man in the trench, and give him the illusion that he is not one of those marked for the sickle of Death. ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... "Is THAT so, Van Sickle? ... Listen here. If you and Sage King don't get more wild running to-morrow than you ever had I'll never ride again!" With this retort Lucy left ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... learned Egypt meant the year. 60 A staff he carried, where on high A glass was fix'd to measure by, As amber boxes made a show For heads of canes an age ago. His vest, for day and night, was pied, A bending sickle arm'd his side, And Spring's new months his train adorn; The other Seasons ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... institutions. "While the king marched in front, laying waste the land of the Philistines," says the figurative Antonio Agapida, "Queen Isabella followed his traces as the binder follows the reaper, gathering and garnering the rich harvest that has fallen beneath his sickle. In this she was greatly assisted by the counsels of that cloud of bishops, friars, and other saintly men which continually surrounded her, garnering the first fruits of this infidel land into the granaries of the Church." Leaving her thus piously employed, the king ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... the patricians flocking to the Council, 260 (Which they dare not refuse, at the dread signal Pealing from out their Patron Saint's proud tower,) Will then be gathered in unto the harvest, And we will reap them with the sword for sickle. If some few should be tardy or absent, them, 'Twill be but to be taken faint and single, When the majority are ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the evening, the tide aiding, they had drifted across many headlands and past carven cliffs of marvellous designs to a long sickle sweep of strand on which two men could be seen solemnly walking up and down. Then, at a signal from Patsy, Godfrey McCulloch let down the anchor and pulled in hand over hand the little skiff which they had been dragging in their wake ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... labour; trees bend beneath the thick clusters of rich fruit which bow their branches to the ground; and the corn, piled in graceful sheaves, or waving in every light breath that sweeps above it, as if it wooed the sickle, tinges the landscape with a golden hue. A mellow softness appears to hang over the whole earth; the influence of the season seems to extend itself to the very wagon, whose slow motion across the well-reaped field, is perceptible only to the eye, but strikes ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... Van Sickle. Riverside reader, 2nd. (Adapted.) Compare with Little red hen in Blaisdell. Child life, in tale and fable. 2nd reader. Lansing. Rhymes and stories. ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... and kindness fickle, The swallow goes south with you: I go west Where fields are empty and scythes at rest. I am the poppy and you the sickle; My heart is broken ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... is read in the book of St. Clement that he said that he should be worshipped of all men as God, and that he might do all that he would. And he said yet more: When my mother Rachel commanded me that I should go reap corn in the field, and saw the sickle ready to reap with, I commanded the sickle to reap by itself alone, and it reaped ten times more than any other. And yet he added hereto more, after Jerome, and said: I am the Word of God, I am the Holy Ghost, I am Almighty, I am all that is of God. He made serpents ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... was shining full upon the bosom of Teviot, and glittering upon the rustling leaves of the woods that overhang her banks, and pouring a flood of more golden light upon the already golden grain that waved—ripe for the sickle—along the margin of the lovely stream, the stars, few in number, but most brilliant, had taken their places in the sky; the owl was whooping from the ivied tower; the corn-craik was calling drowsily; now and then the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... the Herberts presented a most lively appearance; for a large number of country girls, and active young men, were engaged in them. They reaped the fields in those days with the sickle; and had not come to our own times, when the work is mostly done by a machine, and all the music, poetry, and pleasure, seem to have gone out of the operation. Harvest-time used to be of all the year the most ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... with his comrades to the forbidden meadows of the King, to get grass for the horses; but he never took a sickle with him, but pulled all the grass with his hands, and gathered himself as much as ten men together could mow. When the other grooms saw this they were amazed at his strength. His fame at length ...
— The Russian Garland - being Russian Falk Tales • Various
... completely mountainous. The two ports of Dellys and Bougie were their sea-cities, and gave the French infinite trouble: the plain between the two is the great wheat-growing country, where the Kabyle farmer reaps a painful crop with his saw-edged sickle. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... saffron and from saffron to grey. The plaintive voices of homing cows floated up to him from the valley below. A bat had left its shelter and was wheeling around him, a sinister blot against the sky. A sickle moon gleamed over the trees. George felt cold. He turned. The shadows of night wrapped him round, and little things in the hedgerows chirped and chittered mockery at him as he ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... his chariot on; his sickle-wheels smote to earth many brave and strong, yet the tree stood. The winds blew fiercely among its branches; the lightning danced and quivered above and around it; the thunder muttered forth its threatenings; the torrent washed about its roots; yet it stood, grew strong and stately, and ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... sufficient food, but with enough spiritual fervor to kindle two religious services a day and three on Sunday. Attacking the vast prairies with their primitive implements, harvesting grain with the sickle and grinding it by hand when their water power gave out, sheltering themselves in tents and caves, enduring agues and fevers, hunger and cold, the majority still remained loyal to the leader whose eloquence fired them with a sustaining hope. Thrift, unremitting toil, ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... there is nothing to correspond with it in the reality from which his heart and his baby came. You try to say there is no God, and then you begin to grow old and the friends you love best on earth pass away, as Carlyle said his mother did, like "the last pale rim or sickle of the moon which had once been full, sinking in the dark seas." You cannot help wondering whether great souls can be so at the mercy of a few particles of matter that when these are disturbed the spirit is plunged into oblivion! You never really have gotten rid ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Louis XI. had employed fifty years earlier to destroy the feudal system, and Robespierre one hundred and fifty years later to destroy the aristocracy. Every woodman needs an axe, every reaper a sickle, and Richelieu found the instrument he required in de Laubardemont, Councillor ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... which it is suspended. In olden times the ancient Britons believed their gods were in the oaks. When the misletoe berries were ripe, the Druids invited the people to a great feast, and the oldest Druid, dressed in white, climbed up the trees where the misletoe grew, and with a golden sickle cut it down, while the other Druids sang and prayed. We have various accounts of the misletoe, and of the strange superstitious proceedings in gathering it. The misletoe is supposed to be the golden bough which AEneas made use of, to introduce himself to the Elysian regions. ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... town of two thousand inhabitants, with a thirteenth-century church, with mediaeval houses with quaint stone porticoes and outside staircases. There is one street, shaped like a sickle, with a handle that is the ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... are common. The waters swarm with numerous varieties of duck. It surprises us at this utmost distance from the maritime border to see flocks of Arctic gulls circling around the low sand-hills, and sickle-bill curlews wheeling high in air above their broods. Before we get far into this region we shall notice that one of its most typical features is the alkali-pool. Every few miles we come to a shallow basin of stagnant water saturated with salts of soda and potash. Still another characteristic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... before day. In a few weeks an ordaining council has assembled, his old pastor and theological teacher being among the number. The harvest was ripe, waiting for the reapers to put in the sickle, and what began as ecclesiastical council ended in a gracious revival. The Arkansas lad was now a minister; the dream of ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 2, June, 1898 • Various
... Falcate: sickle-shaped; convexly curved: a wing when deeply excavated below the apex so as to leave the latter acute and ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... examination showed he must have been dead some hours. That he had been killed by a bear was also very evident. He was naked to the waist, and had been cutting grass. His bundle lay by him, and the long curved kind of sickle that the hillmen used to cut grass with was stuck in his girdle, showing that he had not had time to draw it to strike one blow in his defence. The mark of the bear's paw on his left side was quite distinct. This had ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... that four of my greatest friends at school, ten short years ago, are long since dead. Like the trees felled by the woodman's axe, they were struck down by the sickle of the silent Reaper, even as the golden sheaves that are gathered into the beautiful barns. Other trees will spring up and shade the naked earth in the woods with their mantle ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... and Eve went down to the land of black mud and came near to the wheat God had showed them and saw that it was ripe and ready for reaping, they did not have a sickle to reap it with. So they readied themselves, and began to pull up the wheat by hand, until it ...
— First Book of Adam and Eve • Rutherford Platt
... found that he was fickle, Was that great oak tree, She was in a pretty pickle, As she well might be - But his gallantries were mickle, For Death followed with his sickle, And her tears began to trickle For her great oak tree! Sing hey, Lackaday! Let the tears fall free For the pretty little flower and the ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... of cowards Rainouart made straight for the enemy, and before him they fell as corn before a sickle. 'Strike, soldiers,' shouted he; 'strike and avenge the noble Vivian; woe to the King Desrame if he crosses my path.' And a messenger came and said to Desrame, 'It is Rainouart with the iron staff, the strongest man in ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... martyr Cyprian refused to recognize Baptism conferred by heretics or schismatics, yet so great are his merits, culminating in the crown of martyrdom, that the light of his charity dispels the darkness of his fault, and if anything needed pruning, the sickle of his passion ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... mite, said to have been "extracted from the human face" in New Orleans. The body is oblong, square behind; the head is long and pointed, while the maxillae end in a long, curved, toothed, sickle-like blade. That this creature has the habits of the itch mite is suggested by the curious, large, hair-like spines with which the body and legs are sparsely armed, some being nearly half as long as the ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... cohesion? Neither have they thrown out a troop in advance, as should even in times of peace be done, and their rear is straggling from here to Bedhampton. Yea,' he continued, suddenly shaking his long arm at the troopers, and calling out to them, 'ye are corn ripe for the sickle and waiting only for the reapers!' Several of them reined up at this sudden out-flame. 'Hit the crop-eared rascal over the pate, Jack!' cried one to another, wheeling his horse round; but there was that in my father's ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the woodshed way to the dining room. It was that of Rev. Mr. Gulmore, who after a long absence, hearing the Romanizing tendencies that threatened to desolate this once stanch Presbyterian family, came, he said, "with his sickle," to cut down the cockles, and "weed out this once ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... trees we will make room for in our plans. But you must cut out the dead tops and spray the trees. We want even these old trees to look comfortable and happy. Oh, they are sickle pears and nearly ripe. Just such ones as grew on father's place near Middletown; and I, a girl in sun bonnet and gingham apron, climbed the trees or picked them from a ladder. I must have a sun bonnet again and some gingham aprons. When you come ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... slowly and with almost an apologetic air, as if it regretted the painful duty of putting an end to the perfect summer day. Over to the west beyond the trees there still lingered a faint afterglow, and a new moon shone like a silver sickle above the big barn. Sally came out of the house and bowed gravely three times for luck. She stood on the gravel, outside the porch, drinking in the sweet evening scents, ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... the religion of the Druids for its great character. Wherefore it is to be rank'd with those other frivolous things, which superstition has introduced into physick; unless a person can work himself up into a belief, that the golden sickle, with which it was cut down, the priest's snow-white garment, the sacrifice of white bulls, and other such trifling circumstances, are conducive towards ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... found its way into the tiled stove during the last hard winter, when people were even forced to burn dried cakes of dung, there is still hidden away in the garret a rusty sickle which once went off to the fields, shining and merry, and stretched low at one swing of the arm a thousand golden-green stalks; and above it hangs the uncanny scythe which a farm-hand once ran into ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... glass of beer with him. We poked sceptically for a while amongst the bushes, peered without conviction into a ditch or two. There was not a sound: patches of slime glimmered feebly amongst the reeds. Slowly we trudged back, drooping under the thin sickle of the moon, and I heard him mutter to himself, "Himmel! Zwei und dreissig Pfund!" He was impressed by the figure of my loss. For a long time we had ceased to hear ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... perfect, the conditions were apparently ideal. I shall never forget the sight of the first swordfish, with his great sickle-shaped tail and his purple fin. Nor am I likely to forget my disappointment when he totally ignored the flying-fish bait we ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... vanish'd in the distant rear. All-cased he flamed in brass, and on the sight 80 Flash'd as the lightnings of Jove AEgis-arm'd. As reapers, toiling opposite,[7] lay bare Some rich man's furrows, while the sever'd grain, Barley or wheat, sinks as the sickle moves, So Greeks and Trojans springing into fight 85 Slew mutual; foul retreat alike they scorn'd, Alike in fierce hostility their heads Both bore aloft, and rush'd like wolves to war. Discord, spectatress terrible, that sight Beheld exulting; she, of all the Gods, 90 ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... originally brought, it was said, from the country of the Hyperboreans, by Hercules, and planted in Olympia, where it was sacredly preserved to furnish garlands for the victors in the games. The leaves were cut from the tree by a boy chosen for the purpose. He gathered the leaves by means of a golden sickle, which was set apart expressly to this use. When the time arrived for the crowning of the victor, the candidate was brought forward in presence of a vast concourse of spectators, and placed upon a tripod, which was originally formed of bronze, but in ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... 7-1/2 pts." The "925" is circled, and the date is boxed. Accompanying the pitcher is a silver tray with the monogram "G S B" in script in the center. The tray is marked on the back with an eagle in a circle to the left, an "A" in a shield in the center, and a hammer and sickle in a circle to the right (an ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... hour of separation for the night came. Everything seemed so fearfully still, except the monotonous wash of the waves on the sea-shore! And as far as she could see the landscape by the light of a bright little moon-sickle, there was nothing but a thick screen of trees and shrubbery. She groped her way to her sleeping-apartment, expecting to find Tulee there. She had been there, and had left a little glimmering taper behind a screen, which threw a fantastic shadow on the ceiling, like a face with ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... the grain and hay to the barn or the stacks when it was ready; but there were no patent rakes or mowing or reaping machines for them to draw. All the wheat, and a good deal of the other grain, was cut down with the old-fashioned hook or sickle, the reapers stooping low to their work. It was tedious and exhausting labour, and slow, too. Shenac's "faculty" and perfect health stood her in good stead at this work as at other things. She ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... Suburbanite happened to be passing along on his Way to the 5:42 Train. He was carrying a Dog Collar, a Sickle, a Basket of Egg ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... washed out the bridges on either side of them and the roadway had been closed to traffic. They sat peering into the darkness like Columbus looking for land and wondering why no one came along to whom they could appeal for a tow into the village. The moon shone, a slender sickle in the west that Gladys said reminded her of the thin slices of melon they used to serve for ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... the women, in their cotton jackets and their wide hats, were reaping. The harvesting never looked so picturesque. I could pick out, in the distance, the tall figure of my Louise, with a sheaf on her head and a sickle in her hand, striding across the fields, and I thought how a painter would have loved the scene, with the long rays of the late September sunset illuminating ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... questions. You have guarded this girl through years of helpless infancy and thoughtless childhood. At the peril of her life, and of what is of more value than life, do not now relax your vigilance. Every day the reaper Death reaps with his keen sickle the flowers of our land. The mothers weep, indeed; but little do they realize that it is because they have neglected to cherish them as was their duty, that the Lord of Paradise has ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... with tea, coffee, sugar, salt, and pepper; a sack of flour; some cooking pots and frying pans, tin plates, dishes, and mugs; two sacks of coal and a quantity of firewood; shovels, carpenter's tools, a sickle, the framework of a hut with two doors and windows, three rolls of felt, a couple of dozen wooden posts, and two large coils of iron wire. While the others were busy unloading, the German had cut some turf and built a rough fireplace, and had ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... Aberystwyth, went to England for the harvest, and after having worked there about three weeks, he returned home alone, with all possible haste, as he knew that his father-in-law's fields were by this time ripe for the sickle. He, however, failed to accomplish the journey before Sunday; but he determined to travel on Sunday, and thus reach home on Sunday night to be ready to commence reaping on Monday morning. His conscience, ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... a desolate bird that through darkness its lost way is winging, As a hand that is helplessly raised when Death's sickle is swinging, So is life! ay, the life that lends passion ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
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