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More "Spike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... always kept tucked up under her body. Out of each egg there comes the queerest little creature! It is just large enough to be seen as it wriggles in the water. Then its skin splits, and there appears a quaint thing with long feathery legs, a big head, a spike on the back of its head, and another spike ...
— On the Seashore • R. Cadwallader Smith
... yellow sand that held the sleepers and the rails—almost with his own hands. From far over the horizon to the east he had crept along westward, urging on his big gang with relentless but just hand. And out there before his door they had driven the last spike at the very edge of the valley that ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... canvas, while he was not averse to licking the galvanised compound off the newly painted quarter-deck stanchions whenever an opportunity of doing so presented itself. He was a healthy goat of voracious appetite. His gastric juices would have dissolved a marline-spike, and he even made short work of the greater portion of a pair of ammunition boots belonging to the Sergeant-Major of Royal Marines, and devoured with every symptom of relish a sheaf of official and highly important documents lying on the writing-table ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... academy, had been a pretty fair operator. In fact, being the son of a general superintendent of one of the big trunk lines, he was quite familiar with a railroad, and could do almost anything from driving a spike, or throwing a switch to running an engine. The first three years succeeding his graduation had been those of enervating peace; all of which palled on the soul of Lieutenant Jack to a large degree. The martial spirit beat high within his ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... roll of the kettledrum; in every State procession it is the implements of death and the men of blood that we parade; and not to nursemaids only is the soldier irresistible. The glamour of romance hangs round him. Terrible with knife and spike and pellet he stalks through this puddle of a world, disdainful of drab mankind. Multitudes may toil at keeping alive, drudging through their scanty years for no hope but living and giving life; he shares with very few the function of inflicting death, and moves gaily clad and light ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... was but one affirmation. He believed absolutely in the Devil. He knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was red, and cloven-footed and that his tail ended in a hard, sharp, spike, like Mammy Flathers' ice-pick. He also knew that when he breathed, it was in groans and hisses, such as he was hearing at the present moment. Chick's hair would have risen on his head, it wanted to, but it ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... his head upon the block, and the executioner's axe fell. Although Bishop Fisher was condemned for denying the King's supremacy, he incurred the wrath of Henry by his book against the divorce, and that practically sealed his fate. His head was placed on a spike on London Bridge as a warning to others who might be rash enough to incur the ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... permission to keep a sort of iron bolt which he used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order to preserve it from the rats," as he said. As Thenardier was kept in sight, no objection had been made to this spike. Still, it was remembered afterwards, that one of the jailers had said: ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... was upon his knees, and with his knife-blade was digging around a plant, as if to raise it by the roots. It was a small herbaceous plant, with erect simple stem, oblong lanceolate leaves, and a terminal spike of not very conspicuous white flowers. Though I knew it not then, it was the famed ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... both his hands he gripped it as he spoke, And, where the butt and top were spliced, in pieces twain he broke; The limber top he cast away, with all its gear abroad, But, grasping the tough hickory butt, with spike of iron shod, He ground the sharp spear to a point; then pulled his bonnet down, And, meditating black revenge, ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... would be madness. To save the gun and escape capture must be the "double event." Seizing a ramrod, he ordered an artilleryman to spike the gun, gave the command to retreat, telling the men to "duck their heads," fearing another discharge, and, leading his horse, followed by Macdonell and Glegg and the firing squad of eight ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... her Cromwellian moods, and, scattered irregularly about its surface, the plots or patches of cultivated smoothness—potato rows, green parallel lines ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant cabbage-globes—each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion leaves, crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs. Here the villagers came by a narrow, steep, and difficult path they had made, to dig in their plots; while, overhead, the gulls, careless of their presence, pass and repass wholly ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... own voice. I was a very good linguist in those days, and spoke English particularly well long before I left Switzerland. After breakfast, my dog and I would go out to catch a peculiar sort of fish called the "sting-rae." These curious creatures have a sharp bony spike about two inches in length near the tail and this I found admirably adapted for arrow-heads. The body of the fish resembled a huge flounder, but the tail was long and tapering. They would come close in-shore, and I would spear them from ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... spike the right-hand rail lightly. Then string your gangs again and set a line of spikes for the outside of the standard-gauge right-hand rail straight through ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... those furrows narrow and turning the ground well, a little deeper than it had been plowed before. I didn't realize what I was doing, then. I simply had been brought up to do my work well. I thought I was doing a good job, that was all. When I was through plowing I got my old harrow, a spike-tooth, and harrowed the ground. I had a roller. They were manufactured in our town. The firm bursted and I had a chance to buy one very cheap. I had a roller, harrow, and plow. That was all the tillage implements. The harrow had moved the lumps around a little. I ran the roller over the lumps; then ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... blackroot, blazing star, and unicorn root ) Bitter American herb of the Bloodwort family, with small yellow or white flowers in a long spike ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... (daedalus) attacks and honeycombs it; and riddled as it may occasionally be, still, if spike or nail finds substance enough to hold, or sufficient solidity to resist crushing, then, for many purposes, even such lumber is practically as good as the soundest timber; because when the tree ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... sharp-shooters and one hundred Indians. De Salaberry does not court defeat by neglecting precautions because he is weak. Windfall is hurriedly thrown up as barricade along the trail. Where the path narrows between the river and the bleak forest, De Salaberry has tree trunks laid spike end towards the foe. At the last moment comes McDonnell of Brockville with six hundred men, but De Salaberry's three hundred occupy the front line facing the ford. McDonnell is farther along the river. By the night of October ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... impaled and injudicious Richard [Sir J. Hooker's youngest son, who had managed to spike himself on a fence.] is none the worse. It is wonderful what boys go through ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... have here a hammer. I will drop it to the floor. Listen. Is the noise very loud? Here I have a heavy railroad spike. Hear the noise this makes as it is dropped. And now I shall drop this large nail. The noise that made is not nearly as loud as the noise occasioned by the falling hammer. Here is a small nail. You will have to listen very carefully if you hear the sound of the nail as it strikes the carpet. Have ...
— The Children's Six Minutes • Bruce S. Wright
... You observe that the scratch on that table is slight at one side, but deepens in the direction of the bedroom door. That in itself is enough to show us that the shoe had been drawn in that direction, and that the culprit had taken refuge there. The earth round the spike had been left on the table, and a second sample was loosened and fell in the bedroom. I may add that I walked out to the athletic grounds this morning, saw that tenacious black clay is used in the jumping-pit and carried away a specimen ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which its own waters have created. Myriads of flowers gleam in their own atmosphere of living light, like jewels among the rich herbage, so that the feet can hardly be set down without crushing scores of them: the Orchis rubra with its splendid spike of crimson blossoms, the bee and spider orchises in great variety, whose flowers mimic the insects after whom they are named, sweet-scented alyssum, golden buttercups and hawkweeds, Roman daisies, larger and taller than the English ones, with the bold wide-eyed gaze ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Clutching Hand, "I want you, Spike, to follow them. See what they do—where they go. It's her birthday. Something's bound to occur that will give you a lead. All you've got to do is to ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... imaginary hat toward the Grdznth. "Spike cracked it," he said. "Spike is a sort of Grdznth genius." He tossed the coffee cup over his shoulder and it ricochetted in graceful slow motion against the far wall. "Now why ...
— PRoblem • Alan Edward Nourse
... timbers than a dozen. When it come to spiking them in place he seen me swinging that twelve-pound sledge and near breaking my back. 'I think it's easier this way,' he says. 'Besides you can hit a lot faster if you use just one hand.' And he takes the hammer, and sends that big spike in all the way to the head with one lick. And he wondered why I didn't work the same way! Ain't got any idea how ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... water is too easy a thing to take up any time to direct you to do it. And yet, because I cut you short in that, I will commute for it by telling you that that was told me for a secret. It is this: Dissolve gum of ivy in oil of spike, and therewith anoint your dead bait for a pike, and then cast it into a likely place, and when it has lain a short time at the bottom, draw it towards the top of the water and so up the stream, and it is more than likely ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... nothing more; let the Conservatism that would preserve cut it away. Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living substance;—nay is far worse; for in every wind-storm ('commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as your ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... both black and stern. But one was a Hebrew, no less than forty-five years of age. He wore a helmet of polished metal, equipped with a visor, which, when raised, finished the front with a flat plate. The top of the head-piece was ornamented with a spike. His armor was complete—shirt of mail, shenti extending half-way to the knees, greaves ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... sword with as much apparent knowledge of how to use it as if it had been a marlin-spike. Ralph pushed it aside with a stout stick that he carried, and was passing on, when the singing soldier came up and said, "Never mind his name; but whether he be Presbyter Jack or Quaker George, he must drink to the health of the King. Here," he cried, filling ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... to him, and Matt turned about and said, "Hello, Caryl!" and yielded him a sort of absent-minded hand, while he kept his face turned smilingly upon the men. Some were holding the rails in position, and another was driving in the spike that was to rivet the plate to the sleeper. He struck it with exquisite accuracy from a wide, free-handed rhythmical swing of ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... some of 'em will be letting prisoners escape right under my nose, making us the laughing stock of these damned militia volunteers." (Canker entered service in '61 as a private in a city company that was militia to the tip of its spike-tailed coats, but he had forgotten it.) "I want these young idlers to understand distinctly, by George, that the first prisoner that gets away from this post takes somebody's commission with him. D'you hear that, Mr. ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... spook," Patsy began, "I got the fearfulest thump on my crust that I've had since that marline-spike fell off the main yard on to me in the little affair of the ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter
... took a precaution. Under the staddles was a long tethering chain, used to prevent the escape of errant horses. This he carried up the ladder, and sticking his rod through the clog at one end, allowed the other end of the chain to trail upon the ground. The spike attached to it he drove in. Under the shadow of this extemporized lightning-conductor he felt himself ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... zest to love? On this particular evening, however, he was in a hopeful mood. At the Clarendon Club, where he had gone, a couple of hours before, to verify a certain news item for the morning paper, he had heard a story about Tom Delamere which, he imagined, would spike that gentleman's guns for all time, so far as Miss Pemberton was concerned. So grave an affair as cheating at cards could never be kept secret,—it was certain to reach her ears; and Ellis was morally certain that Clara would never marry a man who had been proved dishonorable. ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... which they cut the throats of all whom they could master, and then, cutting off their heads, carried them away with them. They sang and danced when the enemy were likely to see them. They carried also a spear of about fifteen cubits in length, having one spike.[34] They stayed in their villages till the Greeks had passed by, when they pursued and perpetually harassed them. They had their dwellings in strong places, in which they had also laid up their provisions, so that the Greeks could get nothing from that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... trophy of the search—a metal spike and some tarnished and corroded metal ornaments. They had lain close beside ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... we shouted, but the sound had not ceased to echo when, out of the horrible tangle about us, rose, with a swift, sinuous motion, a monstrous anacondalike arm, flesh pink in the electric beam, but covered with spike-edged spiracles! It curled itself over the edge of the hovering air ship and ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... sword-like, sweet-scented leaves 3 or 4 ft. long and about an inch wide, closely arranged in two rows as in the true Flag (Iris); the tall, flowering stems (scapes), which very much resemble the leaves, bear an apparently lateral, blunt, tapering spike of densely packed, very small flowers. A long leaf (spathe) borne immediately below the spike forms an apparent continuation of the scape, though really a lateral outgrowth from it, the spike of flowers being terminal. The plant has a wide distribution, growing in wet situations ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... nodded Astro. "I know the old geezer that runs this place. Nice guy. Name's Spike." He turned to the back of the shop ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... February 12, the well was pumped dry and the mate's watch ordered below to get a nap until four. They took their drenched clothing off, wrung the water out, hung it on a line round the bogey fire to dry, and turned into their hammocks as naked as they were born. At three the hand-spike knocked heavily on the deck and a loud voice called down the scuttle hatch, "Larboard watch, ahoy! All hands to the ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... about flies as we make nowadays. You cannot pick up a magazine without running plump into an article on the deadly housefly—with pictures of him magnified until he looks like the old million-toed, barrel-eyed, spike-tailed dragon of your boyhood mince-pie dreams. The first two pages convince you that the human race is doomed to extermination within eighteen ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... State legislatures, but the "scamps" are vastly better at promising than fulfilling. The politicians, of course, expect all this flutter and buncombe about doing something for women in New York—in California—in Iowa—is going to spike our guns and make us help the Republican party to carry all before it; but we must not be thus fooled ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of you," Jim answered, with a laugh. "The bed of the creek's simply full of rocks—you can see a spike sticking up here and there in the rapids. We've seen sheep come down in flood-time—they get battered to bits. I don't think I'll try any ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... always at the significant moment some other bloom has reached its perfect hour. One can never fix the precise moment when the rosy tint the field has from the wild almond passes into the inspiring blue of lupines. One notices here and there a spike of bloom, and a day later the whole field royal and ruffling lightly to the wind. Part of the charm of the lupine is the continual stir of its plumes to airs not suspected otherwhere. Go and stand by any crown of bloom ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... himself upon Wolf Larsen without warning or provocation. Once he threw his heavy sheath-knife, missing Wolf Larsen's throat by an inch. Another time he dropped a steel marlinspike from the mizzen crosstree. It was a difficult cast to make on a rolling ship, but the sharp point of the spike, whistling seventy-five feet through the air, barely missed Wolf Larsen's head as he emerged from the cabin companion-way and drove its length two inches and over into the solid deck-planking. Still another time, he stole into the steerage, possessed himself of a loaded shot-gun, and was making ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... old names for the Plantain were Waybroad (corrupted to Weybread, Wayborn, and Wayforn) and Ribwort. It was also called Lamb's-tongue and Kemps, while the flower spike with the stalk was called Cocks and Cockfighters (still so called by children).[214:1] The old name of Ribwort was derived from the ribbed leaves, while Waybroad marked its universal appearance, scattered by all roadsides and pathways, and literally bred by the wayside. ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... you they will bleed for you; the fount of tears feeds a river as well as betrays a hidden well. Good, then; good, then! He saw a future in all this. From the other spike of the dilemma he saw nothing but his impaling; in this case, if he was impaled, balm at least would be laid upon his wounds. Fra Battista determined to brazen ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... slaves there are to be liberated at twelve o'clock tonight, are to seize the three water towers and to spike the guns, to burn all the shipping in the harbour, to make off with six ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... short swords, with steel edges like those of the ancient Romans, and carried ashen lances ten feet long, with straight and sharp iron spikes: only one-fourth of their number bore halberts instead of lances, the spikes cut into the form of an axe and surmounted by a four-cornered spike, to be used both for cutting like an axe and piercing like a bayonet: the first row of each battalion wore helmets and cuirasses which protected the head and chest, and when the men were drawn up for battle they presented to the enemy a triple array of iron spikes, which ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... standing position the moonlight showed him, impaled upon the horribly sharp stake formed by fining down a good-sized tree and planting it in the bottom, a hideously wolfish-looking hyaena, which, less fortunate than himself, had fallen upon the sharp spike, which had gone completely through the wretched animal's body, leaving it writhing, snarling, and clawing the air with its paws in its vain efforts to ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... five feet; the pedestals on which these immages are fixed are sometimes cut out of the solid stick with the canoe, and the imagary is formed of seperate small peices of timber firmly united with tenants and motices without the assistance of a single spike of any kind. when the natives are engaged in navigating their canoes one sets in the stern and steers with a paddle the others set by pears and paddle over the gunwall next them, they all kneel in the bottom ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... Clarke and I have had many a merry squeeze. I am highly delighted with Mr. Allan's etchings. "Woo'd an' married an' a'," is admirable! The grouping is beyond all praise. The expression of the figures, conformable to the story in the ballad, is absolutely faultless perfection. I next admire "Turnim-spike." What I like least is "Jenny said to Jockey." Besides the female being in her appearance * * * *, if you take her stooping into the account, she is at least two inches taller than her lover. Poor Cleghorn! I sincerely sympathize with him. Happy I am to think that ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... same.' Such language was unequivocal, and hostilities were resumed as fiercely as before. The besieged welcomed them with rapture, and, as usual, made daily the most desperate sallies. In one outbreak the Haarlemers, under cover of a thick fog, marched up to the enemy's chief battery, and attempted to spike the guns before his face. They were all slain at the cannon's mouth, whither patriotism, not vainglory, had led them, and lay dead around the battery, with their hammers and spikes in their hands. The same spirit was daily manifested. As the spring advanced, the kine went ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... and doubtless beguiled the voyage (for others) with the information of a well-stored mind. By an inspiration of luck he checked a mutiny, holding the quarter-deck against a mob of ruffians with no weapon but a marline-spike. And hereafter, as he tells you in his 'Voyage to New South Wales,' he was accorded the fullest liberty to come or go. He visited many a foreign port with the officers of the ship; he packed a hundred note-books with trite and superfluous observations; he posed, in brief, as the captain ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... in hand, sat a strongly-built man, whose deeply-furrowed countenance and grizzled hair showed that he had been for many a year a toiler on the ocean. By his side was a boy of about twelve years of age, dressed in flushing coat and sou'wester, busily employed with a marline-spike, in splicing an eye ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... small armed vessels and a shore battery, with which the English for four hours kept up a weak contest with their foes. Then the fleet sailed past the defences and up the river before a strong breeze, and Oglethorpe was obliged to spike the guns and destroy the war-material at Fort St. Simon's and withdraw to the stronger post of Frederica, where he proposed to make his stand. Not long afterward the Spaniards landed their five thousand men four miles below Frederica. These marched ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... straightened, they grew up to wolf-like men, Worse than the wolves. And King Leodogran Groan'd for the Roman legions here again, And Caesar's eagle: then his brother king, Urien, assail'd him: last a heathen horde, Reddening the sun with smoke and earth with blood, And on the spike that split the mother's heart Spitting the child, brake on him, till, amazed, He knew not whither he should ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... half an acre in size, which flowered three times a year, and during the flowering time it drew the butterflies from all the surrounding plain with its luscious bean-like fragrance, until the field was full of them, red, black, yellow, and white butterflies, fluttering in flocks round every blue spike. ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... dwarf palm, each layer of the onion peels off, brown and netted, like the outside of a cocoa-nut. It is a clever plant that; from the leaves we get a vegetable horsehair; - and eat the bottom of the centre spike. All the leaves you pull have the same aromatic scent. But here a little patch of cleared ground shows old friends, who seem to cling by abused civilisation:-fine, hardy thistles, one of them bright yellow, though; - honest, Scotch- looking, large daisies or gowans; - potatoes here and ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... about to tear the insides out of their fort with four-hundred-pound shot at quarter-mile range, there was nothing for them to do but consult their own safety, which they did with such haste that they did not spike a gun, or destroy a pound ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... send the worst of us to Spike Island or Dartmoor prison,' said Charley; 'but Mr. Snape, no doubt, has heard and ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... with a general preponderance of feminine appellatives, bold incisures, at times, of some worthy professor in profile,—the whole besmutched with ink, and dotted with countless punctures, the result of the sharp spike with which every student's ink-horn is armed, that he may steady it upon the slanting board. The preceding lecture ended when the university-clock struck the hour; the next should begin within ten or fifteen minutes. One by one the students drop in and take their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... distillation an oil termed "oil of spike," or, to distinguish it from oil of L. staechas, "true oil of spike." It is darker in color than the oil of L. vera, and much less grateful in odor, reminding one of turpentine and rancid coker nut oil. It is used by painters on porcelain, and in the manufacture ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... called him. Invariably he spent some part of his day among his beloved peasants, and daily he recited with them public prayers. Often at night he and they together went up to the teeth of the Russian batteries on expeditions to spike the cannon. His inseparable companion, Niemcewicz, who slept with him in his tent till the-end came, describes how the silence of these nights was broken hideously by the wild, shrill cry of the reapers, by the sudden roar of the cannon and crack of gunfire, ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... grave? Your noble father lieth in no grave, I saw his dust strewn on the air, his ashes Whirled through the windy streets like common straws To plague a beggar's eyesight, and his head, That gentle head, set on the prison spike, For the vile rabble in their insolence To ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde
... cost from the East, were covered with splashes of grease and liquor; and the few fly-marked pictures on the walls were coarsely suggestive. Scattered among them haphazard, in one instance through a lithographic print, were round holes as large as a spike-head, through which, by closely applying the eye, one could view the world without. When the place was new, similar openings had been carefully refilled with a whittled stick of wood, but the practice had been discontinued; it was too much trouble, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... moving thing. It rode out of the dark and brushed him. It touched him with soft fingers and he drew them to him. A water hyacinth, and its purple spike topped his head as he stood waist-deep. So cool its leaves, and the dripping bulbs that he pressed them to his bloody cheek. He sank his teeth into them for that coolness on his parched tongue. The spongy bulb was sweet; it exhaled odorous moisture. He seized it ravenously. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... you, Spike,—-this idea of a summer school?" inquired Cooper Fennimore the next morning as the Foxes came back from their early dip ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... sunflowers by the glaring pike Lift shields of sultry brass; the teasel tops, Pink-thorned, advance with bristling spike on spike Against the furious sunlight. Field and copse Are sick with summer: now, with breathless stops, The locusts cymbal; now grasshoppers beat Their castanets: and rolled in dust, a team,— Like some mean life wrapped in its ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... 'n de mawnin' dan yo'self." She watched the animal with all her might, muttering, "Law, see him squot," and "Hole on, hole on!" and "Yasser, he done gone fo' sho. My grashus, you lemme have a scatter shoot-gun an' a spike-tail smell dog, an' I'll git one of ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... a sheet of glassy water, dotted with a hundred sail, from the base of the sultry hill faced with terraces and called Queenstown, to the far Atlantic beyond the Heads. Heavy and dark loom the fortified Government buildings of Haulbowline and the prisons of Spike Island, casting forbidding shadows on the western margin of the tide. Quickly the steam-tug and her follower thread their way among islets and moored barques and guard-ships, southward to the sea. No pause ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... maiden heard no more, But spike: Alas! my heart is very weak, And but for—Stay! And if some dreadful morn, After great search and shouting thorough the wold, We found thee missing,—strangled,—drowned i' the mere, Then should I go distraught ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... broad at base, half clasping the stem and rapidly narrowed to an acute tip; hardly at all spreading from the thread-like twigs; flowers pinkish, in spike-like clusters 6. Tamarix. ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... Merrill, with a tinge of impatience, "don't repeat all the old gossips' tales about Madero. Why, if one believed half of them, he would be endowed with hoofs and horns, not to mention a tail with a spike on the end. If either you or Redman or Jennings wishes to leave the mine, you may. I'll write you a check for the amount I ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... the prince. "I know there are guards in every gallery, bolts to every door, cannon and soldiery at every barrier. How will you overcome the sentries—spike the guns? How will you break through the ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... is heather (erica); The yellow, gorse—call'd sometimes "whin." Cruel boys on its pickles might spike a Green beetle as if on a pin, You may roll in it, if you would like a Few holes ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... plant plenty of space for development, and it will be well to stake the rows immediately. Keep the plants under constant observation, especially while quite young, when they are liable to destruction by garden foes. The flowering should be limited to the fourth spike, and from the time the pods appear assistance must be given in the form of liquid manure or a mulching of well-rotted dung. Remove all lateral shoots and promote vigorous healthy growth at every stage. Some means should be adopted to prevent injury of any kind to the pods, which ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... seed-heads, that fringes the tracks over the hills, or the lanes that cross the hollows. Common blues were there in numbers, and small heath butterflies almost as many. The former, each and every one of them, arrange themselves to look like part of the seed-spike that caps the grass-stem. Then the use and purpose of the parti-coloured grey and yellow under-colouring of their wings is seen. The butterfly invariably goes to sleep head downwards, its eyes looking straight ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... a trip to see the great Pie Championship, where men with bulging cheeks and eyes consume vast quantities of pies. A fashionable West Side crowd beheld the champion, Spike O'Dowd, endeavour to defend his throne against an upstart, Blake's Unknown. He wasn't an Unknown at all. He was young ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... has had a very wide repute for its good-qualities. It belongs to the family of plants known as Labiates, which includes mint, sage, thyme, and other aromatic plants; these flowers mostly have a curious lip, and grow in a spike. The self-heal is not a tall plant, though it flourishes more in the rich soil of a garden than on that of the field-bank or the hedgerow. One curious thing about the plant is, that the flowers do not open all together, but a few at a time, so that ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... those kind of silly fumbles. Now, what you need is formation—see? Must have some sort of formation for advance. Must keep in touch. For two men a tandem is right. For three men, what you want is a spike-team—middle man crawls ahead, other men follow on each side just near enough to touch his left heel with right hand and right heel with left hand—a triangle, see? Keep touching once every thirty seconds. If you miss it, leader crawls back, side men crawl in, sure to meet, nobody gets ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... society at the house was that although the major was as well known as the flag on Spike Island, yet somehow, no officer above the rank of an ensign was ever to be met with there. It was not that he had not a large acquaintance; in fact, the "How are you, Major?" "How goes it, Dalrymple?" that kept everlastingly going ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... many a man has covered a period longer than that interval of eighty-six years between 1783, when George Washington had his vision of "the vast inland navigation of these United States," and the year 1869, when the two divisions of the Union Pacific were joined by a golden spike at Promontory Point in Utah. In point of time, those eighty-six years are as nothing; in point of accomplishment, they stand unparalleled. When Washington's horse splashed across the Youghiogheny in October, 1784, the boundary lines of the United States were guarded with all the jealousy and ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... on. Their child came. It was a railroad train, the Golden Spike Limited, the fastest long distance train in the Rootabaga Country. It ran across the prairie, to the mountains, to ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... hair. His fleecy mantle was over him in the house. Every quarrel therein about seat or bed comes to his decision. Should a needle drop in the house, its fall would be heard when he speaks. Above him is a huge black tree, like a millshaft, with its paddles and its cap and its spike. Liken thou ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... topsail-schooner, with an old fellow by the name of Eaton,—just the strangest old scamp you ever dreamed of. I suppose by rights he ought to have been in the hospital; he certainly was the nearest to crazy and not be it. He used to keep a long pole by him on deck,—a pole with a sharp spike in one end,—and any man who'd get near enough to him to let him have a chance would feel that spike. I've known him to keep the cook up till midnight frying doughnuts; then he'd call all hands aft and range 'em on the quarter-deck, and go round with his hat off ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... capture and a confession. Peg Tatem in the toils. Timber pirates get prison terms. The lumberjacks' big Christmas. "Sit down, you rough-necks!" roars Hippy. Spike bares his ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... is passed and during drier weather, cultivation is carried on for a different purpose, namely, to conserve moisture by making a thin dust mulch of soil over the surface. This is best accomplished by shallow-going implements of which the spike-tooth harrow, the acme harrow, or a light wheel cultivator are best. As the season and the amount of rainfall vary, so must tillage operations be varied. In an early dry season begin with the lighter implements earlier. ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... name of God) before he threw the net. On the first occasion, before I gave him this advice, he had had extremely bad luck, and he told me that "something was wrong with the fish;" as he had thrown his net for an hour without catching anything, except a few uneatable spike-fish. ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... pair of stary, pop eyes, a high colored beak that might be used as a danger signal, and a black, shoebrush beard, trimmed close except for a little spike under the chin, that gives the lower part of his face a look like the ace of spades. His mornin' costume is a faded blue jumper, brown checked pants, and an old pair of rubber soled shoes that Swifty had ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... who will let herself be stabbed without dreaming of employing her venomous fangs. Here craft triumphs over strength; and this craft is not inferior to mine, when, wishing to capture the Tarantula, I make her bite a spike of grass which I dip into the burrow, lead her gently to the surface and then with a sudden jerk throw her outside. For the entomologist as for the Pompilus, the essential thing is to make the Spider leave her stronghold. After this there is no difficulty in catching her, thanks ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... chopper, is Billy, observed Benjamin, who held the bridle of the horse while the sheriff mounted; and he handles an axe much the same as a forecastleman does his marling-spike, or a tailor his goose. They say hell lift a potash-kettle off the arch alone, though I cant say that Ive ever seen him do it with my own eyes; but that is the say. And Ive seen sugar of his making, which, maybe, ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... that the storm was abating; yet the wreck was drifting rapidly toward the inexorable rocks. Wave after wave passed over the uppermost part of the tower, and sometimes the water smote her so that her head reeled, and her senses became dimmed for some moments. A coil of rope hung from a spike in the wall, and fastening an end of it around her slim waist, she bound herself to a stout piece ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... that good-natured quartet, who stood sponsors for that title. We were a pitiful lot of fellows in this garrison. We mixed the handful of flour given to us with snow water, and, wrapping the unsalted dough around a sagebrush spike, we cooked it in the flames, and ate it from the stick, as a dog would gnaw a bone. The officers put a guard around the few little hackberry trees to keep the men from eating the berries and the bark. Not a scrap of the few buffalo we found was wasted. Even ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... your bard shall sit In foremost row before the astonished pit, And grin dislike, and kiss the spike, And twist his mouth and roll his head awry, The arch-absurd quick glancing from ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... helmet by the spike and put it on the mantel. "Lord knows, I'm not presenting that as a token of valor to any one. It belonged to a poor chap who died on the field the night I was wounded. My orderly ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... its aspect; the upper part of the flame has, indeed, broken away, and is now shown in that part of the drawing between the two figures on the line above. The same plate also shows various instances of the remarkable spike-like objects, taken, however, at different times and at various parts of the sun. These spikes attain altitudes not generally greater than 20,000 miles, though sometimes they ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... to see," Pierce's voice came apologetically after a pause in which some background noise sounding like a crash came over the televiewer speaker. "It started swinging around when I came in sight, so I just rammed it with that pretty ornamental nose spike. I'm backing off now ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... of spirits of turpentine, half ounce of oil of spike, half ounce essence of wormwood, half ounce castile soap, half ounce gum camphor, half ounce sulphuric ether, half pint alcohol, and ...
— The Arabian Art of Taming and Training Wild and Vicious Horses • P. R. Kincaid
... I could not put up the flaps, having no proper support. To remedy this I sawed out a broad slip from a chest-side, and boring a large hole through the centre, I spiked it up to the under-side of the table's bed, with a spindle I contrived just loose enough to play round the head of the spike, filing down that part of the spindle which passed through the bed of the table, and riveting it close; so that when my flaps were set up I pulled the slip crosswise of the table, and when the flaps ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... much resembling C. grandis, but somewhat taller, and flowering a little earlier; the latter quality has induced me to mention it, as it offers a fine spike for cutting purposes before the ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... passed and during drier weather, cultivation is carried on for a different purpose, namely, to conserve moisture by making a thin dust mulch of soil over the surface. This is best accomplished by shallow-going implements of which the spike-tooth harrow, the acme harrow, or a light wheel cultivator are best. As the season and the amount of rainfall vary, so must tillage operations be varied. In an early dry season begin with the lighter implements ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... reflect the Sambaquis of the opposite Brazilian shore. The house was guarded by three wooden figures, "clouterly carved," and powdered with ochre or red wood; two of them, representing warriors in studded coatings of spike nails, with a looking-glass fixed in the stomach, raised their hands as if to stab each other. These figures are sometimes found large as life: according to the agents, the spikes are driven in before the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... battery and telegraph instruments for each division, each corps, each army, and one for my headquarters. There were wagons also loaded with light poles, about the size and length of a wall tent pole, supplied with an iron spike in one end, used to hold the wires up when laid, so that wagons and artillery would not run over them. The mules thus loaded were assigned to brigades, and always kept with the command they were assigned to. The operators were also assigned to particular headquarters, and never ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... blisteringly hot but guaranteed weather-controlled future summer day dawned on the Mississippi Valley, the walking mills of Puffy Products ("Spike to Loaf in One Operation!") began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... "H. H.,"—the one which looked so charming from the moving train that her winning tongue brought the iron horse to a pause while it was gathered, "root and branch," for her delectation. Finding the gorgeous spike of golden blossoms without a common name, she called it—most happily—the golden prince's feather. It is to be presumed that it has an unwieldy scientific cognomen in the botanies; but I heard of no common one, except that given ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... non-fulfilment of the terms of union. It was not until 1881, under Sir John Macdonald's Premiership, that a contract was signed with a new Company to complete the Canadian Pacific within ten years, but so rapid was the progress made, that the last spike was actually driven on November 7, 1886, five years before the stipulated time. The names of three Scotsmen will always be associated with this gigantic undertaking: those of the late Donald Smith, afterwards Lord Strathcona; George Stephen, now Lord Mount-stephen; and Mr. R. B. Angus of Montreal. ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... soldiers called him. Invariably he spent some part of his day among his beloved peasants, and daily he recited with them public prayers. Often at night he and they together went up to the teeth of the Russian batteries on expeditions to spike the cannon. His inseparable companion, Niemcewicz, who slept with him in his tent till the-end came, describes how the silence of these nights was broken hideously by the wild, shrill cry of the reapers, by the sudden roar ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... painter carefully round a spike of coral and landed on the reef, and with a shellful of rum and cocoa-nut lemonade mixed half and half, he took his perch on a high ledge of coral from whence a view of the sea and the coral ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... buck soldiers, and Apaches, even his own son, when all had not gone well. It was this which had inspired Bill Lightfoot to restrain his tongue when he was sore over his defeat; and even though Hardy confessed to being a rider, somehow no one ever thought of sawing off Spike Kennedy's "side winder" on him. The quiet, brooding reserve which came from his soldier life protected him from such familiar jests, and without knowing why, the men of the Four Peaks looked up ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... a small gable window, revealed this outer half of the garret empty, and not furniture or other appurtenance than the hole in the floor up which he had come, and the door into the place of wailing beyond, which was fastened by a long iron spike dropping into a staple that overshot a heavy wooden bar. As he slipped up the spike and took the bar off, Phoebus heard some person in the room below mutter, and lock the great padlock upon the other door, effectually barring ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... delighted with Mr. Allan's etchings. "Woo'd and married and a'", is admirable! The grouping is beyond all praise. The expression of the figures, conformable to the story in the ballad, is absolutely faultless perfection. I next admire "Turnim-spike". What I like least is, "Jenny said to Jockey". Besides the female being in her appearance quite a virago, if you take her stooping into the account, she is at least two inches taller than her lover. Poor Cleghorn! I sincerely sympathise with him! Happy am I to think ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... factors such as the international war on terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the war between the US-led coalition and Iraq probably will drive real annual GDP growth levels back below their 3.5% spike in 2002. A long-run economic constraint is the pressure on water supplies caused by rapid population growth, industrial expansion, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... pointed to a bird in the trunk of a cedar. Raising the bow, it bent taut under his firm, cautious pull. "Whiz," went the arrow, and there, pinned to the tree with the iron spike, fluttered a hairy woodpecker. To my wondering child-mind it was a great feat—my inherent instinct for hunting ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... back may spike And pierce him with a thorn; The humble bee A tramp is he And there is none ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... which she seemed fully conscious. This latter weakness gave Mr. Hamlin a new idea. He put up the penknife with which he had been paring his nails while wondering why his hands had become so thin, and awaited events. She presently turned, approached the buckeyes, plucked a spike of the blossoms with great girlish lightness, and then apparently discovering Mr. Hamlin, started in deep concern and said with somewhat stentorian politeness: "I BEG your pardon—didn't ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... way over the sea, far away from land night or day, just as well as on shore. Besides the sun and stars to guide us, we have the compass. It is a wonderful thing, though it is so simple-looking; just a round card, resting on a spike in a brass basin. In the card is a long steel needle, and the point of it is rubbed with a stuff called loadstone, and it takes the card round and round, and always points to the north. The north, and all the other points, are marked on the card; ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... "He would work at the round table in the library for hours and hours—with nothing for refreshment except a cup of coffee and a box of snuff, which always stood at his side;" and that he was rarely without a heavy stick with a whistle at one end and a spike at the other—the spike being to keep away dogs when he was travelling in hot countries. This was one of the many little inventions of his own. Mr. Tedder describes him as a man of great and subtle intellect and very urbane. "He had an athletic appearance and a military carriage, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... highly mentioned, belonging to a plant very closely related to sisal (Bromelia Sylvestris), perhaps even a variety of the same. The Mexican name, jxtle, is possibly derived from the fact of their curiously flattened, spike-edged leaves, resembling the dentated knives formed from volcanic stone (obsidian) possessed by the Aztecs and termed ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... stars (albeit the rays Of that lone orb shot, sparkling, from the east Unseen before), for these, largest and least, Were fold-lamps, lighted nightly: and ye knew Far differing glory in the night's dark blue Suddenly lit with rose, and pierced with spike Of golden spear-beam. Oh, a dream, belike! Some far-fetched vision, new to peasant's sleep, Of paradise stripped bare!—But, why thus keep Secrets for them? This bar, which doth enclose Better and nobler souls, why burst for those Who supped on the parched pulse, and lapped the stream, And ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... the earth, leaving trails of slime. Wails from people burying their dead. Through the window, he can see the rocking steeple. A ball of fire falls on the lead of the roof, and the sky tears apart on a spike of flame. Up the spire, behind the lacings of stone, zigzagging in and out of the carved tracings, squirms the fire. It spouts like yellow wheat from the gargoyles, coils round the head of Saint John, and aureoles him in light. It leaps into the night and hisses against ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... advertised that the rail and the ties still remained. In one place, a ten-inch tree, bursting through at a connection, had lifted the end of a rail clearly into view. The tie had evidently followed the rail, held to it by the spike long enough for its bed to be filled with gravel and rotten leaves, so that now the crumbling, rotten timber thrust itself up at a curious slant. Old as the road was, it was manifest that it had been of the ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... Memoriale of Henry, prior of Canterbury, A.D. 1285, the term prikett denotes, not the candlestick, but the candle, formed with a corresponding cavity at one end, whereby it was securely fixed upon the spike. p.413, n. 1. Henry VIII.'s allowance 'unto our right dere and welbilovede the Lady Lucy,' July 16, 1533, included 'at our Chaundrye barr, in Wynter, every night oon preket and foure syses of Waxe, with eight Candells white ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... the head of the rapids, and on the night of May 4 a messenger from Harrison made his way through the British lines to Clay, instructing him to land eight hundred men on the left bank of the Maumee to carry the British batteries there, and spike the guns, afterwards crossing to the fort. The remainder of the troops were to land on the right side of the river and make their way through the Indians to the fort. According to orders, Colonel Dudley landed with the specified force, ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... and thorns, but the elephant's hide is as strong as a board. He does not mind prickles, and the only sensitive part of him is just behind the ear, so when he is tamed a man sits on his neck, and with a little sharp-pointed spike pricks him behind the ear on the side he wants him to go. It does not hurt, but the elephant feels it and soon understands, and follows the directions as a horse follows the pull of the reins in driving. Elephants live ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... he was renamed that first day in the arena, when, also, he received the surprise of his life. He did not dream of the spike in the saddle, nor, while the saddle was empty, did it press against him. But the moment Samuel Bacon, a negro tumbler, got into the saddle, the spike sank home. He knew about it and was prepared. But Barney, ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... the Major, were several men with elephant spears or goads. These consist of a long, pliant, polished bamboo, with a sharp spike at the end, which they call a jhetha. These men now came hurrying round the ridge, among the opener grass, and as we emerged from the heavy cover, they began goading the elephants behind and urging them to their most furious pace. On ahead, nearly ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... great body, with two red and glaring eyes, which, for some time, were fixed steadily on him, and at length disappeared." Innumerable were the antics it played. Once it purred like a cat; beat the children's legs black and blue; put a long spike into Mr. Mompesson's bed, and a knife into his mother's; filled the porringers with ashes; hid a Bible under the grate; and turned the money black in people's pockets. "One night," said Mr. Mompesson, in a letter to Mr. Glanvil, "there were seven ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... narrator was interrupted by the thumping of a hand-spike on the deck above. "Halloo! what's ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... between five and six he desir'd the other Prisoners, except Stephen Fowles to remain above, while he offer'd something in private to his Friends at the Door; they comply'd, and in this interval he got the Spike asunder, which made way for the Skeleton to pass with his Heels foremost, by the Assistance of Fowles, whom he most ungenerously betray'd to the Keepers after his being retaken, and the Fellow was as ...
— The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard • Daniel Defoe
... missed your calling by something more than a hair's-breadth, Morty. You should have been a novelist. Give you a spike and a cross-tie and you'd infer a whole railroad. But you pique my curiosity. Where are these American royalties of yours going in ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... likes to hire a donkey, and then sham she'd rather not ride, for fear of being too heavy; and to take Spike out for a run, and then carry him to save him the trouble of walking. But she's very good; she made all our cocked hats, and at the review she and Dolly and Spike were the loyal crowd. Dick and Tom and Harry were the troops, and I was the General, and Mother looked ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... sickness was bringing him day by day nearer to his far-away boyhood in the Inverness-shire hills, and it was easy to slip into the speech of the mother-tongue. Then, after a long pause, he went on: "He wasna wearing a beard, a red beard trimmed down to a spike—this writer-man, when ye ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... detectives of their victory. During the summer months an employe spent his entire time mowing the lawn with a large horse-drawn machine. This, when not in use, was often left outdoors. Upon it was a square wooden box, containing certain necessary tools, among them a sharp, spike-like instrument, used to clean the oil-holes when they became clogged. This bit of steel was five or six inches long, and was shaped like a pencil. For at least three months, I seldom went out of doors that I did ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... shortening as an inevitable physiological fact, since the cost of the development of the reproductive elements is so great as necessarily to check vegetative growth. In the same manner the shortening of the inflorescence from raceme to spike or umbel, and thence to the capitulum or dense flower-head of the composite plants is brought about. This shortening, carried still further, produces the flattened leaf-like receptacle of Dorstenia, and further still the deeply hollowed ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... looked at it with huge satisfaction. The stem was woody and each leaf was grey, narrow, and not more than half an inch long. The peculiarity about them was, however, that each little leaf ended in a spike. The black-fellow felt the spikes and grinned to feel the pricks of pain, for the leaves had only recently been pulled from the tree. Then he dropped his handful of parakelia and grabbed the quart-pot and started to run, tracking ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... before the war, the word husk or hus' meant the cob or spike of the corn. "I smack you over wid a cawn-hus'" is a threat I have often heard one negro boy make to another. Cob is provincial English for ear, and I have known "a cob of corn" used in Canada for an ear of Indian corn. While ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... whole affair ended in a great passionate outburst of popular revolution. Spike Foster was a friend of Cortright, and one day, when the latter was indisposed, Spike came to him and borrowed the hat. He had been drinking heavily at the "Red Light," and was in a supremely reckless mood. With the terrible gear hanging jauntily ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... ignominy, gleamed a lively pride in its overwhelming completeness. The malign eye was worn proudly as a badge of honour, so proudly that the wearer, after Winona's first outcry of horror, bubbled vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma by stepping into one of Spike Brennon's straight ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler colouration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and, it may be, even immortality. For the new miracle of Nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient as that of its discoverer? "Johnsmithia"! There have ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... of spike, two ounces origanum, two ounces hemlock, two ounces wormwood, four ounces sweet oil, two ounces spirit of ammonia, two ounces gum camphor, two ounces spirits turpentine. Add one quart strong alcohol. Mix well together, and bottle ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... beauty and fragrance, are worthy to be, as they really are, cousin to the rose. On one of my rambles I came upon some plants of a strangely slim and prim aspect; nothing but a straight, erect, military-looking, needle-like stalk, bearing a spike of pods at the top, and clasped at the middle by two small stemless leaves. By some occult means (perhaps their growing with Tiarella had something to do with the matter) I felt at once that these must be the mitrewort (Mitella diphylla). My prophetic soul was ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... This trunk rises from twelve to fifteen feet from the ground, and then spreads out into long broad leaves, not less than five or six feet each. From the middle of these leaves the flower rises, and also the spike (regime). By this word is to be understood a hundred of large bananas growing from the same stalk, forming together a long branch, that turns towards ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... secondary branch, so that the bark may heal over the junction of the branch with the parent branch, as, if this is not done, the free circulation of the sap is checked. It runs up the branches, and, of course, cannot readily get on when it meets with a spike of wood sticking out of the branch. This spike or stump may be green or half or quite dead, but whatever state it is in the free circulation of the sap will be checked, and the quantity of sap in circulation for the benefit of the main branch will ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... Tim O'Shane, they cached him safe away, An' though he objurgated some, they "cured" him night an' day; An' pretty soon there came the change amazin' to explain: "I'll never take another drink," sez Timothy O'Shane. They tried it out on Spike Muldoon, that toper of renown; They put it over Grouch McGraw, the terror of the town. They roped in "tanks" from far and near, an' every test was sure, An' like a flame there ran the fame ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... hacking and stabbing with the pointed end of the cross. The Huns did not like the look of such a wild apparition and refused to face him. Bit by bit they retired and O'Hagan took advantage of a moment to take a green silk Irish flag, with a crownless harp, from his pocket, and attach it to the spike of the cross. Then, roaring like a lion and brandishing his strange weapon, he fell on them once more—and as they broke he saw the hooded priest driving them before him with his flaming sword. A great joy seemed to burn up in his soul. Men who watched him said he ran amok. His great voice ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... anthers, and style; crowded in a dense spike; quickly fading; unpleasantly odorous. Perianth tubular, 2-lipped, parted into 6 irregular lobes, free from ovary; middle lobe of upper lip with 2 yellow spots at base within. Stamens 6, placed at unequal distances on tube, 3 opposite each lip. Pistil 1, the stigma minutely toothed. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... her Cashmere robe were relieved at the throat by a knot of lilac ribbon, and amid its loops were secured clusters of violets, that matched in hue the long spike of hyacinth which was fastened in one side of the coiled hair, twined just behind the ear, and drooped low on the snowy neck. Before her on a gilded stand was the purple pyramid of flowers she had brought from the theatre, and beside them lay several perfumed envelopes with elaborate ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, and southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is very beautiful in springtime with a great multitude of wild flowers. More particularly is this so in early June, when the slender asphodel Saint Bruno's lily, with its spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the westward of this delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded trench, a great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which arise great precipices ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... in the Great Game of Love. The male is always the aggressor. Not physically—at least not often—and women take the most outrageous kinds of flattery for granted. At parties there are always a couple of hot breaths of passion fanning your neck. A girl has to keep her spike ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... at that worn and rusty bar of iron with its single bent and rusty spike, I was whisked back across the years by some strange trick of memory and I saw, instead, a dimly lighted sick room, on a hot summer night—myself a little sufferer, and sitting beside me, fanning my fevered brow, my beloved father, who, notwithstanding ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty
... truffle-hunting to-day has opened badly, although one party thinks differently. In a few minutes, however, another truffle is found, and this time the old man delivers a whack on the nose at the right moment, and, seizing the fungus, hands it to me. Now he takes from his pocket a spike of maize, and, picking off a few grains, gives them to the pig to soothe her injured feelings, and encourage her to hunt again. This she is quite ready to do, for a pig has no amour propre. We move about in the dry open wood, keeping always near the trees, and truffle ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... he had fastened a barbed spike, and had secured the arrow to the end of the string. Armed with this weapon, he advanced ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... day it moved rather less, namely, 1/500 in 3 h., and 2/500 in an opposite direction during the next 6 h. The two lobes, therefore, seem to be constantly closing or opening, though to a very small distance; for we must remember that the little triangle of paper affixed to the marginal spike increased its length, and thus exaggerated somewhat the movement. Similar observations, with the important difference that the petiole was left free and the plant kept under a high temperature, were made on a leaf, which was healthy, but so old that it ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... was almost universally employed as a vessel by the tribes of the Atlantic drainage of North America. Usually it was trimmed down and excavated until only about three-fourths of the outer wall of the shell remained. At one end was the long spike-like base which served as a handle, and at the other the flat conical apex, with its very pronounced spiral line or ridge expanding from the center to the circumference, as seen in Fig. 475 a. This vessel was often copied in clay, as many good examples now in our museums testify. The notable feature ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... standing on the bench that served instead of dining-chairs, each with a plate and a pancake on the table in front of them. Jack held a hammer and spike, Scott Burton a hatchet, Geoffrey a saw, and Philip a rifle. Bell was nothing if not intuitive. No elaborate explanations ever were needed to show her a fact. Without a word she flung the plate of flapjacks she held as far ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sharp scimiters, frequently severing the steel top from the ashpole, and then breaking through and engaging in hand-to-hand conflict with the knights. Behind the latter sat their squires, with extra spears and arms ready to hand to their masters; and in close combat, the heavy maces with their spike ends were weapons before which the light-clad horsemen went down like reeds before ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... although we never could persuade him to confess his penchant; and, on this occasion, he had attached himself to their immediate sleigh. Provided, like the Canadians, with poles terminated by an iron hook at one end and a spike at the other, we made our way after their fashion, but in quicker time than they possibly could, harnessed as they were in the sledges. With the aid of these poles, we cleared, with facility, chasms of ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... to worlds unknown, for profits guessed at, against dangers neither to be counted nor foreseen. Be not too much stricken of amazement, therefore, when now these cold ones, who would not have bought an American railroad without counting the cross-ties and weighing every spike and fish-plate, were ready to send millions adrift on a sightless invasion of Asia ten thousand miles away. Besides, as the five with Mr. Harley laid out their campaign, any question of Oriental danger was ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... plants put under contribution by the perfume factories of the district, viz., the orange tree, bitter and sweet, the lemon, eucalyptus, myrtle, bay laurel, cherry laurel, elder; the labiates; lavender, spike, thyme, etc.; the umbelliferous fennel and parsley, the composite wormwood and tarragon, and, more delicate than these, the rose, geranium, cassie, jasmin, jonquil, mignonette, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... unsubdued. The order was given for every man to arm himself in the best manner he could, and it was obeyed with the utmost promptitude and alacrity. Rude pike staves were formed by cutting down young trees; small swords, dirks, knives, chisels, and even large spike nails sharpened, were firmly fixed to the ends of these poles, and those who could find nothing better hardened the end of the wood in the fire, and bringing it to a sharp point, formed a tolerable ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... him, and Matt turned about and said, "Hello, Caryl!" and yielded him a sort of absent-minded hand, while he kept his face turned smilingly upon the men. Some were holding the rails in position, and another was driving in the spike that was to rivet the plate to the sleeper. He struck it with exquisite accuracy from a wide, free-handed rhythmical ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... them into his waistcoat pocket, in order to get them home safely. The children found several other curiosities besides shells. They collected pebbles, and specimens of sand, of different colors. Mary found an old iron spike, perhaps part of a vessel, with the sand and gravel concreted around it. It looked like stone growing upon iron. Rollo also found a small piece of wood, battered and worn by the long-continued action of the waves, and he thought it was very curious indeed. In fine, the children filled their ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... "you are a damned good liar, but I am about to spike your gun. Go on out Mike, and ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... knew what to do. Corporal Pederson produced hardened steel spikes with ring tops. Private Trudeau had a sledge. Driving the first spike would be the hardest, because the action of swinging the hammer would propel the Planeteer like a rocket exhaust. In space, the law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction had to be remembered ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... creeper spikes on his heels, and in objecting to the extra weight our guide said derisively: "We've quite enough to pack already, and I guess you don't want to dress us up with a green veil, a crooked club with a spike in the end of it, and fathoms of spun hemp, like them tourist fellows bring out to sit in ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... entirely deflated. A railroad spike four and three-quarters inches long, and otherwise well proportioned, had penetrated full length. It had been picked up along the trolley line, was probably struck by the front wheel, lifted up on end so that the rear tire struck the sharp end exactly the right angle ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... the meeting-point, though at Promontory, fifty miles west of Ogden, the last spike was driven. A thousand people met at that place in May, '69, to see the short space of track closed and the road finished. A Central train and locomotive from the Pacific came steaming up, and an engine and cars from the ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... best to be done. Reginald undertook to lead the whole force of cavalry, which was to make a circuit from the rear of the fort, so that they might be concealed till they were ready to dash at the guns. A party of infantry were at the same time to be prepared to rush forward to spike some of the guns, and to drag the others within the lines. A dozen Europeans, with two of their officers, were to lead the party of infantry, composed of the most determined and best disciplined natives. These were to ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... ripens in a single night, she fell into the most furious rage, but being terribly afraid of her daughter, she controlled herself, and bade the boy go and find the field guarded by eighteen millions of demons, warning him on no account to look back after having plucked the tallest spike of rice, which grew ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... in giving a ramping-performance for the benefit of the crowd. Ramping, it should be explained, consists in running round and round in a wide circle, and sending waves and ripples of movement along the whole length of your spine, from your pointed ears right down to the spike at the end of your long tail. When you are covered with blue scales, the effect is particularly pleasing; and the Boy recollected the dragon's recently expressed wish to ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... thicker and larger than the cocoa-nut tree, although rarely so tall, and having immense pinnate spiny leaves, which completely cover the trunk till it is many years old. It has a creeping root-stem like the Nipa palm, and when about ten or fifteen years of age sends up an immense terminal spike of flowers, after which the tree dies. It grows in swamps, or in swampy hollows on the rocky slopes of hills, where it seems to thrive equally well as when exposed to the influx of salt or brackish water. The ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Turkish irregulars, with a few naval officers leading them, and a solid mass of Jack-tars in the centre, would break from a sally-port, or rush vehemently down through the gap in the wall, and scour the French trenches, overturn the gabions, spike the guns, and slay the guards. The French reserves hurried fiercely up, always scourged, however, by the flank fire of the ships, and drove back the sortie. But the process was renewed the same night or the next day with unlessened fire and daring. The French engineers, despairing of success ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... to spike the port battery and throw the guns overboard, but it was not done, for the enemy's fire was becoming so rapid and severe that the Captain deemed it judicious to abandon the ship at once in order to save the lives of ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... I started from what is called the "Beds," and God help St. Patrick if he lay upon them: they are sharp stones placed circularly in the earth, with the spike ends of them up, one circle within another; and the manner in which the pilgrim gets as far as the innermost, resembles precisely that in which school-boys enter the "Walls of Troy" upon their slates. I moved away from these upon ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... job—you don't want me to draw the moral, do you? I never was good at that, though I've known fellows with that peculiar cast o' brain as could draw a moral out of a marline-spike if they were hard put to it. Seems to me that it's best to let morals draw themselves. For instance, that time when I was wrecked on the South American coast, I came to a shallow river, an' had to wade across, but was too lazy to pull off my boots, 'cause ...
— Jeff Benson, or the Young Coastguardsman • R.M. Ballantyne
... "Sally" was put down, the vessel ranged up alongside, and in an instant a torrent of armed men poured over the sides of the surprised Frenchman, and drove the crew below. There was no resistance. The ship was captured in five minutes. The marines of the expedition had been sent ashore to spike the guns of the battery, and their work was performed with equal promptitude. Then all hands set to work rigging the captured vessel, and getting her ready for sea. On the shore the people were in ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... principles, says I. They're the right sort, says he. But, says he (no offence), I think you wor wrong, says he, to pass the short turn in the ladie-shoes,[B] says he. I know, says I, you mane beside the three-spike headlan'. That's the spot, says he, I see you know it. As well as I know my father, ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... the things answered very well, and ordered more to be made; that, in a little while after this, the said Bentley was sent for to the Bow-street Office, and, after a private examination, was desired to make a pike, or spike, of the same sort, and to carry it to the office, which he did. That your petitioner perceives that the information which it contains may possibly be of the utmost importance in giving a clue to ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... Mr. RUSSELL introduces into his stories without explanations such as this, it would be difficult to say. But with such assistance, a studding-sail-boom becomes as easy of identification as a marling-spike lashed to a forecastle spinaker-boom, close hauled aport under trysails, blowing out like flags from the grips of clew-lines and leech-lines towards the close of a second dog-watch! Shiver LINDLEY MURRAY'S timbers! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... expected. I was too hungry to care about castles at the moment, so I took the 'bus for the Commercial Hotel, an establishment that seemed to live up to its name, both in sentiment and in accommodation. The landlord, Mr. Spike, referred bitterly to the castle, which, he explained, was, by its dominating presence, "spoilin' the prosperous appearance of Perkinsville." Dinner over, he led me to ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... sprouting grasses by the river-bank, the snowdrops opened to the breath of spring; soon afterwards, the early violets and primroses decked the hedgerows on the margin of the wood, and the wild hyacinths thrust their spike-shaped leaves above the mould. The hedgehogs, curled in their beds amid the wind-blown oak-leaves, were awakened by the gentle heat, and wandered through the ditches in search of slugs and snails. ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... we omit allusions to other associations connected with this figure. The dew, formed in the silence of the darkness while men sleep, falling as willingly on a bit of dead wood as anywhere, hanging its pearls on every poor spike of grass, and dressing everything on which it lies with strange beauty, each separate globule tiny and evanescent, but each flashing back the light, and each a perfect sphere, feeble one by one, but united, mighty to make the pastures of the wilderness rejoice—so, created in silence ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... omens were of the following nature. There is a small shrine and in it a golden eagle, which is found in all the legions that are on the register, and it never moves from the winter-quarters except the whole army goes forth on some errand. One man carries it on a long shaft, which ends in a sharp spike for the purpose of setting it firmly in the ground. Now of these so-called eagles one was unwilling to join him in his passage of the Euphrates at that time, but stuck fast in the earth as if planted until many took their places around ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... grins slowly. Then he points to his lips with his fingers and makes signs. This means he is dumb. He places his hand over his stomach and grins again. He is going to eat them. It is time to go home and do this, so he puts up his fishpole and packs his primitive paraphernalia—a tin can, a rusty spike, a ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... wide white courtyard, gravel paved. We left the machine and went from the courtyard into a garden—the loveliest old walled garden imaginable. At the corners of the garden were fine old trees—tall, spike-shaped evergreens of some variety, and in the midst of it was a weeping yew tree and a fountain. Around the walls were shrubs and splashed about the walks and near the fountain were gorgeous dabs of colour, phlox and asters, and dahlias and hollyhocks and flowers ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... Lincoln was the longest of the Sangamon representatives, distinguished as the Long Nine. They were much hampered by an old member who tried to put a stopper upon any measure on the set ground that it was "un-con-sti-tu-tional." Lincoln was selected to "spike his gun." A measure was introduced benefiting the Sangamon district, so that its electee might befittingly push it, and defend it. He was warrantably its usher when the habitual interrupter bawled ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... seemed to me irresolutely for a moment, and then drew from his pocket an instrument which I distinctly saw against the faint moonlight. Imagine a hammer, one end of which had been beaten out into a longish tapering spike, with a handle something longer than usual. He drew stealthily to the window, and seemed to examine this hurriedly, and tested its strength with a twist or two of his hand. And then he adjusted it very carefully in his grasp, and made two or three little experimental ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... know some of 'em will be letting prisoners escape right under my nose, making us the laughing stock of these damned militia volunteers." (Canker entered service in '61 as a private in a city company that was militia to the tip of its spike-tailed coats, but he had forgotten it.) "I want these young idlers to understand distinctly, by George, that the first prisoner that gets away from this post takes somebody's commission with him. D'you hear that, Mr. Gray?" ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... neither sex does wine produce that moral and mental wreckage which abbreviates the length of human existence among those of other creeds. Radical fanaticism, that drives a tack with a maul and a twenty-penny spike with a tack-hammer, cannot be expected to study this or any other question in any rational manner; but to the sociologist, the question as to what produces this remarkable soberness, in the midst of the habitual and continued use of wine in ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... of blossoms get? Take it from my Julia's sweat: Oil of lilies and of spike? From her moisture take the like. Let her breathe, or let her blow, All rich spices thence ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... spikes about 1 inch long and 1/2 inch in diameter; dark purplish-red, oblong, sweet and edible; apparently a simple fruit but really made up of the thickened calyx lobes of the spike. ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... keep a sort of iron bolt which he used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order to preserve it from the rats," as he said. As Thenardier was kept in sight, no objection had been made to this spike. Still, it was remembered afterwards, that one of the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... earthquake rumbling under our feet—a mine accumulating material for a national catastrophe. It should make this a day of fasting and prayer, not of boisterous merriment and idle pageantry—a day of great lamentation, not of congratulatory joy. It should spike every cannon, and haul down every banner. Our garb should be sack-cloth—our heads bowed in the dust—our supplications for the pardon and ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... the field with silver, it was blue with germander speedwell—each flower painted with deepening colour, eyed with startling white, and carrying on slender stamens the round white pollen-balls—worlds of silent, lovely activity. Every flower-spike had its family of buds, blue jewels splashed with white, each close-folded on her mystery. To see the whole field not only bright with them, but brimming over, was like watching ten thousand saints rapt in ecstasy, ten thousand children ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... in his way; but he is a man who has risen too fast, as other men rise too slowly. Nothing in him; no substance, madam; I knew him as a youngster, and I could have tossed him on a marling-spike. And instead of feeding well, Sir, he quite wore himself away. To my firm knowledge, he would scarcely turn the scale upon a good Frenchman of half of the peas. Every man should work his own way up, unless his father did ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... destruction, dying when the tree withered. Some Faraday shows us that each drop of water is a sheath for electric forces sufficient to charge 800,000 Leyden jars, or drive an engine from Liverpool to London. Some Sir William Thomson tells us how hydrogen gas will chew up a large iron spike as a child's molars will chew off the end of a stick of candy. Thus each new book opens up some new and hitherto unexplored realm of nature. Thus books fulfill for us the legend of the wondrous glass that showed its owner all things ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... more," said the prince. "I know there are guards in every gallery, bolts to every door, cannon and soldiery at every barrier. How will you overcome the sentries—spike the guns? How will you break through the ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... the dam and makes its extra growth after birth. When the pelvic bones have been fractured repair takes place with the formation of a large permanent callus, which, projecting internally, may be a serious obstacle to calving. Worse still, if the edge of the broken bone projects internally as a sharp spike or ridge, the vaginal walls are cut upon it during the passage of the calf, with serious or fatal result. In other cases, where the cow has suffered from fragility of bone (fragilitas ossium) the thickening of the bone causes narrowing of the long passage of the pelvis ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... male or buck; the doe is without them. They rise from a rough bony protuberance on the forehead, called the "burr." In the first year they grow in the shape of two short straight spikes; hence the name "spike-bucks" given to the animals of that age. In the second season a small antler appears on each horn, and the number increases until the fourth year, when they obtain a full head-dress of "branching honours." The antlers, or, as they are sometimes called, "points," often increase in number ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... prongs at the end of the staff, three divergent ones in the middle of it, with several small double barbs upon them turning inward. The spear for salmon or other fish, called kakeewei, consists of a wooden staff, with a spike of bone or ivory, three inches long, secured at one end. On each side of the spike is a curved prong, much like that of a pitchfork, but made of flexible horn, which gives them a spring, and having a barb on the inner part of the point turning downward. Their fishhooks (kakliokio) consist ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... decorated it with artificial flowers of the same material, so that it was not distinguishable from porcelain; another had forged an axe-blade of steel, etched the surface and fixed it upon a polished ebony rod with a terminal spike, forming a ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... a message from Teppahoo to acquaint me the heifer was brought to Matavai. I immediately went on shore and found that he had been as good as his word. The purchase money was paid, which consisted of a shirt, a hatchet, a spike nail, a knife, a pair of scissors, a gimlet, and file; to which was added a small quantity of loaf-sugar. Teppahoo appeared well pleased with his bargain; and I sent the heifer to Poeeno's residence near ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... brought no difference into the home, save that George Mansion's arm grew stronger daily in combat against the old foe. Then came the second attack of the enemy, when six white men beset him from behind, again knocking him insensible, with a heavy blue beech hand-spike. They broke his hand and three ribs, knocked out his teeth, injured his side and head; then seizing his pistol, shot at him, the ball fortunately not reaching a vital spot. As his senses swam he felt them drag his poor maimed body into the middle of the road, so it would appear as ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... mainslacks, and splice your marline-spike. Where are you coming to?" cried Peeler, the coastguardsman—for such, we need hardly say, was the rank of the ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... excellent American Journal (27. The 'American Naturalist,' Dec. 1869, p. 552.) says, that he has hunted for the last twenty-one years in the Adirondacks, where the Cervus virginianus abounds. About fourteen years ago he first heard of SPIKE-HORN BUCKS. These became from year to year more common; about five years ago he shot one, and afterwards another, and now they are frequently killed. "The spike-horn differs greatly from the common antler of the C. virginianus. It consists of a single spike, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... the Company's line in the middle of one of the loneliest divisions. In the discharge of his duties there was no more conscientious section foreman in the employ of the C.L.S. He timed his slumber by the sun and his waking hours were filled with the roll of hand-car wheels, the ring of spike-mauls and the tamping grate ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... Catherine. It is the peak of earth most charged with wayward emotions—pity and terror blent together into a poignant beauty, a sorcery. Imagine yourself one of those old Popes—Linus or Anaclete or Damasius—whose heads spike the clerestory of the Duomo, you would look down upon a sea of pictures (by the best pavement-artists in the world)—the Massacre of the Innocents like a patch of dry blood by the altar-steps, a winking Madonna ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... hand, and felt something sticking from the hard bark and looked to see what it was. It was an arrowhead, such a rough iron spike as men will use when they must make fresh arrows after battle, in all haste, and have to use what they can first find. The shaft was snapped close to the iron and the rawhide lashing that held it, and I could not take it out as I would, for the young oak was sturdy and tough; and so I left ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... Punctured or penetrating wounds—those produced by anything running deeply into the flesh; such as a sword, a sharp nail, a spike, the point of ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... not greatly alterable, but that the alteration of their circumstances will certainly influence the effect and working of their capacities and instincts. The buttercup which is tall with a flower at the end of a high firm stalk and leaves with slender spike fingers, if it grows in an open meadow, becomes a stunted flower on a short stem, and its leaves form squat webs, in order to force its growth on a close-cropped lawn. The experience of the American Army shows us that to cut off opportunity and suggestion ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... then hunted for each other and came to grief; all those kind of silly fumbles. Now, what you need is formation—see? Must have some sort of formation for advance. Must keep in touch. For two men a tandem is right. For three men, what you want is a spike-team—middle man crawls ahead, other men follow on each side just near enough to touch his left heel with right hand and right heel with left hand—a triangle, see? Keep touching once every thirty seconds. If you miss ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... lime." I did not hear of any of these "ostreiras," which, if they exist, must reflect the Sambaquis of the opposite Brazilian shore. The house was guarded by three wooden figures, "clouterly carved," and powdered with ochre or red wood; two of them, representing warriors in studded coatings of spike nails, with a looking-glass fixed in the stomach, raised their hands as if to stab each other. These figures are sometimes found large as life: according to the agents, the spikes are driven in before the wars begin, and ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... thirty yet! I'm awful little far my size—I'm purt' nigh littler 'an Some babies is!—an' neighbors all calls me 'The Little Man!' An' Doc one time he laughed an' said: 'I 'spect, first thing you know, You'll have a little spike-tail coat an' travel with a show!' An' nen I laughed—till I looked round an' Aunty was a-cryin'— Sometimes she acts like that, 'cause I got 'Curv'ture of ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... married long ago, if it wasn't for this foolin' with Maddy," chimed in Mrs. Joel Spike, throwing the chalk across the quilt to her sister, Tripheny Marvel, who wondered if Maddy thought he'd ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... Heaven's sake, as an old friend, spike or remove the chimney cowl that McWhannel at No. 3 has written you about. He has called on me twice and written three long letters, "to enlist my sympathy and support." He is the most poisonous kind of bore, and I'll gladly pay for the removal of the cowl, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various
... arrangements of leaves and flowers are quite constant, that the leaves of some plants are opposite, of others alternate; of still others from the root only, that flowers are solitary, in raceme, head, spike or otherwise clustered. ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... fastened their lines securely, baiting each alternate hook with mutton and worms. I declared this was too cockney a method of fishing, and selected a tall slender flax-stick, the stalk of last year's spike of red honey-filled blossoms, and to this extempore rod I fastened my line and bait. When one considers that the old whalers were accustomed to use ropes made in the rudest fashion, from the fibre of this very plant, in their ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... the next 6 h. The two lobes, therefore, seem to be constantly closing or opening, though to a very small distance; for we must remember that the little triangle of paper affixed to the marginal spike increased its length, and thus exaggerated somewhat the movement. Similar observations, with the important difference that the petiole was left free and the plant kept under a high temperature, were made on a leaf, which was healthy, but so old that it did not close ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... the case your way, Mr. Smith; that's a blamed sight better lard than I thought Muggins & Co. were making." And you'd have driven a spike right through that fellow's little joke and have nailed down his order hard and tight with ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... a hemlock top, the spike just tapering its final point. The third, a convolvulus, half closed. "The end draws nigh, and all thy hopes are waning." Then they ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... roared the accused one. "I threw him down according to the rules and I didn't spike him ...
— The Rover Boys at Colby Hall - or The Struggles of the Young Cadets • Arthur M. Winfield
... clearly gather from this By-law. When a person joins Mrs. Eddy's Church he must leave his thinker at home. Leave it permanently. To make sure that it will not go off some time or other when he is not watching, it will be safest for him to spike it. If he should forget himself and think just once, the By-law provides that he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to a period between the Carboniferous and Permian eras; but whether the womb of one colossal volcano or the product of a thousand lesser eruptions threw forth this granite monster, none may yet assert. Whether Dartmoor first appeared as a mighty shield, with one uprising spike in its midst, or as a target supporting many separate bosses cannot be declared; for the original aspect of the region has long vanished, though our worn and weathered land of tors still shadows, in its venerable desolation, those ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... stranger when observing the conduct of a mahout or driver is sympathy for the animal, which is governed through the severe authority of the iron spike. This instrument is about twenty inches long, and resembles somewhat an old-fashioned boat-hook, being a sharp spike at the extremity beyond the keen-pointed hook; it can thus be used either to drive the elephant ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... a spike stickin' out o' the top of it," says the Waiver, "and if mine has three, it is only ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... trace, it had been widened by the Spaniards, and transformed from a line of mud six feet broad to one of thirty. The only pleasant reminiscence which I have about it was the finding in flower a beautiful parasite, undescribed by Griesbach; {192} a 'wild pine' with a branching spike of crimson flowers, purple tipped, which shone in the darkness of the bush like a great bunch of rosebuds ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the good professor used to say at college, as he emerged from a hopeless labyrinth of postulates and preliminaries an hour long, that the guests who abused the courtesy of their hosts, upon the late transcontinental trip to drive the golden spike, may have been persons of social eminence, but were in no ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... meeting-point, though at Promontory, fifty miles west of Ogden, the last spike was driven. A thousand people met at that place in May, '69, to see the short space of track closed and the road finished. A Central train and locomotive from the Pacific came steaming up, and an engine and cars from the Atlantic pulled in on the other ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... the flood in the valley; while, in addition to those stores of substantial food, there was Kerguelen cabbage ad libitum at their disposal—all the fresher and more juicy through being covered up by the snow and watered by the spring rains— besides an abundance of the haddock-like, spike-headed fish to be had for the catching in the bay, not to speak of the dried penguins as a last resource, should the other articles of diet fail to suit or pall on the palate after a time. Indeed, as Mr Lathrope observed frequently when seated at the central table of their general room and disposing ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... Mike. 'But we were chumps to give up our revolvers. What good can a man do pokin' round in the dark with a blanky spike?' ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... of Li Shih-min's campaign in 621 A.D. against the two rebels, Tou Chien-te, King of Hsia, and Wang Shih-ch'ung, Prince of Cheng, was his seizure of the heights of Wu-lao, in spike of which Tou Chien-te persisted in his attempt to relieve his ally in Lo-yang, was defeated and taken prisoner. See CHIU T'ANG, ch. 2, fol. 5 ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... Spike Island is mentioned in Church History as a present given by a Munster King to St. Cartach, of Lismore. In modern times it was used as a convict prison, the convicts' labour being employed in the construction of ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... please alight on this side of the stage, turn their pockets inside out and deposit their coin on top of the box" continued the road agent. "My friend with the spike beard and the gold eye-glasses! You dropped something on the bed of the stage. Pick it up, if you're anxious to retain a whole hide. Thank you! That pocketbook looks fat. Now, one at a time and no crowding. Omit the ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... some time after this, ascended the column of forty cubits; how a great dragon (serpent) crawled towards it, and coiled round it, entreating (so it seemed) to be freed from a spike of wood which had entered its eye; and how, St. Simeon took pity on it, he caused the spike (which was a cubit ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... to dodge Chatelard's hand, and on the downward swing he picked up the rusty marlinespike. It was a weapon of might, indeed. Jim's blow caused Chatelard's arm to drop, limp and nerveless. But in gaining his enemy's weapon, Jim was forced to drop his own. He put a firm foot upon the spike, however, while he held Chatelard at arm's length and looked into ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... of the end of the log and lifted it as high as they could reach; and one of the men reached out quickly for his spike pole, while the other two men held the log, and he jabbed the spike hard into the log and held it while another man got his spike pole and jabbed the spike hard ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins
... bruise, and all testifying with one voice to a constant series of savage outrages during the voyage; or, it might be, they laid an accusation of actual murder, perpetrated by the first or second officers with many blows of steel-knuckles, a rope's end, or a marline-spike, or by the captain, in the twinkling of an eye, with a shot of his pistol. Taking the seamen's view of the case, you would suppose that the gibbet was hungry for the murderers. Listening to the captain's defence, you would seem to discover that ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... worthy of note till the 22d October, when Mr. Page, Second Mate, made an attack on his superior officer, the Doctor of Physic, with a Marline-spike; and, but for a very large Periwig he wore, which was accounted odd in one having a Maritime Command, would have finished him. Mr. Page was had to the Forecastle and clapped in the Bilboes, and Captain Blokes was for Hanging him off-hand as an Example to the rest; but I, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... his duty close to some shells that were placed on her deck; a gay young midshipman was thoughtlessly striving to get the fusee out of one of these by a mallet and spike-nail that lay close at hand; and a fearful explosion ensued, in which the poor marine, cleaning his bayonet near, was shockingly burnt and disfigured, the very skin of all the lower part of his face being utterly destroyed by gunpowder. ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... said Bob; and he drove a spike into the end of the log, tied one end of a rope to the spike, and the other to a pliant young ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... subject by some zealous brethren of another "persuasion," who magnified that mode, and though he was willing to do as I advised in the matter, he was evidently a little inclined to the more spectacular way of receiving the ordinance. Mrs. White suggested that it might save future trouble, and "spike a gun." So Jack, with four others, was taken down to Santa Rosa Creek, that went rippling and sparkling along the southern edge of the town, and duly baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. A great crowd covered the bridge just below, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... well in his way; but he is a man who has risen too fast, as other men rise too slowly. Nothing in him; no substance, madam; I knew him as a youngster, and I could have tossed him on a marling-spike. And instead of feeding well, Sir, he quite wore himself away. To my firm knowledge, he would scarcely turn the scale upon a good Frenchman of half of the peas. Every man should work his own way up, unless his father did it for him. In ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Summerhayes I suppose you will have a hard time wading through my scrawl but I know you will be generous and remember that I went to sea when a little over nine years of age and had my pen been half as often in my hand as a marlin spike, I would now be able to write a ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... He hated that He cannot change His cold, Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived, And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave; Only she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not her life, (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun) Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe, And in her old bounds buried ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... significant moment some other bloom has reached its perfect hour. One can never fix the precise moment when the rosy tint the field has from the wild almond passes into the inspiring blue of lupines. One notices here and there a spike of bloom, and a day later the whole field royal and ruffling lightly to the wind. Part of the charm of the lupine is the continual stir of its plumes to airs not suspected otherwhere. Go and stand by any crown of bloom ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... library for hours and hours—with nothing for refreshment except a cup of coffee and a box of snuff, which always stood at his side;" and that he was rarely without a heavy stick with a whistle at one end and a spike at the other—the spike being to keep away dogs when he was travelling in hot countries. This was one of the many little inventions of his own. Mr. Tedder describes him as a man of great and subtle intellect and very urbane. "He had an athletic ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... rattlesnake plantain. In bogs, two species of piperia, with long spikes of greenish flowers, are abundant. In drier situations, a small form of the ladies' tresses is easily recognized by its spiral spike of small white flowers, which are more or less fragrant. In some of the swamps at the base of the mountain grows Limnorchis leucostachys. This is one of our most fragrant flowers, as well as one of the most beautiful, with its long spike of pure ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... their journey till they are surrendered to the saw-mills. Each wears shoes the soles of which are thickly studded with iron brads an inch long; and each carries a long pole called a "pick-pole," which has a strong sharp-pointed iron spike in the end. This they drive into the wood, and it supports and steadies them as they ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... possible; if dry, it should be soaked until quite soft. Cut some thin strips of hide for sewing or lacing. Now shape a bag or pocket of size sufficient to hold about a hundredweight of stone, and by puncturing the edges with a knife, marline-spike, or other pointed tool, sew together; make a handle of twisted or pleated hide, and having filled your bucket with dry sand or earth let it stand till the whole is quite dry, when it will be properly distended and will maintain its shape until ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... propose to spike one of my guns," said James, who listened to the last remarks with profound emotion. "We are right, and Americans will support us. The Courant was started for a purpose, and we must not ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... let out the hounds, and put them on the track of Coirpre, and Finn followed them, and they came to a house, and Coirpre in it, and three times nine of his men and he cooking fish on a spit; and Lomna's head was on a spike beside ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... battery, with which the English for four hours kept up a weak contest with their foes. Then the fleet sailed past the defences and up the river before a strong breeze, and Oglethorpe was obliged to spike the guns and destroy the war-material at Fort St. Simon's and withdraw to the stronger post of Frederica, where he proposed to make his stand. Not long afterward the Spaniards landed their five thousand men four miles below ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... platinum—differ from each other by the weight of each bar, increasing in orderly succession; the details will be given later. Manganese is often grouped with iron, nickel, and cobalt (see Crookes' lemniscates), but its fourteen protruding bodies repeat the "lithium spike" (proto-element 5) and are grouped round a central ovoid. This would appear to connect it with lithium (2 on Plate IV) rather than with fluorine (3 in Plate IV), with which it is often classed. The "lithium spike" re-appears in potassium and rubidium. These details, again, ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... that god, who is the doer of all that is good, was duly honoured by his son, and in company with the Mothers, he stayed there by the side of Mahasena to tend him. And that lady amongst the Mothers who was born of Anger[74] with a spike in hand kept watch over Skanda even like a mother guarding her own offspring, and that irascible red-coloured daughter of the Sea, who lived herself on blood, hugged Mahasena in her breast and nursed him like a mother. And Agni transforming himself into a trader ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... jack-rabbit, "You go 'long!" she cried, outraged. "I'se seed rabbits earlier 'n de mawnin' dan yo'self." She watched the animal with all her might, muttering, "Law, see him squot," and "Hole on, hole on!" and "Yasser, he done gone fo' sho. My grashus, you lemme have a scatter shoot-gun an' a spike-tail smell dog, an' I'll git one ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... renamed that first day in the arena, when, also, he received the surprise of his life. He did not dream of the spike in the saddle, nor, while the saddle was empty, did it press against him. But the moment Samuel Bacon, a negro tumbler, got into the saddle, the spike sank home. He knew about it and was prepared. But ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... out with three others at night to try and get into the battery and spike the guns, but Major Hannay would not permit ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... their shields. Thence Reichel (see "The Shield") infers that the late poet of Book X. gave them small Ionian round bucklers; but it has been shown that no such inference is legitimate. Their spears were erect by their sides, fixed in the ground by the sauroter, or butt-spike, used by the men of the late "warrior vase" found at Mycenae. To arrange the spears thus, we have seen, was a point of drill that, in Aristotle's time, survived among the Illyrians. [Footnote: Poetics, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... any wild pigs; but before long he sighted a big deer with many-branched antlers. The dogs gave chase and seized the deer, and held it until the man came up and killed it with the sharp iron spike that tipped his long staff (tidalan [149]). Then the man tied to the deer's antlers a strong piece of rattan, and ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... engineering difficulties were not serious, but the pace of construction which was demanded, and the fact that every stick of timber and every pound of food, as well as every rail and spike, had to be brought a great distance, required remarkable organization. Three hundred sub-contractors were employed on the portion of the line crossing the plains. Bridge-gangs and track-layers {162} followed ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... of sheet brass, is pivoted at a, where it must be raised off the base by a small washer. It projects 1/4 inch beyond the base on the gong support side. A square nick is cut in it at such a distance from a that, when the wire spike on C is in the nick, the strip is held clear of T2. The other end of the trigger, when the trigger is set, must be 1/8 inch from the shank of the alarm hammer—at any rate not so far away that the hammer, when it vibrates, cannot ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... impressionable young man (junior editor of the Boomtown Spike), threw himself down on the sod, pulled his hat rim down over his eyes, and looked away over the plain. It was the second year of Boom-town's existence, and Seagraves had not yet grown restless under its monotony. Around him the gophers played saucily. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... time I went to dig around their roots somebody had done it before me! There they were, perfectly huge with their great fluted leaves, and right at the end of the row an extra-large plant had sent up a tall, green spike on the end of which a great, pink doll-blossom was shaking out her rosy skirts in the afternoon sun. I stood for a minute looking at her in utter rapture. Then I reached out my arms and gathered her in and put a kiss right in the center of her ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Not a spike of grass could be seen and the soil, a loose red sand, was in most places covered with a scrub like a thick-set hedge of Eucalyptus dumosa. Many a tree was ascended by Burnett, but nothing was to be seen on any side different to what we found where we were. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... considerable abundance a stately fern, the Cyclopteris Hibernicus (see Fig. 2), of mayhap not smaller proportions than our monarch of the British ferns, Osmunda regalis, associated with a peculiar lepidodendron, and what seems to be a lepidostrobus,—possibly the fructiferous spike or cone of the latter, mingled with carbonaceous stems, which, in the simplicity of their texture, and their abundance, give evidence of a low but not scanty vegetation. Ere passing to the luxuriant carboniferous flora, I shall make but one other remark. The existing plants whence ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... ounces, storax liquid, half an ounce; mastich, frankincense, pitch, bole, each two drachms; then with wax make a plaster; or take laudanum, a drachm and a half; mastich, and frankincense, each half a drachm, wood aloes, cloves, spike, each a drachm; ash-coloured ambergris, four grains: musk, half a scruple; make two round plasters to be laid on each side of the navel; make a fume of snails' skins salted, or of garlic, and let it be taken ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... first real Thinker, Then air-philosophy and element-philosophy grew up—beast-worship, animalism, fire-worship, and the rudiments of simple scientific learning, as, for instance, when men found that they could make a tool to cut, a spike ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... hear "Red Mike" grunting as he and Gibson struggled up the side of the roadbed. They saw "Red Mike" adjust the derailer to the rail and Gibson kneel to hold a spike as it was hammered into the tie by "Red Mike" wielding the sledge hammer. The blows of the hammer sounded sharply on the still night air. They heard "Red Mike" curse viciously as he missed hitting the spike and Gibson jerked his hand away a fraction of a second ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... descended from the primrose, or conversely, ranks them together as a single species, and gives a single definition. As soon as three Orchidean forms (Monochanthus, Myanthus, and Catasetum), which had previously been ranked as three distinct genera, were known to be sometimes produced on the same spike, they were immediately included as a ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... a great while in these slow parts. I feel it in my bones, sore as they are, that some day I'll give you a new dress that will make you look like a spike of red hollyhocks. You'll see ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... Great, gorgeous galaxies! He had forgotten ... had Koa and the others? He turned so fast that he lost his balance and floated above the surface like a captive balloon. Santos, who had been standing nearby to help if requested, hooked a toe on the ground spike, caught him, and set him upright on ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... set out for the church, but the old woman of the cottage had gone before him, and had stuck an enchanted stick called 'the spike of hurt' in a crack of the door, so that he would brush against it as he stepped across the threshold. Suddenly he felt so sleepy that he could not stand up, and throwing himself on the ground he sank into a deep slumber, not knowing that the dark ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... bluebells and red-robins, and now and then crushed the fragrance out of a low-lying spike of gorse. I knew the flowers were there, though in this curious light I could only see them by peering closely. At the foot of the terrace I pulled up and leant over the oak fence that guarded the abrupt drop ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and foot, carbines and petronels, swords and pole-axes, are mingled in one struggling mass. Rupert and his men seem refreshed, not exhausted, by the weary night,—they seem incapable of fatigue; they spike the guns as they cut down the gunners, and, if any escape, it is because many in both armies wear the same red scarfs. One Puritan, surrounded by the enemy, shows such desperate daring that Rupert bids release him at last, and sends afterwards to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... my boy. Happened to be the weak end of their batting list!" observed Frank, as if determined to agree with his enemy, and thus spike ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... investigation of digestive and reproductive operations in plants may by this time have furnished the microscopic malice of botanists with providentially disgusting reasons, or demoniacally nasty necessities, for every possible spur, spike, jag, sting, rent, blotch, flaw, freckle, filth, or venom, which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the dissolution, of vegetable organism. But with these obscene processes and prurient apparitions the gentle and happy scholar of flowers has nothing whatever to do. I am amazed ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... small beams Endwise compression Compression across the grain Shear along the grain Impact test Hardness test: Abrasion and indentation Cleavage test Tension test parallel to the grain Tension test at right angles to the grain Torsion test Special tests Spike pulling test Packing boxes Vehicle and implement ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... the Old Folks never made such a fuss about flies as we make nowadays. You cannot pick up a magazine without running plump into an article on the deadly housefly—with pictures of him magnified until he looks like the old million-toed, barrel-eyed, spike-tailed dragon of your boyhood mince-pie dreams. The first two pages convince you that the human race is doomed to extermination within eighteen months by ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... wolf-like men, Worse than the wolves. And King Leodogran Groan'd for the Roman legions here again, And Caesar's eagle: then his brother king, Urien, assail'd him: last a heathen horde, Reddening the sun with smoke and earth with blood, And on the spike that split the mother's heart Spitting the child, brake on him, till, amazed, He knew not whither ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... savagely at him and the light, its mouth all the time growing larger and larger; and then a big man whisked out of the door, not so quickly, however, but that Elias could catch a glimpse, by the light of the lantern, of a long iron hooked spike sticking out of his back. And now he began to put one and two together. Still he was less anxious about his life than about his boat; so he there and then sat him down in it with the lantern, and kept watch. When his wife came in the morning, she found him sleeping there, ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... invariably of fronds of rattan gathered in the adjoining forest. This thatch is made by bending back on the midrib every alternate spike till all the spikes lie parallel. Another way is to cut the midrib in the center at the small end and tear the frond into two pieces. These half-fronds are neither so durable nor so serviceable as if the midrib is left entire. Two, three, or four ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... visit Mr. Clark in Lynn, who had been 193:1 confined to his bed six months with hip-disease, caused by a fall upon a wooden spike when quite a boy. On enter- 193:3 ing the house I met his physician, who said that the patient was dying. The physician had just probed the ulcer on the hip, and said the bone was carious 193:6 for several inches. He even showed me the probe, which had ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... reed-mace or club-rush, a plant growing in lakes, by edges of rivers and similar localities, with a creeping underground stem, narrow, nearly flat leaves, 3 to 6 ft. long, arranged in opposite rows, and a tall stem ending in a cylindrical spike, half to one foot long, of closely packed male (above) and female (below) flowers. The familiar brown spike is a dense mass of minute one-seeded fruits, each on a long hair-like stalk and covered with long downy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... without further adventure, and found the four company- guns with their spike teams and single drivers waiting for us. Many people were gathered here, and we were halted, so far as I could see, that they might talk with the men in the ranks. The ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... active and willing seaman, and by the men as a lively, hearty fellow, and a good shipmate. He was going aloft to fit a strap round the main topmasthead, for ringtail halyards, and had the strap and block, a coil of halyards, and a marline-spike about his neck. He fell from the starboard futtock shrouds, and, not knowing how to swim, and being heavily dressed, with all those things round his neck, he probably sank immediately. We pulled astern, in the direction in which ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... learn his limitations and to form habits tamely contrary to his natural Greek likings. Then would he honorably neglect rabbits and all fur, cease pointing droves of pigs, and quit the silly chase of robins. Under check-cord and spike-collar he would become a fast and stylish dog, clean-cut in his bird work, perhaps a field-trial winner. He would learn to take reproof amiably, to "heel" at a word, to respect the whistle at any distance, to be steady to shot and ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... August. In drooping spikes about 1 inch long and 1/2 inch in diameter; dark purplish-red, oblong, sweet and edible; apparently a simple fruit but really made up of the thickened calyx lobes of the spike. ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... up; it is the bulb of a dwarf palm, each layer of the onion peels off, brown and netted, like the outside of a cocoa-nut. It is a clever plant that; from the leaves we get a vegetable horsehair; - and eat the bottom of the centre spike. All the leaves you pull have the same aromatic scent. But here a little patch of cleared ground shows old friends, who seem to cling by abused civilisation:-fine, hardy thistles, one of them bright yellow, though; - honest, Scotch- looking, large daisies or ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... It fits the foot of a man who went out one night with a spy Shackleby sent over to see how and when you would play the devil with our work in the canyon. It even shows the stump of the filed-off creeper-spike on your right boot. There's no use protesting—a friend of yours here will help us to trace your career back to the finding of the Blue Bird mine. Take him along and lock him into the ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... is 3-1/8 inches in its longest diameter, and at its thickest part measures about half-an-inch. It has been chipped all over with great care, and has a sharp edge all round. This peculiar style of tool or weapon reached perfection in this specimen, which, whether used as a knife, arrow, spike, or axe, was an implement of singular beauty of design, and exhibits great skill in ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... to propitiate the preachers by signing a negative Covenant against Rome, later made into a precedent for the famous Covenant of 1638. On June 1 Morton was tried for guilty foreknowledge of Darnley's death. He was executed deservedly, and his head was stuck on a spike of the Tolbooth. The death of this avaricious, licentious, and resolute though unamiable Protestant was a heavy blow to the preachers and their party, and a crook in ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... is a common Labiate plant in our hedges and woods, branched and hairy, with whorls of small dull purple flowers on a spike two feet high or more. There are other varieties of the herb, such as the Marsh (March) Woundwort, the Corn Woundwort, and the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... state. To all proposed arrangements some exception can be taken, and the following system is not free from objection, but it is on the whole the most reliable; and this system is founded on the form of the antler, which runs from a single spike, as in the South American Coassus, to the many branches of the red deer (Cervus elaphas); and all the various changes on which we found genera are in successive stages produced in the red deer, which we may accept as the highest development; for instance, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... this brief period it has completely changed its aspect; the upper part of the flame has, indeed, broken away, and is now shown in that part of the drawing between the two figures on the line above. The same plate also shows various instances of the remarkable spike-like objects, taken, however, at different times and at various parts of the sun. These spikes attain altitudes not generally greater than 20,000 miles, though sometimes they ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... simultaneously. One came in front, armed with a brick; there was one at each side, and one behind, and they closed up around me. I was struck on all sides; and, while I was attending to those in front, I received a blow on my head, from behind, dealt with a heavy hand-spike. I was completely stunned by the blow, and fell, heavily, on the ground, among the timbers. Taking advantage of my fall, they rushed upon me, and began to pound me with their fists. I let them lay on, for a while, after I came to myself, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... proportion of it he could not discover; but he saw a great body, with two red and glaring eyes, which, for some time, were fixed steadily on him, and at length disappeared." Innumerable were the antics it played. Once it purred like a cat; beat the children's legs black and blue; put a long spike into Mr. Mompesson's bed, and a knife into his mother's; filled the porringers with ashes; hid a Bible under the grate; and turned the money black in people's pockets. "One night," said Mr. Mompesson, in a letter to Mr. Glanvil, "there were seven ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... cleistogamic flowers, but differ widely from them in being sterile and conspicuous. Not only the aborted flower-buds and their peduncles (which are elongated apparently through the principle of compensation) are brightly coloured, but so is the upper part of the spike—all, no doubt, for the sake of guiding insects to the inconspicuous perfect flowers. From such cases as these we may pass on to certain Labiatae, for instance, Salvia Horminum in which (as I hear from Mr. Thiselton ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler colouration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and, it may be, even immortality. For the new miracle of Nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient as that of its discoverer? "Johnsmithia"! There have ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... rush and spike of mullein, Low laurel shrub and drooping fern, Transfigured, blaze ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... technicalities Mr. RUSSELL introduces into his stories without explanations such as this, it would be difficult to say. But with such assistance, a studding-sail-boom becomes as easy of identification as a marling-spike lashed to a forecastle spinaker-boom, close hauled aport under trysails, blowing out like flags from the grips of clew-lines and leech-lines towards the close of a second dog-watch! Shiver LINDLEY MURRAY'S timbers! but what can be finer than a bulkhead battened down with the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... ashpole, and then breaking through and engaging in hand-to-hand conflict with the knights. Behind the latter sat their squires, with extra spears and arms ready to hand to their masters; and in close combat, the heavy maces with their spike ends were weapons before which the light-clad horsemen went down like ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... a flashlight and found a small hoofed animal, hardly bigger than old Tom, rearing and bucking with a broken leg in the trap. It had sharp little spike horns, only a few inches long, but mean. Ed got several painful jabs before he got the animal tied up and out of the trap. He restrung the alarm, then took his catch into the ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... they could master, and then, cutting off their heads, carried them away with them. They sang and danced when the enemy were likely to see them. They carried also a spear of about fifteen cubits in length, having one spike.[34] They stayed in their villages till the Greeks had passed by, when they pursued and perpetually harassed them. They had their dwellings in strong places, in which they had also laid up their provisions, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... especially Pierre Balmat and his son, are some of the best-informed and most agreeable men I ever conversed with. Indeed for six months of the year they keep company with the most distinguished travellers of Europe. With these guides, each of us armed with a long pole with an iron spike, such as my uncle described to me ages ago, and which I never expected to wield, we came down La Flegere, which we mounted on mules. In talking to an old woman who brought us strawberries, I was surprised to hear her pronounce the Italian proverb, "Poco a poco ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... of the two last do not curve back, but point forward; and as both these carry their heads low down the long sharp spike is often borne horizontally. In the form and length of their neck, the set of their ears, and other respects, the black rhinoceroses differ materially from the white ones. In fact, their habits are quite unlike. The former feed ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... till we put a spike collar and chain on 'em. When Henrietta declared herself Alonzo read the riot act and declared marital law. But there was Henrietta with the collar and chain and pretty soon Lon was saying: 'You're quite right, Pettikins, ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... mischief, and that only: off with it, for the tree's sake, if for nothing more; let the Conservatism that would preserve cut it away. Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living substance;—nay is far worse; for in every wind-storm ('commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... oil of blossoms get? Take it from my Julia's sweat: Oil of lilies and of spike? From her moisture take the like. Let her breathe, or let her blow, All rich ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Germany. One hand menaced France, whose outline the designer had managed to give rudely in the figure of a Zouave in a fierce attitude; and the other was thrust toward Russia, a huge colossus with Calmuck dress, and features. The most conspicuous thing in the giant's dress was a helmet with a spike projecting from the top, much too large for the head of the wearer, and therefore falling over his eyes until they were almost blinded by it. The style of the helmet was that of the usual head-dress of the Prussian soldier. The ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... dazed and bewildered, was seeking a reply, she passed quickly to the next group, going from one to another, and watching with interest the placing of the bouquet on the summit of the hut. One of the men brought a ladder and fastened the flowers to a spike. When they were securely attached and began to nod in the air, he waved his hat and shouted: "Hou, houp!" This was the signal ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... paces from us, and by his side the hammer, spike, and petard he had carried. He and they were visible in the glow of ruddy light that poured down on the bridge. Suddenly, while I stood panting and irresolute, longing, yet not daring—since I saw older men hang back—suddenly ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... cable, hawser, lasso, lariat, cabestro, tether, tow; pl. shrouds, ratlines. Associated Words: marline, marline spike, marling, strand, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the man sat on a capstan a few feet distant from the boys' den, watching for the slightest move on their part, a marlin spike dangling playfully in his hands. Juarez had not taken the crafty and keen ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... suicide. Her heart had just stopped. I saw her, with the long lashes on the cheeks, with the smile about the lips, with the flowers all about her. The stem of a white lily rested in her hand so that the spike of flowers was upon her shoulder. She looked like a bride in the sunlight of the mortuary candles that were all about her, and the white coifs of the two nuns that knelt at her feet with their faces ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... penetrating wounds—those produced by anything running deeply into the flesh; such as a sword, a sharp nail, a spike, the point of ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... O'Shane, they cached him safe away, An' though he objurgated some, they "cured" him night an' day; An' pretty soon there came the change amazin' to explain: "I'll never take another drink," sez Timothy O'Shane. They tried it out on Spike Muldoon, that toper of renown; They put it over Grouch McGraw, the terror of the town. They roped in "tanks" from far and near, an' every test was sure, An' like a flame there ran the fame of ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... a little with time used to have exactly the same meaning. We now say a person looks "spick and span" when he or she is very neatly dressed. Formerly the expression was "spick and span new"—that is, as new as a spike (or spoon) just made or a chip newly cut. We may safely say that very few people who now use the expression "spick and span" have any idea of what it means literally. The metaphor is well ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... fire had been bountifully replenished with wood and now blazed up fiercely. By its ruddy light I saw the fetish-man retire to the interior of the temple or fetish-house, to appear immediately afterwards with a rude stone hammer in one hand and what looked like four or five large spike-nails in the other. He stood for a moment gloating over the agonised countenance of his victim, and then nodded his head. At the signal his four assistants seized their prisoner, and, despite his terrible struggles, rapidly placed him, head ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... terribly afraid of her daughter, she controlled herself, and bade the boy go and find the field guarded by eighteen millions of demons, warning him on no account to look back after having plucked the tallest spike of rice, which grew in ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... fire to the shipping on the north side of the town, while he himself with his men should advance upon the nearby fort and spike the guns. As the fort was an old one and had a small garrison, the intrepid commander had but little trouble in capturing it, particularly as none of the British dreamed of a raid and small wonder, for their ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... is so bracing that we all feel equal to anything. Mr. Struble has already killed a fine "spike" elk for camp eating. We camped in a bunch, and we have camp stoves so that in case of rain or snow we can stay indoors. Just now we have a huge camp fire around which we sit in the evening, telling stories, singing, and eating nuts of the ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... said Susan, pleased with the commission, "that I will;" and away she ran, while Miss Fosbrook examined the spike to her own great enjoyment. "I see," she said, "the flowers are not really white, they each have a patch of pink or yellow on them, which gives them their softness. Yes; and do you see, Bessie, they are in clusters of three, and each three has one ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spring were visible in the swelling buds and rushing torrents. The pine forests exhaled a fresher spicery. The azaleas were already budding; the ceanothus getting ready its lilac livery for spring. On the green upland which climbed the Red Mountain at its southern aspect, the long spike of the monk's-hood shot up from its broad-leaved stool and once more shook its dark blue bells. Again the billow above Smith's grave was soft and green, its crest just tossed with the foam of daisies and buttercups. The little graveyard had gathered a few new dwellers in ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... into the same, for it was now the seuenth of September, but coasting the shore towards the South wee saw an incredible number of birds: hauing diuers fishermen aboord our Barke they all concluded that there was a great skull of fish, we being vnprouided of fishing furniture with a long spike nayle made a hooke, and fastened the same to one of our sounding lines, before the baite was changed we tooke more then fortie great Cods, the fish swimming so abundantly thicke about our barke as is incredible to bee reported, of which with a small portion of salt that we had we preserved some thirtie ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... had to wrap them up carefully in a paper, and put them into his waistcoat pocket, in order to get them home safely. The children found several other curiosities besides shells. They collected pebbles, and specimens of sand, of different colors. Mary found an old iron spike, perhaps part of a vessel, with the sand and gravel concreted around it. It looked like stone growing upon iron. Rollo also found a small piece of wood, battered and worn by the long-continued action of the waves, and he thought it was very curious indeed. In fine, the children ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... respect to the profit that England gains from hence, not the forty thousandth part. Although I must confess, that a mote in the eye, or a thorn in the side, is more dangerous and painful than a beam, or a spike at a distance. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... purple is heather (erica); The yellow, gorse—call'd sometimes "whin." Cruel boys on its pickles might spike a Green beetle as if on a pin, You may roll in it, if you would like a Few ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... much afraid for Minucianus, lest he should light upon the Germans now they were in their fury, that he went and spike to every one of the soldiers, and prayed them to take care of his preservation, and made himself great inquiry about him, lest he should have been slain. And for Clement, he let Minucianus go when he ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Botrychium the leaves are more or less deeply divided, and the sporangia distinct (Fig. 71, B). In Ophioglossum the sterile division of the leaf is usually smooth and undivided, and the spore-bearing division forms a sort of spike, and the sporangia are much less distinct. The sporangia in both differ essentially from those of the true ferns in not being derived from a single epidermal cell, but are developed in part from the ground tissue of ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... the earth, and they often come to feasts and dances in the Indian villages. Jouskeha raises corn for himself, and makes plentiful harvests for mankind. Sometimes he is seen, thin as a skeleton, with a spike of shrivelled corn in his hand, or greedily gnawing a human limb; and then the Indians know that a grievous famine awaits them. He constantly interposes between mankind and the malice of his wicked grandmother, whom, ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... with delight; visions of cowslips, larks, daisies, and mutton-chops floated before my excited imagination, and in ten minutes I found myself standing at that pleasant little inn at Cove which, opposite Spike Island, rejoices in the name of the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... on Clutching Hand, "I want you, Spike, to follow them. See what they do—where they go. It's her birthday. Something's bound to occur that will give you a lead. All you've got to do is to use your ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... flour bag over moraine and glacier trusting only to the creeper spikes on his heels, and in objecting to the extra weight our guide said derisively: "We've quite enough to pack already, and I guess you don't want to dress us up with a green veil, a crooked club with a spike in the end of it, and fathoms of spun hemp, like them tourist fellows bring out to sit in the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... fellow," he cried, "don't you try that game again, or I'll fix a spike to the end of a stout hickory ready for lancing those gums of yours. I'm afraid you've got toothache, or you wouldn't be so ready to bite. Now ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... the children gather from afar; every one in Haifa under the age of fourteen is there I should say. They glue themselves to the fence and force their little faces between the posts, or spike their chins on the top and then watch in solemn deadly earnest the ways of these strange beings whom fate has so kindly sent to amuse them. The rest-house attendant does not approve of these manners, so he slips out of a side-door ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... Nature in one of her Cromwellian moods, and, scattered irregularly about its surface, the plots or patches of cultivated smoothness—potato rows, green parallel lines ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant cabbage-globes—each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion leaves, crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs. Here the villagers came by a narrow, steep, and difficult path they had made, to dig in their plots; while, overhead, the gulls, careless of their presence, pass and repass wholly occupied ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... perhaps thirty yards away. The place seemed deserted. He would have gone up to the door and rapped, but suddenly a big black dog appeared at the side and regarded him. It was a huge heavy-jawed dog of some unfamiliar breed, and it, wore a spike-studded collar. It did not bark nor approach him, it just bristled quietly and emitted a single sound like a short, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... cannon in their embrasures, and fired on those of the enemy who had turned our line and come in range. But the Kentucky troops and the Louisianians masked the guns, and made it impossible to fire without killing our own men. Seeing this, he determined to spike his ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... the many-branched shapes of the Pleistocene and the present age. Now it is further true that each one of these types is represented today in the mature antlers of existing deer, from the small South American species with a simple spike, up to the wapiti and red deer carrying six or eight points, and still more significant is it that the whole story is recapitulated in the growth of each individual of the higher races. The earliest cervine animals known seem to have had no antlers ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... physiological fact, since the cost of the development of the reproductive elements is so great as necessarily to check vegetative growth. In the same manner the shortening of the inflorescence from raceme to spike or umbel, and thence to the capitulum or dense flower-head of the composite plants is brought about. This shortening, carried still further, produces the flattened leaf-like receptacle of Dorstenia, and further still the deeply hollowed fruity ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... hemmed in a broad, green, undulating plateau, scored across and across by the stone walls of the north, and all dappled with the shadows of rolling leaden clouds with silver fringes. Miles away a church spire stuck like a spike out of the hollow, and the smoke of a village dimmed the trees behind. No nearer habitation could I see. I have mentioned a hamlet which we passed in the spring-cart. It lay hidden behind some hillocks to the left. My landlady told me it was better than half a mile away, and "nothing ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... an advertisement for the newspapers. My eddication ain't none of the best, and my hand's more used to a marline spike than it ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... my instincts as they passed by, I should have deemed it safe, at the moment, to stake my life. The next moment, however, as the surrounding flood of moral uncleanness surged over their foot-steps, I would not have staked a spike of thistle-down on the same wager. Yet the miracle was within the scope of Providence, which is equally wise and equally beneficent, (even to those poor girls, though I acknowledge the fact without the remotest comprehension of the mode of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fiddling of grasshoppers, the whispers of trees, the quiet, soft movement of the swamp water. The long thoughts that came to him in the open crossed his mind as clouds cross the sky, idly, moving slowly, breaking up and drifting with the wind. A bee buzzed about a spike of blue lobelia; ants moved up and down the trunk of the oak-tree; birds and butterflies came and went. With his hands under his head, Peter lay so motionless that a great brown water-snake glided upon a branch not ten feet distant, overhanging a brown pool whose depths a spear ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... reached the head of the rapids, and on the night of May 4 a messenger from Harrison made his way through the British lines to Clay, instructing him to land eight hundred men on the left bank of the Maumee to carry the British batteries there, and spike the guns, afterwards crossing to the fort. The remainder of the troops were to land on the right side of the river and make their way through the Indians to the fort. According to orders, Colonel Dudley ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... I made the natives another visit, accompanied by Mr Forster and Mr Hodges, carrying with me various articles which I presented them with, and which they received with a great deal of indifference, except hatchets and spike-nails; these they most esteemed. This interview was at the same place as last night; and now we saw the whole family, it consisted of the man, his two wives (as we supposed), the young woman before mentioned, a boy about fourteen years ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... gazing at that worn and rusty bar of iron with its single bent and rusty spike, I was whisked back across the years by some strange trick of memory and I saw, instead, a dimly lighted sick room, on a hot summer night—myself a little sufferer, and sitting beside me, fanning my fevered brow, ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty
... eyes. This time there was no need to stoop down, nor to turn any body over. The sentry whom he had left to guard both cell and guardroom stood bolt upright, with his mouth and his eyes wide open; skewered to the wall of the guardhouse by an iron spike, which pierced ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... own son, when all had not gone well. It was this which had inspired Bill Lightfoot to restrain his tongue when he was sore over his defeat; and even though Hardy confessed to being a rider, somehow no one ever thought of sawing off Spike Kennedy's "side winder" on him. The quiet, brooding reserve which came from his soldier life protected him from such familiar jests, and without knowing why, the men of the Four ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... Thou would'st come to me, I and the garden waited for their Lord. Here He will rest, beneath this Champa tree; Hence, all ye spike-set grasses ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... aloft another trophy of the search—a metal spike and some tarnished and corroded metal ornaments. They had ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... lettering, arabesque masterpieces of penknife-ingenuity, with a general preponderance of feminine appellatives, bold incisures, at times, of some worthy professor in profile,—the whole besmutched with ink, and dotted with countless punctures, the result of the sharp spike with which every student's ink-horn is armed, that he may steady it upon the slanting board. The preceding lecture ended when the university-clock struck the hour; the next should begin within ten or fifteen minutes. One by one the students drop in and take their places,—high ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... God made him. Tomorrow I've planned to get into that arm and take out the kink. It will mean a couple of days on his back. I'm sorry there's no more chloroform. He'll just have to bite his teeth on a spike and hang on. He can do it. He's got ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... ignorance, and the jig of drunken brutes. Diseases like snakes crawling over the earth, leaving trails of slime. Wails from people burying their dead. Through the window, he can see the rocking steeple. A ball of fire falls on the lead of the roof, and the sky tears apart on a spike of flame. Up the spire, behind the lacings of stone, zigzagging in and out of the carved tracings, squirms the fire. It spouts like yellow wheat from the gargoyles, coils round the head of Saint John, and aureoles him in light. It leaps into the night and hisses against the ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... said the victor, placing his foot on the body of the vanquished, and holding to his throat the point of the axe, which terminated in a spike or poniard. ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... fly your starboard braces! Gigs and quarter-boats away! Mr Courtenay, have the goodness to take the gig and silence that battery on the north side of the channel; Mr Fidd, go you in the quarter-boat and do the same with the battery on the south side. Take a hammer and a bag of nails each, and spike the guns before you leave them. Flatten in, forward there, the larboard sheets, and help her head to pay round; we must go outside again ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... For this purpose, every ship was provided with a boarding-bridge 36 feet in length, which was pulled up by a rope and fastened to a mast in the fore part of the ship. As soon as an enemy's ship came near enough, the rope was loosened, the bridge fell down, and became fastened by means of an iron spike in its under side. The boarders then poured down the bridge into the enemy's ship. Thus prepared, Duilius boldly sailed out to meet the fleet of the enemy. He found them off the Sicilian coast, near Mylae. The Carthaginians hastened to the fight as ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... sector will take years and further government cooperation to develop. External factors such as the international war on terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the war between the US-led coalition and Iraq probably will drive real annual GDP growth levels back below their 3.5% spike in 2002. A long-run economic constraint is the pressure on water supplies caused by rapid population growth, industrial expansion, and ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... regretted Mr. Strumley, feeling his bulging biceps dolefully. "It's all right stroking a crew, and heaps of fun, too, but it doesn't win you a wife. Now there's your dad, he couldn't pull a soap box across a bath tub; but he can pull through a 'deal' I couldn't budge with a hand-spike." ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... by the time that the iron tools, of which they are now possessed, are worn out, they will have almost lost the knowledge of their own. A stone-hatchet is, at present, as rare a thing amongst them, as an iron one was eight years ago; and a chisel of bone or stone is not to be seen. Spike-nails have supplied the place of these last, and they are weak enough to fancy that they have got an inexhaustible store of them; for these were not now at all sought after. Sometimes, however, nails much smaller than a spike would still be taken in exchange for fruit. Knives ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... and Matt turned about and said, "Hello, Caryl!" and yielded him a sort of absent-minded hand, while he kept his face turned smilingly upon the men. Some were holding the rails in position, and another was driving in the spike that was to rivet the plate to the sleeper. He struck it with exquisite accuracy from a wide, free-handed ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... of observation. He stood, as it seemed to me irresolutely for a moment, and then drew from his pocket an instrument which I distinctly saw against the faint moonlight. Imagine a hammer, one end of which had been beaten out into a longish tapering spike, with a handle something longer than usual. He drew stealthily to the window, and seemed to examine this hurriedly, and tested its strength with a twist or two of his hand. And then he adjusted it very carefully in his grasp, and ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... noticed it then, sir; but I've had a look at it since, and there's one leg broken fair off at the top. The break was half in the socket, as it were, leaving a kind of spike, and if you stick that into the socket you can make the table look as good as new. It's all right, in fac', until you try to move it, and then of course the leg just ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... his sword with as much apparent knowledge of how to use it as if it had been a marlin-spike. Ralph pushed it aside with a stout stick that he carried, and was passing on, when the singing soldier came up and said, "Never mind his name; but whether he be Presbyter Jack or Quaker George, he must drink to the health of the King. Here," he cried, filling a drinking-cup ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... let Vincent rant, Let Sturge preach peace to democratic throngs, And Burritt, stammering through his hundred tongues, Repeat, in all, his ghostly lessons o'er, Timed to the pauses of the battery's roar; Check Ban or Kaiser with the barricade Of "Olive-leaves" and Resolutions made, Spike guns with pointed Scripture-texts, and hope To capsize navies with a windy trope; Still shall the glory and the pomp of War Along their train the shouting millions draw; Still dusty Labor to the passing Brave His cap shall doff, and Beauty's kerchief wave; ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... before. I didn't realize what I was doing, then. I simply had been brought up to do my work well. I thought I was doing a good job, that was all. When I was through plowing I got my old harrow, a spike-tooth, and harrowed the ground. I had a roller. They were manufactured in our town. The firm bursted and I had a chance to buy one very cheap. I had a roller, harrow, and plow. That was all the tillage implements. The harrow had moved the lumps around a little. I ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... of the men observed her steal a knife out of the cabin and hide it in the leg of her boot. The reason was now plain. We pulled off the boot without asking leave, and found there a large assortment of articles stolen from us. Two or three knives, a spoon, a bit of hoop-iron, and a marline spike. I have tried to make them understand, by signs, that this is very wicked conduct, but they only laugh at me. They are not in the least ashamed, and evidently regard ...
— Fast in the Ice - Adventures in the Polar Regions • R.M. Ballantyne
... his huge neck aslant. All-conqu'ring sleep Soon seized him. From his gullet gush'd the wine With human morsels mingled, many a blast Sonorous issuing from his glutted maw. Then, thrusting far the spike of olive-wood Into the embers glowing on the hearth, I heated it, and cheer'd my friends, the while, 440 Lest any should, through fear, shrink from his part. But when that stake of olive-wood, though green, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... sir," said Morgan. "I'll get the hammer and a big spike-nail, and drive it through the back of the skin into that big ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... plainest of chapels,—a kind of wooden tent, that owes whatever grace it has to its pointed windows and the high, sharp roofs—traces, both, of that upward movement of ecclesiastical architecture which soared aloft in cathedral-spires, shooting into the sky as the spike of a flowering aloe from the cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below. This suggestion of medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which a hand-bell might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was all of outward show the small edifice ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... command. The expedition was now, of course, commanded by the steward, but the duties of his unpleasant office left him but little time for directing an invasion. Well, we got within reach of England when the wind began to blow, and before I could hitch myself up with a marling-spike, every man Jack of us was ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... move. I had no business to remain there; every prospect of security depended on my joining the crew, but it was not in my power to desert my position. I could hear the hurrying feet of the watch tramping across the deck in response to LeVere's orders; the heavy pounding of a marling-spike on the forecastle hatch, as Haines called for all hands. I was aware that men were already mounting the ratlines, and laying out on the upper yards to make sail, while the capstan bars began rattling. Yet only one thought ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... fine, autumnal afternoon, that a simple-looking traveller, attired in a homespun suit of gray, and wearing a broad-brimmed, Quaker-looking hat, drove up to the door of the Spread Eagle Tavern, in the town of B——, State of Maine, kept by Major E. Spike, and ordered refreshments for himself and horse. There was nothing particular about the traveller, except his air of simplicity; but his horse was a character. The animal was at least thirty years of age, and was as gaunt as Rosinante, and would have been a dear bargain at fifteen ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... not join in the criticisms. It was just, he reflected, because he had avoided the cafes of Metz that he was singled out for special distinction, and he fell to wondering what work it was he had to do that night. Was it to surprise a field-watch? Or to spike a battery? Or to capture a convoy? Lieutenant Fevrier raised his head. For any exploit in the world he ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... filaments, anthers, and style; crowded in a dense spike; quickly fading; unpleasantly odorous. Perianth tubular, 2-lipped, parted into 6 irregular lobes, free from ovary; middle lobe of upper lip with 2 yellow spots at base within. Stamens 6, placed at unequal distances ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... arrowhead he had fastened a barbed spike, and had secured the arrow to the end of the string. Armed with this weapon, he advanced ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... construction which in Ontario brought in the narrow gauge, was the wooden railway built in 1870 from {102} Quebec to Gosford. The rails were simply strips of seasoned maple, 14'x7"x4", notched into the sleepers and wedged in without the use of a single iron spike. The engine and car wheels were made wide to fit the rail. In spite of its cheap construction the road did not pay, and the hope of extending it as far as Lake St John was deferred for a generation. A similar wooden ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... carefully round a spike of coral and landed on the reef, and with a shellful of rum and cocoa-nut lemonade mixed half and half, he took his perch on a high ledge of coral from whence a view of the sea and the coral strand could ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... loneliest divisions. In the discharge of his duties there was no more conscientious section foreman in the employ of the C.L.S. He timed his slumber by the sun and his waking hours were filled with the roll of hand-car wheels, the ring of spike-mauls and the ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... days went on and the hope was deferred. The rush of the Sea-horse did not trouble the sands of the shallow bar, or sweep, with fiercely ramping figure-head, past the long pier-spike, stretching like the hand of welcome from the hospitable shore. While they fancied her full-breasted sails, swelled as with sighs for home, bowing lordly over the submissive waters, the Sea-horse lay a frozen mass, changed by the might of the winds and the snow and the frost ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... seems to have done everything that good generalship could do to secure it. He placed his elephants in advance of his centre and right wing. He had caused the driver of each of them to be provided with a sharp iron spike and a mallet; and had given orders that every beast that became unmanageable, and ran back upon his own ranks, should be instantly killed, by driving the spike into the vertebra at the junction of the head and the spine. Hasdrubal's elephants were ten in number. We have no trustworthy ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... was conscious of it now only as it suggested fingering a missal stiff with gold-leaf and edged with a swarming diversity of buds and insects. The carriage moved so slowly that he was in no haste to turn the pages; and each spike of yellow foxglove, each clouding of butterflies about a patch of speedwell, each quiver of grass over a hidden thread of moisture, became a marvel to be thumbed ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... in a night," said Weatherstaff. "Tha'll have to wait for 'em. They'll poke up a bit higher here, an' push out a spike more there, an' uncurl a leaf this day an' another ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... such a fuss about flies as we make nowadays. You cannot pick up a magazine without running plump into an article on the deadly housefly—with pictures of him magnified until he looks like the old million-toed, barrel-eyed, spike-tailed dragon of your boyhood mince-pie dreams. The first two pages convince you that the human race is doomed to extermination within eighteen months by the ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... with both his hands he gripped it as he spoke, And, where the butt and top were spliced, in pieces twain he broke; The limber top he cast away, with all its gear abroad, But, grasping the tough hickory butt, with spike of iron shod, He ground the sharp spear to a point; then pulled his bonnet down, And, meditating black revenge, set forth ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... with heavy-eyed indolence such of the town as could be viewed from the shade in which they lay. Three girls, in whose dark cheeks glowed a rich French comeliness, were comparing purchases near the store. A group of rivermen, spike-booted, short-trousered, reckless of air, with their little round hats over one ear, sat chair-tilted outside the "hotel." Across the dividing fences of two of the blazoned gardens a pair of old crones gossiped under their breaths. Some Indians smoked silently ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... took from the tree a tiny flower-bud and proceeded to dissect it. After the external covering, which consisted of seventeen scales, he came upon the down which protects the flower. On removing this he could perceive four branchlets surrounding the spike of flowers, and the flowers themselves, though so minute, were as distinct as possible, and he could not only count their number, but discern the stamens, and even ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... although they lived on the product of the ground, were obliged to continue the chase because of the materials and implements which they got from the animals. They used the jaw of a fish, with the teeth in it, as a knife; the arm and leg bones of apes as arrow points; the tail spike of a skate for the same; the two front claws of the armadillo to dig the ground (a process which the animal taught them by the same use of his claws); the shell of a river mussel as a scraper to finish wooden tools. "These people were hunters without dogs, fishers without ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... in upright elevators usually occur at the bottom. Raise the door in the engine deck and remove the obstruction if in the elevator, reverse the elevator screw forcing the obstruction back down in transfer hopper. It may be a small mine spike lodged above this point, and by removing the nut at top of elevator casing and removing the door the obstruction can ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous
... glacier trusting only to the creeper spikes on his heels, and in objecting to the extra weight our guide said derisively: "We've quite enough to pack already, and I guess you don't want to dress us up with a green veil, a crooked club with a spike in the end of it, and fathoms of spun hemp, like them tourist fellows bring out to sit in the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... embroiled in political turmoil. Algeria's financial and economic indicators improved during the mid-1990s, in part because of policy reforms supported by the IMF and debt rescheduling from the Paris Club. Algeria's finances in 2000 benefited from the spike in oil prices and the government's tight fiscal policy, leading to a large increase in the trade surplus, the near tripling of foreign exchange reserves, and reduction in foreign debt. The government continues efforts to diversify the economy by attracting ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... realized with a start that every single blade of grass was the same. The soft green lawn was a carpet of death. As he straightened up he glimpsed something under a broad-leafed plant. A crouching, scale-covered animal, whose tapered head terminated in a long spike. ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... many of their successes. In a noble forest in Russia I met a fine black fox, whose valuable skin it would have been a pity to tear by ball or shot. Reynard stood close to a tree. In a twinkling I took out my ball, and placed a good spike-nail in its room, fired, and hit him so cleverly that I nailed his brush fast to the tree. I now went up to him, took out my hanger, gave him a cross-cut over the face, laid hold of my whip, and fairly flogged him ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... family to which the arums and the "lords and ladies" belong. Half a dozen nuthatches attacking one of the red spikes of this plant present a pretty sight. The berries ripen in July and August, and at Naini Tal one rarely comes across a complete spike because the nuthatches pounce upon every berry the moment it ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... slight at one side, but deepens in the direction of the bedroom door. That in itself is enough to show us that the shoe had been drawn in that direction, and that the culprit had taken refuge there. The earth round the spike had been left on the table, and a second sample was loosened and fell in the bedroom. I may add that I walked out to the athletic grounds this morning, saw that tenacious black clay is used in the jumping-pit and carried away a specimen of it, together with some of the fine ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... some in the interior of the wire-gauze cover, the prison of the female, and some around it, in an unbroken circle. Some contained naphthaline; others the essential oil of spike-lavender; others petroleum, and others a solution of alkaline sulphur giving off a stench of rotten eggs. Short of asphyxiating the prisoner I could do no more. These arrangements were made in the morning, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... word belongs To the Foes of Freedom, the Friends of wrongs, And unto them alone. The first and worst of the Tyrant's terms, Barbed to spike at the writhing worms That crawl about his throne. Only the mob at a despot's heels Would juggle a man at Fortune's wheels, Or conjure one with the die that reels From the lip of the dice-cup thrown! The soldier forced to the field of fight, With never a reck of the wrong or right, ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... globular brown Orchid is. I have only seen pollen of a Cattleya on a bee, but surely have you not unintentionally sent me what I wanted most (after Catasetum or Mormodes), viz. one of the Epidendreae?! I PARTICULARLY want (and will presently tell you why) another spike of this little Orchid, with older flowers, some ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... these "ostreiras," which, if they exist, must reflect the Sambaquis of the opposite Brazilian shore. The house was guarded by three wooden figures, "clouterly carved," and powdered with ochre or red wood; two of them, representing warriors in studded coatings of spike nails, with a looking-glass fixed in the stomach, raised their hands as if to stab each other. These figures are sometimes found large as life: according to the agents, the spikes are driven in before the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... you get in the 'spike' is that 'ard you can't eat it nicely with less'n a pint of water," said the Carpenter, for my benefit. And, on asking him what the "spike" was, he answered, "The casual ward. It's ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... catapult. The crew released it. And a shower of spikes tore the invading ranks apart. Odin saw a white-skinned warrior go to his knees and scream as he tried to pull a six-inch spike ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... does not run into any danger; and also, when the boat comes to land, to step out first and hold it by the painter, that is, the rope which is fastened to the bow, while the others get out. Marco had a pole, with an iron spike and also an iron hook in the end of it, which he used to fend off with, as they called it, when the boat was in danger of running against any obstacle. This was called ...
— Marco Paul's Voyages and Travels; Vermont • Jacob Abbott
... France, whose outline the designer had managed to give rudely in the figure of a Zouave in a fierce attitude; and the other was thrust toward Russia, a huge colossus with Calmuck dress, and features. The most conspicuous thing in the giant's dress was a helmet with a spike projecting from the top, much too large for the head of the wearer, and therefore falling over his eyes until they were almost blinded by it. The style of the helmet was that of the usual head-dress of the Prussian soldier. ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... on her," said one. "Spit in her face, and it will do," said a second. "Prick her with your spike," said a third. "Hold your wild talk," said a fourth; "she's gone to the shades." They gathered round, and looked at her attentively. They could not bring her back. So it was: she had gone to her ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... sailor, who was prized by the officers as an active lad and willing seaman, and by the crew as a lively, hearty fellow, and a good shipmate. He was going aloft to fit a strap round the main top-mast-head, for ringtail halyards, and had the strap and block, a coil of halyards and a marline-spike about his neck. He fell from the starboard futtock shrouds, and not knowing how to swim, and being heavily dressed, with all those things round his neck, he probably sank immediately. We pulled astern, in the direction in which he fell, and though we ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Scouts can and took a shoe lace for a bow string. I had hard work getting the first tiny blaze, but after that I've kept a bed of coals covered with sand as a reserve. I found a piece of wreckage and used part of it for a shelter. One part had a long spike in it and that I sharpened by scraping it on some of the shells. Then I got a piece of fat pine that had washed ashore and made me a torch. With this sharp spike and the torch I went fishing at night and ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... the drum Hiram passed two lengths of Number 9 wire through large screweyes, making a double loop into which the hook of a light timber chain would easily catch. Into one end of the drum he drove a headless spike, upon which the hand-crank of the grindstone fitted, ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... engineer, succeeded well in backing into the clear. Not seeing the troop train, I ran with a hammer and spike when he left the switch with the Arequipena ahead of him and spiked the track. Just then the troop train came in sight. I hurriedly boarded the Arequipena and started, Dobbie backing up at fast as ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... that the best articles for traffic at these islands, are iron tools in general. Axes and hatchets, nails, from the largest spike down to tenpenny ones, rasps, files, and knives, are much sought after. Red cloth, and linen, both white and coloured, looking-glasses and beads are also in estimation; but of the latter those that are blue are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... the natives another visit, accompanied by Mr Forster and Mr Hodges, carrying with me various articles which I presented them with, and which they received with a great deal of indifference, except hatchets and spike-nails; these they most esteemed. This interview was at the same place as last night; and now we saw the whole family, it consisted of the man, his two wives (as we supposed), the young woman before mentioned, a boy about fourteen years old, and three small children, the ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... rare lump o' beef on a dish, We've some bacon 'at's hung up o' th' thack, We've as mich gooid spike-cake as we wish, An' wi' currens its varry near black; We've a barrel o' gooid hooam brewed drink, We've a pack o' flaar reared agean th' clock, We've a load o' puttates under th' sink, So we're pretty weel off as to jock. Aw'm soa fain aw can't tell whear to bide, But the cause aw dar ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley
... hopelessly, she threw it from her. Instantly it stretched itself out, growing wider and wider, the notches in the wood expanding, till it had taken the shape of a roughly-made ladder of irregular steps, hooked on to the ice by the sharp spike at its end, and the Princess, ashamed of her discouragement, mounted up the steps without difficulty, and as she reached the top one, of itself the ladder pushed up before her, so that she could mount straight ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... determined to trust to the effects of an unexpected alarm. Noiselessly moving his alpenstock, he suddenly and with all his force, dashed the door open, shouted aloud, and with his utmost violence swung round the heavy iron spike. A flash, the report of a gun, and a yell of anguish instantly followed; and as Violet in terror and excitement threw open her door, the light which streamed from it showed Kennedy in a moment that the ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... Phormium tenax, loves to grow, and to its long, ribbon-like leaves the eel-fishers fastened their lines securely, baiting each alternate hook with mutton and worms. I declared this was too cockney a method of fishing, and selected a tall slender flax-stick, the stalk of last year's spike of red honey-filled blossoms, and to this extempore rod I fastened my line and bait. When one considers that the old whalers were accustomed to use ropes made in the rudest fashion, from the fibre of ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... not like the look of such a wild apparition and refused to face him. Bit by bit they retired and O'Hagan took advantage of a moment to take a green silk Irish flag, with a crownless harp, from his pocket, and attach it to the spike of the cross. Then, roaring like a lion and brandishing his strange weapon, he fell on them once more—and as they broke he saw the hooded priest driving them before him with his flaming sword. A great joy seemed to burn up in his soul. Men who watched him ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... imaginary. Amelie de Chandour posed as the rival queen of Angouleme; her husband, M. de Chandour, known in the circle as Stanislas, was a ci-devant young man, slim still at five-and-forty, with a countenance like a sieve. His cravat was always tied so as to present two menacing points—one spike reached the height of his right ear, the other pointed downwards to the red ribbon of his cross. His coat-tails were violently at strife. A cut-away waistcoat displayed the ample, swelling curves of a stiffly-starched shirt fastened by massive ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... stealth behind a door, which they find open, or on a window; and after setting it on fire, they make their escape. This is sufficient often to produce the most terrible ravages in a town where the houses, built with wood and painted with oil of spike, afford the easiest opportunity to the miscreant who is disposed to reduce them to ashes. The method employed by the incendiaries, and which often escapes the vigilance of the masters of the houses, added to the common causes ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... near to this spike, is the portion of a shaft of the carriage which passed through the body of a gentleman who happened to be standing near the vehicle when the horse plunged violently forward, with the result that the off shaft penetrated his body under the left arm, and came out from under the right arm, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... nose off, clipt the laurels that were wreathed round his head and drove a musket bullet part of the way thro' his head and otherwise disfigured it, and that it was carried to Moore's tavern adjoining Fort Washington, on New York Island, in order to be fixt on a spike on the Truck of that Flag-staff as soon as it could be got ready, I immediately sent to Cox, who kept the tavern at King's Bridge, to steal it from thence and to bury it, which was effected, and was dug up ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... in and fight. Many of the graders were old soldiers, and a little fight only rested them. Indeed there was more military air about this work than had been or has since been about the building of a railroad in this country. It was one big battle, from the first stake west of Omaha to the last spike at Promontory—a battle that lasted five long years; and if the men had marked the graves of those who fell in that fierce fight their monuments, properly distributed, might have served as mile-posts on the great overland route to-day. But the ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... the earth, yet in this brief period it has completely changed its aspect; the upper part of the flame has, indeed, broken away, and is now shown in that part of the drawing between the two figures on the line above. The same plate also shows various instances of the remarkable spike-like objects, taken, however, at different times and at various parts of the sun. These spikes attain altitudes not generally greater than 20,000 miles, though sometimes they soar ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... SPIKE. The high pyramidical capping or roof of a tower. This is sometimes confounded with the word Steeple, which latter really means the ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... occurrence; and it will often be found that the traitor is the loudest in his protestations of patriotism. It is a pretty safe rule to suspect the man of hypocrisy who makes a parade of his religion, and the partisan of corruption and selfishness, who is clamorous about the rights of the people. Captain Spike was altogether above the first vice; though fairly on level, as respects the second, with divers patriots ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... no incense at her shrine. She'll cut the thread no sooner because you turn your back on her." Fling overboard your mythologies, dead and alive, and kneel to Nature. A budding spike of wild hyacinth is worth all the gods put together. Go hand in hand with Nature, I say. Ask nothing from her; walk humbly; be well content if she lets you but turn the corner of one page none else have read. That's how I live. My life is ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... the centre-spike of gold Which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb What time, with ardors manifold, The bee goes singing to her ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... intense haste to catch her up before she should get too near the house, he removed the bricks very carelessly, not even remarking that one, and the most important, was disposed of in such a manner that the spike left beneath ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... was so much afraid for Minucianus, lest he should light upon the Germans now they were in their fury, that he went and spike to every one of the soldiers, and prayed them to take care of his preservation, and made himself great inquiry about him, lest he should have been slain. And for Clement, he let Minucianus go when he ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... opposite direction during the next 6 h. The two lobes, therefore, seem to be constantly closing or opening, though to a very small distance; for we must remember that the little triangle of paper affixed to the marginal spike increased its length, and thus exaggerated somewhat the movement. Similar observations, with the important difference that the petiole was left free and the plant kept under a high temperature, were made on a leaf, which was healthy, ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... by the glaring pike Lift shields of sultry brass; the teasel tops, Pink-thorned, advance with bristling spike on spike Against the furious sunlight. Field and copse Are sick with summer: now, with breathless stops, The locusts cymbal; now grasshoppers beat Their castanets: and rolled in dust, a team,— Like some ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... golden St. John's-wort. Then the unseen painter begins to mix the royal colour on his palette, and the red of the bee-balm catches your eye. If you are lucky, you may find, in midsummer, a slender fragrant spike of the purple-fringed orchis, and you cannot help finding the universal self-heal. Yellow returns in the drooping flowers of the jewel-weed, and blue repeats itself in the trembling hare-bells, and scarlet is glorified in the flaming ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... No, take that one up; it is the bulb of a dwarf palm, each layer of the onion peels off, brown and netted, like the outside of a cocoa-nut. It is a clever plant that; from the leaves we get a vegetable horsehair; - and eat the bottom of the centre spike. All the leaves you pull have the same aromatic scent. But here a little patch of cleared ground shows old friends, who seem to cling by abused civilisation:-fine, hardy thistles, one of them bright yellow, though; - honest, Scotch- looking, ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shrike His back may spike And pierce him with a thorn; The humble bee A tramp is he And there ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... scamped it. The fact is, there was a little unpleasantness with one of the fellows, owing to Jim's cane happening to scratch one of the pictures by a chap named Rubens. It was quite an accident, as we were only trying to spike a wasp on the frame, and Jim missed his shot. The fellow there made a mule of himself, and lost his temper. So we didn't see the fun of staying, ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... weep for you they will bleed for you; the fount of tears feeds a river as well as betrays a hidden well. Good, then; good, then! He saw a future in all this. From the other spike of the dilemma he saw nothing but his impaling; in this case, if he was impaled, balm at least would be laid upon his wounds. Fra Battista determined to ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... would stick on his hair. His fleecy mantle was over him in the house. Every quarrel therein about seat or bed comes to his decision. Should a needle drop in the house, its fall would be heard when he speaks. Above him is a huge black tree, like a millshaft, with its paddles and its cap and its spike. Liken thou him, O ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... old Caleb's barn had been cleared for that day, and through the afternoon the fiddles whined there, alternating with the twang of banjo and "dulcimore." Old Spike Crooch, who dwelt far up at the headwaters of Little Tribulation, where the "trails jest wiggle an' wingle about," and who bore the repute of a master violinist, had vowed that he "meant ter fiddle at one more shin-dig afore he ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Rrisa came silently back, sliding into the soft dusk of that room almost like a wraith. He bore a silver tray with a hook-nosed coffee-pot of chased metal. The cover of this coffee-pot rose into a tall, minaret-like spike. On the tray stood also a small cup having no handle; a dish of dates; a few wafers made of the Arabian cereal called temmin; and a little bowl of ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... fought heroically but in vain; step by step they were driven back, the battery was recaptured, and the guns, which in the excitement of the advance the captors had omitted to spike, ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... each other in the dark, and then hunted for each other and came to grief; all those kind of silly fumbles. Now, what you need is formation—see? Must have some sort of formation for advance. Must keep in touch. For two men a tandem is right. For three men, what you want is a spike-team—middle man crawls ahead, other men follow on each side just near enough to touch his left heel with right hand and right heel with left hand—a triangle, see? Keep touching once every thirty seconds. If you miss ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... examination of this ice mass the party pressed on past Spike Point to Dunlop Island, sledging coastwise parallel to the Piedmont Glacier, named by Griffith Taylor after Dr. Wilson. A thorough examination was made of Dunlop Island, revealing many facts of extraordinary ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... differ widely from them in being sterile and conspicuous. Not only the aborted flower-buds and their peduncles (which are elongated apparently through the principle of compensation) are brightly coloured, but so is the upper part of the spike—all, no doubt, for the sake of guiding insects to the inconspicuous perfect flowers. From such cases as these we may pass on to certain Labiatae, for instance, Salvia Horminum in which (as I hear from Mr. Thiselton Dyer) the upper bracts are enlarged ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... though when one of these fish breaks water and shoots through the air, it appears to be flying. The wings are merely fins, enormously enlarged, and these give the fish its great size, rather than does the body itself. It is the whipping spike-armed tail of the devil fish that is to be feared, aside from the fact that the rush of a monster ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... close to No Man's Land, a sixty-foot crib bridge was constructed by Lieut. W. C. Giffels. This work was completed in two nights and was entirely finished before the enemy knew that an advance was anticipated. Not a single spike or bolt was driven on the job. Railway spikes were driven into the ties behind our own lines and ties carried up and placed. Finally the rails were forced in under the heads of the spikes and ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... Forest. One prisoner had made a tobacco-box of dough, painted and decorated it with artificial flowers of the same material, so that it was not distinguishable from porcelain; another had forged an axe-blade of steel, etched the surface and fixed it upon a polished ebony rod with a terminal spike, forming a miniature ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... getting gold than digging for it, and set up a mercantile business in San Francisco, which grew rapidly in importance and proved the foundation of a vast fortune. He was the first president of the Central Pacific Railroad, and was in charge of its construction over the mountains, driving the last spike at Promontory Point, Utah, on the tenth of May, 1869. He was prominent in the politics of state and nation, being elected to the ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... journal is merely an assembly of the records (messages, records of oral orders, and the like) from which the journal is compiled. Each item of the file bears a serial number corresponding to that of its entry in the journal. An ordinary spike-file is frequently adequate for safe-keeping of these records while in use. When the journal is closed, the corresponding journal-file is filed with the journal, in accordance with standing instructions or in ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... omit allusions to other associations connected with this figure. The dew, formed in the silence of the darkness while men sleep, falling as willingly on a bit of dead wood as anywhere, hanging its pearls on every poor spike of grass, and dressing everything on which it lies with strange beauty, each separate globule tiny and evanescent, but each flashing back the light, and each a perfect sphere, feeble one by one, but united, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... as an old friend, spike or remove the chimney cowl that McWhannel at No. 3 has written you about. He has called on me twice and written three long letters, "to enlist my sympathy and support." He is the most poisonous kind of bore, and I'll gladly pay for the removal of the cowl, if that's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various
... I call it a really good, jolly adventure, such as you read of in books. Now, what we've got to do is to wait till they're asleep, cut off all their heads with their own cutlasses, seize the boat, row off to the lugger, wait till old Joe comes back, and then spike him with the points of cutlasses till he pilots us out safely. Then we've got to sail home as prize crew of the lugger, which would be ours. Stop! there's something ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... left at Fort Clifton with orders to spike the guns, blow up the magazine, destroy everything which could be of value to the enemy, and rejoin the command. The order was obeyed, and every man of the detail resumed his place in ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... Hand, "I want you, Spike, to follow them. See what they do—where they go. It's her birthday. Something's bound to occur that will give you a lead. All you've got to do is to use your ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... from thousands of spots all over the surface of the globe, it received thousands of facts, of cold, accomplished facts. It knew that a tidal wave had swept through China, a cabinet had changed in Chili, in Texas an express train had been held up and robbed, "Spike" Kennedy had defeated the "Dutchman" in New Orleans, the Oregon had coaled outside of Rio Janeiro Harbor, the Cape Verde fleet had been seen at anchor off Cadiz; it had been located in the harbor of San Juan, Porto Rico; it had been sighted steaming slowly past Fortress Monroe; ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... here interrupted their narrative to inquire in their turn what had passed? What was the cause of the general discouragement? why had the cannon been abandoned to the enemy untouched? Had they not had time to spike them, or at least to spoil ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... turpentine, half ounce of oil of spike, half ounce essence of wormwood, half ounce castile soap, half ounce gum camphor, half ounce sulphuric ether, half ...
— The Arabian Art of Taming and Training Wild and Vicious Horses • P. R. Kincaid
... delight, when we pass from the streets of London to those of Abbeville or Rouen, as the quaint points and pinnacles of the roof gables and turrets. The commonest and heaviest roof may be redeemed by a spike at the end of it, if it is set on with any spirit; but the foreign builders have (or had, at least) a peculiar feeling in this, and gave animation to the whole roof by the fringe of its back, and the spike on its forehead, so that all ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... his finger upon a paragraph and handed me the paper.... And I read where one "Spike" Frazer had been shot to death in a hand-to-hand fight with the police who were raiding a dive suspected of being the rendezvous of drug-fiends. Long wanted and at last cornered, Frazer had fought tigerishly and died in his tracks, preferring death to capture. A sly ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... exposed in the yard at night. One of the prowling, thieving peons climbed the wall and attempted to abstract the cap,—not because he was in want of a brass cap to a dynamite bomb; he would have stolen a railroad spike or an iron tie all the same. He hadn't fooled with this instrument more than sixty seconds before it was discharged in his hands with a report like a cannon. The consequence was, that not enough of ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... morning, Lord Cornwallis directed a sortie to be made in order to destroy or to spike the guns in one of the enemy's batteries which was causing us most annoyance. The party consisted of about a hundred and fifty men from the guards, the light infantry and the 80th regiment. Never have I seen a more spirited or dashing affair. Away they went, nor stopped till they had surmounted ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... the plants put under contribution by the perfume factories of the district, viz., the orange tree, bitter and sweet, the lemon, eucalyptus, myrtle, bay laurel, cherry laurel, elder; the labiates; lavender, spike, thyme, etc.; the umbelliferous fennel and parsley, the composite wormwood and tarragon, and, more delicate than these, the rose, geranium, cassie, jasmin, jonquil, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... and red-robins, and now and then crushed the fragrance out of a low-lying spike of gorse. I knew the flowers were there, though in this curious light I could only see them by peering closely. At the foot of the terrace I pulled up and leant over the oak fence that guarded the ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... entered with a species of halbert, with half-moon shaped steels at the head, and one small spike in the midst. With this they caught the horns of Nero, and he was forced to retreat before the men, for if he resisted the spike entered his head and hurt him. Thus finally, by sheer force, he was driven, snorting, pawing ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... ranks came—a girl! Behind her, enormous pouch at his throat swelling in and out menacingly, in one paw a treelike, spike-studded mace, a frog-man, huger than any of the others, guarding. But of him I caught but a fleeting, involuntary impression—all ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... this railway chapter to quote Steele's account of the ride given him out of compliment to his work and that of the Police generally, on the train which was the first to go through to the coast after Donald A. Smith had driven at Craigellachie in November, 1885, the spike which united the two oceans across Canada. Steele was back on duty in the mountains again and, as he knew some of the party, was invited to go through from Kamloops on a private car with Mr. Dickey, the government engineer, ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... been about his duty close to some shells that were placed on her deck; a gay young midshipman was thoughtlessly striving to get the fusee out of one of these by a mallet and spike-nail that lay close at hand; and a fearful explosion ensued, in which the poor marine, cleaning his bayonet near, was shockingly burnt and disfigured, the very skin of all the lower part of his face being utterly destroyed by gunpowder. They said it was ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... resources of the British Empire could not construct the railway in ten years.[18] As a matter of fact, it was built by Canada in less than five years. On November 7, 1885, Donald Smith drove the last spike at Craigellachie, twenty-eight miles west of Revelstoke, British Columbia; and on the 24th of the following July, just fifteen years (including the five lost years of the Mackenzie regime) after the engagement ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... for a time he leaves off casting. For instance, the end fly was fixed in the lowest ring of the butt, and the slack of the line reeled up so that the collar lay close to the rod itself. Moreover, in such a rocky place, a bed to receive the spike could not have been found without some searching. For a moment I was reassured. Most likely George himself was near—perhaps in quest of blueberries (which abound at the foot of the shingles-and are a very delicious fruit), ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... the curly-pate Tory, whose noddle was stuck on a spike, And BILLY DELANEY, the "Songster,"[20] we never shall meet with his like; For his neck by a witch was anointed, and warranted safe by her charm, No hemp that was ever yet twisted his wonderful throttle ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... ignored, while every time I went to dig around their roots somebody had done it before me! There they were, perfectly huge with their great fluted leaves, and right at the end of the row an extra-large plant had sent up a tall, green spike on the end of which a great, pink doll-blossom was shaking out her rosy skirts in the afternoon sun. I stood for a minute looking at her in utter rapture. Then I reached out my arms and gathered her in and put a kiss right ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Like magic the cry arose from nearly every Texan's throat. The cavalry had charged again, and again the leading line had gone down. Now they were retreating, with the infantry beside them. Seeing it was of no use to remain longer, the cannoneer attempted to spike the four-pounder, but a Texan sharpshooter cut him ...
— For the Liberty of Texas • Edward Stratemeyer
... leaves crossing stem are in red and green, and blue and green; the brown stalks are worked in stem stitch. Loops are worked round the outside of the leaf here as in all the bigger leaves on this work. The spike on the left of the sketch is in herring bone stitch ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... in little sacs known as spore-cases or sporangia (Fig. 4). They are usually clustered in dots or lines on the back or margin of a frond, either on or at the end of a small vein, or in spike-like racemes on separate stalks. Sori (singular sorus, a heap), or fruit dots may be naked as in the polypody, but are usually covered with a thin, delicate membrane, known as the indusium (Greek, a dress, or mantle). The family or ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... always be driven home straight and at right angles with the face of the ties. When the foreman in charge of the track-laying work sees a spiker, when the spike is nearly home, strike the spike head laterally, which is done to make it lie snugly to the rail, he should at once check such imperfect work and put the man who does it at other work. The foreman in charge of gang of spikers should be experienced ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... jammed by a tiny wedge. Hence, it could be opened noiselessly if need be; and lest a hinge might squeak each hinge was forthwith drenched with vaseline. Further, a tiny circlet of India rubber, equipped with a small spike, was placed ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... They wear leg gaiters for travelling in deep snow, and green uniform. They carry a short sword, a rifle fastened by a broad strap passing over the shoulder, and a climbing staff seven feet long, with a spike in the end. They move so fast in the snow that no cavalry can overtake them, and it does little good to fire cannon balls at them, as they go two or three hundred feet apart. They are very useful soldiers in following an enemy on a march. They go over marshes, rivers ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... driven out to the field back of the cider mill, and, with the agent in the seat, started off on its rounds. In this field corn had been raised the year before, and it would be planted in oats this year, so the plow was omitted and the double disk and spike-toothed harrow used. Bob and his grandfather stood for a half hour watching it work, then Bob went to the barn and got out the team and began plowing the garden, which adjoined the field in which ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... continued upstream. Beyond the northern sentry-line, and beyond the sod huts of the scouts, they spied the first sign of the horse-herd they sought—a herd composed of the sutler's spike-team, a four-in-hand used on the wood-wagon, Lieutenant Fraser's "Buckskin," and a dozen or fifteen second-choice mounts belonging to absent officers. That sign was a spark on the ground a long way ahead. They knew it for the lantern of the ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... was trying to persuade himself that he had no choice of occupation for the evening; that he really didn't care. Yet, always two intrusive alternatives continually presented themselves. The one was to change his coat for a spike-tail, his black tie for a white one, and go to the Metropolitan Opera. The other and more attractive alternative was ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... with eyes half-closed, lying back in the arm-chair— one which he had brought from his own room—was "Ruffle-shirt" Tomlins. He was the only member who dressed every day for dinner, whether he was going out afterward or not—spike-tailed coat, white tie and all. Tomlins not only knew intimately a lady of high degree who owned a box at the Academy of Music, in Fourteenth Street, and who invited him to sit in it at least once a season, but he had besides a large visiting acquaintance ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... up and put in the open air. There the aggrieved Belgian saw him, and, maddened by drink, took advantage of his exhaustion to kick him viciously in the ribs; but Jones promptly laid the Dutchman out with a hand-spike. ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... in every State procession it is the implements of death and the men of blood that we parade; and not to nursemaids only is the soldier irresistible. The glamour of romance hangs round him. Terrible with knife and spike and pellet he stalks through this puddle of a world, disdainful of drab mankind. Multitudes may toil at keeping alive, drudging through their scanty years for no hope but living and giving life; he shares with very few the function of inflicting death, and moves gaily clad and light ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... shouted, but the sound had not ceased to echo when, out of the horrible tangle about us, rose, with a swift, sinuous motion, a monstrous anacondalike arm, flesh pink in the electric beam, but covered with spike-edged spiracles! It curled itself over the edge of the hovering air ship ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... prominent part of the rocks above the meadows, and beheld the shadows of the moon thrown forward into dimness across a waste of sand. And he stepped downward to the level of sand, and went the way of the shadows till it was dawn. Then dropped he a drop of the waters of the phial on a spike of lavender, and there was a voice said to him in reply to what he questioned, 'The path of the shadows of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... more or less penetrated with the fact that his interest is included in that of a large number. I have watched several political molecules being educated in this way by the nature of things into a faint feeling of fraternity. But at this moment I am thinking of Spike, an elector who voted on the side of Progress though he was not inwardly attached to it under that name. For abstractions are deities having many specific names, local habitations, and forms of activity, and so get a multitude ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... malign eye was worn proudly as a badge of honour, so proudly that the wearer, after Winona's first outcry of horror, bubbled vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma by stepping into one of Spike Brennon's straight lefts. Nothing less ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... day had been hard, soon fell asleep with her brothers. Henry did not feel sleepy at all; he was bright and happy and rejoiced. This certainly was an adventure. He wondered what Dick and Joe and Spike and the other fellows of his troop would think when he wrote them about it. He did not realize that he had saved the lives of the children, who would assuredly have frozen to death ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... corn plant consists of a culm bearing at its head a spike, which, when it is not mutilated, has, as in barley and wheat, three parts, namely: the grain, the glume and the beard, not to speak of the sheath which contains the spike while it is being formed. The grain is that solid interior part of the spike, the glume ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... gave me two staves to propel myself with. At the end of each was an iron spike, and above it a guard of wicker-work, about ten inches in diameter, to prevent the stick from sinking deeper. "These staves," he added, "are very useful when the snow is soft and the skees do not glide easily. Then propelling oneself with them makes one ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... fell. Although Bishop Fisher was condemned for denying the King's supremacy, he incurred the wrath of Henry by his book against the divorce, and that practically sealed his fate. His head was placed on a spike on London Bridge as a warning to others who might be rash enough to incur the displeasure ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Burton's, tells me that "He would work at the round table in the library for hours and hours—with nothing for refreshment except a cup of coffee and a box of snuff, which always stood at his side;" and that he was rarely without a heavy stick with a whistle at one end and a spike at the other—the spike being to keep away dogs when he was travelling in hot countries. This was one of the many little inventions of his own. Mr. Tedder describes him as a man of great and subtle intellect and very urbane. "He had an athletic appearance and a military carriage, and ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... or penetrating wounds—those produced by anything running deeply into the flesh; such as a sword, a sharp nail, a spike, the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... or spike of iron, Gainest, readiest, Gar, cause, Gart, compelled, Gentily, like a gentleman, Gerfalcon, a fine hawk, Germane, closely allied, Gest, deed, story, Gisarm, halberd, battle-axe, Glaive, sword, Glasting, barking, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... her garage; and about little Mrs. Justin Wright's charming innocence in buying a whole steamship whenever she goes over to Europe. I'd go a long way to see your Four Hundred perform; and moreover, after I had accumulated a precarious balance on an iron spike fence in order to rest one eye on a genuine duke while he fought his way out of a church with one of your leading local beauties, who had just been affixed to him for life, I would not squint pityingly on the heaving ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... marrying Claudine he swore fiercely, and eight days after, he sent me to Porto on a schooner belonging to one of our neighbours, just to give me a change of air. I came back, at the end of six months, thinner than a marling spike, but more in love than ever. Recollections of Claudine scorched me like a fire. I could scarcely eat or drink; but I felt that she loved me a little in return, for I was a fine young fellow, and more than one girl ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... Master Syd; now then, on with these here stockings, and jump into your breeches. I'll help you. On'y want a good wash and a breath o' fresh air, and then—look here, I'll get the cook to let you have a basin o' soup, and you'll be as right as a marlin-spike ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... P——, the supreme excess of Ecelino's cruelty. The guide entered the cell before us, and, as we gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper vividly upon a block that stood in the middle of the floor. Fixed to the block by an immense spike driven through from the back was the little slender hand of a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck from the living arm, and which, after the lapse of so many centuries, was still as ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... described as a vertebral column from which iron roads will ere long be extended laterally on either side, like ribs, to support and bind together the huge frame. Undertaken about twelve years ago it has only recently been completed as far as Hankow, about six hundred miles. The last spike in the bridge across the Yellow River was driven in August, 1905, and since that time through trains have been running from the capital to the banks of the ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... in a bunch of mountain-willers, and, after driving a big railroad-spike into the door-casing, over the latch, he said the senate and house would sit with closed doors during the morning session. Several large, white-eyed holy terrors gazed at him in a kind of dumb, inquiring tone of voice, but he didn't ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... faces of others one could see that they came from curiosity. The stout councilman was recognizable by his scarlet cloak and golden chain; a black, expensive-looking, swelling waistcoat betrayed the honorable and proud citizen. An iron spike-helmet, a yellow leather jerkin, and rattling spurs, weighing a pound, indicated the heavy cavalry-man. Under little black velvet caps, which came together in a point over the brow, there was many a rosy girl-face, and the young fellows who ran along after them, like hunting-dogs ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a dwarf palm, each layer of the onion peels off, brown and netted, like the outside of a cocoa-nut. It is a clever plant that; from the leaves we get a vegetable horsehair; - and eat the bottom of the centre spike. All the leaves you pull have the same aromatic scent. But here a little patch of cleared ground shows old friends, who seem to cling by abused civilisation:-fine, hardy thistles, one of them bright yellow, though; - honest, Scotch- ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the 'spike' is that 'ard you can't eat it nicely with less'n a pint of water," said the Carpenter, for my benefit. And, on asking him what the "spike" was, he answered, "The casual ward. It's ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... myself, hundred of times. And I knew that I had an ice-ax of that very pattern at home—and so I just shoved it under the doctor's nose in court, and asked him if that hole in Crone's head couldn't have been made by the spike of it. Why? Because I knew that Carstairs would be present in court, and I wanted to see if he would ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... duty close to some shells that were placed on her deck; a gay young midshipman was thoughtlessly striving to get the fusee out of one of these by a mallet and spike-nail that lay close at hand; and a fearful explosion ensued, in which the poor marine, cleaning his bayonet near, was shockingly burnt and disfigured, the very skin of all the lower part of his face being utterly destroyed by gunpowder. They ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... best-informed and most agreeable men I ever conversed with. Indeed for six months of the year they keep company with the most distinguished travellers of Europe. With these guides, each of us armed with a long pole with an iron spike, such as my uncle described to me ages ago, and which I never expected to wield, we came down La Flegere, which we mounted on mules. In talking to an old woman who brought us strawberries, I was surprised to hear her pronounce the ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... should always be driven home straight and at right angles with the face of the ties. When the foreman in charge of the track-laying work sees a spiker, when the spike is nearly home, strike the spike head laterally, which is done to make it lie snugly to the rail, he should at once check such imperfect work and put the man who does it at other work. The foreman in charge of gang of spikers should be experienced ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... for cheap pioneer construction which in Ontario brought in the narrow gauge, was the wooden railway built in 1870 from {102} Quebec to Gosford. The rails were simply strips of seasoned maple, 14'x7"x4", notched into the sleepers and wedged in without the use of a single iron spike. The engine and car wheels were made wide to fit the rail. In spite of its cheap construction the road did not pay, and the hope of extending it as far as Lake St John was deferred for a generation. A similar wooden railway was built ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... and almost all had dirks hanging at the pouches which they wore in front. Each had a good gun in his hand, and a broadsword by his side, besides a stout round target, made of light wood, covered with leather, and curiously studded with brass, and having a steel spike screwed into the centre. These hung on their left shoulder during a march, or while they were engaged in exchanging fire with the enemy, and were worn on their left arm when they charged with sword ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... they will send the worst of us to Spike Island or Dartmoor prison,' said Charley; 'but Mr. Snape, no doubt, has heard ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... over hand brought me to the edge of the shelf, when, throwing my arm around the granite spike. I swung my body upon the shelf and lay down to rest, shouting to Cotter that I was all right, and that the prospects upward were capital. After a few moments' breathing I looked over the brink and directed my comrade to tie ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... is also one of the most delicate of the Dutch artist's studies. Nothing could be truer than the insolent and swollen decay of the Jew Ferdinant; or the more effeminate collapse of the Kaiser, the very spike on whose ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... door behind him. The terrified boy did as he was told immediately he found himself on land, and the giant, quick to observe his flight, dashed after him into the boathouse. Now Loki had cunningly placed a sharp spike in such a position that the great head of the giant ran full tilt against it, and he sank to the ground with a groan, whereupon Loki, seeing him helpless, cut off one of his legs. Imagine the god's dismay, however, when he saw the pieces join and immediately knit together. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... have contained, and also enormous square boots. The female children they put in skin-tight blue overalls. The male children they dressed in bloomers. Why this should be I cannot tell you. All carried toy hatchets with a spike on one end built to resemble the pictures ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... But Dennis deliberately turned and watched the sailor. Hilderman and his companion strolled ahead while I stood beside Dennis. The man with the red hair fished among a pile of wire rope, and picked out a small marline-spike. Then he lifted a large stone, held the marline-spike on the wooden planking of the landing-stage, and hammered it in with the stone. Then he threw the painter round it, and made the boat secure in ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... your mainslacks, and splice your marline-spike. Where are you coming to?" cried Peeler, the coastguardsman—for such, we need hardly say, was the rank ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... boughs like the arms of a candle-stick. In the sky vultures soared, and lower there flew from acacia to acacia birds of the raven species with black and white plumage. The grass was yellow and, in spike, looked like ripe rye. But, nevertheless, that dry jungle obviously supplied food for a great number of animals, for several times each day the travelers met considerable herds of antelopes, hartbeests, and particularly ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... blown out with gunpowder, and the other did but glimmer in its socket. Turning it upward as he spoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French and battles with his own shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike-nail through his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes he expatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden, a greasy and goose-like fowl which the sailors catch with hook and line on the Grand Banks. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I have always admired Ned Hanlon's pluck—that the national game never received so severe a set-back as it did during the last Baltimore series here. The effort to spike players, the constant flow of profanity and vulgarity, the incessant and idiotic abuse of an umpire, all combined to make the Baltimore club—that local people have been led to believe was made of a crowd of earnest, honest players—thoroughly ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... sent to camp with their boys, while just behind another group were listening to an exciting tale of how the only night-shirt in camp, together with the Leader's razor-strop, were hung on the topmost branch of a great spike-topped pine that stood just in the middle of ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... Never! The word belongs To the Foes of Freedom, the Friends of wrongs, And unto them alone. The first and worst of the Tyrant's terms, Barbed to spike at the writhing worms That crawl about his throne. Only the mob at a despot's heels Would juggle a man at Fortune's wheels, Or conjure one with the die that reels From the lip of the dice-cup thrown! The soldier ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... pronounced a single word, but his face had grown pale for a moment. Letting go of his hand-spike, ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... ground, and on one occasion I have known it to be greatly in excess even of that; but such an elevation cannot be attained for more than a single year, and it afterward is contented with more moderate efforts. E. Himalaicus is of the purest possible white, and the spike is very much to be admired when it is seen at its best. It can be very easily raised from seed, but a good deal of patience is needed before its full glory has come. E. Olgae is the last of all, and it shows by its arrival that summer is hastening ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... directed to land. It was the design of general Harrison while the troops under Dudley were destroying the enemy's batteries on the north-west side of the river, and general Clay was fighting the Indians above the fort on the south-east side, to send out a detachment to take and spike the British ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... When a person joins Mrs. Eddy's Church he must leave his thinker at home. Leave it permanently. To make sure that it will not go off some time or other when he is not watching, it will be safest for him to spike it. If he should forget himself and think just once, the By-law provides that he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... one of the men; "you're pretty free with some of the rules; maybe you'll kindly keep an eye upon the rest. This crew's dissatisfied; this crew don't vally bullying a marlin-spike; this crew has its rights like other crews, I'll make so free as that; and by your own rules, I take it we can talk together. I ax your pardon, sir, acknowledging you for to be captaing at this present; but I claim my right, and steps outside ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the way from my shoulder blade down to where my ribs attach to my backbone, and the only way I get any relief from the pain is to have some one kick me along the side." (She was a witch, and concealed in her robe a long sharp steel spike. It was placed so that the last kick they would give her, their foot would hit the spike and they would instantly drop off into a swoon, as ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin
... her business of tying down a canvas cover over her load and gave Sheila an amused and searching look. She held an iron spike between her teeth, but spoke around ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... now possessed, are worn out, they will have almost lost the knowledge of their own. A stone-hatchet is, at present, as rare a thing amongst them, as an iron one was eight years ago; and a chisel of bone or stone is not to be seen. Spike-nails have supplied the place of these last, and they are weak enough to fancy that they have got an inexhaustible store of them; for these were not now at all sought after. Sometimes, however, nails much smaller than a spike would still be taken in exchange for fruit. Knives happened, at present, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... city were in a state of great distress. The trenches were open and the siege was pushed with great vigilance. All within the walls of the beleaguered city were reduced to extreme suffering. Horse flesh was considered a delicacy which was reserved for the sick. The French made sally after sally to spike the guns which were battering down the walls. As Mallebois, with his powerful reenforcement, drew near, their courage rose. The Duke of Lorraine became increasingly anxious to secure the capitulation before the arrival of the army of relief, and proposed a conference to decide ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... curly-pate Tory, whose noddle was stuck on a spike, And BILLY DELANEY, the "Songster,"[20] we never shall meet with his like; For his neck by a witch was anointed, and warranted safe by her charm, No hemp that was ever yet twisted his wonderful ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... while her step-mother urged him to abjure his faith. Margaret Roper intercepted her father on his return to the Tower after his trial, and penetrating the circle of the Guards, hung on his neck and bade him farewell. There is a tradition that she caused her father's head to be stolen from the spike of the bridge on which it was exposed, and, getting it preserved, kept it in a casket. She and her husband, William Roper, wrote together the biography of her father, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... of Denderah in Egypt, and on the inside of the dome, there is or WAS an elaborate circular representation of the Northern hemisphere of the sky and the Zodiac. (1) Here Virgo the constellation is represented, as in our star-maps, by a woman with a spike of corn in her hand (Spica). But on the margin close by there is an annotating and explicatory figure—a figure of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms, and quite resembling in style the Christian Madonna ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... spoke like that. I had my eyes fixed on the face of the young girl upon the bench. I remember it so well. Her eyes were fixed, fascinated, upon my hand. I tried to move it, and found that it was stuck upon the spike on which I had jammed it. I moved it carelessly away, and only felt a little pain, as if from a pin-prick; but the blood was dripping on to the floor, pat, pat. Later on, a man lit the candles on the ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... his might had thrown himself clear over our palisades, except one strong pile, which stood higher than the rest, and which had caught hold of him, and by his weight he had hanged himself upon it, the spike of the pile running into his hinder haunch or thigh, on the inside; and by that he hung, growling and biting the wood for rage. I snatched up a lance from one of the negroes that stood just by me, and running to him, struck it three or four times into him, and despatched ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... armed with a brick; there was one at each side, and one behind, and they closed up around me. I was struck on all sides; and, while I was attending to those in front, I received a blow on my head, from behind, dealt with a heavy hand-spike. I was completely stunned by the blow, and fell, heavily, on the ground, among the timbers. Taking advantage of my fall, they rushed upon me, and began to pound me with their fists. I let them lay on, for ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... drink the children gather from afar; every one in Haifa under the age of fourteen is there I should say. They glue themselves to the fence and force their little faces between the posts, or spike their chins on the top and then watch in solemn deadly earnest the ways of these strange beings whom fate has so kindly sent to amuse them. The rest-house attendant does not approve of these manners, so he slips out of a ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... only to the creeper spikes on his heels, and in objecting to the extra weight our guide said derisively: "We've quite enough to pack already, and I guess you don't want to dress us up with a green veil, a crooked club with a spike in the end of it, and fathoms of spun hemp, like them tourist fellows bring out to sit in the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... he drove a spike into the end of the log, tied one end of a rope to the spike, and the other to a pliant ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... then breaking through and engaging in hand-to-hand conflict with the knights. Behind the latter sat their squires, with extra spears and arms ready to hand to their masters; and in close combat, the heavy maces with their spike ends were weapons before which the light-clad horsemen went down like ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... not give either musket or fusil, but they had every one an halbert, or a long staff, like a quarter-staff, with a great spike of iron fastened into each end of it, and by his side a hatchet; also every one of our men had hatchets. Two of the women could not be prevailed upon but they would come into the fight, and they had ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... between the Carboniferous and Permian eras; but whether the womb of one colossal volcano or the product of a thousand lesser eruptions threw forth this granite monster, none may yet assert. Whether Dartmoor first appeared as a mighty shield, with one uprising spike in its midst, or as a target supporting many separate bosses cannot be declared; for the original aspect of the region has long vanished, though our worn and weathered land of tors still shadows, in its venerable desolation, those sublimer, ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Voyage (p. 508) is described a throwing-stick of Igloolik, 18 inches long, grooved for the shaft of the bird-spear, and having a spike for the hole of the shaft, and a groove for the thumb and for the fingers. The index-finger hole is not mentioned, but more than probably it existed, since it is nowhere else wanting between Ungava and Cape Romanzoff in Alaska. This form, if properly ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... for anything, if they get a signed confession out of her. Now we both know she is innocent. I'm willing to do what I can to help you. Turn about is fair play. If you want to send me out there, I'll try to spike their guns. Maybe I can get there in time to put fresh heart in the girl. She's safe if she doesn't go to pieces and say something ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... galvanised compound off the newly painted quarter-deck stanchions whenever an opportunity of doing so presented itself. He was a healthy goat of voracious appetite. His gastric juices would have dissolved a marline-spike, and he even made short work of the greater portion of a pair of ammunition boots belonging to the Sergeant-Major of Royal Marines, and devoured with every symptom of relish a sheaf of official and highly important documents lying on ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... collar your marline spikes And each belaying pin; Come, stir your stumps to spike the pumps, Or ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... not been mentioned yet. While managing his reins, snaffle and curb, with excellent ease in his left hand, his right held—not a whip or stick of any sort, but—a lance like a rod, some seven or eight feet long, and armed at the end with a short iron spike. This spike rested on the toe of his boot as he rode—an attitude which, resembling that of a cavalier entering the tournament lists, gave to the rod in question all the appearance of a knightly lance. Yet there is in the recollection or the imagination of most people ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... out of an old telephone, then drove a spike in a damp place under the porch, attached a wire to the spike and ran the wire to one of the poles of the magneto. Then I set the garbage-can on some blocks of wood, being careful not to have it touch the ground at any point. I next ran a wire from the other ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... a tiny wedge. Hence, it could be opened noiselessly if need be; and lest a hinge might squeak each hinge was forthwith drenched with vaseline. Further, a tiny circlet of India rubber, equipped with a small spike, was placed ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... resorted to another method. With a strength so enormous that it could overcome the force of the gravity-plates and his forward momentum, the creature tossed him free. Dizzy, he hurtled upward. But he knew that the bird's purpose was to impale him on the long steely spike of its beak as he came ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... the night of May 4 a messenger from Harrison made his way through the British lines to Clay, instructing him to land eight hundred men on the left bank of the Maumee to carry the British batteries there, and spike the guns, afterwards crossing to the fort. The remainder of the troops were to land on the right side of the river and make their way through the Indians to the fort. According to orders, Colonel Dudley landed with ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... hills, rooted into permanence by twisted oaks and magnolias. Upon their limbs in April the Spanish moss and air-plants were just blossoming, the former into little star-like, hardly-discernible flowers, the latter throwing up a green stem with a pink terminal bud, which in August had burst into a spike of crimson flowers. Curious lichens cover the rough trunks of these oaks—some gray, some ashy-white, some pink, some scarlet like blotches of blood. The Mitchella, the little partridge-berry, is here in bloom, and has been since the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... snakelike bodies, and ten reptilian legs apiece, terminating in fins which acted as wings. The bodies were of bright blue, the legs and fins were yellow. They were flying, without haste, but in a somewhat ominous fashion, straight toward them. He could make out a long, thin spike projecting from ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... end of the drum Hiram passed two lengths of Number 9 wire through large screweyes, making a double loop into which the hook of a light timber chain would easily catch. Into one end of the drum he drove a headless spike, upon which the hand-crank of the grindstone fitted, and was ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... was about up to Jim Parker, who broke a bear's back with a hand-spike in driving him out of his corn field, just as he was climbing over the fence." [Footnote: Facts which transpired in the early history of Bloomfield. See ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... scarf. After this—August, September, October—our uplands faint out in semitones: grey scabious, grey harebell, pale bed-straw, white meadowsweet, like the lace of an old lady's cap. But even so, if I must have a sunset glow of brown-pink, herb-willow gives it me. Pinch out the leader of each slim spike, and you make a different plant of it." Thus the poet embroidered the philosopher's text, and kept away from his memories, and husbanded ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... Congress and our State legislatures, but the "scamps" are vastly better at promising than fulfilling. The politicians, of course, expect all this flutter and buncombe about doing something for women in New York—in California—in Iowa—is going to spike our guns and make us help the Republican party to carry all before it; but we must not be thus ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... laid his finger upon a paragraph and handed me the paper.... And I read where one "Spike" Frazer had been shot to death in a hand-to-hand fight with the police who were raiding a dive suspected of being the rendezvous of drug-fiends. Long wanted and at last cornered, Frazer had fought tigerishly and died in his tracks, preferring death to capture. A sly and secretive creature, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... was heavy with the morning dew and the brim was broken and bent where Goddard's weapon had struck it. Hard by in a heap of driven oak leaves lay the weapon itself, which Mr. Juxon examined curiously. It was a heavy piece of hewn oak, evidently very old, and at one end a thick iron spike was driven through, the sharp point projecting upon one side and the wrought head upon the other. He turned it over in his hands and realised that he had narrowly escaped his death. Then he laid the hat and the ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... am can detect such a sense. I cannot learn what a lady's traces are; but I suspect plaitings of her hair to be meant. "Upon the spiral sort," says Gerard, "are placed certaine small white flowers, trace fashion," while other sorts grow, he says, "spike fashion," or "not trace fashion." Whence I infer, that in his day trace ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... good," answered the First Consul, smiling with the sense of his own power; "and at an hour's notice, with fifty chosen men landed from the London Trader—ah, I love that name; it is appropriate—you could spike all the guns of that pretentious little battery, and lock the Commander of the Coast-Defence in one of his own cellars. Is it not so, my good Captain? Answer me not. That is enough. One question more, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... records (messages, records of oral orders, and the like) from which the journal is compiled. Each item of the file bears a serial number corresponding to that of its entry in the journal. An ordinary spike-file is frequently adequate for safe-keeping of these records while in use. When the journal is closed, the corresponding journal-file is filed with the journal, in accordance with standing instructions or in compliance with any particular disposition directed by ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something—a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other, never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... the first Indian had entered, an active young warrior, holding in his hand a tomahawk with a long spike at the end, also came in. Edward Cunningham instantly drew up his gun to shoot him; but it flashed, and they closed in doubtful strife. Both were active and athletic; and sensible of the high prize ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... irregulars, with a few naval officers leading them, and a solid mass of Jack-tars in the centre, would break from a sally-port, or rush vehemently down through the gap in the wall, and scour the French trenches, overturn the gabions, spike the guns, and slay the guards. The French reserves hurried fiercely up, always scourged, however, by the flank fire of the ships, and drove back the sortie. But the process was renewed the same night or the next day with unlessened fire and daring. The French engineers, despairing ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... toward the Grdznth. "Spike cracked it," he said. "Spike is a sort of Grdznth genius." He tossed the coffee cup over his shoulder and it ricochetted in graceful slow motion against the far wall. "Now why don't you ...
— PRoblem • Alan Edward Nourse
... chances were a thousand to one that the enemy would have the outlying redoubt, very likely would have them both, and would turn the guns before help could come. But I knew, at least I hoped, that there was time for me to get to the more exposed redoubt ahead of them and give the word to spike the guns. It was all in an instant, I say, that I found this thought in my mind, and my musket and cartridge-box thrown I don't know where, and myself dashing off through the mist across the broken ground like ...
— For The Honor Of France - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... horse. He merely walked in front holding the bridle slackly. The horse followed him as good as gold—and picked up his feet at nearly every spike. Once or twice a hind hoof grazed a spike-head with a rasping sound that sent Racey's heart bouncing up into his throat. Lord, so much depended on a ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... a peculiar feature to the Australian landscape. From a rugged stem, varying from two to ten or twelve feet in height, springs a tuft of drooping wiry foliage, from the centre of which rises a spike not unlike a huge bulrush. When it flowers in winter, this spike becomes covered with white stars, and a heath covered with grass trees then has an appearance at once ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... in a topsail-schooner, with an old fellow by the name of Eaton,—just the strangest old scamp you ever dreamed of. I suppose by rights he ought to have been in the hospital; he certainly was the nearest to crazy and not be it. He used to keep a long pole by him on deck,—a pole with a sharp spike in one end,—and any man who'd get near enough to him to let him have a chance would feel that spike. I've known him to keep the cook up till midnight frying doughnuts; then he'd call all hands aft and range 'em on the quarter-deck, and go round with his hat off and a plate of doughnuts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... altitude of 3,000 to 4,500 feet. With it, grow two tway-blades and the rattlesnake plantain. In bogs, two species of piperia, with long spikes of greenish flowers, are abundant. In drier situations, a small form of the ladies' tresses is easily recognized by its spiral spike of small white flowers, which are more or less fragrant. In some of the swamps at the base of the mountain grows Limnorchis leucostachys. This is one of our most fragrant flowers, as well as one of the most beautiful, with its long spike of ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... fish have been spoken of. They are not really wings, though when one of these fish breaks water and shoots through the air, it appears to be flying. The wings are merely fins, enormously enlarged, and these give the fish its great size, rather than does the body itself. It is the whipping spike-armed tail of the devil fish that is to be feared, aside from the fact that the rush of a monster might swamp a ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... land is a nation And her people most loyal and true, And all others take care how they meddle Or insult her colors of blue. San Berdoo and the counties around Come in for their share of the fun And have rolled up the numbers most nobly And helped spike the enemy's gun. ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... square chunk of a man walked into a shipping office on the East Side, and inquired for the Manager of the Line. He had kindly blue eyes, a stub nose, and a mouth that shut to like a rat-trap, and stayed shut. Under his chin hung a pair of half-moon whiskers which framed his weather-beaten face as a spike collar ...
— A List To Starboard - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the arums and the "lords and ladies" belong. Half a dozen nuthatches attacking one of the red spikes of this plant present a pretty sight. The berries ripen in July and August, and at Naini Tal one rarely comes across a complete spike because the nuthatches pounce upon every berry ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... noo, Maister Delamere, precisely what ye hae to dae?" observed the first luff, when concluding his instructions to me. "Oor business is tae tak' yon wee bit battery, and to spike the guns. But we're to dae't wi'oot loss o' life on oor ain part, if possible; ye'll therefore approach the place cannily and get as close up to it as maybe wi'oot bein' discovert; and, that done, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... clearing shower, Tom, depend upon it; and the wind is freshening up again. Now, have you looked out for a hand-spike ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... and beer, and then we had a terrible time. The whole roomful got fighting. They were all against Jack and Mackenzie. The Galicians had clubs and knives, but Jack just had his hands. It was fine to see him stand up and knock those Galicians back, and smiling all the time. Mackenzie had a hand-spike. Of course, I helped a little with a club. I thought they were going to kill Jack. We got away alive, but Jack was badly hurt, and for a week afterwards he did not look at me. Mackenzie said he was ashamed, but ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... blue, including filaments, anthers, and style; crowded in a dense spike; quickly fading; unpleasantly odorous. Perianth tubular, 2-lipped, parted into 6 irregular lobes, free from ovary; middle lobe of upper lip with 2 yellow spots at base within. Stamens 6, placed at unequal ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe
... executioner's axe fell. Although Bishop Fisher was condemned for denying the King's supremacy, he incurred the wrath of Henry by his book against the divorce, and that practically sealed his fate. His head was placed on a spike on London Bridge as a warning to others who might be rash enough to incur the displeasure ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... recent phrenzy for the investigation of digestive and reproductive operations in plants may by this time have furnished the microscopic malice of botanists with providentially disgusting reasons, or demoniacally nasty necessities, for every possible spur, spike, jag, sting, rent, blotch, flaw, freckle, filth, or venom, which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the dissolution, of vegetable organism. But with these obscene processes and prurient apparitions the gentle and happy scholar of flowers ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Hence these birds are not found where the forester removes trees as fast as they become fit habitations for such insects. In clearing new lands in the United States, dead trees, especially of the spike-leaved kinds, too much decayed to serve for timber, and which, in that state, are worth little for fuel, are often allowed to stand until they fall of themselves. Such stubs, as they are popularly called, are filled with borers, and often deeply cut by the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... awaken and ask for water to drink." Scarcely had Jael crossed the threshold when Sisera awakened and begged for water to quench his burning thirst. Jael gave him wine mixed with water, which caused him to drop into a sound sleep again. The woman then took a wooden spike in her left hand, approached the sleeping warrior, and said: "This shall be the sign that Thou wilt deliver him into my hand if I draw him from the bed down on the ground without awaking him." She tugged at Sisera, and in very truth he did not awaken even when ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... table in the library for hours and hours—with nothing for refreshment except a cup of coffee and a box of snuff, which always stood at his side;" and that he was rarely without a heavy stick with a whistle at one end and a spike at the other—the spike being to keep away dogs when he was travelling in hot countries. This was one of the many little inventions of his own. Mr. Tedder describes him as a man of great and subtle intellect and very urbane. "He had an athletic appearance and a military carriage, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... time after this, ascended the column of forty cubits; how a great dragon (serpent) crawled towards it, and coiled round it, entreating (so it seemed) to be freed from a spike of wood which had entered its eye; and how, St. Simeon took pity on it, he caused the spike (which was a cubit long) to ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... bracing that we all feel equal to anything. Mr. Struble has already killed a fine "spike" elk for camp eating. We camped in a bunch, and we have camp stoves so that in case of rain or snow we can stay indoors. Just now we have a huge camp fire around which we sit in the evening, telling ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... hold it with the boat-hook, it eluded the touch, turning round and round, or bobbing under the water, and coming up again, as if in sport: but accident saved them any further trouble; for the bowman, reproached by the boat's crew for not hooking the body, got angry, and darting the spike of the boat-hook into the abdomen, the pent-up gas escaped with a loud whiz, and the corpse instantly sank like a stone. Many jokes were passed on the occasion; but I was not in humour for joking on serious subjects: and before the watch was out I had ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Most like the centre-spike of gold Which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb What time, with ardors manifold, The bee goes singing to her groom, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... slightly, shaped; but with the face of a devil. In his right hand he held a spear about five and a half feet long, the blade being two and a half feet in length, by nearly three inches in width, and having an iron spike at the end of the handle that measured more than a foot. On his left arm was a large and well-made elliptical shield of buffalo hide, on which were painted strange heraldic-looking devices. On his shoulders was a huge cape of hawk's feathers, and round his neck was a 'naibere', or strip ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... another trophy of the search—a metal spike and some tarnished and corroded metal ornaments. They had lain close ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... brothers, to both of whom she was barren. Because of this, other women shook their heads, and no third Toyaat man could be found to dare matrimony with the childless widow. But at this time, many hundred miles above, at Fort Yukon, was a man, Spike O'Brien. Fort Yukon was a Hudson Bay Company post, and Spike O'Brien one of the Company's servants. He was a good servant, but he achieved an opinion that the service was bad, and in the course of time vindicated that opinion by deserting. It was a year's journey, by ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... guidance she offered. Advancing cautiously always, she stopped for long seconds at a time to reconnoitre, shifting her huge ears about and changing their shape, twitching her nostrils, and glancing hither and thither with bright little eyes. Sometimes they passed immense spike-tipped flowers ten feet in diameter, with fleshy yellow leaves which gave out a nauseating stench. Vines with long, recurved thorns and blossoms of deep scarlet, laced the undergrowth together and made passing dangerous. Fire-flies drifted past, and all above ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... were contemplated, I could take my infantry command out that night, with perhaps others, by the Back Creek or Apple-Pie Ridge road without encountering the enemy, and could safely reach Pennsylvania by keeping well to the west of Martinsburg. It was decided about midnight, however, to spike the guns, abandon all wagons, and all sick and wounded and stores of all kinds, and evacuate Winchester. The teamsters, artillerists, and camp followers were to ride and lead the horses and mules, following closely the armed troops, who were to move at 1 A.M. ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... too wide On the narrow crest we stood, And in pride we named it Home, As we sign'd it with our blood. And we held-on all the morning, and the tide Of foes on that low dyke Surged up, and fear'd to strike, Or on the bayonet-spike Flung ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... and jammed her rudder hard to port. Her fourteen-inch screw, suddenly started at full speed ahead, made the light, slim craft leap like a spike-spurred horse. ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
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