"Spavined" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he went on, 'with every old screw in the country. I got broken-winded mares from the ploughs. I collected a regular hospital of spavined, knock-kneed beasts, and he took them from me without a word at thirty pounds apiece. It would have been all right if I had gone no further. But, hang it all! I got to the end of my tether. I declare ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... had not to decide, for lumbering along the road, with one lamp lighted and two spavined horses in the shafts, came a heavy coach, which after a moment's suspense they recognized as the Oxford coach, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... refuse to play ball I could send the check back to Uncle Peter, and a telegram to Clara J., telling her that I was back in the flat, laid up with a spavined ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... stream of money keep comin'. I used to work hard—you may not believe that, but 'twas so. I used to have long days and nights of watching. 'Twas work of a kind, though you may not admire the kind. And now I have nothing to do but sit and twist me two thumbs—and one of them bog-spavined, ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... of a green bag, as a decoy to his customers, laughing loud as he piled the yarn in and ostentatious heap, which in the pride of his commercial sagacity, he had purchased at a dead loss. Again you might see him at a horse-fair, cantering about on the back of some sleek but broken-winded jade, with spavined legs, imposed on him as "a great bargain entirely," by the superior cunning of some rustic sharper; or standing over a hogshead of damaged flaxseed, in the purchase of which he shrewdly suspected himself of having ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... reflect how at every step I was petted, nursed, and encouraged? I did not even discover my own talent. It was discovered first by my father in Russia, and next by my friend in America. What did I ever do but write when they told me to write? I suppose my grandfather who drove a spavined horse through lonely country lanes sat in the shade of crisp-leaved oaks to refresh himself with a bit of black bread; and an acorn falling beside him, in the immense stillness, shook his heart with the echo, and left him wondering. ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... him. He also proposed to put him on trial for sixty days, giving his note for the amount paid him for the horse, to be taken up in case the animal were returned. I asked him what were the principal defects of the horse. He said he'd been fired once, because they thought he was spavined; but there was no more spavin to him than there was to a fresh-laid egg—he was as sound as a dollar. I asked him if he would just state what were the defects of the horse. He answered, that he once had the pink-eye, and added, "now that's honest." I thought so, but proceeded to question ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... so surpassingly lovely that he forgot to inquire for her chaperone. The chaperone, therefore, without difficulty, effected a clandestine retreat, found her way to a carriage and drove home as fast as the spavined droschke horse would convey her. Twenty minutes later she slipped into the dressing-room at the Schuetzenhaus, accompanied by a second daughter of Father Rhine, whom that worthy parent himself could scarcely have told ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... so high an estate; for I beg you to observe that though I am tolerably efficient in the use of my weapon" (here he laid his hand lightly upon the silver hilt of his small-sword), "though I can tell a spavined horse from a sound one, and can lose a trifle without positive tears, yet—and I say it with a sense of my extreme unworthiness—I have an excessive and abiding horror of mud, or dirt in any shape or form. But is there ...
— The Honourable Mr. Tawnish • Jeffery Farnol
... during the winter she was proposed to under almost every conceivable condition and circumstance. Kathleen had been bored and badgered and bothered and importuned to the verge of exhaustion; Scott was used, shamelessly, without his suspecting it, and he generally had in tow a string of financially spavined aspirants who linked arms with him from club to club, from theatre to opera, from grille to grille, until he was pleasantly bewildered at his ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... that mules are not subject to such ailments as horses—spavin, glanders, ringbone, and bots. If I had the committee here, I would show its members that every other mule in the quartermasters' department, over fifteen and a half hands high, is either spavined, ringboned, or ill some way injured by the above-named diseases. The mule may not be so liable to spavin as the horse, but he has ringbone just the same. I cannot, for the life of me, see how the committee could have fallen into this error. There is this, however, ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... of legs lasts a lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he's a hard driver. Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand there with those screws, and let's finish it before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with his horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... not what I now am; not even as you saw me five years ago; but as I leapt into youth! Was I born to cast sums and nib pens as a City clerk? Aha, my poor father, you were wrong there! Blood will out! Mad devil, indeed, is a racer in a citizen's gig! Spavined, and wind-galled, and foundered—let the brute go at last to the knockers; but by his eye, and his pluck, and his bone, the brute shows the stock that ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "'A brace of spavined old croakers. Old Plain Talk had a shrew for a wife, and that's made him shrewish; and Old Prudence, when a boy, broke down in an apple-stall, and that discouraged him for life. No better sport for a knowing spark like me than to hear Old Plain Talk wheeze out his ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... and shook his head. The change was soon effected, and within ten minutes he was leading his spavined horse toward the gates of Nottingham. In the distance he could hear the butcher's loud song losing itself in the ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick |
