"Sickle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Emptied magazine yields to full one; the Maxims are pumping, not bullets, but veritable streams of death, with calm, devilish swiftness. The quick-firing guns are spouting radiating torrents of case. The attackers are mown down as corn falls, not before the sickle but the scythe. Not a man has reached, or can reach, the little earth-bank behind which the defenders keep their ground. The attack has failed; and failed from no lack of valour, of methodised effort, of punctilious compliance ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... much of true English endearing loveliness to recommend it. Such a quiet, pleasing landscape, in short, as one views, at such a season of the year, from every eminence in every county of our merry isle. The picture was made up of a tract of land filled with corn ripe for the sickle, or studded with sheaves of the same golden produce, enlivened with green meadows, so deeply luxuriant as to claim the scythe for the second time; each divided from the other by thick hedgerows, the uniformity ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... district, and the bold bearing of our brave and brisk men; but my heart sinks again when I think of what is to come—the blood of men flowing like water, death sweeping them down like grain before the sickle; and for what? Ada, these go not forth to defend us from our enemies, they go to war ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... I look out of my window this glorious morning, and watch the triple line of foaming waves breaking on the long beach, a silver sickle in the sunshine; the broad expanse of the Pacific, with distant sails looking like butterflies apoise; Point Loma grandly guarding the right, and farther back the mountain view, where snowy peaks can just be discerned over the nearer ranges; the quiet beauty of the ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... being thus removed from their path, they journeyed more swiftly; and when the next new moon was a thin white sickle in the sky, just above the line of saw-toothed hills, they came safely back to the comfortable caves and the ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... on, and presently reached a farmhouse set close to the road, with a barn on the other side. At a grindstone a tall, thin boy was sharpening a sickle. ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... his chariot on; his sickle-wheels smote to earth many brave and strong, yet the tree stood. The winds blew fiercely among its branches; the lightning danced and quivered above and around it; the thunder muttered forth its threatenings; the torrent ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... people to believe that oaks on which it was seen growing were to be respected, because of the wonderful cures which the priests were then able to effect with it, particularly of the falling sickness. The parasite was cut from the tree with a golden sickle at a high and solemn festival, using much ceremonial display, it being then credited with a special power of "giving fertility to all animals." Ovid said, "Ad ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... their fourteen stones, and thou, alas, Who from thy misery wouldst gladly pass To death, dost kiss the tombs, O wretched one, Where lies thy fruit so cruelly undone. Thus blossoms fall where some keen sickle passes And so, when rain doth level them, green grasses. What hope canst thou yet harbor in thee? Why Dost thou not drive thy sorrow hence and die? And thy swift arrows, Phoebus, what do they? And thine unerring ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... them all, and that is the swift annihilation of what is opposed to Him. The Bible has a set of standing metaphors by which to illustrate this thought of the Coming of the Lord—a flood, a harvest when the ears are ripe for the sickle, the waking of God from slumber, and the like; all suggesting similar thoughts. The day of the Lord, the coming of the Lord, will include and surpass all the characteristics which these lesser and premonitory judgment days presented in miniature. I do not enlarge on this ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... still being employed in agriculture. Crops were cut with scythe and sickle, while old scythe-blades fastened at one end of a wooden bench did duty to cut turnips in slices to feed the cattle, and farm work generally ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... black foliage of the Square, beneath the slim sickle of the moon, two cats were hunting after happiness; their savage cries of passion rang in the blossom-scented air like a cry of dark humanity in the jungle of dim streets. Stephen, with a shiver of disgust, for his nerves were on edge, shut the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a bankrupt's promissory note in lieu of told gold. It gives me small gratification, Miss Sophia—very small indeed—to see the bowing head of the grain that yet my sickle cannot reach." ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... took one-half hour from each of these divisions for silent prayer and adoration. He argued that good work was a prayer, and that one could pray with his heart and lips, even as his hands swung the ax, the sickle or the grub-hoe. All that Benedict required of others, he did himself, and through the daily work he evolved a very strong and sturdy physique. From the accounts that have come to us he was rather small in stature, but in strength he surpassed any ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... evening, the tide aiding, they had drifted across many headlands and past carven cliffs of marvellous designs to a long sickle sweep of strand on which two men could be seen solemnly walking up and down. Then, at a signal from Patsy, Godfrey McCulloch let down the anchor and pulled in hand over hand the little skiff which they had been dragging in their wake ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... with a great surprise. But something like fear overshadowed him at finding his sermons come back upon him thus. Was he, an unbelieving labourer, to go reaping with his blunt and broken sickle where the corn was ripest! But he had no time to think about that now. It was nearly ten o'clock, and she would be looking for her answer at eleven. He had not to think long, however, before he saw what ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... again. But after a time he got up deliberately and trotted down to the encircling line of old courtyarded tombs. There were nooks and crannies between and behind these along the wall into which the caretaker could not penetrate with sickle, rake and spade, that formed sheltered ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... ring of his cheery voice was wanting to the house; and the absence of his merry whistle seemed to make Sir Marmaduke's heart sink like lead as he donned his heavy boots, and went forth in the silver dew of the summer morning to judge which of his cornfields would soonest be ready for the sickle. Until this expedition of his sons he had, for more than fourteen years never been alone in those morning rounds on his farm; and much as he loved his daughters, they seemed to weigh very light in the scale compared with the sturdy heir ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Ceres or those of Isis were established; as is evident from its being imagined as an instrument of punishment in hell, in the case of Ixion, as represented in those mysteries. The taming of the ox and the horse, the use of the sickle and the bow and arrow, a considerable knowledge of astronomy, and its application to the purposes of agriculture and navigation, with many other circumstances, which show a prodigious improvement, must evidently have preceded the date of ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... our story known is that found in Nicholas de Troyes' "Grand Parangon des nouvelles Nouvelles," No. X, dating from 1535. The three things here bequeathed by the father are a cock, a cat, and a sickle, as in our version. I think it probable that the tale was introduced into the Philippines through the medium of a French religious. The Catalan form differs from the French in mentioning a fourth "heirloom," a raven, and was probably not the parent ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... Carson baked the cakes fur 'em, sixteen of 'em; an' Dickison the undertaker's tellin' all over they got the best quality shroud he carries. Well, you'll find it all in the Biweekly, under Death's Busy Sickle. Jim Bisbee shore set a store by Matty oncet she was dead. It was a grand affair, Delia. Not but what we've had some good ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... forget that first view! It was only a glimpse, for Edmund was nervous about meteors again, and would allow us only a moment at the peephole because he wished to be continually on the watch himself. But, brief as was the view, that vast gleaming sickle hanging in the black sky was the most tremendous ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... all how this should be—he feels The great bare barrenness o' the outside world. He thinks on Time and what it has to say; He thinks on God, but God has changed His hand, Sitting afar. And as the moon draws on To cover the day-king in his eclipse, And thin the last fine sickle of light, till all Be gone, so fares it with his ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... equal horizontal bands of red (top) and black with a centered yellow emblem consisting of a five-pointed star within half a cogwheel crossed by a machete (in the style of a hammer and sickle) ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... ploughed and sowed and reaped, and if, as happened occasionally, it was needful to get the work done quickly, the brownie called in some of his friends, and as soon as it was light a host of little dwarfs might have been seen in the fields, busy with hoe, fork or sickle. But by the time the people were about all was finished, and the little fellows ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... of the room, awaiting a sign from his master, stood the magistrate's clerk, a little man with a round head, and legs like the sickle of the waxing or waning moon. He carried under his short arms two portfolios, filled with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... admonition to be giuen, but not to presume anie thing by authoritie, sith the archbishop of Arles had receiued the pall in times past, whose authoritie he might not diminish, least he should seeme to put his sickle into another mans haruest. But as for the bishops of Britaine, he committed them vnto him, that the vnlearned might be taught, the weake with wholesome persuasions [Sidenote: Women with child.] strengthened, ...
— Chronicles 1 (of 6): The Historie of England 5 (of 8) - The Fift Booke of the Historie of England. • Raphael Holinshed
... the bodies lay. In one place the Russians had made a stand, and were piled up in heaps as the British again and again charged them. In other parts the round-shot had torn through whole ranks of men, cutting them down like corn before the reaper's sickle. ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... tune. The black bulk of the cook balanced behind the tiny galley over the glare of the stove, and the pots and pans in the pierced wooden board before it jarred and racketed to each plunge. Up and up the foc'sle climbed, yearning and surging and quivering, and then, with a clear, sickle-like swoop, came down into the seas. He could hear the flaring bows cut and squelch, and there was a pause ere the divided waters came down on the deck above, like a volley of buckshot. Followed the ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... in Plymouth harbor. Services on ship. This harbor is a bay greater than Cape Cod, compassed with goodly land. It is in fashion like a sickle ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... that sickle thing which you left lying about after cutting the grass,' said Winifred, looking into his face with bitter accusation as he ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... That flesh is grass! that earthly things, but mist! What are our joys, but dreams? And what our hopes? But goodly shadows in the summer cloud? There's not a wind that blows, but bears with it Some rainbow promise. Not a moment flies, But puts its sickle in the fields of life, And mows its thousands, with their ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... have stated, until he has accomplished what is above stated. We cannot possibly see how he can begin to reign over the nations as king, while he is in the most holy place, cleansing the Sanctuary, and the saints being perfected for the blessing when he lays aside his priestly robes and takes the sickle, as in Rev. xiv: 14; and God speaks, as in Joel iii: 16. If what you have stated, had been even approbated in Oct. 1844, it would have thrown the whole harmony of the scriptures, in our past history, into confusion. As I have said, I will here repeat ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates
... seals had been his food. Ever and ever through long months the everlasting white glitter of the snow and ice, ever and ever the cold stars, the cloudless sky, the moon at full, or swung like a white sickle in the sky to warn him that his life must be mown like grass. At night to sleep in a bag of fur and wool, by day the steely wind, or the air shaking with a filmy powder of frost; while the illimitably distant sun made the tiny flakes sparkle like silver—a poudre day, when the face ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... reap corruption in our bodies, and yet we are so earnest and laborious in sowing to the flesh. Be not deceived, for you are daily reaping what you have sown. And, O! that it were all the harvest; but death is only the putting in of the sickle of vengeance, the first cut of it: but, O! to think on what follows, would certainly restrain men, and cool them in ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... is allowed to produce fruit, instead of yielding tuba, the nuts are collected about every four months. They are brought down either by a sickle-shaped knife lashed on to the end of a long pole, or by climbing the tree with the knife in hand. When they are collected for oil-extraction, they are carted on a kind of sleigh, [144] unless there be a river or creek providing a water-way, in which latter case they are tied together, stalk ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... o' drifted snow. It looked like a girl of fifteen—not a hair on the little fellow's face. He'd been shot through the temple, but the Malo'ts had left their mark on him. Stalky unbuttoned the tunic, and showed it to us—a rummy sickle-shaped cut on the chest. 'Member the snow all white on his eyebrows, Tertius? 'Member when Stalky moved the lamp and it looked as if ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... and Mousie took the Girl home. They set up house together, and planted a crop of corn. The corn ripened, and they went out to cut it. Miss Mouse was a wee mousie, and was quite hidden among the stalks of the corn. While the Girl was cutting the corn with a sickle, she did not see poor little Mousie, so she cut her in two, and that ...
— The Talking Thrush - and Other Tales from India • William Crooke
... the great grain-fields of Diarbekir, Farkin, and Harpoot valleys, planted the year before, grew golden and bowed their heavy spear-crowned heads in waiting for the sickle. But no sickles were there, no scythes, not even knives. It was a new and sorry sight for our full-handed American farming men to see those poor, hard Asiatic hands trying, by main strength, to break the tough ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... assumption? He simply appeals to what he calls "the natural light," which is for him a source of all sorts of information which cannot be derived from experience. This "natural light" furnishes him with a vast number of "eternal truths", these he has not brought under the sickle of his sweeping doubt, and these help him to build up again the world he has overthrown, beginning with the one indubitable fact ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... and soul in the richest raw material. They were full-grown, ripened specimens of aboriginal life. They had a plump berry, as the farmers say, and came to the sickle without cockle, or rust, or weevil, or smut. They were as thrifty vines, and needed only to be trimmed and trained. They were as virgin gold in the bullion, and wanted to be melted and minted into coin. They were as statues rough-hewn at the quarry, and would have ripened to forms of majestic ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... he cried, fervently, "open his eyes, guide his tottering footsteps, and lead him from the paths of folly into those that are lovely and of good report, for lo! his days are numbered, and the sickle has been sharpened, and the corn is not ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... of the spruce, now seen to be rather close at hand, shone a slender, silver crescent moon, darkening, hiding, shining again, climbing until its exquisite sickle-point topped the trees, and then, magically, it cleared them, radiant and cold. While the eastern black wall shaded still blacker, the park blanched and the border-line opposite began to ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... harvest of that year, and the universal need of extra labor for a time, Gilbert Potter would have found his burden too heavy, but for welcome help from an unexpected quarter. On the very morning that he first thrust his sickle into the ripened wheat, Deb Smith made her appearance, in a short-armed ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... the good, green grass. She is the true grazing animal. That broad, smooth, always dewy nose of hers is just the suggestion of green sward. She caresses the grass; she sweeps off the ends of the leaves; she reaps it with the soft sickle of her tongue. She crops close, but she does not bruise or devour the turf like the horse. She is the sward's best friend, and will make it thick and smooth as ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... and with a leader's instinct, acted. Springing over the parapet, followed by his remaining Zulus of the Axe, he leapt upon them with a roar. Down they went before Inkosikaas, like corn before a sickle. The thing was marvellous to see, it was like the charge of a leopard, so swift was the rush and so lightning-like were the strokes or rather the pecks of that flashing axe, for now he was tapping at their heads or spines with the gouge-like point upon its back. Nor were these the only victims, for ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... lone; the grass was dank With night-dews on the briery bank Whereon a weary reaper sank. His garb was old; his visage tanned; The rusty sickle in his hand Could find no work ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke: How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bow'd the woods ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Vines hung down over the face of the wall, coarse grasses and underbrush grew to its very edge, and sharp-pointed fir trees etched themselves against the clear blue of the sky. Below, the white sand formed a sickle-shaped beach, bordered by the rocky wall, with its sharp point dipping far out to sea. High up on the sand a small rowboat was beached. There was no path visible up from the shingle, but it was evident that the ascent would be ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... that he was fickle, Was that great oak tree, She was in a pretty pickle, As she well might be - But his gallantries were mickle, For Death followed with his sickle, And her tears began to trickle For her great oak tree! Sing hey, Lackaday! Let the tears fall free For the pretty little flower and ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... contrast with the old days of household economies, the days of the ox-chain, the sickle, and the leach-tub. All of these, some happily and some unhappily, have been swept away by the besom of Progress. But in any case life was too serious in those days for effeminate luxury, or for aught but proper pride in defending ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... the corner. Susie and her companion were on the point of disappearing in a doorway fifty yards down Sickle Street. ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... sheep often weighed less than two ounces. Farm implements were few and clumsy. The wooden ploughs only scratched the ground. Harrowing was done with a hand implement little better than a large rake. Grain was cut with a sickle, and grass was mown with a scythe. It took five men a day to reap and bind ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... man, the eyelets of whose shoes pulled out, but who could not afford to get another pair, said to himself, "I will make a metallic lacing hook, which can be riveted into the leather." He was then so poor that he had to borrow a sickle to cut grass in front of his hired tenement. He became a ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the following case may here be noticed as not coming under any of the previous heads. It is an instance recorded by Professor Babington ('Phytologist,' August, 1853), and in which the pod of Medicago maculata, which is usually rolled up like a snail shell and provided with spines, was sickle-shaped and unarmed. ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... all as if I were in chains. I once had such an exquisite dream! Shall I tell it you? Well, listen. I dreamt I was standing in a meadow, and all round me was rye, so tall, and ripe as gold!... and I had a reddish dog with me—such a wicked dog; it kept trying to bite me. And I had a sickle in my hands; not a simple sickle; it seemed to be the moon itself—the moon as it is when it's the shape of a sickle. And with this same moon I had to cut the rye clean. Only I was very weary with the heat, and the moon blinded me, and I felt lazy; ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... blue kimono, Pale as the sickle moon Glimmered thro' soft plum-branches Blue in the dusk of June, Stole she, willing and waning, Frightened and unafraid,— "Take me with you, Sawara, Over ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... trouble or sickness; if they are cutting the wheat, or plucking the ears of corn, it is then sure to be followed by a death. I suppose God reveals these things to me by figures, the same as He did to Simon Peter in the long ago; for ain't we all jest like wheat waiting for the sickle, or like corn waiting till the time comes to be plucked by the Death Angel? I suppose my heavenly Father reveals more to me than He does to others, 'cause He, in His wisdom, has taken so much from me. He has left me here a poor old woman, deaf, blind, and lame. I can't see ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... Eve went down to the land of black mud and came near to the wheat God had showed them and saw that it was ripe and ready for reaping, they did not have a sickle to reap it with. So they readied themselves, and began to pull up the wheat by hand, until ...
— First Book of Adam and Eve • Rutherford Platt
... of the trees sweeps like a huge sickle across space. An acrid smell of cold decay rises on the night. The wind wails its ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... must he feel, the true-born son of Greece, If Greece one true-born patriot can boast: Not such as prate of war but skulk in peace, The bondsman's peace, who sighs for all he lost, Yet with smooth smile his tyrant can accost, And wield the slavish sickle, not the sword: Ah, Greece! they love thee least who owe thee most - Their birth, their blood, and that sublime record Of hero sires, who ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... holidays were beginning once more, summer holidays, with all their promise of pleasure for dwellers in the country. The scent of sweet new hay was borne on the afternoon breeze, and the broad sunlight lay on fields of waving corn which would soon be ready for the sickle, and on green meadows from which the hay was ...
— Ruth Arnold - or, the Country Cousin • Lucy Byerley
... very far off; the silent fields lay basking in the sunshine, with the lengthening shadows stretching athwart them, some with the golden grain cut and ready for carting, some still standing awaiting the sickle. But no happy toilers were to be seen. Yes, we alighted upon one, a lad sitting manufacturing a whistle-pipe, and watching some sheep wandering in a field, where the wheat ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... reaping and the mowing machine make very little progress in the competition between manual and mechanical labour. In the southern provinces, few owners of the soil have ever seen such contrivances. People who cling to the poetic associations of the scythe and the sickle—and who does not that has been awakened by their music in his childhood?—must not cry out against the laws which have caused the land of France to be divided up into such a multitude of small properties, for it is just this that preserves the old ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... employ. We have, therefore, little time to prepare to meet them.—Look over these lists, Marchie (an abbreviation by which Mareschal-Wells was known among his friends). Do you, Sir Frederick, read these letters from Lothian and the west—all is ripe for the sickle, and we have but to summon out ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... on forest and field. The weeks passed; summer sped to autumn, the ripe corn bowed to the sickle. The Convent's lands were rich and heavy, virgin soil reclaimed; and the Prior, watching the last great wain piled high with wealth of golden treasure, saw the porter coming ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... hour of separation for the night came. Everything seemed so fearfully still, except the monotonous wash of the waves on the sea-shore! And as far as she could see the landscape by the light of a bright little moon-sickle, there was nothing but a thick screen of trees and shrubbery. She groped her way to her sleeping-apartment, expecting to find Tulee there. She had been there, and had left a little glimmering taper behind a screen, which threw a fantastic shadow on the ceiling, like a face with a monstrous nose. ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... to ripen, and the corn will soon be ready for the sickle; of this fact our forefathers were reminded by the Lammas Festival, which was celebrated on the first of this month. Lammas is a shortened form of the word Loaf-mass, or feast of the loaf. A loaf of ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... chants—of old!- Putting his sickle to the perilous grain In the hot corn-field of the Phrygian king, For thee the Lityerses-song again Young Daphnis with his silver voice ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... supply To her their fairest tints for dye, But ever through her twirling thread There spires one strand of warmest red, Tinged from the homestead's genial heart, The stamp and warrant of her art; With this Time's sickle she outwears, And blunts the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... our northern counties, a rural district had its harvest operations affected by continuous rains. The crops being much laid, wind was desired in order to restore them to a condition fit for the sickle. A minister, in his Sabbath services, expressed their want in prayer as follows:—"O Lord, we pray thee to send us wind; no a rantin' tantin' tearin' wind, but a noohin' (noughin?) soughin' winnin' wind." More ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... board his ship and drink a glass of beer with him. We poked sceptically for a while amongst the bushes, peered without conviction into a ditch or two. There was not a sound: patches of slime glimmered feebly amongst the reeds. Slowly we trudged back, drooping under the thin sickle of the moon, and I heard him mutter to himself, "Himmel! Zwei und dreissig Pfund!" He was impressed by the figure of my loss. For a long time we had ceased to hear the ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... became, in turn, baker, carpenter, forester, and farm-labourer. He appeared to have little affection for his mother and still less for his father, with whom he had come to blows on one occasion. At the age of twenty, in a quarrel with some companions, one of them struck him with a sickle and fractured his skull. He had been convicted several times ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... them from their lowly Bed. For them no more the blazing Hearth shall burn, Or busy Houswife ply her Evening Care: No Children run to lisp their Sire's Return, Or climb his Knees the envied Kiss to share. Oft did the Harvest to their Sickle yield, Their Furrow oft the stubborn Glebe has broke; How jocund did they they drive their Team afield! How bow'd the Woods beneath their sturdy Stroke! Let not Ambition mock their useful Toil, Their homely Joys and Destiny obscure; ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... be from ten to fifteen for one; and of rice, from twenty-five to thirty; commonly about thirty. Those corn-lands that will admit of easy irrigation are usually turned over with the plough immediately after the grain is cut; which, in the middle provinces, is ready for the sickle early in June, about the same time that the young rice fields stand at the height of eight or ten inches. These being now thinned, the young plants are transplanted into the prepared wheat lands, which are then immediately flooded. Upon such a crop they reckon from fifteen ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... now some learner tries to shear, But comes right little speed, I fear; 'The corn lies ill,' and aye we hear 'The sickle's bad:' The byeword says, 'Ill shearer ne'er A gude hook had.'"—The ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... (d) A sickle-shaped piece of glass tubing passing just through the stopper, plugged with cotton-wool, to act as a vent for ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... had, prepar'd above, For which he sigh'd and pray'd & long'd full sore He might be cloath'd upon, for evermore. Oft spake of death, and with a smiling chear, He did exult his end was drawing near, Now fully ripe, as shock of wheat that's grown, Death as a Sickle hath him timely mown, And in celestial Barn hath hous'd him high, Where storms, nor showrs, nor ought can damnifie. His Generation serv'd, his labours cease; And to his Fathers gathered is in peace. Ah happy Soul, 'mongst Saints and Angels blest, Who after ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... man with a nickel, A sword, and a sickle, A pipe, and a paper of pins Set out for the Niger To capture a tiger— And ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... named) And his old Father both betook themselves To such convenient work as might employ 105 Their hands by the fireside; perhaps to card Wool for the Housewife's spindle, or repair Some injury done to sickle, flail, or scythe, Or other implement ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... troubled him, sitting there—the melancholy craving in his heart—because the sun was like enchantment on his face and on the clouds and on the golden birch leaves, and the wind's rustle was so gentle, and the yewtree green so dark, and the sickle of a moon ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a Reaper, whose name is Death, And, with his sickle keen, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... plant-stems rising out of flower-pots, and these extreme sartorial disproportions gave her a sort of "father's waistcoat" look. Yet at a change of the wind, at the slightest alteration of the calm content of their relationship, she would disclose herself indubitably romantic as the sickle moon, as music heard at dusk in a garden of red roses. He supposed that to every man of his horse-power there ultimately came a Juliet, but none but him in the whole world had a Juliet of so many merry disguises. He looked at the range and thought that somewhere behind them was ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... living among the woods, and her only son living along with her. He went out every morning through the trees to get sticks, and one day as he was lying on the ground he saw a swarm of flies flying over what the cow leaves behind her. He took up his sickle and hit one blow at them, and hit that hard he left no single ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... in the direction opposite from that used in finding the Pole, we are brought into the body of the Lion. This group will be recognised by the star of the first magnitude called Regulus. It is one of a series of stars forming an object somewhat resembling a sickle: three of the group are of the second magnitude. The Sickle has a special claim on our notice because it contains the radiant point from which the periodic shooting star shower known as the Leonids diverges. Regulus ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... cleared for the dance of the weary feet that have long toiled in the five acre. Under the crescent moon, in those mild September evenings, the old superstitions of the Saxon Druids are repeated, while many a beautiful Norma, crowned with vervain and mistletoe, a gleaming sickle in her hand, and her eyes filled with the prophetic light of love, reigns a queen over the honest loving hearts of swains who lay at her feet the brightest wisps of the upland. And the humble Ruth is there, too, with her sweet patient face, and her timid look ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... they live on ghaseb and milk, eating little meat; these come to them almost without labour. The ground is tilled by burning the stubble of the previous year, or by burning the trees on new land. The seed is thrown in when the rain begins, and nothing more is done till the grain is ripe for the sickle, when it is gathered in. It is collected under small sheds made of matting, and eaten as it is wanted. The cattle are mostly driven to graze and to water, and this is all the attention they require. The cotton furnishes a scanty clothing, deemed sufficient; ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... to subside. Alpatych left the cellar and stopped in the doorway. The evening sky that had been so clear was clouded with smoke, through which, high up, the sickle of the new moon shone strangely. Now that the terrible din of the guns had ceased a hush seemed to reign over the town, broken only by the rustle of footsteps, the moaning, the distant cries, and the crackle of fires which seemed widespread ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... grateful, and, under all points of view, an ORTHODOX Visitor. It seems however, from the language of the French Typographer, that I acted under a gross delusion; and that it was necessary to have recourse to his sharp-set sickle to cut away all the tares which I had sown in the soil of his country. Upon the motive and the merit of his labours, I have already given my unbiassed opinion.[A] Here, it is only necessary to observe, that I have not, consciously, falsified his opinions, or undervalued his worth. Let the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... decree? Knowest thou not that Adam and Eve died, and all their offspring; none of the forefathers escaped death; they are all of them gone unto the place of spirits, all of them have been gathered by the sickle of death. And I have not suffered the angel of death to approach thee: I have not permitted any evil disease to come upon thee, but instead I have sent mine own prince Michael to speak peaceably unto thee, ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James
... crags and the new villages on the lowlands told their own story of Turkish and Algerine piracy, now doomed to the limbo of things that were. In the evening we were safely anchored within the zancle (sickle) of Messina-port, whose depth of water and circular shape have suggested an old crater flooded. It was Sunday, and we were greeted with the familiar sounds, the ringing of cracked bells, the screaming of harsh, hoarse voices, a military band and detached ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... two other monasteries, which were built on the summit of the mountain, being before much distressed for want of water. In that of St. Clement, situate on the bank of a lake, a Goth, who was a monk, let fall the head of a sickle into the water as he was cutting down thistles and weeds in order to make a garden; but St. Maur, who with St. Placidus lived in that house, holding the wooden handle in the water, the iron of its own accord swam, and joined it again, as ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... to it for a scythe or a sickle to cut it down, and all I could do was to make one as well as I could out of one of the broad-swords, or cutlasses, which I saved among the arms out of the ship. However, as my crop was but small, I had no great ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... with crab's provender: crab's love, if soothing, Is no sweeter than pincers are soft—and a new sickle Cuts no sharper than crab's claws nip, keen as boar's toothing! Yet crab's love's no less fervent than bard's, if less musical— 'Tis a new thing I'd lilt—but a ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... autumn of '69 crept over the woods in flame and russet, and the sound of the sickle was in folks' ears, the life at Great Keynes was far more tranquil than we should fancy who look back on those stirring days. The village, lying as it did out of the direct route between any larger towns, was not so much affected by ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... of it rolled in on itself in a curving mass at the back. Over it the frost had raised a crisp web of hair that covered its solid smoothness like a net. Anne's head was the head of a hunting Diana; it might have fitted into the sickle moon. ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... 5 Behold, the field was ripe, and blessed are ye, for ye did thrust in the sickle, and did reap with your might, yea, all the day long did ye labor; and behold the number of your sheaves! And they shall be gathered into the garners, that they ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... making for a point of land that curved like a sickle. On the inside of the sickle was Nipe Bay. On the opposite shore of that broad harbor at the place of rendezvous a little band of Cubans waited to receive the filibusters. The goal was in sight. The dreadful voyage was done. Joy and excitement thrilled ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... stirs one with regret. And the world has such need of all noble talent; such exigent and hungry need of the true teacher, statesman, seer,—of the word of inspiration and the act of leadership! How shall one who feels in him the power and sees the need; who grasps in his hand the keen sickle, yet is held back, while before his eyes the fields are white with the harvest which threatens, unreaped, to perish,—how shall he reconcile himself to his lot? How escape the thought that he and all mankind are but playthings in the grasp of ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... hanging from their chamber windows in the sun. The cows are kept up for the greater part of the year, and every green thing is collected for them. Every little nook where the grass prows by roadside, and river, and brook, is carefully cut with the sickle, and carried home, on the heads of women and children, in baskets, or tied in large cloths. Nothing of any kind that can possibly be made of any use is lost. Weeds, nettles, nay, the very goose-grass which covers waste places, is cut up and taken for the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the harvest to their sickle yield, 25 Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe[3] has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bowed the ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... them,—the ships that were even then on their way to rescue the two castaways. And the second was carved with anchors, the sign of hope, and with coils of rope, and nautical instruments, and things familiar to seamen's eyes. But the third was carved with stars, and sickle-curved moons, and broad-rayed suns, "Because, ye see, Peach Blossom, arthly hope bein' as ye might say foundered, them things, and what was above 'em, stayed where they was; and it stiddied a man's mind to think on 'em, and to make a note on 'em as fur as might ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... upon itself for most of the necessaries of life. Each member has his own work. The father is the protector and provider; the mother is the housekeeper, the cook, the weaver, and the tailor. Father and sons work out-of-doors with axe, hoe, and sickle; while indoors the hum of the spinning-wheel or the clatter of the loom shows that mother and daughters are busily ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy |
