"Besom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ulmus' bear, And siffling mists beyond a bell That hide veiled shadows of a peak Above the stationed domes of red, Augueries of a marching pair,— Twin demons of unconquered Hell! Spell visions that the soffins leak That felt the besom of the dead, Just as the Twilight's scarlet urn Is seen from heights unfathomed, strong. There runnels of green waters cold, Toss lepers from their murky breast; There venom-oils and tapers burn To light the way of souls gone ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... callynge lowe, Goe waken Time from sleepe: Goe whysper in his ear, that soe His besom sweepe Me to that heape Where all ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... o' thee!" he harangued. "I couldna' abide thee th' first time I set eyes on thee. A scrawny buttermilk-faced young besom, allus askin' questions an' pokin' tha' nose where it wasna' wanted. I never knowed how tha' got so thick wi' me. If it hadna' ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... counsel. The first thing the witches did (for, as the sequel will show, they were witches deeply learned in Satan's wicked ways) was to impose on the novice a vow of secrecy; then to direct her, when going to bed, to take with her the besom, and, when her husband was asleep, to rise and come to them, leaving the besom beside him, and it would assume her appearance, so that he could not ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... it is traversed, now dry and neglected; and the quantity of heaps of earth, covered with fragments of brick and broken tiles, which are seen in every direction—the indisputable traces of former cultivation."[93] "The abundance of the country has vanished as clean away as if the besom of desolation had swept it from north to south; the whole land, from the outskirts of Babylon to the farthest stretch of sight, lying a melancholy waste. Not a habitable spot ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... carrying a pound of cherries. After a final douche with boiling water, we mounted the high shelf, with its wooden pillow, and the artistic part of the operation began. As we lay there in the suffocating steam, Alexandra whipped us thoroughly with a small besom of birch twigs, rendered pliable and secure of their tender leaves by a preliminary plunge in boiling water. When we gasped for breath, she interpreted it as a symptom of speechless delight, and flew to the oven and dashed a bucket ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... so far, no interest; in his soul's salvation he had little active concern. The revivals which were occasionally upstirred in the community by prayer, and the besom of threatened destruction, passed over him like a hot wind, for which he had no power of sensation, sometimes to his own wonder. Probably the cause lay in the fact that he was too thoroughly, without knowing it, rooted and grounded in his own creed to be emotionally moved by religious appeals. Jerome ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the wind again changed, and the whole mass of vapour, smoke, and ashes came sweeping like the very besom of destruction towards the giddy ledge on which the observers stood. Nigel was so entranced that it is probable he might have been caught in the horrible tempest and lost, had not his cooler companion grasped his arm and dragged him violently into the passage—where they were safe, though half ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... clever, Catlaw, my lass, but you're mista'en. You're a thrawn limmer, that's what you are. You think you have blood in you. You ha'e blood! Gae awa, and dinna blether. I tell you what, Catlaw, I met a man yestreen that kent your mither, and he says she was a feikie,[3] fushionless besom. What do ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... there. You kid, fetch this or bring that. You kid, go to the drift for water, or take the besom and sweep the stoep, or scrub out the room there—do you hear, you kid?" These orders came thick and fast when at last she was old enough to work; and she was old enough when she was very young, and did work like a little beast of burden. A real mother's heart—all ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... get to the bottom of this," said Tommy, rising, "and as you are too great a coward, Corp, to tell the truth with that shameless woman glowering at you, out you go, Gavinia, and take your disgraced bairn with you. Do as you are told, you besom, for I ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... gude cause to remember her,' said Peter, 'for she turned a dyvour on my hands, the auld besom! and after a' that the law could do to make me satisfied and paid, in the way of poinding and distrenzieing and sae forth, as the law will, she ran awa to the charity workhouse, a matter of twenty punds Scots in my debt—it's ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... frae your bed sae warm, And leave your coaxing wife, man; Gae get your besom, tramps and stane, And join the friendly strife, man. For on the water's face are met, Wi' mony a merry joke, man; The tenant and his jolly laird, The ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... the minister who in his white manse dwelt by the white kirk on the top of the windy hill. This was, by every earthly canon, a good man, but a stern and unsupple. He had not been long in this parish, and he was sweeping with a strong, new besom. The old minister, to his mind, had been Erastian and lax, weak in doctrine and in discipline of the fold. Mr. M'Nab meant not to be weak. He loathed sin and would compel the sinner also to loathe it. Now he came up, tall and darkly clad, and in his ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... might not drown. Conquered lies unconquered Agamemnon; how else lies Julius Caesar? Nabuchodonosor, eater of grass, what is he? Kings pass, and their royal seat gathereth a little dust. Anon with a besom of feathers cometh. Time the chamberlain, and scareth to his hiding-place the lizard on the wall. Think soberly, O ye kings! how your crowns are but yellow metal, and your purple robes the food of moths, ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... brewing, I doubt! It'll be Jock this and Jock that both but and ben all day long, and whatever is the use of all this tirley-wirly I can't see, when on Monday the house will look as if it had never seen the sight of a besom! I'll just bide where I am." He closed his eyes and ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... rather prolix on the subject of knightly honor, but I had good reason for being so, because the Augean stable of moral and intellectual enormity in this world can be cleaned out only with the besom of philosophy. There are two things which more than all else serve to make the social arrangements of modern life compare unfavorably with those of antiquity, by giving our age a gloomy, dark and sinister aspect, from which antiquity, fresh, natural and, ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... like a wart." Yet the rubbish must be removed; and it is mine and every man's duty to handle the spade and besom. But men want to work miracles; and, because the mountain does not vanish at a word, they rashly conclude it cannot be diminished. They are mistaken. Political error is a pestilential cloud; dense with ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... she is!" exclaimed the housekeeper, as she saw them depart, "to set up to be sae muckle better than ither folk, the auld besom, and to bring sae muckle distress on a douce quiet family! If it hadna been that I am mair than half a gentlewoman by my station, I wad hae tried my ten nails in the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... horse at last obeyed the spur, and he rode on and into the city, the gates of which were deserted. There he beheld on all sides that the Lord had indeed put the besom of destruction into the hands of the Reformers; and that not one of all the buildings which had been polluted by the papistry—no, not one—had escaped the erasing fierceness of its ruinous sweep. The presence of the magistrates ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... Turks have as good Scriptures to prove their Mahomet Saviour as Christians had for Christ? What if all we believed in should be but 'a think-so' too?" So powerful and so real were his illusions that he had hard work to keep himself from praying to things about him, to "a bush, a bull, a besom, or the like," or even to Satan himself. He heard voices behind him crying out that Satan desired to have him, and that "so loud and plain that he would turn his head to see who was calling him;" when on his knees in prayer he fancied he felt ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... she was at her worst, comport with her idea of a lady, poor as that idea was, to drink whisky till she did not know what she did next. And when the sleeping woman God made, wakes up to see in what a house she lives, she will soon grasp at besom and bucket, nor cease her cleansing while spot is left on wall ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... decrepit dotards. My master is mad, not as you are, but with another sort of madness, quite a new kind. The livelong day he looks open-mouthed towards heaven and never stops addressing Zeus. "Ah! Zeus," he cries, "what are thy intentions? Lay aside thy besom; do not ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... to extend the benediction of your sweetness a little further in the world. Believe me, I am not so foolish as to despise charity or true efforts to increase the comfort of the poor; but I know that poverty and pain and wretchedness can never be driven from the world by any besom of the law, and I do see that humanitarianism, sprung as it is from materialism and sentimentalism (what a demonic crew of isms!) has bartered away the one valid consolation of mankind for an impossible hope that begets only discontent and mutual hatred among ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... through to the outer yard. Jock Gilmour had been dashing water on the paved floor, and was now sweeping it out with a great whalebone besom. The hissing whalebone sent a splatter of dirty drops showering in front of it. John set his bare feet wide (he was only in his shirt and knickers) and eyed the man whom his father had "downed" with a kind of silent swagger. He felt superior. His pose ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... primary fixed resolution was to stand out of the quarrel; and he abides by that; suppresses any wishes of his own in regard to the Polish Election;—keeps ward on his own frontiers, with good military besom in hand, to sweep it out again if it intruded there. "What King you like, in God's name; only don't come over my threshold with ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of summer the mortality continued. The valley was swept as with the besom of destruction, and the drama of a people's death was enacted with a thousand variations of horror. When spring came, the invaders entered the valley once more. They found it deserted, with the exception of a few wretched bands, sole ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... done in the way of cleaning the streets and the drainage was simple, natural, and unaided by art. A few years later, however, about 1824, a beginning was made towards an improved state of things, and a man was employed to sweep the streets periodically with a besom at the munificent salary of 36s. 4d. a year! Over the seventy years that have intervened, this pioneer of our town improvements stands out clear and notable with his four-penny besom and basket. That he did good honest work with his birch there is credible testimony in the parochial ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... Now, as Ikey entered, McMahan stood, flushed and triumphant and mighty, the centre of a huzzaing concourse of his lieutenants and constituents. It seems there had been an election; a signal victory had been won; the city had been swept back into line by a resistless besom of ballots. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... Man o' the Hill was well out of the house, she stuffed some of her clothes with straw, and stuck up this lass of straw in the corner by the chimney, with a besom in her hand, so that it looked just as if she herself were standing there. After that she stole off home, and got a sharp-shooter to stay in the ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... men-of-the-earth! Once, in my days of obscurity, I was made to put a besom into the piece, and it swept all my genius off the boards. Ah, the donkey-men! But I am glad Eselmann gave me my "Hamlet" back, for before giving it to Goldwater I made it even more subtle. No vulgar nonsense ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... 3—"If the Messiah Priest, (or anointed priest) doth sin," &c.]—and have no successor; and the city and the temple shall be destroyed by Titus and the Romans, and until the end of the war, your country shall be swept with the besom of destruction. ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... office-bearer, but is distinctly determined in the making of the tabernacle; there is not a tackle, nor the quantity of it, not a curtain, nor the colour thereof, not a snuffer, nor a candlestick, nor a besom that sweeps away the filth, nor an ash-pan that keepeth the ashes, but all are particularly set down; yet, ye will not get a bishop, nor an archbishop, nor this metropolitan, nor that great and cathedral man, no not within all the Bible. The Lord pity them; for indeed I think them objects of ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... could be glimpsed the eternal snows. Sometimes an avalanche slid over a slope with the distant appearance of a great white waterfall and the echo of muffled thunder. Where the mountain was swept as by a mighty besom, the pack-train kept an anxious eye on the snow {31} amid the valleys of the upper peaks; for, in an instant, the snowslide might come over the edge of the upper valley to sweep down the slope, carrying away forests, rocks, trail, pack-train ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... a whiff of Naseby, that would sweep, With its stern Puritan besom, all this chaff From the Lord's threshing-floor! Yet more than half The victory is attained, when one or two, Through the fool's laughter and the traitor's scorn, Beside thy sepulchre can bide the morn, Crucified Truth, when thou shalt ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... with the water of beauty, in hopes that the queen would then conceive a greater affection for him than she had. This water stood in a phial upon a table in the queen's chamber, where she had put it, that it might not be out of her sight. But one of the chambermaids going to kill a spider with her besom, by accident threw down the phial, and broke it, so that the water was lost. She dried it up with all the speed she could, and not knowing what to do, she bethought herself that she had seen a phial of clear water in the king's cabinet very like ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... Ideographically the Chinese represent wife by a woman holding a broom—certainly not to brandish it offensively or defensively against her conjugal ally, neither for witchcraft, but for the more harmless uses for which the besom was first invented—the idea involved being thus not less homely than the etymological derivation of the English wife (weaver) and daughter (duhitar, milkmaid). Without confining the sphere of woman's activity to Kueche, Kirche, Kinder, ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... grew most likely in the vicinity of the building where the lazy novice lived, a shrub, perhaps, repeatedly touched by him while in a state of anger provoked by his laziness and distaste for his duty—why should not a quantity of his life-atoms have passed into the materials of the future besom, and therein have been recognized by Buddha, owing to his superhuman (not supernatural) powers? The processes of Nature are acts of incessant borrowing and giving back. The materialistic sceptic, however, will not take anything in any other way than ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... primitive peoples, from whose customs and beliefs we can learn what our own ancestors must have believed before the besom of civilization swept aside ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... the springs o' Calvin, For gumlie dubs of your ain delvin'! Ye sons of heresy and error, Ye'll some day squeal in quaking terror! When Vengeance draws the sword in wrath, And in the fire throws the sheath; When Ruin, with his sweeping besom, Just frets 'till Heav'n commission gies him: While o'er the harp pale Mis'ry moans, And strikes the ever-deep'ning tones, Still louder shrieks, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... to ye, ma leddy," he said, "this is mair honour than ever I thought wad come my road in this world. And I hae kenned Miss Patsy ever since I catched her up my sugar-ploom tree and she pelted me wi' the ploom-stanes. Ech, she was a besom, and I'm thinkin' she ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... beautiful bright chestnut colour; and, being soft and pliant, is very proper for the dusting of beds, curtains, carpets, hangings, etc. If these besoms were known to the brushmakers in town, it is probable they might come much in use for the purpose above-mentioned.* (*A besom of this sort is to be seen in Sir Ashton ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... hands; and so they remain, and wither, and despair, and die. Thus when the kelp business was at an end, the Scotch Highlanders sat down in their helpless hunger, till they were swept as with a besom out of the land they cumbered. Yet what Mechi has done for his Tiptree bog on a large scale, with expensive machinery, and hired labour, might have been done by each of them on a small scale, without expense, and with his own labour. A wholesome living might be ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... sweeper is much oftener a poor countryman, who has wandered to London in search of employment, and, finding nothing else, has spent his last fourpence in the purchase of a besom, with which he hopes to earn a crust. Here his want of experience in town is very much against him. You may know him instantly from the old habitue of the streets: he plants himself in the very thick and throng of the most crowded thoroughfare—the rapids, so to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... lived ecstatically at the Languedocian capital. It is a metropolis of beggardom, a mendicant's Mecca, a citadel of Jules Richepin's cherished Gueux. Here, indeed, Elia need not have lamented over the decay of beggars, "the all sweeping besom of societarian reformation—your only modern Alcides' club to rid time of its abuses—is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendicity. Scrips, wallets, bags, staves, dogs and crutches, the whole mendicant fraternity with all their ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and driving them before him; ay, he even selected the battle-ground on the slopes of the Biggarsberg in Natal. Then he saw himself again, sweeping the natives out of South Africa with the relentless besom of his might, and ruling unquestioned over a submissive people. And, last of all, he saw something glittering at his feet—it ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... he said. "I don't stand in need of hedge-stealings. I'm a freeholder, with money in the bank; and now I won't trust women no more! Silly old besom! I do beleft she'd ha' stole the Squire's big fob-watch, if ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... of pleasant perfume, Then stepped from the place where he lay, Then hid herself close in the besom of broom, To hear what her true ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... practice of sleeping in the kitchen; he considered that a house could only be well guarded at night from the ground floor. There was his bed, in the corner against the brush and besom cupboard, all made up. Its creaselessness, so characteristic of Aguilar, had not been disturbed. The sight of the narrow bed made Audrey think what a strange existence was the existence of Aguilar. ... Then, with a boldness that ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform hath swept him out of office, and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the assumed fulfilment! But perhaps there may be detected in Mr. Masson's "swept its arcs" a little of that prophetic hedging-in vagueness to which he allows so generous a latitude. How if the "two-handed engine," after all, were a broom (or besom, to ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... infamous sinner? So his Grace wonders much over the daring of the harlot; for he had given her no proebenda, though she was writing to him constantly requesting one. Nor would he ever think of giving her one; for why should he send such a hell-besom to sweep the pious convent of Marienfliess? The good abbess might rise up, for as long as he lived Sidonia ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... Land—for its sunshine, its verdure, its forests, its flowers, its perfume; but oh! above all, for the loving, refined, intelligent, gentle race of people it was my great, my priceless privilege, to be born amongst—a people worthy to live with, yes, worthy to die for! The stern besom of war has wept over you, beloved Natchez—your fairest homes have been desolated, your lovely gardens are now only remembrances—your family circles are broken up—your bravest sons are sleeping in the dust of death, or weeping ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... and he sometimes prevailed upon them to order the rabble to disperse, whom they had previously invited to the task of spoliation. He spoke to the better-informed, of the degradation which England would suffer in the eyes of surrounding nations, by thus wantonly "sweeping the land with the besom of destruction," and annihilating all those records of her own pre-eminence, which other countries, had they possessed them, would have been so solicitous to preserve. He distinguished between excitements to devotion and objects of worship, and he read from ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... well gin in at oncet," John said to him one day, when he borrowed ten dollars for the payment of an oyster bill. "I tell you she's got more besom in her ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... moderate man received much denunciation from zealots on either side. He soon clears himself, however, from all suspicions of Lutheranism. He is appalled at the fierce conflict which rages far and wide. He becomes querulous as the mighty besom sweeps away sacred dust and consecrated cobwebs. "Men should not attempt every thing at once," he writes, "but rather step by step. That which men can not improve they must look at through the fingers. If the godlessness of mankind requires such fierce physicians as Luther, if ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation." "I will also make it a possession for the bittern and pools of water: and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of hosts." Isa. 13:19, 20; 14:23. See also the prophecy of the overthrow of Nineveh, Nahum, chs. 2, 3, and of Tyre: "I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the very end of the century, there is a steady stream of invective, from men whose character and position lend weight to their words, against the romances of chivalry and the infatuation of their readers. Ridicule was the only besom to sweep away ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... canst thou answer to my majesty for giving up of Normandy unto Mounsieur Basimecu, the dauphin of France? Be it known unto thee by these presence, even the presence of Lord Mortimer, that I am the besom that must sweep the court clean of such filth as thou art. Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... a besom over the treeless spaces, whisking new sand over the litter of the scant-leaved shrubs, and the little doorways of the burrowers are as trim as city fronts. It takes man to leave unsightly scars on the face of the earth. ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... immediate predecessors—these Italians, Spaniards, Germans, and Walloons, who during so many terrible years had stormed and sacked almost every city of the Netherlands, and swept over the whole breadth of those little provinces as with the besom of destruction. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... appropriated, for war spares nothing. Some of the frightened people of the village were returning as we passed through, and were sadly lamenting the destruction of almost everything that could be destroyed on and about their homes by this besom of destruction,—war. Food, stock, fences, bed and bedding, etc., all gone or destroyed. Some of the houses had been perforated by the shells,—probably our own shells, aimed at the enemy. One man told me a shell had entered his house and landed on the bed in the front room, but had not exploded. ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... pride and might towards the city; but an awful burning rose, afar as it were in the darkness, and the flames stood like a tower of fire that reached unto the heavens. And I saw a dreadful hand and an arm stretched from out of the cloud, and in its hold was a besom made of the hail and the storm, and it swept the fugitives like dust; and in their place I saw the churchyard, as it were, cleared and spread around, the graves closed, and the ancient tombs, with ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... for your own sake alone, but for the sake of all these women and children. The Black Riders seek only an excuse to sweep the city from end to end with the besom of fire and blood." ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... the arm-chair, whose back, at right angles with its seat, was so high that the sitter's head stopped two feet short of the top. This chair was of oak, and carved at the summit. There was a copper pail, that went in at the waist, holding holy water, and a little hand-besom to sprinkle it far and wide; and a long, narrow, but massive oak table, and a dwarf sticking to its rim by his teeth, his eyes glaring, and his claws in the air like a pouncing vampire. Nature, it would seem, did not make Giles ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... parts of England a singular custom prevails. When a married woman leaves home for a few days, the husband hangs a broom or besom from the window. When, how, and where did this originate, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... washed my foster-sister's feet I took a besom and began to sweep the floor of the house. One of the Hags was very pleased to see me doing that. She said I would make a good servant, and after a while she asked me to sit at the fire. I sat in the corner of the chimney. They had put meal in the water, and I began to stir ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... and sick with self-disgust; but the end will be a clean house, and the light and wind of Heaven shining and blowing clear and fresh and sweet through all its chambers. Better so, than have a hurricane from God burst in doors and windows, and sweep from his temple with the besom of destruction every thing that loveth and maketh a lie. Brothers, sisters, let us be clean. The light and the air around us are God's vast purifying furnace; out into it let us cast all hypocrisy. Let us be open-hearted, and speak every man the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... and the children eat on unhindered on the other side. I had hoped that there was real feeling among politicians. But no; we are put off with a fast day. There, an end! I begin to think that nothing will do for England but a good revolution, and a 'besom of destruction' used dauntlessly. We are getting up our vainglories again, smoothing our peacock's plumes. We shall be as exemplary as ever by next ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... these horrible people, or I should not have admitted him. He came with his broom to brush out the litter of the birds. His eyes fell upon the Venus, and in an instant he had rushed upon her and struck her two blows with his wooden besom. Then we fell upon him and dragged him away. But alas! alas! it was too late, for already the wretch had dashed off the fingers of ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... instantly seized the broom and threw it into the fire; but, although the besom burned, the deathless Kashtshei still remained alive. Then the Tsarevna said to him: "My beloved, you do not love me sincerely, for you have not told me truly where is your death; nevertheless, I am not angry, but love ...
— The Russian Garland - being Russian Falk Tales • Various
... they do not weigh them in a pair of balances); and when once matched with a great deal of care, if one of them chance to die, then is the coach maimed till a meet mate be found, whose corresponding may be as equivalent to the surviving palfrey, in all respects, as like as a broom to a besom, barm to yeast, or codlings to boiled apples." This is good natural humour. He proceeds —"They use more diligence in matching their coach-horses than in the marriage of their sons and daughters." A great fashion, in its novelty, is often extravagant; ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... down the insurrection. Neither of these soldiers was a sentimentalist; both believed as heartily as did Wentworth in later years that the word of the hour was Thorough. They started with their armies from Antioch in March, 67, resolved on sweeping Palestine with the besom of destruction. Cities and villages, one by one, were besieged, captured, destroyed; men, women, and children were indiscriminately massacred. The Jewish army fought every inch of the ground like tigers; ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... we that curse him, though in woe our sad heart bleeds, The curse that's on him is the curse that follows wicked deeds. He suspected and he punished, he judged, and then he drew The besom of destruction our quiet homesteads through; So it's rippling in the waters, it is rustling through the air, Five hundred thousand curses ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... must be a good deep green. I want to know the name of his tutor. I hope that he will have a very good collection of books in his own room, a sufficient allowance, and a hamper of claret, en cas de besom. I think, if there are to be no hounds or horses, we may compound for all the rest. But these I believe the Dean will never suffer to ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... and missionaries. Like the dread cyclone, it came, unheralded, and like that much-to-be-dreaded monster of the prairies, it left desolation and death in its pathway. The Sioux arose against the whites and in their savage wrath swept the prairies of Western Minnesota as with a besom of destruction. One thousand settlers perished and hundreds of happy homes were made desolate. The churches, school-houses and homes of the missionaries were laid in ashes. However, all the missionaries and their households ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... with innumerable lockets, which in size and inventive taste resembled a poached egg, and betrayed the insular goldsmith. A train three yards long completed this gorgeous figure. She had commenced life a shrimp-girl, and pushed a dredge before her, instead of pulling a silken besom after her. Another stately queen (with an "a") heated the atmosphere with a burnous of that color the French call flamme d'enfer, and cooled it with a green bonnet. A third appeared to have been struck with the beauty of a painter's palette, and the skill ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... to it. Be good enough to vanish. Permit yourself to be swept quietly into the dunghill. All that there was about you of value has departed from you; and allow me to say that you are now—rubbish." And then the ruthless besom comes with irresistible rush, and the rubbish is swept into the pit, there to be hidden for ever from the sight. And the pity of it is this—that a man, if he will only restrain his greed, may eat his cake and yet have it; aye, and in so doing will have twice ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... passive to the active state, relieved and stimulated her, and she hurried from one needed reform to another. She drew others into the vortex. She inspired the chambermaid to unwilling yet amazing effort, and the lodging-house endured such a blast from the besom that it stood in open-windowed astonishment uttering dust like the breath of a dragon. Having swept and garnished the bed-chambers, Virginia moved on the dining-room. As the ranger had said, this, ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... wounded.' Not without clangour, complaint; subsequent criminal trials, and official persons dying of heartbreak! (Histoire de la Revolution, par Deux Amis de la Liberte, i. 58.) So, however, with steel-besom, Rascality is brushed back into its dim depths, and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... own part. When I was fourteen I was put out to service to a small farmer and his wife, with whom, however, I did not stay long, for I was half-starved, and otherwise ill treated, especially by my mistress, who one day attempting to knock me down with a besom, I knocked her down with my fist, and went back ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation—your only modern Alcides' club to rid the time of its abuses—is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear MENDICITY from the metropolis. Scrips, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... men in regard to slavery. All the Scriptural arguments, all the fitness of things, all the physiological demonstrations, all Mr. Stephens's corner-stones, Ham, Onesimus, heels, hair, and facial angle,—all are swept out, by one flirt of the besom of Fate, into the inexorable limbo of things that were and never should have been. How is Truth wounded to death in the house of her friends! The highest authority of the South has deliberately renounced its vested interest in the curse of Noah, and its right to make beasts of black men ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of abuses, a remover of grievances, * * sharing deeply all the while in the very same pollutions he pretends to sweep away: his last days are spent in slavery to women, and generally the least deserving; till worn to the stumps like his brother besom, he is either kicked out of doors, or made use of to kindle flames for ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... Since right along the foreshore, out of reach Of furious driven waves, three hundred pines Straggle the marches between sand and soil. Like maps of stone-walled fields their branching roots Hold the silt still so that thin grass grows there, Its blades whitened with travelling powdery drift The besom of the lightest breeze sets stirring. That woman's gaze toils worn from remote years, Yet forward yearns through the bright spacious noon, Beyond the farthest isle, whose filmy shape Floats faint on the sea-line. I, scooping grains up with the frail half-shell ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... thunder in the halls of Congress, and the cloud, at first no bigger than a man's hand, was yearly gathering force, till it finally burst in a cyclone of passion and prejudice and tyranny, and swept all before it in one besom of destruction. That the question of slavery lay at the root of the dissension cannot be doubted by any who are conversant with the political history of the United States. The tariff rulings had their weight, as ...
— Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War • Mrs. Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... mundation^; ablution, lavation^, colature^; disinfection &c v.; drainage, sewerage. lavatory, laundry, washhouse^; washerwoman, laundress, dhobi^, laundryman, washerman^; scavenger, dustman^, sweep; white wings brush [U.S.]; broom, besom^, mop, rake, shovel, sieve, riddle, screen, filter; blotter. napkin, cloth, maukin^, malkin^, handkerchief, towel, sudary^; doyley^, doily, duster, sponge, mop, swab. cover, drugget^. wash, lotion, detergent, cathartic, purgative; purifier &c v.; disinfectant; aperient^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... you, then," said the Becchino, sullenly, "such as two nights since she was committed to my charge. Line and lineament may already be swept away, for the Plague hath a rapid besom; but I have left that upon her by which you will know the Becchino is no liar. Bring hither the torches, comrades, and lift the door. Never stare; it's the gentleman's whim, and he'll ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... man's shield. But we can lie still, like sleepy old dogs; and it's clear enough that barking would be of no use just now. As for this psalm-singing party, who vote for nothing but the glory of God, and want to make believe we can all love each other, and talk as if vice could be swept out with a besom by the Magnificent Eight, their day will not be a long one. After all the talk of scholars, there are but two sorts of government: one where men show their teeth at each other, and one where men show their tongues and lick the feet of the strongest. ...
— Romola • George Eliot |
