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More "Chaff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pint on the smallest provocation has not shed a tear these six weeks. The very learned gentleman who has cooled the natural heat of his gingery complexion in pools and fountains of law until he has become great in knotty arguments for term-time, when he poses the drowsy bench with legal "chaff," inexplicable to the uninitiated and to most of the initiated too, is roaming, with a characteristic delight in aridity and dust, about Constantinople. Other dispersed fragments of the same great palladium are to be found on the canals of Venice, at the second ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... you call it," interposed Sir Norman, "to let you make your escape, as you most assuredly will do the moment you are out of our sight! No, no; we are too old birds to be caught with such chaff; and though the informer always gets off scot-free, your services deserve no such boon; for we could have found our way without your help! On with you, Sir Robber; and if your companions do kill you, console yourself with ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... any but themselves—a world far away above all the dull matters of every-day life—they talked of many things that might else never have been known to one another. Mostly they spoke the crude romantic thoughts and desires of boyhood's time—chaff thrown to the wind, in which, however, lay a few stray seeds, fated to fall to good earth, and to ripen to fruition in ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... attention squarely now to the foreign ship and take account of the strangeness of its conditions. "Not a sound on board! And see, not a light! No sign of the crew!"—"Halloo, sea-folk!" the maidens shout, "Halloo! Do you need lights? Where are you? We cannot see...."—"Don't wake them," chaff the Norwegians, "they are still asleep!" The girls go close to the ship and shout again. "Halloo, sea-folk! Halloo, answer!" There is along silence. The sailor-lads have the laugh now on the girls. "Ha, ha! In very truth, they are dead. ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... strutting about the dining-room with a man's cap on her head, twisting a cane and bargaining with an Isvostchick—this last because, only the evening before, he had told them with great pride of his cleverness in that especial direction. The fun was good-natured enough, but it was, as Russian chaff generally is, quite regardless of sensitive feelings. Nina chaffed everybody and nobody minded, but Bohun did not know this, and minded very much indeed. He showed during dinner that evening that he was hurt, and sat over his cabbage soup very dignified and silent. This made every one uncomfortable, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... grantee of landed estate.—By this division it fancies that it has respected lawful ownership by overthrowing illegitimate property, and that in the feudal scheme of obligations, it has separated the wheat from the chaff.[2221] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... so the wicked,—they are chaff Before the wind that flies, Nor could they stand His searching glance, Should God in judgment rise; For known to God are all the right, But wicked ...
— Hymns from the Morningland - Being Translations, Centos and Suggestions from the Service - Books of the Holy Eastern Church • Various
... of honour are not so well taught now as they used to be. Noble sentiments are not the fashion. The very phrase provokes a smile of ridicule. But I do not know whether the habit of uttering ignoble ones in "chaff" does not at last bring the tone of mind down to the low level. It is so terribly easy to be mean, and covetous, and selfish, and cowardly untrue, if the people by whose good opinion one's character lives will comfortably confess that they also "look out for themselves," and "take ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... once recognised by Lieutenant Jellaby, a jolly fellow, in whose watch I was. He went by his Christian name of "Joe" amongst us all, being very good-natured and always full of fun and chaff. ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... once more, but was silent. He knew that if he protested again the young Philadelphians would chaff him without mercy, and he knew at heart also that Tayoga's statement about him was true. He remembered with pride his defeat of St. Luc in the great test of words in the vale of Onondaga. But Wilton's mind ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... charge. Squadron upon squadron raced over the open ground in a mad dash toward the Belgian line; and as they charged, the rapid-fire guns of the great forts poured forth their answer. Great holes were cut in the German columns, and men and horses were mowed down like chaff. ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... battered fineries and upon her homely errand, across the plains of ocean, and past the gorgeous scenery of dawn and sunset; and the ship's company, so strangely assembled, so Britishly chuckle-headed, filling their days with chaff in place of conversation; no human book on board with them except Hadden's Buckle, and not a creature fit either to read or to understand it; and the one mark of any civilised interest being when Carthew filled ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had a very wise saying: 'Here is a man trying to fill a bushel with chaff. Now if I fill it with wheat first, it is better than to fight him.' This apothegm contains in it the whole of what I would say on the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... touch of high spirits to the company and extorted all their latent humor. Samuel excelled himself in vivacious repartee, and responded comically to the toast of his health as drunk in coffee. Suddenly, amid the hubbub of chaff and laughter and the clatter of cutlery, a still small voice made itself heard. It same from old Hyams, who had been sitting quietly with brow corrugated under ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... have passed into immortality as a proverb. Perhaps a few other grains of corn might be picked out of these hundred and seventy pages of chaff. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... lack of great hearts, and brave hearts, at the present day, if it were necessary to bring them to the test, still there have been few men like unto him. It is a pleasant and a profitable task, so to sift through past ages, so to separate the wheat from the chaff, to see, when the feelings of party and prejudice sink to their proper insignificance, how the morally great stands forth in its own dignity, bright, glorious, and everlasting. St. Evremond sets forth the firmness ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... laughs low At ruddy RASPER'S keenly-whispered mot— RASPER, a soul all strictures, Holds the great world a field for sketchy chaff. Many love not the man, but how they laugh At his swift, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... Murrayfield? There is precious little sense in it, but it might amuse. Cassell's published it in a thing called YULE-TIDE years ago, and nobody that ever I heard of read or has ever seen YULE-TIDE. It is addressed to a class we never met - readers of Cassell's series and that class of conscientious chaff, and my tale was dull, though I don't recall that it was conscientious. Only, there's the house at Murrayfield and a dead body in it. Glad the BALLADS amused you. They failed to entertain a coy public, at which I wondered, not that I set much account ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whether a lemon or an orange had better be stuck into its mouth. We wanted to know how to cook it, and why it would not get itself baked. About an hour before supper-time I grew desperate at the anticipation of the "chaff" Alice and I would certainly have to undergo if this detestable animal could not be produced in a sufficiently cooked state by evening. We took it out of the oven and contemplated it with silence and dismay. Fair as ever did that pig appear, and as if it had no present ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... a jest, Or distil it from the folly of a fool. I can teach you with a quip, if I've a mind; I can trick you into learning with a laugh; Oh, winnow all my folly, and you'll find A grain or two of truth among the chaff! ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... had appeared from the surrounding country and were dangling over fires as the kid and the compressed vegetable bubbled together; there rose a cheerful clinking of mess-tins; outrageous demands for 'a little more stuffin' with that there liver-wing'; and gust on gust of chaff as pointed as a bayonet and as delicate as ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... "I," and "I," cried out several of the seamen, laughing and passing all sorts of chaff about the expedition; and soon there were more than enough offers to man the jolly-boat twice over if all had ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... solid people, who understand a joke even less than the Scotch, while such a thing as chaff is absolutely unintelligible to them. Life to the Finns seems a serious matter which can be only undertaken after long thought and much deliberation. They lose much pleasure by their seriousness. They sing continually, but all their music is sad; they dance sometimes, but the native dances ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... father's family, and one in the mother's. A third name commemorating the day or some event, or perhaps the name of a spirit, is frequently added. [60] Certain names, such as Abacas ("worthless"), Inaknam ("taken up"), and Dolso ("rice-chaff") are common. If the infant is ailing, or if the family has been unfortunate in raising children, the newborn is named in the regular way, then is placed on an old rice winnower, and is carried to a refuse heap ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... take on credit as open and even- down truth; but as to whether Taffy's master's nick-nackets be true or false, every one is at liberty, in this free country, to think for himself. Old sparrows are not easily caught with chaff; and unless I saw a proper affidavit, I would not, for my own part, pin my faith to a single word of them. But every man his ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... Cleon shall not be able to accuse me of attacking Athens before strangers;[213] we are by ourselves at the festival of the Lenaea; the period when our allies send us their tribute and their soldiers is not yet. Here is only the pure wheat without chaff; as to the resident strangers settled among us, they and the citizens are one, like the straw ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... bodily, and could not be rallied. The moment was full of significance, and I beheld these failures with breathless suspense. In five minutes the pursuers would gain the creek, and in ten, drive our dismayed battalions, like chaff before the wind. I hurried to my horse, that I might be ready to escape. The shell and ball still made music around me. I buckled up my saddle with tremulous fingers, and put my foot upon the stirrup. But a cheer recalled me and a great clapping of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... favorable. paille, f., straw; — lgre, chaff. paisible, peaceful. paix, f., peace. palais, m., palace. ple, pale. pleur, f., pallor, whiteness. plir, to turn pale. par, by. paratre, to appear. pareil, similar, like; — , like unto. parer, to adorn, ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... shook my head 'n' said 'no' in the end 'n' then we looked up railway stocks. Mr. Kimball read me a list of millionaires 'n' he asked me if I would n't like to be called 'Susan Clegg, queen of the Western Pacific'—but I 'm too old to be caught by any such chaff, 'n' I told him so to his face, and then it was that we come to his favorite scheme of the 'Little Flyer in Wheat.' That was what he called it, 'n' I must say that I think it's a pretty good name, only if I know myself I 'll buy wheat as ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... barn with fell purpose in his heart. He set up on end a bag of chaff, which was laid aside to fill a bed. He squared up to it in a deadly way, dancing lightly on his feet, his hands revolving in a most ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... first light brought news of a morning, they on afresh; because they had intercepted a letter tied to the leg of a dove, wherein the Persian emperor promised present succours to the besieged. The Turks cased the outside of their walls with bags of chaff, straw, and such like pliable matter, which conquered the engines of the Christians by yielding unto them. As for one sturdy engine, whose force would not be tamed, they brought two old witches on the walls to enchant it; but the spirit thereof was too strong ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... Bible to hold forth upon, and these agents, employed by the Canada Company, say what they can out of their own heads. The object in both is to make money. I thought the Leaftenant had been too long in a colony to be caught by chaff." ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... the supposed coexistence of Mind and matter and the mingling of good and evil have re- sulted from the philosophy of the serpent. Jesus' demon- 269:6 strations sift the chaff from the wheat, and unfold the unity and the reality of good, the unreality, the nothing- ness, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Burt's chaff," he said. "This is merely a map of the farm, and we are doing a little planning for our spring work—deciding what crop we shall put on that field and how treat this one, etc. You can see, Amy, that each field is numbered, and here in this book ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... making a path for them through the depths of the sea, reining back its foaming waves as a rider his white-maned steed; giving to the thirsty—water from the rock, to the hungry—bread from the skies, and scattering the foes of Israel before them, as chaff is driven by the wind. I have heard of the sun's fiery chariot arrested in its course by the voice of a man, speaking with authority given to him by an inspiring Deity. Tell me what is the name of the Hebrew's ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... brother officers happily knew nothing of his elopement with the minister's daughter, and the duel that followed it; but supposed that his long absence had been occasioned by a long illness, he escaped all that exasperating chaff that might, under the circumstances, have ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... minute whether their testimony was liable to be vitiated or not, and whether the separation for which you contend be conceivable, or even possible. I fear that you have no winnowing-fan which will separate the chaff from the wheat." ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... in good humor; stretching himself out on my sofa he began to chaff me about my appearance, which indicated, he said, that I had not slept well. As I was little disposed to indulge in pleasantry I ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... chaff Shock blushed a deeper red than usual. No one expected much of poor Shock. Indeed, most of his classmates wondered if he would ever "get a place," and none ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... washed; the bandages were then removed entirely, and the legs rubbed by hand until quite dry. We used the best old white potato oats, weighing usually 45 lbs. per bushel, but so few beans that a quarter lasted us a season. The oats were bruised, and a little sweet hay chaff mixed with them. We also gave our horses a few carrots the day after hunting, to cool their bodies, or a bran mash or two. They were never coddled up in hoods or half a dozen rugs at night, but a single blanket sufficed, which was never ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... to epoch, but it does not differ much. And we may be perfectly sure that our own age will make a favourable impression upon that excellent judge, posterity. Therefore, beware of disparaging the present in your own mind. While temporarily ignoring it, dwell upon the idea that its chaff contains about as much wheat as any similar quantity ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... His captors bound him upon a horse and departed for the village of their king. Tidings came of the ravages of a fierce lion and no warriors dared to give it battle. Fiercer had roamed no lion in the land of King Zoheir nor in Persia. Whole villages fled before it and herds were but as chaff. But Antar begged that he be loosed and they untied his bonds and gave him a lance and he departed to ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... they're too poor, and the times is hard, and the agent's harder than the times; there's two of them, the under and the upper; and they grind the substance of one between them, and then blow one away like chaff: but we'll not be talking of that to spoil your honour's night's rest. The room's ready, and ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... looks that were by no means pleasant. "There's enough of this chaff I have been called names, and blackguarded quite sufficiently for one sitting. I shall act as I please. I choose to take my own way, and if any gentleman stops me he has full warning." And he fell to tugging his mustachios, which were of a dark tawny hue, and looked as warlike as he ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a little clumsy chaff by saying: "I am sorry to have disappointed you!" it was always met with a protest; and on one occasion I heard a man say to the ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... to look upon the pale-faces as the natural friends and benefactors of his species. Until within the last few years, no pen has ventured to write impartially of the Indian character, and no one has attempted to separate the wheat from the chaff in the generally received accounts which have come down to us from our forefathers. The fact is that the Indian is very much what his white brother has made him. The red man was the original possessor of this continent, the settlement, of which by Europeans ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Master Padilla, 'tain't no use shammin' ignorance— not wi' Jack Striker, at all events. He be too old a bird to get cheated wi' chaff. If ye want to throw dust into my eyes, it must be o' the sort that's stowed aft in the cuddy. Now, d'ye understan' me?" Padilla looks grave, so does Velarde. Old Tarry and Slush show no sign of feeling; both being already prepared for the demand Striker intended to make, and having given their ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... lady should have his own bed—a chaff- stuffed mattress, covered with a woollen rug, in the recess behind the projecting hearth—a strange luxury for a farm boy; and Doll yielded very unwillingly when he spoke in a tone that savoured of command. The shaggy ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not merely turn the lance of Mars from Diomed; but seizes it in both her hands, and casts it aside, with a sense of making it vain, like chaff in the wind;—to the shout of Achilles, she adds her own voice of storm in heaven—but in all cases the moral power is still the principal one—most beautifully in that seizing of Achilles by the hair, which was the talisman of his ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... with a sense of amazement," a critic writes in a private letter, "that one afternoon after a protest that nothing he said was to be published, I heard him discuss the prospects and the works of our ultra-modern painters. Even in fields beyond his sympathy he picked out the chaff from the wheat, and was judicially accurate in his verdicts of the difference between 'tweedle-dum' and 'tweedle-dee,' both one would have ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... word describes a condition to which hardly any series of misfortunes could have reduced the Duchess of Omnium,—but inclined to quiescence by feelings of penitence. She was less disposed than heretofore to attack him with what the world of yesterday calls "chaff," or with what the world of to-day calls "cheek." She would not admit to herself that she was cowed;—but the greatness of the game and the high interest attached to her husband's position did in some degree dismay her. Nevertheless she executed ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... call 'chaff' enters largely as an element into Irish life; and when Walpole stigmatised the habit to Joe Atlee as essentially that of the smaller island, he was not far wrong. I will not say that it is a high order of wit—very elegant, or very refined; but it is a ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Hottentot cavalry charged. The Kafirs recoiled, though some of the boldest, scorning to give in, rushed madly among the soldiers, and perished fighting. Then a wild panic and a total rout ensued, and the great host was scattered like chaff, and driven into ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... beauty. The eye-piece is Jesus Christ, and He, looking from outside through Himself into the kaleidoscope, finds perfect all our works. But, should we leave that ineffable abode of Love, He would see but the rags and chaff of ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... room was very draughty; the wind came in through the broken window and the cracks between the slabs, so we tried the partitioned-off room—the bedroom—and that was better. It had been lined with chaff-bags, and there were two stretchers left by some timber-getters or other Bush contractors who'd camped there last; and there were a box and a couple of ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... king's chaff is better than other folk's corn; but I think that canna be said o' king's soldiers, if they let themselves be beaten wi' a wheen auld carles that are past fighting, and bairns that are no come till't, and wives ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... morning. And she had written to thank him for it, but he did not answer the letter. He had always been by way of writing to her from time to time; letters, generally embellished with comic sketches and full of chaff and nonsense, which were shared by the family. Lately he had not felt in the mood to write such letters. He wanted to see her with an unceasing ache of longing intense and persistent; and if he wrote he ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... lend a horse. He did not drink. He was a very safe man in the field. He did not lie outrageously in selling his horses. He did not cheat at cards. As long as he had a drop of drink left in his flask, he would share it with any friend. He never boasted. He was much given to chaff, but his chaff was good-humoured. He was generous with his cigars. Such were his virtues. That he had no adequate means of his own and that he never earned a penny, that he lived chiefly by gambling, that he had no pursuit in life but pleasure, that he never went ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... equally inspired in his eyes—and find texts which he interpreted in his own way to meet his case. He took everything quite literally. What happened three thousand years ago in Palestine might, for all he minded, have been going on next door. I used to chaff him and tell him that he was like the Kaiser, very good at fitting the Bible to his purpose, but his sincerity was so complete that he only smiled. I remember one night, when he had been thinking about his flying days, he found a passage in Thessalonians about the dead rising to meet their ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... quick-eyed facile crowd around him beguiled the tedium of waiting with good-humoured chaff. One great creature with a shaggy mane and a sanguinary voice came up, bottle in hand, saluted the downcast head with a mixture of deference and familiarity, then climbed to the box-seat beside the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... ancient controversies. The "drum ecclesiastic" of the seventeenth century would sound a mere lullaby to us. Here and there a priest or a belated dissenting minister may amuse himself by threshing out once more the old chaff of dead and buried dogmas. There are people who can argue gravely about baptismal regeneration or apostolical succession. Such doctrines were once alive, no doubt, because they represented the form in which certain still living problems had then to present themselves. ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... failed in their former promises. Flynn's good-nature was as unfaltering as his self-esteem, perhaps because of his self-esteem. He only smiled with fatuous superiority when from time to time, after the elections, his patrons would chaff him about his failure to secure the mayoralty. They did so with more effect since there were always among the horse-players on such occasions a few who would cast votes for the barber, esteeming it as a choice and perennial joke, and his ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of their leader the whole fighting class, weighing some ten tons in battle trim, vanished like chaff before the spirit of one Freshie co-ed. By twos and threes they slouched away, trying to ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... and trotted off with it to the nest; but not so a second time; the mistake was soon found out, and the (to them) worthless beads were left untouched by the wary workers, who before they stored the seeds in their granary, took off the chaff and left it in heaps outside, to be blown away ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... "how Cathelineau led a few of the townsmen against a whole regiment of soldiers, and scattered them through the town like chaff." ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... classes may, therefore, be likened to men reaping wheat, of which the Purists take the fine flour, and the Sensualists the chaff and straw, but the Naturalists take all home, and make their cake of the one, and their couch of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... afeard they must give it up; for they're too poor, and the times is hard, and the agent's harder than the times: there's two of them, the under and the upper; and they grind the substance of one between them, and then blow one away like chaff; but we'll not be talking of that, to spoil your honour's night's rest. The room's ready, and here's ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... motor-car is used at election times, till scratched, battered, broken down, it creeps from the fray. 'We are all sweated workers here,' she said to me afterwards, and then I saw her uses of me explained; anything which came to that mill came to be ground, and the chaff to be cast out. I submitted to her test, and in that first day saw her only by glimpses; but in accompanying her back to the Home from which she emanated I told her why I had come—said that I wished to have a clear conscience and wear clothes upon my back in which there was no element ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... lie in my cell and listen; I'll wish that I couldn't hear The laugh and the chaff of the fellows swigging the canteen beer; The nasal tone of ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... can for a moment doubt that all this much-ado-about-nothing will end in a month. The Northern people are invincible. The rebels are a band of ragamuffins who will fly like chaff before the wind on ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... this merriment, And drive this motley flock of sheep Into the fold, where drink and sleep The jolly old friars of Benevent. Of a truth, it often provokes me to laugh To see these beggars hobble along, Lamed and maimed, and fed upon chaff, Chanting their wonderful piff and paff, And, to make up for not understanding the song, Singing it fiercely, and wild, and strong! Were it not for my magic garters and staff, And the goblets of goodly wine I quaff, And the mischief I make in the idle throng, I should ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... hear him speak with something like his old manner. He felt he could stand any amount of chaff from him now, and so the proposition he had made in seriousness he went on to defend in the hope of giving amusement, yet with a secret wild delight in the dream of such full devotion to the service of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... imagination he saw himself riding in the line of horsemen, going at full speed for a body of bloodthirsty Indians, and driving them helter-skelter like chaff before ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... of unpractised topers at any rate, that, after an extra indulgence, they either see nothing or see double. Whichever it was with Buchanan, he insisted on berthing for the night in Porter's occupied nest, while the latter, after standing the all-round chaff for a little, got savage and threatened war. Buchanan's sight getting by-and-by clearer, the remainder of the night was, happily, peace. But it was not for long, as almost with the dawn our host, alive as if nothing out of the usual had happened, woke us up with the ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... impossible blue swallow-tail with brass buttons,—the sort of thing, indeed, that Webster had worn a few years before, only Hughson was not fitted for it. She suspected he had hired it for the evening, in the hope of pleasing her, for she saw that he had to bear some chaff about it from his friends. One of the colonels of the staff, with plumed hat and a sword, came and was introduced to her. In a sense she made a conquest of him, for he tried clumsily to pay his court ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... diverging paths. The axe will be laid at the root of the trees, and every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit will be hewn down and cast into the fire. The threshing-floor will be thoroughly purged, and the wheat will be gathered into the garner, while the chaff will be burned with ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... the burra sahib," says he. Then I says to pris'ner, "You bito[10] an' give an account of yerself," says I. Says 'e quite 'aughty like, "I'll account fer myself to the burra sahib," an' wouldn't take no chaff. But 'e bitoes, an' curls 'isself up in the sand, an' goes sound asleep in no time—an' ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... keep his hand in that he adopted a tone of serious chaff to Mr. Norbury, such as some people think a well-chosen one towards children, to their great embarrassment. He replied to that most responsible of butlers with some pomposity of manner. "The question before the house," said he—and paused to enjoy a perversion of speech—"the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... and inserted them. But his task seemed to afford him little satisfaction; his face wore an expression not remote from discouragement; none knew better than he the actual value, for his purpose, of the material before him. The chaff, froth, bubble of the case!—almost contemptuously he regarded it. Had he sought the unattainable? Certainly he had left no stone unturned, no stone, and yet the head and front of what he sought had ever escaped him—should he ever grasp it?—with these ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... sympathetic audience as an audience of Harvard men. Gracie and I are only two, but Gracie is a host in himself, and I am sure he will say as much of me." The young man spoke these words freely and lightly, smiling at Verena, and even a little at Olive, with the air of one to whom a mastery of clever "chaff" was commonly attributed. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Laying hold of my tool I pulled it out. "Stand there as long as you like, you look lovely,—as you won't let me fuck you, I'll frig myself." Suiting the action to the word I began fist-fucking, not meaning however to finish so. It was but chaff, for ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... rats, with traps, or by sinking some vessel almost level with the surface of the ground, the vessel half full of water, upon which let there be strew'd some hulls, or chaff of oats; also with bane, powder of orpiment in milk, and aconites mix'd with butter: Cop'ras or green-glass broken with honey: Morsels of sponge chopp'd small and fry'd in lard, &c. are very fit baits to destroy ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... shivers. My heart yearns toward that beautiful young creature, and I believe she is as innocent as my baby. It is a burning shame to send her here, unless there is no doubt of her guilt. Judge Dent is too shrewd an old fox to be baited with chaff, and I am satisfied from what he told you, that he believes her statement. There is nothing I would not do to comfort her, but I would rather have my ears boxed than witness her suffering. The day I carried to her a change of clothes, until her own ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... rose or did not rise, whether Luke or some one else wrote the Third Gospel, whether the Fourth Gospel is history or poetry. The life-giving force is here, and now! It is burning in your life and mine—as it burnt in the life of Christ. Give all you have to the flame of it—let it consume the chaff and purify the gold. Take the cup of cold water to the thirsty, heal the sick, tend the dying, and feel it thrill within you—the ineffable, the immortal life! Let the false miracle go!—the true has grown out of it, up from it, as the flower from the sheath.' Ah! but then"—he ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the great chest, or ark as Patience called it, where all the Sunday clothes were kept, had been crushed in and the upper things singed, but all below was safe. The beds and bedding were gone; but then the best bed had been only a box in the wall with an open side, and the others only chaff or straw ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... such judgment? no—as soon Seek roses in December—ice in June; Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff, Believe a woman or an epitaph, Or any other thing that's false, before You trust in Critics, who themselves are sore; 80 Or yield one single thought to be misled By JEFFREY'S heart, or LAMB'S Boeotian ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... "Sometimes, when I listen to the preachers, I get so befuddled and mixed up that there's nothing but a big pile of chaff, with now and then a few stray grains of truth, and the parson keeps the air so full of the dust and dirt that you'd rather he wouldn't hunt for the grain of truth at all. Then I'm an infidel. And again I see something like that last night, and I believe it must be true. And then ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... with the sun and gone for a long walk in the country. When he reached the first barn of the village of Dautenwinden he saw a company of strolling musicians, who had played dance music the evening before and far into the night, and who were now shaking from their hair and garments the straw and chaff amid which they had slept. Above them, under the open gable of the barn, Daniel Nothafft was lying in the straw. With an absorbed and devout expression he was seeking to elicit a melody from a flute which one of ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... that Thundel, a savage giant with two heads, had heard of the death of his two kinsmen, and was come to take his revenge on Jack; and that he was now within a mile of the house; the people flying before him like chaff before the wind. At this news the very boldest of the guests trembled; but Jack drew his sword, and said: "Let him come, I have a rod for him also. Pray, ladies and gentlemen, do me the favour to walk ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... this mortal race Builds on thwackings for its base; Thus the All-Wise doth make a flail a staff, And separates his heavenly corn from chaff. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Horns fresh budding to his Grave, On one of Twenty, blooming as a Rose, His dry and wither'd Carkass he bestows: She jilts, intrigues, and plays upon him still, Keeps her Gallants, and Rambles at her Will; Do's nothing but her Pride and Pleasure mind, And throws his Gold like Chaff before the Wind; Until at length she beggars the old Slave, And brings his Gray-Hairs with ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses from Men • Various
... at Fairfax. What a queer compound he was, she thought, glancing over to where the youth stood. He was blushing as Sally helped him to remove the cobwebs from his clothing, and seemed unable to answer the chaff with which she and Robert were plying him. Yet but a short time since he had made that little joke concerning the fur rug and her housekeeping. Had he really ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... like the rushing of many waters: but God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his money ran out—had made liquid food almost his sole means of sustenance. These things, however, are by the way. We are not such snobs as to think better or worse of a bee because it can claim kinship with the Hymenoptera family, nor so ill-bred as to chaff it for having large feet. The really interesting passage in the article occurs later, where it says: 'The bee industry ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... Ernestine was known as the "Laundryman," a name in which respect was mixed with chaff. Ernestine did not care. She knew that she had "made good," and it was pleasant. She could afford now to have a home of her own, and so she had installed herself in this apartment, far out of the dirt and the noise in which she had lived her life. She filled it with a strange assortment of ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... his staff of Mamre oak, A knotted shepherd-staff that's broke The skull of many a wolf and fox Come filching lambs from Jesse's flocks. Loud laughs Goliath, and that laugh Can scatter chariots like blown chaff To rout: but David, calm and brave, Holds his ground, for God will save. Steel crosses wood, a flash, and oh! Shame for Beauty's overthrow! (God's eyes are dim, His ears are shut.) One cruel backhand sabre ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... party of Americans have been driven at bay by an overwhelming number of Mexicans or greasers, who have suddenly found themselves attacked by a party of howling Comanches. The latter have scattered the Mexicans like chaff, the Americans acting the part of spectators until the rout was complete, when the Comanches turned about and sailed into the Americans. The Kiowas, Comanches, Apaches, Mexicans and Americans afforded just the elements for a complication of guerilla warfare, ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... that is unwittingly the safety valve of constitutional government. Wherever the people rule the public welfare is ever endangered whenever radical changes are to be introduced, unaccompanied with a vigorous opposition. A healthy opposition is the winnowing fan that separates the politician's chaff from the patriot's wheat, presenting the most desirable of the substantial element needed. At the convention in 1868 at Fort Yale, called by A. Decosmos, editor of The British Colonist, and others, for the purpose of getting an expression of the people of British Columbia regarding union with ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... Hsueeh P'an vehemently, "the primary idea I had in view was to ask you to come out a moment sooner and I forgot to respectfully shun the expression. But by and bye, when you wish to chaff me, just you likewise allude to my father, and we'll thus ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... hatred of the human race. A religion of faith and love consorts with a religion of rules and limitations. If the faith of Israel was to fulfil its mission to the world it was necessary that some one should come who could purge this threshing-floor, burning the chaff and gathering up the wheat to be the seed of the ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... machinery very much out of date and in exceedingly bad order, and intimating, with another shrug and wave, that Derrick was free of the concern, walked off. Derrick strolled round the antiquated engine and rusty pump and chaff-cutters, then took off his coat, turned up his sleeves and proceeded to make a detailed examination; wondering why the worn boiler had not burst and blown the whole kit, and anyone who happened to be near, ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... "tribulation" of want, the wheat was beaten from the straw. Of this older view much still survives, and much that is ennobling. Nor is there any need to say goodby to it. Even if poverty were gone, the flail could still beat hard enough upon the grain and chaff ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... wheats. We must think of Neolithic man noticing the big seeds of this Hermon grass, gathering some of the heads, breaking the brittle spikelet-bearing axis in his fingers, knocking off the rough awns or bruising the spikelets in his hand till the glumes or chaff separated off and could be blown away, chewing a mouthful of the seeds—and resolving to sow and ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... last, you are not the lowest nor the least in my favour"), gained over Waller, and suggested to him the scheme of his famous plot. We do not think so little of our hero's intellect, or so much of his heart, as to credit this story. Though not aged, he was by far too old to be caught with such chaff. He knew, too, before, Charles' private sentiments towards him, and we incline with some of his biographers to suppose that these words of royalty were simply the signal to Waller to fire the train which the king knew right ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... Wattlesea, a kind of town village in the flat below. He could not get back till dinner was half over, and came in alarmed and apologetic; but he had nothing worse to encounter than Griff's unmerciful banter (or, as you would call it, chaff) about his knight errantry, and Emily's lovely heroine in the ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... recognized as the product of a long line of erroneous theory and zigzag development, but the wheat has largely been sifted and the chaff thrown to the winds of antiquity. Its therapeutic and psychological value is ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... bodied forth under the character of Harry Benson, and am, in consequence, a handsome young man, who can do a little of every thing instead of——but never mind what; your actor has not yet sufficient standing to come down before the footlights, and have his little bit of private chaff with the audience. Only this will I say, so help me N. P. Willis, I mean to go on with these sketches till they are finished, provided always that Fraser will take them so long and that you continue to read them, or fall ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... that, after the guests had departed, poor SOPHY had to endure from her sister a dreadful scene, the harsh details of which have not yet faded from her memory. And then I remembered, too, how it was a matter of family chaff against HERMIONE that once, not very long after she had entered upon her teens, she had sobbed convulsively through a whole night, because she had discovered that her juvenile arms were thin and mottled, and she ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... he replied, almost briskly for him, though he stammered and tripped over the words. "He's a university chap; I used to hear he was clever; I don't know about that, I'm sure; he used to chaff me, I remember, but—" ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... Kingozi was getting what he required. Information came to him a word now, a word then; promises came to him in single phrases lost in empty gossip. He collected what he wanted grain by grain from bushels of chaff. The whole sum of his new knowledge could have been expressed in a paragraph, took him a week to get, but was just what he wanted. If he had asked categorical questions, he would have received lies. If he had attempted ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... in the mountains, the Rio Grande is flooded to its full capacity, often overflowing its banks in marshy regions. The first bridge built by the railway company at this point was of wood, which was swept away like chaff by the next flood of the river. The present substantial iron structure bids fair to last for many years. The river, such as it is, belongs to the two nations, the boundary agreed upon being ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... only chaff and fun, for all the fairies were in good humor. They were only talking, to fill up the interval ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... the sea? O God! thy justice makes the world turn pale, When on the armed fleet, that royally Bears down the surges, carrying war, to smite Some city, or invade some thoughtless realm, Descends the fierce tornado. The vast hulks Are whirled like chaff upon the waves; the sails Fly, rent like webs of gossamer; the masts Are snapped asunder; downward from the decks, Downward are slung, into the fathomless gulf, Their cruel engines; and their hosts, arrayed In trappings ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... speaks an infinite deal of nothing: more than any man in Venice; his reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall seek all day ere you find them; and when you have them, they are not worth ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... more chaff, and the end of it was that I promised to buy one, though, between you and me, I never meant to. However, when market-day come round, she would go with me, and never a bit of peace did she give me ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... so much about that," replied MacGregor confidently. "The fellows up at Umfuli often used to chaff me, saying that I had eyes like a cat. Believe I have. At any rate I'll risk it, and if I'm not back an hour before dawn my name's ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... the Tables." It gives a spirited description of the prudent retreat of General Huysmans, the unconditional surrender of Commandant Eybel, and winds up with a pen-and-ink sketch of Brounckers' bright boy breaking the chaff-bread of captivity in the quarters of that slim duyvel, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... he saw Connor lying on the ground with a bullet-hole in his tunic. But Coolin, being industrious at his trencher, often had dreams, and one more or less horrible about Connor had not seemed to him to matter at all. It had sufficed, however, to give him a cue to chaff the man who had knocked the wind out of Subadar Goordit Singh, and who must pay for it one hour or another in due course, as Coolin and the Berkshires ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the good-humoured countenance of Mr. Gunnill, but it was chased away almost immediately by Sims reminding him of the chaff of ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... there were only "civvies" about, and though the admiration of any youthful male was dear to Dot's heart, and though chaff and blandishments were not wanting, still the wall was high, and she lacked the resolve to descend. But presently two khaki coats appeared and the matter grew more serious. It was evident that it was not principle or modesty that held her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... As you walk down the way Where the world scatters chaff, Light your labors with play And your griefs with a laugh! And when it's all o'er And you reach heaven's stile, You will get through the door If you carry a smile! ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... came and snarled right in my face. At this several others snarled and came up closer, and I realized that I was to be devoured by the foe that I most despised; when suddenly out of the gloom with a guttural roar sprang a great black wolf. The prairie wolves scattered like chaff except the bold one, which, seized by the black new-corner, was in a few moments a draggled corpse, and then, oh horrors! this mighty brute bounded at me and—Bingo—noble Bingo, rubbed his shaggy, panting sides against me ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... professes by its title to separate the wheat from the chaff. By the "wheat," in the view of this writer, is meant the aggregate of those who persevered in their recusant policy up to the practical result of secession. All who stopped short of that consummation, (on whatever plea,) are the "chaff." The writer is something of an incendiary, or something of a fanatic; but he is consistent with regard to his own principles, and so elaborately careful in his details as to extort admiration of his energy and of his patience ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... are not muzzled, and the poor brutes seem rather to enjoy the unwonted luxury of feeding while they work. When there is a good wind, the grain is winnowed; it is lifted either in bamboo scoops or in the two hands. The wind blows the chaff or bhoosa on to a heap, and the fine fresh rice remains behind. The grain merchants now do a good business. Rice must be sold to pay the rent, the money-lender, and other clamouring creditors. The bunniahs will take repayment ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... of reticence and pose, was wholly free from solemnity, and when he heard or saw what was ludicrous was not afraid to laugh at it. Sir Robert Peel was an excellent hand at what our fathers called banter and we call chaff. A prig or a pedant was his favourite butt, and the performance was rendered all the more effective by his elaborate assumption of the grand seigneur's manner. The victim was dimly conscious that he was ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... am biased in my doubt concerning the usefulness of his persistence in re-writing, by my regret that he destroyed so many of his romances, as not worthy of him. "King's chaff is better than other folk's corn" says our proverb. In his day, I bored him by pressing him to write more, and more rapidly; he never could have been commonplace, he never could have been less than excellent. But his conscience was adamant: no man was less of an improviser, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the grown plants is that of topping; this is the planter's hay harvest; the tops serve for chaff, for dry food instead of hay, for fodder. They are cut off above the ears, collected by a cart going along the intervals or roads, and stacked for winter use. Mr. Cobbett's harvest of tops was not so successful as it might have been: this arose from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... was a good supply of straw to lay over that part of the floor to conceal any efforts he might make for raising the stone, and meanwhile dusting some of the ashes and half-burned straw-chaff over the spot, he awaited Allstone's next appearance ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... And I have also the great satisfaction of reflecting that all the Negroes from whom any assistance could reasonably be expected, behaved like so many Heroes of Antiquity; risking their lives and limbs for us and our property, while their own poor houses were flying like chaff before the hurricane. There are few White people here who can say as much for their Black dependents; and the force and value of the relation between Master and Slave has been tried by the late calamity ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... the common law courts, the King's Bench and the Court of Common Pleas, are of less direct historical value than those of the Chancery and the Exchequer. Extraordinarily bulky, they require a good deal of sifting to sort the wheat from the chaff. As yet a very small proportion of them has been printed, and few have even been calendared. A brief index of them has been compiled in the useful List of Plea Rolls (1894, P.R.O. Lists and Indexes, ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... dexterity hit with his long whip the off-hand leader a cut on the off cheek. 'These seem to be fine horses,' said I. The coachman made no answer. 'Nearly thoroughbred,' I continued; the coachman drew his breath, with a kind of hissing sound, through his teeth. 'Come, young fellow, none of your chaff. Don't you think, because you ride on my mail, I'm going to talk to you about 'orses. I talk to nobody about 'orses except lords.' 'Well,' said I, 'I have been called a lord in my time.' 'It must have been by a thimble-rigger, then,' said ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... used to chaff her about her faulty English and spelling. Several correspondents have mentioned this. She used to retort good-humouredly by flinging in his face some of his ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... that I should arrive at a fundamental and complete cleansing from all tares and earthiness ... I gave over my will entirely to its [wisdom's] fiery smelting furnace as to a fire of purification, till all my vain and chaff-like desires and the tares of earthly lust had been burnt away as by fire, and all my iron, tin and dross had been entirely melted in this furnace, so that I appeared in spirit as a pure gold, and could see a new heaven and a new earth created and ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... to a hollow in the ground, which was filled with water. Beside it lay a pile of bait and husks and chaff; and she bade them make the most of these. "We have had a severe snow-winter this year, on the island," she said. "The peasants who own us came out to us with hay and oaten straw, so we shouldn't starve to death. And this trash is all there is ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... the Lord alone is God The pomp and power of tyrant man Are scattered at his lightest breath, Like chaff ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... there is an American plow in Spain, much less a steam plow. Sowing and reaping machines are here unknown, and grain is tread out by oxen and mules just as it was in Scripture times, and cleaned by women, who toss it in the air to scatter the chaff. Everything is primitive and Oriental ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... the year on furze, or "fuzz," as we call it here. Two acres of furze he had, which he cut close in alternate years, the second year's growth making a fine juicy fodder when chopped small into a sort of chaff. An old hand-apparatus for that purpose—a kind of chaff-cutting box—was described to me. The same man had a horse, which also did well on furze diet mixed with a little malt ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... the Australian colonel, "the captain had to go and make all sorts of apologies to get his sergeant-major off. The other people agreed, provided the officer ransomed him with half a dozen pit-props and ten sheets of corrugated iron. For a long time afterwards we used to chaff the captain, and tell him that he valued his sergeant-major at six pit-props ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... soul are at stake. But the breath of the woman is ritual poison, and her touch will bring down the curses of the law. But the look of Christ indicates that depth of spirituality before which the institutions of Moses flee away as chaff before the wind. Simon has some esteem for Jesus, and in this juncture his sensations take a turn of pity, spiced, perhaps, with a little contempt, and he says with himself,—"Surely, this man cannot be a prophet, as is pretended, or he would know who and what sort ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... I do to get a graff Of this unspotted tree? —For all the rest are plain but chaff, Which seem good corn ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... Gargantua would now find the people of Chauny as entertaining as Rabelais tells us they were in his time. Then he 'amused himself much with the boatmen, and above all with those of Chauny in Picardy—wonderful chatterboxes, and great at bandying chaff on the subject of green monkeys.' There is no lack of boatmen now at Chauny, though the railway has taken away much of their living; but the glory of the green monkeys, I fear, has departed. In the days of Gargantua, the Chaunois ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long-suffering and doctrine," 2 Tim. iv. 2. "That he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and convince gainsayers," Tit. i. 9. "He that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully: what is the chaff to the wheat, saith the Lord?" ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... Harry, if you think by chaff to escape the scolding you know you deserve, you will find yourself mistaken. The idea of your taking Graeme and Fanny away, and leaving me there by myself! I don't know what I should have done if Arthur had not come back. To be sure I had Etta Goldsmith, ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... look back through a period of some twenty, thirty, and forty years," continued the old man, "noting the changes that have taken place, and counting over the hopes that have been given like chaff to the winds, I feel sad. And yet, amid all this change and disappointment, there is much to stir the heart with feelings of pleasure. A single instance I ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... that the only path to safety, beset with difficulty and danger though it were, was through the convention at Parkinson's Ferry. He did not believe that any revolutionary proceedings had yet been taken, or that the convention was an illegal body, but he was determined to separate the wheat from the chaff, and disengage the moderate and the law-abiding from the disorderly. By the light of his own experience he had learned wisdom. He also had drawn a lesson from the French Revolution, and knew the uncontrollable nature of large ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... deal to answer for as regards men, and every girl should do her best to be on the right side and to help a man to be at his best, by showing that she thinks silliness and vulgar chaff objectionable. Every girl sets the tone of those she talks with, for every one's conscience responds to the tacit appeal of a nice-minded girl's dislike of these things. If you do not respond, ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... before a large and brilliant audience, in the lecture-room of the Young Men's Association. The concert was a complete triumph for her; won, too, from a discriminating auditory not likely to be caught with chaff, and none too willing to suffer admiration to get the better of prejudice. Her singing more than met the expectations of her hearers, and elicited the heartiest applause and frequent encores. She possesses a truly ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... report are given the quantity of wheat per acre, the weight of straw cut close to the ground to the acre, and also that of the chaff. These researches show, that from ninety-three to one hundred and fifty pounds of soluble flint are required to form an acre of wheat; and I will add from my own investigations, that three-fourths of this silica is ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... an effort to cure yourself.—Mind, though a fault, I consider it one on the right side—in the connection, that is, which we have just now been discussing. When a girl has as much intelligence as—we needn't name names, need we?—she resents perpetual chaff and piffle. They bore her—seem to her a flagrant waste of time. Her mind tends to scorn delights and live laborious days—a tendency which rectifies itself later as a rule. All the same in avoiding frivolity, one must not rush to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... of chaff in a light breeze and he flattered himself that it had taken his own perspicacity to detect them. A less capable diagnostician might have passed them by unobserved. But to him they ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... galloping, Joris and I, Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh; 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff; Till over by Delhem a dome spire sprung white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, "for Aix is ...
— O May I Join the Choir Invisible! - and Other Favorite Poems • George Eliot
... new partnership going, by this time," she asked, after the manner of one who re-winnows the chaff of the commonplaces in the hope of finding grain enough for ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... When we had done talking about the horrid wolf, the dragon and the serpent and when the resinous splinters had given out their last gleams, we went to sleep the sweet sleep that toil gives. As the youngest of the household, I had a right to the mattress, a sack stuffed with oat chaff. The others had to ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... eyes and equipped with hammers, staffs and butterfly-nets we would start out in search of new adventures. First we passed through the narrow gothic streets paved with pebbles, then we struck into the paths that lay just beyond the village, paths that were always covered with wheat-chaff that got into our shoes, and into which we sank ankle deep; finally we reached the open country, the vineyards, and the roads that led to the woods, or better still those that brought us to the river which we forded by means ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... an Isvostchick—this last because, only the evening before, he had told them with great pride of his cleverness in that especial direction. The fun was good-natured enough, but it was, as Russian chaff generally is, quite regardless of sensitive feelings. Nina chaffed everybody and nobody minded, but Bohun did not know this, and minded very much indeed. He showed during dinner that evening that he was hurt, and sat over his cabbage soup very dignified ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... Arriving at early dawn of the 14th, Nelson at once visited the general and the Viceroy. The former saw no hope, under the conditions, of saving either stores, cannon, or provisions. "The Army," said Nelson in a private letter to Jervis, with something of the prejudiced chaff of a seaman of that day, "is, as usual, well dressed and powdered. I hope the general will join me cordially, but, as you well know, great exertions belong exclusively to the Navy." After the evacuation, however, he ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... themselves to be involved in purely domestic disputes among Catholic theologians or to be guided by the advice of those who sought to secure peace by means of dishonourable compromises, the Fathers of Trent set themselves calmly but resolutely to sift the chaff from the wheat, to examine the theories of Luther in the light of the teaching of the Scriptures and the tradition of the Church as contained in the writings of the Fathers, and to give to the world a clear-cut exposition of the dogmas that had been attacked by the heretics. Never ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... worship, to subterranean caverns of gross superstition, and lurking demons of cruelty and despair. While Nevil was imbibing impressions of Indian Art, Lilamani was secretly weighing and probing the Indian spirit that inspired it; sifting the grain from the chaff—a process closely linked with her personal life; because, for India, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... in its midst. His light topcoat and silk hat-rendered him as conspicuous as a red Indian in war-paint would have been on Rotten Row. A cry of surprise was raised, and drowned in a volley of ribald inquiry and chaff. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... dares to talk of party, And the coming President, When the rebels threaten 'bolder raids,' And all the land is rent? How dare we learn 'they gather strength,' by every telegraph, If an army of a million could have scattered them like chaff! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... attendance, and set off for Wattlesea, a kind of town village in the flat below. He could not get back till dinner was half over, and came in alarmed and apologetic; but he had nothing worse to encounter than Griff's unmerciful banter (or, as you would call it, chaff) about his knight errantry, and Emily's lovely heroine in the ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sliding-scale, which he understood to mean the wooden pavement. Things went much more smoothly wherever it was established. He contended for the abolition of nose-bags, which he designated as an intolerable nuisance; urged the prohibition of chaff with oats, as unfit for the use of able-bodied horses; and indeed evinced the truth of his professions, that he 'yielded to no horse in an anxious desire to promote the true interests of the horse-community.' An OLD ENGLISH HUNTER impressed upon the young delegates the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... too old a bird to be caught by such chaff, nephew; it is pearls before.... I mean it is too late in the day, my dear. Keep it for the young things. And indeed I see the sheep's eyes you have been casting in their direction. Come nearer, young ladies, and make your cousin's acquaintance," beckoning ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... bushels of beautiful wheat. This I cut with a sickle, and then thrashed it with a flail. Mrs Young sewed several sheets together, and one day, when there was a steady, gentle breeze blowing, we winnowed the chaff from the wheat in the wind. There were no mills within hundreds of miles of us; so we merely cracked the wheat in a hand coffee-mill, and used some of it for porridge, and gave the rest to the Indians, who made use of ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... "Don't chaff, because I'm in earnest. Kattie Forrester will be in by the very train that was to take you on to London, and I'm to wait and put her into Mr Hall's carriage. One of the daughters, I don't doubt, will be there, and you can wait and see her if you like it. If you'll get your bag ready, ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... Laodice, but the shock of their recent talk had shaken her too much to enter into this idle chaff on the lips of those upon whom the fortunes of Israel depended at ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... faith is rotten, all our rites defiled, Our temples sullied, and, methinks, this man, With his new ordinance, so wise and mild, Is come, even as He says, the chaff to fan And sever from the wheat; but will his faith Survive the terrors ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... the human flux in front. She was not shopping, save in sweet imagination. This was her theater, and she was fain to make the show last as long as possible. Her absorbent gaze saw everything. Yet it was selective too, for it passed swiftly over the chaff of the shabby and fixed itself on the wheat of the properly gowned. Sometimes she wove romances about her swiftly-disappearing actors, romances not of heart and soul but of garments, of splendors and of ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... great deal to answer for as regards men, and every girl should do her best to be on the right side and to help a man to be at his best, by showing that she thinks silliness and vulgar chaff objectionable. Every girl sets the tone of those she talks with, for every one's conscience responds to the tacit appeal of a nice-minded girl's dislike of these things. If you do not respond, it checks ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... dinner at Sir John McDonald's, then adjutant-general, a very kind and excellent friend of mine. Mrs. Norton and Lord C——, who were among the guests, both came late, and after we had gone into the dining-room, where they were received with a discreet quantity of mild chaff, Mrs. Norton being much too formidable an adversary to be challenged lightly. After dinner, however, when the men came up into the drawing-room, Theodore Hook was requested to extemporize, and having sung ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... little fragments, like leaves of gold, silver, paper, etc." "Thus this globe," he says, "when brought rather near drops of water causes them to swell and puff up. It likewise attracts air, smoke, etc."(9) Before the time of Guericke's demonstrations, Cabaeus had noted that chaff leaped back from an "electric," but he did not interpret the phenomenon as electrical repulsion. Von Guericke, however, recognized it as such, and refers to it as what he calls "expulsive virtue." "Even expulsive virtue is seen in this globe," he says, "for it not only ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... fellow-creatures less seriously disposed have sustained him alive, in those baleful Historic Acherons and Stygian Fens, where he has had to dig and to fish so long, far away from the upper light!—Let me request all readers to blow that sorry chaff entirely out of their minds; and to believe nothing on the subject except what they get some ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... hour they tramped slowly forward. The darkness grew more intense, and the chaff and laughter—for the soldiers, elated by success, had hitherto shown no sign of fatigue—died gradually away. Nothing was to be heard but the clang of accoutrements, the long rumble of the guns, and the shuffle of ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... free field, we went off to Haggard and Leigh's quarters, whereafter all to dinner, where our two parties, a brother of Colonel Kitchener's, a passing globe-trotter, and Clarke the missionary. A very gay evening, with all sorts of chaff and mirth, and a moonlit ride home, and to bed before 12.30. And now to-day, we have the Jersey-Haggard troupe to lunch, and I must ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cry, gran'pa. She'd chaff you worser 'n us! We're only poor little innocent boys. We don't know ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... immensely, and begged Kim to stay as he was, immobile for half an hour—cross-legged, ash-smeared, and wild-eyed, in the back room. At the end of that time entered a hulking, obese Babu whose stockinged legs shook with fat, and Kim opened on him with a shower of wayside chaff. Lurgan Sahib—this annoyed Kim—watched the Babu ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... Implement conquers Heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have Food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have Light, have Guidance, Freedom, Immortality?—These two, in all their degrees, I honor: all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Nero was driven to a voluntary death by the executioner's shewing him some halters and hooks, as if he had been sent to him by order of the senate. Drusus, it is said, was so rabid with hunger, that he attempted to eat the chaff with which his mattress was stuffed. The relics of both were so scattered, that it was with difficulty ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... smiles through anxious tears; Unborn years Pressing forward, she perceives. Shadowy muffled shapes, they come Deaf and dumb, Bringing what? dry chaff and tares, or ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... futility of the efforts that he or any other man could make against them. They were like elemental, cosmic forces; they held all the world in their grip, and a common man was as much at their mercy as a bit of chaff in ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... the question." Then he darted a triumphantly malicious glance at me, retreated to the back of his cage, thrust his oyster out of sight beneath the straw of his bed, and washed it—washed the oyster in the straw, washed it into a fistful of sticks and chaff, and gloated ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... mildest little men I ever knew, but chaff or abuse of his Spirit roused the devil in him, and I feared we were going to have a scene. Fortunately, I was able to get his mind back to the consideration of "Hesturnemysfear" before anything worse happened than a few muttered remarks about the laughter of fools, and want of reverence ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... easily perceived, but those of oneself are difficult to perceive; a man winnows his neighbour's faults like chaff, but his own fault he hides as a cheat hides the ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... and snarled right in my face. At this several others snarled and came up closer, and I realized that I was to be devoured by the foe that I most despised; when suddenly out of the gloom with a guttural roar sprang a great black wolf. The prairie wolves scattered like chaff except the bold one, which, seized by the black new-corner, was in a few moments a draggled corpse, and then, oh horrors! this mighty brute bounded at me and—Bingo—noble Bingo, rubbed his shaggy, panting sides against me and licked my ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... longer poems, his titanic prophecies and apocalyptic splendors, it is impossible to write justly in such a brief work as this. Outwardly they suggest a huge chaff pile, and the scattered grains of wheat hardly warrant the labor of winnowing. The curious reader will get an idea of Blake's amazing mysticism by dipping into any of the works of his middle life,—Urizen, Gates ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... riding on the blast. In some parts of Austria a heavy gale is propitiated by the act and speech of a peasant who, as the demon wings his flight in the raging storm, opens the window and casts a handful of meal or chaff to the enraged sprite as a peace offering, at ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... into the air. In the neighbouring sea-port the effects were even more violent, the largest trees having been torn up by the roots and whirled aloft. Before such a furious tempest no living thing could stand. Men, horses, and cattle were whirled into the air like so much chaff, and then dashed violently down on the ground. The sea rose nearly twelve feet above the highest tide- mark, sweeping away houses, trees, everything within ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... ready to drop from them. In all this work especial care must be paid to the details of cleaning. For a pleasing appearance the seed heads must be gathered before they become the least bit weather-beaten. This is as essential as to have the seed ripe. Next, the seed must be perfectly clean, free from chaff, bits of broken stems and other debris. Much depends upon the manner of handling as well as upon harvesting. Care must be taken in threshing to avoid bruising the seeds, particularly the oily ones, by pounding too hard or by tramping upon them. Threshing should ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... lame hands of faith, and grope And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... an army into Scotland. The terror of his name went before him, and the people fled as he approached. At Dunbar he met the Scotch army. Before the terrible onset of the fanatic Roundheads the Scots were scattered like chaff before the ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... was a bit o' chaff back and forrit between us, and next thing he did was to slap me across the face wi' his hand. Do ye think," he appealed to his audience, "it would brak' his jaw if I gave him a bit ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... along. And of sweet fancies dream; Waiting till some inspired song, Within my memory cherished long, Comes fairer forth. With more of worth; Because that time upon its stream Feathers and chaff will bear away, But give to gems a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... suppose a whiskey-sipping, cutty-pipe smoking, horse-racing, bar-frequenting fellow like Raleigh could by any possible means fall in love at first sight. But whiskey, cutty, horse, and bar were not the real man, any more than your hat is your head, they were mere outside chaff, he had a sound heart all the same, a great deal sounder and better, and infinitely more generous than some very respectable folk who are regularly seen in their pews, and grind down their clerks and dependents to ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... week had seemed endless. He had kept away from the club; the men in the club always knew everything—he had learned that by previous experience; he had no desire for the shower of chaff which he knew ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... sure that the historian who comes after him will sift the wheat from his chaff, and leave him no better reputation than that of the quarry from which the marble of the statue comes. He must tell a consecutive story, but must eschew all redundancy, furnish no more supports for his bridge than its stability requires, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... with laughter and applause, for local feeling was very strong in Stokebridge, and a storm of jeers and rough chaff were poured upon the bagmen for having been brought in prisoners ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... to such wretched questions as, 'Will it pay to follow the Master?' or such thoughts as, 'If I give myself fully to God, perhaps I shall have to suffer the loss of many things I hold dear; people will be down upon me, and chaff me, and, perhaps, persecute me; and, besides, I really do want to make a little money for myself and my family, and I must not be righteous over-much'; when, I say, men or women have cast aside all such thoughts, and come to the determination ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... Gazette, in a double-leaded leader, went so far as to compare him to a bird with fine feathers and no song, and to suggest that perhaps the bird might have sung if the inducement offered had been more substantial. A singer of Mr. Taggett's plumage was not to be taught by such chaff as five hundred dollars. Having killed his man, the editor proceeded to remark that he would suspend judgment ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Shelburne for not acting the part of Good Samaritans. He, at least, may throw the first stone who has always taken the trouble to sift the grain from the chaff amidst all the begging letters which he has received, and who has never lamented that his benevolence outran his discretion. But there was one man in England at the time who had the rare union of qualities necessary for Crabbe's purpose. Burke is a name never to be ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... rushing down at full speed. Turning at once, his party joined them, and fell upon the advancing enemy. Taken wholly by surprise, when they believed that victory was won, the two or three hundred men who had passed the abattis were swept before the crowd of peasants like chaff. The latter, pressing close upon their heels, followed them through the gaps that ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... "Duryea's best refined." The starch, like the soap, must be made at home. "On this day," writes our diarist, "had a bushel of wheat put in soak for starch;" and in another place we find the details of the starch-making process. The wheat was put into a tub and covered with water. As the chaff rose to the top it was skimmed off. Each day the water was carefully turned off, without disturbing the wheat, and fresh water was added, until after several days there was nothing left but a hard and perfectly white mass ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... offering to a lady a brooch or a pair of earings in a truss of hay. The house-door of the person to be complimented is pushed open, and there is thrown into the house a truss of hay or straw, a sheaf of corn, or a bag of chaff. In some part of this "bottle of hay" envelope, there is a "needle" as a present to be hunted for. A friend of mine once received from her betrothed, according to the Christmas custom, an exceedingly large brown paper parcel, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... plaited rattan strips with a rim of thicker rattan. It is held in both hands and by a series of shuffling motions, which are better seen than described, accompained[sic] by a peculiar movement of the thumb of the left hand, the chaff and the little broken fragments of rice are thrown off into another receptacle ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... danger though it were, was through the convention at Parkinson's Ferry. He did not believe that any revolutionary proceedings had yet been taken, or that the convention was an illegal body, but he was determined to separate the wheat from the chaff, and disengage the moderate and the law-abiding from the disorderly. By the light of his own experience he had learned wisdom. He also had drawn a lesson from the French Revolution, and knew the uncontrollable ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... 136, 137. The date of the return is from Cavelier.] Their story was a brief one. After losing Duhaut, they had wandered on through various savage tribes, with whom they had more than one encounter, scattering them like chaff by the terror of their fire-arms. At length, they found a more friendly band, and learned much touching the Spaniards, who were, they were told, universally hated by the tribes of that country. It would be easy, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... filled with amazement at Fairfax. What a queer compound he was, she thought, glancing over to where the youth stood. He was blushing as Sally helped him to remove the cobwebs from his clothing, and seemed unable to answer the chaff with which she and Robert were plying him. Yet but a short time since he had made that little joke concerning the fur rug and her housekeeping. Had he really ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... the tone of one nor the appearance. Very calm, but with a real calmness, not one assumed to cloak the passion of a man endeavoring to restrain himself; very polite, but without exaggeration; smiling, but without chaff, he presented the most perfect contrast to Arsene Lupin, a contrast so perfect even that, to my mind, Lupin appeared as much ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... have no time to attend to this business; I have too much to do, both indoors and out of doors. Come down and I will give you the book; and mind ye, these muleteers are the very devil, and will do you out of a peck of oats under your very nose, with no more conscience than if it was so much chaff." ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... was at this time he no longer knew. She never spoke of it to him; never nowadays complained of loneliness. When he saw her she appeared to be cheerful. But this very cheerfulness made him uneasy, and at times, through the murk of the chaff of wheat, through the bellow of the Pit, and the crash of collapsing fortunes there reached him a suspicion that all was not ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... present day, at least 100,000 words, arranged as on the shelves of a Museum, in the pages of Johnson and Webster. But these 100,000 words represent only the best grains that have remained in the sieve, while clouds of chaff have been winnowed off, and while many a valuable grain too has been lost by mere carelessness. If we counted the wealth of English dialects, and if we added the treasures of the ancient language from Alfred to Wycliffe, we should easily double the herbarium of the linguistic ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... closed, and her father crossed the hall. She was no sooner alone than a rush of unbidden thoughts and emotions swept over her, carrying all her promises like chaff before a hurricane. While her father had been in the room she had thought herself quite determined to take the hard step of explaining to Uncle Josiah just enough to remove the blame from the one she loved to the half-brother. But now that the Elder had gone her ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... Then an occasional question came in Swedish from the matron above their heads, and was followed by a reply in Celtic English from Mike, each wholly ignorant of the views or wishes of the others. And occasionally the escort of riflemen, after some particular attack of chaff, in words which they fortunately did not understand, looked up to their matron, controller, and director, exchanged words with her, and then studied the pavement again for tracks of buffalo. A long hour of all this, the stone and brick of the city giving way to ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... which produces the effect of shears. Threshing consists in beating the ears with thick sticks to loosen the husks, after which the padi is carried in baskets to platforms ten feet above the ground, and is allowed to fall on mats, when the chaff is driven away by the wind. It is husked by a pestle, and it requires some skill to avoid crushing the grain. All these ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... seemed purposely excluded. Through open doors and windows he could see the inside of wretched homes, could catch glimpses of stifling bedrooms and close, crowded little kitchens. Often one of the denizens came to door or window to stare at Nellie and him; sometimes they were accosted with impudent chaff, once or twice ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... fortunate enough to escape and subsequently to be placed under the protection of Augustus. Cato thought that a proper man ought to study oratory, medicine, husbandry, war, and law, and was at liberty to look into Greek literature a little, that he might cull from the mass of chaff and rubbish, as he affected to deem it, some serviceable maxims of practical experience, but he might not study it thoroughly. Varro extended the limit of allowed and fitting studies to grammar, logic, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... advice, fearing some treachery. But Poseidon sent a huge wave which struck him and scattered the raft as if it were dry chaff. Then Odysseus at once got astride of the swimming timber. He bound the veil around his breast and bravely ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... happiness to another world. The general tendency is to enjoy the present. All religions have taught men that the pleasures of this world are of no account; that they are nothing but husks and rags and chaff and disappointment; that whoever expects to be happy in this world makes a mistake; that there is nothing on the earth worth striving for; that the principal business of mankind should be to get ready to be happy ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of such princely estates as Eumaeus managed in the Ionian seas. Flaxman has certainly not given him the look of a large proprietor in his outlines: his toilet is severely scant, and the old gentleman appears to have lost two of his fingers in a chaff-cutter. As for Perses, who is represented as listening to the sage,[A] his dress is in the extreme of classic scantiness,—being, in fact, a mere night-shirt, and a tight ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... no one knew who it was that had so recklessly matched his strength and staying power against John Gardner, the acknowledged champion for miles around. Bets were freely laid; rough, but good natured chaff flew from mouth to mouth; and now and then a hearty yell echoed over the field, but the two men in the contest were silent; they scarcely ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... sail-boat shared all the excitement of the catch. The young men left their flirtations for the boat's side, where they could get a better view. A great deal of chaff went on between Captain Davis and the captain of the menhaden steamer. Tom Joy amused himself by bargaining for blue-fish, and actually bought three big flapping specimens for a dollar and a quarter. They were deposited on the bottom of the "Cornelia," where they leaped ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... allowed their land to run to waste, and their people to fall into poverty in their attempts to "soften marble for pillows and pin-cushions," to "petrify the hoofs of a living horse to prevent them from foundering," to "sow land with chaff," and to "extract sunbeams from cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers." The satire cannot be considered too broad when we consider the folly and credulity which, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... common law courts, the King's Bench and the Court of Common Pleas, are of less direct historical value than those of the Chancery and the Exchequer. Extraordinarily bulky, they require a good deal of sifting to sort the wheat from the chaff. As yet a very small proportion of them has been printed, and few have even been calendared. A brief index of them has been compiled in the useful List of Plea Rolls (1894, P.R.O. Lists and Indexes, No. iv.). Of the various types of these records the FEET OF FINES have been largely used by the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... him, and the fame of his doings in that region went far and near. To his actual deeds were added many legends, and stories imported from English books, till the man's name was wrapped around by amazing web of history. I may, some day, sift the grain from the chaff, and make a book. There is certainly fact enough there, from which to create a ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... reasons best known to herself Miss Hastings put off from day to day this final expedition until Blair began to chaff at ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... quite ready to "chaff" Dick Lee, and he would not have hesitated about trying a like experiment upon Mr. Dabney Kinzer; but he knew enough to speak respectfully to the portly and business-like lady ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... untenable as dogma, but none so indispensable as experience and life. The Trinity, truly received, would harmonize science, faith, and vital piety. The Trinity, as it now stands in the belief of Christendom, at once confuses the mind, and leaves it empty. It feeds us with chaff, with empty phrases and forms, with no real inflowing convictions. It seems to lie like a vessel on the shore, of no use where it is, yet difficult to remove and get afloat; but when the tide rises, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... the peace, but if he could only feel that the people were with him he would drive the sixty plotting conspirators before him like chaff before the whirlwind. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... and storm scatter them as the chaff! My liege, my royal master," continued the earl, in a deep, low, faltering voice, "why knew I not thy holy and princely heart before? Why stood so many between Warwick's devotion and a king so worthy to command it? How ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Eastern Church. What does he mean by 'unlearned,' or wanting 'majesty,' or containing 'strange things'? Were ever such vague puerilities collected into one short paragraph? This is pure impertinence, and Phil. deserves to be privately reprimanded for quoting such windy chaff without noting and protesting it as colloquial. But what I wish the reader to mark—the [Greek: tho hepimhythion]—is, that suppose the two Scaligers amongst the Christian Fathers engaged in fixing the canon: greater learning you cannot have; neither was there, to a dead ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... inventions nearer home. The thresher is a square frame drawn over the grain—which is spread upon the bare ground—and is furnished on its under side with steel blades which not only shell the grain out of the ear, but also reduce the straw into chaff, which is desirable, as storing for feed more conveniently. Southern nations have but little conception of our use of hay. Grain for the man and straw for the beast is the usual division. The ancient Roman tribulum and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... good-naturedly. It was impossible to take offence at the mock seriousness of Bobby's harangue. Furthermore, it held its own grain of truth, even though the grain was buried in an infinite amount of chaff. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... minutes she would attend, and then she would drift away on a sea of pleasant indolence, and time fluttered away from her like an escaping bird, and she knew herself for a light woman who would never excel. And Kay's brown head was bent over his book, and raised sometimes to chaff or talk, and bent over his books again, the thread of his attention unbroken by his easy interruptions. And Gerda's golden head lay pillowed in her two clasped hands, and she stared up at the blue through the green and did nothing ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... working oxen before some one, and with chaff. Why? I will tell you. Because it often happens that the oxherd ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... thing as is made this side of Jordan. Wal, that might be a little child, we'll say; if there's a thing handsomer than a field o' wheat, it's a little child. But bimeby comes reapin' and all, and then the trouble begins. First, it's all in the rough, ain't it, chaff and all, mixed together; and has to go through the thresher? Well, maybe that's the lickin's a boy's father gives him. He don't like 'em,—I can feel Father Belfort's lickin's yet,—but they git red of a sight ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... magnificent ceremony with which they were removed from the cemetery of the Madeleine to the Abbey of St. Denis,—when the escape of Napoleon from Elba in February,1815, scattered the royal family and their followers like chaff before the wind. The Duc d'Angouleme, compelled to capitulate at Toulouse, sailed from Cette in a Swedish vessel. The Comte d'Artois, the Duc de Berri, and the Prince de Conde withdrew beyond the frontier. The King ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... had been correct. The chaff and scoffing which he had so good-naturedly put up with from the fellow-excavators who had been to visit the camp were likely to be turned the other way. He had little or no doubt left that he had struck an important tomb, ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... of nearly every one of the judges. Had they been dressed as longshoremen, one would still have known them for possessors of the judicial temperament—men born to hold the balances and fitted and trained to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. So many eagle-beaked noses, so many hawk-keen eyes, so many smooth-chopped, long-jowled faces, seen here together, made me think of what we are prone to regard as the highwater period of American statesmanship ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... blackguard) faring with her battered fineries and upon her homely errand, across the plains of ocean, and past the gorgeous scenery of dawn and sunset; and the ship's company, so strangely assembled, so Britishly chuckle-headed, filling their days with chaff in place of conversation; no human book on board with them except Hadden's Buckle, and not a creature fit either to read or to understand it; and the one mark of any civilised interest, being when Carthew filled in his spare hours with the pencil and the brush: ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Beetle. "He's unpopular in Common-room, and they'll chaff his head off about Rabbits-Eggs. Golly! How lovely! How beautiful! How holy! But you should have seen his face when the first rock came in! And the earth ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... like a mountain torrent, and charged straight for Lone Wolf and his band. The latter, of course, were quick to detect it, and drew up with the purpose of making a fight; but when they took in the strength of the company approaching, they changed their minds, and broke and scattered like chaff ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... his wife's power over me. He suspected every man and every woman under the sun, yet he was the least jealous of men so far as his wife was concerned, though he loved and was proud of her. From time to time he would chaff Dora and myself on the danger of our falling in love with each other, but that was never more than a joke and, at any rate, I heard it from him far less often than that other joke of his—about my being his and ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... reproachfully. I was about to say that "Blackman's Warbler" was the local name for the Chiff-chaff in our part of Flint, when the Authority ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... it? Voila!' and, rising suddenly to an unexpected height, Matilda waved the umbrella like a baton, cried 'Allez!' in a stern voice, and the children fled like chaff before ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... prediction that we shall conquer? But I have shaken the oracle books till there is only chaff in them. Or a bribe to Adeimantus and his fellows? But gold can buy only souls, not courage. Or another brave speech and convincing argument? Had I the tongue of Nestor and the wisdom of Thales, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... it is the story of the development and progress of the most remarkable man of modern times. You can read the story in countless books; for now, after Napoleon has been dead for over seventy years, the world is learning to sift the truth from all the chaff of falsehood and fable that so long surrounded him; it is endeavoring to place this marvellous leader of men in the place he should rightly occupy—that of a great man, led by ambition and swayed by selfishness, but moved ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... about that," interposed Benjamin, with a knowing smile. "Who will ever know the difference if a quarter part of the total weight is chaff and clay? It will all grind up into excellent flour, and when the soldier eats his barley bread or his rye loaf it will taste all the better to him. There is nearly half a million florins' clear profit in the ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... more four-horse coaches, with fast teams and still faster loads, are thundering in the rear. Slang reigns supreme; and John Gilpin's friend, who had a "ready wit," would here meet with his match. Nor are jest and repartee (what John calls "chaff") the only missiles bandied about. Toys, knocked off "the sticks" for the purpose, darken the air as they fly from one vehicle to another, and the broadside from a well-supplied coach is like that of a seventy-four. Fun and ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... hypnotism, telepathy, and psychological speculations in general, and he had studied some with ironical amusement and others with a quickening of his interest. Amidst much that he thought of as sterile chaff he saw germs of truth, and had once or twice been led to the brink of a startling discovery. There the elusive clue had failed him, though he felt that strange secrets ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... provisions of every kind and in filling his arsenals with care. He should also increase his stores of rice and other grain, and strengthen his counsels (with wisdom). He should further, enhance his stores of fuel, iron, chaff, charcoal, timber, horns, bones, bamboos, marrow, oils and ghee, fat, honey, medicines, flax, resinous exudations, rice, weapons, shafts, leather catgut (for bow-strings), caries, and strings and cords made ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... gammon with me! Take your chaff to the goslings. I tells you I can't do without that 'ere lad. Every ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... was so clear and serene, that we could scarcely have believed such a dreadful scene had been exhibited, had it not left many striking proofs behind it. Its route was not only marked in the woods, having levelled the loftiest trees, or swept them away before it like chaff, but its effects were visible in the fleet, by the number ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear. He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire." For what purpose is this fiery baptism with the Holy Ghost? Most certainly that it may consume the inbred sin of our nature, as fire consumes the chaff, or destroys the alloy that the gold may ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... with him to drive prices down as low as he chose. In Brazovics' cafe there was angry talk every evening among the assembled corn-dealers. He scatters money like chaff, and squanders his goods as if they were stolen. If only he would come among them they would get ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... I have got matters pretty straight. The question is, whether the Baron will accept my last message as chaff, or resent it. Let me see, how does it read—"It is suggested, for the President's consideration, that rumours uncorrected or unexplained acquire almost the force of admitted truth." Quite so—so they do. Let me see—"That any want of confidence between the governed and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... suspended for a moment, then hurls itself as from a catapult against the barrier with a sound like thunder, filling the cavern to its utmost, causing the ground to fairly tremble with the impact, and sending the white spray high up the face of the cliff, to be scattered like chaff before the breeze. And the old rock that has stood the storms of ages, looks down at its beaten and broken enemy, swirling, seething, and snarling at its feet, and fairly ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... his hand in that he adopted a tone of serious chaff to Mr. Norbury, such as some people think a well-chosen one towards children, to their great embarrassment. He replied to that most responsible of butlers with some pomposity of manner. "The question before the house," said he—and paused to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... After the numbering of Israel, when the anger of the Lord was kindled against them, it was He who inflicted the punishment, 2 Sam. xxiv. 1, 15, 16. As He encampeth round about them who fear the Lord, so He is, in regard to the ungodly, like the wind which carries away the chaff, Ps. xxxiv. 8, xxxv. 5, 6.—In opposition to the objection raised by Baur,—"That, with the exception of the passage in Is. vi., nowhere, in the books composed before the Chaldee period, do angels appear to act as mediators in the execution ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... a man of splendid genius, who has made her his own and in doing so has made her the world's. There is no better reading at Venice therefore, as I say, than Ruskin, for every true Venice-lover can separate the wheat from the chaff. The narrow theological spirit, the moralism a tout propos, the queer provincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in a mountain of flowers. One may doubtless be very happy in Venice without reading at all—without criticising or analysing or thinking ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... He had for a long time known—for, by the power of the life in him, he had gathered from the Scriptures the finest of the wheat, where so many of every sect, great church and little church, gather only the husks and chaff—that the only baptism of any avail is the washing of the fresh birth, and the making new by that breath of God, which, breathed into man's nostrils, first made of him a living soul. When a man knows this, potentially he knows all things. But, just therefore, he did not ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... almost makes me laugh To see men leaving the golden grain, To gather in piles the pitiful chaff That old Peter Lombard thrashed with his brain, To have it caught up and tossed again On the horns of the Dumb ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... said a word. Surprised at first, he had soon smiled. He was gifted with more penetration than Dubuche, so he gave him a knowing nod, and they then began to chaff. They begged Claude's pardon; the moment he wanted to keep the young person for his personal use, they would not ask him to lend her. Ha! ha! the scamp went hunting about for pretty models. And where had he picked ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... seems to like to talk to me," he answered simply. "She seems to me to have rather a remarkable mind, Doctor Mary." (She was "Doctor Mary" to all the Old Place party now, in affection, with a touch of chaff.) ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... arrangements with a third, and case it into a blood-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped from under his hands as though they were facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them from the vat and thrust them under a thing like a chaff-cutter, which, descending, hewed them into unseemly red gobbets fit ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... on through the crowd that continued to chaff us good-naturedly—"joshing" they called it. Then we managed to struggle into a sort of backwater at the side of the dais upon which an alleged string band was trying to make good, as ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... refinement; taste &c 850; critique, judgment; tact; discernment &c (intelligence) 498; acuteness, penetration; nuances. dope [Slang], past performances. V. discriminate, distinguish, severalize^; recognize, match, identify; separate; draw the line, sift; separate the chaff from the wheat, winnow the chaff from the wheat; separate the men from the boys; split hairs, draw a fine line, nitpick, quibble. estimate &c (measure) 466; know which is which, know what is what, know 'a hawk from ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... undoubtedly hard reading for the general consumer of novels. It is true, also, that fine morals do not always go with fine manners, and that Lovelace had a fascination of address which John Knox lacked. The chaff and slang of the Bayard of to-day are at least decent, and his morals probably purer than those of the courtly and punctilious old Sir Roger de Coverleys. Possibly; but it has been wisely said that hypocrisy is the homage paid ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... roses in December, ice in June; Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff; Believe a woman or an epitaph, Or any other thing that 's false, before You ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... continual pain I felt made me fretful, and my peevishness was increased by the mortification of my pride in seeing those miserable wretches, whom a hard gale of wind would have scattered through the air like chaff, bear those toils with alacrity under which I was ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... air, Whose curses on the welkin cast Edge the keen and icy blast! Iberia, sorrow bade thee nurse Those who now the tyrant curse, Whose wrongs for vengeance cry aloud! Lo, the coming of a cloud! To burst in wrath, and sweep away Light as chaff the firm array! To rack with pain, or lull to rest Both ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... not the slightest intention of yielding; her mind and her feet were braced against any divergence from the straight road now; but the man Janet Payne had called Gregory Jessup said something that scattered her resolutions like so much chaff. ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... puzzle him up to the last moment and to bewilder him by the most unexpected sensational news. And how well this last detail depicted the fellow, a queer mixture of dignity and impudence, of mischief and simplicity, of smiling chaff and disconcerting charm, a sort of hero who, while conquering kingdoms by most incredible adventures, amused himself by mixing up the letters on his name so as to ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... enough for 'Mr. A.' became a certainty in the course of the year 1815. When her aunt, in November of that year, joked with her about an imaginary tenderness for Mr. Haden, 'the apothecary,' it was no doubt pure 'chaff'; but we may be sure she would not have indulged in it if any serious attachment had then ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... the study of one side of mediumship only. The phenomena produced in the presence of mediums are various. All the phenomena classified as "psychical" must be carefully considered and thoroughly investigated. The grain must be separated from the chaff; it must be decided which among these phenomena appear to be due to spirits, which, according to the evidence, are due to incarnated minds, and finally, which (if there are such) have only ordinary physical causes. ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... inside the old Holmes house in Cambridge. It served as a boarding-house during our college days, but afterwards Professor James B. Thayer rented it for a term of years, until it was finally swept away like chaff by President Eliot's broom of reform. The popular notion that it was a quaint-looking old mansion of the eighteenth century, which seems to have been encouraged by Doctor Holmes himself, is a misconception. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... than human seer, Yellow-breeched philosopher! Seeing only what is fair, Sipping only what is sweet, Thou dost mock at fate and care, Leave the chaff, and ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... little child, we'll say; if there's a thing handsomer than a field o' wheat, it's a little child. But bimeby comes reapin' and all, and then the trouble begins. First, it's all in the rough, ain't it, chaff and all, mixed together; and has to go through the thresher? Well, maybe that's the lickin's a boy's father gives him. He don't like 'em,—I can feel Father Belfort's lickin's yet,—but they git red of a sight o' chaff, nonsense, airs, and what not, for him. Then it comes here to the grist-mill. ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... fresh water put on. This precaution is essentially necessary, in order to make clean bright malt, and should never be omitted. It is further right, at each watering, to skim off the surface of the water the light grain, chaff, and seed weeds, that are found floating on it; all this kind of trash, when suffered to remain in the steep, is a real injury to the malt, and considerably depreciates its value when offered for sale, and not less so when brewed. The depth of water over the barley in ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... from Time shall drop Earth's days Like chaff from the bloom of the year sublime, With the gentle spirits of every time, And the martyr souls, he ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... Whatever stress may be laid upon this, we find it hard to vindicate Burke from the charge of factiousness. Nothing can have been more unworthy of him than the sneer at Pitt in the great speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts (1785), for stopping to pick up chaff and straws from the Irish revenue instead of checking profligate ...
— Burke • John Morley
... run up in time for us to take it," she said, thinking she would try the effect of a little chaff. ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... speedily to pay his humble homage at his august master's throne, of which he begged leave to be counted the most loyal and constant defender. Such a WARY old BIRD as King Padella was not to be caught by Master Hogginarmo's CHAFF and we shall hear presently how the tyrant treated his upstart vassal. No, no; depend on's, two such rogues do not ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... when he married her, and he had never ceased to wonder what there had been in him to win the love of a woman like her, or to regret that fate had not taken him instead of her. Heaven knows his calling had been risky enough. But—that was how things went sometimes—the wheat was taken and the chaff remained. ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... him," said Jacqueline, as if taking her under her protection. "He is nothing but a tease; what he says is only chaff. But I might as well talk Greek to her," she added, shrugging her shoulders. "In the convent they don't know what to make of a joke. Only spare her at least, if ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... the pleasure out of his book. He tossed it aside and stood up. A motor-boat was rounding the eastern point. Percy recognized her as the Calista. Ordinarily he would have been glad to exchange chaff with Captain Higgins and Brad while they dipped the lobsters out of the car. This morning, however, he felt too much disgruntled to ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... SOLDIER took the utmost pains with his charger. As long as the war lasted, he looked upon him as his fellow-helper in all emergencies and fed him carefully with hay and corn. But when the war was over, he only allowed him chaff to eat and made him carry heavy loads of wood, subjecting him to much slavish drudgery and ill-treatment. War was again proclaimed, however, and when the trumpet summoned him to his standard, the Soldier put on his charger its military trappings, and mounted, being clad in his heavy coat ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... I am old who should be young. The splendid vigour of my youth I flung Under the feet of a mad, unthinking throng. My strength went out with wine and dance and song; Unto the winds of earth I tossed like chaff, With idle jest and laugh, The pride of splendid manhood, all its wealth Of unused power and health - Its dream of looking into some pure girl's eyes And finding there its earthly paradise - Its hope of virile children free ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... why is this? It is, in a word, because the soul was made for religious employments and pleasures; and hence, that no temporal blessings, however exalted or refined, can satisfy it. As well might we attempt to sustain the body on chaff, as to feed and nourish the immortal soul with the pleasures and ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... admit it. But I've slyly hinted...however, it's not the sort of story you could pour through the funnel of an ear-trumpet without getting wheat mixed with chaff. She'd misunderstand—the neighbors would get it first—anyway she wouldn't make a move because her daughter won't. It's you and I, Abbott, against ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... other so constantly, that each of us knew every wrinkle of his mates' faces. It was not long also before we had exhausted almost every topic of conversation; that is why we were most of the time silent, unless we were chaffing each other; but one cannot always find something about which to chaff another man, especially when that man is one's mate. Neither were we much given to finding fault with one another; how, indeed, could one of us poor devils be in a position to find fault with another, when we were all of us half dead and, as it were, ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... with machinery for extracting the juice from the cane, the refining rooms, the places where it is dried, etc., all on a large scale. If the hacienda is, as here, a coffee plantation also, then there is the great mill for separating the beans from the chaff, and sometimes also there are buildings where they make brandy. Here there are four hundred men employed, exclusive of boys, one hundred horses, and a number of mules. The property is generally ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... struggle, concentrating themselves in force upon the left bank, where they think to do us most hurt. We shall then destroy their bastilles, so that they will have no place of shelter to fly back to; and then we shall fall upon them hip and thigh on the south side, and drive them before us as chaff before the wind. They must needs then disperse themselves altogether, having no more cover to hide themselves in; so will the enemies of the Lord be dispersed, and the siege of Orleans ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... blew away the chaff from her handful of beans. The spring breeze blew the chaff back again, and sifted it over her face and shoulders. She rubbed it out of her eyes impatiently, and happened to notice old Peggy holding her own handful high, as if it were an oblation, and turning her queer, up-tilted head this way ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... evil, and who is so absurdly credulous as to look upon the pale-faces as the natural friends and benefactors of his species. Until within the last few years, no pen has ventured to write impartially of the Indian character, and no one has attempted to separate the wheat from the chaff in the generally received accounts which have come down to us from our forefathers. The fact is that the Indian is very much what his white brother has made him. The red man was the original possessor of this continent, ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... What follows? Chaff follows, a kind of intimacy, a supper, perhaps, after the play, if an actor seems to be good company. This is quite natural; the most modish young gallants are not so very dainty as to stand aloof from any amusing company. They found it among prize- fighters, when ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... rode up to the guns and dashed into their midst, cutting down the gunners where they stood. We saw them riding through the guns, as I have said: to our delight we saw them returning after breaking through a column of Russian infantry and scattering it like chaff, when the flank fire of the battery on the hill swept them down scattered and broken as they were. Wounded men and riderless horses flying towards us told the sad tale. Demi-gods could not have done what they had failed ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... cousin," remarked Hsueeh P'an vehemently, "the primary idea I had in view was to ask you to come out a moment sooner and I forgot to respectfully shun the expression. But by and bye, when you wish to chaff me, just you likewise allude to my father, and we'll ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... into the United States Territories. And now there was some inconsistency in saying that the decision was right, and saying, too, that the people of the Territory could lawfully drive slavery out again. When all the trash, the words, the collateral matter, was cleared away from it, all the chaff was fanned out of it, it was a bare absurdity,—no less than that a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has a lawful right to be. Clear it of all the verbiage, and that is the naked truth of his proposition,—that a thing may ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... matter, and very soon the doctor's offer was accepted, and a gang of six men volunteered to begin their work on the Monday without beer. The beer drinkers did their best to chaff the water drinkers, and aggravated them by taking good care to show them how very nice it was to have recourse to unlimited beer. The water drinkers kept firm, and the first day, to their astonishment, found that they could ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... unworthy as I am, received two crowns for officiating there; I even preached a very good sermon on the text, 'God has separated the wheat from the chaff.' It is in the Bible, 'God will separate,' but as it is a long time since that was written, I supposed that the ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... be!—the dreams were scatter'd, As chaff is toss'd by the wind, The faith has been rudely shattered That listen'd with credence blind; Things were to have been, and therefore They were, and they are to be, And will be;—we must prepare for The doom we ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... continued, comfortably filling his pipe, "the daughter, Miss Kirkby, was awfully good fun; so fresh, so perfectly natural and innocent, don't you know, and yet so extraordinarily sharp and clever. She had some awfully good chaff over that Scotch scenery before those Scotch tourists, do you remember? And it was all so beastly true, too. Perhaps ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to have remembered that your penning, like your painting, belongs to the region of "chaff." I will not forget it again; and ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... Tigg,—You always WERE full of your chaff, but you must have been drinking when you wrote all that cock-and-a-bull gammon. Thirty pounds! No; nor fifteen; nor as many pence. I never heard of the party you mention by the name of the Count of Monte Cristo; and as for the Prince, he's as likely to be setting out for Boulogne ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... ploughed a piece of barren upland. Having ploughed he had no seed paddy to sow; he went to try and borrow some paddy from the neighbours, but they would lend him nothing. Then he went and begged some paddy chaff, and a neighbour readily gave him some. The man took the chaff and sowed it as if it had been seed. Wonderful to relate from this chaff grew up the finest crop of paddy that ever was seen. Day by day the man went and watched with joy his ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... heaven-made Implement conquers Heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have Food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have Light, have Guidance, Freedom, Immortality?—These two, in all their degrees, I honor: all else is chaff and dust, which let the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... grains of truth. Starr knew that the masses of Mexico were suffering, broken under the tramplings of revolution and counter-revolution that swept back and forth from gulf to gulf. Still, it was not his business to sift out the plump grains of truth and justice, but to keep the chaff from lighting and spreading a wildfire of sedition through ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... the air rushed away from Him like a wake; birds were blown away like chaff, and I clung to the sod and the trees ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... retorted with a laugh: 'If bread's the staff of life, they must walk without a staff.' 'While I've a loaf they're welcome to my blessing and the chaff.' ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... the sleepy animal in motion, and, the animal being partially roused, he drives across the street to us. DAUBINET directs him, and on we go, lumbering and rattling through the town, meeting only one other voiture, whose driver appears infinitely amused at his friend having obtained a fare. Some chaff passes between them, which to me is unintelligible, and which DAUBINET professes not to catch, but I fancy, whatever it is, it is not highly complimentary to our cocher's fares. In one quarter through which we drive, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... old fellow! I've made a mistake," thought Gaudissart, "I must catch him with other chaff. I'll try humbug No. 1. Not at all," he said aloud, ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... a gauntlet of chaff to his law office that afternoon, and found Bowers awaiting him in bilious mood. He was hazing the rooms with gusts of tobacco smoke, a sign of nervousness in so deliberate a smoker. They nodded curtly without words, and Shelby ran perfunctorily through ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Nan fled like chaff before the wind, while Di, full of remorseful zeal, charged at the kettles, and wrenched off the potatoes' jackets, as if she were revengefully pulling her own hair. Laura had a vague intention of going to assist; but, getting lost among the lights and shadows of ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... nonsense is in itself in as bad taste and is as poor as the essay she sent me when she played her great practical joke. She is playing a practical joke now on these people, leading them to believe that her chaff is wit." ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... out their money. Hence the dearness of necessaries for life, because the tenants cannot afford to pay such extravagant rates for land (which they must take, or go a-begging) without raising the price of cattle, and of corn, although they should live upon chaff. Hence our increase of buildings in this City, because workmen have nothing to do but employ one another, and one half of them are infallibly undone. Hence the daily increase of bankers, who may be a necessary ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... morning out. He had grown soft, and was light-headed, his knees all of a shake. By means of voluminous threats Preiston got him up. But he sat his horse all of a huddle, as limp as a half-empty sack of chaff. Richard looked on feeling, not pity, but only irritation, finally amounting to anger. The child's whole aspect and the sniveling sounds he made were so hatefully ugly. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... figurations in the accompaniment, now above, now below, give the effect of whispered questions and answers during the dance. The questions—put by the man—are pressing and ardent, the answers—from the girl—playful and parrying. Sometimes they even ripple with chaff. Yet, toward the end of the dainty little composition, they become tinged with sentiment, as if she were afraid she might have gone a little too far and might "spoil things" and thought it just as well to let him know ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... the birds is almost an art in itself. A winter lunch counter spread with suet, nuts, hemp seed, meat, and crumbs will attract nuthatches, chickadees, downy and hairy woodpeckers, creepers, blue jays, etc. Canary seed, buckwheat, oats and hay-chaff scattered on the ground beneath will provide an irresistible banquet for other feathered boarders. A feeding place of this sort can be arranged for convenient observation from a window, and afford no end of diversion ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... major part of my task has been a matter of arrangement, of joining up flats, as they say in the theatre, of translation, of editing, of winnowing, as far as my fallible judgment can decide, the chaff from the grain in his narrative, and of relating facts which have come within the horizon of my own ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... was only chaff and fun, for all the fairies were in good humor. They were only talking, to fill up the interval ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... she had taken chaff! ...Nevertheless, it was not dead within her—the self. It cried out under Renault's pitiless scorn for satisfaction, for life. The rebellious surge of desire still suffocated her at times. There was beauty, the loveliness of the earth, the magic wonder of music and ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... sir, I accept your remarks in the same friendly spirit as, I am sure, you have offered them. Permit me, at the same time, as one many years your senior, to say that, in considering your proposals, I shall separate the chaff—of which there is a good deal—from the wheat—of which there is some little; the latter I shall gather into my mind's garner, and I trust it will fall on good soil." I took the old gentleman's hand and shook it warmly, and, as he retired, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... verses have passed into immortality as a proverb. Perhaps a few other grains of corn might be picked out of these hundred and seventy pages of chaff. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... strike while the iron was hot: hence his visit to Grey Abbey. His pretended ignorance of the young man's death, when he found he could not see Miss Wyndham, was a ruse; but an old bird like Lord Cashel was not to be caught with chaff. And then, how indelicate of him to come and press his suit immediately after news of so distressing a nature had reached Miss Wyndham! How very impolitic, thought Lord Cashel, to show such a hurry to take possession of the fortune!—How completely he had ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... generous artist thus cruelly taunting his sensitive rival, I shall simply say that Liszt had not the slightest recollection of ever having imitated Chopin's playing in a darkened room. There may be some minute grains of truth mixed up with all this chaff of fancy—Chopin's displeasure at the liberties Liszt took with his compositions was no doubt one of them—but it is impossible to ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... he was frequently too poor to give. "But if we would follow the Lord in these days," he wrote to a friend, "we must evidently be prepared to renounce all things for His sake and cast out all these heathen worries for dross and chaff with which we as ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... "None of your chaff, Richards. Just tell where the paper went, for in the loss of that lot of paper, as it proved, the bottom dropped out of the Treasury tub. On that paper was to have been printed our new issue of ten per cent, convertible, you know, and secured on that up-country cotton, which Kirby ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... was getting tired, and bored with the whole business, and stifled with the close atmosphere—laden with every graveolent horror; besides, I had not escaped from London "chaff" and Parisian persiflage, to be mocked by a wild Virginian. So I said, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... the next day. She was a favorite pupil with the master. Out of so much musical chaff he winnowed only now and then a grain of real ability. And Harmony had that. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had been ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... subsequently to be placed under the protection of Augustus. Cato thought that a proper man ought to study oratory, medicine, husbandry, war, and law, and was at liberty to look into Greek literature a little, that he might cull from the mass of chaff and rubbish, as he affected to deem it, some serviceable maxims of practical experience, but he might not study it thoroughly. Varro extended the limit of allowed and fitting studies to grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... King went gathering Wessex men, As grain out of the chaff The few that were alive to die, Laughing, as littered skulls that lie After lost battles turn to ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... swept by the butler and he had the sensation of chaff scattering before a strong wind. In truth Mrs. Oglethorpe was an impressive figure and quite two inches taller than himself. He could only stare at her in helpless awe, the more so as he had recognized her at once. Leadership might be ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... went into the barn with fell purpose in his heart. He set up on end a bag of chaff, which was laid aside to fill a bed. He squared up to it in a deadly way, dancing lightly on his feet, his hands revolving ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... discovered symptoms of lush-logic, for though he had an inclination to keep up the chaff, his dictionary appeared to be new modelled, and his lingo abridged by repeated clips at his mother tongue, by which he ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Easton's invitation, and went with him to his father's in Leicestershire. Had it not been for the uncertainty about Edgar he would have enjoyed his holidays greatly. Although he had always joined to a certain extent in the chaff of his school-fellows at Easton's care about his dress and little peculiarities of manner, he had never shared in Skinner's prejudices against him, and always said that he could do anything well that he chose to turn his hand to, and had appreciated his readiness to do a kindness ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... bed prepared for its reception. Through stones and sand and boulders it came in an impetuous hurricane of power. The liberation of its life appalled him. All that was free, untied, responded instantly like chaff; loose objects fled towards it; there was a yielding in the hills and precipices; and even in the mass of Desert which provided their foundation. The hinges of the Sand went creaking in the night. It shaped ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... Punch will stoop to being "heckled." I have no "Programmes," I. My wit's too wide To a wire-puller's "platform" to be tied. I know what's right, I mean to see it done, And for the rest good-tempered chaff and fun Are my pet "principles"—till fools grow rash From toleration, then they feel the lash. I am a sage, and not a prig or pump, Therefore I never canvas, spout or stump, I'm Liberal—as the sunlight—of all Good, Which to Conserve I strive—that's understood, But Tory nincompoop, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... of Harvard men. Gracie and I are only two, but Gracie is a host in himself, and I am sure he will say as much of me." The young man spoke these words freely and lightly, smiling at Verena, and even a little at Olive, with the air of one to whom a mastery of clever "chaff" was commonly attributed. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... gross superstition, and lurking demons of cruelty and despair. While Nevil was imbibing impressions of Indian Art, Lilamani was secretly weighing and probing the Indian spirit that inspired it; sifting the grain from the chaff—a process closely linked with her personal life; because, for India, religion and ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... arguments, but objected to his "personalities." Now, the reader must have observed that of all people practical jokers are those who can least tolerate a practical joke played at their own expense, and that those whose staple of conversation is banter or "chaff" become irascible the moment they are flicked with their own whip. For years Wagner had been the victim of unprovoked personal attacks in the Jew-controlled press, and some of the worst of these can be traced to Jew scribblers. Yet on the publication of Judaism ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Alec stayed to chaff with them, while the Texan sauntered across the floor and took a seat on one of the benches which lined the walls. As he did so, a man and his partner, so busy in talk with each other that they had not observed who he was, sat down beside him in such position that the young woman was ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... solid grain, to take Jack's view, winnowed out of bushels of aboriginal chaff; an Indian, all Indian, without any strain of Spanish blood in the primitive ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... ingrained thanklessness of the human race. I was obliged to make a clean breast of it to my sister, who of course did not keep the secret long; and for some time afterward I had to submit to a good deal of mild chaff upon the subject from my friends. But it is an old story now, and two of the actors in it are dead, and of the remaining three I dare say I am the only one who cares to recall it. Even to me it is a ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... 'Speaker,'—the one on the right: 'Mr. Mayor,' my young one, how are you to-night? That's our 'Member of Congress,' we say when we chaff; There's the 'Reverend' What's his name?—don't make ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... those red varmints spare us?" Gummidge cried hoarsely. "They melted away like chaff. What ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... was electrical. The ladies (including Carrie) were in no way inclined to be deprived of Mr. Huttle's fascinating society, and immediately resumed their seats, amid much laughter and a little chaff. Mr. Huttle said: "Well, that's a real good sign; you shall not be insulted by being called orthodox any longer." Mrs. Purdick, who seemed to be a bright and rather sharp woman, said: "Mr. Huttle, we will meet you half-way—that ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... swift to bear his master, when need arose, out of the reach of danger. But when the war was over he employed him on all sorts of drudgery, bestowing but little attention upon him, and giving him, moreover, nothing but chaff to eat. The time came when war broke out again, and the Soldier saddled and bridled his Horse, and, having put on his heavy coat of mail, mounted him to ride off and take the field. But the poor half-starved beast sank down under ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... Dacres who had anticipated that pleasure, for while responding with the best grace he could command to the chaff and banter which began to be darted at him, he was consigning Miss Fisher, and more especially the effusive Doady, to every depth between this world and the ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... apparent that I am in very serious earnest, perhaps too much so, from the first page of my book to the last. I am not aware of a single argument put forward which is not a bona fide argument, although, perhaps, sometimes admitting of a humorous side. If a grain of corn looks like a piece of chaff, I confess I prefer it occasionally to something which looks like a grain, but which turns out to be a piece of chaff only. There is no lack of matter of this description going about in some very decorous volumes; I have, therefore, endeavoured, for a ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... "We may chaff and joke a little about these things," I continued; "but when it comes to practice, that is what always happens. We have mentioned to our wives that we are going. Naturally, they are grieved; they would ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... The boys turned to chaff Chris, but he had slipped away at the first words of the explanation. Soon he reappeared with an armful of dry wood. His face was still ashen, but his ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... marked and decided color: the Assyrian feels himself infinitely superior to all the nations with whom he is brought into contact; he alone enjoys the favor of the gods; he alone is either truly wise or truly valiant; the armies of his enemies are driven like chaff before him; he sweeps them away, like heaps of stubble; either they fear to fight, or they are at once defeated; he carries his victorious arms just as far as it pleases him, and never under any circumstances admits that he has suffered a reverse. The only merit ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... congested junction where six lines of temporary track accommodated six forty-waggon trains; where whistles blew, Babus sweated, and Commissariat officers swore from dawn till far into the night amid the wind-driven chaff of the fodder-bales and the lowing of ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... I, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire: whose fan is in his hand, thoroughly to cleanse his threshing-floor, and to gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn up with ...
— His Life - A Complete Story in the Words of the Four Gospels • William E. Barton, Theodore G. Soares, Sydney Strong
... sort of talk is happily dying out just now; but no one can approach the history of the Elizabethan age (perhaps of any age) without finding that truth is all but buried under mountains of dirt and chaff—an Augaean stable, which, perhaps, will never be swept clean. Yet I have seen, with great delight, several attempts toward removal of the said superstratum of dirt and chaff from the Elizabethan histories, in several articles, all evidently from the same ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... factor thought that he could not have come to a better place to get all that he wanted out of everybody. He put away his saddle, and the saddlebags and sword, in a rough old sea-chest with a padlock to it, and having a sprinkle of chaff at the bottom. Then he calmly took the key, as if the place were his, gave his horse a rackful of long-cut grass, and presented himself, with a lordly aspect, at the front door of the silent inn. Here he made noise enough to stir the dead; and at ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the fruit of thy doings themselves, is thine. What the Eternal Laws will sanction for thee, do; what the Froth Gospels and multitudinous long-eared Hearsays never so loudly bid, all this is already chaff for thee,—drifting rapidly along, thou knowest whitherward, on the ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... interested. When a newspaper writer commented that a "consensus of opinion among biologists" would probably rate Dr. Loeb as a man of lively imagination rather than an inerrant investigator of natural phenomena, he felt called to chaff the consensus idea. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... or by sinking some vessel almost level with the surface of the ground, the vessel half full of water, upon which let there be strew'd some hulls, or chaff of oats; also with bane, powder of orpiment in milk, and aconites mix'd with butter: Cop'ras or green-glass broken with honey: Morsels of sponge chopp'd small and fry'd in lard, &c. are very fit baits to destroy these nimble creatures, which else soon will ruin a semination of nuts, acorns and ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... stretching himself out on my sofa he began to chaff me about my appearance, which indicated, he said, that I had not slept well. As I was little disposed to indulge in pleasantry I ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... drawn on and greased their shooting-gloves and fastened their bracers. They plucked and cast up a few blades of grass to measure the wind, examined every small point of their tackle, turned their sides to the mark, and Widened their feet in a firmer stance. From all sides came chaff and ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "have you ever been stuck with a horse? It isn't the money I mind, though that is bad enough; but what I resent is the chaff that follows, especially from the boy who stuck me. But I think ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Lupin had simply to examine the writing-desk, for he knew, from Sebastiani's chaff, that this was the spot of the hiding-place. And the hiding-place could not be a complicated one, seeing that Daubrecq had not remained in the study for more than twenty seconds, just long enough, so to speak, to walk in ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... wood-pigeon was perched. A pair of turtle-doves built in the same hedge one spring, and while resting on the gate by the roadside their "coo-coo" mingled with the song of the nightingale and thrush, the blackbird's whistle, the chiff-chaff's "chip-chip," the willow-wren's pleading voice, and the rustle of green corn as the wind came rushing (as it always does to ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... provide support for this nation, sinking under the mountainous load of two hundred and thirty millions of debt. But whilst we look with pain at his desperate and laborious trifling, whilst we are apprehensive that he will break his back in stooping to pick up chaff and straws, he recovers himself at an elastic bound, and with a broadcast swing of his arm he squanders over his Indian field a sum far greater than the clear produce of the whole hereditary revenue of the kingdom ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... "Chaff away," said Stafford, good-humouredly. "At any rate, he has been a jolly liberal father to me. Did I tell you that just before he came home be placed a largish sum at his bank for me; I mean ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... the ungodly man is as chaff carried by the wind, and as foam vanishing before a tempest; and is scattered as smoke is scattered by the wind; and passeth by as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day. But the righteous live for ever, and in the Lord is their reward, and the care for them with the ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... the back numbers of Punch. But, if we may be permitted the slang, the type itself is anything but "a back number." Du Maurier's work bids fair to live in the enjoyment of many generations, from the fact that its chaff, for the most part, is directed against vanities that recur in human nature. Mr. James tells us that the lady of whom we write "hesitates at nothing; she is very modern. If she doesn't take the aesthetic line more than is necessary, she finds it necessary to ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... is an undertaking that most amateurs fail in. The seed is light as chaff, and every puff of wind, no matter how light, will carry it far and wide. Choose a still day, if possible, for sowing, and cross-sow. That is—sow from north to south, and then from east to west. In this way you will probably be able to get the seed quite evenly distributed. Hold the hand ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... of our day; while the Latin is the fat. The Saxon puts small and convenient handles to things, handles that are easy to grasp; while your ponderous Johnsonian phraseology distends and exaggerates, and never peels the chaff from the wheat. Johnson's periods act like a lever of the third kind,—the power applied always exceeds the weight raised; while the terse, laconic style of later writers is eminently a lever on the first principle, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... faction. The concession of 1850 was one which he would not have made, and it must be the last. Welcome to him the iron flail of war, whose tribulation saved the immortal wheat of justice and purged away the chaff of wrong to perish ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... have suspected chaff under this courtly style of address. I take infinite credit to myself for recognising at once the natural attitude of a man to whom his fellows were gentlemen all, neither Jew nor Gentile, clean nor unclean. Of course, I took the blame ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... mission,— Ever faithful, ever constant. Now he steppeth from his high throne, Builded to the gates eternal, Which are quickly opened to him, And he joins the never ending. Then his kingdom is forgotten, And in flames as chaff consumed, Rolled away as clouds of vapor; Clouds of smoke and clouds of vapor, Flying with the roar of thunders, Terrible, and loud, and mighty, And with lurid lights illuming All the vast unfathomed chaos. ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... unlike than the "ways" of Dickens and Thackeray? The subjects chosen by these great authors are not more diverse than their styles. Thackeray writes like a scholar, not in the narrow sense, but rather as a student and a master of all the refinements and resources of language. Dickens copies the chaff of the street, or he roams into melodramatics, "drops into poetry"—blank verse at least—and touches all with peculiarities, we might say mannerisms, of his own. I have often thought, and even tried to ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... no further trouble. He had for a long time known—for, by the power of the life in him, he had gathered from the Scriptures the finest of the wheat, where so many of every sect, great church and little church, gather only the husks and chaff—that the only baptism of any avail is the washing of the fresh birth, and the making new by that breath of God, which, breathed into man's nostrils, first made of him a living soul. When a man knows this, potentially he knows all things. But, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... I was red to the ears, not knowing whether it were wiser for a lady's-maid to run away, or to take the rough chaff good-humouredly, and make the best of it. I fluttered, undecided, never thinking of the old adage concerning the ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... inspired Thinker, who with heaven-made Implement conquers Heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have Food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have Light, have Guidance, Freedom, Immortality?—These two, in all their degrees, I honor: all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... then a subject of the Queen, and entitled to a pension from the Cape Government. The canteen interest on the goldfields, playing upon the prejudices of the Boers, represented that this was unfitting the dignity of the Republic. The President, who was too shrewd to be caught with such chaff, was perfectly ready to support them for the sake of the liquor interest, which for him constitutes a very useful electioneering and political agency throughout the country. Mr. Esselen was sent for, and it was represented ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... have, And carry Horns fresh budding to his Grave, On one of Twenty, blooming as a Rose, His dry and wither'd Carkass he bestows: She jilts, intrigues, and plays upon him still, Keeps her Gallants, and Rambles at her Will; Do's nothing but her Pride and Pleasure mind, And throws his Gold like Chaff before the Wind; Until at length she beggars the old Slave, And brings his Gray-Hairs ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses from Men • Various
... the Autumn breeze's bugle sound, Various and vague the dry leaves dance their round; Or, from the garner-door, on ether borne, The chaff flies devious from the winnow'd corn; So vague, so devious, at the breath of heaven, From their fix'd ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... corpse, the birds of the air, and the beasts of the field; for who will have pity on thee, O Jerusalem? Thou hast rejected me. I am weary of relenting. I will scatter them as with a broad winnowing-shovel, as men scatter the chaff on ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... as I am, received two crowns for officiating there; I even preached a very good sermon on the text, 'God has separated the wheat from the chaff.' It is in the Bible, 'God will separate,' but as it is a long time since that was written, I supposed that ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... dreams were scatter'd, As chaff is toss'd by the wind, The faith has been rudely shattered That listen'd with credence blind; Things were to have been, and therefore They were, and they are to be, And will be;—we must prepare for The doom we ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... I fear you may possibly have to submit to a certain amount of good-natured chaff, but nothing more. All, if I may say so, is ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... under coverlets made of dagswaine or hopharlots, (I use their own terms,) and a good round log under their head instead of a bolster. If it were so, that the father or the goodman of the house had a matrass or flock-bed, and thereto a sack of chaff to rest his head upon, he thought himself to be as well lodged as the lord of the town, so well were they contented. Pillows, said they, were thought meet only for women in childbed. As for servants, if they had any sheet above them, it was well; for seldom ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... 'twon't disappoint you! There's a good deal of rubbish here, but a scattering of grain among the chaff. Ah, messieurs! Good-evening!" ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... is not concerned with the physical ecstasies of Sex. It has no interest in such human matters. But deprive it of the fact of Sex-difference, and it drifts away whimpering like a dead leaf, an empty husk, a wisp of chaff, a skeleton gossamer. The poor, actual, warm lips, "so sweetly forsworn," may have had small interest for this "spiritual" lover, but now that she is dead and buried, and a ghost, they must remain a woman's ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... what is called grocery stores, we had simply to dispense with them. Our food was abominably bad; the sheep we purchased were little better than London cats; and as no flour-mill is to be found in Abyssinia, far less any bakers, we were obliged to purchase the grain, beat it to remove the chaff, and grind it between two stones—not the flat grinding-stones of Egypt or India, but on a small curved piece of rock, where the grain is reduced to flour by means of a large hard kind of pebble held in the hand. It was brown bread with a vengeance. ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... twenty-four hours, then run off, and fresh water put on. This precaution is essentially necessary, in order to make clean bright malt, and should never be omitted. It is further right, at each watering, to skim off the surface of the water the light grain, chaff, and seed weeds, that are found floating on it; all this kind of trash, when suffered to remain in the steep, is a real injury to the malt, and considerably depreciates its value when offered for sale, and not less so when brewed. The depth of water over the barley in the steep need not exceed ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... one to which chaff did not commend itself. He snatched his hand from beneath the Doctor's fingers, and picked up some letters that ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the Vedas, from Plato and Pythagoras, from India, Persia, Phœnicia, and Syria, from Greece and Egypt, and from the Holy Books of the Jews. Hence we are called Knights of the East and West, because their doctrines came from both. And these doctrines, the wheat sifted from the chaff, the Truth separated from Error, Masonry has garnered up in her heart of hearts, and through the fires of persecution, and the storms of calamity, has brought them and delivered them unto us. That God is One, immutable, unchangeable, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Joris and I, Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh; 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff; Till over by Delhem a dome spire sprung white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, ...
— O May I Join the Choir Invisible! - and Other Favorite Poems • George Eliot
... people more and more are declining the postponement of happiness to another world. The general tendency is to enjoy the present. All religions have taught men that the pleasures of this world are of no account; that they are nothing but husks and rags and chaff and disappointment; that whoever expects to be happy in this world makes a mistake; that there is nothing on the earth worth striving for; that the principal business of mankind should be to get ready to be happy in another world; that the great occupation is to save ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... wit"; that Shakespeare betrayed very early signs of poetic genius; that he paid annual visits to his native place when his career was at its height; that he loved at tavern meetings in the town to chaff John Combe, the richest of his fellow-townsmen, who was accused of usurious practices; and finally, that he died possessed ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... common interests of mankind will be helped! What a blessing is wealth when rightly used! True society looks inwardly and not outwardly, and all that does not belong to it falls away as does wheat fanned by a sheet; the trash and chaff being blown away. ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... him speak with something like his old manner. He felt he could stand any amount of chaff from him now, and so the proposition he had made in seriousness he went on to defend in the hope of giving amusement, yet with a secret wild delight in the dream of such full devotion to the service ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... in fact, for it was not a promising case. He had many interviews in his office with Seppi and me, and threshed out our testimony pretty thoroughly, thinking to find some valuable grains among the chaff, but the harvest ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I have compared the humorous vein of the comic tales with our northern "wut," chiefly for the dryness and slyness which pervade it. But it differs in degree as much as the pathos varies. The staple article is Cairene "chaff," a peculiar banter possibly inherited from their pagan forefathers: instances of this are found in the Cock and Dog (vol. i. 22), the Eunuch's address to the Cook (vol. i. 244), the Wazir's exclamation, "Too little pepper!" (vol. i. 246), the self- communing of Judar (vol. vi. 219), ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the perplexed pair threshed away, striving to winnow the chaff from the pure grain in Aunt Sharley's nature, and the upshot was that Emmy Lou had a headache and Mildred had a little spell of crying, and they agreed that never had there been such a paradox of part saint and part sinner, part black ogre and part black angel, as their Auntie was, created ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... and into this I fell. The cool water revived me, and I had just enough wits left to think of escape. I squirmed up the lade among the slippery green slime till I reached the mill-wheel. Then I wriggled through the axle hole into the old mill and tumbled on to a bed of chaff. A nail caught the seat of my trousers, and I left a wisp ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... threatened private houses, all had their cases dismissed; by way of example, one was detained a few days in prison. Having often been served in its enterprises by the passions of the mob, the Parliament had not foreseen the day when those same outbursts would sweep it away like chaff before the wind with all that regimen of tradition and respect to which it still clung even in its most ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... from liberty on shore, was heard saying to another with drunken impressiveness, "Remember, our motto is, 'Patriotism and laziness.'" Of course, this went round the ship, greatly delighting on both counts our marine officers, and became embodied in the chaff that passed to and fro between the two corps; of which one saying, "The two most useless things in a ship were the captain of marines and the mizzen-royal," deserves for its drollery to be committed to writing, now that mizzen-royals have ceased to be. May it be long before the like extinction ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... religious chaff; the Shaykh had doubtless often dipped his hand abroad in such dishes; but like a good Moslem, he contented himself at home with wheaten scones and olives, a kind of sacramental food like bread and wine in southern Europe. But his ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... this, we find it hard to vindicate Burke from the charge of factiousness. Nothing can have been more unworthy of him than the sneer at Pitt in the great speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts (1785), for stopping to pick up chaff and straws from the Irish revenue instead of checking profligate expenditure ...
— Burke • John Morley
... fortunes be, This or that man's fall I fear not; Him I love that loveth me, For the rest a pin I care not. You are sad when others chaff, And grow merry as they laugh; I that hate it, and am free, Laugh and ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... next morning, his five tentmates fell to catechising him as to his pensive mood, and their catechism was largely intermingled with chaff. ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... of all wisdom and strength is the Holy Scriptures. Many disciples practically prefer religious books to the Book of God. He had indeed found much of the reading with which too many professed believers occupy their minds to be but worthless chaff—such as French and German novels; but as yet he had not formed the habit of reading the word of God daily and systematically as in later life, almost to the exclusion of other books. In his ninety-second year, he said to the writer, that for every page ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... countryman, in their yearly order. She stands, with her hair yellow like the ripe corn, at the threshing-floor, and takes her share in the toil, the heap of grain whitening, as the flails, moving in the wind, disperse the chaff. Out in the fresh fields, she yields to the embraces of Iasion, to the extreme jealousy of Zeus, who slays her mortal lover with lightning. The flowery town of Pyrasus—the wheat- town,—an ancient place in Thessaly, is her sacred precinct. But when [94] Homer ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the ages and the beacon-moments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... violent, the largest trees having been torn up by the roots and whirled aloft. Before such a furious tempest no living thing could stand. Men, horses, and cattle were whirled into the air like so much chaff, and then dashed violently down on the ground. The sea rose nearly twelve feet above the highest tide- mark, sweeping away houses, trees, ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... The Southwest has been noted for what are termed "triangular fights." A party of Americans have been driven at bay by an overwhelming number of Mexicans or greasers, who have suddenly found themselves attacked by a party of howling Comanches. The latter have scattered the Mexicans like chaff, the Americans acting the part of spectators until the rout was complete, when the Comanches turned about and sailed into the Americans. The Kiowas, Comanches, Apaches, Mexicans and Americans afforded just the elements for ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... were sae snell, His back they loundert, mell for mell, Mell for mell, and baff for baff, Till his hide flew round his lugs like chaff.' ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... such princely estates as Eumaeus managed in the Ionian seas. Flaxman has certainly not given him the look of a large proprietor in his outlines: his toilet is severely scant, and the old gentleman appears to have lost two of his fingers in a chaff-cutter. As for Perses, who is represented as listening to the sage,[A] his dress is in the extreme of classic scantiness,—being, in fact, a mere night-shirt, and a tight fit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... the present Pope, being a horrid Radical, would be sure to blackball me as an honest Tory, I would send him a copy of my Opera Omnia, requesting his Holiness to say, by return of post, whether I ranked amongst the chaff winnowed by St. Peter's flail, or had his gracious permission to hold myself amongst the pure wheat gathered into the Vatican garner.] which index, continually, she is enlarging by successive supplements, needs also an Index Expurgatorius for the catalogue of her prelates. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... doubt, in all its harrowing details. Simultaneously those details flashed into his own consciousness with a horrible distinctness, depressing his spirits and extinguishing a natural gayety and light chaff that had ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... repulsion of electrostatically charged bodies for each other, shown when charged with electricity. If charged with electricity of the same sign they repel each other. If with opposite they attract each other. The classic attraction and subsequent repulsion of bits of straw and chaff by the excited piece of amber is a case of electrostatic attraction and repulsion. (See Electricity, Static—Electrostatics—Coulomb's Laws of Electrostatic ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... wakes the fury of the sea? O God! thy justice makes the world turn pale, When on the armed fleet, that royally Bears down the surges, carrying war, to smite Some city, or invade some thoughtless realm, Descends the fierce tornado. The vast hulks Are whirled like chaff upon the waves; the sails Fly, rent like webs of gossamer; the masts Are snapped asunder; downward from the decks, Downward are slung, into the fathomless gulf, Their cruel engines; and their hosts, arrayed In trappings of the battle-field, are whelmed By ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... be able to accuse me of attacking Athens before strangers;(1) we are by ourselves at the festival of the Lenaea; the period when our allies send us their tribute and their soldiers is not yet. Here is only the pure wheat without chaff; as to the resident strangers settled among us, they and the citizens are one, like ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... isle, o'er its billows of green, To the billows of foam-crested blue, Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen, Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue: Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray As the chaff in the stroke of the flail; Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way, The sun gleaming ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... away the chaff from her handful of beans. The spring breeze blew the chaff back again, and sifted it over her face and shoulders. She rubbed it out of her eyes impatiently, and happened to notice old Peggy holding her own ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... it," interposed Sir Norman, "to let you make your escape, as you most assuredly will do the moment you are out of our sight! No, no; we are too old birds to be caught with such chaff; and though the informer always gets off scot-free, your services deserve no such boon; for we could have found our way without your help! On with you, Sir Robber; and if your companions do kill you, console yourself with ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... there is something lamentable in a state of the public mind, which was so little prone to examination as to receive such a mass of superstition without sifting the wheat, for such there undoubtedly is, from the chaff. Calmet's work contains enough, had we the minor circumstances in each case preserved, to set at rest many philosophic doubts, and to illustrate many physical facts; and to those who desire to know what was believed by our Christian forefathers, and why it was believed, the compilation is absolutely ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... great cruel conspiracy, their silliest possibilities; fencing them in to these, and so not only shutting them out from others, but mounting guard at the fence, walking round and round outside it, to see they didn't escape, and admiring them, talking to them, through the rails, in mere terms of chaff, terms of chucked cakes and apples—as if they had been antelopes or zebras, or even some superior sort of performing, of dancing, bear. It had been reserved for Basil French to strike her as willing to let ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... confine ourselves to the study of one side of mediumship only. The phenomena produced in the presence of mediums are various. All the phenomena classified as "psychical" must be carefully considered and thoroughly investigated. The grain must be separated from the chaff; it must be decided which among these phenomena appear to be due to spirits, which, according to the evidence, are due to incarnated minds, and finally, which (if there are such) have only ordinary physical causes. The new workmen who are entering the ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... Lambourne; "you cannot put the change on me so easy as you think, for I have lived among the quick-stirring spirits of the age too long to swallow chaff for grain. You are a gentleman of birth and breeding—your bearing makes it good; of civil habits and fair reputation—your manners declare it, and my uncle avouches it; and yet you associate yourself with a sort of scant-of-grace, as men ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... suffered to a serious degree. My tribulations increased to such an extent that I seriously contemplated suicide. I am convinced that this period left an indelible mark, and that not an improving one, on my character. Where sensitive children are concerned, chaff may be useful in hardening them, but it should not be carried ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... rapidly, as only the mind knows and comprehends in moments of stress and crisis; and before her knowledge, all ideas save one fell away like chaff before the wind. At all costs—in face of every obstacle—she must warn and save ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... to this, we find in the conversation of most men that their thoughts are cut up as small as chaff, making it impossible for them to spin out the thread of their discourse to any length. If this world were peopled by really thinking beings, noise of every kind would not be so universally tolerated, as indeed the most horrible ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... all the kernels were shaken or crushed out of the heads. It usually took several days to thresh all the grain from an average-sized field. Then the straw was raked away, and the grain was left mixed with chaff and dust. The next windy day the winnowers, with large "fans," or wooden shovels, came and tossed the mingled chaff and dust and grain in the wind. The kernels of wheat fell back and the chaff and ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... two thousand Scripture lessons, says to himself when he leaves school: 'If this is religion I will have no more of it,' is acting in obedience to a healthy instinct. He is to be honoured rather than blamed for having realized at last that the chaff on which he has so long been fed is not the life-giving grain which, unknown to himself, his ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... brings forward the apocryphal book of Enoch, has been among my people in my absence, and many have been led after him. How humbling is this to them and to me! Lord, what is man! This may be blessed, 1st, to discover chaff which we thought to be wheat; 2nd, to lead some to greater distrust of themselves, when their eyes are opened: 3rd, to teach me the need of solidly instructing those who seem to have ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... one and another couple? The wind had risen, for one thing, and the little boat was so tossed about by the vigorous waves that the skipper declared it would be imprudent to attempt to land on the Rip-Raps. Was it the thought that the day was over, and that underneath all chaff and hilarity there was the question of settling in life to be met some time, which subdued a little the high spirits, and gave an air of protection and of tenderness to a couple here and there? Consciously, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... all the news," stated the landlord. "I'll sift the wheat out of the chaff and hand you what's for your own good. And now you'll have to excuse me whilst I go and pound steak and dish up dinner and wait on the table. That's the trouble with running a tavern up here in the woods. I can't keep help of ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... repulse at the Redan, the death of Lord Raglan, and the vainglorious boast of Prince Gortschakoff, who declared 'that the hour was at hand when the pride of the enemies of Russia would be lowered, and their armies swept from our soil like chaff blown away by the wind,' rendered all dreams of diplomatic solution impossible, and made England, in spite of the preachers of peace at any price, determined to push forward her quarrel to the bitter end. The nation, ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... thousands who are just as anxious to see the king on the throne again as you are, Edward—and you now know that I am one of them; but the time is not yet come, and we must bide our time. Depend upon it, that General Cromwell will scatter that army like chaff. He is on his march now. After what has passed between us this day, Edward, I shall talk unreservedly to you on what ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... adversary he had come upon! Was it even an adversary? Really, he had neither the tone of one nor the appearance. Very calm, but with a real calmness, not one assumed to cloak the passion of a man endeavoring to restrain himself; very polite, but without exaggeration; smiling, but without chaff, he presented the most perfect contrast to Arsene Lupin, a contrast so perfect even that, to my mind, Lupin appeared as much perplexed ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... of piles of chaff, portends many hours spent in useless and degrading gossip, bringing them into notoriety and causing them to lose husbands who would have maintained them without work on ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... identification of what remained of her parents' bodies, and the magnificent ceremony with which they were removed from the cemetery of the Madeleine to the Abbey of St. Denis,—when the escape of Napoleon from Elba in February,1815, scattered the royal family and their followers like chaff before the wind. The Duc d'Angouleme, compelled to capitulate at Toulouse, sailed from Cette in a Swedish vessel. The Comte d'Artois, the Duc de Berri, and the Prince de Conde withdrew beyond the frontier. The King fled from ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... himself in favor of the sliding-scale, which he understood to mean the wooden pavement. Things went much more smoothly wherever it was established. He contended for the abolition of nose-bags, which he designated as an intolerable nuisance; urged the prohibition of chaff with oats, as unfit for the use of able-bodied horses; and indeed evinced the truth of his professions, that he 'yielded to no horse in an anxious desire to promote the true interests of the horse-community.' An OLD ENGLISH ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... certainly sown tares among the exclusive federalists. It has winnowed the grain from the chaff. The sincerely Adamites did not go. The Washingtonians went religiously, and took the secession of the others in high dudgeon. The one sect threatens to desert the levees, the other the parties. The whigs went in number, to encourage the idea that the birth-nights hitherto ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the rust come to dim its brightness or spoil the keenness of her weapon's edge, knowing that she, as with the sword of the cherubim, will scatter, at the last, the evil legions and their dark array, as the whirlwind scatters the chaff. ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... lips, The conquering smile wherein his spirit sails Calm as the God who the white sea-wave whips, Yet full of speech and intershifting tales, Close mirrors of us: thence had he the laugh We feel is thine: broad as ten thousand beeves At pasture! thence thy songs, that winnow chaff From grain, bid sick Philosophy's last leaves Whirl, if they have no response—they enforced To fatten Earth when ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is fair—and though I buy this Knowledge at the vast Price of all my Repose; yet I must own, 'tis a better Bargain than chaff'ring of a Heart for feign'd Embraces—Thou hast undone me—yet must have my Friendship; and 'twill be still some Ease in this Extreme, to see thee yet ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... others is easily perceived, but that of oneself is difficult to perceive; a man winnows his neighbour's faults like chaff, but his own fault he hides, as a cheat hides the bad die from ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown
... /n./ 1. The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after they have been separated from the printed portion. Also called {selvage} and {perf}. 2. obs. The confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or paper tape; this has also been called 'chaff', 'computer confetti', and 'keypunch droppings'. This use may now be mainstream; it has been reported seen (1993) in directions for a card-based ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... abyss he wheels,— So fell Darius. Upon his crown, In the midst of the barnyard, he came down, In a wonderful whirl of tangled strings, Broken braces and broken springs, Broken tail and broken wings, Shooting stars, and various things,— Barnyard litter of straw and chaff, And much that wasn't so sweet by half. Away with a bellow flew the calf, And what was that? Did the gosling laugh? 'Tis a merry roar from the old barn-door, And he hears the voice of Jotham crying; "Say, D'rius! how de yeou ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... indication that parliamentary government will within a limited period be more successful in China than in some European countries; and that the Chinese with their love of well- established procedure and cautious action, will select open debate as the best method of sifting the grain from the chaff and deciding every important matter by the vote of the majority. Already in the period of 1916-1917 Parliament has more than justified its re-convocation by becoming a National Watch Committee. Interpellations on every conceivable subject have been constant and frequent; fierce verbal assaults ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... like to know, Alfred, is—what's come to you?" she commenced indignantly. "Not a word have you spoken all the evening—you that there's no holding generally with your chaff and jokes. What Mr. and Mrs. Johnson must have thought of you, I can't imagine, standing there like a stick when they stopped to be civil for a few minutes, and behaving as though you never even heard their asking us to go in and have a bite of supper. What have we done, ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... aloft the standard of a chaste and holy life; such men in this day are spoken of as "too slow" as "weak-kneed," and {426} "goody-goody" men. Let me recall that word, the fast and indecently-dressed "things," the animals of easy virtue, the "respectable" courtesans that flirt, chaff, gamble, and waltz with well-known high-class licentious lepers—such is the ideal of womanhood which a large proportion of our large city society accepts, fawns ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... devil entered into him, and ruled his hand with a whirlwind power which he could no more withstand than the chaff ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... be; that I very much feared that we had fallen into the hands of pirates ourselves, but that I would have justice done as soon as we arrived at James Town, without he intended to murder us all before we arrived. His answer was, that he was too old a bird to be caught with such chaff, and that he would secure us and deliver us up to the authorities as soon as he arrived. I replied, in great anger, that he would then be convinced of his error, if it was an error, on his part; that ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... and was not in the least disturbed nor daunted that they had failed in their former promises. Flynn's good-nature was as unfaltering as his self-esteem, perhaps because of his self-esteem. He only smiled with fatuous superiority when from time to time, after the elections, his patrons would chaff him about his failure to secure the mayoralty. They did so with more effect since there were always among the horse-players on such occasions a few who would cast votes for the barber, esteeming ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... or his cause; when you can make it appear, that in the course of this administration, since the Queen thought fit to change her servants, there hath one step been made toward weakening the Hanover title, or giving the least countenance to any other whatsoever; then, and not until then, go dry your chaff and stubble, give fire to the zeal of your faction, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... on the 22nd day of the month. The following is recounted by this personage with malicious glee, and certainly, if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed with wheat, and how ignorant, almost impious, persons were engaged in this movement; nevertheless we give it, for we wish to present with impartiality all the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... your chaff, mister," retorted one of the street boys, irreverently. "When did you come from the ...
— Paul the Peddler - The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... to be so recuperative as you, Anna Belle. I have a plan, however, a plan of self-defense; but if it weren't for your discretion, I shouldn't tell it to you, for I'm an old bird, young lady, and can't be caught with chaff. There are many worthy persons who may rise to lofty heights in eternity, who nevertheless, meanwhile are not desirable to sit opposite a man at his breakfast table. A visit, Anna Belle, a short visit from my daughter Julia is all I shall ask for at first, ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... palate, in short, all the grosser tastes. All that is not only like savages, but like animals. They are merry and contented at the prospect of a savory meal, and they are fond of playing tricks on each other—both sexes chaff and tease constantly. I believe that the development of our larger brain is the intellectual work of man during hundreds and thousands of years, and it would gratify me to see it raised to a still greater state ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... reflecting that all the Negroes from whom any assistance could reasonably be expected, behaved like so many Heroes of Antiquity; risking their lives and limbs for us and our property, while their own poor houses were flying like chaff before the hurricane. There are few White people here who can say as much for their Black dependents; and the force and value of the relation between Master and Slave has been tried by the late calamity ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... d'ye see, that my mot, Yellow a-bit about the swag that I'd got, Thinking that I should jeer and laugh, Although I never tips no chaff [13] Tries her hand at the downy trick, And prigs in a shop, but precious quick "Stop thief!" was the cry, and she vas taken I cuts and ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... came out every evening to watch the two boats at their practising; and sometimes, as they passed one another, Seth Ede, who had the reputation for a wag, would call out to Sal and offer her the odds by way of chaff. Sal never answered. The woman was in deadly earnest, and moreover, I dare say, a bit timmersome, now that the whole Borough had its eyes on ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and upon her homely errand, across the plains of ocean, and past the gorgeous scenery of dawn and sunset; and the ship's company, so strangely assembled, so Britishly chuckle-headed, filling their days with chaff in place of conversation; no human book on board with them except Hadden's Buckle, and not a creature fit either to read or to understand it; and the one mark of any civilised interest being when Carthew filled in his spare hours with the pencil and the brush: ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... other presents on her plate that morning. And she had written to thank him for it, but he did not answer the letter. He had always been by way of writing to her from time to time; letters, generally embellished with comic sketches and full of chaff and nonsense, which were shared by the family. Lately he had not felt in the mood to write such letters. He wanted to see her with an unceasing ache of longing intense and persistent; and if he wrote he wanted to write, not a love letter—Reggie did not fancy he'd be much ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... system of mythology, when, in its second century, the Christian Church was ready to replace the forms of heathen worship. He laughed at the philosophers, confounding together in one censure deep conviction with shallow convention. His vigorous winnowing sent chaff to the winds, but not without some scattering of wheat. Delight in the power of satire leads always to some excess in its use. But if the power be used honestly—and even if it be used recklessly—no truth can be destroyed. Only the reckless use of it breeds in minds ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... Montalembert, Correspondance, ii. 58-65.] 'With all my heart,' answers Soltikof; 'I make the Austrians and History perfectly welcome! Monsieur, my ammunition is in Posen; my bread is fallen scarce; in Frankfurt can you find me one horse more?' Indignant Soltikof is not to be taken by chaff; growls now and then, if you stir him to the bottom: 'Why should we, who are volunteer assistants, take all the burden of the work? I will fall back to Posen, and home to Poland and East Preussen, if this ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... shallow furrow with a sharp-pointed stick. We see the sheep being driven across sown fields to trample the seed into the moist soil. We watch the patient laborers as with hand sickles they gather in the harvest and then with heavy flails separate the chaff from the grain. Although their methods were very clumsy, ancient farmers raised immense crops of wheat and barley. The soil of Egypt and Babylonia not only supported a dense population, but also supplied food for neighboring ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... was in no sense alarmed. He left the palace convinced that a few hours of repose would bring back the color to her cheeks and the natural buoyancy to her manner. Then he meant to chaff her about her distracted air; for Joan was no neurotic subject, and she herself would be the first to laugh at the nervous ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... were all on the ground beside him—Wally, disdaining the steps, having sprung down, and unexpectedly measured his length on the earth, to the accompaniment of much chaff. He picked himself up, laughing more than any of them, just as Norah popped her head through the scrub that ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... fascinating steps along front row. Chaff—exclamations—near and distant poppings of corks, striking of matches, and other accompaniments ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... natives joined the movement, and troops had to be sent to suppress the rising. Having assumed the title of King of the Tagalogs, he pretended to have direct heavenly support, telling the ignorant masses that he was invulnerable and that the soldiers' bullets would fly from them like chaff ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... was known as the "Laundryman," a name in which respect was mixed with chaff. Ernestine did not care. She knew that she had "made good," and it was pleasant. She could afford now to have a home of her own, and so she had installed herself in this apartment, far out of the dirt ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... condition to which hardly any series of misfortunes could have reduced the Duchess of Omnium,—but inclined to quiescence by feelings of penitence. She was less disposed than heretofore to attack him with what the world of yesterday calls "chaff," or with what the world of to-day calls "cheek." She would not admit to herself that she was cowed;—but the greatness of the game and the high interest attached to her husband's position did in some degree dismay her. Nevertheless she executed her purpose of "having it out with ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... of others is easily perceived, but that of one's self is difficult to perceive; a man winnows his neighbor's faults like chaff, but his own fault he hides, as a cheat hides the ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... accounted me their equal, and actually patronised me in a sort of good-humoured fashion. What in particular excited in me this feeling was their feet, their dirty nails and fingers, a particularly long talon on Operoff's obtrusive little finger, their red shirts, their dickeys, the chaff which they good-naturedly threw at one another, the dirty room, a habit which Zuchin had of continually snuffling and pressing a finger to his nose, and, above all, their manner of speaking—that is to say, their use and intonation of words. ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... to get a graff Of this unspotted tree? —For all the rest are plain but chaff, Which seem good ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... ministers do not know—and never will know—the heart-hunger of the world. When they rise to speak, there is always some one present whose breath is hushed with longing to hear spoken some real word of truth, or strength, or comfort. If he receive but chaff!— ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... calls the men to milking; he rouses up Betty, our maid; as often as not he gives the horses their feed before the man is up—for Jem, who takes care of the horses, is an old man; and father is always loth to disturb him; he looks at the calves, and the shoulders, heels, traces, chaff, and corn before the horses go a-field; he has often to whip-cord the plough-whips; he sees the hogs fed; he looks into the swill-tubs, and writes his orders for what is wanted for food for man and beast; yes, and for fuel, too. And then, if he has a bit of time to ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the mountains of chaff there may be a grain worth preserving, as where I read that at Haddon Hall the old lady who showed the house, and who boasted that her ancestors had been servitors of the possessors of it for more than three hundred years, pointed ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... through Waste-paper-land, where all the stupid books lie in heaps, up hill and down dale, like leaves in a winter wood; and there he saw people digging and grubbing among them, to make worse books out of bad ones, and thrashing chaff to save the dust of it; and a very good trade they ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... Assembly against the length and labour of the curriculum. Was there ever a class that was as full and attentive at the end of the session as it was at the beginning? Never since our poor human nature was so stricken with laziness and shallowness and self-sufficiency. But what is the chaff to the wheat? It is the wheat that deserves and repays the husbandman's love and labour. When Plato looked up from his desk in the Academy, after reading and expounding one of his greatest Dialogues, he found only one student left ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... shout, a huzzah, and a charge. But our men had by this time reloaded their pieces, and were only too eager awaiting the command "fire." But when it did come the result was telling—men falling on top of men, rear rank pushing forward the first rank, only to be swept away like chaff. Our batteries on the hills in rear and those mounted on our infantry line were raking the field, the former with shell and solid shot, the latter with grape and canister. Smoke settling on the ground, soon rendered objects in front scarcely visible, but the steady flashing of the ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... sorrel, white, and piebald, not understanding why they were made to run round in one place and to crush the wheat straw, ran unwillingly as though with effort, swinging their tails with an offended air. The wind raised up perfect clouds of golden chaff from under their hoofs and carried it away far beyond the hurdle. Near the tall fresh stacks peasant women were swarming with rakes, and carts were moving, and beyond the stacks in another yard another dozen similar horses were running round ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... serve him whom the king himself commands to do so, and his servants are not bought for money,—of these attendants then they strangle fifty and also fifty of the finest horses; and when they have taken out their bowels and cleansed the belly, they fill it with chaff and sew it together again. Then they set the half of a wheel upon two stakes with the hollow side upwards, and the other half of the wheel upon other two stakes, and in this manner they fix a number ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... kindly eyes. But in the city, with a few lame words, And a few wretched coins, sore-coveted, To mediate 'twixt my cannot and my would, My best attempts would never strike a root; My scattered corn would turn to wind-blown chaff; I should grow weak, might weary of my kind, Misunderstood the most where almost known, Baffled and beaten by their unbelief: Years could not place me where I stand this day High on the vantage-ground of confidence: I might for years toil on, and reach no man. Besides, to leave the thing ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... rescued horse on the Barrier, but the other four of us pulled might and main till we got the old horse out and lying on his side. The brash ice was so thin that, had a 'Killer' come up then he would have scattered it, and the lot of us into the water like chaff. I was sick with disappointment when I found that my horse could not rise. Titus said: 'He's done; we shall never get him up alive.' The cold water and shock on top of all his recent troubles, had been too much for the undefeated old sportsman. In vain I ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... those who have been emptying our churches by reason of their attempts to give stones for bread, husks and chaff for the life-giving grain, let their places be taken even for but a few times by those who are open and alive to these higher inspirations, and then let us again question those who feel that religion is dying out. "It is the live coal ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... to herself Miss Hastings put off from day to day this final expedition until Blair began to chaff at the delay. ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... sure that our own age will make a favourable impression upon that excellent judge, posterity. Therefore, beware of disparaging the present in your own mind. While temporarily ignoring it, dwell upon the idea that its chaff contains about as much wheat as any similar quantity of chaff has ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... the village on market days and Sundays, with a loose, shambling gait, making altogether an appearance so homely and peculiar that the smart village chaps riding along in their jaunty turn-outs used to chaff the good deacon on the character of his steed, and satirically challenge him to a brush. The deacon always took their badinage in good part, although he inwardly said more than once, "If I ever get a good chance, ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... aware. "Catharine, thou art a superstitious fool, like most women; nevertheless thou hast some mind, and I speak to thee as one of more understanding than the buffaloes which are herding about us. These haughty barons who overstride the world, what are they in the day of adversity? Chaff before the wind. Let their sledge hammer hands or their column resembling legs have injury, and bah! the men at arms are gone. Heart and courage is nothing to them, lith and limb everything: give them animal strength, what are they better than furious bulls; take that away, and ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... improve the time. In youth our steps are light, and our minds are ductile, and knowledge is easily laid up; but if we neglect our spring, our summers will be useless and contemptible, our harvest will be chaff, and the winter of our old age ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... Caprice" has just one motive,—to reach the maximum of technical trickiness and difficulty. There is such a thing as hiding one's light under a bushel, and there is such a thing as emptying a bushel of chaff upon it. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Hundred idea as a logical system was broken by the quality of some of its members. Compared to the society I have previously mentioned it was as chaff. There was a total lack of intellectuality. Degeneracy marked some of their acts; divorce blackened their records, and shameless affairs marked them. In this "set," and particularly its imitators throughout ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... gladder!" said Lord James, gripping the bony hand of Griffith. "Don't let Tom chaff you. My ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... Willoughby, his father's partner in the old "banking-and-broking" house of Toogood & Masterman, enjoyed the same sort of chaff. "Looking pale, Thor. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... makes her man's. A second man I honor, and still more highly: him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but the bread of life. These two in all their degrees I honor; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth. We must all toil, or steal (howsoever we name our stealing), which ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... capital, then located at Vandalia. One day he went with a friend to call on an older acquaintance, named Smoot, who was almost as dry a joker as himself, but Smoot had more of this world's goods than the young legislator-elect. Lincoln began at once to chaff his friend. ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... alway leaves behind him at his last place of sojourn, as a mark for those of his tribe who may come upon his track. 'Patteran,' it may be remarked, is an almost pure Sanscrit word cognate with our own 'path;' and the least philological raking among the chaff of the Gipsy dialect will show their secret argot to be, as Mr. Leland calls it, 'a curious old tongue, not merely allied to Sanscrit, but perhaps in point of age an elder though vagabond sister or cousin of that ancient language.' No Sanscrit ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... such an extent that I seriously contemplated suicide. I am convinced that this period left an indelible mark, and that not an improving one, on my character. Where sensitive children are concerned, chaff may be useful in hardening them, but it should not be ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... might have served as models for goddesses stood, pitch-fork in hand, removing the chaff. The breeze blowing through it would catch the wisps and send them dancing in the air, while the great generous streams of golden grain flowing from the machine seemed ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... he made it, that it was not a very able retort, but he was feeling too limp for satisfactory repartee. Criticisms in the Bureau, dealing with his alleged solidity of skull, he did not resent. He attributed them to man's natural desire to chaff his fellow-man. But to be unmasked by the general public in this way was another matter. It struck at the root ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... composed of Audrey, Sara, and Garth had joined the main party now, and Garth was shaking eager, outstretched hands and laughingly tossing back the shower of chaff ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... who tempt The sea of life, by summer gales impell'd, Have ye this anchor? Sure a time will come For storms to try you, and strong blasts to rend Your painted sails, and shred your gold like chaff O'er the wild wave. And what a wreck is man, If sorrow find him ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... legs rubbed by hand until quite dry. We used the best old white potato oats, weighing usually 45 lbs. per bushel, but so few beans that a quarter lasted us a season. The oats were bruised, and a little sweet hay chaff mixed with them. We also gave our horses a few carrots the day after hunting, to cool their bodies, or a bran mash or two. They were never coddled up in hoods or half a dozen rugs at night, but a single ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... but chaff, she understood, and she began to wonder if that other, that young Signor Elder, had been but joking. It might be the American way. . . . And yet this was all flattering chaff and so perhaps she could trust the flattery ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... very satisfactory reason for his activity in attempting to remove the figure. He knew that the selectmen would be obliged to clear the street of the obstruction, but a display of loyalty to the king might possibly inure to his benefit. Boys on their way to school began to chaff the informer. ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... it, a something began to move in his heart— a something half of jealousy for God, half of pity for poor souls buffeted by such winds as had that morning been roaring, chaff laden, about the church, while the grain fell all to the bottom of the pulpit. Something burned in him: was it the word that was as a fire in his bones, or was it a mere lust of talk? He thought for ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... tea, and Dad thought to buy more with the money Anderson owed him for some fencing he had done; but when he asked for it, Anderson was very sorry he had n't got it just then, but promised to let him have it as soon as he could sell his chaff. When Mother heard Anderson could n't pay, she DID cry, and said there was n't a bit of sugar in the house, nor enough cotton to mend the children's ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... breeze's bugle sound, Various and vague the dry leaves dance their round; Or, from the garner-door, on ether borne, The chaff flies devious from the winnow'd corn; So vague, so devious, at the breath of heaven, From their fix'd ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... a fellow not to put up with a little mild chaff of that sort. He looked at the horizon, where the faint streaks of another dawn were beginning to show in ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... A.D. 220, revolted from Artabanus, it was no doubt with a conviction that the Parthians were no longer the terrible warriors who under Mithridates I. had driven all the armies of the East before them like chaff, or who under Orodes and Phraates IV. had gained signal victories over the Romans. It is true that Artabanus had contended not unsuccessfully with Macrinus. But the prestige of Parthia was far from being re-established by the result of his three days' battle. Rome retained ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... littered with retorts, bottles, and test-glasses. Before leaving school he invented a flying machine (heavier than air), and an unsuccessful attempt to start it on the high road caused him to be the victim of much chaff and ridicule. ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... did. It is the result of her engagement. If our naughty soldier had not carried her off, she might have made an ideal schoolmaster's wife. I often chaff him about it, for he a little despises the intellectual professions. Natural, perfectly natural. How can a man who faces death feel as we ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... discharge made by the enemy in that campaign! The fall of its leader, so immediately in its presence, seemed to rouse the column into a sense of the necessity of doing something effective, and it assaulted the party in its front with the rage of so many tigers, dispersing the enemy like chaff; making a considerable number of prisoners, besides killing and wounding not ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... nothing to send love scuttling away with his quiver between his legs like a note of interrogation of that sort. The only touch of the morbid in Paul was his resentment at owing anything to his mere personal appearance. He could not escape the easy chaff of his fellows on his "fatal beauty." He dreaded the horrible and hackneyed phrase which every fresh intimacy either with man or woman would inevitably evoke, and he hated it beyond reason. There was a tour during which he longed for small-pox or a ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... that we had fallen into the hands of pirates ourselves, but that I would have justice done as soon as we arrived at James Town, without he intended to murder us all before we arrived. His answer was, that he was too old a bird to be caught with such chaff, and that he would secure us and deliver us up to the authorities as soon as he arrived. I replied, in great anger, that he would then be convinced of his error, if it was an error, on his part; that his conduct was infamous, and he looked like a scoundrel, and ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... doctor came again, fetching with him one of the cabin stewards to rig the storm-board at the side of my berth and some extra pillows with which to wedge me fast. But though he gave me a lot more of his pleasant chaff to cheer me I could see that his look was anxious, and it seemed to me that the steward was badly scared. Between them they managed to stow me pretty tight in my berth and to make me as comfortable as was possible while everything was in such commotion—with ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... so weary and disheartened that his pride was failing him, and he was ready to plead for the chance of a little rest. Therefore he opened the door, and invited the landlady to enter in the most conciliating manner. But no such poor chaff would be of any avail with one of Mrs. Gruppins' experience, and looking straight before her, as if addressing no one ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... Maroons had been busily occupied all night, men, women, and children, in preparing and filling great hampers of the finest rice, yams, and cassava, from the adjacent provision-grounds, to be used for subsistence during their escape, leaving only chaff and refuse for the hungry soldiers. "This was certainly such a masterly trait of generalship in a savage people, whom we affected to despise, as would have done honor ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... twelve long, broad, and blunt knives or hatchets. This was drawn by two horses or oxen over the bundles of corn laid on the ground, until the whole of the corn was separated from the straw. It was then thrown up into the air by means of shovels, so that the chaff might be separated from the grain by ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... must have had a kind heart. He took me by the hand and made me carry his broom and brushes. Nobody took much notice of us, the dawn was only just breaking, and the passages were very dark and deserted; only once some soldiers began to chaff him about me: 'C'est ma fille—quoi?' he said roughly. I very nearly laughed then, only I had the good sense to restrain myself, for I knew that my freedom, and perhaps my life, depended on my not betraying ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... the yellow lampshade. She had not yet given up all her dreams of going forth and conquering the world with her music—and he sat there rolling out eternity itself before her, while he and she herself, her parents, all, all became as chaff blown before the wind ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... a tale before," Masters answered, with a sneer. "Job Masters is too old a bird to be caught by such chaff. I'll take my risks, gentlemen. I'll take ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a small joke sets men laughing when they sit a-staring at one another with a pipe i' their mouths," said Mrs. Poyser. "Give Bartle Massey his way and he'd have all the sharpness to himself. If the chaff-cutter had the making of us, we should all be straw, I reckon. Totty, my chicken, go upstairs to cousin Dinah, and see what she's doing, and give her a ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... lighter traction engine which does not plough, but travels from farm to farm with a threshing machine. In autumn it is in full work threshing, and in winter drives chaff-cutters for the larger farmers. Occasionally it draws a load of coal in waggons or trucks built for the purpose. Hodge's forefathers knew no rival at plough time; after the harvest they threshed the corn all the winter ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... princely estates as Eumaeus managed in the Ionian seas. Flaxman has certainly not given him the look of a large proprietor in his outlines: his toilet is severely scant, and the old gentleman appears to have lost two of his fingers in a chaff-cutter. As for Perses, who is represented as listening to the sage,[A] his dress is in the extreme of classic scantiness,—being, in fact, a mere night-shirt, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... in you & for you & be amended by you. Bere [the] wordes of saynt Ierom in your mynde that sayth thus. Truste me verely [that] theris no thynge more peryllous to a man. than is a woman / & to a woman no thynge more contagyous than is a man / for eyther of them is chaff & eyther is fyre. And note this for a truth / [that] preuy talkyng lacketh no suspycyon. That thynge is not lefull to be seen / [that] is not lefull to be desyred. More than ony man can suppose or wryte / [the] deuyll reioyseth whan memorye of o man is fixed ...
— A Ryght Profytable Treatyse Compendiously Drawen Out Of Many and Dyvers Wrytynges Of Holy Men • Thomas Betson
... stronghold. Their fighting men, in the middle of the forests, like wild beasts, I smote. Their carcasses filled the Tigris, and the tops of the mountains. At this time the troops of the Akhe,[4] who came to the deliverance and assistance of Comukha, together with the troops of Comukha, like chaff I scattered. The carcasses of their fighting men I piled up like heaps on the tops of the mountains. The bodies of their warriors, the roaring[5] waters carried down to the Tigris. Kili Teru son of Kali Teru, son of Zarupin Zihusun, their King,[6] in the course ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... passing some ten minutes in talk and in good-humored chaff. But at last Dick broke away and drew out from the canoe talk as he saw Laura, Belle, Susie and the other girls awaiting them at a point farther up in ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... However, chaff and nonsense aside, I think I honor and appreciate your Pilgrim stock as much as you do yourselves, perhaps; and I endorse and adopt a sentiment uttered by a grandfather of mine once—a man of sturdy opinions, of sincere make of mind, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... intention of yielding; her mind and her feet were braced against any divergence from the straight road now; but the man Janet Payne had called Gregory Jessup said something that scattered her resolutions like so much chaff. ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... feels inclined for, let the quantity usually allotted for a meal be mixed, consisting, for the first week, of three parts of milk and one part of hay-tea. The only nourishing infusion of hay is that which is made from the best and sweetest hay, cut by a chaff-cutter into pieces about two inches long, and put into an earthen vessel; over this, boiling water should be poured, and the whole allowed to stand for two hours, during which time it ought to be ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... said that, Sir! Your prestige is exactly opposite to the German Emperor's prestige, but equally important to your country and to peace. It may have been a fool who said it, but it was probably chaff." ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... conquers heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have light, have guidance, freedom, immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... it. However, the general factor thought that he could not have come to a better place to get all that he wanted out of everybody. He put away his saddle, and the saddlebags and sword, in a rough old sea-chest with a padlock to it, and having a sprinkle of chaff at the bottom. Then he calmly took the key, as if the place were his, gave his horse a rackful of long-cut grass, and presented himself, with a lordly aspect, at the front door of the silent inn. ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... alongside just then, and the men passed down their "dunnage" into her amid a brisk fire of good-humoured chaff from their shipmates, and such enquiries as: "Hello, Jim, haven't you got so much as a monkey or a parrot to cheer us up with?" and so on. Then they followed their belongings down the side, and stowed themselves ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... inclined for the walk from Rye. The little train was nearly empty, and Joanna had a carriage to herself. She settled herself comfortably in a corner—it was good to be coming home, even as things were. The day was very sunny and still. The blue sky was slightly misted—a yellow haze which smelt of chaff and corn smudged together the sky and the marsh and the distant sea. The farms with their red and yellow roofs were like ripe apples lying ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... hostess to attempt to arrange a tete-a-tete after dinner under the eye of an important social leader like Lady Maulevrier, whom she had only just succeeded in enticing to stay in her country house. So, with the usual semi-political chaff, the evening passed, and good-nights and good-bys were said, and early next day ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... the style of those heroic times? 35 For nature brings not back the Mastodon, Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel models? these twelve books of mine Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth, Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt.' 'But I,' 40 Said Francis, 'pick'd the eleventh from this hearth' And have it: keep a thing, its use will come. I hoard it as a sugar-plum for Holmes.' He laugh'd, and I, tho' sleepy, like ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... fragments, like leaves of gold, silver, paper, etc." "Thus this globe," he says, "when brought rather near drops of water causes them to swell and puff up. It likewise attracts air, smoke, etc."(9) Before the time of Guericke's demonstrations, Cabaeus had noted that chaff leaped back from an "electric," but he did not interpret the phenomenon as electrical repulsion. Von Guericke, however, recognized it as such, and refers to it as what he calls "expulsive virtue." "Even expulsive ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... gather up the sunbeams Lying all along our path; Let us keep the wheat and roses Casting out the thorns and chaff. ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... The peasants chaff Slimak for living in exile like a Sibiriak.[1] It is true, they say, that he lives nearer to the church, but on the other hand he has no one ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... to make me so, but Heaven willed it otherwise. Ever since he has known of the conversion of the property into an entail, he has persecuted me with deadly hatred. He envies me this property, which in his hands would only be scattered like chaff. He is the wildest spendthrift I ever heard of. His load of debt exceeds by a long way the half of the unentailed property in Courland that fell to him, and now, pursued by his creditors, who fail not to worry him for payment, he hurries here to me to beg for money." "And ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... anemones spread out their laces; Each celandine has donned a silken gown; The violets are lifting shy sweet faces. (And there's a chiff-chaff, ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... of terror in Europe, that terrible period of mingled war and revolution, during which thrones were hurled down and dynasties swept away like chaff in a gale. The face of Europe was changed. Whole provinces were blackened and devastated by fire and sword. During the three years in which the terror was at its height it is calculated that at least four millions of men bearing arms, the flower of each land, ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... and chaff from the noisy inmates of the many Bakele villages, and worried by mangrove-flies, we held our way up the muddy and rapidly narrowing stream, whose avenues of rhizophoras and palms acted as wind-sails; when the breeze failed the sensation was stifling. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... more racing chatter to be heard at the great hairdressers' than almost anywhere else outside a race-course. Some of it is worth hearing, most of it is valueless. The difficulty, as elsewhere, is to sift the wheat from the chaff. ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... gathering Wessex men, As grain out of the chaff The few that were alive to die, Laughing, as littered skulls that lie After lost battles turn to ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... at Ochiltree, on the 22nd day of the month. The following is recounted by this personage with malicious glee, and certainly, if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed with wheat, and how ignorant, almost impious, persons were engaged in this movement; nevertheless we give it, for we wish to present with impartiality all the alleged facts to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... He didn't chaff me about my country, and make fun of our government, or hint that American men were the only men living who knew how to treat women, as he seemed to delight in doing when his sister and cousin were with us. He began by offering to teach me some of his best slang; but as the lesson ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... field; a wreck in which their boasts and hopes of the last few years met the fate which wise men had always anticipated. Oxford repudiated them. Their theories, their controversial successes, their learned arguments, their appeals to the imagination, all seemed to go down, and to be swept away like chaff, before the breath of straightforward common sense and honesty. Henceforth there was a badge affixed to them and all who belonged to them, a badge of suspicion and discredit, and even shame, which bade men beware of them, an overthrow under which it seemed wonderful that they ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... FAIR, who meet with ills like these, And nothing can their wounded minds appease: I many know howe'er, who would but laugh, And treat such accidents as light as chaff. But I have done: no more of that or this; May ev'ry belle receive her ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... must do or be swept off his feet, and when it had passed there was not one scrap of that dry alfalfa hay where I'd thrown it. I found my hat a mile distant. My nostrils and ears and eyes and mouth were literally loaded with dirt and fine hay chaff. And my hair! Heavens!" She put her hands to it. "I usually wear it in braids, you know, but to-day I thought I'd be smart and perk up a bit. Now I'll have to 'go to the cleaners,' ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: 17. Whose fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly purge His floor, and will gather the wheat into His garner; but the chaff He will burn with fire unquenchable. 18. And many other things, in his exhortation, preached he unto the people. 19. But Herod the tetrarch, being reproved by him for Herodias his brother Philip's wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done, 20. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... been give and take 'twixt him and Toomey ever since the discovery that each had served in the cavalry. Beaten thus far in the battle of chaff, the conductor tried another as he studied Geordie with ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... not Captain Dacres who had anticipated that pleasure, for while responding with the best grace he could command to the chaff and banter which began to be darted at him, he was consigning Miss Fisher, and more especially the effusive Doady, to every depth between this world and the ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... laughter and applause, for local feeling was very strong in Stokebridge, and a storm of jeers and rough chaff were poured upon the bagmen for having been brought in prisoners ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... of purification? May I ask where you are going to find it and what it is going to consist of? Oh, don't look so melodramatic! If you can put up with what you got from Riis's girl yesterday and her mother to-day, surely you can put up with a little angry talk or a little chaff from your father. I have had to put up with the whole affair—the betrothal and the breaking it off as well! And then to be sprinkled with essence of morality into the bargain! Good Lord! I hope at least I shall not smell of it still ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... haps alway, Will faintly take to fleeing, A lion's heart have I to-day For Kaiser Henry's seeing. The wheat springs forth, the chaff's behind;[12] Strike harder, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... present us with a racing stud," lisps the gunner, "but, by G——, they'll shy chaff enough at us to keep all the bloomin' horses between 'ere and 'ell, and the girls will send us a kid's feedin' bottle, as a mark of feelin' and esteem, every Valentine's Day for ten years to come, because of the glorious name we made for Australia on the bloody ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... like the ship and the commander. Captain Hemming bore a good character, as did Lieutenants Cherry and Rogers, among those who had ever sailed with them. No persons are more thoroughly discussed than are naval officers by seamen; the wheat is completely sifted from the chaff, the gold from the alloy; and many who pass for very fine fellows on shore are looked upon as arrant pretenders afloat. Jack was making his way towards the shop of Mr Woodward the bookseller, when two seamen in a happy state of indifferentism to all sublunary ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... I purpose not to dele Soo large by my wyll it longeth not to me were hit dreme or vysyon for your owne wele All that shall hit rede here rad or se Take thereof the best & let the worst be Try out the corne clene from the chaff And then may ye say ye have a ...
— The Assemble of Goddes • Anonymous
... they tramped slowly forward. The darkness grew more intense, and the chaff and laughter—for the soldiers, elated by success, had hitherto shown no sign of fatigue—died gradually away. Nothing was to be heard but the clang of accoutrements, the long rumble of the guns, and the shuffle of weary feet. Men ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... and ready for harvest, the Indians cut the wheat, and scattering the bundles over a spot of hard ground, drove oxen round and round on the sheaves till the wheat was threshed out from the straw. Then Indian women winnowed out the chaff and dirt by tossing the grain up in the wind, or from basket to basket, till in this slow way the yellow kernels were made ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... be taken in by chaff like that, he said. And indeed he fully believed, as I hoped he would, that I was making ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... learning, progress, and common sense, we had such an inadequate idea of the responsibilities of government that we elected men to office who were incapable, simply because they had carried a gun or tripped over a sword! No, no. The shrewd Yankee and the calculating Hoosier are not caught with such chaff. They selected these officers as servants of the nation because the war had served to show what sort of ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... is rotten, all our rites defiled, Our temples sullied, and, methinks, this man, With his new ordinance, so wise and mild, Is come, even as He says, the chaff to fan And sever from the wheat; but will his faith Survive the ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... tyrant, like his vile body, shall moulder in the dust. Put your trust in the Lord of hosts, he is your strong tower, he is your helper and defense, he will guide and strengthen the arm of flesh, and scatter your enemies like chaff. ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... Who else like you Could sift the seed corn from our chaff, And make us, with the pen we knew, Deathless at ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... character of small coal is, of course, owing to the fact that no ordinary furnace can burn it. But picture to yourself a blast of hot air into which powdered coal is sifted from above like ground coffee, or like chaff in a thrashing mill, and see how rapidly and completely it might burn. Fine dust in a flour mill is so combustible as to be explosive and dangerous, and Mr. Galloway has shown that many colliery explosions are due not to the presence of gas so much as the presence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... and cheese, or, for certain reasons, prefer to employ the little they make use of in its original state. Horses are rarely kept for luxury or for labour; and the few animals employed in agriculture, which are mostly asses, mules, or buffalos, subsist in the winter season on chaff and straw; and their chief support in the summer is derived from the strong grasses that grow in the ditches and the common reed, with which, in this part of the country, large tracts of swampy ground ...
— 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
... thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of God it would immediately burst forth upon you. The sovereign pleasure of God, for the present, stays his rough wind; otherwise it would come with fury, and your destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like the chaff of the summer threshing-floor. The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given; and the longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course when once it is let ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... gondoliers urging their frail craft along with tremendous strokes in unison were a magnificent spectacle. The excitement was intense towards the end, but there was no close finish. Between the races the exchange of chaff among the ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... consequently, unreliable judgment. These deficiencies are worse than handicaps to an editor. They are absolute disqualifications. An editor's first duty is to discriminate, to sift, to winnow the few grains of wheat out of the bushels of chaff that come to his mill. Editors must have a very keen sense of the fitness of things. It is true that the discriminating reader of newspapers and magazines may be tempted to feel at times that this sense of the fitness of things is very rare in editors. Unquestionably, it could be improved in ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... of an editor, much more than to illustrate the original writer. Notes have been chiefly introduced for the purpose of guarding our readers against some political sophisms, or to correct some hasty error. But happily, in the writings to which we have devoted our time and attention, the chaff and dross lie so open to view, and are so easily separated from purer matter, that a hint is sufficient to protect the most incautious from harm. Accordingly, in our notes and prefaces we have confined ourselves to simple and succinct histories ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... tired, and bored with the whole business, and stifled with the close atmosphere—laden with every graveolent horror; besides, I had not escaped from London "chaff" and Parisian persiflage, to be mocked by a wild Virginian. So I said, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... the tribute to genius, to industry, to birth, to fortune. At first he yields reluctantly to novitiate and culture; he yearns for action. His masters tell him that the world is coy, must be approached cautiously, and with something substantial in the hand. The old bird will not be caught with chaff. He does not yet understand the process of accumulation and transmutation. The fate of the Danaides is his, and he draws long with a bottomless bucket. But at last his incompetency can no further be concealed. Then he either submits ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... character as a dog is to discover from a stranger's face whether this is a friend or no? Those by-words—"atoms," "affinities"—are facts surviving in modern languages for the confusion of philosophic wiseacres who amuse themselves by winnowing the chaff of language to find its grammatical roots. We feel that we are loved. Our sentiments make themselves felt in everything, even at a great distance. A letter is a living soul, and so faithful an echo of the ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... When the chaff-piles cease their burning and the frost is closing over All the barren leagues of stubble that my lonely feet have passed, I shall spike the door and journey towards the Channel lights of Dover— That England may receive my dreams and ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... that a gentleman wished to see him, "and a real swell, too," added the boy. Andre was a good deal put out at being disturbed, but when he reached the street and saw that it was M. de Breulh-Faverlay who was waiting for him, his ill-humor disappeared like chaff before the wind. ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... were of straw, mountain grass, or green and dried rushes. Among the nine thousand people there were but two feather-beds, and but eight beds stuffed with chaff. There were but two stables and six cow-houses in the whole district. None of the women owned more than one shift, nor was there a single bonnet among them all, nor a looking-glass costing ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the review of Childe Harold, February, 1812 (xix., 476), the editor inserted a ponderous retort to this harmless and good-natured "chaff:" "To those strictures of the noble author we feel no inclination to trouble our readers with any reply ... we shall merely observe that if we viewed with astonishment the immeasurable fury with which the minor poet received the innocent pleasantry ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... I think it probable that a certain proportion of chaff—of straw cut very fine, or even saw dust, might be employed with great advantage. I wish those who have leisure would turn their thoughts to this subject, for I am persuaded that very important improvements would result from a ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... It gives a spirited description of the prudent retreat of General Huysmans, the unconditional surrender of Commandant Eybel, and winds up with a pen-and-ink sketch of Brounckers' bright boy breaking the chaff-bread of captivity in the quarters of that ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... life was spotless, yet as the judgments of God are unsearchable, as there is such a quantity of dross mixed with our purest gold, such chaff with our purest grain, our purest virtues tarnished with so many imperfections, that on appearing in the presence of God, into whose Kingdom the slightest stain is not admitted, who can say, "My soul is pure; I have nothing to answer for?" as in ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... of the sixteenth century. It is not an easy task to find the few grains of historical truth referring to him, among the chaff of popular fiction that several centuries have accumulated around his name. A halo so mysterious and miraculous surrounds his person, that not only have various other famous individuals, who lived long before or after him, been completely amalgamated with him, but even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... would have done any good. Allan was very sorry for Tom, and took more than a fair share of the blame, saying he ought to have been more careful; but he was rather distressed when he found that he had a black eye, and that it could not be well before the cricket match, when the boys would be sure to chaff him. ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... was seated at the metate (hand-mill), which is one of the most important articles of the Californian culinary apparatus. While the muchacha ground, or rather crushed, the wheat between the stones, the ranchera, with a platter-shaped basket, cleansed it of dust, chaff, and all impure particles, by tossing the grain in the basket. The flour being manufactured and sifted through a cedazo, or coarse sieve, the labour of kneading the dough was performed by the muchacha. An iron plate was then placed over a rudely-constructed furnace, and the ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... war and storm scatter them as the chaff! My liege, my royal master," continued the earl, in a deep, low, faltering voice, "why knew I not thy holy and princely heart before? Why stood so many between Warwick's devotion and a king so worthy to command it? How poor, beside thy great-hearted fortitude and thy Christian ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... novels, not very good I was told, but still, emanating from the pen of a lady, they were well paid. She was very eccentric, and rather amusing. When a woman says everything that comes into her head, out of a great deal of chaff there will drop some few grains of wheat; and so sometimes, more by accident than otherwise, she said what is called a good thing. Now, a good thing is repeated, while all the nonsense is forgotten; and Lady R—was considered a wit as well as an authoress. She was a tall ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... secret; I felt under no obligation to keep it. He deserved no mercy, and I exposed him at breakfast that very morning. But I could not help being a little sorry for him when he came in. He bent his head under the shower of reproach, chaff, and gibing; he did not try to excuse himself; he simply opened his book at the old place, and we all shouted the old ode, substituting "Betsa" for "Pyrrha" wherever we could. Still, in spite of our jocularity, we all felt an under-current ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... least disturbed nor daunted that they had failed in their former promises. Flynn's good-nature was as unfaltering as his self-esteem, perhaps because of his self-esteem. He only smiled with fatuous superiority when from time to time, after the elections, his patrons would chaff him about his failure to secure the mayoralty. They did so with more effect since there were always among the horse-players on such occasions a few who would cast votes for the barber, esteeming it as a choice and perennial joke, and his reading his ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... day to take any living interest, for example, in the ancient controversies. The "drum ecclesiastic" of the seventeenth century would sound a mere lullaby to us. Here and there a priest or a belated dissenting minister may amuse himself by threshing out once more the old chaff of dead and buried dogmas. There are people who can argue gravely about baptismal regeneration or apostolical succession. Such doctrines were once alive, no doubt, because they represented the form in which certain still ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... driven by the pangs of hunger to consume weeds and the bark of trees, fallen leaves, insects of the lowest orders and the bones of wild animals which had died in the forest. To carry a little rice openly was a rash challenge to those who still valued life, and a loaf of chaff and black mould was guarded as a precious jewel. No wife or daughter could weigh in the balance against a measure of corn, and men sold themselves into captivity to secure the coarse nourishment which the rich allotted to their slaves. Those who remained in the villages followed in Ten-teh's ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... private letter, "that one afternoon after a protest that nothing he said was to be published, I heard him discuss the prospects and the works of our ultra-modern painters. Even in fields beyond his sympathy he picked out the chaff from the wheat, and was judicially accurate in his verdicts of the difference between 'tweedle-dum' and 'tweedle-dee,' both one would have ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... in their saddles, and were ordered out to query the delay. They broke up into skirmishing parties and shook their fists at the foe. But it was all to no purpose; the foe declined to be caught with chaff, and decided "to ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... they was making." Pook, a haycock. All of a pummy, all of a moulter, because it was so very brow, describing the condition of a tree, which shattered as it fell because it was brow, i.e. brittle. Leer, empty, generally said of hunger.—See German. Hulls, chaff. The chaff of oats; used to be in favour for stuffing mattresses. Heft, Weight. To huck, to push or pull out. Scotch (howk). Stook, the foundation of a bee hive. Pe-art, bright, lively, the original word bearht for both bright and pert. Loo (or lee), sheltered. Steady, slow. "She ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... crash, there was the report of a gun from the steamer, followed almost instantly by the bursting of a shell in the very thick of the trees where the Malays had gathered, with the result that there was quite an opening rent in that part of the jungle, and the threatening party was scattered like chaff. ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... the guards' vans. Sometimes six of them would be installed on the ledge behind the funnel of the engine, with their russet faces to the wind. In the argot of Paris slums, or in the dialects of seaport towns, they hurled chaff at comrades waiting on the platforms with stacked arms, and made outrageous love to girls who ran by the side of their trains with laughing eyes and saucy tongues and a last farewell of "Bonne chance, mes petits! Bonne chance et toujours la victoire!" At every wayside halt artists ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... who knows as little of Sanscrit as of Erse Scottis or gaelic; calls England an island! and wishes to teach everyone "The ode to a Skylark," "Silas Marner,"[19] and "Tom Browne's Schooldays." (My own dear countrymen you will not be taken in by this chaff for ever, will you?) Why not study Campbells tales in gaelic, or Sir David Lindsay, or the Psalms by Waddell or ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... managed to take up an enfilading position as the Harrisons advanced to break in the door. A threatening shout from the ambuscaded partisans caused them to hurriedly fall back towards the rear of the barn. There was a pause, and then began the usual Homeric chaff,—with this Western difference that it was cunningly intended ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... than I, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire: 17 whose fan is in his hand, thoroughly to cleanse his threshing-floor, and to gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... he saw himself riding in the line of horsemen, going at full speed for a body of bloodthirsty Indians, and driving them helter-skelter like chaff before a storm. ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... Out of much you cannot understand,—wherever the blame for that may lie,—out of much slag and much dross, I am mistaken if you will not lay up some of your finest gold; and out of much straw and chaff some of the finest of the wheat. The Divine Nature, human nature, time, space, matter, life, love, sin, death, holiness, heaven, hell,—Behmen's reader must have lived and moved all his days among such things as these: he must be at home, as far as the mind of man can be at home, among ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... think I have got matters pretty straight. The question is, whether the Baron will accept my last message as chaff, or resent it. Let me see, how does it read—"It is suggested, for the President's consideration, that rumours uncorrected or unexplained acquire almost the force of admitted truth." Quite so—so they do. Let me see—"That any want of confidence between the governed and the Government must be hurtful"—well, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... He reserved his chaff for a future occasion, and only permitted himself one allusion to the state of affairs by taking Nell's hand and murmuring: "Beg pardon, Nell! Thought ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... comfortably filling his pipe, "the daughter, Miss Kirkby, was awfully good fun; so fresh, so perfectly natural and innocent, don't you know, and yet so extraordinarily sharp and clever. She had some awfully good chaff over that Scotch scenery before those Scotch tourists, do you remember? And it was all so beastly true, too. Perhaps she's ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... independent soul—flown like a bird from the cage, he thought, and was going a way that he felt would be a way of pain, and probably sorrow, yet he could not stop her. All the experience of his life was worthless to her. All that he knew of men, all that he feared of her lover, were as chaff ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... so far as to continue his visits as before; but he made it clear that he only came to see the Master and hear of Owd Bob's doings. On these occasions he loved best to sit on the window-sill outside the kitchen, and talk and chaff with Tammas and the men in the yard, feigning an uneasy bashfulness when reference made to Bessie Bolstock. And after sitting thus for some time, he would half turn, look over his shoulder, and remark in indifferent ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... blarney me. I'm too old a bird to be caught with chaff. It's a dirty shame, of course, about this man Henderson, but I'm not running the criminal ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... haunted the theatre, frolicked in company, laughed and mocked and tripped it to the flute when she saw good; nay, she would mount her anapaests, as likely as not, and pelt the friends of Dialogue with nicknames— doctrinaires, airy metaphysicians, and the like. The thing she loved of all else was to chaff them and drench them in holiday impertinence, exhibit them treading on air and arguing with the clouds, or measuring the jump of a flea, as a type of their ethereal refinements. But Dialogue continued his deep speculations ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... the rest of the fleet had passed out of sight to the eastward, scattered like chaff before the angry breath of the hurricane, and the Princess Royal was left to fight out her battle alone. By dint of almost superhuman exertions, the shattered spars had been secured, the main-sail cut away from the yard, and such other dispositions made as would ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
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