|
|
|
More "Flail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... head grain found how treat dead staid ground town beast stead waif hound growl bleat tread rail mound clown preach dread flail pound frown speak thread quail round crown streak sweat snail sound ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... the Volsung banners, and on went Sigmund before, And his sword was the flail of the tiller on the wheat of the wheat-thrashing floor, And his shield was rent from his arm, and his helm was sheared from his head: But who may draw nigh him to smite for the heap and the rampart of dead? White went his hair on ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... was the follow-up of the perfunctory hand-shake. "Let's find a place where we can flail it out," and together the two ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... later MacLure came out from Annie's room and laid hold of Tammas, a heap of speechless misery by the kitchen fire, and carried him off to the barn, and spread some corn on the threshing floor and thrust a flail into ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... planted, and, in different ways, breaks and bruises the grain. Is he inconsistent because he ploughs in winter and reaps in harvest? Does his carrying the seed-basket at one time make it impossible that he shall come with flail and threshing-oxen at another? Are not all the various operations co-operant to one end? Does not the end need them all? Is not one purpose going steadily forward through ploughing, sowing, reaping, threshing? Is not that like the work of the great Husbandman, who changes His methods and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... gate by a little green man with a queer cap who had been seen slipping under a culvert? Canon Atkinson told us of this lady who knew all these strange things, and of the Hart Hall "Hob" who worked so hard with his flail, and of many other curious folk who frequented the Yorkshire moors in olden days. The last witch had just died before he went to Danby, but he found the whole atmosphere of the folklore firmament so surcharged with the being and work of the witch, that he seemed ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... tactics. He was wary as a cat. He went cautiously. Yet again he assumed the aggressive, gradually working the Jam-wagon into a corner. A collision was inevitable; there was no means of escape for my friend; that huge bulk, with its swinging, flail-like arms, menaced him hopelessly. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... for advocating the cause of his distressed fellow-creatures, including noblemen, squires, yeomanry, farmers, and all yearly subscribers in the New Proprietary Agricultural Anti-Innovating-Shire Weekly Gazette. At the head of his newspaper Uncle Jack caused to be engraved a crown, supported by a flail and a crook, with the motto, "Pro rege et grege." And that was the way in which Uncle Jack ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Hesketh could administer to her repentant Job was that of the tongue. In her early matrimonial life she had wielded this like a flail, and Job had winced before the blows which she delivered. But in course of time she had come to realise that her husband's passion for the chase was incurable, and, like a wise woman, she accepted it as part of her destiny. "Thou's bin ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... her power and her strength again, followed close. And like blows of a flail, the sputtering, flaring flame beat down ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... both, As ripe in years as culture, verily To miss that voice two worlds are loth, In which much wisdom spake so merrily. A voice, and no mere echo, thine, Of many tones, but manly ever. Thy rustic Biglow's rugged line A grateful world neglecteth never! It smote hypocrisy and cant With flail-like force; sleek bards that ripple Like shallow pools—who pose and pant, And vaguely smudge or softly stipple,— These have not brain or heart to sing As Biglow sang, our quaint Hosea, Whose ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various
... removed, one formidable difficulty still remained in the way of the rice planters, and that was the threshing of the crop by flail. The labor requisite to accomplish this was so great, that we once heard a distinguished planter say, while having one large crop threshed out by flail, that he would regard another large crop as a calamity. Previous to 1830 threshing mills had been tried by various individuals, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... characteristics of the period 1820-40, therefore, is the invention and introduction of such machinery. Boards were now planed, and bricks pressed, by machine. It was during this period that the farmers began to give up the flail for the thrashing machine; that paper was extensively made from straw; that Fairbanks invented the platform scales; that Colt invented the revolver; that steel pens were made by machine; and that a rude form of friction ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... woman dumb. Stay—one there was who found a tongue And still retained her strength of lung. Freydissa, beauteous matron bold, Resolved to give that whale a scold! But little cared that monster fish To gratify Freydissa's wish; He shook his tail, that naughty whale, And flourished it like any flail, And, ho! for Vinland ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Lord and of Gideon," Gib made a great lunge at me with his fist. But the sword of Gideon missed its aim, and skinned its knuckles on the stone wall. I saw now to my great comfort that the man was beside himself with fury, and was swinging his arms wildly like a flail. Three or four times I avoided his rushes, noting with satisfaction that one of the countrymen had got hold of the shrieking Isobel. Then my chance came, for as he lunged I struck from the side with all my ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... knew that, so handicapped, she could never reach them, and with shaking, fumbling fingers she set herself to unfasten the straps that bound the skis. It took her a long, long time—all the longer for her fevered haste. And still that awful, flail-like sound went on and on, though all sound of voices ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... how the drudging Goblin sweat To earn his cream-bowl duly set, When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn That ten day labourers ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... niver no good a threshin' other folks' corn; ye allays gits the flail agin' i' yer own ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... silent man, who was a marvel of strength and endurance. The work in which he most delighted was precisely that which most labourers hated, before threshing machines came in despite the action of the "mobs"—threshing out corn with the flail. From earliest dawn till after dark he would sit or stand in a dim, dusty barn, monotonously pounding away, without an interval to rest, and without dinner, and with no food but a piece of bread and a pinch ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... is not known, but the fact remains that bowlers in village matches, whatever their other shortcomings, seldom fall short in the matter of speed. The present trundler, having swung his arm round like a flail, bounded to the crease and sent down a ball which hummed in the air. It pitched halfway between the wickets in a slight hollow caused by the foot of a cow and shot. Dick reached blindly forward, and the next moment his off-stump was out of ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... happened in a flash. Like lightning his right wing came round with a terrific flail-stroke, and hit Pig Head in the face at the precise instant that the surgical instrument he carried as his beak sank deep into one of Pig Head's calves. The Chieftain was upside-down at the moment, and his legs ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... with friend and foe, At home che hold the plough by th' tail: Che dig, che delve, che zet, che zow, Che mow, che reap, che ply my flail. A pair of dice is thy delight, Thou liv'st for most part by the spoil: I truly labour day and night To get my living by my toil. Chill therefore sure this issue make: The best ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... drudging goblin swet, To earn the cream-bowl, duly set; When, in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail had thresh'd the corn, That ten day-lab'rers could not end; Then lies him down the lubbar fiend, And, stretch'd out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength; And, crop-full, out of doors he flings, E'er the first cock ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... bright eye and legs like gate-posts, but he never fell down with us boys, for all that. If we fell off he stopped still and began to feed, so that he suited us all to pieces. We soon got sharp enough to flail him along with a quince stick, and we used to bring up the milkers, I expect, a good deal faster than was good for them. After a bit we could milk, leg-rope, and bail up for ourselves, and help dad brand the calves, which began to come pretty thick. ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... here, Christmas comes but once a year, But when it comes it brings good cheer, And when it's gone it's no longer near. May luck attend the milking-pail, Yule logs and cakes in plenty be, May each blow of the thrashing-flail Produce good frumenty. And let the Wassail Cup abound, Whene'er the mummers' ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of the field of Mars, which Tarquin had owned, was devoted to the service of that god; it happening to be harvest season, and the sheaves yet being on the ground, they thought it not proper to commit them to the flail, or unsanctify them with any use; and, therefore, carrying them to the river side, and trees withal that were cut down, they cast all into the water, dedicating the soil, free from all occupation, to the deity. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... with its plaintive whistle, And pecks by the witch-hazel, whilst aloud From cottage roofs the warbling blue-bird sings, And merrily, with oft-repeated stroke, Sounds from the threshing-floor the busy flail. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... along the way. Here lived burgesses who daily walked the fallow; shepherds in an intra-mural squeeze. A street of farmers' homesteads—a street ruled by a mayor and corporation, yet echoing with the thump of the flail, the flutter of the winnowing-fan, and the purr of the milk into the pails—a street which had nothing urban in it whatever—this was the ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... his usual savageness and activity. It whirled round his adversary's head with frightful rapidity. Now it carried away a feather of his plume; now it shore off a leaf of his coronet. The flail of the thrasher does not fall more swiftly upon the corn. For many minutes it was the Unknown's only task to defend himself from the tremendous activity ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... it mean, to condescend To know a brother or a friend; They blush to hear their mother's name, And by their pride expose their shame. As cross his yard, at early day, A careful farmer took his way, 10 He stopped, and leaning on his fork, Observed the flail's incessant work. In thought he measured all his store, His geese, his hogs, he numbered o'er; In fancy weighed the fleeces shorn, And multiplied the next year's corn. A Barley-mow, which stood beside, Thus to its musing master cried: 'Say, good sir, is it fit or ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... emerge, rather ridiculously, theatrical lodgings, provincial theatres, the arcades at Birmingham. And a blue straw hat that he had bought for her long ago; and at last her name. Kitty Messenger, and her mother, a golden-haired actress with a tongue like a flail in one temper, like the honey-seeking proboscis of ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... from clouds; but light mist may do so. Who is the mother of the buds? In what way are they "rocked to rest"? How does the mother "dance about the sun"? Do you like the sound of the line, "I wield the flail of the lashing hail"? There are five "l's" in the line and they give it that liquid sound which you like. Did you ever see a farmer standing in the midst of a floor covered with stalks of grain, beating out the kernels with a flail? What does the word "under" mean here? (An adverb, and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... be mad as soin as yo heard, Abaat that oud kaa at belonged to Blue Beard, For I like as I saw yo just hod of its tail, And braying it rump wi th' end o' yor flail; For I wisht monny a time at yo'd been here, For swallowing th' plan yo'd a geen it ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced; Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reach'd the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... readily guess the struggle of feeling to which this honest young fellow fell a prey when we read the letter that he now indited, in which every stroke of the flail which scourged his conscience will be found to have ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... can dwell on; Her heart's like a lemon—so nice She carves for each lover a slice; In truth she's to me, Like the wind, like the sea, Whose raging will hearken to no man; Like a mill, like a pill, Like a flail, like a whale, Like an ass, like a glass Whose image is constant to no man; Like a shower, like a flower, Like a fly, like a pie, Like a pea, like a flea, Like a thief, like—in brief, She's like nothing on ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... swung his cutlass and made an arc of blue flame. The weapon became in his hands a flail, terrible to look upon, making lightnings and whistling in the air, but in reality not so deadly as it seemed. The fury of his onslaught would have beaten down the guard of any mere swordsman, but that I was not. A man, knowing ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... could see nothing else in the wide universe. Here were men whose faith had embodied itself in the form of a potato; and others whose long beards had a deep spiritual significance. Here was the abolitionist, brandishing his one idea like an iron flail. In a word, there were a thousand shapes of good and evil, faith and infidelity, wisdom and nonsense, —a most ...
— The Hall of Fantasy (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lame man sharpening a scythe, and beside him a little child lay among the broken corn that was strewn over the whole platform. Where the battlements had once frowned, now stood sheaves of smiling corn, golden and nodding in the wind and the sun. Suddenly the lad who had led me hither seized the flail and began to beat the corn and stalks strewn over the floor, while the old man, quavering a little, sang a long-drawn-out gay melody, and the little girl beat her tiny hands in time to the work and the music. Then, unheard, into ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... I harnessed eight dogs to my plough, and ploughed up my little fields; and, after making a harrow, I harrowed in my wheat with the dogs. The first year I had thirty 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, ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... into a knot in the center of the inclosure. Then the brazen sun looked down upon a Homeric struggle. Bulger, brawny warrior of the iron hook, swung his musket like a flail, every now and again shooting forth his more sinister weapon with terrible effect. Desmond, slim and athletic, dashed in upon the enemy with his half pike as they recoiled before Bulger's whirling musket. The rest, now a bare dozen, Bengalis though they were, ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... not go alone, for his men leapt after him like hounds. But he fought his way in the lead with a clubbed rifle, and stood over Kagig's body working the weapon like a flail. That was all I saw of that encounter, for Mahmoud decided to attempt escape by the upper way again, and it was I who captured him. I landed on him through the darkness with my clenched fist under the low hung angle of his jaw and, seizing his leg, threw him out ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... The flail-finned thresher and steel-beaked sword-fish Only attempt to do what all do wish: The thresher backs him, and to beat begins; The sluggard whale leads to oppression, And t' hide himself from shame and danger, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... there are but a few, sometimes none. So many are built in the fields and threshed there "to rights," as the bailiff would say. It is not needful to have them near home or keep them, now the threshing-machine has stayed the flail and emptied the barns. Perhaps these are the only two losses to those who look at things and mete them with the eye—the corn-ricks and the barns. The corn-ricks were very characteristic, but even now you may see plenty if you look directly after harvest. The barns are going ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... up silently, holding a naked dagger in his left hand and thrashing the laboring sides of his chestnut horse with his whip as if it were a flail. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... house was as big and as strong as a jail; With a cruel four-pounder, he kept in great order, He'd murder the country, would Larry M'Hale. He'd a blunderbuss too, of horse-pistols a pair; But his favorite weapon was always a flail. I wish you could see how he'd empty a fair, For he handled it neatly, did ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the Red Axe became like iron, but my joints were loose and swung easily as a flail ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... thick as harvests beneath hail, Grass before scythes, or corn below the sickle, Proving that trite old truth, that life 's as frail As any other boon for which men stickle. The Turkish batteries thrash'd them like a flail, Or a good boxer, into a sad pickle Putting the very bravest, who were knock'd Upon the head, before ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... But now, what a change had come! Instead of well-stored barns, he had only a little wheat, which he had contrived to conceal from the Arab invaders; and, instead of its being trodden out by plump oxen, he was glad to beat it with a stick, not possessing even the poor man's flail, and hiding in a winepress, where no one would ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... men were already busy at it. There were twelve threshing-floors, and the twelve men were at work on six of them—two on each. Hans must thresh by himself all that was lying upon the other six floors. He went out to the barn and got hold of a flail. Then he looked to see how the others did it and did the same, but at hte first stroke he smashed the flail in pieces. There were several flails hanging there, and Hans took the one after the other, but they all went the same way, every one flying in splinters at the ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... 'mid the ruddy wheat, The thumping of the flail, The winnowing within the barn By whirling ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge
... frae East to Wast, An' the rein catched the grey mear's tail, An' her heels to save her hin'er en' Gaed lashin' like a flail. An' the haill apotheck lay in spails, As the grey mear warsled free; An' when auld Jock Smairt saw the fashion o' his cairt: "Wha's seekin' ony ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... neck particularly rigid. Delora Bunker, stenographer at St. Ronan's mill, followed. Last came Patrolman Rellihan, his bulk nigh filling the door, his helmeted head almost scraping the lintel. He carried a night-stick that resembled a flail-handle rather than the usual locust club. Morrison slammed the door and Rellihan put his back ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... fell as thick as harvests beneath hail, Grass before scythes, or corn below the sickle, Proving that trite old truth, that Life's as frail As any other boon for which men stickle. The Turkish batteries thrashed them like a flail, Or a good boxer, into a sad pickle Putting the very bravest, who were knocked Upon the head ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... the Kuru forces, strong as Death's resistless flail, Human chiefs nor bright Immortals could ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... known it would be driven back—here and then here and then here. It has been fighting night and day. It has made the most splendid fight—and the most ineffectual fight.... You see the vast swing of the German flail through Belgium. And meanwhile we have been standing about talking of the use we would ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... farm telephony. The cost of an efficient farm system is now so little—not more than two dollars a month, that the present trashy lines are certain sooner or later to go to the junk-heap with the sickle and the flail and all the ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... of rapier, poniard, and pistols, which were placed nevertheless, at no great distance from his chair. One offensive implement, indeed, he thought it prudent to keep on the table beside his huge Coke upon Lyttleton. This was a sort of pocket flail, consisting of a piece of strong ash, about eighteen inches long, to which was attached a swinging club of lignum-vitae, nearly twice as long as the handle, but jointed so as to be easily folded up. This instrument, which bore at that ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... it is supposed that those who remained behind existed upon the grain in the warehouses, and what they could thresh by the flail from the crops left neglected in the fields. But as the provisions in the warehouses were consumed or spoiled, they hunted the animals, lately tame and as yet but half wild. As these grew less in number and difficult to ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... of arduous activity. Let but a flock of wild pigeons fly across the valley and all Sleepy Hollow was wide awake in an instant. The pigeon season had arrived. Every gun and net was forthwith in requisition. The flail was thrown down on the barn floor; the spade rusted in the garden; the plough stood idle in the furrow; every one was to the hillside and stubble-field at daybreak to shoot or entrap the ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... thirsting flowers From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their Mother's breast As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under; And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... threshing some of this corn with a flail. I heard of it with astonishment. "A flail?" "Yes," he said; "my old dad put me to it when I was seventeen, so I had to learn." He seemed to think little of it. But to me threshing by hand was so ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... cried, as his breath came and went in gusts,—"there I sat, a poor barrow-back't creature, and heard that old savvorless loon spit his spite at my lass. I'm none of a brave man, Ralph: no, I must be a coward, but I went nigh to snatching up yon flail of his and striking him—aye, killing him!—but no, it must be that I'm ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... this board Burke's, Goldsmith's knees Were often thrust—so runs the tale— 'Twas here the Doctor took his ease And wielded speech that like a flail Threshed out the golden truth. All hail, Great souls! that met on nights like these Till morning made the candles pale, And revellers ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... farmer took his way Across his yard at break of day: He leant a moment o'er the rail, To hear the music of the flail; In his quick eye he viewed his stock,— The geese, the hogs, the ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... fertilizing his fields. The farming implements in use showed little of that mechanical ingenuity which is now characteristic of the American people. The plough was still a clumsy affair with heavy beam and handles, and wooden mould-board. The scythe, the sickle, and the flail were the same as their ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... shall come to poverty. {49b} Many that have begun the world with Plenty, have gone out of it in Rags; through drunkenness. Yea, many Children that have been born to good Estates, have yet been brought to a Flail & a Rake, through this beastly ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... celebrated night of the laying of the foundation stone I had the pleasure of witnessing a rough-and-tumble fight between two of the most powerful men in Coolgardie. The excitement was intense as one seized his antagonist, and, using him as a flail, proceeded to clear the room with him; he retaliated by overpowering the other man, and finally breaking his leg as they fell heavily together out through the door on to the hard street beyond. How much ill-feeling this little incident engendered may be judged from the fact that the maimed ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... kinds of costumes, and armed with all kinds of fire-arms, but chiefly the deadly rifle, which they knew so well bow to use. Old men, middle-aged men, young men, and often mere boys, like the "minute-men" of the old Revolution, they left the plough in the furrow, the flail on the half-threshed sheaves, the unfinished iron upon the anvil,—in short, dropped all their peculiar avocations, and with their leathern pouches full of bullets and their ox-horns full of powder, poured into the city by every highway and by-way ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... scandalising the old-fashioned village folk—who did not believe in such new-fangled notions, and thought a judgment would come on those having to do with the machine, depriving, as it did, honest men who could wield the flail of a job! ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... and myself into the fray, however, turned the tide of battle in our favor. Joe had caught up the chair to which he had been bound, and wielded it like a flail, with every swing of it breaking a head or snapping an arm. And my musket took a heavy toll. The room rang with the din of battle—the shouts of the men, the whoops of the negroes, the clashing of our weapons. For half a minute it was perfect ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... darkness back; Streaming, gleaming, I will goad them to my glory and my fame. Bring me gnarly limbs of live-oak, aid me in my frenzied fight; Strips of iron-wood, scaly blue-gum, writhing redly in my hold; With my lunge of lurid lances, with my whips that flail the night, They will burgeon into beauty, they will foliate in gold. Let me star the dim sierras, stab with light the inland seas; Roaming wind and roaring darkness! seek no mercy at my hands; I will mock the marly heavens, lamp the purple prairies, I will flaunt my deathless ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... the bar,—so runs the ancient tale; 'T was hammered by an Antwerp smith, whose arm was like a flail; And now and then between the strokes, for fear his strength should fail, He wiped his brow and quaffed a cup of good old ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Caedmon's had, With power reserved at need to reach The Roman forum's loftiest speech, Sweet with persuasion, eloquent In passion, cool in argument, Or, ponderous, falling on thy foes As fell the Norse god's hammer blows. Crushing as if with Talus' flail Through Error's logic-woven mail, And failing only when they tried The adamant of the righteous side,— Thou, foiled in aim and hope, bereaved Of old friends, by the new deceived, Too soon for us, too soon for thee, Beside thy lonely Northern sea, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... the eye, And perhaps produced the very faintest sigh For such-like beauties on a larger scale, Where sweeping meadows meet the azure sky, And florid milk-maids bear their bounteous pail, And breezes waft the sound of winnow and of flail. ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... drive that there cow over to Sam's, and if you dare bring her back agin, I'll hide yer with the flail till yer can't ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... all, there was none whose rage made him cold and his anger merry. However they were, they could scarcely have faced the hard glitter of his blue eyes, the smile of his fixed lips. He could have carved with a dagger, with a bludgeon, a flail, or a whip. As it was, to a long arm was added a long sword, which whistled through the air, but through flesh went quiet. There had been blows at first from behind and at the side of him. The long mowing ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... beautiful microscopic hawk, which would have made a lovely watch-charm, was attached by a thread to a necklace of small plates of blue glass, to which was hung also a sort of amulet in the shape of a flail, made of turquoise-blue enamel. Some of the plates had become semi-opaque, no doubt owing to the heat of the boiling bitumen which had been poured over them, and then ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... speaks my pensive self, "that he Whose passion 'tis to sing of men who fail,— (Belabored, broken by The Unseen Flail) Small wonder that ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... down a bent which the road climbed, and with them were three men, their drovers, and they drew nigh him as he was amidst of the sheep, so that he could scarce see the way. Each of these three had a weapon; one a pole-axe, another a long spear, and the third a flail jointed and bound with iron, and an anlace hanging at his girdle. So they stood in the way and hailed him when the sheep were gone past; and the man with the spear asked him whither away. "I am turned toward Higham-on-the-Way," quoth he; "and how many miles shall I ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... of a flail, depend on it: wan no use wi'out t'other. Then theer's the singing of the auld song: who's gwaine to say that's the least ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... John. Devout was my intent; I haunted meetings, Used zealous greetings, Crept full of devotion; Smectymnuus won me first, then holy Nye prevail, (111) Then Captain Kiffin (112) slops me with John of Leyden's tail, Then Fox and Naylor bangs me with Jacob Beamond's flail. (113) Alas! ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... earnest, came creeping about in the night and was going to take away the sheep. But the farmer, to whom the faithful Sultan had told the wolf's plan, caught him and dressed his hide soundly with the flail. The wolf had to pack off, but he cried out to the dog, "Wait a bit, you scoundrel, you shall ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... behalf, he was refused, and the brawny son and heir of the well-to-do citizen told of the incident, and was idiot enough in Percy's presence to repeat this old village saw as the reason of the refusal, it nearly led to tragedy. Seizing the first available weapon, a flail, which he wielded with uncommon skill, in one mad moment the indignant youth smote the other hip and thigh,—the first, and for years the only, time he was ever known to lose control of himself. In ten seconds the battered ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... element that startled and astonished him. He had expected to see the furious Fogg join the mob and aid them in finishing up their dastardly work. Instead, like some madman, Fogg had waded into the ranks of the group, swinging his formidable weapon like a flail. It rose, it fell, it swayed from side to side, and its ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... as the shack. While the real pioneer uses whatever material he finds at hand, it does no harm for him to know that to make a really good thatch one should use only straw which is fully ripe and has been thrashed clean with an old-fashioned flail. The straw must be clear of all seed or grain and kept straight, not mussed up, crumpled, and broken. If any grain is left in the straw it will attract field-mice, birds, domestic mice and rats, domestic turkeys and chickens, and ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... and get down,' said the officer quietly, and the men crawled back and crouched low again. For a full hour the line lay under the flail of the big shells that roared and shrieked overhead and thundered crashing along the trenches. For a full hour the men barely moved, except to shift along from a spot where the shaken and crumbling parapet gave insufficient cover from ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... all of steel, Where the rolling caissons wheel, Brought a rumble and a roar Rolling down that velvet floor, And like blows of autumn flail Sharply ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... hammer and a "make-believe" curtain. No!—hammer away, like Charles Martel; "fillip me with a three-man beetle;" be to me a malleus hereticorum; come like Spenser's Talus—an iron man with an iron flail, and thresh out the straw of my logic; rack me; put me to the question; get me down; jump upon me; kick me; throttle me; put an end to me in any ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... crash upon the two or three Frenchmen nearest me. The force of the blow made my arm tingle to the elbow, but it swept the Frenchmen down as though it had been a scythe, and caused those behind to recoil in terror. Another flail-like sweep proved equally effective, the cutlasses raised to guard the blows being as useless as so many wands, and when I followed it up with a third it proved too much for the Frenchmen, who, seeing ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... drizzling rain whitened the distant hills, that seemed to blanch in their helplessness as the wind smote them like a flail; and it wove a grayish veil over the leafless boughs of bending, shivering elms, on the long, dim avenue. The wintry afternoon closed swiftly, and, in its dusky dreariness, Salome listened to the tattoo of the rain on the roof, and to the miserere that wailed through ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... escape and get away over the fence. Then they all set upon Tom, but by G—— it was glorious to see the way in which he held his own. Out came that cross of his, four foot and a half long, with a thong as heavy as a flail. He soon had the road clear around him, and the big black horse you remember, stood as steady as a statue till he was bidden to move on. Then when he had the hounds, and Barney Smith and the whips to himself,—and I was there—we all rode off at ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... the racquet should do the work. The ball willingly goes where the racquet head directs it. Do not flail or attempt to push your shots. Hit them crisply with the snap of your cocked wrist, and at all times attempt to regiment ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... James one feels like a wisp of straw floating down a wide smooth river; reading Meredith one is flicked and flapped and beaten, as if beneath a hand with a flail. ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... of whose tall elms We may discern the thresher at his task, Thump after thump resounds the constant flail That seems to swing uncertain, and yet falls Full on the destined ear. Wide flies the chaff, The rustling straw sends up a fragrant mist Of atoms, sparkling ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... to peer through the leaves of Plug Street Wood at No Man's Land between the lines, where every creature had been killed by the sweeping flail of machine-guns and shrapnel. Along the harvest-fields there were many barren territories like that, and up by Hooge, along the edge of the fatal crater, and behind the stripped trees of Zouave Wood there was no other gleaning to be had but that of broken shells and shrapnel ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... stories told of many a feat. How Fairy Mab the junkets eat; She was pinch'd and pull'd she said. And he by Frier's lapthorp led; Tells how the drudging goblin sweat To earn his cream-bowl duly set, When in one night ere glimpse of morn His shadowy flail had thresh'd the corn Which ten day-labourers could not end. Then lies him down the ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... hands, and with a swift movement discarded robe and yashmak, and stood before him, in the clinging draperies of an ancient queen, wearing the leopard skin and the uraeus, and carrying the flail of royal Egypt! ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... The whip fell flail-like, with absolute precision and regularity. It spared no part of him. His coat was nearly torn off. In one place, on the shoulder, the white shirt was exposed, and this also was streaked ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... hours for play! Gait, dress, domicile, furniture, throughout all his poetry, are Scottish as their dialect; and sometimes, in the pride of his heart, he rejoices by such nationality to provoke some alien's smile. The sickle, the scythe, and the flail, the spade, the mattock, and the hoe, have been taken up more cheerfully by many a toil-worn cottar, because of the poetry with which Burns has invested the very implements of labour. Now and then, too, here and there peals forth the clangour of the war-trumpet. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... truth, an excellently devout and worthy woman!—for scarcely were we out of the village, when so fearful a storm of thunder, lightning, wind, and hail burst over our heads, that the corn all around us was beaten down as with a flail, and the horses before the coach were quite maddened; however, it did not last long. But my poor child had to bear all the blame again, [Footnote: Such sudden storms were attributed to witches.] inasmuch as Dom. Consul thought that it was not old Lizzie, which, nevertheless, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... shed where the air circulates freely is an admirable place, since the natural temperature of the air is sufficient in the case of seeds to bring about good results. Usually in less than a week the tops will have become dry enough to be beaten out with a light flail or a rod. In this operation great care must be taken to avoid bruising or otherwise injuring the seed. The beating should therefore be done in a sheet spread upon a lawn or at least upon short grass. The force of the blows will thus be lessened and ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... to turn its energies in a backward direction. It would be just as reactionary in the political world as it would be in the industrial world to revert back to hand-tool production; to substitute the ox-team for the railway system, the hand-loom for the power-loom, the flail for the threshing-machine, the sickle for the modern harvesting-machine, the human courier ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... hereto have clearly before the mind, as it is very apt to be overlooked. At the time of St. Columba's ministry, England, which during the lifetime of St. Patrick had been Roman and Christian, had now under the iron flail of its Saxon conquerors lapsed back into Paganism. Ireland, therefore, which for a while had made a part of Christendom, had been broken short off by the heathen conquest of Britain. It was now a small, isolated fragment of Christendom, with a great mass of heathenism between. We can easily ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... state of siege. The trainbands were under arms all night. Preparations were made for barricading the great thoroughfares. Patrols marched up and down the streets. Cannon were planted round Whitehall. No citizen thought himself safe unless he carried under his coat a small flail loaded with lead to brain the Popish assassins. The corpse of the murdered magistrate was exhibited during several days to the gaze of great multitudes, and was then committed to the grave with strange and terrible ceremonies, which indicated ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... inexorable hand tears away from his ships and his merchandise;—the storm-tossed ship, with Death snapping the mast;—a Count, dressed in the extreme of courtly splendor, who recognizes Death in the disguise of a peasant who has flung down his flail to seize his lordship's emblazoned shield and dash it to pieces;—a Duchess, whom one skeleton drags rudely from her canopied bed, while another scrapes upon a violin;—a Peddler;—a Ploughman, of whose four-horse team Death is the driver;—Gamblers, Drunkards, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... us as unjust as it would be to compare the best baker in London with Robinson Crusoe, who, before he could bake a single loaf, had to make his plough and his harrow, his fences and his scarecrows, his sickle and his flail, his mill ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... measured closely up to the value of a farthing's-worth of capacity. A shilling's difference per acre in the cost of ploughing by horse-flesh or steam brings the latter into the field. The sound of the flail is dying out of the land, and soon will be heard no more. Even threshing machines worked by horses are being discarded, as too slow and old-fashioned. Locomotive steam-engines, on broad-rimmed wheels, may be met on the turnpike road, travelling on their own legs from farm to ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... Yet, surely the railroads are new? No; not at all. Talus, the iron man in Spenser, who continually ran round the island of Crete, administering gentle warning and correction to offenders, by flooring them with an iron flail, was a very ancient personage in Greek fable; and the received opinion is, that he must have been a Cretan railroad, called The Great Circular Coast-Line, that carried my lords the judges on their circuits ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... has better secured the harvests, and it is computed that the 230,000 threshing machines used in the United States in 1870 obtained five per cent. more grain from the sheaves which passed through them than could have been secured by the use of the flail. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... States Constitution seem to me more ingenious than convincing. But, constitutional or not, the compromise is reasonable; and though people in the South still feel, as one of them put it to me, that the Republican party "may yet wield the flail of the negro over them," the flail has been laid aside long enough to permit the South, in the main, to recover its peace of mind and its self-respect. The negro problem is still difficult enough, as many ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... had two furious wings, Each one upon each shoulder; With a sting in his tail as long as a flail, Which made him bolder and bolder. He had long claws, and in his jaws Four and forty teeth of iron; With a hide as tough as any buff, Which did him ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... a hide-bound flail; Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer oiled his Tonk jezail; Yar Mahommed Yusufzai spat and grinned with glee As he ground ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the church were called up by the Japanese, who stepped down and ran his fingers along the floor. "Look at this dust," he said. Ordering the two men to sit down on the floor, he beat them with a flail, over the shoulders. ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... himself is treated in this way in South America. The Sulphur Tyrant-bird picks up a young snake by the tail, and, flying to a branch or stone, uses it like a flail until ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... comfortable, and warm. Over where she sat, jutted out the "brace" well lined with bacon; to the right hung a well-scoured salt-box, and to the left was the jamb, with its little paneless window to admit the light. Within it hung several ash rungs, seasoning for flail-sooples, or boulteens, a dozen of eel-skins, and several stripes of horse-skin, as hangings for them. The dresser was a "parfit white," and well furnished with the usual appurtenances. Over the ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... shown a short-handled flail, which is about 2-1/2 ft. long with a dark handle of wood, studded with brass or steel nails. A steel band is placed around the handle near the top. The imitation of the steel band is made by gluing a piece ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... attached to the position of stockholder in the New-York Tribune. Mr. GREELEY conceives some of his most brilliant editorial articles while churning the mercurial milk of the Chappaqua farm into butter; or vexing the gracious grain with the flying flail; or listening to the pensive murmurings of the plaintive pigs, and the whispered cadences of the kindly cattle. RICHARD GRANT WHITE can't write, it is said, until a towel moistened with Cologne water is applied to his nostrils. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... begin when three fourths of the leaves have fallen and most of the pods are ripe. Do not wait, however, until the pods are so dry that they have begun to split and drop their seeds. A slight amount of dampness on the plants aids the cutting. The threshing may be done with a flail, with pea-hullers, or ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... campaign may be crudely stated as follows: Regard that extended line as a flail ready to fall, hinged near Verdun, moved in a circle until the northern tip, under command of Von Kluck, should fall with all the energy Germany could put into the blow on Paris. In the meantime, the other armies would crush back, outflank, defeat, and capture the small British and hastily ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... to potatoes. Another food plant, almost unknown to Europeans, even those who live in Lima, is canihua, a kind of pigweed. It was being harvested at the time of our visit in April. The threshing floor for canihua is a large blanket laid on the ground. On top of this the stalks are placed and the flail applied, the blanket serving to prevent the small grayish seeds from escaping. The entire process uses nothing of European origin and has probably not ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... light from the fire on her face, and on her hair, and on her bare arms, I was minded o' th' angel that walked i' the fiery furnace with th' men in holy writ. And when a pounded away at a shoe, and her young arm going like a flail—chink, chank—chink, chank—and th' white spatters o' hot iron flying this way and that from th' anvil, meseemed 'twas as though Dame Venus (for thou knowest how in th' masque twelve year gone this Yuletide 'twas shown as how a great dame called Venus ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... out to talk of the work on the farm. The threshing was mostly done in winter with the hickory flail, one shock of fifteen sheaves making a flooring. On the dry cold days the grain shelled easily. After a flooring had been thrashed over at least three times, the straw was bound up again in sheaves, the floor completely raked over and the grain ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... be noticed separately, but one thing is absolutely certain, that a much higher standard of usefulness, both in equality of length, amount of anchylosis, and position, is needed in the lower than in the upper limb. For a leg hanging like a flail, or shortened by some inches, is not so good for purposes of locomotion as a wooden leg is, while an arm, even though powerless at the elbow, and perhaps much shortened, can be so strengthened and supported by slings and bandages as to give ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... Goblin swet, To earn his cream-bowl duly set, When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath thresh'd the corn, That ten day-labourers ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... angle of the bank was not steep and the elephant's speed never slackened on the slope. Its right shoulder struck a sapling and the sapling splintered. It was crashing forward in full charge. Again it trumpeted, trunk extended like a flail of doom. ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... verily To miss that voice two worlds are loth, In which much wisdom spake so merrily. A voice, and no mere echo, thine, Of many tones, but manly ever. Thy rustic Biglow's rugged line A grateful world neglecteth never! It smote hypocrisy and cant With flail-like force; sleek bards that ripple Like shallow pools—who pose and pant, And vaguely smudge or softly stipple,— These have not brain or heart to sing As Biglow sang, our quaint Hosea, Whose "Sunthin in the Pastoral line," Full primed with picture and idea, Lives, with "The Courtin'," ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various
... knitting, and holding by the chair, he stood trembling and quivering with gladness, while, summoned by the dog's bark, Patience, pail in hand, appeared on one side, and Ben, tall and slight, with his flail, on ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They went through the world, like Sir Artegal's iron man Talus with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, nor to be withstood by ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the men in the early morning was rather unique. A man with a stick—a heavy stick that reminded me of an Irish flail—thumped the bare floor, and, to my astonishment, there was a rush of this savage-looking, naked crowd to the door. As I knew no reason for the excitement, ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... barons bold, "in vain are mace and mail, We fall before the Norman axe, as corn before the flail." "And vainly," cry the pious monks, "by Mary's shrine we kneel, For prayers, like arrows glance aside, against the Norman steel." The barons groaned, the shavelings wept, while near and nearer drew, As death-birds round their scented feast, ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... times, the crops of wheat and oats, rye and barley, were gathered with a sickle; the grain was thrashed with a flail; the grass in the meadows was cut with a scythe. But, now, all this is changed; on the great prairies of the West, the wheat, rye and oats are cut by the reaper, and with a steady hum the thrashing-machine does its work of ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... pointed to a bed in the corner of a large apartment, whose beautiful painted ceiling and cornice, and fine chimney-piece with caryatides of white marble, ill accorded with the heaps of oats and corn, the thrashing cloth and flail, which ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... scrambled to their feet and responded. Their cheers rang out. One of them, moved to enthusiasm, seized his oar and beat the water with the flat of the blade. Like a man with a flail he raised the oar high and brought it down with loud smacks on the water, splashing up sparkling drops, rocking the boat in which he stood. He was not a native of Salissa, not a subject of the Queen, but his action expressed the enthusiasm ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... rapier, poniard, and pistols, which were placed nevertheless, at no great distance from his chair. One offensive implement, indeed, he thought it prudent to keep on the table beside his huge Coke upon Lyttleton. This was a sort of pocket flail, consisting of a piece of strong ash, about eighteen inches long, to which was attached a swinging club of lignum-vitae, nearly twice as long as the handle, but jointed so as to be easily folded up. This instrument, which bore at that time the singular name of the Protestant flail, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... her lips. For a moment it was a physical impossibility for her to speak. She could only shrink, mute and quivering, beneath the flail of his scorn. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... for the old life. Perugia was rebuilt, and rehabilitated, in spite of the conquering name of Augustus superimposed upon its most ancient Etruscan portal. Assisi was plying a busy and happy life on the opposite hillside. The intervening valley, once cowering under the flail of war, was given over now to plenty and to peace. Its beauty, as she had seen it last, recurred to her vividly. She had left home in the early morning. The sky still held the flush of dawn, and the white mists were just rising from the valley and floating away over the tops of the awakening hills. ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... Instead of well-stored barns, he had only a little wheat, which he had contrived to conceal from the Arab invaders; and, instead of its being trodden out by plump oxen, he was glad to beat it with a stick, not possessing even the poor man's flail, and hiding in a winepress, where no one would expect ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... his one chance and took it. He did not give back. And he did not offer the poor defense of one arm against the flail of blows. Instead he stooped low, very low, jerking his body double, dropping suddenly under Brayley's threshing arms, and hurled himself bodily to meet the attack, his left shoulder thrust forward, striking Brayley with the ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... was all cut, Henry commenced to beat it with a flail which he found at hand. This occupied ...
— Old French Fairy Tales • Comtesse de Segur
... meddle, Tam; it's niver no good a threshin' other folk's corn; ye allays gits the flail agin i' ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... concentrate my attention on! With them I should be apt so make rather brief work; to them one would apply the besom, try to sweep them, with some rapidity into the dust-bin, and well out of one's road, I should rather say. Fill your thrashing-floor with docks, ragweeds, mugworths, and ply your flail upon them,—that is not the method to obtain sacks of wheat. Away, you; begone swiftly, ye regiments of the line: in the name of God and of His poor struggling servants, sore put to it to live in these bad days, I mean to rid myself of you with some degree of brevity. To feed you in palaces, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... worked at his vocation in a stone cottage that stood among the nutty hedgerows near the village of Raveloe, and not far from the edge of a deserted stone-pit. The questionable sound of Silas's loom, so unlike the natural cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine, or the simpler rhythm of the flail, had a half-fearful fascination for the Raveloe boys, who would often leave off their nutting or birds'-nesting to peep in at the window of the stone cottage, counterbalancing a certain awe at the mysterious action of the loom, by a pleasant sense of scornful superiority, drawn from ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... laid his hand on the shoulder of the dwarf. In an instant Jennings had swung his flail-like arms, and before the tramp understood what was happening he was lying flat on his back, as much to Carl's ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... drama was visible to Cardington it would be impossible to say, but apparently he was lost to his surroundings, for he allowed the others to thresh out the Emmet incident without the assistance of his own able flail. Not until the conversation turned to Bermuda did he arouse himself from his reverie and take the lead. The topic suggested to his mind the influence of climate upon architecture and the arts, and presently he was exploring distant ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... worshipful of love. Much has come to him that we had almost despaired of his acquiring, including nearly all the divine attributes except that sense of humour. The beautiful SYBIL has always possessed but little of it also, and what she had has been struck from her by Cupid's flail. Naked of the saving grace, they face each ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... sports, the racquet should do the work. The ball willingly goes where the racquet head directs it. Do not flail or attempt to push your shots. Hit them crisply with the snap of your cocked wrist, and at all times attempt to ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... rock, in such sort that, leaning over the parapet of the open cloister, Desiderius might have dropped a pebble sheer down to the plain below. A single path wound up the rock to the gate, so narrow and steep that one sturdy lay-brother might have held the way with a thresher's flail against ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... grain is effected in several ways. Some beat it out with their feet, others flail it, whilst in Cavite Province it is a common practice to spread the sheaves in a circular enclosure within which a number of ponies ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... pike will fly Dace and roach and such small fry; As the leaf before the gale, As the chaff beneath the flail; As before the wolf the flocks, As before the hounds the fox; As before the cat the mouse, As the rat from falling house; As the fiend before the spell Of holy water, book, and bell; As the ghost from dawning day,— So has fled, in gaunt dismay, This septemvirate of quacks ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... missing yak herd. Mystery of the turning water wheel. The mill and workshop. Their home. "Baby" learning civilized ways. The noise in the night. The return of the yaks. The need for keeping correct time. Shoe leather necessary. Threshing out barley. The flail. The grindstone. Making flour. Baking bread. How the bread was raised. What yeast does in bread. Temperature required. The "Baby" and the honey pot. The bread with large holes in it. George's trip to the cliffs. A peculiar sounding noise and spray from the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... the heavy sail: "God be our help!" he only cried, As the roaring gale, like the stroke of a flail, Smote the boat on its starboard side. The Shoalsmen looked, but saw alone Dark films of rain-cloud slantwise blown, Wild rocks lit up by the lightning's glare, The strife and torment of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... took him to a lonely barn on the tymor's estate, where his business was to thresh out grain with a flail. One day while he was at this labor the tymor came to the barn. He was in a very bad humor, and when he saw Smith he began to offer him every insult. This made the young soldier very angry. He looked around ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... fell, her arm she brak, A compound fracture as could be; Nae leech the cure wad undertak, Whate'er was the gratuity. It 's cured! she handles 't like a flail, It does as weel in bits as hale; But I 'm a broken man mysel' Wi' ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... his opponent out of his evasive tactics. He was wary as a cat. He went cautiously. Yet again he assumed the aggressive, gradually working the Jam-wagon into a corner. A collision was inevitable; there was no means of escape for my friend; that huge bulk, with its swinging, flail-like arms, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... hill he had smashed it. Now when he charged, Gharib met him like a hungry lion, and the brigand aimed a blow at his head with his mace; but he evaded it and it smote the earth and sank therein half a cubit deep. Then Gharib took his battle flail and smiting Jamrkan on the wrist, crushed his fingers and the mace dropped from his grasp; whereupon Gharib bent down from his seat in selle and snatching it up, swiftlier than the blinding leven, smote him therewith full on the flat of the ribs, and he fell to the earth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... and bellowing: Uxmoor dragged by the tail and compelled to follow in preposterous, giant strides, barely touching the ground with the point of his toe, pounded the creature's ribs with such blows as Zoe had never dreamed possible. They sounded like flail on wooden floor, and each blow was accompanied with a loud jubilant shout. Presently, being a five's player, and ambidexter, he shifted his hand, and the tremendous whacks resounded on the bull's left side. The bull, thus belabored, and resounding like the big drum, made a circuit of the field, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... directions, at the first sight of their terrible foe. Two Spaniards lost their lives and two thousand Netherlanders. It was natural that these consummate warriors should despise such easily slaughtered victims. A single stroke of the iron flail, and the chaff was scattered to the four winds; a single sweep of the disciplined scythe, and countless acres were in an instant mown. Nevertheless, although beaten constantly, the Netherlanders were not conquered. Holland and Zealand had read the foe a lesson which he ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of the survivors, who was to plow a field near the house. In a few minutes he did something displeasing to the bull, which started him to running at a fearful speed. He dashed away towards the house, the plow flying and flapping about like the arms of a flail; tore through the flower-beds, ripping them to pieces; tore down all the choice young trees about the house; frightened the ladies and children nearly to death, and demoralized the whole farm. He was at last captured and affectionately cared for by the ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... devout and worthy woman!—for scarcely were we out of the village, when so fearful a storm of thunder, lightning, wind, and hail burst over our heads, that the corn all around us was beaten down as with a flail, and the horses before the coach were quite maddened; however, it did not last long. But my poor child had to bear all the blame again, [Footnote: Such sudden storms were attributed to witches.] inasmuch as Dom. Consul thought that it was ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... post on the high and narrow bridge over the Almond river, and defended himself bravely with his sword. A peasant who was thrashing in a neighboring barn came out upon the noise, and, whether moved by compassion or by natural gallantry, took the weaker side, and laid about with his flail so effectually as to disperse the assailants, well thrashed, even according to the letter. He then conducted the King into his barn, where his guest requested a basin and a towel, to remove the stains of the broil. This being procured with difficulty, James employed ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... body. A beautiful microscopic hawk, which would have made a lovely watch-charm, was attached by a thread to a necklace of small plates of blue glass, to which was hung also a sort of amulet in the shape of a flail, made of turquoise-blue enamel. Some of the plates had become semi-opaque, no doubt owing to the heat of the boiling bitumen which had been poured over them, and ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... arms and legs would be wrenched from his body. He did not venture to move or to relax his hold. He clung with all his strength, and nerved himself for the return journey. He had watched carefully, and knew something of the vagaries of the giant flail. When it was flung to port the wind helped to hold it there until the resistless surge of the schooner sent it flying wild once more. He knew that no mere flesh and blood could endure many of those collisions with the stays. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... and endurance. The work in which he most delighted was precisely that which most labourers hated, before threshing machines came in despite the action of the "mobs"—threshing out corn with the flail. From earliest dawn till after dark he would sit or stand in a dim, dusty barn, monotonously pounding away, without an interval to rest, and without dinner, and with no food but a piece of bread and a pinch of salt. Without the salt he would not eat the bread. ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... towards them. The angle of the bank was not steep and the elephant's speed never slackened on the slope. Its right shoulder struck a sapling and the sapling splintered. It was crashing forward in full charge. Again it trumpeted, trunk extended like a flail of doom. ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... a Glow-worm light (You must suppose it now was night), Which, for her hinder part was bright, He took to be a devil, And furiously doth her assail For carrying fire in her tail; He thrasht her rough coat with his flail; The mad King ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... corn, Colonel Crawford saw the Newars [Picture: Flail] using a kind of flail, an implement which I have never observed in India. Three pieces of Bamboo, about eighteen inches long, were fastened together in a parallel manner, at about a finger’s breadth asunder, and then fixed to a peg, which passed ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... my bad memory. My sister Sarah shewed me all the beautiful places about grandmamma's house. She first took me into the farm-yard, and I peeped into the barn; there I saw a man thrashing, and as he beat the corn with his flail, he made such a dreadful noise that I was frightened and ran away: my sister persuaded me to return; she said Will Tasker was very good-natured: then I went back, and peeped at him again; but as I could not reconcile myself to the sound of his flail, or the sight of his ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... preparation and a trial—a threshing floor where, under the "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 ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... literal sense, on the parish, when bread was dear and the loaf was really life itself, then that stern inscription had meaning enough. The granaries were full, the people half starved. The wheat was threshed by the flail in full view of the wretched, who could gaze through the broad doors at the golden grain; the sparrows helped themselves, men dare not. At night men tried to steal the corn, and had to be prevented by steel traps, like rats. To-day wheat is so cheap, it scarcely ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... bed is prepared by smoothing, and, if needful, stamping a sufficient space of ground, and enclosing it in boards 14 inches wide, set on edge. Into this bed the partially dried peat is thrown, and, as it cracks on the surface by drying, it is compressed by blows with a heavy mallet or flail, or by treading it with flat boards, attached to the feet, somewhat like snow shoes. By this treatment the mass is reduced to a continuous sheet of less than one-half its first thickness, and becomes so firm, that a man's step gives ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... now, When other weapons fail, With club to thrash invaders rash, Like barley with a flail? Hath Seville any Perez still, To lay his clusters low, And ride with seven turbans green Around ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... dazzled them that they could see nothing else in the wide universe. Here were men whose faith had embodied itself in the form of a potato; and others whose long beards had a deep spiritual significance. Here was the abolitionist, brandishing his one idea like an iron flail. In a word, there were a thousand shapes of good and evil, faith and infidelity, wisdom and nonsense, —a most ...
— The Hall of Fantasy (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "I 'll fight Beelzebub if he be aught I can hit; but these same boggarts, they say, a blow falls on 'em like rain-drops on a mist, or like beating the wind with a corn-flail. I cannot fight with naught, as ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... attack. Then his twinkling little eyes began to blaze, and he trumpeted shrilly with anger. The next moment, reaching over the fence, he brought down the trunk on Last Bull's hump with such a terrible flail-like blow that the great buffalo ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... was filled to the brim with hard work. With the help of the Twins, Mother Van Hove kept the garden free of weeds and took care of the stock. She even threshed the wheat herself with her husband's flail, and stored the grain away in sacks ready for the mill. Each evening, when the work was done, the three went down the village street together. One evening, just at dusk, they found nearly the whole village gathered ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... Punjabi Jat found a hide-bound flail; Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer oiled his Tonk jezail; Yar Mahommed Yusufzai spat and grinned with glee As he ground the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... wives and bits o' weans mingled on the rig—kilted to the knees, like the comely cummers, and the handsome hizzies, and the lo'esome lassies wi' their silken snoods—among the heather-legged Highlandmen, and the bandy Irishers, brawny all, and with hook, scythe, or flail, inferior to none of the children of men. The scene lies in Scotland—but now, too, is England "Merry England" indeed, and outside passengers on a thousand coaches see stooks rising like stacks, and far and wide, over the tree-speckled champaign, rejoice in the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... had his adversary—the audience—conquered before he struck a blow. His glance was terrific, his "nerve" enormous. What he did afterward didn't much matter. He usually accomplished a hard day's threshing with those flail-like arms of his, and, heavens, how the poor piano objected to being taken for ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... Blaize, transported with rage. "If I am only a porter, while you pretend to be a major, I will let you see I am the better man of the two." And taking the goose by the neck, he swung it round his head like a flail, and began to batter Pillichody about the ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... love with easy dreams might have known it would be driven back—here and then here and then here. It has been fighting night and day. It has made the most splendid fight—and the most ineffectual fight.... You see the vast swing of the German flail through Belgium. And meanwhile we have been standing about talking of the use we would make of ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... I learned to know the charm of his manner and the delight of his conversation. If I had been even more prejudiced than I was, I could not have withstood that easy grace, that winning cordiality. Every one knew where he had stood during the war, and how he had wielded the flail of his "lashing hail" against the South and the Southern cause and "Southern sympathizers." But that warfare was over for him, and out of kindly regard for my feelings he made no allusion to the great quarrel, with two exceptions. Once, just before he left Baltimore, he was talking as no other man ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... The Drunkard, says Solomon, shall come to poverty. {49b} Many that have begun the world with Plenty, have gone out of it in Rags; through drunkenness. Yea, many Children that have been born to good Estates, have yet been brought to a Flail & a Rake, through this beastly sin ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... band into a knot in the center of the inclosure. Then the brazen sun looked down upon a Homeric struggle. Bulger, brawny warrior of the iron hook, swung his musket like a flail, every now and again shooting forth his more sinister weapon with terrible effect. Desmond, slim and athletic, dashed in upon the enemy with his half pike as they recoiled before Bulger's whirling musket. The rest, now a bare dozen, Bengalis ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under; And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... While yet alive, in boiling water cast, Vex'd with unwonted heat he flings about The scorching brass, and hurls the liquor out; So with the barbed jav'lin stung, he raves, And scourges with his tail the suffering waves. 140 Like Spenser's Talus with his iron flail, He threatens ruin with his pond'rous tail; Dissolving at one stroke the batter'd boat, And down the men fall drenched in the moat; With every fierce encounter they are forced To quit their boats, ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... heel and was so frightened, his mother said, he could hardly get home from fear, and he had three whole miles to go. Next day he was thrashing corn in the barn and something upset him and pitched him head foremost across the flail. He rose, and three times he was pitched like that across the flail, so he gave up and went home. His mother asked him: 'Johnny, what is the matter with you? You do look very bad!' So he up and told her what ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... with an old shoe, but with an iron-heeled one. Others proposed the "anguille," another kind of recreation, in which a handkerchief is filled with sand, pebbles, and two-sous pieces, when they have them, which the wretches beat like a flail over the head and shoulders of the unhappy sufferer. "Let us horsewhip ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... on that last Article of yours in the 'Flail.' Awfully smart, and will make some of them 'sit up' a bit!" i.e., Most malicious thing I ever read, and will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 12, 1890 • Various
... said Titus, whisking the poker round his head like a flail in action. "My blood's up. Come on, Jack ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... gleamed compact and green with scale on scale, But special burnishment adorned his mail And special terror weighed upon his frown; 20 His punier brethren quaked before his tail, Broad as a rafter, potent as a flail. So he grew lord and master of his kin: But who shall tell the tale of all their woes? An execrable appetite arose, He battened on them, crunched, and sucked them in. He knew no law, he feared no binding law, But ground them with inexorable jaw: The luscious fat distilled upon ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... lodgings, provincial theatres, the arcades at Birmingham. And a blue straw hat that he had bought for her long ago; and at last her name. Kitty Messenger, and her mother, a golden-haired actress with a tongue like a flail in one temper, like the honey-seeking proboscis of ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... but little of their father. By one of the hallucinations peculiar to selfish persons, the count had not the slightest idea of the misery he caused. In the confidential communication he made to me on my arrival he particularly dwelt on his goodness to his family. He wielded the flail, beat, bruised, and broke everything about him as a monkey might have done. Then, having half-destroyed his prey, he denied having touched it. I now understood the lines on Henriette's forehead,—fine ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... to go upstairs, and there was a man up there threshing, and he knocked me down with his flail." That was the ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... ditches in the rice marshes, clearing up land, chopping cord-wood, threshing, &c. I have known the women go into the barn as soon as they could see in the morning, and work as late as they could see at night, threshing rice with the flail, (they now have a threshing machine,) and when they could see to thresh no longer, they had to gather up the rice, carry it up stairs, and deposit it ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... thus singled out for show seemed neither resentful nor distressed, ready enough most times to exhibit his merits, anxious only for the chance of a good master and the momentary avoidance of the lictor's flail. At the praefect's bidding he cracked his knuckles or showed his teeth, strained the muscles of his arm to make them stand up like cords, turned a somersault, jumped, danced or stood on his head if ordered ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... had finished his porridge, he was to go into the barn to thrash. He took one of the rafters from the roof and made a flail out of it, and when the roof was about to fall in, he took a big pine tree with branches and all and put it up instead of the rafter. So he went on thrashing the grain and the straw and the hay all together. This was doing more damage than good, for the corn and the ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... a hoe! A pickaxe or a bill! A hook to reap, or a scythe to mow, A flail, or what ye will— And here's a ready hand To ply the needful tool, And skill'd enough, by lessons rough, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... him less readily; came a change when Harrigan had to stand up and fight. And then, with deadly, insensate purpose which made the other's madness a wild and futile thing, Stephen O'Mara set himself to chop his face to pieces. Flail-like blows he side-stepped, and whipped to the other's eyes. That open guard he feinted wider and laid flesh open raw. Harrigan could no longer curse, for his lips were puffy things pulped between his own teeth and those merciless knuckles. He could only sob, great groaning ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... 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
... astonished him. He had expected to see the furious Fogg join the mob and aid them in finishing up their dastardly work. Instead, like some madman, Fogg had waded into the ranks of the group, swinging his formidable weapon like a flail. It rose, it fell, it swayed from side to side, and ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... activity had outdone the activity of all other hands in clearing and cultivating those very fields where her feet loved to run; how in its pride of strength it had handled the scythe and the sickle and the flail, with a grace and efficiency that no other could attain; and how in happy manhood that strong hand had fondled and sheltered and led the little children that now had grown up and were gone!—Strength and activity, ay, and the fruits of ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... he seemed alone, unaided by his poor horse, to cleave the yielding bosom of the earth, or when, about St. Peter's Day, he plied his scythe with a furious energy that might have mown a young birch copse up by the roots, or swiftly and untiringly wielded a flail over two yards long; while the hard oblong muscles of his shoulders rose and fell like a lever. His perpetual silence lent a solemn dignity to his unwearying labor. He was a splendid peasant, and, except for his affliction, any girl would have been glad to marry him. . . But now they ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... fairies are very vampirish. The Loch Awe boatman lives at a spot haunted by a shadowy maiden. Her last appearance was about thirty years ago. Two young men were thrashing corn one morning, when the joint of the flail broke. The owner went to Larichban and entered an outhouse to look for a piece of sheepskin wherewith to mend the flail. He was long absent, and his companion went after him. He found him struggling in the arms of a ghostly ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... rose up along with him. "Stop here, Men of the World," he said, "for it is not you but myself that has to go and ask satisfaction for the bodies of my brothers." So he went on shore; and it is the way he was, with a strong iron flail in his hand having seven balls of pure iron on it, and fifty iron chains, and fifty apples on every chain, and fifty deadly thorns on every apple. And he made a rush through the Fianna to break them up entirely and to tear them into strings, and they gave way before him. And great shame came ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... a naked dagger in his left hand and thrashing the laboring sides of his chestnut horse with his whip as if it were a flail. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... made from (1) arthritis deformans, in which the movements are less restricted, and are attended with grating and cracking; (2) paralysis involving the deltoid and scapular muscles—by the absence of pain, and the flail-like character of the movements; (3) disease in the sub-deltoid bursa—by the absence of rigidity and other evidence of implication of the articular surfaces; and (4) sarcoma of the upper end of the humerus—by the history of the case, the use of the X-rays or an exploratory incision. ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... of the church were called up by the Japanese, who stepped down and ran his fingers along the floor. "Look at this dust," he said. Ordering the two men to sit down on the floor, he beat them with a flail, over the shoulders. ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... set out to talk of the work on the farm. The threshing was mostly done in winter with the hickory flail, one shock of fifteen sheaves making a flooring. On the dry cold days the grain shelled easily. After a flooring had been thrashed over at least three times, the straw was bound up again in sheaves, the floor completely ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... My quondam friends, Flail, Trask, and Bisland, are no more; they are dead, and with them has gone out of existence as gross an imposition as the moral cowardice of man were capable of inventing, constructing, ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... be realized, the king adopted, in addition to the simple costume of the old chiefs, the long or short petticoat, the jackal's tail, the turned-up sandals, and the insignia of the supreme gods,—the ankh, the crook, the flail, and the sceptre tipped with the head of a jerboa or a hare, which we misname the cucupha-headed sceptre.* He put on the many-coloured diadems of the gods, the head-dresses covered with feathers, the white and the red crowns either separately or combined so as to form the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... glen through which the herd-callan maun bicker in his gloamin route frae the fauld!—Be thou a brownie, set, at dead of night, to thy task by the blazing ingle, or in the solitary barn, where the repercussions of thy iron flail half affright thyself, as thou performest the work of twenty of the sons of men, ere the cock-crowing summon thee to thy ample cog of substantial brose. Be thou a kelpie, haunting the ford or ferry, in the starless night, mixing ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... summer time, to plant their corn, potatoes, and other vegetables. As soon as their crops were put away in the ground, [Footnote: The mode of securing their corn was first to dry the ears by fire. When perfectly dry, they would then beat them with a flail and pick all the cobs out. The grain was then winnowed and put into sacks. These were put in the ground in a large cylinder made out of elm bark, set in deep in the ground and made very dry, filling this cylinder full and then covering it to stay there for winter and summer ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... himself the herald of his own return. His humble equipage attracted no attention. His first care being to lodge his family, he sought the house of Dame Humphreys. The streets of the village were silent and deserted. Neither the loom, the flail, nor the anvil were heard; not a child was to be seen at play; every thing looked as if this was a portion of that city where progressive action is suspended, and the sun hangs level over the ocean without power of sinking. Dr. Beaumont, however, found ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this tumult ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... the still autumnal vale From his great timbered barn's wide open door The muffled sound of his unresting flail In rhythmic swing upon the ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... earnest" like Carlyle. While the genius of that great writer is indisputable, I submit that one Carlyle in a generation is enough; another is impossible. That rugged Titan did his appointed work with fidelity. But is every author to lay about him with an iron flail? Is there no place for playful satirists of manners, for essayists who dissolve philosophy and science, who teach truth, manliness, and courtesy by epigram, and who make life beautiful with the glow of poetry? The magnolia cannot ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... was often a flail that fell on friend, foe and self indiscriminately. "Allow it to be unreasonable, and I do it as a matter of ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... surrounded by piles of white hickory shavings, are whittling out with keen Barlow jack-knives, implements for home use,—ox-bows and bow-pins, axe-helves, rakestales, forkstales, handles for spades and billhooks, wooden shovels, flail-staff and swingle, swingling knives, pokes and hog-yokes for unruly cattle and swine. The more ingenious, perhaps, are fashioning buckets, or powdering tubs, or weaving skepes, baskets, or snow-shoes. Some, it may be, sit ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... the philosophy of it was pretty much the same as it is now. Oxen were occasionally used for team labour and were shod like horses; wheat was universally reaped with a sickle, and as universally threshed with a flail, the bent figure of the wheat-barn tasker being a familiar object in the "big old barn with its gloomy bays and the moss upon the thatch." An honest pride he took in his work and has found a fit memorial in the delightful Sketches ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... to his own land, which has been translated into several languages. For the same reason we must pass over the interesting castle—not nearly so delightful though as our dear old haunted pile at Nyslott—with its valuable collection of national curiosities, among which figures an old-fashioned flail, used until comparatively modern times, to beat the devil out ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... the halves of a flail, depend on it: wan no use wi'out t'other. Then theer's the singing of the auld song: who's gwaine to say that's ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... invention of drill plough and thrashing-machines, and other agricultural novelties, she failed not to attribute all the mishaps or misdoings of the whole parish. The last-mentioned discovery especially aroused her indignation. Oh to hear her descant on the merits of the flail, wielded by a stout right arm, such as she had known in her youth (for by her account there was as great a deterioration in bones and sinews as in the other implements of husbandry), was enough to make the very inventor ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... more intimate strokes are necessary to complete the sketch. This strong young ploughman, who feared no competitor with the flail, suffered like a fine lady from sleeplessness and vapours; he would fall into the blackest melancholies, and be filled with remorse for the past and terror for the future. He was still not perhaps devoted to religion, but haunted by it; and at a touch of sickness prostrated himself ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said March, with a boyish smile to Fannie, who was rising to move to a lounge, "it's a mighty old——" He was going to say "debt," but before Ravenel could more than catch his breath or John start half a step forward she had struck the lounge like a flail. ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... boisterous and vulgar raillery with which Clifford and Leigh had assailed Dryden himself; and little resembles our poet's general style of controversy. He seems to have exchanged his satirical scourge for the clumsy flail of Shadwell, when he stooped to use such raillery as the following description of Settle: "In short, he is an animal of a most deplored understanding, without reading and conversation: his being is in a twilight ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... hurt her unduly while he severed a stout rope, and he could not see the expression of sheer bewilderment which again mastered the usually impassive features of Abdullah. The Arab had yielded to unwonted surprise when he saw Royson use a man as flail, but the removal of the gag, and the consequent revelation of ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... Used zealous greetings, Crept full of devotion; Smectymnuus won me first, then holy Nye prevail, (111) Then Captain Kiffin (112) slops me with John of Leyden's tail, Then Fox and Naylor bangs me with Jacob Beamond's flail. (113) Alas! ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... their hands off him. One was a girl, and Harry never could bear to strike a girl; and the other was a boy, whom he could easily have beat, but he always cried out, when Mrs. Pastoureau came sailing to the rescue with arms like a flail. She only washed Harry's face the day he went away; nor ever so much as once boxed his ears. She whimpered rather when the gentleman in black came for the boy; and old Mr. Pastoureau, as he gave the child his blessing, scowled over his shoulder at the strange ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... great favourite on the farm, where he played the part of the old jester, and made up for his practical deficiencies by his success in repartee. His hits, I imagine, were those of the flail, which falls quite at random, but nevertheless smashes an insect now and then. They were much quoted at sheep-shearing and haymaking times, but I refrain from recording them here, lest Tom's wit should prove to be like that of many other bygone jesters eminent ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... compare the most celebrated European ministers to him seems to us as unjust as it would be to compare the best baker in London with Robinson Crusoe, who, before he could bake a single loaf, had to make his plough and his harrow, his fences and his scarecrows, his sickle and his flail, his mill and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cheese. Yet when the [12] meal Was ended, Luke (for so the Son was named) And his old Father both betook themselves To such convenient work as might employ 105 Their hands by the fire-side; perhaps to card Wool for the Housewife's spindle, or repair Some injury done to sickle, flail, or scythe, Or other implement of house ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... the drudging goblin swet, To earn the cream-bowl, duly set; When, in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail had thresh'd the corn, That ten day-lab'rers could not end; Then lies him down the lubbar fiend, And, stretch'd out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength; And, crop-full, out of doors he flings, E'er the first cock his ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... by name her cows And deck her windows with green boughs; She can wreaths and tutties[9] make, And trim with plums a bridal cake. Jack knows what brings gain or loss; And his long flail can stoutly toss: Makes the hedge which others break, And ever thinks what he ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... us from London. On Tuesday he must leave Town for Hampshire, but time-tables were consulted, and it was discovered that he could travel across country on Christmas Eve, and, by changing from one station to the other at the market town of Flail, arrive at Red Abbey in ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... busy at it. There were twelve threshing-floors, and the twelve men were at work on six of them—two on each. Hans must thresh by himself all that was lying upon the other six floors. He went out to the barn and got hold of a flail. Then he looked to see how the others did it and did the same, but at hte first stroke he smashed the flail in pieces. There were several flails hanging there, and Hans took the one after the other, but they all went the same way, every one ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... way to Norway House. I harnessed eight dogs to my plough, and ploughed up my little fields; and, after making a harrow, I harrowed in my wheat with the dogs. The first year I had thirty 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 ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... Form said. He could trust to time to bring them round again; but that Stanley could have believed him guilty of such mean, despicable trickery—there was the sting. Stanley had felt the blows of Wyndham on his face, but that was as nothing to the torture endured at that moment by Paul. It was as a flail cutting deep ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... Roxas grasp The towering banner of her sway; And Monagas, with fearful clasp, Plucks down the chief that stops the way; The reckless Urdaneta rides, Where rives the earth the iron hail; Nor long the Spanish foeman bides, The stroke of old Zaraza's flail. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... most of the pods are ripe. Do not wait, however, until the pods are so dry that they have begun to split and drop their seeds. A slight amount of dampness on the plants aids the cutting. The threshing may be done with a flail, with pea-hullers, or with a ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... land I say: 'Take that, darn you!' And it pleases me to imagine that with every crack Mr. Putnam Jones lets out a mighty 'Ouch!' Now listen! Didn't that sound a little like an ouch?" Mr. Dillingford rubbed a spot clean on the handle of the flail and pressed his lips to it. "Good dog!" he murmured tenderly. "Bite him! (Whack!) Now, bite him again! (Whack!) Once more! (Whack!) Good dog! Now, go lie down awhile and rest." He tossed the flail to the ground and, mopping his ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... his cream-bowl daily set, When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath thresh'd the corn, That ten day lab'rers could not end; Then lies him down, the lubber[56] fiend, And stretch'd out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength, And cropful out of doors he flings, Ere the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... upright shafts of whose tall elms We may discern the thresher at his task, Thump after thump resounds the constant flail That seems to swing uncertain, and yet falls Full on the destined ear. Wide flies the chaff, The rustling straw sends up a fragrant mist Of atoms, sparkling in ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... devoured the antelope; something beneath the water had dragged the leopard to its doom, and swish! a huge flail tore the speargrass to ribbons and sent Adams flying backward with the ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of the Empty Pockets, kings and heroes, and others, which stand leaning on their swords between the columns of the church, as if guarding the tomb of the dead. These statues reminded Flemming of the bronze giants, which strike the hours on the belfry of San Basso, in Venice, and of the flail-armed monsters, that guarded the gateway of Angulaffer's castle in Oberon. After gazing awhile at these motionless sentinels, they went forth, and strolled throughthe public gardens, with the jagged mountains right over their heads, and all around them tall, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... rotating spindle with steel tines or hammers attached that repeatedly beats and tears materials into smaller and smaller pieces until they fall out through a bottom screen. Hammermills will flail almost anything to pieces without becoming dulled. Soft, green materials are beaten to shreds; hard, dry, brittle stuff is rapidly fractured into tiny chips. Changing the size of the discharge screen adjusts the size of the final product. By using very coarse ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... But when the Shepherd was smitten the sheep were scattered. When the followers of Christ saw Him powerless and dead they denied Him and fell back to their natural instinct of self-defence, and the first Church died with the death of Christ. It was like the green corn in the field smitten by a flail to the very root. The owner of the corn walks in the field and looks with despair on his perished corn. But it happens often that after a few days the field begins under the sunshine to flourish anew, and the corn grows beautifully and brings forth ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... of the bank was not steep and the elephant's speed never slackened on the slope. Its right shoulder struck a sapling and the sapling splintered. It was crashing forward in full charge. Again it trumpeted, trunk extended like a flail of doom. ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... an excellently devout and worthy woman!—for scarcely were we out of the village, when so fearful a storm of thunder, lightning, wind, and hail burst over our heads, that the corn all around us was beaten down as with a flail, and the horses before the coach were quite maddened; however, it did not last long. But my poor child had to bear all the blame again, [Footnote: Such sudden storms were attributed to witches.] inasmuch as Dom. Consul thought that it was not old Lizzie, which, nevertheless, was as clear ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... the junkets eat; She was pinch'd and pull'd, she said; And he, by friar's lantern led, Tells how the drudging Goblin sweat To earn his cream-bowl duly set, When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath thresh'd the corn That ten day-labourers could not end; Then lies him down the lubber fiend, And, stretch'd out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength; And crop-full out of doors ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... chance and took it. He did not give back. And he did not offer the poor defense of one arm against the flail of blows. Instead he stooped low, very low, jerking his body double, dropping suddenly under Brayley's threshing arms, and hurled himself bodily to meet the attack, his left shoulder thrust forward, striking Brayley with the full impact of his hundred and eighty pounds ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... in this way in South America. The Sulphur Tyrant-bird picks up a young snake by the tail, and, flying to a branch or stone, uses it like a flail until its ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... whose tongue was often a flail that fell on friend, foe and self indiscriminately. "Allow it to be unreasonable, and I do it as a matter of course—to please ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... comes, with the steady air of a matron? Her robe is of yellow, tinged with brown; and a wreath of berries encircles her head. She fills her barns; and the flail, with monotonous sound, is heard. Labour blesses her as he turns the earth with his plough, and scatters, with a seemingly careless hand, the seeds of future harvests. She shakes the clustering nuts from the trees, and gathers the rosy produce of the ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... night the hoof-beats Went sounding like a flail; And Goody Cole at cockcrow Came forth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under; And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... to be roasted. Once more using his knife to cut down a sheaf of stems, he made a flail of these, and beat out the fire to windward. And as he worked on the one side of the little clearing the fire grew on the other side, and then raced along, leaving behind in the blackened area many separate ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... Sir, You are not like the thresher that doth stand With a huge flail, watching a heap of corn, And, hungry, dares not taste the smallest grain, But feeds on mallows, and such bitter herbs; Nor like the merchant, who hath filled his vaults With Romagnia, and rich Candian wines, Yet drinks ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... struck Henry Montagu like a flail in the face, wiping away his anger, his astonishment at the boy's uncanny knowledge, even his astonishment that the word was able to strike ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... sits in the Scotchman's room, And eats his meat and drinks his ale, And beats the maid with her unused broom, And the lazy lout with his idle flail; But he sweeps the floor and threshes the corn, And hies him away ere the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... hallucinations peculiar to selfish persons, the count had not the slightest idea of the misery he caused. In the confidential communication he made to me on my arrival he particularly dwelt on his goodness to his family. He wielded the flail, beat, bruised, and broke everything about him as a monkey might have done. Then, having half-destroyed his prey, he denied having touched it. I now understood the lines on Henriette's forehead,—fine lines, traced as it were with the edge of a razor, which I had noticed the moment I saw her. ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... very evident. For trees that are cut in the full of the moon carpenters refuse, as being soft, and, by reason of their moistness, subject to corruption; and in its wane farmers usually thresh their wheat, that being dry it may better endure the flail; for the corn in the full of the moon is moist, and commonly bruised in threshing. Besides, they say dough will be leavened sooner in the full, for then, though the leaven is scarce proportioned to the meal, yet it rarefies ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... fellow-creatures, including noblemen, squires, yeomanry, farmers, and all yearly subscribers in the New Proprietary Agricultural Anti-Innovating-Shire Weekly Gazette. At the head of his newspaper Uncle Jack caused to be engraved a crown, supported by a flail and a crook, with the motto, "Pro rege et grege." And that was the way in which Uncle Jack ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Talus with his modern flail He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail. ... Their fixed jav'lins in his side he wears, And on his back a grove of pikes appears." —WALLER'S BATTLE ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... of a finger, whether the result of injury or disease, is difficult to remedy by any operative procedure, for while it is possible to restore mobility, the new joint is apt to be flail-like. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... so handicapped, she could never reach them, and with shaking, fumbling fingers she set herself to unfasten the straps that bound the skis. It took her a long, long time—all the longer for her fevered haste. And still that awful, flail-like sound went on and on, though all sound of voices ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... at this intelligence, and, under pretence of serving another company in the next room, went out to the barn, where, arming himself with a flail, he repaired to a lane through which the curate was under a necessity of passing in his way home. There he lay in ambush with fell intent; and when the supposed author of his shame arrived, greeted him in the dark with such a salutation as forced him to stagger backward three paces at least. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... him, seized him by the shirt collar, and pulled him bodily from the bunk. Then, smothering his protesting voice by a grip on his throat, slatted him from side to side as a farmer uses a flail, and threw him headlong against the after bulkhead and half-way into an empty bunk. Sampson had uttered no word, and Forsythe only muttered as he crawled back to his own bunk. But he ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... near Salisbury, a stern, silent man, who was a marvel of strength and endurance. The work in which he most delighted was precisely that which most labourers hated, before threshing machines came in despite the action of the "mobs"—threshing out corn with the flail. From earliest dawn till after dark he would sit or stand in a dim, dusty barn, monotonously pounding away, without an interval to rest, and without dinner, and with no food but a piece of bread and a pinch of salt. Without the salt he would not ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... butter, and had seen the butter smeared all over the gate by a little green man with a queer cap who had been seen slipping under a culvert? Canon Atkinson told us of this lady who knew all these strange things, and of the Hart Hall "Hob" who worked so hard with his flail, and of many other curious folk who frequented the Yorkshire moors in olden days. The last witch had just died before he went to Danby, but he found the whole atmosphere of the folklore firmament so surcharged with the being and work ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... passengers. The third night out the mischief happened. I had left the bridge soon after four bells and was just turning in for my beauty-sleep when I heard an unholy racket below in the engine-room, and felt the ship slow down of a sudden. One of the rods had kicked loose from its gib and started to flail around death and destruction. Thanks to Crosbie, our first engineer, she was brought up before kicking our insides out, and we hove to; but the repairs cost us close on eighteen hours. By daybreak the weather ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... are not completely paralysed and the tendo Achillis is merely stretched, this tendon may be shortened by splitting it longitudinally and making the ends overlap, or its insertion may be displaced downwards. When the ankle is flail-like, it may be necessary to ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... it until the blood flows freely. Thus he walks from visita to visita, with covered face, beating himself with a cord, into the end of which is braided a bunch of sticks about the size of lead pencils. He prostrates himself in the dust and is beaten on the back and soles of his feet with a flail. At every stream he plunges into it, and grovels before every visita. From all the houses as he passes comes the chant of the Passion. (Lieut. Charles Norton Barney, who was an eye-witness of the flagellation—"Circumcision and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... neighbours dear, We are right glad to meet you here, Christmas comes but once a year, But when it comes it brings good cheer, And when it's gone it's no longer near. May luck attend the milking-pail, Yule logs and cakes in plenty be, May each blow of the thrashing-flail Produce good frumenty. And let the Wassail Cup abound, Whene'er the mummers' time ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... me, Sir Boy," said Genvil; "nor shake your sword my way. I tell thee, Amelot, were my weapon to cross with yours, never flail sent abroad more chaff than I would make splinters of your hatched and gilded toasting-iron. Look you, there are gray- bearded men here that care not to be led about on any boy's humour. For me, I stand little upon that; and I care not whether one boy or another commands me. But I am the Lacy's ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... howled at them, beating at them as if they were sheaves and his cudgel were a flail. "Sons of nameless mothers! Forgotten of God! Shameless! Brood of the ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... of arousing the men in the early morning was rather unique. A man with a stick—a heavy stick that reminded me of an Irish flail—thumped the bare floor, and, to my astonishment, there was a rush of this savage-looking, naked crowd to the door. As I knew no reason for the excitement, ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... can pierce a suit of armor through and through, and at a hundred steps he will not miss a dove. Czechowie (Bohemians) cut dreadfully with axes. For the big two-handed sword the German is the best. The Swiss is glad to strike the helmets with an iron flail, but the greatest knights are those who come from France. These will fight on horseback and on foot, and in the meanwhile they will speak very brave words, which however you will not understand, because it is such a strange language. They are pious people. ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... turn its energies in a backward direction. It would be just as reactionary in the political world as it would be in the industrial world to revert back to hand-tool production; to substitute the ox-team for the railway system, the hand-loom for the power-loom, the flail for the threshing-machine, the sickle for the modern harvesting-machine, the human courier for ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... a sufficient space of ground, and enclosing it in boards 14 inches wide, set on edge. Into this bed the partially dried peat is thrown, and, as it cracks on the surface by drying, it is compressed by blows with a heavy mallet or flail, or by treading it with flat boards, attached to the feet, somewhat like snow shoes. By this treatment the mass is reduced to a continuous sheet of less than one-half its first thickness, and becomes so firm, that ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... flail-like, with absolute precision and regularity. It spared no part of him. His coat was nearly torn off. In one place, on the shoulder, the white shirt was exposed, and this also was streaked ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... that great writer is indisputable, I submit that one Carlyle in a generation is enough; another is impossible. That rugged Titan did his appointed work with fidelity. But is every author to lay about him with an iron flail? Is there no place for playful satirists of manners, for essayists who dissolve philosophy and science, who teach truth, manliness, and courtesy by epigram, and who make life beautiful with the glow of poetry? The magnolia cannot be the oak, although unhappy critics ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... came out from Annie's room and laid hold of Tammas, a heap of speechless misery by the kitchen fire, and carried him off to the barn, and spread some corn on the threshing-floor, and thrust a flail ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... spoke he swung his cutlass and made an arc of blue flame. The weapon became in his hands a flail, terrible to look upon, making lightnings and whistling in the air, but in reality not so deadly as it seemed. The fury of his onslaught would have beaten down the guard of any mere swordsman, but that ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... Crawford saw the Newars [Picture: Flail] using a kind of flail, an implement which I have never observed in India. Three pieces of Bamboo, about eighteen inches long, were fastened together in a parallel manner, at about a finger’s breadth asunder, and then fixed to a peg, which passed ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... crops which are now falling beneath the sickle; it has recalled to me the beautiful walks I took as a child through my native province, when the threshing-floors at the farmhouses resounded from every part with the sound of a flail, and when the carts, loaded with golden sheaves, came in by all the roads. I still remember the songs of the maidens, the cheerfulness of the old men, the open-hearted merriment of the laborers. There was, at that time, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... which the road climbed, and with them were three men, their drovers, and they drew nigh him as he was amidst of the sheep, so that he could scarce see the way. Each of these three had a weapon; one a pole-axe, another a long spear, and the third a flail jointed and bound with iron, and an anlace hanging at his girdle. So they stood in the way and hailed him when the sheep were gone past; and the man with the spear asked him whither away. "I am turned toward ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... glory and my fame. Bring me gnarly limbs of live-oak, aid me in my frenzied fight; Strips of iron-wood, scaly blue-gum, writhing redly in my hold; With my lunge of lurid lances, with my whips that flail the night, They will burgeon into beauty, they will foliate in gold. Let me star the dim sierras, stab with light the inland seas; Roaming wind and roaring darkness! seek no mercy at my hands; I will mock the ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... strike. Her head's like the island folks tell on, Which nothing but monkeys can dwell on; Her heart's like a lemon—so nice She carves for each lover a slice; In truth she's to me, Like the wind, like the sea, Whose raging will hearken to no man; Like a mill, like a pill, Like a flail, like a whale, Like an ass, like a glass Whose image is constant to no man; Like a shower, like a flower, Like a fly, like a pie, Like a pea, like a flea, Like a thief, like—in brief, She's like nothing ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the flail of the monks,' he said abstractedly. 'They would have burned me and thousands ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... he, nor with such a reach, above all, there was none whose rage made him cold and his anger merry. However they were, they could scarcely have faced the hard glitter of his blue eyes, the smile of his fixed lips. He could have carved with a dagger, with a bludgeon, a flail, or a whip. As it was, to a long arm was added a long sword, which whistled through the air, but through flesh went quiet. There had been blows at first from behind and at the side of him. The long mowing arms stayed them. It became a butchery of sheep before he was midway ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... was a flail-like blow between Tenlow's eyes. The deputy staggered, gritted his teeth, and flung himself at the younger man. The fight was unequal from the beginning. Apache snorted and circled as the bushes ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the noble champion of justice, or lord deputy of Ireland, sets forth at Gloriana's behest to defend Irena, or Ireland. He is attended by Talus, an iron man, whose flail is supposed to thresh out falsehood. They two have not proceeded very far before they come across a knight bending over a headless lady. On inquiring of him, they learn that a passing ruffian not only carried off the knight's mate, but left in her stead a dame, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... the plants may have plenty of moisture to fill the pods, then let them dry and die. Gather the dry plants before the pods open much, and let them dry on a clean, smooth piece of ground or on the barn floor. When they are well dried, thresh with a flail, rake off the straw, sweep up the beans and clean by winnowing in the wind or with a ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... grew into a violent desire for the old life. Perugia was rebuilt, and rehabilitated, in spite of the conquering name of Augustus superimposed upon its most ancient Etruscan portal. Assisi was plying a busy and happy life on the opposite hillside. The intervening valley, once cowering under the flail of war, was given over now to plenty and to peace. Its beauty, as she had seen it last, recurred to her vividly. She had left home in the early morning. The sky still held the flush of dawn, and the white mists were just rising from the valley and floating away over the tops of the ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... found the usual village sights and life. We moved along a narrow, crooked lane which had been paved in the Middle Ages. A strapping, ruddy girl was beating flax or some such stuff in a little bit of a good-box of a barn, and she swung her flail with a will—if it was a flail; I was not farmer enough to know what she was at; a frowsy, barelegged girl was herding half a dozen geese with a stick—driving them along the lane and keeping them out of the dwellings; a cooper was at work in a shop which ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... flash. Like lightning his right wing came round with a terrific flail-stroke, and hit Pig Head in the face at the precise instant that the surgical instrument he carried as his beak sank deep into one of Pig Head's calves. The Chieftain was upside-down at the moment, and his legs were tied together, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... the arm. But these were unnoticed in the heat of the combat. His eyes were "seeing red," as the Westerners say. He had no nerves to feel with; only muscles to fight with. And all the time the impromptu club was in action—sometimes swinging like a flail, at other times being gripped for a no less ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... gate and to the entrance of the alley. The boys were so intent upon their game that they never noticed his approach until he was close upon them. Then they sprang up with wild yells, but the lash descended on them like a well-aimed flail; they rolled over and over in a writhing heap. After the heap had broken up and its shrieking units scattered, the irate priest calmly pocketed the marbles and, whip in hand, stalked back ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... Here Flecknoe, as a place to fame well known, Ambitiously design'd his Shadwell's throne. For ancient Dekker prophesy'd long since, That in this pile should reign a mighty prince, Born for a scourge of wit, and flail of sense: To whom true dulness should some Psyches owe, But worlds of misers from his pen should flow; Humorists and hypocrites it should produce, Whole Raymond families, and tribes of Bruce. Now Empress Fame had publish'd the ...
— English Satires • Various
... the turning water wheel. The mill and workshop. Their home. "Baby" learning civilized ways. The noise in the night. The return of the yaks. The need for keeping correct time. Shoe leather necessary. Threshing out barley. The flail. The grindstone. Making flour. Baking bread. How the bread was raised. What yeast does in bread. Temperature required. The "Baby" and the honey pot. The bread with large holes in it. George's trip to the cliffs. A peculiar sounding noise and spray from ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... singled out for show seemed neither resentful nor distressed, ready enough most times to exhibit his merits, anxious only for the chance of a good master and the momentary avoidance of the lictor's flail. At the praefect's bidding he cracked his knuckles or showed his teeth, strained the muscles of his arm to make them stand up like cords, turned a somersault, jumped, danced or stood on his head if ordered ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... him by. This chance occurred in 1505, when—Queen Isabella being dead—King Ferdinand discovered that Gonzalo de Cordoba was playing him false in Naples. The Spanish king conceived a plan—according to the chronicles of Zurita—to employ Cesare as a flail for the punishment of the Great Captain. He proposed to liberate the duke, set him at the head of an army, and loose him upon Naples, trusting to the formidable alliance of Cesare's military talents with his hatred of Gonzalo—who had betrayed him—to work the ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... their pedestal to take the air." They come on the stage only to utter pompous sentiments of morality, turgid declamation, and frigid similes. Yet there is throughout, that strength of language, that heavy mace of words, with which, as with the flail of Talus, Johnson lays every thing prostrate before him. This style is better suited to his imitations of the two satires of Juvenal. Of the first of these, "the London," Gray, in a letter to Horace Walpole, says that "to him it is ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... think I've expressed my meaning quite plainly, (reads) "Farmer Flail, I'm instructed by lord Austencourt, your landlord, to inform you, by word of letter, that if you can't afford to pay the additional rent for your farm, you must turn out." I think that's clear enough. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... and Parliament I was Prester John. Devout was my intent; I haunted meetings, Used zealous greetings, Crept full of devotion; Smectymnuus won me first, then holy Nye prevail, (111) Then Captain Kiffin (112) slops me with John of Leyden's tail, Then Fox and Naylor bangs me with Jacob Beamond's flail. (113) ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... not break no heart. He who has a roof of glass let him not fling stones at his neighbour. Into all the taverns of Spain may reeds come. A bird in the hand is worth more than a hundred flying. To God (be) praying and with the flail plying. It is worth more to be the head of a mouse than the tail of a lion. To see and to believe, as Saint Thomas says. The extreme (100) of a dwarf is to spit largely. Houses well managed:- at mid-day the stew-pan, (101) and at night salad. Although thou seest me dressed in wool ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... and laid his hand on the shoulder of the dwarf. In an instant Jennings had swung his flail-like arms, and before the tramp understood what was happening he was lying flat on his back, as much to Carl's ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... them round again; but that Stanley could have believed him guilty of such mean, despicable trickery—there was the sting. Stanley had felt the blows of Wyndham on his face, but that was as nothing to the torture endured at that moment by Paul. It was as a flail cutting deep ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... stern; the harrying sound Lashes them like a flail the long hours round, Till to strained nerves 'twere sweeter To silence it with one fierce passionate grip, Than into some bland Lotos Land to slip, And moon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... provincial theatres, the arcades at Birmingham. And a blue straw hat that he had bought for her long ago; and at last her name. Kitty Messenger, and her mother, a golden-haired actress with a tongue like a flail in one temper, like the honey-seeking proboscis of a bee ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... The bull ran, tossing his nose with pain and bellowing: Uxmoor dragged by the tail and compelled to follow in preposterous, giant strides, barely touching the ground with the point of his toe, pounded the creature's ribs with such blows as Zoe had never dreamed possible. They sounded like flail on wooden floor, and each blow was accompanied with a loud jubilant shout. Presently, being a five's player, and ambidexter, he shifted his hand, and the tremendous whacks resounded on the bull's left side. The bull, thus belabored, and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... was pinched, and pulled, she said: And he, by friar's lanthern led, Tells how the drudging Goblin sweat To earn his cream-bowl duly set; When, in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy Flail hath threshed the corn That ten day-labourers could not end. Then lies him down the lubbar Fiend; And, stretched out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength: And, crop-full, out of door he flings Ere the first cock ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... the water had devoured the antelope; something beneath the water had dragged the leopard to its doom, and swish! a huge flail tore the speargrass to ribbons and sent Adams flying backward with the wind ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... and geese, the boy was in due course promoted to the rank of team-leader, and was also set to assist his father in the threshing barn. "John," his father used to say, "was weak but willing," and the good man made his son a flail proportioned to his strength. Exposure in the ill-drained fields round Helpstone brought on an attack of tertiary ague, from which the boy had scarcely rallied when he was again sent into the fields. Favourable weather ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... strength of Caedmon's had, With power reserved at need to reach The Roman forum's loftiest speech, Sweet with persuasion, eloquent In passion, cool in argument, Or, ponderous, falling on thy foes As fell the Norse god's hammer blows, Crushing as if with Talus' flail Through Error's logic-woven mail, And failing only when they tried The adamant of the righteous side,— Thou, foiled in aim and hope, bereaved Of old friends, by the new deceived, Too soon for us, too soon for thee, Beside thy ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... at me with his fist. But the sword of Gideon missed its aim, and skinned its knuckles on the stone wall. I saw now to my great comfort that the man was beside himself with fury, and was swinging his arms wildly like a flail. Three or four times I avoided his rushes, noting with satisfaction that one of the countrymen had got hold of the shrieking Isobel. Then my chance came, for as he lunged I struck from the side with all my force on his jaw. I am left-handed, and the ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... man. Life itself was but a preparation and a trial—a threshing floor where, under the "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 ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... bubbled along among alders and dwarf willows. Hard by the farm-house was a vast barn, that might have served for a church, every window and crevice of which seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm. The flail was busily resounding within it from morning till night; swallows and martins skimmed twittering about the eaves; and rows of pigeons, some with one eye turned up, as if watching the weather, some with their heads under their wings, or buried in their bosoms, and others swelling and cooing ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... fictitious claim to universal dominion would be realized, the king adopted, in addition to the simple costume of the old chiefs, the long or short petticoat, the jackal's tail, the turned-up sandals, and the insignia of the supreme gods,—the ankh, the crook, the flail, and the sceptre tipped with the head of a jerboa or a hare, which we misname the cucupha-headed sceptre.* He put on the many-coloured diadems of the gods, the head-dresses covered with feathers, the white and the red crowns either separately or combined so as ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Tam; it's niver no good a threshin' other folk's corn; ye allays gits the flail agin i' yer ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... you will, hunt him as you will, do what you will! And he, too—Ian! Ian and his sins. Grapes in the wine-press—wheat beneath the flail—ore in the ardent fire, and over all the clouds of wrath! Suffering and making to suffer—sinning and making to sin.... And yet will the dawn come, and yet will you ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... to be darted forward; but at that moment both Rob and Brazier fired together, and as the smoke cleared away another cloud of something seemed to be playing about on the ground, but a solid cloud, before which everything gave way, while some great flail-like object rapidly beat ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... charge could take effect, had got its back to the wall. He had made the same mistake again—the mistake of brainless breeding all the world over. It mattered not whether he approached from front, or right, or left, the same whirling flail of fore-paws was ready for him. He leapt clean over its head, and was flung back—by the brickwork. Whichever way he tried he had only half a foe to aim at. Still he never flinched, happy in the conviction ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... broken corn that was strewn over the whole platform. Where the battlements had once frowned, now stood sheaves of smiling corn, golden and nodding in the wind and the sun. Suddenly the lad who had led me hither seized the flail and began to beat the corn and stalks strewn over the floor, while the old man, quavering a little, sang a long-drawn-out gay melody, and the little girl beat her tiny hands in time to the work and the music. Then, unheard, into this miracle came a young woman,—ah, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... he vaulteth, Fresh as when he first began; All in coat of bright vermilion, 'Quipped as Shaw, the Lifeguardsman; Right and left his whizzing broadsword, Like a sturdy flail, he throws; Cutting out a path ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... snapping his rider like the lash of a whip, then stopped suddenly, poised on his fore feet, with devilish intent to discharge Mose over his head. With the spurs set deep into the quivering painted hide of his mount Mose began plying the quirt like a flail. The boys cheered and yelled with delight. It was one of their chief recreations, this battle ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... writing on women farmers, quotes the tribute of HUTTON, the historian, to a Derbyshire lady who died at Matlock in 1854: "She undertakes any kind of manual labour, as holding the plough, driving the team, thatching the barn, using the flail; but her chief avocation is breaking horses at a guinea per week. She is fond of Pope and Shakespeare, is a self-taught and capable instrumentalist, and supports the bass viol in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They went through the world, like Sir Artegal's iron man Talus with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, nor to be ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... dear my wife, be blithe To bid the New Year hail And welcome—plough, drill, scythe, And jolly flail. ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of stockholder in the New-York Tribune. Mr. GREELEY conceives some of his most brilliant editorial articles while churning the mercurial milk of the Chappaqua farm into butter; or vexing the gracious grain with the flying flail; or listening to the pensive murmurings of the plaintive pigs, and the whispered cadences of the kindly cattle. RICHARD GRANT WHITE can't write, it is said, until a towel moistened with Cologne water is applied to his nostrils. Sometimes, however, he varies ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... administer it. Such was Father Roche, as the pastor of a large but poor flock, who had few sympathies to expect, save those which this venerable man was able to afford them. Very different from him, on the other hand, was his curate, the Rev. Patrick M'Cabe, or M'Flail, as he was nicknamed by the Orangemen of the parish, in consequence of a very unsacerdotal tendency to use the horsewhip, as a last resource, especially in cases where reason and the influence of argument failed. He was a powerful young man, in point of physical strength, but ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... to see the furious Fogg join the mob and aid them in finishing up their dastardly work. Instead, like some madman, Fogg had waded into the ranks of the group, swinging his formidable weapon like a flail. It rose, it fell, it swayed from side to side, and ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... moan broke from her lips. For a moment it was a physical impossibility for her to speak. She could only shrink, mute and quivering, beneath the flail of ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... name but changed, our nasty nation Chews its own excrements, the Association[1]. 'Tis true, we have not learned their poisoning way, For that's a mode but newly come in play; Resides, your drug's uncertain to prevail, But your true protestant can never fail With that compendious instrument, a flail[2]. Go on, and bite, even though the hook lies bare; Twice in one age expel the lawful heir; Once more decide religion by the sword, And purchase for us a new tyrant lord. Pray for your king, but yet your purses spare; Make him not two-pence richer by your ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... Instead of the rows on rows, like the conical huts of a savage town, there are but a few, sometimes none. So many are built in the fields and threshed there "to rights," as the bailiff would say. It is not needful to have them near home or keep them, now the threshing-machine has stayed the flail and emptied the barns. Perhaps these are the only two losses to those who look at things and mete them with the eye—the corn-ricks and the barns. The corn-ricks were very characteristic, but even now you may see plenty if you look directly after harvest. The barns ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... little field of buckwheat that had been cut some days and had fully ripened. A woman was threshing out the grain with a flail upon a spread canvas, surrounded by a circle of purple-tinted cones, the sheaves leaning together. Now the wide level moor returned, but Nature was not quite the same here as she had been before. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... beasts are half-starved. Their "kitchen" is a meagre ration of bruised beans, and their daily bread consists of the dry leaves of thorn trees, beaten down by the Makhbat, a flail-like staff, and caught in a large circle of matting (El-Khasaf). In Sinai the vegetation fares even worse: the branches are rudely lopped off to feed the flocks; only "holy trees" escape this mutilation. With the greatest difficulty ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... ice Melted in many a quaint device, And sees, above the city's din, Afar its silent Alpine kin: I track thee over carpets deep To wealth's and beauty's inmost keep; Across the sand of bar-room floors Mid the stale reek of boosing boors; Where browse the hay-field's fragrant heats, Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats; 80 I dog thee through the market's throngs To where the sea with myriad tongues Laps the green edges of the pier, And the tall ships that eastward steer, Curtsy their farewells to the town, O'er the curved distance lessening down: I follow allwhere ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... first sight of their terrible foe. Two Spaniards lost their lives and two thousand Netherlanders. It was natural that these consummate warriors should despise such easily slaughtered victims. A single stroke of the iron flail, and the chaff was scattered to the four winds; a single sweep of the disciplined scythe, and countless acres were in an instant mown. Nevertheless, although beaten constantly, the Netherlanders were not conquered. Holland ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... his old Father both betook themselves To such convenient work as might employ 105 Their hands by the fire-side; perhaps to card Wool for the Housewife's spindle, or repair Some injury done to sickle, flail, or scythe, Or other implement ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... and let the record stand, That, when Bellona ravaged half the land, When even these groves, from bloody fields afar, Oft shook and shuddered at the sounds of war, When the drum drowned the music of the flail, And midnight marches broke the peace of Yale, Then gathered here amid these vacant bowers A band of scholars, men of various powers, Various in motion, but with one desire, Through wreck and war to watch the sacred fire, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fellow whose staff has done more execution than both our sword-blades?" the young count asked; "verily it rose and fell like a flail on a thrashing-floor." ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... by the eerie side of an auld thorn, in the dreary glen through which the herd-callan maun bicker in his gloamin route frae the fauld!—Be thou a brownie, set, at dead of night, to thy task by the blazing ingle, or in the solitary barn, where the repercussions of thy iron flail half affright thyself, as thou performest the work of twenty of the sons of men, ere the cock-crowing summon thee to thy ample cog of substantial brose. Be thou a kelpie, haunting the ford or ferry, in the starless night, mixing thy laughing yell with the howling ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... last day of the trial, was ushered in by a tempest of wind and rain, that drove the blinding sheets of sleet against the court-house windows with the insistence of an icy flail; while now and then with spasmodic bursts of fury the gale heightened, rattled the sash, moaned hysterically, like invisible fiends tearing at the obstacles that barred entrance. So dense was the gloom pervading the court-room, that every gas jet was burning at ten o'clock, when Mr. Dunbar ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of violence are seen. The convulsions may consist only of a rapid trembling, or the limb or limbs may be flung about like a flail. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... this. According to him, God, in punishment for sin delivers over people to shameful affections, to a reprobate sense; he suffers them to be a hell unto themselves. And nature seldom fails to avenge herself for the outrages suffered. She uses the flail of disease and remorse, of misery and disgust, and she scourges the culprit to the verge of the grave, often to ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... alone, for his men leapt after him like hounds. But he fought his way in the lead with a clubbed rifle, and stood over Kagig's body working the weapon like a flail. That was all I saw of that encounter, for Mahmoud decided to attempt escape by the upper way again, and it was I who captured him. I landed on him through the darkness with my clenched fist under the low hung angle of his jaw and, seizing his leg, threw him out of the saddle. There Gloria ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... the whoppingest Whale, Brave boys! As ever whisked a ta-a-a-il; In the trough o' the sea It was Labouring free. And a lashin' the waves like a flail, Brave boys! A lashin' the waves ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... only to stay there during the summer time, to plant their corn, potatoes, and other vegetables. As soon as their crops were put away in the ground, [Footnote: The mode of securing their corn was first to dry the ears by fire. When perfectly dry, they would then beat them with a flail and pick all the cobs out. The grain was then winnowed and put into sacks. These were put in the ground in a large cylinder made out of elm bark, set in deep in the ground and made very dry, filling this cylinder ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... thick as harvests beneath hail, Grass before scythes, or corn below the sickle, Proving that trite old truth, that Life's as frail As any other boon for which men stickle. The Turkish batteries thrashed them like a flail, Or a good boxer, into a sad pickle Putting the very bravest, who were knocked Upon the head before their guns ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... The solid forest gives fluid utterances, They tumble forth, they rise and form, Hut, tent, landing, survey, Flail, plough, pick, crowbar, spade, Shingle, rail, prop, wainscot, lamb, lath, panel, gable, Citadel, ceiling, saloon, academy, organ, exhibition-house, library, Cornice, trellis, pilaster, balcony, window, turret, porch, Hoe, rake, pitchfork, pencil, wagon, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... outcast who had tried to set himself above his betters by winning the favor of a Turkish lady. The Englishman flew at him like a wildcat, dragged him off his horse and broke his skull with the club which was used instead of a flail for threshing. Then he dressed himself in the Turk's garments, hid the body under a heap of grain, filled a bag with wheat for all his provision, mounted the horse of his late master, and rode away northward. He knew that Muscovy was in this general direction, and coming to a road marked ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... you infernal liar!" cried Spurlock, striking at the arm. But the free arm of the stranger hit him a flail-like blow on the chest and sent him sprawling into the yielding sand. Berserker, Spurlock rose, ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... by the discovery of the plank, made the first rush up and was immediately knocked from his perch by Tod, whose pole swung around his head like a flail. Then Scootsy tried it, crawling up, protecting his head by ducking it under his elbows, holding meanwhile by his hand. Tod's blows fell about his back, but the boy struggled on until Archie reached over the gunwale, and with a twist of his wrist, using all his strength, dropped the invader ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... plays to flail the follies of his time, he makes his chief characters, in spite of his realistic purpose, extreme and distorted 'humors,' each, in spite of individual traits, the embodiment of some one abstract vice—cowardice, sensualism, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... a trial, and scandalising the old-fashioned village folk—who did not believe in such new-fangled notions, and thought a judgment would come on those having to do with the machine, depriving, as it did, honest men who could wield the flail of a job! ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... with mighty flail Have threshed us, yet we have not blenched: The sea of blood could naught prevail, That ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... manner and the delight of his conversation. If I had been even more prejudiced than I was, I could not have withstood that easy grace, that winning cordiality. Every one knew where he had stood during the war, and how he had wielded the flail of his "lashing hail" against the South and the Southern cause and "Southern sympathizers." But that warfare was over for him, and out of kindly regard for my feelings he made no allusion to the great quarrel, ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... she sat, jutted out the "brace" well lined with bacon; to the right hung a well-scoured salt-box, and to the left was the jamb, with its little paneless window to admit the light. Within it hung several ash rungs, seasoning for flail-sooples, or boulteens, a dozen of eel-skins, and several stripes of horse-skin, as hangings for them. The dresser was a "parfit white," and well furnished with the usual appurtenances. Over the door and on the "threshel" were ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
