"Flax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not yet your squire. But all things considered, what good can it do the lady Aldonza Lorenzo, I mean the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, to have the vanquished your worship sends or will send coming to her and going down on their knees before her? Because may be when they came she'd be hackling flax or threshing on the threshing floor, and they'd be ashamed to see her, and she'd ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... a fixed oil, obtained from the seed of flax. Nut oil, which is frequently used for the same purpose, ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... flax is Linum usitatissimum, N.O. Liniae. There is a species in Australia, Linum marginale, Cunn., N.O. Linaceae, called Native Flax. In New Zealand, the Phormium is called Native ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... that has been the means of bringing out a wonderful study, that is explained by the nature of the soil itself. In every country certain sections will spontaneously produce product alike, in almost every essential quality. Thus, flax, for instance, is found, identical in its character, in Kamscatska, and in Minnesota; in the Siberian wilds and in Central America; on the heights of the Himalayas, and in the lowest plains of ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... A. Cotton, flax, and hemp. B. Wood, celluloses (a) sulphite process, and (b) soda and sulphate process. C. Esparto and straw celluloses. D. ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... been so continuous that Quebec had almost come to regard warfare as her normal state. The respite following upon the Treaty of Utrecht was the more welcome; and in that breathing space of almost thirty years it seemed as if a real prosperity had at last visited the St. Lawrence. The cultivation of flax and hemp and the weaving of cloth, which had been but a feeble industry since the days of Talon, now assumed real importance. Furs were still the main resource of the colony; but grain, fish, oil, and leather also found their way to France in increasing quantities. Quebec became the centre ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... instruments, joynery, turnery, the making of blocks and watches, weaving, shoemaking, or any other useful trade or mystery that the school is capable of teaching; and the girls to be taught and instructed in spinning of flax and wool, and knitting of gloves and stockings, sewing and making of all sorts of useful needlework, and the making of straw-work, as hats, baskets, etc., or any other useful art or mystery that the school is capable ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... the reminder to the man of his secular duties, and its material varies, in consequence, according to the occupation of the wearer. Thus, while the thread of the Brahmans is made of pure cotton, that of the Kshatriyas (the warriors) is composed of flax—the bow-string material; and that of Vaishyas (the traders and cattle-breeders), of wool. From this it is not to be inferred that caste was originally meant to be hereditary. In the ancient times, it depended on the qualities of the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... and call him her Buttercup. But always Klaas wanted more cheese. When unusually greedy, she twitted him as a boy "worse than Butter-and-Eggs"; that is, as troublesome as the yellow and white plant, called toad-flax, is to the farmer—very pretty, but nothing ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... every thing within and without, most reputably, these twenty years? I must own I grow a little old, and she does take a deal of pains: but all this she learned of me. When she first came here—Mercy on us! she didn't know that linen was made of flax. But what was to be expected from one who has no foreign ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... the plates away from her son, and says that when he first received them he hid them until the next day in a rotten birch log, bringing them home wrapped in his linen frock under his arm.* Later, she says, he hid them in a hole dug in the hearth of their house, and again in a pile of flax in a cooper shop; Willard Chase's daughter almost found them once by means of a ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... good housewives described by the prudent mother of King Lemuel, it should be said of the emigrant's wife, "She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff." "She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands." "She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... the public interest to have them managed well; and the moving of Shakespeare to deal in the matter sprang most likely from confidence in his practical judgment and skill. The tithes of "corn, grain, blade, and hay," and also those of "wool, lamb, hemp, flax, and other small and privy tithes," in Stratford, Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton, had been leased in 1544 for the term of ninety-two years. In July, 1605, the unexpired term of the lease, thirty-one ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... being hospitable, received them, and hid them under the stalks of flax, on the top of ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... distinguished by a stiff silk gown, which rustles in the wind as he struts along; a flax tie-wig, or sometimes a long natural one, which reaches down below his [well, say below his waist]; a broad bully-cock'd hat, or a square cap of about twice the usual size; white stockings; thin Spanish leather ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... or poising gracefully on the right foot, the left hand extended with the roll or bat, while with a wheel finger in the other, she gives the wheel a few swift turns for a final twist to the long-drawn thread of wool or tow. The continuous buzz of the flax wheels, harmonizing with the spasmodic hum of the big wheel, shows that the girls are preparing a stock of linen against their wedding day. Less active and more fitful rattled the quill wheel, where the younger children are filling quills for ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... cinnamon, treasure without price, and placed it in the mausoleum of granite which, after our Egyptian fashion, she had built upon the hill that is by the Temple of the Holy Isis. These riches she piled up upon a bed of flax, that, when she fired it, all might perish in the flame and escape the greed of money-loving Octavianus. And she slept henceforth in this tomb, away from Antony; but in the daytime she still saw him ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... abroad In leathern girdle, and a clasp of bone; And, with no artful coloring on her cheeks, His lady leave the glass. The sons I saw Of Verli and of Vecchio, well content With unrobed jerkin, and their good dames handling The spindle and the flax.... One waked to tend the cradle, hushing it With sounds that lulled the parents' infancy; Another, with her maidens, drawing off The tresses from the distaff, lectured them Old tales of Troy, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the beginning of the present century, poor women found profitable employment in spinning flax or wool. This was a better occupation for them than straw plaiting, inasmuch as it was carried on at the family hearth, and did not admit of gadding and gossiping about the village. The implement used was a ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... see the flicker of firelight in the windows of the nearest house. It was Tom Daly's house. They could see Tom's shadow as he sat at his loom, weaving flax into beautiful white linen cloth. They could hear the clack! clack! of his loom. It made the Twins feel much safer to hear this sound and see Tom's shadow, for Tom was a friend of theirs, and they often went into his house and watched him weave his beautiful ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... or raiting of flax, soft water is absolutely necessary; in hard water the flax may be immersed for months, till its texture be injured, and still the ligneous matter will not be decomposed, and the fibres ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... in different parts of England. Hops, which had been introduced in the early part of the 16th century, and on the culture of which a treatise was published in 1574 by Reginald Scott, are mentioned as a well-known crop. Buckwheat was sown after barley. Hemp and flax are mentioned as common crops. Enclosures must have been numerous in some counties; and there is a very good comparison between "champion (open fields) country and several,'' which Blith afterwards ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... convinced it would not. I felt it settling down under my feet inch by inch; and the blaze already threatened the after-part of the boat, licking the light wood-work of the gaudy saloon as if it had been flax! Not a moment was to be lost: we must take voluntarily to the water, be drawn in by the sinking wreck, or driven to it by the fire. One of the ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... Arkwright invented the carding engine, and preparatory ("slubbing and roving") frames about the same time, the factory system became the prevailing one for the spinning of cotton. By means of trifling modifications these machines were gradually adapted to the spinning of flax, and so to the superseding of hand-work here, too. But even then, the end was not yet. In the closing years of the last century, Dr. Cartwright, a country parson, had invented the power-loom, and about 1804 had so far ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... for the productions of these countries? Unfortunately at present most of the evidence on this point is of a negative kind. Besides articles of food, such as pigs, yams, and coconuts, and weapons and ornaments of no marketable value—tortoise-shell, flax, arrowroot, massoy bark, and feathers of the birds of paradise were seen by us, it is true, but in such small quantities as to hold out at present no inducement for traders to resort to these coasts for the purpose of procuring them. ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... reason the land is not cultivated. Yet it is famous for commerce with India, and the islands of the Indian sea; and merchants from Sennar, Arabia, and Persia, bring thither all sorts of silk and purple manufactures, hemp, cotton, flax, and Indian cloth, with plenty of wheat, barley, millet, and rice. The Indian merchants bring also great quantities of spices, and the natives act as factors and interpreters, by which they make great gains; but in that place there are not above 500 Jews. Sailing thence with a favourable wind, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... of any other State. The Wheat crop of 1861 was estimated at 85,000,000 bushels, while the Corn crop yields not less than 140,000,000 bushels besides the crop of Oats, Barley, Rye, Buckwheat, Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Pumpkins, Squashes, Flax, Hemp, Peas, Clover, Cabbage, Beets, Tobacco, Sorgheim, Grapes, Peaches, Apples, &c., which go to swell the vast aggregate of production in this fertile region. Over Four Million tons of produce were sent out the State of Illinois during the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to Mam' Sarah at the loom-house. It was considered a great treat by Roberta to go down to the loom-house. That was where the wool, cotton, and flax was carded, spun, and wove, then manufactured into winter and summer clothes for the negroes on the place. Yard upon yard of beautiful red and black flannel, blue and brown linseys, and blue and white striped cottonades, for the women, ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... with my grandmother, when the morning's work was done, to uncover her flax-wheel, seat herself, and call me to sit by her, and, after my childish manner, read to her from the "Life of General Francis Marion," by Mason L. Weems, the graphic account of the general's exploits, by ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... endless walking and getting nowhere very soon called forth vigorous protests. The churner would pull back, brace himself, choke, and stop the machine: one churner threw himself off and was choked to death before he was discovered. I remember when the old hetchel from the day of flax dressing, fastened to a board, did duty behind the old churner, spurring him up with its score or more of sharp teeth when he settled back to stop the machine. "Run and start the old sheep," was a command we heard less often after that. He could not long hold out against ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... preparatory school of medicine, a school of music and a school of iron-working and wood-working. The textile industries for which Amiens has been celebrated since the middle ages include manufactures of velvet, cotton-, wool-, silk-, hemp- and flax-spinning, and the weaving of hosiery and a variety of mixed fabrics. Manufactures of machinery, chemicals, blacking, polish and sugar, and printing, dyeing and iron-founding are also carried on. Market gardens, known as hortillonnages, intersected by small canals derived from the Somme ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... at other times scrambling over rocks and hills. The country in general was destitute of trees, but they passed through groves of wormwood, eight and ten feet in height, which they used occasionally for fuel, and they met with large quantities of wild flax. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... comrades, behold this wonder. Glyc has robbed me of my cock and has fled. Oh, Nymphs of the mountains! oh! Mania! seize her! How unhappy I am! I was full busy with my work, I was sp-sp-sp-sp-spinning the flax that was on my spindle, I was rounding off the clew that I was to go and sell in the market at dawn; and he flew off, flew off, cleaving the air with his swift wings; he left to me nothing but pain, pain! What tears, tears, poured, poured from my unfortunate eyes! Oh! Cretans, children ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... stamped it with the seal of the Church and the arrival from the West about the same period of flax or linen paper with the added fact that these assimilated so well together, later placed them both on the popular basis which has continued ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... Chris, holding a large spoonful of raspberries poised above the dish to which she was helping. "Why, old Dr. Smith attended me forty years ago when I had measles. I remember he made me lie in bed with blankets over me, though it was August, and he wouldn't let me drink anything except hot flax-seed tea. They say all that has been changed in ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... disconsolate thoughts followed Michael to Baja, where he had an office, and where, when he traveled into the flax districts of Hungary, he had his letters sent. A whole bundle awaited him; he opened one after another with indifference; what did he care whether the rape had been frost-bitten or not, that the duties in England were raised, ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... the most significant fashion and replied by the well-know proverb: "'The sparrow was in the orchard eating flax-seed; the grandmother threw a stone at it, and missed.' And ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... little dependence can be placed upon crops. The greater part of this region consists of lakes, swamps, forests of pine, and extensive and barren plains. The mines of Siberia may be regarded as the most valuable feature in this desolate region. The production of flax and hemp in the province of Petersburg, and the lumber products of the forests which are accessible to the capital, give some importance to such portions as border on the southern and European limit of this great belt; but ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... ratchet. crag, crest, arete [Fr.], cone peak, sugar loaf, pike, aiguille^; spire, pyramid, steeple. beard, chevaux de frise [Fr.], porcupine, hedgehog, brier, bramble, thistle; comb; awn, beggar's lice, bur, burr, catchweed^, cleavers, clivers^, goose, grass, hairif^, hariff, flax comb, hackle, hatchel^, heckle. wedge; knife edge, cutting edge; blade, edge tool, cutlery, knife, penknife, whittle, razor, razor blade, safety razor, straight razor, electric razor; scalpel; bistoury^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... population, corn-laws, currency, and the laws that regulate wages, a criticism on the leading speakers in the House of Commons, with some discursive observations on the importance of fattening cattle, the introduction of flax into Ireland, emigration, the condition of the poor: these and such-like stupendous subjects for reflection—all branching more or less intricately from the single idea of the Castleton property—the young lord discussed and disposed of in half a dozen prim, poised sentences, evincing, I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... gave her a generous diet, and hoped, that with rest and cheerful surroundings, she would soon rally as other children had, who came to me in a similar broken-down condition. Still the cough and pain continued. I dosed her with various restoratives, such as flax-seed, and slippery elm, etc., but all were of no avail. She steadily grew worse. Every week I could see she declined. Her appetite failed; night sweats came on; and she was so weak that most of the day she lay in bed. The children, ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... to begin. The day after Twelfth Day was humorously called St. Distaft's[3] Day, which was devoted to "partly work and partly play." Herrick, the recorder of many social customs, tells us that the ploughmen used to set on fire the flax which the maids used for spinning, and received pails of water on their heads for their mischief. The following Monday was called Plough Monday, when the labourers used to draw a plough decked with ribbons round the parish, ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... company invited to adventure to Virginia in 1620: among them, sawyers, joiners, shipwrights, millwrights, coopers, weavers, tanners, potters, fishermen, fishhookmakers, netmakers, leather dressers, limeburners, and dressers of hemp and flax. Even more important because so much depended upon persuading the individual adventurers to invest their own money in the development of their land, were plans for the production of sugar, wine, indigo, silk, cotton, olive oil, rice, etc. In the development of these products Sandys ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven
... may not acknowledge God, He is none the less your Lord and Master. Your will opposed to His is as smoking flax. He has seen fit sorely to afflict you, and you are utterly powerless. But, God does everything in wisdom. He has chastened you for your good, if you will but make a wise ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... Roman was lodged, clothed, and subsisted, by the industry of a thousand hands. The invention of the loom and distaff has been piously ascribed to the gods. In every age, a variety of animal and vegetable productions, hair, skins, wool, flax, cotton, and at length silk, have been skilfully manufactured to hide or adorn the human body; they were stained with an infusion of permanent colors; and the pencil was successfully employed to ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... publish facts, which by their accumulation tended to clench his arguments. Soon after the "Origin of Species" he had in course of publication several important botanical papers, on the two forms of flower in the Primrose genus (1862), and in the genus Linum (flax), 1863, on the forms of Loosestrife, 1864, all published in ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... darkness. Sometimes madame goes hard; so does the sun in summer-shines, shines, shines like a furnace. Madame's body goes like that—at the dairy, in the garden, with the loom, among the fowls, growing her strawberries, keeping the women at the beating of the flax; and then again it is all still and idle like the sun on a cloudy day; and it rests. So it is with the human soul—I am a philosopher—I think the soul goes hard the same as the body, churning, churning away in the heat of the sun; and then ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... its edge, a spot of dancing light set in the miles of rustling wheat, it retains even in July, on an afternoon of glare and brazen locusts, the freshness of a spring morning. A thousand slews, a hundred lakes bordered with rippling barley or tinkling bells of the flax, Claire passed. She had left the occasional groves of oak and poplar and silver birch, and come out on the treeless ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... uphold; My chosen, in whom my soul delighteth; I will make my spirit rest upon him, And he shall publish judgment to the nations. He shall not cry aloud, nor clamour, Nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets. The bruised reed he shall not break, And the smoking flax he shall not quench. He shall publish justice, and establish it. His force shall not be abated, nor broken, Until he has firmly seated justice in the earth, And the distant nations shall wait for his Law. Thus saith the God, even ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... agreeable zest, and effectually destroys the disagreeable smell of that fish when smoke-dried. Saint John's wort is very common, and has been successfully applied as a fomentation in topical inflammations. A kind of weed, which the natives convert into a species of flax, is in general demand. An evergreen, similar to that we found at the mouth of the Columbia, with small berries growing in clusters like grapes, also flourishes in this district. Sarsaparilla and bear-root are found in abundance. White earth abounds in the vicinity of the fort; and one description ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... carpenter again swung his hammer and drew his saw. The broken and scattered spinning-wheels and looms from under the storms and debris of winter again took form and motion, and the fresh bundles of wool, cotton, flax, and hemp in the waiting widow's hand brought hopeful visions of the revival of industries which should not ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... master; Troyon's "Cattle Drinking"; Diaz's "Storm" and "Autumn Scene in the Forest of Fontainebleau"; Rousseau's "Le Givre"; Decamps's "Suicide"; Daubigny's large "Sunset on the Coast of France"; Delacroix's "Christ on the Cross"; and Millet's "Breaking Flax." One of the finest Millets I have ever seen is here, lent by Mr. Walters. This is the "Sheepfold at Night," which with several others of Mr. Walters's paintings here shown, was in the exhibition of "One Hundred Masterpieces" held at Paris ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... rising. But the law of Solon must have been altogether inoperative, in reference to the great articles of human subsistence; for Attica imported, both largely and constantly, grain and salt provisions, probably also wool and flax for the spinning and weaving of the women, and certainly timber for building. Whether the law was ever enforced with reference to figs and honey may well be doubted; at least these productions of Attica were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... to be told or represented. Now that which is first and most broadly characteristic of a thing, is that which distinguishes its genus, or which makes it what it is. For instance, that which makes drapery be drapery, is not its being made of silk or worsted or flax, for things are made of all these which are not drapery, but the ideas peculiar to drapery; the properties which, when inherent in a thing, make it drapery, are extension, non-elastic flexibility, unity and comparative thinness. Everything which has ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... the news went through the whole country that Anna had gathered grain, ground, boiled, and kneaded it, and made a loaf of bread, as she had promised while picking strawberries. Then, after three more days and nights, tidings went through the land that Stana had collected flax, dried, and hackled it, spun it into linen, wove the cloth, and made her husband a shirt as she had promised while seeking for her strawberries. Laptitza alone had not yet kept her word, but great things ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... Queen a red glass full of honeybell whiskey; but she called it a fine name, like Rose-dew, or Tears-of-Flax, and then Queen Lura drank it down nicely;—so much depends on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... unthought of, by us at least, and the navigation of the Mississippi was carried on in small boats that could be drawn up along the river bank by means of oars, spikes, poles, and hooks. The articles most in demand were axes, hoes, cotton cards, hatchels for cleaning flax, hemp and cotton, spinning wheels, knives, and ammunition, guns, and bar shears for plows. In exchange for such goods the people traded beef, hides, furs, tallow, beeswax, and honey. Money was not needed or used by anyone - everything was ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... which in their iniquitous operation have ruined her peasantry. Sweep away the leech-like Church which has sucked her vitality, and has given her back no word even of comfort in her degradation. Turn her barracks into flax mills, encourage a spirit of independence in her citizens, restore to her people the protection of the law, so that they may speak without fear of arrest, and beg them to plainly and boldly state their grievances. Let a commission ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... charged with gunpowder," answered Crevecoeur, "to which, I fear, it is my fate to bring the kindled linstock. Your news and mine are like flax and fire, which cannot meet without bursting into flame, or like certain chemical substances which cannot be mingled without an explosion. Friends—gentlemen—ride close by my rein, and when I tell you what has chanced in the bishopric of Liege, I think you will be of opinion that King Louis ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... eyes as the fairy-flax, Her cheeks like the dawn of day, And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds, That ope in the month ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... the thirteen-year-old Jendrek[1] minds the cows and performs strange antics meanwhile to amuse himself. If you look more closely you will also find the eight-year-old Stasiek[2] with hair as white as flax, who roams through the ravines or sits under the lonely pine on the hill and looks thoughtfully ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... the general stock of provisions by the aid of my gun. The feathers and oil from the wild sea fowl I shot were sold or bartered for other commodities; and the wool of the few sheep we kept, and the flax we grew, were helpful in supplying us ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... scarlet and purple—representing the universe in its four elements—scarlet standing for fire and blue for air by their colours, and the white linen for earth and the purple for sea on account of their derivation, the one, from the flax of the earth and the other from the shellfish of ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... still shall be his voice; No threats from him proceed; The smoking flax shall he not quench, Nor ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... the way of living, the occupations of the women, can be clearly made out in every detail from the Anglo-Saxon literature. The women in the country made the garments, carded the wool, sheared the sheep, washed the things, beat the flax, ground the corn, sat at the spinning-wheel, and prepared the food. In the towns they had no shearing to do, but all the rest of their duty fell to their province. The English women excelled in embroidery. "English" work meant the best kind of work. They worked church vestments ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... made than that of the foregoing species; it is likewise less deep internally. It was composed of the dry stalks of 'forget-me-not,' compactly held together by the intermixture of a quantity of moss interwoven with fine flax and seed-down, and lined with fine grass-stalks. Internal diameter 31/2 inches; external 6 inches; depth 11/2 inch, forming a flattish cup, of which the sides are about 11/2 inch thick. The depth, therefore, is less by 1 inch than in that of the ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... knew and used gold, silver, and copper; they made weapons and other implements of bronze; they had ploughs to till the ground, and axes, and probably saws, for the purpose of cutting and shaping timber. Of pottery and weaving they knew something: the western tribes certainly used hemp and flax as materials for weaving, and when the stuff was woven the women made it into garments by the use of the needle. Thus we get a certain division of trades or occupations. There were the tiller of the soil, the herdsman, the smith who forged the tools and weapons of bronze, the joiner or ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... contrary, entire sincerity. She assures you that she shall always bear it and yourself in mind, whether on land or water; and as a proof of the good-will she bears to you, she sends you a lock of the hair which she wears on her head, which you were often looking at, and were pleased to call flax, which word she supposes you meant as a compliment, even as the old people meant to pass a compliment to their great folks, when they called them bears; though she cannot help thinking that they might have ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... erring spirit had recognized good, and therefore could not be wholly unsanctified by good; it had repented, and therefore sin was no longer loved; all the rest was dark; but He who, speaking in metaphors, forbade the "bruised reed" to be broken, or "smoking flax" to be quenched, might have seen light, invisible to mortal eyes, even about a soul as shadowed as that of ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... down the road, and Nancy went indoors and went about her household work. She cleaned the dishes and trimmed the hearth; she spun the flax which tufted her wheel; then she took the rags of some garments past repair, and in the afternoon shadow of her threshold she cut them into ribbons and sewed them end to end and wound them into balls, for weaving ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... labour, too, which is necessary to produce any one complete manufacture, is almost always divided among a great number of hands. How many different trades are employed in each branch of the linen and woollen manufactures, from the growers of the flax and the wool, to the bleachers and smoothers of the linen, or to the dyers and dressers of the cloth! The nature of agriculture, indeed, does not admit of so many subdivisions of labour, nor of so complete a separation of one business from another, as ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... a community of peasants no great inequalities of wealth existed. Few citizens were very rich; few were very poor. The members of each household made their own clothing from flax or wool, and fashioned out of wood and clay what utensils were needed for their simple life. For a long time the Romans had no coined money whatever. When copper came into use as currency, it passed from hand ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... employment, to which the attention of the fair has been directed from the remotest times. Specimens of Egyptian network, performed three thousand years since, are still in existence; and, from that time, the art, in connection with that of spinning flax, was there carried to its highest state of perfection. With these specimens, are preserved some of the needles anciently used in netting. They are to be found in one of the museums at Berlin. The Egyptian nets were made of flax, and ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... Sir Iohn, do you thinke though wee would haue thrust vertue out of our hearts by the head and shoulders, and haue giuen our selues without scruple to hell, that euer the deuill could haue made you our delight? Ford. What, a hodge-pudding? A bag of flax? Mist.Page. A puft man? Page. Old, cold, wither'd, and of intollerable entrailes? Ford. And one that is as slanderous as Sathan? Page. And as poore as Iob? Ford. And as wicked as his wife? Euan. And giuen to Fornications, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the wave of a wand, they all stop short and listen. The sun is behind them, low and calm, there is not a breath of wind to stir their flax, not even the feather of a last year's bloom has moved, unless they moved it. Yet signal of peril has passed among them; they curve their soft ears for the sound of it, and open their sensitive nostrils, and pat upon the ground with one little ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... them woman's work to do, such as spinning, carding, sewing, etc., and feeding them on bread and water to effeminate them (canto 4). When she overthrew Sir Artegal in single combat, she imposed on him the condition of dressing in "woman's weeds," with a white apron, and to spend his time in spinning flax, instead of in deeds of arms. Radigund fell in love with the captive knight, and sent Clarinda as a go-between; but Clarinda tried to win him for herself, and told the queen he was inexorable (canto 5). At length ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... reach me more! My ear is pained, My soul is sick with every day's report Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled. There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart, It does not feel for man. The natural bond Of brotherhood is severed as the flax That falls asunder at the touch of fire. He finds his fellow guilty of a skin Not coloured like his own, and having power To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey. Lands intersected by a narrow frith Abhor each ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... in-doors by the wide-mouthed fireplace singing fragments of songs such as his fathers before him had sung in their orchards in sunny France, and Evangeline was close beside him at her wheel industriously spinning flax for her loom. Up-stairs there was a chest filled with strong white linen which Evangeline would take to her new home. Every thread of it had been spun and woven by ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... tasks were quite enough, He thought them all too few, And so her uncle, rude and rough, Invented something new. He took her to a little room, Her willingness to tax, And pointed out a broken loom And half a ton of flax, Observing: "Spin six pairs of trousers!" His haughty manner seemed to rouse hers. She ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... on either side of the pathway leading to the house was planted with vegetables—carrots, beets, and cabbage; further off in a separate fenced-in lot there waved with each breath of wind the tender blue flower of the flax; still beyond could be seen the dark green of the potato patch; the rest of the clearing was checkered with the variegated shades of the different cereals that ran to the edge of the lake which touched the glade ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... low attainments in holiness, the strength of your temptations, and your inability to resist sin. "Said I not unto thee," interposes this voice of mingled reproof and love, "My grace is sufficient for thee?" "The bruised reed I will not break, the smoking flax I will not quench." "Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." We are too apt to look to ourselves, to turn our contemplation inwards, instead of keeping the eye of faith centered undeviatingly on a faithful ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... Trustees' agent at 15 shillings per 1,000, two-thirds of the price to be applied on their debt, and one-third to be paid them in cash. Moreover several English boys should be apprenticed to them to learn the trade. Hemp and flax seed should also be given them, and he urged them to weave the linen, for they had men who understood the art, and cloth was scarce and dear in Georgia. He also advised them to buy oxen to use in cultivating their land; and said that they should have one-third of the grape-vines ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... attained bank credit the B. T. Becker Hemp, Rope, and Twine Company bought out the about-to-be-insolvent Mound City Flax Twine Company, the consolidated interests moving into a two-story brick building ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... it." His bugle did so. "Bring the pitch, men the flax—so now—break the windows, and let the air in—set the house on fire; and, Sergeant Guido, remain to prevent it being extinguished I shall fire the village as we ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... thee, for I do not know." How old is the oldest straw known? the oldest {165} linen? the oldest hemp? We have mummy wheat,—cloth of papyrus, which is a kind of straw. The paper reeds by the brooks, the flax-flower in the field, leave such imperishable frame behind them. And Ponte-della-Paglia, in Venice; and Straw Street, of Paris, remembered in Heaven,—there is no occasion to change their names, as one may have to change 'Waterloo Bridge,' or the 'Rue de l'Imperatrice.' Poor Empress! ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... labour with their hands and take part in the Common Life. Wherefore the clerks were diligent in writing the books of Holy Scriptures, and the lay folk busied them with bodily labour and tillage. Some also followed the tailor's craft, others wove wool and flax; others again made baskets and mats, or did divers tasks for the good of the community at the bidding of their Superior. Outwardly indeed they led a life of poverty and toil for Christ's sake, but the love of the heavenly life made sweet the present indigence. ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... has rather too much flax-yellow and lily-whiteness in her complexion," replied Madame, fixing in a moment upon the only fault it was possible to find in the almost perfect beauty of ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... flames with equal vehemence in descent or lateral progress, [Footnote: For a full account of the Greek five, see Gibbon, chapter 53] In sieges, it was poured from the ramparts, or launched like our bombs, in red-hot balls of stone or iron, or it was darted in flax twisted round arrows and in javelins. It was considered as a state secret of the greatest importance; and for wellnigh four centuries it was unknown to the Mahomedans. But at length the composition was discovered by the Saracens, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... has only to consult the curious historical researches of the brothers De Goncourt in order to appreciate the luxury and extravagance of the past century. Imagine that in the wedding-trousseau of Mademoiselle Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau there figured twelve blonde wigs, varying in shade from flax to gold! Madame Tallien alone possessed thirty of these wigs, each of which was valued at that time at one hundred dollars,—that is to say, some two hundred dollars of modern money. None of our modern elegantes would ever think of buying six thousand dollars' worth ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... which they wielded over the fate of man was significantly indicated under the figure of a thread, which they spun out for the life of each human being from his birth to the grave. This occupation they divided between them. Clotho wound the flax round the distaff, {140} ready for her sister Lachesis, who span out the thread of life, which Atropos, with her scissors, relentlessly snapt asunder, when the career of an individual was about ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... weather, he would send rain in the midst of the hay-harvest; or if the time had come for sowing oats, he would parch the land with drought; or if the time for sowing is past, he dries up the barley in the ground, beats down the flax, and presses down the peas in the furrows; he won't let the buckwheat grow, or the lentils in their pods; and when the rye is white for harvest, he either glows fiercely and drives away the clouds, ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... thickness, technically over one inch in circumference. Ropes are made of hemp, manila, flax, cotton or other vegetable fiber or of iron, steel or other metallic wire. A rope is sometimes called a line. They are composed of threads which are spun or twisted into strands and the finished ropes have special names, according to the number of the strands, and the various sizes are ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... Had the attention of a few local societies in different parts of New England been directed to the culture, with special reference to its feasibility and profitableness, a definite result might have been reached the present year. The growth of flax, both in the means of cultivation and in economy, is a subject of great importance. Many other crops might also be named, concerning which opposite, not to say vague, opinions prevail. The local societies may make these trials through the agency of individual members ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... only scarcely budded promises; the phlox-beds but green carpets; and zinnia, calendula, poppy, and coreopsis were symphonies in shades of green against the dropping pink of bleeding-hearts or the nascent azure of flax and spiderwort. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... a garrison of farmers and shepherds. Zealand is the richest agricultural province in the Netherlands. The alluvial soil of these islands is a marvel of fertility. Few countries can boast such wheat, colza, flax, and madder as it produces. Its people raise prodigious cattle and colossal horses, which are even larger than those of the Flemish breed. The people are strong and handsome; they preserve their ancient customs, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... carried their water as in a cask, because had we not often heard of clouds bursting and producing havoc and ruin beneath them? The hoops gave way, perhaps, or the head was pressed out. Goethe says that when the barometer rises, the clouds are spun off from the top downward like a distaff of flax; but this is more truly the process when it rains. When fair weather is in the ascendant, the clouds are simply reabsorbed by the air; but when it rains, they are spun off into something more compact: ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... sword, were evidently the most interesting parts of the affair to the youthful husband, who seemed to find in them his only solace for the weary length of the ceremony. He was a fine, handsome little fellow, fair and rosy, with bright blue eyes, and hair like shining flax, unusually tall and strong-limbed for his age; and as he gave his hand to his little bride, and walked with her under a canopy up to kneel at the High Altar, for the marriage blessing and the mass, they looked like a full-grown couple ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... got a little aforehand in the world, till I have done this and that and the other business; but, alas! the thing is, they are not willing; for, were they but soundly willing, these, and a thousand such as these, would hold them no faster than the cords held Samson, when he broke them like burnt flax. I tell you the will is all: that is one of the chief things which turns the wheel either backward or forward; and God knoweth that full well, and so likewise doth the devil; and therefore they both ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... you would, Ana, who also struggle in this net of moonbeams that is stronger and more real than any twisted out of palm or flax. Well, nor will I, who in my age love to watch such human sport and, being so near to them, fear to thwart the schemes of gods. Let this scroll unroll itself as it will, and when it is open, read it, Ana, and remember what I said to you this day. It will ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... in a peculiar way. When this was done it was taken possession of by the Atua, whose spirit entered it. The priest then either held it in the hand and vibrated it in the air whilst the powerful karakia was repeated, or he tied a piece of string (formed of the centre of a flax leaf) round the neck of the image and stuck it in the ground. He sat at a little distance from it, leaning against a tuahu, a short stone pillar stuck in the ground in a slanting position and, holding the string in his hand, he gave ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to the merry green wood; Like flax was each tress on her temples that stood; Her cheek like the rose-leaf that perfumes the air; Her form, like ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... extraordinary occurrence, and not knowing what might ensue, the pursuers reined in their steeds. But the terror of the scene was not yet over. The whole of the brushwood had caught fire, and blazed up with the fury and swiftness of lighted flax. The flames caught the parched branches of the trees, and in a few seconds the whole grove was ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... The cord was made in England: A rough cord, a tough cord, A cord that bowmen love; So we'll drain our jacks To the English flax And the land where the hemp ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... adjoining, there is nothing which our east and northerly countries of Europe do yield, but the like also may be made in them as plentifully, by time and industry; namely, resin, pitch, tar, soap-ashes, deal-board, masts for ships, hides, furs, flax, hemp, corn, cables, cordage, linen cloth, metals, and many more. All which the countries will afford, and the soil is apt to yield. The trees for the most in those south parts are fir-trees, pine, and cypress, all yielding gum and turpentine. Cherry trees bearing fruit no ...
— Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage to Newfoundland • Edward Hayes
... considerable production of hemp, flax, and tobacco, but not for export in any large quantity. The tobacco grown in the colony was coarse and ill-flavored. It was smoked by both the habitant and the Indian because it was cheap; but Brazilian tobacco was greatly preferred by those ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... wrinkled old woman, with a red handkerchief wound about her head, was a chestnut merchant. The sailors, children, and Italians coming over the border bought her wares, and when she was not employed in serving them she twisted flax ...
— Harper's Young People, September 28, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... is still so precious, that when gathered up, ground anew with paper and sawdust, and at length amalgamated with a mucilaginous water composed of soaked flax-seed, one finally obtains a kind of pulp that one tries vainly to make ignite, but which obstinately refuses to do so, though examples to the ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... truths. It follows from it that Emerson is more striking than suggestive. He likes things on a large scale—he is fond of ethnical remarks and typical persons. Notwithstanding his habit of introducing the names of common things into his discourses and poetry ('Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood,' is a line from one of his poems), his familiarity therewith is evidently not great. 'Take care, papa,' cried his little son, seeing him at work with his spade, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... of the country where flax is spun on a "foot-wheel," it is not unfrequent that the spinners moisten the thread with the secretions of the mouth. This seems to operate economically for a time, but debility of the salivary organs soon follows, which incapacitates them from supplying saliva sufficient to moisten the food, ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... prophecy is when a man, by an inward instinct, is moved to perform some outward action. Thus it is related of Samson (Judges 15:14) that "the Spirit of the Lord came strongly upon him, and as the flax [*Lina. St. Thomas apparently read ligna ('wood')] is wont to be consumed at the approach of fire, so the bands with which he was bound were broken and loosed." The second degree of prophecy is when ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... met the mother of this maiden, nine bushels of flax were sown therein, and none has yet sprung up, white nor black. I require to have the flax to sow in the new land yonder, that when it grows up it may make a white wimple for my daughter's head on the ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... wonderful scenes, in which she herself always played a part, she got on but lamentably in real and every-day life. The head in which so many splendid pictures and grand schemes were agitating, looked generally something like a bundle of flax; she never noticed the holes and specks in her dress, nor her ragged stockings and trodden-down shoes; she forgot all her little, every-day business, and whatever she had in her hand she ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... nights of incessant conflict, aware that their ammunition must soon be exhausted, and knowing not from what quarter to hope for relief, were in despair. The Indians now filled a cart with hemp, flax, and the resinous boughs of firs and pines. They fastened to the tongue a succession of long poles, and then, setting the whole fabric on fire, as it rolled up volumes of flame and smoke, pushed it back against the log house, whose walls were as ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... mother to kindle the flax whereby the dim and flickering tapers might be lighted. His fingers were more deft at this business, it would seem, than in the making of arrows. Fitzooth, in the intervals of his eating, took up Robin's arrows ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... with Lieut. King only a small detachment, consisting of one subaltern officer, and six marines, a very promising young man who was a midshipman, a surgeon,* two men who understood the cultivation and dressing of flax, with nine men and six women convicts. That the nature of this settlement may be fully understood, a copy of the instructions delivered to Mr. King at his departure is ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... wearily, half laughingly. "Spare me the old world-worn, threadbare formulas. Because the flax and the laleza blossom for use, and the garden flowers grow trained and pruned, must there be no bud that opens for mere love of the sun, and swings free in the wind in its fearless, fair fashion? Believe me, dear Victor, it is the lives which follow no previous rule that do the most good and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... platform by his rival, Douglas, with having sold liquor, Mr. Lincoln replied that if he figured on one side of the counter, Douglas figured on the other. "As a storekeeper," says Mr. Ellis, "Mr. Lincoln wore flax and tow linen pantaloons—I thought about five inches too short in the legs—and frequently he had but one suspender, no vest or coat. He had a calico shirt such as he had in the Black Hawk War; coarse brogues, tan-colour; ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... situation of the poor more destitute than ever, Mrs. Graham adopted a plan best calculated in her view to detect the idle applicant for charity, and at the same time to furnish employment for the more worthy among the female poor. She purchased flax, and lent wheels where applicants had none. Such as were industrious, took the work with thankfulness and were paid for it; those who were beggars by profession never kept their word by returning for the flax or the wheel. The ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... is rewarded with a large crop of maize and sweet potatoes. These, with bacon from his herd of wandering pigs, give sustenance to his family of children, who, hatless and bonnetless, roam through the woods until the sun bleaches their hair to the color of flax. With tobacco, whiskey, and ammunition for himself, and an ample supply of snuff for his wife, he drags out an indolent existence; but he is the pioneer of American civilization, and as he migrates ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... of print-paper in England. Mixed with rags it makes an excellent product, but the chemicals required to free it from resin and gritty silica are expensive, while the cost of importation has rendered its use in America impractical. Flax, hemp, manila, jute and straw, and of course old paper that has been once used, are extensively employed in this manufacture, the process beginning with the chemical treatment and boiling that are found necessary ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... he worked away merely to save the expense of paying the blacksmith a few farthings? Now his daughter is marrying another rich fellow; she'll get a dowry, I tell you! I happened to pass the linen closet; flax, yarn, tablecloths and napkins and sheets and shirts and every possible kind of stuff are piled up to the ceiling in there. And in addition to that the old codger will give her six thousand thalers in cash! Just glance about you; don't you feel as if you ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... bullets seemed to fly like hail; and quickly they wounded one man among us, then another, and then a third. About two hours (according to my observation, in that amazing time) they had been about the house before they prevailed to fire it (which they did with flax and hemp, which they brought out of the barn, and there being no defense about the house, only two flankers at two opposite corners and one of them not finished); they fired it once and one ventured out and quenched it, but they quickly fired it again, and that took. Now ...
— Captivity and Restoration • Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
... number of mountain-locked valleys. Mountain slopes comprise about two-fifths of the area of the country, and practically all of the rivers are rapid and unnavigable. The forests are extensive and consist of large trees. Cereals, along with hemp, flax and tobacco, are raised, and the pasture lands are fertile and abundant. Hence, the dairy products, as well as hides and tallow, are produced in profusion. Fruits of the hardier varieties grow ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... was, over and above all your sorrows, by mistaken kindness, and comforters in whom is no comfort; who break the bruised reed and quench the smoking flax; who tell you that you must be wicked, and God must be angry with you, or all this would not have come upon you? Job's comforters did so, and spoke very righteous-sounding words, and took great pains to justify God and to break poor Job's heart, and made him say many wild ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... "And the smoking flax"—the life that has lost its fire, and therefore its light, its enthusiasm, and therefore its ideals; the life that is smouldering into the cold ashes of moral and spiritual death! He will not stamp it out with ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... We are of all races; we come from everywhere. I look at the two men beside me. Poterloo, the miner from the Calonne pit, is pink; his eyebrows are the color of straw, his eyes flax-blue. His great golden head involved a long search in the stores to find the vast steel-blue tureen that bonnets him. Fouillade, the boatman from Cette, rolls his wicked eyes in the long, lean face of a musketeer, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... awe of the spark, and rest not till it is quenched. As Christ our Lord is tenderly careful of spiritual life when it is feeble, and cherishes it into strength, we should sternly stamp out evil while it is yet young in our own hearts, lest it spread like a fire. He will not quench the smoking flax of beginning grace, and we should quench with all our might the smoking flax of sin. He commanded the Church in Sardis to "be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die" (Rev. iii. 2). The counterpart ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... worthy son of Abraham! I sell neither hops, nor eider-down, nor honey, nor wax, nor hemp-seed, nor salt meat, nor caviare, nor wood, nor wool, nor ribbons, nor, hemp, nor flax, nor morocco, ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... Harmonists, who have aimed to do all things well, were famous among Western men for many years for the excellence of the whisky they made; of which, however, they always used very sparingly themselves. Among their crops in succeeding years were corn, wheat, rye, hemp, and flax; wool from merino sheep, which they were the first in that part of Pennsylvania to own; and poppies, from which they made sweet-oil. They did not rest until they had established also a woolen-mill. It was a principle ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... towmond auld, sin' lint was i' the bell, it was a twelve-month old since flax was in flower; i.e. when the flax was last in bloom it ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... but in winter the pioneer wore moccasins of buckskin, and buckskin leggins or trousers; his coat was a hunting shirt belted at the waist and fringed where it fell to his knees. It was of homespun, a mixture of wool and flax called linsey-woolsey, and out of this the dresses of his wife and daughters were made; the wool was shorn from the sheep, which were so scarce that they were never killed for their flesh, except by the wolves, ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... twine, tar and lampblack mixed with a proportion of lime, vulcanized fibre, celluloid, boxwood, cocoanut hair and shell, spruce, hickory, baywood, cedar and maple shavings, rosewood, punk, cork, bagging, flax, and a host of other things. He also extended his searches far into the realms of nature in the line of grasses, plants, canes, and similar products, and in these experiments at that time and later he carbonized, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... was twenty-two he again left home. This time he went to the little seaport town of Irvine to learn flax dressing. For on the farm the father and brothers had begun to grow flax, and it was thought well that one of them should know how to prepare ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall |
