"Spavined" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... came from the contemptuously self-commiserating thought that I was rather like a worn-out 'bus horse, to whom some benevolent minor Providence was offering the freedom of a fine grazing paddock. 'You're too much galled and spavined, you poor devil, to be moved by verbal assurances. Wait till you scent the breezy upland, and your feet feel the turf. You'll know better what it all ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... on their way. The horse dealer was rather astonished when the naval officer, whom he naturally supposed knew as much about horse-flesh as he himself did about the management of a ship, indignantly refused a couple of spavined animals which he offered for sale. Several others were brought forward, which Jack in like manner rejected. At length he fixed upon two beasts which, after passing his hands over their shoulders and down their legs, he thought might suit ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... wine will be no bad preparation for the journey," said the muleteer; "and I will readily bestow one in memory of the spavined mule which you tried to palm upon me, but could not, now some three ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... this unsavoury composite wraith, the hall was empty when P. Sybarite entered it. But it echoed with sounds of rowdy revelry from the room in back: mechanical clatter of galled and spavined piano, despondent growling of a broken-winded 'cello, nervous giggling and moaning of an excoriated violin—the three wringing from the score of O You Beautiful Doll an entirely adequate accompaniment to the perfunctory performance of a ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... his mount, and, looking at the woe-begone O'Hara, laughed. "A nice trick this is, Sergeant," he said, "to start out on a trip to dodge Indians with a spavined horse. Why didn't you get a broomstick? Now go back to camp as fast as you can go; and that horse ought to be blistered when you get there. See if you can't really cure him. He's too good to be shot." He patted the gray's nervous head, and the beast ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... place, indeed, that for some people there could be no solution of its injustice, its brutality, its dissonance, its inequalities. The rapture in the song of the bluebirds was sweeter than the voice of Cyrus to which he had listened. And in a meadow on the right, an old grey horse, scarred, dim-eyed, spavined, stood resting one crooked leg, while he gazed wistfully over the topmost rail of the fence into the vivid green of the distance—for into his aching old bones, also, there had passed a little of that longing ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... watchin' a stage full of more or less young ladies in street clothes who are listenin' sort of bored while a bald-headed party in his shirt sleeves asks 'em for the love of Mike can't they move a little less like they was all spavined. ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... ascertained that the horse was blind in one eye, and that the sight of the other was very defective; and not a month elapsed before my purchase developed most of the diseases that horse-flesh is heir to, and a more worthless, broken-winded, spavined quadruped never disgraced the noble name of horse. After worrying through two or three months of life, he expired one night in a fit of the colic. I replaced him with a mule, and Julius henceforth had to take his chances ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... go neck and neck round the eighteen holes, than to take on some lissome youngster who could spatter them all over the course with one old ball and a cut-down cleek stolen from his father; or some spavined elder who not only rubbed it into them, but was apt, between strokes, to bore them with personal reminiscences of the Crimean War. So they began to play together early and late. In the small hours before breakfast, long ere the first faint piping of the waking caddie made itself ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... de Paris. Dwarfs ride them, rustyarmoured, leaping, leaping in their, in their saddles. Last in a drizzle of rain on a brokenwinded isabelle nag, Cock of the North, the favourite, honey cap, green jacket, orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, gripping the reins, a hockeystick at the ready. His nag on spavined whitegaitered feet ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... I still hesitated, he said, "Perhaps, brother, you think I did not come honestly by the money: by the honestest manner in the world, for it is the money I earnt by fighting in the ring: I did not steal it, brother, nor did I get it by disposing of spavined donkeys, or glandered ponies—nor is it, brother, the profits of my wife's witchcraft ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... subaltern told me who came to look at the pony with the view, he said, of making me an offer. Another officer proved to me that the off foreleg was gone hopelessly; a third confirmed this diagnosis of his friend, and in a clinical lecture demonstrated that the poor beast was spavined, and that its near hind frog was rotten, "as all Chinese ponies' are," he added. One of the mounted constabulary, a smart officer, fortunately discovered in time that the pony was a roarer; while the Hungarian Israelite who lends help on notes of hand, post-obits, personal applications, and other ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... and knew that they were winking, his belief in his final success never wavered. Any ordinary observer might be expected to remark that Creeping Peter was not entirely without blemish. Besides being spavined and having three of his hoofs injured by sand-crack, he had poll-evil, fistulas, malanders, ring-bone, capped hock, curb, splint, and several other maladies which made him a very suitable horse for the general public ...
— Punchinello Vol. 2, No. 28, October 8, 1870 • Various
... raison that ye are going to pick out this animal for me," he added, "how do I know but what ye'll pick out some ring-boned, spavined critter that trots sideways, and is blind ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... they had not to decide, for lumbering along the road, with one lamp lighted and two spavined horses in the shafts, came a heavy coach, which after a moment's suspense they recognized as the Oxford coach, the redoubtable ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... matter how blind-instinctively apprehended, is a dread giant; that life is beneficent and worth while; that, in the end, with fading life, it will not be knocked about and beaten and urged beyond its sprained and spavined best; that old age, even, is decent, dignified, and valuable, though old age means a ribby scare-crow in a hawker's cart, stumbling a step to every blow, stumbling dizzily on through merciless servitude and slow disintegration ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... yarn in and ostentatious heap, which in the pride of his commercial sagacity, he had purchased at a dead loss. Again you might see him at a horse-fair, cantering about on the back of some sleek but broken-winded jade, with spavined legs, imposed on him as "a great bargain entirely," by the superior cunning of some rustic sharper; or standing over a hogshead of damaged flaxseed, in the purchase of which he shrewdly suspected himself of ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... cawn-demmed if I'll stand it. I don't—Ike don't want them spavined old crows; they're all ring-boned and got the heaves." His long repressed ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... that mules are not subject to such ailments as horses—spavin, glanders, ringbone, and bots. If I had the committee here, I would show its members that every other mule in the quartermasters' department, over fifteen and a half hands high, is either spavined, ringboned, or ill some way injured by the above-named diseases. The mule may not be so liable to spavin as the horse, but he has ringbone just the same. I cannot, for the life of me, see how the committee could have fallen into this error. There is this, however, to be taken into consideration: ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... me a coward," he said. "No. A broken sword is better than none.... One spavined white horse cannot be expected to carry two men a four days' journey. I hate white horses, but this time it cannot be helped. You begin to understand me?... I perceive that you are minded, on the strength of what you have seen and fancy, to taint my reputation. It is men of ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... still a Young Man he made the Important Discovery that the honest Laborer who digs Post-Holes for 11 Hours at a Stretch gets $1.25 in the Currency of the Realm, while the Brain-Worker who leads out a Spavined Horse and puts in 20 Minutes at tall Bunko Work, can clean up $14.50 and then sit on the Porch all Afternoon, reading "The Lives of ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... smoked and rested, he would come stepping across the court in the likeness of some young man whose maiden had just smiled on him. Or if some hunter prided himself too openly on a buck he had killed, the first thing he knew there would be Tse-tse-yote walking like an ancient spavined wether prodded by a blunt arrow, until the whole court ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al |
