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More "Barbed" Quotes from Famous Books



... them to look at. Occasionally, too, a stray passer-by, under the erroneous impression that in crossing them he was taking a short cut, would venture into them, only to turn back discomfited when confronted with padlocked gates and hedges threaded with barbed wire, to say nothing of notice ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler

... correct reading being "my heat." In vi. 396, the Scottish "boune" (though it occurs twice in other parts of the poem) has been changed to "bound" in all editions since 1821; and, eight lines below, the old word "barded" has become "barbed." Scores of similar corruptions are recorded in my Notes, and need ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... its weapon for a few instants longer and to avenge the deceased before being itself overcome with death's inertia. This vindictive persistency serves me to perfection. There is another circumstance in my favour: the barbed sting remains where it is, which enables me to ascertain the exact spot pierced. A needle withdrawn as soon as inserted would leave me doubtful. I can also, when the transparency of the tissues permits, perceive the direction of the weapon, whether perpendicular and favourable to my plans, ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... home from a road house. It surely is a proof of discipline to hear the mocking, silver-toned laughter of women ring out in the night only ten feet away and not drop your gun and follow it right through the barbed wire. After the war, I am going to buy lots of barbed wire and cut it up into little bits just ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.

... warning farmers and townspeople against us. They did their work thoroughly, all right. The erstwhile hospitable farmers met us with the icy mit. Also, they summoned the constables when we tied up to the bank, and loosed the dogs. I know. Two of the latter caught me with a barbed-wire fence between me and the river. I was carrying two buckets of milk for the pale Vienna. I didn't damage the fence any; but we drank plebian coffee boiled with vulgar water, and it was up to me to ...
— The Road • Jack London

... enlightened eyes in all her disharmony. And I, who in wanton Paris had passed as an innocent child through a hotbed of sensuality and a hailstorm of seduction, on a single twilight eve in London had four or five encounters the particulars of which remained in my memory as barbed arrows remain imbedded in the flesh, smarting and itching and burning like the thorny fibres of cactus or sweetbriar seed with which one has come into ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... explorations in the Base until the grass should be sufficiently dry to burn; there were two varieties: that upon the slopes and hollows of the stony soil of the Atbara valley had been a pest ever since it had ripened; as the head formed three barbed darts, these detached themselves from the plant with such facility, that the slightest touch was sufficient to dislodge them; they immediately pierced the clothes, from which they could not be withdrawn, as the barbed heads broke off and remained. It was simply impossible to walk in this grass as ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker

... Wants to look over his nearest jay neighbor, I should imagine, and see what sort of a curio he is. He thinks it may be necessary to put up barbed wire ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... the report with their mouth, and held up three fingers, signifying that they recollected my first visit and number, which they do not seem to have forgotten, and seem to dread the appearance of a gun. The first one that came up had a very long spear, with a flat, sharp, and barbed point. They were two elderly stout men, one very much diseased and lame. They remained a long time looking at us. None of the others came up. In a little more than three hours they went off and we saw no more of them during the evening. Wind, south-west, with heavy clouds from ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart

... goods would have found their way into the Yamens of Canton. Assuredly in Li Keen you will have a friend who will make many delicate allusions to your ancestors when you meet, and yet one who will float many barbed whispers to follow you when you have passed; for you have planted shame before him in the eyes of those who would otherwise neither have eyes to see nor tongues to discuss the matter. It is for such a reason that this person distrusts all things connected with the journey, except your constancy, ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah

... avenging demon who had so punished their imbecility would pass away, were terrified from their obscurity. They came like moths to the candle, and sarcasms in the satire which had long been unheeded, in the belief that they would soon be forgotten, were felt to have been barbed with irremediable venom, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... good thing. I'd like to see it every day if I could, I laughed and drank lemonade till I've got my cloze all pinned up with pins, and I'd as soon tell you, if you wont give it away, that my pants is tied on me with barbed fence wire." ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... from the advertisement at the end of the volume, was Henry Hills. The middle of the title-page is occupied by a coarsely executed woodcut, representing a boar with barbed instrument in his snout, and similar instrument on a larger scale under the head, surmounted with some rude characters, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various

... Meriones shot forth a deadly shaft, And smote Phylodamas, Polites' friend, Beneath the jaw; the arrow pierced his throat. Down fell he like a vulture, from a rock By fowler's barbed arrow shot and slain; So from the high tower swiftly down he fell: His life fled; clanged his armour o'er the corpse. With laughter of triumph stalwart Molus' son A second arrow sped, with strong desire To smite Polites, ill-starred Priam's son: But with a ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus

... herself quickly about and joyfully began to retrace her steps. Why, then, was it that in the course of a few minutes more her voice suddenly broke into a wild, unearthly shriek, which ringing with terror burst the bounds of that dungeon-like room, and sank, a barbed shaft, into the breasts of those awaiting the result of her doubtful adventure, at either end of this ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various

... motor-cycle standing against a tree Tom hurried to a fence that separated the road from a field. The fence was a barbed-wire one, and in a moment Tom had found a ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton

... my blood. I caught the spear, and tested it across my knee. It was pliant but tough, and wickedly barbed,—a weapon for a man to respect. "So you wanted the color of my blood," I called angrily. "You have a good spear; all that was lacking was a man to aim it;" and with a contemptuous laugh I tossed the spear ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... composition that which is most practical and imaginative alike; whose energy can subdue a continent, and whose boastfulness would awaken contempt if it were not palliated by the magnitude of their achievements. A humor that is often barbed, but which is most willingly directed against one's self; but, whether directed against the humorist or his neighbor, carries no poison upon its point and ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... instant, had been too spellbound to move. The farmer squared his fists and received the newcomers on his knuckles. He was a clean hitter, and from the way he pirouetted and skipped you would have said he could dance, too. The three young sports, considerably the worse for wear, fled pell-mell for the barbed-wire fence that bordered the road, and went over it in the twinkling of an eye. Only a few bits of what they would probably have called "nobby pants," speckled here and there on the barbs, betrayed to later wayfarers this new instance of man's ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne

... retort—except glass or crockery—that the heavy creature was capable of making; but, I became as highly incensed by it as if it had been barbed with wit, and I immediately rose in my place and said that I could not but regard it as being like the honorable Finch's impudence to come down to that Grove,—we always talked about coming down ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... and spare Was idle mail 'gainst the barbed air, For it was just at the Christmas time; 260 So he mused, as he sat, of a sunnier clime, And sought for a shelter from cold and snow In the light and warmth of long-ago; He sees the snake-like caravan crawl O'er the edge of the desert, black and small, Then nearer and nearer, till, one ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... heard it," said Jane. Mechanically she withdrew the bolt of the gate, which forthwith collapsed in a tangle of barbed wire. Tramping over this snare, Jane faced the doctor as he wiped his brows. "I aint much hand with children," she reminded him. "You better ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead

... landed in Boche territory. After setting fire to the machine we would attempt to hide, and then, at night-time, creep along a communication trench to the enemy front line, jump across it in a gap between the sentries, and chance getting by the barbed wire and across No Man's Land. Or we would steal to the Somme, float down-stream, and somehow or other pass the entanglements placed across the river by the enemy. Wouff! wouff! Archie was ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... the treetops?" he panted ironically. "Ghosts have no business getting their spirit raiment tangled up in a barbed-wire fence." ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... barbed dart from his arm and poured a powerful antiseptic into the open wound, unmindful of the pain. As best he could, he disinfected his other cuts and bandaged them. Ora had raised herself and now sat there, swaying weakly and regarding him ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent

... into the fight like a lion, you go out like a lamb. By Saint Paul! this is not in accordance with the De Gamelyn traditions. Take up thy arms! Come along!" said the stranger tapping him on the shoulder with a barbed shaft trimmed ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips

... gathered her countenance into an expression of as perfect unconcern as a little heightening of her colour would allow her, and returned his salute with rather a distant bow. But Mr Bunker was not to be damped by this hint of barbed wire. He held out his hand and exclaimed cordially, "My dear Lady Alicia! ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston

... resultant whatever from his lifetime, for the future of the world. It points this disregard of the sequence of life and birth in favour of an abstract and fruitless virtue, it points it indeed with a barbed point that the son of Marcus Aurelius was the unspeakable Commodus, and that the Roman Empire fell from the temporizing detachment of his rule into a century of ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... Once again he couched lance, and again he drove down upon his bruised and wounded enemy. This time the lance struck full and fair, and those who watched saw the steel point pierce the iron breast-plate and then snap short, leaving the barbed ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle

... provided, they discharged their guns into the crowd of the natives, who instantly fled, leaving Roper and Calvert pierced with several spears, and severely beaten by their waddies. Several of these spears were barbed, and could not be extracted without difficulty. I had to force one through the arm of Roper, to break off the barb; and to cut another out of the groin of Mr. Calvert. John Murphy had succeeded in getting ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt

... reign of terror in the coke regions. Secretly, and while peace negotiations were being purposely prolonged, Frick supervised the military preparations, the fortification of the Homestead Steel Works, the erection of a high board fence, capped with barbed wire and provided with loopholes for sharpshooters. And then, in the dead of night, he attempted to smuggle his army of hired Pinkerton thugs into Homestead, which act precipitated the terrible carnage of the steel workers. ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... conflict had come. It was no longer to be a duel at a distance—no more a contest between rifle-bullets and barbed arrows; but the close, desperate, hand-to-hand contest of pistol, knife, spear, club, ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... intrepid horsemen." "My God! How they fell!" writes Captain Letorez, who, after his horse was shot under him, leapt on a riderless animal and came through unhurt. When the men got up close to the German guns they found themselves riding full tilt into hidden wire entanglements—seven strands of barbed wire. Horses and men came down in a heap, and few of the brave fellows who reached ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick

... For he who never asked For quarter from mankind—shall he be tasked To beg of Time for mercy? Rather he Would girdle up his loins, like Baldwin be. Aged he is, but of a lineage rare; The least intrepid of the birds that dare Is not the eagle barbed. What matters age, The years but fire him with a holy rage. Though late from Palestine, he is not spent,— With age he wrestles, firm ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... me sleeping: half awake 480 I sought for her smooth arms and lips, to slake My greedy thirst with nectarous camel-draughts; But she was gone. Whereat the barbed shafts Of disappointment stuck in me so sore, That out I ran and search'd the forest o'er. Wandering about in pine and cedar gloom Damp awe assail'd me; for there 'gan to boom A sound of moan, an agony of sound, Sepulchral from the distance all around. Then came a conquering ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... more ill at ease than I can ever remember. My mind is a seething blank, and I think my left sock-suspender is coming down. However ... Of course, it is beginning to be forcibly what they call 'borne in upon' me that we ought to have brought some barbed wire and a turnstile. As it is, we shall miss about two-thirds of them. Here's your chance," he added, nodding at a stout lady with a green suit-case and a defiant glare. "I'll take ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... weighs most heavily with me. Changed man as I am, I abhor myself in the recollection. May none who hear this tale ever have felt as I. A horse driven to fury by a rider armed with barbed spurs, was not more a slave than I to the violent tyranny of my temper. A fiend possessed my soul, irritating it to madness. I felt the voice of conscience within me; but if I yielded to it for a brief interval, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... they charged the bowmen of Tario. Barbed shafts flew thick and fast. Men fell, and the ground ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... animals do not use barbed fences. To see the lacerations that these fences have produced upon the innocent animals should be sufficient testimony against them. Many use pokes and blinders on cattle and goats, but as a rule such things fail. The better way is to separate breachy animals ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various

... commission for Mexican and South American trade—though I handle a good many orders for country dealers, too," replied Mitchell. "My specialty is agricultural implements, barbed wire, machinery and iron stuff generally, for the export trade. There's things about it would surprise you. Why, such things, farm machinery more especially, retail in Buenos Ayres at from 40 to 60 per cent, of what they do here, after ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... friend who has built his home where he may look always at this white oak, or that he raged in anger when a crabbed neighbor ruthlessly cut down a superb tree of the same kind that was on his property line, in order that he might run his barbed-wire fence straight? No; I agree with him that this tree-murderer has probably a barbed-wire heart, and we expect that his future existence will be ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland

... toward the open country. At last, leaving behind all lines of houses, she crawled under a barbed-wire fence into a broad meadow where a few cows were grazing; then over a creek into another meadow, and up to a grassy knoll just ahead. From beyond it faint shouts were coming. At the foot of the knoll Margery rested ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore

... races in the wide Piazza Santa Maria Novella, where the small obelisks point the start and finish of the races. These were followed by the corso dei barberi—barbed horse-races without riders—down the longest street of the town. Then followed the French Minister's masked ball, amusing as well as splendid, readers of Cooper's "Italy" will find. But more than all, on their return to Villa St. Illario, were they charmed with the brilliant illumination ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips

... for eight or nine hours, eating sparingly, accepting every conversational opportunity, not even disdaining the discussion of possible work. And beyond mending a hole in his coat that he had made while negotiating barbed wire, with a borrowed needle and thread in a lodging house, he had done no work at all. Neither had he worried about business nor about time and seasons. And for the first time in his life he had seen the ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... finished a hasty meal ere his menial announced to him that five men, each leading a barbed steed,[70-11] desired to speak with him. The Disinherited Knight had exchanged his armor for the long robe usually worn by those of his condition, which, being furnished with a hood, concealed the features, when such was ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... manner or not I am unable to say. Here we should have discussed the matter at length if it had taken us until midnight, or adjourned over until next day, "the spinsters and widows" having been the target for all our barbed arrows until completely annihilated. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... showing the great importance attached to its possession. The usual length of the bow—which was made of yew, witch-hazel, ash, or elm—was about six feet; and the arrow, about half that length. Arrows were made of ash, feathered with part of a goose's wing, and barbed with iron or steel. In the reign of Edward III., a painted bow cost 1 shilling and 6 pence, a white bow, 1 shilling; a sheaf of steel-tipped arrows (24 to the sheaf), 1 shilling and 2 pence, and a sheaf of non accerata (the blunt sort), 1 shilling ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... "it would be ticklish work for any of us to get over that fence by climbing the tree. The fence is a good ten feet high, and the strands of barbed wire curve forward at the top. That limb, besides, is twelve feet or more from the ground, and not very strong, either. It looks as if we would have to make our way around the fence ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge

... company still had corn and red wine, they refrained them from the kine, for they were fain of life. But when the corn was now all spent from out the ship, and they went wandering with barbed hooks in quest of game, as needs they must, fishes and fowls, whatsoever might come to their hand, for hunger gnawed at their belly, then at last I departed up the isle, that I might pray to the ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.

... loosed, the sudden string Rang, and sprang inward, and the waterish air Hissed, and the moist plumes of the songless reeds Moved as a wave which the wind moves no more. But the boar heaved half out of ooze and slime His tense flank trembling round the barbed wound, Hateful, and fiery with invasive eyes And bristling with intolerable hair Plunged, and the hounds clung, and green flowers and white Reddened and broke all round them where they came. And charging ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... thing,—just desolation, the impulsive, panic-stricken desolation of a little child left suddenly alone with a stranger. "Father!" the frightened voice ventured forth a tiny bit louder. But the unheeding Senior Surgeon had already reached the piazza. "Fat Father!" screamed the little voice. Barbed now like a shark-hook the phrase ripped through the Senior Surgeon's dormant sensibilities. As one fairly yanked out of his thoughts he whirled around ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... was bound. The death of love had been so gradual that she had not noticed it in time for decent obsequies; she had not sent a regret in its wake....She had had enough left, more than many women who had made the same blind plunge into the barbed wire maze of matrimony....And now she had nothing. She would have liked to drive right out on to a liner about to sail through the Golden Gate...but she would no doubt have to live on...and on...in changed, possibly humble, conditions...despising ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... must soon abandon the attempt to break the French lines at Verdun; but each repulse brought a new assault mightier than before. The Germans raced across the open ground under a veritable hail of lead. They fell by hundreds and thousands, but what few survived hurled themselves against the barbed wire entanglements of the French or into the trenches, there to die upon the points of the foes' bayonets, or to be shot down as they tumbled over ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes

... Aunt Hedwig the impolite remark that ghosts only were seen by women and fools; in a surly tone informed Herr Sohnstein that policemen still were plentiful in the vicinity of Tompkins Square; and then, having planted these barbed arrows in the breasts of his daughter, his sister, and his friend, sought the retirement of his own upper room. As he left them, Minna buried her face in Aunt Hedwig's capacious bosom and cried bitterly, and Aunt Hedwig also cried; and Herr Sohnstein, laying aside for the moment his ...
— A Romance Of Tompkins Square - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier

... a thing I want," Beverly laughed again, still lightly. Her friend's barbed shafts had not wounded her. "And I'd much rather be thought a hypocrite, even a sanctimonious one, than a ravening, slavering—I can't think of the technical name for a female wolf, so—wolfess, running around with teeth and claws bared, ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith

... were again employed, the first in the initial series and the second in a final series of trials. The animal's persistent attempts to raise the doors gave the experimenter so much trouble that on April 29 barbed wire was nailed over the windows of the entrance doors with the hope that it might prevent him from working at them. But he quickly learned to place his fingers between the barbs and raise the doors as ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes

... American divisions in the front line advanced at 5 a.m., on September 12, assisted by a limited number of tanks manned partly by Americans and partly by the French. These divisions, accompanied by groups of wire cutters and others armed with bangalore torpedoes, went through the successive bands of barbed wire that protected the enemy's front line and support trenches, in irresistible waves on schedule time, breaking down all defense of an enemy demoralized by the great volume of our artillery fire and our sudden approach out ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... two here. I happen to have known the man who invented barbed wire and who had his abundant reward. Blessings on him! though one is sometimes inclined to add cursings too. It is dangerous stuff to handle. Heavy gloves should always be worn. The flesh is so torn by the ragged barb that the wound ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... romance-writer of modern times? But to return, the Scottish archers were first formed into a company and obtained a charter, granting them great privileges, under the reign of queen Anne, for which they were to pay to the crown, annually, a pair of barbed arrows. One of these allowances was, that they might meet and go forth under their officer's conduct, in military form, in manner of weapon-showing, as often as they should think convenient. "But they have made ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various

... and though there had been no great outburst of despair, no whirlwind of stormy grief, no loud tempest of anguish and tears, Robert took no comforting thought from the unnatural stillness. He knew enough to know that Sir Michael Audley went away with the barbed arrow, which his nephew's hand had sent home to its aim, rankling in his tortured heart; he knew that this strange and icy calm was the first numbness of a heart stricken by grief so unexpected as for a time to be rendered almost incomprehensible by a blank stupor of astonishment; ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... more aid;' but they held together in good order, and Shane, with the Derry garrison in his rear, durst not follow far from home in pursuit. 'Before he could revenge himself on Sidney, before he could stir against the Scots, before he could strike a blow at O'Donel, he must pluck out the barbed dart which was ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... so near to the front; the Triarii, from having been arrayed behind the first two lines as a body of reserve. The Triarii were armed with the pilum, thicker and stronger than the Grecian lance, four and a half feet long, of wood, with a barbed head of iron,—so that the whole length of the weapon was six feet nine inches. It was used either to throw or thrust with, and when it pierced the enemy's shield the iron head was bent, and the spear, owing to the twist in the iron, still held to the shield. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... "but I dare say he is brave, and that many a chief has offered him his daughters for wives. But he has been mistaken," pointing to the arrow, which was dangling from the hand that held the bow, "in bringing a loose and barbed arrow-head to kill the buffaloe. Do the Pawnees wish the wounds they give their game ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... frame—all was gone; only a jagged hole was left. On the floor lay broken carvings, pieces of stone from flying buttresses outside that had been hurled through the embrasures, tangled masses of leaden window-sashes, like twisted coils of barbed wire, and great brass candelabra. The steel ropes that supported them had been shot away, and they had plunged to the flagging below, carrying with them their scarlet silk tassels heavy with the dust of centuries. And everywhere was broken glass. Not one of the famous blue windows was intact. None ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis

... across toward the kitchen. Evidently, she was going to see about his dinner. But as she passed by the artesian well, she met young Delaney, one of Annixter's hands, coming up the trail by the irrigating ditch, leading his horse toward the stables, a great coil of barbed wire in his gloved hands and a pair of nippers thrust into his belt. No doubt, he had been mending the break in the line fence by the Long Trestle. Annixter saw him take off his wide-brimmed hat as he met Hilma, and the two stood there for some ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... not a model clergyman. He, however, had no reason whatever to hang grandmother, but quite the reverse, although he did not so conclude, as he considered the matter on his way home. It seemed to him that this darling of a girl was fairly hedged in by a barbed wire fence of ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... he'd be the wild wolf of the world; but he ain't, not by a long shot, he just had the drop on me, and he run me off my own claim! I came back and they ganged me and when I woke up I looked like I'd been through a barbed-wire fence. ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge

... shrapnel at one range, then another lot fifty yards on, and so on, so it was no good hurrying on, as you only came in for the next lot. Then they very nearly got us just when we had got to a hopeless-looking place—the railway, with thick fence and ditch on each side of the track and a barbed-wire fence as well, with signal wires knee high just where you expected to be able to jump down on to the track. Luckily Catley, my groom, had some wire nippers; but just as he was cutting at the wire, and we ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen

... walked briskly along, the track in front of her looking quite plain for several yards, though the sea below was completely hidden. She recognised many familiar points en route, the bank where the spleenwort grew, the ruined shed, a supposed relic of smuggling days, the barbed-wire fence, the group of elder trees, and the blackberry bank. When she came to the slanting gorse bushes which overhung the path, she knew she had reached the beginning of St. Morval's Head, and that she must be just about over the spot where the buoy ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil

... life asset. More he learned. There was John Chisum, owner of the Jingle-bob, the Bosque Grande, and of other cattle ranches as far away as the Black River and beyond. John Chisum was a cattle king who had foreseen the coming of the farmer and adjusted from the open range to barbed wire, and who, in order to do so, had purchased every forty acres carrying water and got for nothing the use of the millions of acres of adjacent range that was worthless without the water he controlled. And in the talk by the camp-fire and chuck wagon, among forty-dollar-a-month cowboys ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... The men are armed with spears having a point as sharp as a needle. Other men enter the arena on foot, armed with red flags and explosives about the size of a musket cartridge. To each of these explosives is fastened a barbed needle which serves the purpose of attaching them to the bull by running the needle into the skin. Before the animal is turned loose a lot of these explosives are attached to him. The pain from the pricking of the skin ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... of a spear, to which a long rope is attached. This spear is hurled at the whale by a sailor who stands in the bow of the boat; it has a barbed end, like that of a fish-hook, and if it once gets into the flesh of a whale it will hold fast, and the struggles of the great fish cannot pull ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 19, March 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... to quarrel, yet in a minute the barbed words were flying between them; in a minute they faced each other as coldly as if they had been strangers instead of adoring lovers. At the last, he looked at her an instant in silence while she sat perfectly motionless with her deep eyes changing to gold in the sunlight; then, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... for beginning the last preparations for the long journey to China, when one day Ruth came in from her play with her heavy coat almost in shreds, she having in some way torn it on a barbed wire fence. The coat was the only heavy one she had, and I had planned to make it do for the ocean voyage, intending to get a new one in England. I tried to find a new one in the stores, but the season was past and I could not; and I had no time to make another. I just took the need ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth

... door was locked, and, as you saw, the fence around this field was protected with barbed wire. There's something wrong. I felt it on my trip here all the way, like someone watching me in the dark. And don't laugh! I have stopped laughing at all things that seem unnatural. You ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... growing wearisome, I would now recommend for a change something else for a pleasure—namely, the unconscious astuteness with which good, fat, honest mediocrity always behaves towards loftier spirits and the tasks they have to perform, the subtle, barbed, Jesuitical astuteness, which is a thousand times subtler than the taste and understanding of the middle-class in its best moments—subtler even than the understanding of its victims:—a repeated proof that "instinct" is the most intelligent of all ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... was to touch him. She hadn't intended to hurt him like that. He looked so defiant, and gaunt and deserted—such a huge, scarred boy of a man. He reminded her of one of those early war-posters, in which a solitary figure was depicted, knee-deep in barbed wire, head bandaged, hurling the last of ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... Lazy A coulee,—the broad mouth that yawned always at the narrow valley and the undulations of the open range, and the purple line of mountains beyond. You felt it more strongly when you rode up to the gate of barbed-wire, spliced here and there, and having an unexpected stubbornness to harry the patience of men who would pass through it in haste. You grew unaccountably depressed if you rode on past the stables and corrals ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower

... Reverted plays in undulating flow, There throw, nice judging, the delusive fly; And as you lead it round in artful curve With eye attentive mark the springing game, Straight as above the surface of the flood They wanton rise, or urged by hunger leap, Then fix with gentle twitch, the barbed hook. Some lightly tossing to the grassy bank, And to the shelving shore slow-dragging some, With various hand proportioned to their force. If yet too young and easily deceived, A worthless prey scarce bends your pliant rod; Him, ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton

... dashed forward with such fury that the Boers did not stop to meet their bayonets. By a quarter-past seven the enemy had been driven across the Tugela. Without hesitation the Irish dashed into the river. Many fell headlong, for along the bottom barbed wires had been stretched. Worse still, it was found that instead of being two feet deep, as was expected, it was eight feet; for the Boers had erected a dyke across the river a little lower down, and had ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty

... Jagged strokes of pain tore through it, hands dragged at it with nails that bit like teeth. They wound thongs about him, bound him, tied weights to him, tried to pull him down with them; but still he floated, floated, danced on the fiery waves of pain, with barbed light pouring down on him from an ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... sloping face diving, finally, with fearful crash into the rocky bed at the bottom, sending a shower of fragments hurtling in every direction, oft dislodging some section of parapet, yet never reaching the depths of the cave. Add to this nerve-racking siege work the instant, spiteful flash of barbed arrow or zip and crack of bullet when hat or hand of one of the defenders was for a second exposed, and it is not difficult to fancy the wear and tear on even the stoutest heart in the depleted ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... though of course I admit to having a little curiosity about this mysterious Mr. Dennison. I've heard a lot of queer things about his doings. He has a pretty fine place away up here, but keeps it surrounded by a high fence, and they even say it has a strand or two of terrible barbed wire on top of the fence, to discourage any one from ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen

... was interested by a strange proceeding on the part of the boat's crew. Upright pipes, serving as stanchions, were being screwed into the top of the Arangi's rail so that they served to support three strands of barbed wire that ran completely around the vessel, being broken only at the gangway for a narrow space of fifteen inches. That this was a precaution against danger, Jerry sensed without a passing thought to it. All his life, from his first impressions of life, had been passed in the heart of danger, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... was mystifying and oppressive. They saw before them the beautiful country, the hills and valleys, the forest and the blue loom of the mountains, so much that appealed to the eye, and yet the horizon, looking so peaceful in the distance, was barbed with spears. Jackson was there! The sergeant's theory had become conviction with them. Distance had been nothing to him. He was at hand with a great force, and Lee with another army might fall at any time upon their flank, while McClellan was isolated and left useless, ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler

... Fielding brought down the new tariff. It was at once recognized as a well-considered measure, an honest and a long first step in redeeming platform promises. In the revision of the old tariff beneficent changes were effected, such as abolition of the duties on binder twine, barbed wire, and Indian corn, substantial reductions on flour and sugar, the substitution of ad valorem for specific duties, and a provision for reducing the duty on goods controlled by trusts or combines. ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton

... harvest, even but a wisp of hay under thy great face only, Harvest the wheat of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, every barbed spear under thee, Harvest the maize of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, each ear in its light-green sheath, Gather the hay to its myriad mows in the odorous tranquil barns, Oats to their bins, the white potato, the buckwheat ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... how Will J. Shannon girds at your poor friend; and how the rhythmic Clinton steps chivalrously forth in his defence. First the Rev. Purcell; then Will J. Shannon: thick fall the barbed arrows.[42] ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the rear of the hotel about sundown. Our friend Mrs. Hutton came running to meet us. I was ashamed to go into her house, but she leaned up against the house and laughed until tears came. "What chased you?" she gasped. "You must have been run through some of those barbed wire things that they are putting up ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart

... discipline, organization, thrift. On the specifically military side the French seem to have learned this lesson well. They have fortified the ground between the present front and Paris with line after line of defensive works. The fields are gray with barbed wire. A few miles outside of the suburbs of Paris may be seen as complete a system of trenches as on the front, and the kepi of the territorial digging a trench is a familiar sight almost anywhere in eastern France. It is inconceivable that ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... of Solutr]/e, told the tribe my style was outr]/e — 'Neath a tomahawk of diorite he fell. And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart Of a mammothistic ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling

... chiefs and headmen of the tribe, and their national weapon was the bamboo bow having the bowstring made from a thin strip of its elastic bark. The quiver was a piece of strong bamboo matting, and would contain sixty barbed arrows a yard long, and tipped with an iron spike either flattened and sharpened like a knife or rounded like a nail; other arrows, used for knocking over birds, had knob-like heads. Thus armed, the Bhils would lie in wait in some deep ravine ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... importance in his own opinion! Have done with thy wheezing,"—he continued, vehemently thumping the struggling old gentleman on the back—"Here is another one of the minstrel craft thou hatest,—hast aught of bitterness in thy barbed tongue wherewith to welcome him as ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... inn. This was the Flying Dragon, with wings of brilliant red and gold, expanded, and its tail, pale green and gold, twisted and knotted into ever so many rings, and ending in a burnished point barbed like the dart ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... and manner of his opponent. The old man's eyes darted war-flames under his finely arched brows. He regarded the younger with a more and more hostile, even malicious air; his arguments grew personal, offensive; his shafts were many and barbed, till at last Warkworth felt his face burning and ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... drier the region, the more thorny are its plants. A little shrub called the crucifixion thorn has no leaves at all, nothing but long, sharp spines. Besides the straight thorns there are curved and also barbed ones, for every conceivable form is represented among the ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks

... to watch. He did the club what damage he could, posting his property, and as much of the river as he controlled. But he could not legally prevent fishermen from wading the stream and fishing; so he filled the waters with sawdust, logs, barbed-wire, brambles, and brush, choking it so that no living creature, except perhaps a mink, could catch a fish ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers

... wings, armed with sharp hooks and prongs; it had stout legs in front, with projecting claws; but there were no legs behind,—the body running out into a long and powerful tail, finished off at the end with a barbed point. This tail was coiled up under him, the end sticking up ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... which each village paid a subscription towards the employment of professional shikaris. These men soon reduced the numbers of the common enemy, by setting clever traps, with bows and arrows, the latter having a broad barbed head, precisely resembling the broad arrow that is well known as the Government mark throughout Great Britain. The destruction of tigers was so great in a few years that the Lieut.-Governor of Bengal found it necessary ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... to Dalgard's smooth skin, Sssuri was covered with a fluffy pelt of rainbow-tipped gray fur. In place of the human's steel blade, he wore one of bone, barbed and ugly, as menacing as the spear now resting in the bottom of the outrigger. And his round eyes watched the sea with the familiarity of one whose natural home was beneath those ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton

... earthly bodies, nothing of iron, but much of stone, like to yellow soft flint spa, shaped like a barbed arrowhead, but flung like a dart, with great force. These arms (cut by art and tools, it seems, beyond human) have somewhat of the nature of thunderbolt subtlety, and mortally wounding the vital parts without breaking the skin; of which wounds I have observed ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous

... stockings," and with hair streaming like a meteor, described in Letter XX, is clearly a cruel mockery of Cecilia's distressful plight in Miss Burney's novel. Even Scott is not immune from Barrett's barbed arrows, and Byron is glanced at in the bogus antique language of "Eftsoones." Barrett, indeed, jeers at the mediaeval revival in its various manifestations and even at "Romanticism" generally, not merely at the new school of fiction represented by Mrs. Radcliffe, her followers and ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... a huge herd of blesbok suddenly appeared on the scene, wildly galloping about in every direction, being continually brought up by the barbed wire fences of the farms. A good many were shot, but it was cruel to kill them, or try to, with hard bullets, and many and many a beast must have got away badly wounded, whilst the indiscriminate manner in which the sportsmen fired in all directions was a source of danger, not ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring

... gradual. It coincides with the domestication of the dog, an epoch in hunting-life. It embraces thousands of centuries. The appearance of arrow-heads indicates the invention of the bow, and the rise of man from a defensive to an offensive mode of life. The introduction of barbed arrows shows how inventive talent was displaying itself; bone and horn tips, that the huntsman was including smaller animals, and perhaps birds, in his chase; bone whistles, his companionship with other huntsmen or with his dog. The scraping-knives ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... which had reached me, I guessed what this decision was likely to be, and it took the very worst shape it could have taken. All this increased my agitation from hour to hour. But all this was quickened and barbed by the certainty of so immediately meeting Lady Carbery. To her it was, and to her only, that I could look for any useful advice or any effectual aid. She over my mother, as in turn my mother over her, exercised considerable influence; whilst my mother's power ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... primitive Chinese 'hieroglyphs' none showed a knowledge of metal.] The chief weapons were small triangles of close-grained basalt and iztli (obsidian flakes) for tabonas, or knives, both being without handles. They carried rude clubs and banot, or barbed spears of pine-wood with fire-charred points. The garrotes (pikes) had heads like two flattened semicircles, a shape preserved amongst negroes to the present day. Our old author tells us that the people would 'leap from rock to rock, sometimes making ten ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... bows! our bows! The thousand bows of Narvi! Ribs of Tara, god of War! Fashioned from the light Tola their arrows; Swift messengers! Heart piercers! Barbed with sharp pearl shells; Winged with white tail-plumes; To wild death-chants, strung with the hair ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... like all sanitariums, you go into it with one disease and come out of it with ten. Had Shakib been forewarned of Khalid's mind, had he even seen him at the gate before he entered, he would have given him a few hints about the cross-signs and barbed-cordons therein. But should he not have divined that Khalid soon or late was coming? Did he not call enough to him, and aloud? "Get thee behind me on this dromedary," our Scribe, reading his Al-Mutanabbi, would ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... and more delicate" (Marshal Foch). "This war has given us no new principles; but different mechanical appliances—and in particular the rapid improvement and multiplication of aeroplanes, the use of immense numbers of machine guns and Lewis guns, the employment of vast quantities of barbed wire as effective obstacles, the enormous expansion of artillery, and the provision of great masses of motor transport—have introduced new problems of considerable complexity concerning the effective ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous

... the family taste and habit; the barracks for the single men; the barracks for the single women; the two hospitals, one general, the other for infectious diseases; and last of all, the house where the half-dozen disorderly women are confined, surrounded by a double fence of barbed wire ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke

... back on the farm, an' when he's wore out his Winnipeg clothes and his big ideas, we're lookin' to make him some use." Mrs Crow's intention, though barbed, was humorous, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... have reigned ere now Bretwalda of the Seven!' In hour accursed The weak man with his Faith equivocated: Fraudful, beneath the self-same roofs he raised Altars to Christ and idols. By degrees That Truth he mocked forsook him. Year by year His face grew dark, and barbed his tongue though smooth, Manner and mind like grass-fields after thaw, Silk-soft above, yet iron-hard below: Spleenful that night at Sebert's blithe discourse He answered thus, with seeming-careless eye Wandering from wall to roof: 'I like your Church: Would it had rested ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... not more than a hundred yards away, and though their losses had been severe there were so many left that it was evident it would come to a hand-to-hand fight. The enemy cannon had torn big rents in the barbed wire entanglements that stretched before the American position so that it would be ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall

... marriage—women who have no virtues save one tied like millstones to some of earth's noblemen; great-hearted and great-souled women mated with clods. I see people insanely jealous of one another, suspicious, fault-finding, malicious; covertly sending barbed shafts to one another through the medium of general conversation. As if love were ever to be held captive, or be won by cords and chains! As if the freest thing on earth would for a moment enter into bondage, or minister unto selfishness when ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... place, enormous blocks of marble. He was a noble animal, and, as it seemed to me, of far more than common size and strength. Yet did not his utmost endeavors appear to satisfy the demands of those who drove him, and who plied without mercy the barbed scourges which they bore. His temper at length gave way. He was chained to a mass of rock, which it was evidently beyond his power to move. It required the united strength of two at least. But this was nothing to his inhuman masters. They ceased not ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware

... information. The General telephoned to his cousin, who said that the allegation was absurd and that Pivko was one of his best officers. The orderly was therefore thrown into prison, and Pivko, having turned off the electricity from the barbed wires and arranged matters with a Bosnian regiment, made his way to the Italians. The suggestion is that, owing to the lie of the land and the weak Austrian forces, it was possible for the Italians to reach Trent; anyhow the Austrians were amazed when they ceased to advance and the ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein

... were reconnoitring on one of the kopjes, I suggested to a friend that we should go to the farm in front of us, where none of us had been since Olifantsnek was in possession of the enemy. We had to ford a donga closed in by barbed wire. When we got to the farm, we were told that the enemy had not been there, with the exception of a khaki who had lost his way. He had taken six eggs from a nest in a kraal and swallowed them greedily, and had then passed ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo

... a star-shell shot high up into the air and, bursting, flooded the space between the French and German lines with a brilliant light. Remi peered over the top of the parapet and across the 'No Man's Land' of which he had so often heard, over its barbed-wire entanglements and on to the parapets of the ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce

... the thick, dark brush, and amidst the barbed prickly-pears that filled their flesh with sharp needles, all the worse because ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin

... Zer the ivory arrow tip began to be commonly used; hundreds were gathered from his tomb, and the variety of forms is greater than in any other reign. Besides the plain circular points, many of them have reddened tips; there are also examples of quadrangular barbed tips, and others are pentagonal, square, or oval. Only the plain circular tips appear in succeeding reigns down to the reign of Mersekha, except a single example of the oval forms ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... the devil's emissaries in the time of mortal agony; as in the season of the temptations immediately after His baptism it had been most insidiously pressed upon Him by the devil himself.[1315] That "If" was Satan's last shaft, keenly barbed and doubly envenomed, and it sped as with the fierce hiss of a viper. Was it possible in this the final and most dreadful stage of Christ's mission, to make Him doubt His divine Sonship, or, failing such, to taunt or anger the dying Savior into the use of His superhuman powers ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... a decided feeling of depression that Patty Sinclair approached the Watts ranch. Long before she reached the buildings an air of shiftless dilapidation was manifest in the ill-lined barbed wire fences whose rotting posts sagged drunkenly upon loosely strung wire. A dry weed-choked irrigation ditch paralleled the trail, its wooden flumes, like the fence posts, rotting where they stood, and its walls all but obliterated by ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx

... Grain Company added to the list of commodities in 1912-13—fence posts, woven fence wire, barbed wire and binder twine. Followed other staples—cement, plaster, sash and doors, hardware and other builders' supplies; sheet metal roofing and siding, shingles, curbing, culverts, portable granaries, etc.; oil, salt and other miscellaneous supplies; finally, in 1914-15, ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse

... frighted deer; With ruin I o'erwhelm him and abjectness and woe And cause him quaff the goblet of death and distance drear. Well-ground my polished sword is and thin and keen of edge And trenchant, eke, for smiting and long my steel-barbed spear. So fell and fierce my stroke is, if on a mountain high It lit, though all of granite, right through its midst 'twould shear. Nor troops have I nor henchmen nor one to lend me aid Save God, to whom, my Maker, my voice in praise I rear. 'Tis He who pardoneth errors alike to slave ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... out the evening before attending a watermelon recital in the country, and having contributed a portion of his clothing to a barbed-wire fence and the balance to an open-faced Waterbury bull-dog, some one asked him what he thought of ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye

... In war they use, besides bows and arrows, clubs and a kind of sword made of wood. The arrows are reeds, five or six feet long, and of the thickness of a finger. The point is of very hard wood, and is strongly barbed by notches and with sharp fish teeth about three inches long. To the other extremity of the arrow colored feathers are ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... glimpse of the vast form of her father, moving rapidly across the plain, in the direction of the French army. He was, in truth, proceeding to Montcalm, fearless of every danger, to claim the tardy escort for which he had before conditioned. Fifty glittering axes and barbed spears were offered unheeded at his life, but the savages respected his rank and calmness, even in their fury. The dangerous weapons were brushed aside by the still nervous arm of the veteran, or fell of themselves, after menacing an act that it would ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper

... and fro all night long through my lines. The respective C.O.'s, an Australian and an Irishman, drop in on us from time to time and warn us against each other. I remain strictly neutral, and so far they have respected my neutrality. I have taken steps toward this end by surrounding my horses with barbed wire and spring guns, tying bells on them and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various

... lean hand on a post and vaulted the fence. But Anderson had to climb laboriously and painfully over the barbed-wire obstruction. Lenore marveled at his silence and his persistence. Anderson hated wire fences. Presently he got over, and then he divided his time between searching in the wheat and peering after the strange car that ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey

... looted my garden was afraid to use the gate for fear he'd be seen from the house. He came and went through the barbed-wire fence and left that as a souvenir. It's a piece of a flannel shirt, like the one Maxon usually wears. Get his shirt and match this to the hole you'll find in it—see? Then take his everyday shoes and fit 'em to the footprints he left in my tomato patch—I've had two of 'em ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... at the brown desolation of weeds. As far as the two officers could see there was nothing but brown weeds and bits of brown barbed wire. He turned from the desolate scene ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany

... he caught up by running swiftly. The master calmly got off his horse, motioned to the servant to drop his load, and proceeded to beat the man unmercifully with a cane made out of fish tail, a sword-like, cruel, barbed affair, about four feet long. The poor servant never uttered a cry. As soon as possible the officers interfered and stopped the torture. So bloody and faint was the poor victim that they gave him a horse to ride. The master was angry, ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger

... manufacture of silk and silk goods, its most important industry. Other important manufactures are iron and steel, slaughtering and meat-packing products, boots and shoes, cigars, furniture, men's clothing, hosiery and knit goods, jute and jute goods, linen-thread, malt liquors, brick, cement, barbed wire, wire nails and planing-mill products. Allentown's total factory product in 1905 was valued at $16,966,550, of which $3,901,249, or 23%, was the value of silk and silk goods. The municipality owns and operates its water-works. Allentown was first settled in 1751; in 1762 it was ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... a real human interest detail. At Kimberley the Zulus and Kaffirs know the value of the diamond and there was formerly considerable filching. All the workers are segregated in barbed wire compounds and kept under constant surveillance. At the end of their period of service they remain in custody for two weeks in order to make certain that they have not swallowed ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... Figure 1.) The only implement of this class that we have yet found is the fish spear head (Fig. D.). It was probably made from the antlers of a deer killed in the chase. Its barbed edge indicates that it was used for spearing fish. It is in ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce

... the sarcastic wits are more pointed than the blind mawla Abu 'l-Aina (806-96), whose tongue was venomously barbed, and who, like other blind men, often used his malady as a protection when his satire had been excessive. Viziers were his favourite butts. Being one day in the society of one of them, the conversation turned on the history of the Barmekides and their generosity, on which the vizier ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas

... as they reach the summit!— Strength and stir new-primed in their plump battalions: Puffs of barbed flame blown on the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... the people in London became afraid of looking into their works, lest they too should be convicted of cockneyism. Oh, brave public! This epithet proved too much for one of the writers in question, and stuck like a barbed arrow in his heart. Poor Keats! What was sport to the town was death to him. Young, sensitive, delicate, he ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... almost in awe by noble and simple alike, Madame de Montespan, neglected now by Louis, moved amid reflections of that neglect, with arrogantly smiling lips and desperate rage in her heart. She sneered openly at the royal lack of taste, allowed her barbed wit to make offensive sport with the ladies who supplanted her; yet, ravaged by jealousy, she feared for herself the fate which through her had overtaken ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... me, thank you, that Swansdown pillow. I refuse as flatly to fuddle myself in the shop of "W. Shakespeare, Druggist," as to stimulate myself with the juicy joints of "C. Dickens, Family Butcher." Of these and suchlike pernicious establishments my patronage consists in weaving round the shop-door a barbed-wire entanglement of dialectic and then training my moral machine-guns ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm

... White House to Archangel—and still longer if you measured it through the ramifications of the army machine, a route more thoroughly criss-crossed with red tape than any sector of the Hindenburg line with barbed wire. ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... hare and hound, and it fell to Peace's lot to be the hare. With an apron full of gay dandelion blossoms for the trail, the active little body set out on a wide detour of the woods, across the bridge, up through the Hartman pasture land, reaching the barbed wire fence on their own little farm just in time to see Hope dropping a last handful of grain into a gopher hole before returning to the house ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown

... remote window, remarked, above the din, that whatever he'd done he'd got a rummy hat on. A young girl was pinioned against the wall by a struggling mass for whom there was no way. There was in the air an imminence of incident, acid and barbed. The girl screamed. She implored. Then, with a frantic movement, her free hand flew to her hat. She withdrew something horrid, and brought it down, horridly, three times. Three shrieks flitted from her corner like sparks from a funnel. But ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... skinned and their weapons handy by day and night. And again Bough had wriggled like a snake, but through shallow water instead of grass and red mud. He had swam the deep pools, and once got entangled in barbed-wire, and went under, gurgling and drowning, three times before he wrenched himself loose. It had seemed as though a dead woman's hands had seized him, and were dragging him down. But he tore free and passed safely. There was not a single shot—the Devil was so obliging! And then, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... "Now God were in garth if our lot might better: over Thorfinn's bed hangs the barbed spear, the big one that was owned by Karr the Old; there, too, is a helmet and a byrni, and the short-sword, the good one; and the arms will not fail if thine ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris

... the venom of her tongue the inventive cunning of a Malayan witch doctor. The Appleboys' flower-pots mysteriously fell off the piazza, their thole-pins disappeared, their milk bottles vanished, Mr. Appleboy's fish lines acquired a habit of derangement equaled only by barbed-wire entanglements, and his clams went bad! But these things might have been borne had it not been for the crowning achievement of her malevolence, the invasion of the Appleboys' cherished lawn, upon which they lavished all that anxious ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train

... With ruin I o'erwhelm him and abjectness and woe And cause him quaff the goblet of death and distance drear. Well-ground my polished sword is and thin and keen of edge And trenchant, eke, for smiting and long my steel-barbed spear. So fell and fierce my stroke is, if on a mountain high It lit, though all of granite, right through its midst 'twould shear. Nor troops have I nor henchmen nor one to lend me aid Save God, to whom, my Maker, ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... spread the plain, broken here and there with coulees and clumps of bush. A partly fenced roadway, with some scattered houses on the river bank, but no barbed-wire entanglements, impeded his movements. The introduction of such pleasant devices was ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey

... on the scene of Lady Florimel's terror. He crossed the head of the little bay and descended into the heart of the rock. Even there the wind blew dank and howling through all the cavernous hollows. As he approached the last chamber, out of the Devil's Window flew, with clanging wing, an arrow barbed seagull, down to the grey veiled tumult below, and the joy of life for a moment seized his soul. But the next, the dismay of that which is forsaken was upon him. It was not that the once lordly structure lay abandoned to ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... spirit!" She patted him on the shoulder, then danced on into the center of the set, stopping to direct some barbed remark ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve

... attack. The sergeant is ready to blow the whistle for his squad to follow him out through a path in the barbed wire. In another minute they will advance close behind the bursting shells of a heavy barrage which, lifting, will leave them face to ...
— "I was there" - with the Yanks in France. • C. LeRoy Baldridge

... silk goods, its most important industry. Other important manufactures are iron and steel, slaughtering and meat-packing products, boots and shoes, cigars, furniture, men's clothing, hosiery and knit goods, jute and jute goods, linen-thread, malt liquors, brick, cement, barbed wire, wire nails and planing-mill products. Allentown's total factory product in 1905 was valued at $16,966,550, of which $3,901,249, or 23%, was the value of silk and silk goods. The municipality owns and operates its water-works. Allentown ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... together with a trusty war-horse, which he entreated him to use upon the field of battle; for Bertha had not omitted to intimate Count Robert's want of the means of knightly equipment. The horse was brought before the pavilion accordingly, completely barbed or armed in steel, and laden with armour for the knight's body. Godfrey himself put the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... hastened to find, and, as soon as they were provided, they discharged their guns into the crowd of the natives, who instantly fled, leaving Roper and Calvert pierced with several spears, and severely beaten by their waddies. Several of these spears were barbed, and could not be extracted without difficulty. I had to force one through the arm of Roper, to break off the barb; and to cut another out of the groin of Mr. Calvert. John Murphy had succeeded in getting out of the tent, and concealing himself behind a tree, whence he fired at the natives, ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt

... committed suicide when at length the Transvaal ceased to be a "nation.") Men went through the seat of that war after it was all over, and found humanity unchanged, except for a general impoverishment, and the convenience of an unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire and cartridge cases—unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity all its old habits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-like kraal, the white in his ugly ill-managed ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... I saw that many riderless horses were being led, that some of the horses and many of the men were wounded, and that one regiment of lancers was pathetically small. It was the 2nd Cavalry Brigade, that had charged the enemy's guns, to find them protected by barbed wire. ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson

... animals as they pass. A shower of these diminutive vermin will sometimes drop from a branch, if unluckily shaken, and disperse themselves over the body, each fastening on the neck, the ears, and eyelids, and inserting a barbed proboscis. They burrow, with their heads pressed as far as practicable under the skin, causing a sensation of smarting, as if particles of red hot sand had been scattered over the flesh. If torn from their hold, the suckers remain behind and form an ulcer. The only safe ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... smiled as if enjoying a secret joke. They were. For they knew something of which the Americans were not aware—that Monitaya had improved on the trench-trap idea of the whites by studding the bottom of those trenches with barbed araya bones smeared ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel

... real business of ranching began. Lew Cawley was sent out with Tresler to instruct him in mending barbed-wire fences. A distant pasture had been broken into by the roving cattle outside. Lew remained with him long enough to show him how to strain the wires up and splice them, then he rode ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum

... the Bosque Grande, and of other cattle ranches as far away as the Black River and beyond. John Chisum was a cattle king who had foreseen the coming of the farmer and adjusted from the open range to barbed wire, and who, in order to do so, had purchased every forty acres carrying water and got for nothing the use of the millions of acres of adjacent range that was worthless without the water he controlled. And in the talk by the camp-fire ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... "The barbed formation of the point explains how, under the stroking with the finger, it was forced through the dense tarsal cartilage and against the cornea of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... But how about boys? Active, noisy, happy-go-lucky boys? Boys that smash windows, and yell, and tear their clothes on barbed-wire fences? ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards

... They also bring in a respectable revenue. In the district of Kairouan, for instance, many families draw their entire income from them. A few have been planted at Sidi Mansur and elsewhere near Gafsa, but they are unprotected and liable to be trodden down in their early years, or eaten. Barbed wire, herald of civilization, is almost ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... standing against a tree Tom hurried to a fence that separated the road from a field. The fence was a barbed-wire one, and in a moment Tom ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton

... whispers of her young maids of honor, "Really, Aimee, he looks so young! One would never surmise," were more galling in their intended consolation, more revealing in their betrayal of her friends' own shrinking from that arrogant, dandified old man than the barbed dart of the uncaring, inquisitive, "How do you find him, my dear? He has the ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... addressed to Aunt Hedwig the impolite remark that ghosts only were seen by women and fools; in a surly tone informed Herr Sohnstein that policemen still were plentiful in the vicinity of Tompkins Square; and then, having planted these barbed arrows in the breasts of his daughter, his sister, and his friend, sought the retirement of his own upper room. As he left them, Minna buried her face in Aunt Hedwig's capacious bosom and cried bitterly, and Aunt Hedwig also cried; and Herr Sohnstein, laying aside for the moment his pipe, ...
— A Romance Of Tompkins Square - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier

... money or not until he felt it in his hand. A cold, sorrowful weight lay upon his heart; the din of the town deadened his affliction into a stupor; but an overwhelming sense of his disappointment, and a conviction of the Agent's diabolical falsehood, entered like barbed arrows ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... years old, four little boys and four infants, one of the latter about a week old, and quite naked. They had rude weapons, viz. slings to throw stones, three rude spears, pointed at the end with bone, and notched on one side with barbed teeth. With this they catch their fish, which are in great quantities among the kelp. Two of the natives were induced to come on board, after they had been alongside for upwards of an hour, and received many presents, for which they gave their spears, a dog, ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous

... countenance into an expression of as perfect unconcern as a little heightening of her colour would allow her, and returned his salute with rather a distant bow. But Mr Bunker was not to be damped by this hint of barbed wire. He held out his hand and exclaimed cordially, "My dear Lady Alicia! ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston

... words are barbed arrows in my heart. But 'tis too late. [aside.] Thou hast appointed Harcourt To see thee here ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More

... Peter resumed, "is woman's weapon, even as the fist is man's. And it is a far deadlier weapon. Words break no bones—they break hearts, instead. Yet were men one-tenth part so ready with their fists, as women are with their barbed and envenomed tongues, what savage brutes you would think us—would n't you?—and what a rushing trade the police-courts would drive, to be sure. That is one of the good old cliches that came back ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... once; but though sore wounded it got to the bury, and, struggling in, the arrow caught the side of the hole and was drawn out. Indeed, a nail filed sharp is not of much avail as an arrowhead; you must have it barbed, and that was a little beyond our skill. Ikey the blacksmith had forged us a spearhead after a sketch from a picture of a Greek warrior; and a rake-handle served as a shaft. It was really a dangerous weapon. He had also made us a small anchor according to plan; nor ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies

... the first of the boys to go over the top for they were over by the time he reached the second-line trench, but as he passed along the fire trench toward the road he could see them crowding over, and when he reached the road the barbed wire entanglements lay flat in many places, the boys picking their way across the fallen meshes, the clumsy tanks waddling on ahead, across No Man's Land. As far as Tom could see along the line in either direction this shell-torn area ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... pathetic scenes enacted there during the famous siege and in the magistracy of Peter van der Werff, was accordingly enclosed by a solid palisade of oaken planks, strengthened by rows of iron bars with barbed prongs: The entrenchment was called by the populace the Arminian Fort, and the iron spear heads were baptized Barneveld's teeth. Cannon were planted at intervals along the works, and a company or ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... could yet spare him the bitter pang of bereavement. As yet my flight, I was sure, was undiscovered. I could go back and be his comforter—his pride; his redeemer from misery, perhaps from ruin. Oh, that fear of his self-abandonment—far worse than my abandonment—how it goaded me! It was a barbed arrow-head in my breast; it tore me when I tried to extract it; it sickened me when remembrance thrust it farther in. Birds began singing in brake and copse: birds were faithful to their mates; birds were emblems of ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... went cautiously by reason of torn and twisted tangles of German barbed wire, of hand grenades and huge shells, of broken and rusty iron and steel that once were deadly machine guns. As I picked my way among all this flotsam, I turned to take up a bayonet, slipped in the slime and sank to my waist in a shell hole—even ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol

... of bushes that lined the fence row. He moved more slowly now, and she followed by sound rather than by sight. At length they came to where a brook ran at right angles to the fence row. The man stopped and crawled under the barbed-wire fence and came out on the ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings

... learn any but the fewest facts necessary to make him as harmless as he was happy; chiefly not to bark at old ladies and babies, no matter how threatening their aspect, as they passed our house. A few things he had already learned—to avoid fences of the barbed wire, to respect the big cat from across the way who sometimes called and treated him with watchful disdain, and not to chew a baby robin if by any chance he caught one. This last had been a hard lesson, his first contact with a problem only a few days younger than ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... roots, and all the earth about it ploughed up where we had fought. The ground was also dyed with blood for several yards round, and where it had fallen the grass was withered up to the roots, as if scorched with fire. We also picked up a cluster of hairs—long, wiry, crooked hairs, barbed at the ends like fish-hooks; also three or four scales like fish-scales, only rougher, and as large as doubloons. The spot where the fight took place is now called La Canada del Diablo, and I have heard that since that day the ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson

... be dishonor; to go may be death! When a Roman falls, the foe has one more arrow aimed at his heart; an arrow barbed with revenge, and sent with unerring precision. Hark! that shout is music to every soldier's ear. Hear you that tramp of horsemen? that ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... withdrew his eyes from her face, as if fearful that the sight of her woe might weaken his resolve. She had turned mechanically back. They walked on in gloomy silence side by side, away now from the lake—back under the barbed thorn-tree-back by the moss-grown crag-back by the hollow trunks, and over the fallen leaves of trees, that had defied the storms of centuries, to drop, perhaps, brittle and sapless, some quiet day when every wind ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... perplex them, for they saw that their interrogator knew the difference between a war and a hunting arrow—the former being barbed in order to render its extraction from the wound difficult, while the head of the latter is round, and can be drawn out of game that has ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... this was the case here: Bob had seen a pike so big that no mortal rod and line could ever bear it; he could tell of somewhere about ten or a dozen fishermen who had once had hold of him, so that Mr Jack must have thought no more of the sharpest barbed hooks than he would of so many ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn

... Agnes, who are on either side of her, intercede for him. Although this painting is not remarkable for its design and invention, yet it is worthy of some amount of praise, chiefly on account of the variety of clothing, and of the barbed and other armour of the time. I myself made use of it in some scenes which I did for Duke Cosimo, in which it was necessary to represent an armed man in the antique style and other similar things of that age. This thing greatly pleased His Most Illustrious ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari

... Inflorescence is usually a spike-like panicle. Spikelets are 1- to 2-flowered, jointed on very short pedicels which bear persistent scabrid or barbed bristles (modified branchlets). There are four glumes. The first glume is the shortest, equal to about half the length of the third, membranous, 3- to 5-nerved. The second glume is equal to or shorter than the fourth, 5- to 7-nerved. The third glume more or less exceeding and ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar

... shampooing and rubbing with oil were the more common remedies in such cases. Cuts they washed in the sea, and bound up with a leaf. Into wounds in the scalp they blew the smoke of burnt chestnut wood. To take a barbed spear from the arm or leg they cut into the limb from the opposite side and pushed it right ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner

... went to a "pharmacie" and got some boxes of morphia tablets, after which we went to an ironmonger's (don't know the French for it) and each bought a ponderous pair of barbed wire cutters. So what with wire clippers and morphia tablets, we were gay. About four o'clock we calmed down a bit, and went to the same ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather

... out of the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. All the way up the half-mile precipice it fingered and wrenched away at groaning ice-slabs. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow plowed ruler-straight ...
— Accidental Death • Peter Baily

... began to be commonly used; hundreds were gathered from his tomb, and the variety of forms is greater than in any other reign. Besides the plain circular points, many of them have reddened tips; there are also examples of quadrangular barbed tips, and others are pentagonal, square, or oval. Only the plain circular tips appear in succeeding reigns down to the reign of Mersekha, except a single example of the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... caught the spear, and tested it across my knee. It was pliant but tough, and wickedly barbed,—a weapon for a man to respect. "So you wanted the color of my blood," I called angrily. "You have a good spear; all that was lacking was a man to aim it;" and with a contemptuous laugh I tossed the ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... whispered back, "that we have come to a barbed-wire entanglement. I had forgotten about ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes

... Thorn; but, though on horseback, the judges deemed their attacks were so fierce that this assault was likewise not without peril; for some horses were killed, and some knights were thrown, and lay bruised by their own mail; but the barbed horses, wearing only des chamfreins, head-pieces magnificently caparisoned, found no protection in their ornaments. The last days were passed in combats of two to two, or in a single encounter, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... the traveller his weary head, Grim MANCINELLA haunts the mossy bed, Brews her black hebenon, and, stealing near, 190 Pours the curst venom in his tortured ear.— Wide o'er the mad'ning throng URTICA flings Her barbed shafts, and darts her ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin

... stings of bees are often more virulent than those of wasps, and attended with more painful effects. The sting being barbed, it is always left in the wound. When therefore a person is stung by a bee, the sting should be instantly extracted, or it will communicate more of its poison, according to the time it is permitted to remain. It should be carefully pulled ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton

... star-shell shot high up into the air and, bursting, flooded the space between the French and German lines with a brilliant light. Remi peered over the top of the parapet and across the 'No Man's Land' of which he had so often heard, over its barbed-wire entanglements and on to the ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce

... the Indian mode of warfare is, without exception, the most inhuman and revolting. But I do not know that those who die by the barbed and poisoned arrow linger in any more unendurable torment than those who are mangled with powder and lead balls, and the custom of scalping among Christian murderers would save thousands from groaning days, and perhaps weeks, among heaps that ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson

... returned. Ambrose and Macfarlane helped him through the barbed wire, and he set off, making a wide detour behind the houses that faced the river, meaning to join the Indians ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... he was something wicked. The suggestion of danger to Kingsley's life had made her wince, and he had added another little barbed arrow to keep the first company. The cause was a good one. Hurt now to heal afterwards—and Kingsley was an old friend, and a good fellow. Anyhow, this work was wasting her life, and she would be much better back in England, living a civilised life, riding in the Row, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... two 'underd and fifty horses. Don't think I shall ever get to like 'em. Yu don't take no notice o' rifle fire after a little—not a bit o' notice. I was out once with a sapper and two o' the Devons, fixin' up barbed wire—bullets strikin' everywhere just like rain. One o' the Devons, he was sittin' on a biscuit-tin, singin': 'The fields were white wi' daisies'—singing. All of a sudden he goes like this—" And giving a queer dull "sumph" of a sound, ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... of the rudiments of trench warfare. Trenches had been dug, with barbed-wire entanglements, bombing saps, dug-outs, observation posts, and machine-gun emplacements. We were given a smattering of trench cooking, sanitation, bomb throwing, reconnoitering, listening posts, constructing ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey

... from the head to go on drawing its weapon for a few instants longer and to avenge the deceased before being itself overcome with death's inertia. This vindictive persistency serves me to perfection. There is another circumstance in my favour: the barbed sting remains where it is, which enables me to ascertain the exact spot pierced. A needle withdrawn as soon as inserted would leave me doubtful. I can also, when the transparency of the tissues permits, perceive the direction of the weapon, whether perpendicular ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... few months we moved from one village to another in the neighbourhood of Skegness. "We dug miles of trenches along the coast—we erected barbed wire entanglements for the sea to play with—we patrolled bleak stretches of coast day and night, and in all sorts of weather—we watched patiently for spies and Zeppelins, and we were disappointed. Nothing happened; the Germans ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie

... is funny! All these old gentlemen sit up on a platform and talk such a lot. The Duke put in "buts" and "ifs" and "thats" over and over again when he could not think of a word, and you weren't a bit the wiser when he had finished, except that it was awfully wrong to put up barbed wire; but I can't see what that has to do with politics, can you? One of the pepper-and-salts did speak nicely, and so did one of the new people—quite a youngish person; but they all had such a lot of words, when it would have done just ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn

... who combine in their composition that which is most practical and imaginative alike; whose energy can subdue a continent, and whose boastfulness would awaken contempt if it were not palliated by the magnitude of their achievements. A humor that is often barbed, but which is most willingly directed against one's self; but, whether directed against the humorist or his neighbor, carries no poison upon its point and leaves no wound ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... without danger appeared to revive in his soul the outraged souls of a hundred Mediterranean ancestors, cruel and piratical perhaps, but who, nevertheless, had sought the enemy face to face with naked breast, battle-axe in hand, and the barbed harpoon for boarding ship as their ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... was despatched to San Francisco to prepare the Monterey for a voyage to Manila, where she would join Commodore Dewey's fleet. The Monterey is probably the most formidable monitor in the world; technically described she is a barbed turret, low freeboard monitor of four thousand tons displacement, 256 feet long, fifty-nine feet beam, and fourteen feet six inches draught. She carries in two turrets, surrounded by barbettes, two 12-inch and two 10-inch guns, while on her superstructure, ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis

... railway. On one side of it huge stacks of sleepers stretched away in long rows that were soon lost to sight in the wintry atmosphere. On the other side was a barbed wire fence. Beyond it lay flat fields on which the snow had settled evenly. In one of the fields was the dim form of a farm-building, barely visible through the rush and turmoil of ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt

... of the West and in eastern States, too, have learned to use the barbed wire that fences off their fields as a means of communicating with one another and with distant parts ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday

... that weepest on the sharp-barbed thorn, Why didst thou fall from Day's golden chalices? 'My tears bathe the thorn,' said the Dewdrop, 'To nourish the ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton

... the spirit of the new Finland. On the Russian side we came to the same grey old wooden station known to all passengers to and from Russia for polyglot profanity and passport difficulties. There were no porters, which was not surprising because there is barbed wire and an extremely hostile sort of neutrality along the frontier and traffic across has practically ceased. In the buffet, which was very cold, no food could be bought. The long tables once laden with caviare and other zakuski were bare. There was, however, a samovar, ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome

... strangest of all, Onotawah replied meekly. Shalah rose to his feet and strode to the door, pointing down the glen with his hand. He seemed to menace the other, his nostrils quivered with contempt, and his voice was barbed with passion. Onotawah bowed his ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan

... often called a sapsucker — though quite another bird alone merits that name — from the supposition that he bores into the trees for the purpose of sucking the sap; but his tongue is ill adapted for such use, being barbed at the end, and most ornithologists consider the charge libellous. It has been surmised that he bores the numerous little round holes close together, so often seen, with the idea of attracting insects to the luscious sap. The woodpeckers never drill for insects in live wood. The downy ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... him he roar'd. As a broad bream, to please some curious taste, 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 ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... alas, it was a long way from the White House to Archangel—and still longer if you measured it through the ramifications of the army machine, a route more thoroughly criss-crossed with red tape than any sector of the Hindenburg line with barbed wire. ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... fence of the Young Ladies' High School. And nearly always, too, you will find hard by, over doors and passageways, the names of his two sons, each accompanied or underscored by the heraldic emblem of their house—a barbed and feathered ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... something clove the air between them and stuck in the earth beyond. They went to it. It was a large arrow having a barbed point and flighted with ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... means of crushing obstruction provided by the powers of the Rules Committee, in one day they passed the Tariff Bill as amended by the Senate, which eventually became law, and then passed separate bills putting on the free list coal, barbed wire, and sugar. These bills had no effect other than to put on record the opinion of the House, as they were of course subsequently held up in the Senate. This unwonted insubordination on the part of the House excited much angry comment from dissatisfied ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford

... of an exceptional kind done in the army is like floundering in a trench full of sticky mud—one is inclined sometimes to say sticky muddle—surrounded by dense entanglements of barbed red-tape. You track authority from place to place, finding always that the man you want, the ultimate person who can actually give the permission you require, lies just beyond. If you are enormously persevering, and, nose to scent, you hunt on for ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham

... plantations, where the tired stock was being turned out to graze for the night. Here, in the shadow of the wood, she lingered. Slowly, but with infinite patience, she broke one strand after another of the barbed-wire fencing, watching, the while, the sun grow great and crimson, and die at last in mighty splendor behind ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... to turn the poor hungry animals out; yet I knew that somebody would have to suffer for it if Montgomery knew of anything trespassing here. But how had they got in, through seven wires—the upper one barbed—with rabbit-netting along ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... were about to start, everybody was ordered to attend prayers, and as they were embarking about twenty naked savages came running and shouting toward them, each carrying a long barbed spear, but the English made all haste to put ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... distance of some two miles, as far as the base of the hills at its higher extremity, and had there come upon a small Indian village, the inhabitants of which had at first fled at their approach, but had afterwards been induced to return and barter with them, giving barbed spears, feather head-dresses, parrots, monkeys and a queer-looking little animal something like a miniature pig encased in a shell-like coat—which the men had incontinently named a "hog in armour"—now known as the armadillo, in exchange ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood

... Are barbed hooks, That catch by art The strongest heart When yet they spend no breath; But let them speak, And sighing break Forth into tears, Their words are spears That ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various

... throwing-stick is indicated in Fig. 1 by a drawing of H.W. Elliott. The Eskimo is just in the act of launching the light seal harpoon. The barbed point will fasten itself into the animal, detach itself from the ivory foreshaft, and unwind the rawhide or sinew line, which is securely tied to both ends of the light wooden shaft by a martingale device. The heavy ivory foreshaft will cause the shaft to assume an upright position in the water, ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason

... on and on, catching gladly at names that kindled a tenderly warm glow of half-forgotten memories in his soul, until he came to the last paragraph of all; and then, as he comprehended the intent of it in all its barbed and venomed malice, he stood suddenly erect, with the outspread paper shaking in his hard grip. For now, coming back to him by so strange a way across fifty years of silence and misunderstanding, he read there the ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... Dalgard's smooth skin, Sssuri was covered with a fluffy pelt of rainbow-tipped gray fur. In place of the human's steel blade, he wore one of bone, barbed and ugly, as menacing as the spear now resting in the bottom of the outrigger. And his round eyes watched the sea with the familiarity of one whose natural home was beneath those ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton

... suggests most horribly to me how far behind we must be in all matters of ingenuity, device, and mechanical contrivance. I am reminded again of the days during the Boer war, when one realised that it had never occurred to our happy-go-lucky Army that it was possible to make a military use of barbed wire or construct a trench to defy shrapnel. Suppose in the North Sea we got a surprise like that, and fished out a parboiled, half-drowned admiral explaining what a confoundedly slim, unexpected, almost ungentlemanly thing the enemy ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... her husband for his barbed and irritating remarks, her own tongue had, incontestibly, a very beautiful edge on it. Witness her reply to Mrs. X., who declared that when she met Burton she was inexpressibly shocked by his Chaucerian conversation ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... failing to pierce the drifts. On the banks of the stream, on the slopes of the mountain, in wildest jungles, in the niches and crevices of bare cliffs, the holly-berries glowed red in the midst of the ever-green snow-laden leaves and ice-barbed twigs. When his house at last came into view, the roof was deeply covered; the dizzying whirl had followed every line of the rail-fence; scurrying away along the furthest zigzags there was a vanishing glimpse of a squirrel; the boles of the trees were ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... remarked in accents of distress, "this beastly barbed wire has hooked my trousers leg and the back of my coat, and I ...
— Under Padlock and Seal • Charles Harold Avery

... portion of the house represents the work of my own unaccustomed hands. I have found how laborious an occupation fencing is, and how very exasperating if barbed wire is used; that the keeping in order of even a small plantation in which ill-bred and riotous plants grow with the rapidity of the prophet's gourd, and which if unattended would lapse in a very ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... use, besides bows and arrows, clubs and a kind of sword made of wood. The arrows are reeds, five or six feet long, and of the thickness of a finger. The point is of very hard wood, and is strongly barbed by notches and with sharp fish teeth about three inches long. To the other extremity of the arrow colored feathers are ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... second, he saw the top of the gate beneath his body, and he felt a thrill as he beheld twisted strands of barbed wire, cruel and jagged, across it; then, with a great sensation of joy, he knew that he had cleared the top, and a second later, he landed on the ground, in the country road, in ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice

... searched very carefully. The two roads crossed almost at right angles and at the corner of the cross thus formed, the hedges were broken, admitting to a field which had evidently been used as a pasture by an adjoining dairy farm. Some rough attempt had been made to close the gap with barbed wire, but it was possible to step over the drooping strands with little or no difficulty. It was to this gap that T. X. devoted his principal attention. All the fields had been carefully examined without result, the four drains which were merely the connecting pipes between ditches at the sides ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace

... glad visage, all adrip With carnage; and he licked his bearded lips. I, crouched among the shadows of the trees On the green hill-top, waited his approach, And as he came I aimed at his left flank. The barbed shaft sped idly, nor could pierce The flesh, but glancing dropped on the green grass. He, wondering, raised forthwith his tawny head, And ran his eyes o'er all the vicinage, And snarled and gave to view his cavernous throat. ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus

... and melancholy too; The bridegroom widowed, ere he pleasure knew; His hopes of bliss had soared unduly high, And little dreamt he there was danger nigh; But see! the throes of death his bride arrest, The barbed arrow strikes her beating breast: His hands have touched the cup, but ere he sips, The wine is ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth

... literature under Miss Baylis. Now Miss Baylis at her very best was not a restful individual with whom to come in touch, and after a long morning of hard work and the growing hunger of healthy appetites for food for the body rather than for the mind, the girls did not find "a barbed tongue" ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... The two sergeants—James Blaise and Roger Barlow—went to a distant part of the intricate trench system, while the two corporals, Robert Dalton and Ignace Pulinski and Sergeant Franz Schnitzel were together in a ditch near the middle of the barbed wire entanglements. And now, by a strange turn of fate, they were all together again, waiting for the final word that might send then all into eternity, or cause them ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates

... but before that interview was at an end, he hated Madame la Marechale. His passion (as I am led to understand by one who was present) stood confessed in a burning eye, a pale cheek, and a trembling utterance; Madame, meanwhile tasting the joys of the matador, goading him with barbed words and staring ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to the swamp, climbed the snake fence, followed the path to the old trail and then turned south upon it. Elnora indicated to Philip the trail with remnants of sagging barbed wire. ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter

... jointed, joints broad and fleshy, or rounded; spines barbed; flowers large; fruit ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson

... which appeal to the gullible many without imposing upon the cantankerous few. His arguments, it is true, were merely an elaboration of those with which he had favored some of us already; but they were pointed by a concise exposition of the several definite principles they represented, and barbed with a caustic rhetoric quite admirable in itself. In a word, the manner was worthy of the very foundation it sought to shake, or we had never swallowed such matter without a murmur. As it was, there was a demonstration in the wilderness when the voice ceased crying. ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung

... idea to form a grand semicircle around Santiago, starting from El Caney on the north, and running in an irregular line to Aguadores on the south. Throughout this territory the Spaniards had done everything possible to hinder the advance of our troops. Barbed wire was strung in many directions, and often the brushwood would conceal dangerous pitfalls, so that any advance had to ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer

... local rabbit, and took up his residence therein. Now this mud-pushing Todd had a cousin in the same division, one of those highly trained specialists who trickles about the country shedding coils of barbed wire and calling them "dumps"—a sapper, in short. One afternoon the sapping Todd, finding some old sheets of corrugated iron that he had neglected to dump, sent them over to his gravel-grinding cousin with his love and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various

... maiming without weapons; and proceeds to gathering with devices that take the place of the hand in dipping, digging, hooking and grasping; weapons for striking, whether clubs, missiles or projectiles; edged weapons of capture, which were rare in America; piercing devices for capture, in lances, barbed spears, harpoons and arrows; traps for enclosing, arresting and killing, such as pens, cages, pits, pen-falls, nets, hooks, nooses, clutches, adhesives, deadfalls, impalers, knife traps and poisons; animals consciously and unconsciously aiding in capture; fire in the form of torches, beacons, burning ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... toward the fire indicated by his departed friend. As he reeled, he bethought him of the welcome his comrades would give him. He had a conviction that he would soon feel in his sore heart the barbed missiles of ridicule. He had no strength to invent a tale; he would be a ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... banks sedgy and thickly grown with flaggers and bulrushes, the sport of spearing for eels commenced. Gusty first undertook the task, and, after some vigorous plunges of his implement into the water, he brought up the prey, wriggling between its barbed prongs. Furlong was amazed, for he thought this, like the salmon-fishing, was intended as a quiz, and, after a few more examples of Gusty's prowess, he undertook the sport; a short time, however, fatigued his unpractised arm, and he relinquished ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover

... are the barbed wire entanglements, a nightmare of tumbled wires piled high in cruel confusion. Close behind this are the observation trenches. There was no firing from these small trenches; they were simply what the ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske

... The barbed arrow did not find its mark. It may require a surgical operation to get a joke into a Scotsman, but only the medium of some high explosive could properly convey a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various

... and fatigue. We carried him back to the ranch-house, propped him up in a chair, and despatched Uncle Jake for a doctor. Before midnight we learned what little there was to know. Mary had been chased by the Coon Dogs. He, of course, was a-foot; the cowboys were mounted. A couple of barbed-wire fences had saved him from capture. We had listened, that afternoon, too coolly, perhaps, to a tale of many outrages, but the horror and infamy of them were not brought home to us till we saw Mary, tattered ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... might seem the outlook. I felt as if my very thoughts were in danger from her intuition, and scarcely dared breathe my intentions to the walls, lest the treacherous breeze should carry them to her ears and awaken that formidable antagonism which in her case was barbed with a power which might easily make the most daring quail. And yet she must be braved; for not to save his life could I let such an appeal as he had made me go unanswered; no, though I knew the possibility remained ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green

... that suggests pre-Norman times. It cannot be definitely called a Saxon church, but although 'long and short work' does not appear, there is every reason to associate this lonely little building with the middle of the eleventh century. There are mason marks consisting of crosses and barbed lines on the south wall of the nave. The opening between the tower and the nave is an almost unique feature, having a Moorish-looking arch of horseshoe shape resting ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home

... had been over P. a M. In the afternoon the report came that the infantry on the heights of —— had seen a biplane "flutter" to earth. The artillery positively reported that the biplane I had fired on had fallen behind the enemy's barbed-wire entanglements. They said the pilot had been dragged to the trenches, dead or severely wounded. Then our artillery had fired at the 'plane and destroyed it. I can only explain the thing this way: I wounded ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke

... School to one or two writers born in the metropolis, all the people in London became afraid of looking into their works, lest they too should be convicted of cockneyism. Oh, brave public! This epithet proved too much for one of the writers in question, and stuck like a barbed arrow in his heart. Poor Keats! What was sport to the town was death to him. Young, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... wiring-party. He had duly crawled forth with his satellites, under cover of darkness, on to No Man's Land; and, there selecting a row of "knife-rests" which struck him as being badly in need of repair, had well and truly reinforced the same with many strands of the most barbarous brand of barbed wire. This, despite more than usually fractious behaviour upon ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)

... fairly with Labour. There are not only parish boundaries, but park boundaries and class and sect boundaries. You will find the Bocking-Braintree line too at a dozen points on a small scale map of Europe.... These Braintree-Bocking lines are the barbed-wire entanglements between us and the peace of the world. Against these entanglements in every country the new spirit struggles in many thousands of minds. Where will it be strongest? Which country will get clear first, get most rapidly to work again, have least of the confusion and ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... performed on that malignant or that radical in the course of the evening, and would relate to us exultingly the next day all the incidents of the power of arms, and vindictively (for him) dwell on the barbed points and double edge of the beautiful episcopalian repartee ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... regular metropolitan production, with the original all-star cast. There is the gallant performer known as the armadilla, who teases the bull to desperation by waving a red shawl at him; the no less daring parabola, sticking little barbed boleros in the bull's withers; and, last of all, the intrepid mantilla, who calmly meets the final rush of the infuriated beast and, with one unerring thrust of his trusty sword, delivers the porte-cochere, ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb

... had he lived to see these days, he would have cursed the hour he ever drew sword in their cause. But more of this hereafter—I promise thee full surely that thy hour will come, and then the words thou hast now heard will stick in thy bosom like barbed ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... preparation, in which the Malays are very skilful. At the right time of tide, the fluid is thrown into the stream. The effect is to stupefy and sometimes kill the fish. With dip-nets the fish are picked up, though some of them are so large that they can be secured only with a kind of barbed spear." ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic

... thou hast hurt me sore. Dost thou not know, Allan, that it is cruel to prophesy ill to any, since such words feathered from Fate's own wing and barbed with venom, fester in the breast and mayhap bring about their own accomplishment. Most cruel of all is it when with them are ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... extremely nervous and more ill at ease than I can ever remember. My mind is a seething blank, and I think my left sock-suspender is coming down. However ... Of course, it is beginning to be forcibly what they call 'borne in upon' me that we ought to have brought some barbed wire and a turnstile. As it is, we shall miss about two-thirds of them. Here's your chance," he added, nodding at a stout lady with a green suit-case and a defiant glare. "I'll take the jug ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... or thirty row galleys in readiness, which were out on the river practising every day, watched by approving groups on the shore. Men were at work on the forts five miles below the city, where, also, Dr. Franklin was arranging his three rows of iron-barbed beams in the channel, which were called chevaux de frise. In a letter of that day, written to Captain Richard Varick, of New York, I find these French words spelt thus: "Shiver de freeses." Committees were going about Philadelphia ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton

... sometimes only tapering to a point at one end, and having the other end broad, and shaped somewhat like the blade of an oar. They have also another weapon, about a foot shorter than these, pointed at one end, and at the other shaped like an axe. The points of their long lances are barbed, and they handle them with such strength and agility, that we can match them with no weapon ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... began to feel a tinge of rheumatism in my arms through wearing wet clothing continuously. About the new year one of my saddle horses came into the camp with a portion of a spear stuck in his rump. We threw him and cut out the barbed head of the spear, but the wound afterwards remained a running sore. I caught the camp horse, which we always kept hobbled, and started in search of the others. In following the tracks, I found where the blacks had rounded them up—killing two, one my favourite ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield

... action with a charming glance, one in which all the woman in her was uppermost, and one which made Monsieur d'Agreste's pale cheeks flush like a boy's. He was a philosopher and a scientist; but all his science and philosophy had not saved him from the barbed shafts of a certain mischievous little god. He, also, was visibly ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... on 'em," said Archer. "It was his idea (indicating Tom). They let us have some chemical stuff to fix the pump engine with and we melted the barbed wire with it and made a place to crawl out through. I got a piece of the barbed wirre for a sooveneerr. Maybe you'd like to have it," Archer added, fumbling in ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... like a savage boar, Through streams of blood, through dust and dirt he ran, O'er heaps of bodies wallowing in their gore, The squadrons close his sword to ope began, He broke their ranks, behind, beside, before, And, where he goes, under his feet he treads The armed Saracens, and barbed steeds. ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... of herbage and patches of bright verdure. As we glide along among the islands which line the shore, we are pretty sure to fall in with one of the little propellers, with a small swivel gun at the bow, in search of whales. The projectile which is used consists of a barbed harpoon, to which a short chain is affixed, and to that a strong line. This harpoon has barbs which expand as soon as they enter the body of the animal and he pulls upon the line, stopping at a certain angle, which renders the withdrawal of the weapon impossible. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou

... arguments, it is true, were merely an elaboration of those with which he had favored some of us already; but they were pointed by a concise exposition of the several definite principles they represented, and barbed with a caustic rhetoric quite admirable in itself. In a word, the manner was worthy of the very foundation it sought to shake, or we had never swallowed such matter without a murmur. As it was, there was a demonstration in the wilderness when the voice ceased ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung

... too, I thought it would send me mad, I longed to kill myself to get out of it. But, in an attack, when you've seen your own jolly pals, who have lived in the trenches with you, bleeding and tattered, spatchcocked against barbed wire, and had to leave them sticking to it, their eyes haunt you, your blood gets up, you long for a hundred hands to shoot with, instead of only two. When you've seen the result of Prussian militarism on decent ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... the yacht might be doing here; I ran my sailboat close under the overhanging rocks and anchored. Then I saw a small boat in the moonlight, pulling from the yacht toward shore, where the crescent cove had already been thoroughly staked and the bottom closely covered with barbed wire as far as the edge of the deep channel which curves ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... and working class are mostly confined in barbed-wire internment camps outside the city, and guarded by Sengalese. Twenty per cent get permission to go into the city each day. The seventy or eighty thousand indigent Russians in Constantinople belong mostly to the upper classes. Very ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... balloons and flying machines and their distinctive component parts, together with accessories and articles recognizable as intended for use in connexion with balloons and flying machines; (9) fuel; lubricants; (10) powder and explosives not specially prepared for use in war; (11) barbed wire and implements for fixing and cutting the same; (12) horseshoes and shoeing materials; (13) harness and saddlery; (14) field glasses, telescopes, chronometers and all kinds ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... meanwhile, he felt the dire penetration of two or three of the words she had used; so that after a painful minute the quaver with which he repeated them resembled his-drawing, slowly, carefully, timidly, some barbed ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... answer and said to him: "Most noble son of Atreus, why urgest thou me that myself am eager? Verily with such strength as is in me forbear I not, but ever since we drave them towards Ilios I watch with my bow to slay the foemen. Eight long-barbed arrows have I now sped, and all are buried in the flesh of young men swift in battle; only this mad dog can I ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)

... these high explosive bombs at the zero hour on the morning of the attack. That hill, famous for its strength through four years of struggle between the French and Germans, dis-appeared completely as an enemy standpoint. Nothing remained but torn and broken barbed wire, bits of concrete pill-boxes, and trenches filled with debris, and a few scattered ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden

... showers, now with the proper tramp and rattle of the tropics. All this while I met no sight or sound of man, except the voice which was now silent, and a damned pig-fence that headed me off at every corner. Do you know barbed wire? Think of a fence of it on rotten posts, and you barefoot. But I crossed it at last with my heart in my mouth and no harm done. Thence at last to C's.: no C. Next place I came to was in the zone of woods. They offered me a buggy and set a ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... courage so sublime and unafraid, It wears its sorrows like a coat of mail; And Fate, the archer, passes by dismayed, Knowing his best barbed arrows needs must fail To pierce a soul so armored and arrayed That Death himself might look on it ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... red-hot pokers down their throats; by hugging red-hot stoves; by stripping themselves naked and allowing themselves to freeze to death on winter snow-drifts out of doors, or on piles of ice in refrigerator-cars; by lacerating their throats on barbed-wire fences; by drowning themselves head downward in barrels; by suffocating themselves head downward in chimneys; by diving into white-hot coke-ovens; by throwing themselves into craters of volcanoes; ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... beyond. A sentry challenges us, and we produce our permit. Then we dismount, and I look out upon a wide stretch of what three months ago was swamp, or wet plough land. Now its 250 acres are enclosed with barbed wire, and patrolled by sentries night and day. A number of small buildings, workshops, stores, etc., are rising all over it. I am looking at what is to be the great "filling" factory of the district, where ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... dipping, digging, hooking and grasping; weapons for striking, whether clubs, missiles or projectiles; edged weapons of capture, which were rare in America; piercing devices for capture, in lances, barbed spears, harpoons and arrows; traps for enclosing, arresting and killing, such as pens, cages, pits, pen-falls, nets, hooks, nooses, clutches, adhesives, deadfalls, impalers, knife traps and poisons; animals consciously and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... would thus be doubled, he made them of a peculiar construction, to enable one man to do the work of two. There is no occasion to describe the rows of ditches, dry and wet; the staked pitfalls; the cervi, pronged instruments like the branching horns of a stag; the stimuli, barbed spikes treacherously concealed to impale the unwary and hold him fast when caught, with which the ground was sown in irregular rows; the vallus and the lorica, and all the varied contrivances of Roman engineering genius. Military students ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... September 12, assisted by a limited number of tanks manned partly by Americans and partly by the French. These divisions, accompanied by groups of wire cutters and others armed with bangalore torpedoes, went through the successive bands of barbed wire that protected the enemy's front line and support trenches, in irresistible waves on schedule time, breaking down all defense of an enemy demoralized by the great volume of our artillery fire and our sudden approach out ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... death or capture. Our orders were under no circumstances to leave the gun as long as a shell remained and a man lived. Deuced pleasant! The ground in front of us was well drilled with concealed holes all the way from four to six feet deep, in each of which strands of barbed wire had been placed and the opening carefully concealed with clumps of ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant

... than my mother, and she had one son. He was a sulky, handsome boy, with a selfish, cruel nature. He seemed to be happy only when he was tormenting some one. He used to come to Uncle's to visit when I was there, and he delighted in annoying me. He stretched barbed wire where he knew I was going to pass in the dark, to throw me down and tear my clothes. He threw a quantity of burrs in my hair, and once he led me into a hornet's nest. After we went to live at my uncle's, Richard was not there so ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill

... built a shed for it. When she sniffed contemptuously at his notion of fencing a hog corral with sod walls, he made a spiritless beginning on the structure—merely to "show his temper," as she put it—but in the end he went off quietly to town and bought enough barbed wire to complete the fence. When the first heavy rains came on, and the pigs rooted down the sod wall and made little paths all over it to facilitate their ascent, he heard his wife relate with relish the story of the little pig that built a mud house, to the minister at the dinner table, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... happened at court, or befell the courtiers; and inasmuch as his subjects were frequently of a licentious nature, his lines were generally of a scandalous character. He therefore became the public censor of court folly; and so unerringly did his barbed shafts hit the weaknesses at which they aimed, that his productions were equally the terror of those he victimized, and the ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy

... and extracted the backbone, so that it was in two flaps. Then taking the large hook, he passed it in at the tail, drew the pilchard carefully up the shank, and then held up the hook for Arthur to see, with the broad flaps hanging down on either side of the curve and barbed point. ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn

... devout heart, forgets his longings after righteousness, flings away the joys of Divine communion, darkens his soul, ends his prosperity, brings down upon his head for all his remaining years a cataract of calamities, and makes his name and his religion a target for the barbed sarcasms of each succeeding generation of scoffers. "All the fences and their whole array," which God's mercies and his own past had reared, "one cunning sin sweeps quite away." Every obligation of his office, as every ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren

... The quills were rayed out and flattened on the hinder part of its back, even as if it had lain on that part, but were erect and long between this and the tail. Their points, closely examined, were seen to be finely bearded or barbed, and shaped like an awl, that is, a little concave, to give the barbs effect. After about a mile of still water, we prepared our camp on the right side, just at the foot of a considerable fall. Little chopping was done that night, for fear of scaring the moose. We had moose- meat ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... privileges of an individual. One fourth of the capital stock was at once paid into the hands of the treasurer, the lease and cattle on hand were transferred to the new company, and the executive committee began operations for the future. Barbed wire by the carload was purchased sufficient to build one hundred miles of four-strand fence, and arrangements were made to have the same freighted one hundred and fifty miles inland by wagon from the railway terminal to the new ranch ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams

... the pale features now deform'd with blood. Then, with his spear, unseen, his time he took, Aim'd at the king, and near his elbow strook. The thrilling steel transpierced the brawny part, And through his arm stood forth the barbed dart. Surprised the monarch feels, yet void of fear On Coon rushes with his lifted spear: His brother's corpse the pious Trojan draws, And calls his country to assert his cause; Defends him breathless on the sanguine field, And o'er the body spreads his ample shield. Atrides, marking ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... with one disease and come out of it with ten. Had Shakib been forewarned of Khalid's mind, had he even seen him at the gate before he entered, he would have given him a few hints about the cross-signs and barbed-cordons therein. But should he not have divined that Khalid soon or late was coming? Did he not call enough to him, and aloud? "Get thee behind me on this dromedary," our Scribe, reading his Al-Mutanabbi, would often say to his comrade, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... not all down there," growled Ned. But his barbed wit failed to penetrate the tough skin of the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Ozarks • Frank Gee Patchin

... but made no further objection when they saw who wanted it and why. King wondered at their sudden change of mind, the Pathan looked actually grieved that a fight should have been spared him. He tried, with a few barbed insults, to rearouse a spark of enmity, but failed, to his own ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... the heart of the rock. Even there the wind blew dank and howling through all the cavernous hollows. As he approached the last chamber, out of the Devil's Window flew, with clanging wing, an arrow barbed seagull, down to the grey veiled tumult below, and the joy of life for a moment seized his soul. But the next, the dismay of that which is forsaken was upon him. It was not that the once lordly structure lay abandoned to the birds and the gusts, but that she would never think ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... ended in black claws! Snarling, grinning teeth in faces of dead-white flesh! Barbed tails that hissed through the air as they swung down upon him! And Chet Bullard, his blond hair shining like the gold that was inlaid and encrusted upon the walls of the room—Chet Bullard, Master Pilot, once, of a distant Earth—did not wait for the assault to ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin

... coincides with the domestication of the dog, an epoch in hunting life. The appearance of arrow heads indicates the invention of the bow, and the rise of man from a defensive to an offensive mode of life. The introduction of barbed arrows shows how inventive talent was displaying itself; bone and horn tips, that the huntsman was including smaller animals, and perhaps birds, in his chase; bone whistles, his companionship with other huntsmen, or with his dog. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... not going to interfere with that girl's matrimonial affairs, sir, not for any one. That child, bless her heart, is like my own child to me. If she wants the moon, and there's nothing else to stop her having it but my consent, why, I guess that moon's as good as fenced in with triple-barbed wire an' registered in her name in the Government ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... lived from the age of twenty, might have rivalled Shakespeare's own; which even now asserts its force by a hundred little never-to-be-forgotten phrases scattered through his poems, which stick, like barbed arrows, in the memory of every reader. And as for his tenderness—the quality without which all other poetic excellence is barren—it gushes forth toward every creature, animate and inanimate, with one exception, namely, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... two hundred feet was enclosed by a barbed wire fence, and this space was quite as interesting ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman

... bees are often more virulent than those of wasps, and attended with more painful effects. The sting being barbed, it is always left in the wound. When therefore a person is stung by a bee, the sting should be instantly extracted, or it will communicate more of its poison, according to the time it is permitted to remain. It should be carefully pulled out with a steady hand, for if any ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton

... mind. That large low head seemed to have been created for butting rather than for anything else. There he stood, four-square and menacing in the doorway of reform; and it remained to be seen whether, the bulky mass, upon whose solid hide even the barbed arrows of Lord Raglan's scorn had made no mark, would prove amenable to the pressure of Miss Nightingale. Nor was he alone in the doorway. There loomed behind him the whole phalanx of professional conservatism, the stubborn supporters of the out-of-date, the worshippers and the victims ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... with blood trickling from it down the wall. The fierce bolt, slightly barbed, had gone through it and deep into the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... and fairly with Labour. There are not only parish boundaries, but park boundaries and class and sect boundaries. You will find the Bocking-Braintree line too at a dozen points on a small scale map of Europe.... These Braintree-Bocking lines are the barbed-wire entanglements between us and the peace of the world. Against these entanglements in every country the new spirit struggles in many thousands of minds. Where will it be strongest? Which country will get clear first, get most rapidly ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... drawing its weapon for a few instants longer and to avenge the deceased before being itself overcome with death's inertia. This vindictive persistency serves me to perfection. There is another circumstance in my favour: the barbed sting remains where it is, which enables me to ascertain the exact spot pierced. A needle withdrawn as soon as inserted would leave me doubtful. I can also, when the transparency of the tissues permits, perceive the direction ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... this that the nations will have to fix up some other way to settle their differences. About that Zeppelin, Tubby; don't you see how they might be able to drop a few bombs on the enemy's trenches; or where the Belgians have fixed barbed-wire entanglements to stop the rush of the charging German troops? Just to think that here we are really watching a battle that isn't like one of the sham rights they have every summer at home. ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson

... of loops of small diameter fastened to stakes, or wire laid along the ground and attached at the ends, or spirals of barbed wire in racks, is used for entanglements. It is reported that this form is coming into considerable use, but the details have not been published. Such entanglements are much harder ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker

... and on fote, with suche actiuitie and force, that thei are almoste inuincible in bothe. Their weapons are bowe and arrowes, Launces and Armynge swordes. Their beltes aboute their waste, the ornament of their heades, and their pollerone, are garnished with golde. Their Horses are barbed on the brest, with barbes of gold. Their reines, bridles, and trappour are all of golde. The heades of their Launces are of Brasse, and their Quiuers armed with Brasse. As for Siluer and Iron thei occupie none. Eche manne marieth one wife, and yet are the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt

... start everybody was ordered to attend prayers, and as they were embarking about twenty naked savages came running and shouting towards them, each carrying a long barbed spear, but the English made all haste to ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various

... almost in every respect. Their other fishing implements are large and small hooks. The last are composed entirely of pearl-shell, but the first are only covered with it on the back, and the points of both commonly of tortoise-shell; those of the small being plain, and the others barbed. With the large ones they catch bonnetos and albicores, by putting them to a bamboo rod, twelve or fourteen feet long, with a line of the same length, which rests in a notch of a piece of wood, fixed in the stern of the canoe for that purpose, and is dragged ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... of barbed wire all along the bottom of the fence. That will stop the pig from rooting, I'll ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... window. If it should, by any chance, be unlocked. But that was foolish to expect. Perhaps it would be possible to twist a rope from the bed-clothes and throw it up over the chevaux-de-frise; but even then there would be a long hand-over-hand climb to accomplish; and the barbed and pointed spikes had looked very formidable. In any event, she had the whole night before her; she must not act hastily; she must wait and watch; perhaps some other means would present ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... He cut steps with his ax in the slippery carcass, and got up to it as well as he could, extracted it by cutting and pulling, and threw it down into his boat, but not till he had taken the precaution to stick a great piece of blubber on the barbed point. He then sawed and hacked under difficulties, being buffeted and bothered with thousands of birds, so eager for slices that it was as much as he could do to avoid the making of minced fowl; but, true to ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade

... hand on a post and vaulted the fence. But Anderson had to climb laboriously and painfully over the barbed-wire obstruction. Lenore marveled at his silence and his persistence. Anderson hated wire fences. Presently he got over, and then he divided his time between searching in the wheat and peering after the strange car that was drawing ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey

... "Morning Post" (articles in which he attacked the snobs of England before Thackeray did), and other of Punch's permanent butts; but his chief merit lies in his having set up the hereditary sins of Society as targets, and shot his barbed darts into them with unerring accuracy of aim. Of his bitterness it was said that it was "healthy—healthy as bark," just as Thackeray—was it not?—had previously said of his ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... If you come in peace, you shall be welcome, and we will make a feast for you. We will hunt the nimble deer with you, and show you where the mighty eagle roosts, and where the fish with shining scales abides. If you come painted, your war-pipe filled, your bow bent, your arrow sharp and barbed, your heart strong, and your cry loud, we too will paint ourselves; we will smoke our pipe of war, we will bend our bow, make sharp our arrows, and stout our hearts, and will cry our war-cry, till the startled heron shall wing his way from the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... more than wily; he was something wicked. The suggestion of danger to Kingsley's life had made her wince, and he had added another little barbed arrow to keep the first company. The cause was a good one. Hurt now to heal afterwards—and Kingsley was an old friend, and a good fellow. Anyhow, this work was wasting her life, and she would be much better back in England, living a civilised life, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... with the force of a barbed arrow from a strong-bow. Struggle as she might, she could not henceforth ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... up in, circumvest. vest, clothe, array, dress, dight[obs3], drape, robe, enrobe, attire, apparel, accounter[obs3], rig, fit out; deck &c. (ornament) 847; perk, equip, harness, caparison. wear; don; put on, huddle on, slip on; mantle. Adj. invested &c. v.; habited; dighted[obs3]; barbed, barded; clad, costume, shod, chausse[Fr]; en grande tenue &c. (show) 882[Fr]. sartorial. Phr. "the soul of this man is ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... it with all our might, and as we drew near, the captain ordered Tom Lokins to "stand up", so he at once laid in his oar, and took up the harpoon. The harpoon is an iron lance with a barbed point. A whale-line is attached to it, and this line is coiled away in a tub. When we were within a few yards of the fish, which was going slowly through the water, all ignorant of the terrible foes who were pursuing him, Tom Lokins raised the harpoon high above his head, and darted it deep into ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne

... the river practising every day, watched by approving groups on the shore. Men were at work on the forts five miles below the city, where, also, Dr. Franklin was arranging his three rows of iron-barbed beams in the channel, which were called chevaux de frise. In a letter of that day, written to Captain Richard Varick, of New York, I find these French words spelt thus: "Shiver de freeses." Committees were going about Philadelphia during this spring buying lead from house to house at ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton

... shot forth a deadly shaft, And smote Phylodamas, Polites' friend, Beneath the jaw; the arrow pierced his throat. Down fell he like a vulture, from a rock By fowler's barbed arrow shot and slain; So from the high tower swiftly down he fell: His life fled; clanged his armour o'er the corpse. With laughter of triumph stalwart Molus' son A second arrow sped, with strong desire To smite Polites, ill-starred Priam's son: But with a swift ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus

... afterwards. I don't give because I see things are needed, but because I can't spend my income unless I do give. If I could have my way I'd buy you a good house in Buffalo, right side of mine; take your beggarly little income and manage it for you; build a six-foot barbed wire fence round the lot so 't the neighbors couldn't get in and eat you out of house and home, and in a couple of years I could make ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... defence known as the 'line of resistance.' They might be ordered to make a counter-attack. When no fighting was taking place their work was likely to consist in carrying up rations and R.E. materials (wooden pickets, sandbags, coils of barbed wire, etc.) to the front line. This work had to be done at night, because in winter 'communication trenches' (which alone made daylight movement possible from place to place in the forward zone) were so choked with mud as to be impassable. ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose

... out of pasture and into the corn; the pigs, like the chickens, evinced decided preference for the garden. The horse would break his halter and dart down the street, or, if in pasture, would leap the barbed-wire fence, at the risk of laming his legs for life, and dash into a neighbor's yard where children and babies were sunning ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... entrenchments and earthworks, not made recently, because grass had clothed them, afforded splendid cover for the French batteries. Bomb-proof shelters were dotted about the fields, and for miles away, as far as the Belgian frontier, were lines of trenches and barbed-wire entanglements. To the eye of a man not skilled in military science all these signs of a strong defence were comforting. And yet I think they were known to be valueless if the enemy broke through along the ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... The weak man with his Faith equivocated: Fraudful, beneath the self-same roofs he raised Altars to Christ and idols. By degrees That Truth he mocked forsook him. Year by year His face grew dark, and barbed his tongue though smooth, Manner and mind like grass-fields after thaw, Silk-soft above, yet iron-hard below: Spleenful that night at Sebert's blithe discourse He answered thus, with seeming-careless eye Wandering from wall ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... the report thereof went current, that salt-beef will make one find the way to the wine without a candle, though it were hid in the bottom of a collier's sack, and that with his drawers on he were mounted on a barbed horse furnished with a fronstal, and such arms, thighs, and leg-pieces as are requisite for the well frying and broiling of a swaggering sauciness. Here is a sheep's head, and it is well they make a proverb of this, that it ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... from the killing and already frozen. An early spring cold-snap was on, and the wildness of the scene was painted in a temperature of thirty below zero. Woven cloth was not in evidence. Furs and soft-tanned leather clad all alike. Boys passed with bows in their hands, and quivers of bone-barbed arrows; and many a skinning-knife of bone or stone Smoke saw in belts or neck-hung sheaths. Women toiled over the fires, smoke-curing the meat, on their backs infants that stared round-eyed and sucked at lumps of tallow. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... either fly over the water or live in the water. The hunting of the last is called fishing; and of fishing, one kind uses enclosures, catching the fish in nets and baskets, and another kind strikes them either with spears by night or with barbed spears or barbed hooks by day; the barbed spears are impelled from above, the barbed hooks are jerked into the head and lips of the fish, which are then drawn from below upwards. Thus, by a series of divisions, we have arrived at the definition of ...
— Sophist • Plato

... 'Thanase was in high spirits. His jests came thick and fast, and some were hard and personal, and some were barbed with truth, and one, at length, ended in the word "deserter." The victim grew instantly fierce and red, leaped up crying "Liar," and was knocked backward to the ground by the long-reaching fist of 'Thanase. He rose again and dashed at his assailant. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... expansion were merely the cost of subduing naked savages, the business was a remunerative one; but when, to these ordinary costs must be added the stupendous price of capturing trenches protected by barbed wire entanglements, of bombing whole countrysides, of desolating states and wiping out industries, not to mention the cost of building forty million dollar ships that can be sunk in six or seven minutes with one well aimed torpedo, the limit has been ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing

... built in the time of the Ten Years' War (1868-1878) as a barrier against the revolutionists operating in eastern Cuba. It was restored for use in the revolution of 1895, but its blockhouses at every kilometre, and its barbed wire tangles, were entirely ineffective against Gomez and Maceo and other leaders, all of whom crossed it at their own sweet will, although not without an occasional vicious little contest. We reached Ciego de Avila soon after noon, and had to wait there over night for a further ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson

... which proved them to be possessed of much ingenuity and taste. The description of their weapons reminds one of those remains of prehistoric man which we find treasured in our museums, for they had arrows barbed with horn, flint, iron, and copper, spears shod with bone, daggers of horn and bone, and axes made of brown or grey stone. The latter were from six to eight inches long and two thick, having the inside flat and the outside round, and tapering to an edge, and ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne

... the single women; the two hospitals, one general, the other for infectious diseases; and last of all, the house where the half-dozen disorderly women are confined, surrounded by a double fence of barbed wire and guarded by ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke

... behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of scientific truth as they ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... the Mosaic Law, or whether it be the law of our own country, or whether it be the laws written upon men's consciences. These all partake of the one characteristic, that they help nothing to the fulfilment of their own behests, and that they are barbed with threatenings of retribution. Like some avenging goddess, law comes down amongst men, terrible in her purity, awful in her beauty, with a hard light in her clear grey eyes—in the one hand the tables of stone, bearing the commandments which we have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... "Daughters of Jerusalem," said he, to the sympathizing women, "weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children." As though he had said, "You have a right to weep; weep, then, in that great catastrophe which is coming, when barbed affliction shall pierce your hearts, and the dearest ties shall be cut in sunder. Those ties are tender; those hearts are ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin

... the rudiments of trench warfare. Trenches had been dug, with barbed-wire entanglements, bombing saps, dug-outs, observation posts, and machine-gun emplacements. We were given a smattering of trench cooking, sanitation, bomb throwing, reconnoitering, listening posts, constructing and repairing barbed ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey

... until the grass should be sufficiently dry to burn; there were two varieties: that upon the slopes and hollows of the stony soil of the Atbara valley had been a pest ever since it had ripened; as the head formed three barbed darts, these detached themselves from the plant with such facility, that the slightest touch was sufficient to dislodge them; they immediately pierced the clothes, from which they could not be withdrawn, as the barbed heads broke off and remained. It was ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker

... are even more clinging than those of the Burdock. These are the Acaenas; they are mostly natives of America and New Zealand, and some of them (especially A. sarmentosa and A. microphylla) form excellent carpet plants, but their points being furnished with double hooks, like a double-barbed arrow, they ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... dimpled the sea like a hailstorm, and clanged on our shields and smote the decks with a sharp click from end to end of the vessel. Even at that time I saw that some of the arrows were British, but more of some outland make with cruelly barbed heads. One or two went near my helm, and I had several in my shield, but none of us ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler

... thine may be, No wealth, no pow'r, to set the captive free; Though only to thy ravish'd sight is given The golden path that HOWARD trod to heaven; Thy slights can make the wretched more forlorn, And deeper drive affliction's barbed thorn. Say not, "I'll come and cheer thy gloomy cell With news of dearest friends; how good, how well: I'll be a joyful herald to thine heart:" Then fail, and play the worthless trifler's part, To sip flat pleasures from thy glass's brim, And waste the precious ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield

... glass or crockery—that the heavy creature was capable of making; but, I became as highly incensed by it as if it had been barbed with wit, and I immediately rose in my place and said that I could not but regard it as being like the honorable Finch's impudence to come down to that Grove,—we always talked about coming down to that Grove, as a neat Parliamentary ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... play. But what a chance for arrows now, with that threatening band preparing for the rush and leap together, and, while out of reach of spear or ax, within easy reach of the singing little shafts! Oh, for the shafts now, those slender barbed things which were hurled in his new way! And, even as he thus raged, there came a feeble shout from down the valley behind him and ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... the antiquary, poet, and romance-writer of modern times? But to return, the Scottish archers were first formed into a company and obtained a charter, granting them great privileges, under the reign of queen Anne, for which they were to pay to the crown, annually, a pair of barbed arrows. One of these allowances was, that they might meet and go forth under their officer's conduct, in military form, in manner of weapon-showing, as often as they should think convenient. "But they have made no public parade since ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various

... him on the shoulder, then danced on into the center of the set, stopping to direct some barbed remark at Marilyn. ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve

... seductive Smiles. —Slow rolls the Cyprian car in purple pride, And, steer'd by LOVE, ascends admiring Ide; Climbs the green slopes, the nodding woods pervades, Burns round the rocks, or gleams amid the shades. 225 —Glad ZEPHYR leads the train, and waves above The barbed darts, and blazing torch of Love; Reverts his smiling face, and pausing flings Soft showers of roses from aurelian wings. Delighted Fawns, in wreathes of flowers array'd, 230 With tiptoe Wood-Boys beat the chequer'd glade; Alarmed Naiads, rising into ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... cigar. She accompanied her action with a charming glance, one in which all the woman in her was uppermost, and one which made Monsieur d'Agreste's pale cheeks flush like a boy's. He was a philosopher and a scientist; but all his science and philosophy had not saved him from the barbed shafts of a certain mischievous little god. He, also, was visibly ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... portion, and (2) a pair of darts of marvellous delicacy. These darts we cannot see in position because they lie on the other side of the gouge-like piece. But to the left you will notice a long sword-like blade, drawn separately, with a curiously crooked handle and a sharp barbed point. This is one of the pair of darts. Those who have had the misfortune to be stung may be interested to know that this painful wound was inflicted thus: When the bee alighted on you, he first thrust through the skin this hard, pointed gouge; then one of the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... of a mile inland was the gravel road that followed the windings of Plum Run, to cut across at the wagon bridge. Two stealthy figures hurried through the woods and across the fields, to emerge on the other side of a barbed wire fence and trudge off down ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart

... Some call this barbed shaft Cruelty; some Superstition; some Ignorance; some Priestcraft; maybe its poison is drawn from all four; be it how it may, it is the duty of all Italians to pluck hard at the arrow of hell, so that the smile of God alone shall remain with ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... it!" said the Son of the Mist, looking after him with an air of exultation; "the barbed arrow is in thy side! Spirits of the slaughtered, rejoice! soon shall your murderers' swords be ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott

... are of two kinds: (a) the barbed-headed (ki pliang), and (b) the plain-headed (sop). Both are made out of bamboo. The first kind is used for hunting, the latter for archery matches only. Archery may be styled the Khasi national game. A description of ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon

... Perhaps they have strayed among the company? Would it not be well to summon them, that they may hear the father's instructions, and join in the song which we shall all sing as we draw near to Shiloh?" Cruel words! and they do their work. Like barbed arrows, they stick fast in the sore heart of this injured one. Her head sinks, but she utters no reply. She only draws nearer to her husband, and walks more closely ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... broad-gauge railway. On one side of it huge stacks of sleepers stretched away in long rows that were soon lost to sight in the wintry atmosphere. On the other side was a barbed wire fence. Beyond it lay flat fields on which the snow had settled evenly. In one of the fields was the dim form of a farm-building, barely visible through the rush and turmoil ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt

... than Methuselah because she knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of. Then he mentioned a number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by saying, "What did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?" ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... midst one day, borrowed a hole from a local rabbit, and took up his residence therein. Now this mud-pushing Todd had a cousin in the same division, one of those highly trained specialists who trickles about the country shedding coils of barbed wire and calling them "dumps"—a sapper, in short. One afternoon the sapping Todd, finding some old sheets of corrugated iron that he had neglected to dump, sent them over to his gravel-grinding cousin with his love and the request of a loan of a dozen of soda. The earth-pounding ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various

... not a pleasant companion as all persons know who have had any experience with it. Its needles are not only very sharp, but also finely barbed, and they penetrate and cling fast like a burr the moment that they are touched. Cowboys profess to believe that the plant has some kind of sense as they say that it jumps and takes hold of its victim before it ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk

... west; a seemingly endless succession of diminishing posts. He estimated that there must he at least forty thousand acres under fence. According to location, this was The Spider's ranch—the Olla—Pete reined around and rode along the fence for a mile or so, searching for a gateway; but the taut barbed wire ran on and on, toward a sun that was rounding swiftly down to the western horizon. He dismounted and pulled the staples from several lengths of wire until he had enough slack to allow the top wire to touch the ground. He stood on the wires and jockeyed Blue Smoke ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... mankind—shall he be tasked To beg of Time for mercy? Rather he Would girdle up his loins, like Baldwin be. Aged he is, but of a lineage rare; The least intrepid of the birds that dare Is not the eagle barbed. What matters age, The years but fire him with a holy rage. Though late from Palestine, he is not spent,— With age he wrestles, firm in ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... not a very great deal larger than the common British hedgehog; the quills, however, are longer and stronger, and varied with alternate clouded marks of pure white and dark brownish grey; they are minutely barbed, so that if one enters the flesh it is with difficulty extracted, but will work through of itself in an opposite direction, and can then be easily pulled out. Dogs and cattle often suffer great inconvenience from getting their muzzles filled with the quills of the porcupine, the former when ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... cloud shadow, the great Wolfhound streaked across the thirty yards of moonlit paddock which divided the camp from the ring-barked bush, and melted away among that crowded assembly of tree ghosts. The barbed wire fence of the paddock was no more than four feet high, and this Finn took in his stride, without ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... bitter pang of bereavement. As yet my flight, I was sure, was undiscovered. I could go back and be his comforter—his pride; his redeemer from misery, perhaps from ruin. Oh, that fear of his self-abandonment—far worse than my abandonment—how it goaded me! It was a barbed arrow-head in my breast; it tore me when I tried to extract it; it sickened me when remembrance thrust it farther in. Birds began singing in brake and copse: birds were faithful to their mates; birds were emblems of ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... Which bears a sword Can pierce an armed man. It hurls its barbed syllables,— At once is mute again. But where it fell The saved will tell On patriotic day, Some epauletted brother ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson

... circumstances of the American War and the politics of the Great Rebellion. These, of course, have lost their interest with the passing away of the times which gave them birth. The points of many of the jokes have corroded, and the barbed head of many an arrow of Artemus's wit has rusted into bluntness with the decay of the bow ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne

... suppressed, whether in a parliamentary manner or not I am unable to say. Here we should have discussed the matter at length if it had taken us until midnight, or adjourned over until next day, "the spinsters and widows" having been the target for all our barbed arrows until ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... about to sniff at him inquiringly. Had he done so, the result would have been disastrous. He would have got a slap in the face from the porcupine's active and armed tail; and his face would have straightway been transformed into a sort of anguished pincushion, stuck full of piercing, finely barbed quills. He would have paid dear for his ignorance of woodcraft,—perhaps with the loss of an eye, or even with starvation from a quill working through into his gullet. But fortunately for him the ewe understood the peculiarities of porcupines. Just in time she noted his danger, and rudely ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... been saved by the intercession of the Virgin Mary—the word Thuin meaning in Flemish "an enclosed space, such as a garden plot," an allusion to the barrier of thorns which had so well kept the enemy away from the walls—a sort of predecessor of the barbed-wire entanglements used in ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards

... apparently from the snow,—nowhere touching it, the clear sky seen between it and the mountain edge, yet never leaving it—poised as a white bird hovers over its nest? Or those war clouds that gather on the horizon, dragon-crested, tongued with fire,—how is their barbed strength bridled? What bits are those they are champing with their vapourous lips, flinging off flakes of black foam? Leagued leviathans of the Sea of Heaven,—out of their nostrils goeth smoke, and their eyes are like ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin

... successfully practiced during his reign of terror in the coke regions. Secretly, and while peace negotiations were being purposely prolonged, Frick supervised the military preparations, the fortification of the Homestead Steel Works, the erection of a high board fence, capped with barbed wire and provided with loopholes for sharpshooters. And then, in the dead of night, he attempted to smuggle his army of hired Pinkerton thugs into Homestead, which act precipitated the terrible carnage ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... a target full and fair. Now, as always in the moment of imminent crisis, his nerves were steady, never had they been more steady, and his eyes pierced the darkness. Never before and never again did he bend so well the bow of Ulysses. The arrow, feathered and barbed, hummed through the air, going as straight and swift as a bullet to its mark, and then it pierced the throat of the wolf so deep that the barb stood out on one side and the feathers on ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler

... wide and florid arch, over which, cut in high relief in stone, and painted and gilded, was the sign of the inn. This was the Flying Dragon, with wings of brilliant red and gold, expanded, and its tail, pale green and gold, twisted and knotted into ever so many rings, and ending in a burnished point barbed like the dart ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... range, then another lot fifty yards on, and so on, so it was no good hurrying on, as you only came in for the next lot. Then they very nearly got us just when we had got to a hopeless-looking place—the railway, with thick fence and ditch on each side of the track and a barbed-wire fence as well, with signal wires knee high just where you expected to be able to jump down on to the track. Luckily Catley, my groom, had some wire nippers; but just as he was cutting at the wire, and we of the Brigade Staff were all standing round close ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen

... said, Whene'er the snow came feathering down, Four barbed steeds,—from the Bull's head, Carried thy master ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger

... which the Malays are very skilful. At the right time of tide, the fluid is thrown into the stream. The effect is to stupefy and sometimes kill the fish. With dip-nets the fish are picked up, though some of them are so large that they can be secured only with a kind of barbed spear." ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic

... Plays the light gas, or kindles into flame. If rests the traveller his weary head, Grim MANCINELLA haunts the mossy bed, Brews her black hebenon, and, stealing near, 190 Pours the curst venom in his tortured ear.— Wide o'er the mad'ning throng URTICA flings Her barbed shafts, and darts ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin

... the barbed end down into the hole. Down, down it went, fifteen, twenty feet, then struck with a dull thud. He began twisting the sapling over and over, then drew it slowly and gently up, but the end came into view with nothing adhering to it. Again and again was the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... fascinating sight. Few things could be finer than to see him snatch away a barbed-wire entanglement of blackberry-bushes, clutch a three-inch thorn sapling with his hairy left, and with one swing of his terrible right cut the taproot through. I had figured that it would take a month to clear away that ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine

... imperious in her resentments; and, when she strongly disapproved, was apt to express her censure in terms that gave a very humiliating sensation to the person against whom it was directed. Her displeasure however never assumed its severest form, but when it was barbed by disappointment. Where she expected little, she was not very rigid in ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin

... history weighs most heavily with me. Changed man as I am, I abhor myself in the recollection. May none who hear this tale ever have felt as I. A horse driven to fury by a rider armed with barbed spurs, was not more a slave than I to the violent tyranny of my temper. A fiend possessed my soul, irritating it to madness. I felt the voice of conscience within me; but if I yielded to it for a brief ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... savage head-hunters, the terror of all the plainsmen of no matter what origin. It is interesting to read [51] that "among other measures taken by the Japanese authorities to 'control' the aborigines was the erection of barbed wire entanglements charged with electricity," the idea being, after surrounding a savage position by these entanglements, to have the troops drive the savages upon them. Many people have refused to believe that this ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... like putting up barbed wire, not so much, I think, from any real deep-seated affection for the stuff itself, or from any confidence in the protection it affords—its disintegration being one of the assumed preliminaries of an attack—as for the satisfaction of writing in the Weekly Work Report, "In front ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various

... not allowed to drop at this point. Many a barbed shaft of wit-winged sarcasm was shot by the light-armed scholar against the ranks of the Reformers. "Where Lutheranism reigns," he wrote Pirckheimer, "sound learning perishes." "With disgust," he confessed to Ber, "I see the cause of Christianity ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... hill, Thrilling and horrible it rang, Around, beneath, above; The wild beast from his cavern sprang, The wild bird from her grove! Nor fear, nor joy, nor agony Were mingled in that midnight cry; But like the lion's growl of wrath, When falls that hunter in his path Whose barbed arrow, deeply set, Is rankling in his bosom yet, It told of hate, full, deep, and strong, Of vengeance kindling out of wrong; It was as if the crimes of years— The unrequited toil, the tears, The ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... over the barbed-wire fence which marked the dividing-line between the Centipede Ranch and their own, staring mournfully into a summer night such as only the far southwestern country knows. Big yellow stars hung thick ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach

... narrow below, broad above. Fair, flaxen, golden hair upon him, and a proper fillet around it. A brooch of silver in his mantle, and in his hand a gold-hilted sword. A shield with five golden circles upon it: a five-barbed javelin in his hand. A visage just, fair, ruddy he hath: he is also beardless. Modest-minded is ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various

... armour is a large target, made of the skin of an animal called Danta, which is very difficultly pierced; and their principal weapons are azagays or light darts, which they throw with great dexterity. These darts are pointed with iron, the length of a span, and barbed in different directions, so that they make dangerous wounds, and tear the flesh extremely when pulled out. They have also a Moorish weapon, much-bent like a Turkish sword or cimeter, and made of iron, without any steel, which they procure from the negroes on the river Gambia, as they either ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr

... with its barbed hooks was torn out of my heart; and the question then was, how the inward sanative power of youth could be brought to one's aid? I really put on the man; and the first thing instantly laid aside was the weeping and raving, which I now regarded ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... betrayed, was hardest. The whispers of her young maids of honor, "Really, Aimee, he looks so young! One would never surmise," were more galling in their intended consolation, more revealing in their betrayal of her friends' own shrinking from that arrogant, dandified old man than the barbed dart of the uncaring, inquisitive, "How do you find him, my dear? He has ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... slowly toward the fire indicated by his departed friend. As he reeled, he bethought him of the welcome his comrades would give him. He had a conviction that he would soon feel in his sore heart the barbed missiles of ridicule. He had no strength to invent a tale; he would ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... he threw his challenge down before Fate, before Germany, before barbed wire entanglements—before everything and everybody. He did not know whether they ever paroled ordinary prisoners, but he hoped they would not parole him, because then he would be bound by honor. And he did not want to be bound by honor. He kept ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... ordering us out of their territories, to the south. Seeing us, however, motionless and silent, their courage returned, and again they advanced, uttering their war cries with renewed energy. Again the spears would have been amongst us; but I, not relishing even the idea of barbed spears being stuck through my body, determined not to permit either my own or any of my party's lives to be lost for the sake of not discharging my firearms. Consequently we at length succeeded in causing a rout, and driving ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... close by the roadside, and a little higher than ourselves. The grave was marked by four short, rough posts on which was strung barbed wire; a white flag; a white cross of painted wood, very simply but neatly made; a faded wreath. We could distinguish a few words of an inscription. "Comrades, 66th Territorials..." Soldiers were buried where they fell, and this was the tomb of him who fell nearest to Paris. It marked the last homicidal ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett

... parting. The two sergeants—James Blaise and Roger Barlow—went to a distant part of the intricate trench system, while the two corporals, Robert Dalton and Ignace Pulinski and Sergeant Franz Schnitzel were together in a ditch near the middle of the barbed wire entanglements. And now, by a strange turn of fate, they were all together again, waiting for the final word that might send then all into eternity, or cause them to ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates

... brick wall dead-blank, at least twelve feet high, which ran for eighty or ninety yards along the straight line of the path. Across the canal a row of unkempt cottage gardens sloped to the water, the most of them fenced from the brink of it with decayed palings, a few with elder bushes and barbed wire to fill up the gaps, while at least two ended in moraines of old meat tins and shards of crockery. And between these containing banks wound the canal, shallow and waveless, with noisome weeds trailing on its surface afloat amid soot and iridescent patches or pools of tar. In the ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the gravel. The companies were going back to their barracks. He wanted to smile but he didn't dare. He wanted to smile because he had a pass till midnight, because in ten minutes he'd be outside the gates, outside the green fence and the sentries and the strands of barbed wire. Crunch, crunch, crunch; oh, they were so slow in getting back to the barracks and he was losing time, precious free minutes. "Hep, hep, hep," cried the sergeant, glaring down the ranks, with his aggressive bulldog ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... a straw stack loomed large within a fenced enclosure. The youth wormed his way between the barbed wires determined at last to let nothing prevent him from making a cozy bed in the deep straw beside the stack. With courage radiating from every pore he strode toward the stack. His walk was almost a swagger, for thus does youth dissemble the bravery it yearns for but does not possess. ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... coolly, with a smile, Felling a seam with utmost care, meanwhile. "The caustic tongue of Vivian Dangerfield Is barbed as ever, for my sex, this morn. Still unconvinced, no smallest point I yield. Woman I love, and trust, despite your scorn. There is some truth in what you say? Well, yes! Your statements usually hold more or less. Some women write weak letters—(some ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... to this lonely veld tavern. He watched it growing into ugly, sordid shape as the waggon drew nearer. To this horrible place, miscalled the Free State Hotel—a mere jumble of corrugated-iron buildings, wattle and mud-walled stables for horses, and a barbed-wire waggon-enclosure—he had brought his beloved at the end of their last journey together. He shuddered at ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... again with them in the boats for a short time to see them spear salmon. A man holding a large torch made of strips of resinous wood stood in the bow of the boat, and on either side of him stood an Ostjak holding a long barbed spear. In a short time there were swirls on the surface of the river. These increased till the water round the boat seemed to boil. The Ostjaks were soon at work, and in half an hour twenty fine ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty

... at it with nails that bit like teeth. They wound thongs about him, bound him, tied weights to him, tried to pull him down with them; but still he floated, floated, danced on the fiery waves of pain, with barbed light pouring down on him from an ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... a bag of wool. "A big herd of sheep went by this afternoon," she explained, "and they left a lot of fine wool on the barbed-wire fences. See, I have gathered enough for a pair of ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson

... porches and wide windows; further down the coulee, at the base of a gentle slope, were the sheds, the high, round corrals and the haystacks. Great, board gates were distributed in seemingly useless profusion, while barbed wire fences stretched away in all directions. A small creek, bordered with cottonwoods and scraggly willows, wound ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower

... exact, it was not the cow-puncher, who was merely a gawky, loud-mouthed and uncouth importation from a Middle Western farm, broken to ride after a fashion, to rope and brand when necessary and to wield pliers in mending barbed wire, the sort of product, in fact, that had disillusioned De Launay. It was his clothes ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter

... horsemen down each bank, warning farmers and townspeople against us. They did their work thoroughly, all right. The erstwhile hospitable farmers met us with the icy mit. Also, they summoned the constables when we tied up to the bank, and loosed the dogs. I know. Two of the latter caught me with a barbed-wire fence between me and the river. I was carrying two buckets of milk for the pale Vienna. I didn't damage the fence any; but we drank plebian coffee boiled with vulgar water, and it was up to me to throw my feet for another pair of trousers. ...
— The Road • Jack London

... more engineers, a lot of hand grenades, trench mortars, periscopes and tools. The barbed wire bothers me! Am specially keen about trench mortars; if it comes to close fighting on the Peninsula with its restricted area trench mortars may make up for our lack of artillery and especially of howitzers. Luckily, they ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton

... could not live here without the plant on their farms. Once given a chance to naturalize itself, no composite is slow in seizing it. The vigorous elecampane, rearing its fringy, yellow disks above lichen-covered stone walls in New England, the Virginia rail fence, and the rank weedy growth along barbed-wire barriers farther west, now bids fair ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... her eyes, her fine white hands were folded in her lap. There was in voice and manner an air of finality, which was as impervious as a barrier of barbed wire. Not for any bribe in the world would I have attempted ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... up. A cold hand seemed suddenly to have been placed on her heart. Joan,—it was Joan, the girl who, once before, at Martin's house, had sent the earth spinning from under her feet and put Martin suddenly behind barbed wire. What hideous trick was this of Fate's? Why was this moment the one chosen for the appearance of this girl,—his wife? ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... autumn sun that hung over the park. It seemed to her that she had never passed through them, never felt anything, never suffered anything. It seemed to her that she was curling up within herself, growing smaller and shrinking, like that withered leaf that hung upon the barbed wire of the fence, all ready to drop and be hurled down into the abyss of death by that light breath of wind. Then again it seemed to her that she was ripping to pieces, like that spider web that ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... house stretched a sloping patch of growing wheat, perhaps about thirty acres in extent. This was the real business of the homestead, and, in spite of the crazy fencing of barbed wire about it, it ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum









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