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More "Flail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to abuse him, taunting him with being a Christian outcast who had tried to set himself above his betters by winning the favor of a Turkish lady. The Englishman flew at him like a wildcat, dragged him off his horse and broke his skull with the club which was used instead of a flail for threshing. Then he dressed himself in the Turk's garments, hid the body under a heap of grain, filled a bag with wheat for all his provision, mounted the horse of his late master, and rode away ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... hauled at the heavy sail: "God be our help!" he only cried, As the roaring gale, like the stroke of a flail, Smote the boat on its starboard side. The Shoalsmen looked, but saw alone Dark films of rain-cloud slantwise blown, Wild rocks lit up by the lightning's glare, The strife and torment of sea ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... from their flat flag basket, or at least all but three or four favourites, he filled it with other clothes likely to be needed, and buckled it over his hatchet-head. Then the beating of his heart was like a flail inside a barn, as he stole along silently for ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... hoe! A pickaxe or a bill! A hook to reap, or a scythe to mow, A flail, or what ye will— And here's a ready hand To ply the needful tool, And skill'd enough, by lessons rough, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... stories told of many a feat. How Fairy Mab the junkets eat; She was pinch'd and pull'd she said. And he by Frier's lapthorp led; Tells how the drudging goblin sweat To earn his cream-bowl duly set, When in one night ere glimpse of morn His shadowy flail had thresh'd the corn Which ten day-labourers could not end. Then lies ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... had devoured the antelope; something beneath the water had dragged the leopard to its doom, and swish! a huge flail tore the speargrass to ribbons and sent Adams flying backward with the ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... a bed in the corner of a large apartment, whose beautiful painted ceiling and cornice, and fine chimney-piece with caryatides of white marble, ill accorded with the heaps of oats and corn, the thrashing cloth and flail, which lay on ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... down with a crash upon the two or three Frenchmen nearest me. The force of the blow made my arm tingle to the elbow, but it swept the Frenchmen down as though it had been a scythe, and caused those behind to recoil in terror. Another flail-like sweep proved equally effective, the cutlasses raised to guard the blows being as useless as so many wands, and when I followed it up with a third it proved too much for the Frenchmen, who, seeing their comrades go down before me like ninepins, gave way with a yell of dismay, retreating ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... name her cows And deck her windows with green boughs; She can wreaths and tutties[9] make, And trim with plums a bridal cake. Jack knows what brings gain or loss; And his long flail can stoutly toss: Makes the hedge which others break, And ever thinks what ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... very evil turn,' he said. 'Ye spoke stiff-necked folly to this lady. Ye shall learn, Protestants that ye are, that if I be the flail of the monks I may be a hail, a lightning, a bolt from heaven upon Lutherans that ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... Crawford saw the Newars [Picture: Flail] using a kind of flail, an implement which I have never observed in India. Three pieces of Bamboo, about eighteen inches long, were fastened together in a parallel manner, at about a finger’s breadth asunder, and then fixed to a peg, which passed through a hole in the end of ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... at that moment both Rob and Brazier fired together, and as the smoke cleared away another cloud of something seemed to be playing about on the ground, but a solid cloud, before which everything gave way, while some great flail-like object rapidly beat ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... near the village of Raveloe, and not far from the edge of a deserted stone-pit. The questionable sound of Silas's loom, so unlike the natural cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine, or the simpler rhythm of the flail, had a half-fearful fascination for the Raveloe boys, who would often leave off their nutting or birds'-nesting to peep in at the window of the stone cottage, counterbalancing a certain awe at the mysterious action of the loom, by a pleasant sense ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... cried, as his breath came and went in gusts,—"there I sat, a poor barrow-back't creature, and heard that old savvorless loon spit his spite at my lass. I'm none of a brave man, Ralph: no, I must be a coward, but I went nigh to snatching up yon flail of his and striking him—aye, killing him!—but no, it must ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... mercy. At last physical memories began to emerge, rather ridiculously, theatrical lodgings, provincial theatres, the arcades at Birmingham. And a blue straw hat that he had bought for her long ago; and at last her name. Kitty Messenger, and her mother, a golden-haired actress with a tongue like a flail in one temper, like the honey-seeking proboscis of ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... bar,—so runs the ancient tale; 'T was hammered by an Antwerp smith, whose arm was like a flail; And now and then between the strokes, for fear his strength should fail, He wiped his brow and quaffed a cup of good ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... proved by his costume which in some countries he has worn for centuries; and by his tools, which are identical with those used by his earliest forefathers. His plough is unchanged; he carries the seed in his apron; mows with the historical scythe, and threshes with the time-honored flail. But we know that all this can be done by machinery. The agrarian question is only a question of machinery. America must conquer Europe, in the same way as large landed possessions absorb small ones. The peasant is consequently a type which is in course of extinction. Whenever he is artificially ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... goin' to tip over!" squalled Murray, the big blacksmith. Between the two options—to take the wheel and bring the clumsy hooker into the wind, or to rush forward and flail his bunglers away from the rigging—Cap'n Sproul shuttled insanely, rushing to and fro and bellowing furious language. The language had no effect. With axes and knives the willing crew hacked away every rope forward that seemed to be anything supporting a sail, and down came ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... his hoarded gold; and the Merchant, whom the same inexorable hand tears away from his ships and his merchandise;—the storm-tossed ship, with Death snapping the mast;—a Count, dressed in the extreme of courtly splendor, who recognizes Death in the disguise of a peasant who has flung down his flail to seize his lordship's emblazoned shield and dash it to pieces;—a Duchess, whom one skeleton drags rudely from her canopied bed, while another scrapes upon a violin;—a Peddler;—a Ploughman, of whose four-horse team Death is the driver;—Gamblers, Drunkards, and Robbers, all interrupted in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... grown so cold, That scarce a creature can be found To prance with me his statue round. The public safety, I foresee, Henceforth depends alone on me; And while this vital breath I blow, Or from above or from below, I'll sputter, swagger, curse, and rail, The Tories' terror, scourge, and flail. M. Tim, you mistake the matter quite; The Tories! you are their delight; And should you act a different part, Be grave and wise, 'twould break their heart. Why, Tim, you have a taste you know, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... said Genvil; "nor shake your sword my way. I tell thee, Amelot, were my weapon to cross with yours, never flail sent abroad more chaff than I would make splinters of your hatched and gilded toasting-iron. Look you, there are gray- bearded men here that care not to be led about on any boy's humour. For me, I stand little upon that; and I care not ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... him. One was a girl, and Harry never could bear to strike a girl; and the other was a boy, whom he could easily have beat, but he always cried out, when Mrs. Pastoureau came sailing to the rescue with arms like a flail. She only washed Harry's face the day he went away; nor ever so much as once boxed his ears. She whimpered rather when the gentleman in black came for the boy; and old Mr. Pastoureau, as he gave the child his blessing, scowled over his shoulder at the strange gentleman, and grumbled out ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Goblin swet, To earn his cream-bowl duly set, When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath thresh'd the corn, That ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... club, like Giant Despair in the Pilgrim's Progress, he knocks out their brains; and not only no individual but no corrupt system could hold out against his powerful and repeated attacks, but with the same weapon, swung round like a flail, that he levels his antagonists, he lays his friends low, and puts his own party hors de combat. This is a bad propensity., and a worse principle in political tactics, though a common one. If his blows were straightforward and steadily directed ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... knew that, so handicapped, she could never reach them, and with shaking, fumbling fingers she set herself to unfasten the straps that bound the skis. It took her a long, long time—all the longer for her fevered haste. And still that awful, flail-like sound went on and on, though all sound of voices had ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... white hickory shavings, are whittling out with keen Barlow jack-knives, implements for home use,—ox-bows and bow-pins, axe-helves, rakestales, forkstales, handles for spades and billhooks, wooden shovels, flail-staff and swingle, swingling knives, pokes and hog-yokes for unruly cattle and swine. The more ingenious, perhaps, are fashioning buckets, or powdering tubs, or weaving skepes, baskets, or snow-shoes. Some, it may be, sit astride ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... that, leaning over the parapet of the open cloister, Desiderius might have dropped a pebble sheer down to the plain below. A single path wound up the rock to the gate, so narrow and steep that one sturdy lay-brother might have held the way with a thresher's flail against a score ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... generally fallen, pull up the male plants, leaving only the females to mature. Cut the seed-plants after the first hard frost, and carry in wet, so as to avoid loss by shelling. Seed is easily separated by a common flail. After the seeds are thrashed out, they should be spread thin, and thoroughly dried, or their vegetative power will be destroyed by heat or decay. They should be spread to be kept for the next spring's planting, and not be kept in large bulk. Their vegetation is very uncertain after they ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... weather-beaten face, which left his sharp black eyes, red nose, and wide mouth alone visible. He flourished in his hand a large whip of raw hide, which ever and anon descended upon the backs of his rawboned cattle like the strokes of a flail. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... 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 To quit their boats, and fare like ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... preparation and a trial—a threshing floor where, under the "tribulation" of want, the wheat was beaten from the straw. Of this older view much still survives, and much that is ennobling. Nor is there any need to say goodby to it. Even if poverty were gone, the flail could still beat hard enough upon the grain and chaff ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... pinnacles of ice Melted in many a quaint device, And sees, above the city's din, Afar its silent Alpine kin: I track thee over carpets deep To wealth's and beauty's inmost keep; Across the sand of bar-room floors Mid the stale reek of boosing boors; Where browse the hay-field's fragrant heats, Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats; 80 I dog thee through the market's throngs To where the sea with myriad tongues Laps the green edges of the pier, And the tall ships that eastward steer, Curtsy their farewells ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the far end, with my hand on the dribbling stern-gland, there came a sudden thump and a grinding shock. The turning shaft shook and chattered before my eyes, the propeller outside caught in something, shuddered, broke clear and beat like a flail. Then the ship lifted bodily and fell, bump, bump, bump. I stood there transfixed. What could it be? I looked along the dark tunnel to where the lights of the engine-room showed in a pale glint and I could have sworn I saw ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... for his men leapt after him like hounds. But he fought his way in the lead with a clubbed rifle, and stood over Kagig's body working the weapon like a flail. That was all I saw of that encounter, for Mahmoud decided to attempt escape by the upper way again, and it was I who captured him. I landed on him through the darkness with my clenched fist under the low hung angle of his jaw and, seizing his leg, threw him out ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... oppression belated and vain? Put up the old weapon, O despot, slack hand from the scourge and the chain; For the days of the PHARAOHS are done, and the laureates of tyranny mute, And the whistle of falchion and flail are not set to the chords of the lute. True, the Hebrew, who bowed to the lash of the Pyramid-builders, bows still, For a time, to the knout of the TSAR, to the Muscovite's merciless will; But four millions of Israel's children are not to be crushed in the path Of a TSAR, like the Hittites of old, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... rocks when they, like ourselves, heard the sound of thrashing in a barn, which started an argument between them on their relative abilities in the handling of the flail. As they could not settle the matter by words, they resolved to do so by blows; so they made their way to the farm and requested the farmer to allow them to try their hand at thrashing corn, and to judge which ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... racquet sports, the racquet should do the work. The ball willingly goes where the racquet head directs it. Do not flail or attempt to push your shots. Hit them crisply with the snap of your cocked wrist, and at all times ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... window and raised big hands toward the spear-points of the aloof stars. "Master of us all!" he cried; "O Father of us all! the Hammer of the Scots am I! the Scourge of France, the conqueror of Llewellyn and of Leicester, and the flail of the accursed race that slew Thine only Son! the King of England am I, who have made of England an imperial nation, and have given to Thy Englishmen new laws! And to-night I crave my hire. Never, O my Father, have I ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... labor is commonly assigned to men and women,—such as digging ditches in the rice marshes, clearing up land, chopping cord-wood, threshing, &c. I have known the women go into the barn as soon as they could see in the morning, and work as late as they could see at night, threshing rice with the flail, (they now have a threshing machine,) and when they could see to thresh no longer, they had to gather up the rice, carry it up stairs, and deposit it in ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... doubt my sympathy. All my heart is with you. But what can be done? Can a poor village, a poor commune, struggle with any chance of success against a rich company and a government? Can a stalk of wheat resist the sickle? Can an ear of wheat resist the threshing-flail? I have told you the story of Don Quixote della Mancha. Would you fight the empty air ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... differed somewhat in its appliances, but the philosophy of it was pretty much the same as it is now. Oxen were occasionally used for team labour and were shod like horses; wheat was universally reaped with a sickle, and as universally threshed with a flail, the bent figure of the wheat-barn tasker being a familiar object in the "big old barn with its gloomy bays and the moss upon the thatch." An honest pride he took in his work and has found a fit memorial in the delightful Sketches of Rural Life by Mr. Francis Lucas, of Hitchin, who says ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... by the following terms: No. 1 spring, a corner, a disk harrow, a cradle, a flail, a separator, futures, ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... "dews" fall from clouds; but light mist may do so. Who is the mother of the buds? In what way are they "rocked to rest"? How does the mother "dance about the sun"? Do you like the sound of the line, "I wield the flail of the lashing hail"? There are five "l's" in the line and they give it that liquid sound which you like. Did you ever see a farmer standing in the midst of a floor covered with stalks of grain, beating out the kernels with a flail? What does ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... flail and set to work. And he threshed so hard that all the grain was beaten to powder and the straw was broken up into useless pieces. But when Untamo saw this, he grew very angry, and cried out that Kullervo was a wretched ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... Baksh Punjabi Jat found a hide-bound flail; Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer oiled his Tonk jezail; Yar Mahommed Yusufzai spat and grinned with glee As he ground the butcher-knife ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... each drop striking through my jersey to my warm skin; and the accumulation of small shocks put me nearly beside myself. I decided I should buy a mackintosh at Noyon. It is nothing to get wet; but the misery of these individual pricks of cold all over my body at the same instant of time made me flail the water with my paddle like a madman. The Cigarette was greatly amused by these ebullitions. It gave him something else to look at besides ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... din, Afar its silent Alpine kin: I track thee over carpets deep To wealth's and beauty's inmost keep; Across the sand of bar-room floors Mid the stale reek of boosing boors; Where browse the hay-field's fragrant heats, Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats; 80 I dog thee through the market's throngs To where the sea with myriad tongues Laps the green edges of the pier, And the tall ships that eastward steer, Curtsy their farewells to the town, O'er the curved distance lessening down: I follow allwhere ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Sugyn the son of Sugnedydd (who would suck up the sea on which were three hundred ships so as to leave nothing but a dry strand. He was broad-chested). Rhacymwri, the attendant of Arthur (whatever barn he was shown, were there the produce of thirty ploughs within it, he would strike it with an iron flail until the rafters, the beams, and the boards were no better than the small oats in the mow upon the floor of the barn). Dygyflwng and Anoeth Veidawg. And Hir Eiddyl, and Hir Amreu (they were two attendants of ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... the flail of the monks,' he said abstractedly. 'They would have burned me and thousands more but ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... prepared by smoothing, and, if needful, stamping a sufficient space of ground, and enclosing it in boards 14 inches wide, set on edge. Into this bed the partially dried peat is thrown, and, as it cracks on the surface by drying, it is compressed by blows with a heavy mallet or flail, or by treading it with flat boards, attached to the feet, somewhat like snow shoes. By this treatment the mass is reduced to a continuous sheet of less than one-half its first thickness, and becomes so firm, that a man's step gives little ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... John. Devout was my intent; I haunted meetings, Used zealous greetings, Crept full of devotion; Smectymnuus won me first, then holy Nye prevail, (111) Then Captain Kiffin (112) slops me with John of Leyden's tail, Then Fox and Naylor bangs me with Jacob Beamond's flail. (113) ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... excellently devout and worthy woman!—for scarcely were we out of the village, when so fearful a storm of thunder, lightning, wind, and hail burst over our heads, that the corn all around us was beaten down as with a flail, and the horses before the coach were quite maddened; however, it did not last long. But my poor child had to bear all the blame again, [Footnote: Such sudden storms were attributed to witches.] inasmuch as Dom. Consul thought that it was not old Lizzie, which, nevertheless, was as ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They went through the world, like Sir Artegal's iron man Talus with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, nor to be withstood by ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... physical memories began to emerge, rather ridiculously, theatrical lodgings, provincial theatres, the arcades at Birmingham. And a blue straw hat that he had bought for her long ago; and at last her name. Kitty Messenger, and her mother, a golden-haired actress with a tongue like a flail in one temper, like the honey-seeking proboscis ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... Blaize, transported with rage. "If I am only a porter, while you pretend to be a major, I will let you see I am the better man of the two." And taking the goose by the neck, he swung it round his head like a flail, and began to batter Pillichody ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... spoke he swung his cutlass and made an arc of blue flame. The weapon became in his hands a flail, terrible to look upon, making lightnings and whistling in the air, but in reality not so deadly as it seemed. The fury of his onslaught would have beaten down the guard of any mere swordsman, but that I was not. A man, knowing his weakness and insufficiency in many and many a thing, may ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... awkward muse, With censures praise, with flatteries abuse. To lash, and not be felt, in thee's an art; Thou ne'er mad'st any but thy schoolboys smart. Then be advis'd, and scribble not agen; Thou'rt fashioned for a flail, and not a pen. If B——l's immortal wit thou wouldst descry, Pretend 'tis he that writ thy poetry. Thy feeble satire ne'er can do him wrong; Thy poems and thy patients live ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... through the leaves of Plug Street Wood at No Man's Land between the lines, where every creature had been killed by the sweeping flail of machine-guns and shrapnel. Along the harvest-fields there were many barren territories like that, and up by Hooge, along the edge of the fatal crater, and behind the stripped trees of Zouave Wood there was no other gleaning to be had but that of broken shells and shrapnel ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... Chronicle, writing on women farmers, quotes the tribute of HUTTON, the historian, to a Derbyshire lady who died at Matlock in 1854: "She undertakes any kind of manual labour, as holding the plough, driving the team, thatching the barn, using the flail; but her chief avocation is breaking horses at a guinea per week. She is fond of Pope and Shakespeare, is a self-taught and capable instrumentalist, and supports the bass viol in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... by name her cows, And deck her windows with green boughs; She can wreaths and tuttyes make, And trim with plums a bridal cake. Jack knows what brings gain or loss; And his long flail can stoutly toss: Makes the hedge which others break; And ever thinks what ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... later MacLure came out from Annie's room and laid hold of Tammas, a heap of speechless misery by the kitchen fire, and carried him off to the barn, and spread some corn on the threshing floor and thrust a flail into his hands. ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... tranquil spell lay fond Joe and Bob (with their cash to spend), Widow Precious (with her beer laid in), and Widow Carroway, with a dole at last extorted from the government; while Anerley Farm was content to hearken the creak of wagon and the ring of flail, and the rector of Flamborough once more rejoiced in the bloodless ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... himself is treated in this way in South America. The Sulphur Tyrant-bird picks up a young snake by the tail, and, flying to a branch or stone, uses it like a flail until ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... Egan O'Rahilly. Edited, with translation, by the Rev. P.S. Dinneen, M.A., for the Irish Texts Society, p. 11. O'Rahilly's charge against Cromwell is that he "gave plenty to the man with the flail," but beggared the great ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... became a far-reaching club. And, swinging it like a fiercely driven flail, he rushed into the crowd of savages, scattering them like chaff in a gale. The smashing blows fell on heads that split under their superlative force, and the ground about him became like a shambles. In a moment he discovered another figure in the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... as thick as harvests beneath hail, Grass before scythes, or corn below the sickle, Proving that trite old truth, that Life's as frail As any other boon for which men stickle. The Turkish batteries thrashed them like a flail, Or a good boxer, into a sad pickle Putting the very bravest, who were knocked Upon the head ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... in the open air, upon a broad rock, or a smooth, dry plat of greensward; and it is occasionally done there yet, especially the threshing of the buckwheat crop, by a farmer who has not a good barn floor, or who cannot afford to hire the machine. The flail makes a louder thud in the fields than you would imagine; and in the splendid October weather it is a pleasing spectacle to behold the gathering of the ruddy crop, and three or four lithe figures beating out the grain with their flails in some sheltered ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... isle, o'er its billows of green, To the billows of foam-crested blue, Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen, Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue: Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray As the chaff in the stroke of the flail; Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way, The sun gleaming bright ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... should begin when three fourths of the leaves have fallen and most of the pods are ripe. Do not wait, however, until the pods are so dry that they have begun to split and drop their seeds. A slight amount of dampness on the plants aids the cutting. The threshing may be done with a flail, with pea-hullers, or with a ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... and surely and inexorably towards them. The angle of the bank was not steep and the elephant's speed never slackened on the slope. Its right shoulder struck a sapling and the sapling splintered. It was crashing forward in full charge. Again it trumpeted, trunk extended like a flail ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... of wheat and oats, rye and barley, were gathered with a sickle; the grain was thrashed with a flail; the grass in the meadows was cut with a scythe. But, now, all this is changed; on the great prairies of the West, the wheat, rye and oats are cut by the reaper, and with a steady hum the thrashing-machine does its work ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... into the river with me three times! 'Twas hardly I got her down the quays; and the first o' thim alecthric thrams she seen! Look at me hands, sir! She had me swingin' on the rope the way ye'd swing a flail. I tell you, Masther Freddy, ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... men, their drovers, and they drew nigh him as he was amidst of the sheep, so that he could scarce see the way. Each of these three had a weapon; one a pole-axe, another a long spear, and the third a flail jointed and bound with iron, and an anlace hanging at his girdle. So they stood in the way and hailed him when the sheep were gone past; and the man with the spear asked him whither away. "I am turned toward Higham-on-the-Way," quoth he; "and how many miles ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... two furious wings, Each one upon each shoulder; With a sting in his tail as long as a flail, Which made him bolder and bolder. He had long claws, and in his jaws Four and forty teeth of iron; With a hide as tough as any buff, ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... a suit of armor through and through, and at a hundred steps he will not miss a dove. Czechowie (Bohemians) cut dreadfully with axes. For the big two-handed sword the German is the best. The Swiss is glad to strike the helmets with an iron flail, but the greatest knights are those who come from France. These will fight on horseback and on foot, and in the meanwhile they will speak very brave words, which however you will not understand, because it is such a strange language. They are pious people. They criticise us through the Germans. ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... moment his head rose above the level of the steep black wall his ears were filled with a deafening roaring and rushing, supplemented by most tremendous dull thuddings which shook the stack like the blows of a mighty flail. ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... a boy on the farm, we used to thrash our grain with the hand-flail. Our custom was to thrash a flooring of sheaves on one side, then turn the sheaves over and thrash them on the other, then unbind them and thrash the loosened straw again, and then finish by turning the whole over and thrashing it once more. I suspect my reader will ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... gallant matron who pursued the most obnoxious farmer in the district even to his very porch with heavy stones and opprobrious epithets. Once when he thought he had left her far behind did he alight to draw breath and take a pinch of snuff, and she was upon him like a flail. With a terror stricken cry he leaped once more upon his horse and fled, but not without leaving his snuff-box in the hands of the derisive enemy. Meggy has long gone to the kirk-yard, but ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... harrying sound Lashes them like a flail the long hours round, Till to strained nerves 'twere sweeter To silence it with one fierce passionate grip, Than into some bland Lotos Land to slip, And moon out life ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... and meadows wide, Where moves the richly-laden wain To barns well-stored with new-made hay, Or where the flail at early day Rolls out ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... last day of the trial, was ushered in by a tempest of wind and rain, that drove the blinding sheets of sleet against the court-house windows with the insistence of an icy flail; while now and then with spasmodic bursts of fury the gale heightened, rattled the sash, moaned hysterically, like invisible fiends tearing at the obstacles that barred entrance. So dense was the gloom pervading the court-room, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the Lad, "lie still and don't grin, like a good bairn." But the little Imp of out of bed, and said, "Go east, Donald, and when ye come to the big brae (or brow of the hill), rap three times, and when they come, say ye are seeking Johnnie's flail." Donald did so, and out came a little fairy man, and gave him a flail. Then Johnnie took the flail, thrashed away at the straw, finished it, sent the flail back, and went to bed again. When the parents came back, Donald told them all ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... to talk of the work on the farm. The threshing was mostly done in winter with the hickory flail, one shock of fifteen sheaves making a flooring. On the dry cold days the grain shelled easily. After a flooring had been thrashed over at least three times, the straw was bound up again in sheaves, the floor completely raked over and the grain banked up against the side of ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... cuff &c 972; squash, dowse, swap, whap^, punch, thump, pelt, kick, punce^, calcitration^; ruade^; arietation^; cut, thrust, lunge, yerk^; carom, carrom^, clip [Slang], jab, plug [Slang], sidewinder [U.S.], sidewipe^, sideswipe [U.S.]. hammer, sledge hammer, mall, maul, mallet, flail; ram, rammer^; battering ram, monkey, pile-driving engine, punch, bat; cant hook; cudgel &c (weapon) 727; ax &c (sharp) 253. [Science of mechanical forces] dynamics; seismometer, accelerometer, earthquake detector. V. give an impetus &c n.; impel, push; start, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... While the real pioneer uses whatever material he finds at hand, it does no harm for him to know that to make a really good thatch one should use only straw which is fully ripe and has been thrashed clean with an old-fashioned flail. The straw must be clear of all seed or grain and kept straight, not mussed up, crumpled, and broken. If any grain is left in the straw it will attract field-mice, birds, domestic mice and rats, domestic turkeys and chickens, and these ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... pain and bellowing: Uxmoor dragged by the tail and compelled to follow in preposterous, giant strides, barely touching the ground with the point of his toe, pounded the creature's ribs with such blows as Zoe had never dreamed possible. They sounded like flail on wooden floor, and each blow was accompanied with a loud jubilant shout. Presently, being a five's player, and ambidexter, he shifted his hand, and the tremendous whacks resounded on the bull's left side. The bull, thus belabored, and resounding like the big drum, made ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Christmas comes but once a year, But when it comes it brings good cheer, And when it's gone it's no longer near. May luck attend the milking-pail, Yule logs and cakes in plenty be, May each blow of the thrashing-flail Produce good frumenty. And let the Wassail Cup abound, Whene'er ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... outrolled of bells, so sent he forth Defiance from fierce lip, vindictive chaunt, And blight and ban, and maledictive rite Potent on face of Spirits impure to raise These plague-spots three, Defeat, Madness, Despair; Nor stinted flail of taunt—"When first my bark Threatened your coasts, as now upon the hills Hung ye in cloud; as now, I raised this Cross; Ye fled before it and again shall fly!" So hurled he back their squadrons. Day ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... of whose tall elms We may discern the thresher at his task, Thump after thump resounds the constant flail That seems to swing uncertain, and yet falls Full on the destined ear. Wide flies the chaff, The rustling straw sends up a fragrant mist Of atoms, sparkling ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... undaunted now, feeling her power and her strength again, followed close. And like blows of a flail, the sputtering, flaring flame beat down upon ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... realized, the king adopted, in addition to the simple costume of the old chiefs, the long or short petticoat, the jackal's tail, the turned-up sandals, and the insignia of the supreme gods,—the ankh, the crook, the flail, and the sceptre tipped with the head of a jerboa or a hare, which we misname the cucupha-headed sceptre.* He put on the many-coloured diadems of the gods, the head-dresses covered with feathers, the white and the red crowns either separately or combined so as ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... favourite on the farm, where he played the part of the old jester, and made up for his practical deficiencies by his success in repartee. His hits, I imagine, were those of the flail, which falls quite at random, but nevertheless smashes an insect now and then. They were much quoted at sheep-shearing and haymaking times, but I refrain from recording them here, lest Tom's wit should prove to be like that ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... within a shrine through whose open doors he might be seen wearing a red necklace over his close-fitting case of white bandaging, his green face surmounted by the tall white diadem flanked by two plumes, his slender hands grasping flail and crook, the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the struggle of feeling to which this honest young fellow fell a prey when we read the letter that he now indited, in which every stroke of the flail which scourged his conscience will be found ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... some of this corn with a flail. I heard of it with astonishment. "A flail?" "Yes," he said; "my old dad put me to it when I was seventeen, so I had to learn." He seemed to think little of it. But to me threshing by hand was so obsolete and antiquated a thing as to be a novelty; nor yet to ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... systems. One is the hammermill—a grinding chamber containing a rotating spindle with steel tines or hammers attached that repeatedly beats and tears materials into smaller and smaller pieces until they fall out through a bottom screen. Hammermills will flail almost anything to pieces without becoming dulled. Soft, green materials are beaten to shreds; hard, dry, brittle stuff is rapidly fractured into tiny chips. Changing the size of the discharge screen adjusts the size of the final product. By using very ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... and while I stood in the dark gloom at the far end, with my hand on the dribbling stern-gland, there came a sudden thump and a grinding shock. The turning shaft shook and chattered before my eyes, the propeller outside caught in something, shuddered, broke clear and beat like a flail. Then the ship lifted bodily and fell, bump, bump, bump. I stood there transfixed. What could it be? I looked along the dark tunnel to where the lights of the engine-room showed in a pale glint and I could have sworn I saw the whole bag of tricks move slowly ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... to the window and raised big hands toward the spear-points of the aloof stars. "Master of us all!" he cried; "O Father of us all! the Hammer of the Scots am I! the Scourge of France, the conqueror of Llewellyn and of Leicester, and the flail of the accursed race that slew Thine only Son! the King of England am I, who have made of England an imperial nation, and have given to Thy Englishmen new laws! And to-night I crave my hire. Never, O my Father, have ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... field of Mars, which Tarquin had owned, was devoted to the service of that god; it happening to be harvest season, and the sheaves yet being on the ground, they thought it not proper to commit them to the flail, or unsanctify them with any use; and, therefore, carrying them to the river side, and trees withal that were cut down, they cast all into the water, dedicating the soil, free from all occupation, to the deity. Now, these thrown in, one upon another, and closing together, the stream did not ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... yo'd be mad as soin as yo heard, Abaat that oud kaa at belonged to Blue Beard, For I like as I saw yo just hod of its tail, And braying it rump wi th' end o' yor flail; For I wisht monny a time at yo'd been here, For swallowing th' plan yo'd a ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... how the drudging Goblin swet, To earn his cream-bowl duly set, When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath thresh'd the corn, That ten ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... the man went sheer raving mad from the emotions of his forefathers and from his own. He came to close quarters. He gripped the stick with his two hands and made it speed like a flail. The snake, tumbling in the anguish of final despair, fought, bit, flung itself upon this stick ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... at its last gasp when we left the schooner. It soon rolled over on its side. The mysterious flail stopped beating the huge body and the water seemed churned excitedly at the nose ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... of strength and endurance. The work in which he most delighted was precisely that which most labourers hated, before threshing machines came in despite the action of the "mobs"—threshing out corn with the flail. From earliest dawn till after dark he would sit or stand in a dim, dusty barn, monotonously pounding away, without an interval to rest, and without dinner, and with no food but a piece of bread and a pinch of salt. Without the salt he would ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... prance with me his statue round. The public safety, I foresee, Henceforth depends alone on me; And while this vital breath I blow, Or from above or from below, I'll sputter, swagger, curse, and rail, The Tories' terror, scourge, and flail. M. Tim, you mistake the matter quite; The Tories! you are their delight; And should you act a different part, Be grave and wise, 'twould break their heart. Why, Tim, you have a taste you know, And often see a puppet-show: Observe the audience is in pain, While Punch is hid behind the scene: ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... the distant hills, that seemed to blanch in their helplessness as the wind smote them like a flail; and it wove a grayish veil over the leafless boughs of bending, shivering elms, on the long, dim avenue. The wintry afternoon closed swiftly, and, in its dusky dreariness, Salome listened to the tattoo of the rain on the roof, and to the miserere that wailed through the lonely chambers ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... behind, Have each a med'cine for the rustic mind; Nor has he care to whom his wealth shall go, Or who shall labour with his spade and hoe; But as he lends the strength that yet remains, And some dead neighbour on his bier sustains, (One with whom oft he whirl'd the bounding flail, Toss'd the broad coit, or took the inspiring ale,) "For me," (he meditates,) "shall soon be done This friendly duty, when my race be run; 'Twas first in trouble as in error pass'd, Dark clouds and stormy cares whole years o'ercast, But calm my ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... liberty, for you do more harm in an hour, than a body can set right again in a month!' Will then took up hats full of the corn and chaff, and threw it in the two men's faces; afterwards taking up a flail, he gave Simon a blow across his back, saying, at the same time, 'I will show you the way to thresh, and separate the flesh from the bones.' 'O! will you so, young squire?' said John; 'I will show you the way to make naughty boys good.' He then left the barn, but presently returned accompanied ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... of rapier, poniard, and pistols, which were placed nevertheless, at no great distance from his chair. One offensive implement, indeed, he thought it prudent to keep on the table beside his huge Coke upon Lyttleton. This was a sort of pocket flail, consisting of a piece of strong ash, about eighteen inches long, to which was attached a swinging club of lignum-vitae, nearly twice as long as the handle, but jointed so as to be easily folded up. This instrument, which bore at that time the singular name of the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... siege. The trainbands were under arms all night. Preparations were made for barricading the great thoroughfares. Patrols marched up and down the streets. Cannon were planted round Whitehall. No citizen thought himself safe unless he carried under his coat a small flail loaded with lead to brain the Popish assassins. The corpse of the murdered magistrate was exhibited during several days to the gaze of great multitudes, and was then committed to the grave with strange and terrible ceremonies, which indicated rather fear and the thirst of vengeance shall ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the trumpeters playing alluringly up the lanes to young hearts to come away; pipers squeezed out upon their instruments the fine tunes that in the time I speak of no lad of Gaelic blood could hear but he must down with the flail or sheep-hook and on with the philabeg and up with the sword. Gentlemen were for ever going to wars or coming from them; were they not of the clan, was not the Duke their cousin, as the way of putting it was, and by his gracious offices many a pock-pudding English corps got a colonel with ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... out from Annie's room and laid hold of Tammas, a heap of speechless misery by the kitchen fire, and carried him off to the barn, and spread some corn on the threshing-floor, and thrust a flail into ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... weighed upon her now was certain, for the thoughts that possessed her seemed bowing her person forward. She stooped heavily toward the fire, with her long, flail-like arms clasped around her knees, not rocking back and forth as seemed most natural to the position, but immovable as the andiron upon which her feet rested, and sombre as the storm that shook the windows and howled down ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... charged, Gharib met him like a hungry lion, and the brigand aimed a blow at his head with his mace; but he evaded it and it smote the earth and sank therein half a cubit deep. Then Gharib took his battle flail and smiting Jamrkan on the wrist, crushed his fingers and the mace dropped from his grasp; whereupon Gharib bent down from his seat in selle and snatching it up, swiftlier than the blinding leven, smote him therewith full on the flat of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... a time. Cadillac scowled and beat his palm upon his knee as a flail beats grain, and I knew he needed no words of mine. I thought that he was going over his defenses in his mind, and I began to calculate how many rounds of shot I had in my canoes, and to hope that ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... East to Wast, An' the rein catched the grey mear's tail, An' her heels to save her hin'er en' Gaed lashin' like a flail. An' the haill apotheck lay in spails, As the grey mear warsled free; An' when auld Jock Smairt saw the fashion o' his cairt: "Wha's seekin' ony ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... ploughed up my little fields; and, after making a harrow, I harrowed in my wheat with the dogs. The first year I had thirty bushels of beautiful wheat. This I cut with a sickle, and then thrashed it with a flail. Mrs Young sewed several sheets together, and one day, when there was a steady, gentle breeze blowing, we winnowed the chaff from the wheat in the wind. There were no mills within hundreds of miles of us; so we merely cracked the wheat in a hand coffee-mill, and used some of it for porridge, ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... spend with friend and foe, At home che hold the plough by th' tail: Che dig, che delve, che zet, che zow, Che mow, che reap, che ply my flail. A pair of dice is thy delight, Thou liv'st for most part by the spoil: I truly labour day and night To get my living by my toil. Chill therefore sure this issue make: The best deserver draw ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... the farmers were in dismay,—nobody more so than Farmer Weitbreck, who had miles of bottom-lands, in grain of one sort and another, all yellow and nodding, and ready for the sickle, and nobody but himself and his son John to swing scythe, sickle, or flail on the place. ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... literally, "the bean will be struck" or "laid about me;" meaning, "I shall have to smart for it." There is considerable doubt what is the origin of this expression, and this doubt existed as early as the time of Donatus. He says that it was a proverb either taken from the threshing of beans with a flail by the countrymen; or else from the circumstance of the cooks who have dressed the beans, but have not moistened them sufficiently, being sure to have them thrown at their heads, as though for the purpose of softening them. Neither of these solutions seems so probable as that suggested by Madame ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... these plays to flail the follies of his time, he makes his chief characters, in spite of his realistic purpose, extreme and distorted 'humors,' each, in spite of individual traits, the embodiment of some one abstract vice—cowardice, sensualism, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Western Empire in 1198. The kingdom was at its zenith under Hetum or Hayton I., husband of Leon's daughter Isabel (1224-1269); he was, however, prudent enough to make an early submission to the Mongols, and remained ever staunch to them, which brought his territory constantly under the flail of Egypt. It included at one time all Cilicia, with many cities of Syria and the ancient Armenia Minor, of Isauria and Cappadocia. The male line of Rupen becoming extinct in 1342, the kingdom passed to John de Lusignan, of the royal house of Cyprus, and in 1375 it was put an ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... and other vegetables. As soon as their crops were put away in the ground, [Footnote: The mode of securing their corn was first to dry the ears by fire. When perfectly dry, they would then beat them with a flail and pick all the cobs out. The grain was then winnowed and put into sacks. These were put in the ground in a large cylinder made out of elm bark, set in deep in the ground and made very dry, filling this cylinder ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... Afric soil, Ye worn and weary, hoist the sail, For your own glebes and garners toil With easy plough and lightsome flail. A father's home ye never knew, A father's home your sons shall have from you. Enjoy your palmy groves, your cloudless day, Your world that demons tore away. Look up! look up! the flaming sword Hath vanished! and behold your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... rotating his crops and of fertilizing his fields. The farming implements in use showed little of that mechanical ingenuity which is now characteristic of the American people. The plough was still a clumsy affair with heavy beam and handles, and wooden mould-board. The scythe, the sickle, and the flail were the same as their forbears ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... Amaryllis, or played with the tangles of Neaera's hair,—should not have worn well-anointed love-locks and snowy linen,—should, on the other hand, have bared his brawny arm, and sent the hissing flail down swiftly upon the waled and blistered back of Sham! How much better would it have been, if he had written a history, in twelve elephantine volumes, of the rise, culmination, and decay of the Empire of Barataria, which we would have gone to prison, the rack, and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under; And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... see me. She first took me to the farmyard, and I peeped into the barn. There I saw a man thrashing, and as he beat the corn with his flail he made a great noise. Then I went to the pond where the ducks were swimming, and I saw the little wooden houses where the hens slept at night. The hens were feeding all over the yard, and the prettiest little chickens ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... relief as the fact, that the immeasurable torrent of abuse that greeted his expressed opinion did not in any least degree avail to make him one of the pro-slavery faction. The concession of 1850 was one which he would not have made, and it must be the last. Welcome to him the iron flail of war, whose tribulation saved the immortal wheat of justice and purged away the chaff of wrong ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... over, except to die. I had no sense of fear; no thought but to kill and be killed. I felt within me strength—desperate, insane strength. The rifle butt splintered in my hands, but the bent and shapeless barrel rose and fell like a flail. I saw it crush against skulls; I jabbed it straight into red faces; I brought it down with all my force on clutching arms. For an instant Tim was beside me. He had lost his gun and was fighting with a knife. It was only a glimpse I had of him through red mist—the next instant he ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... his acquiring, including nearly all the divine attributes except that sense of humour. The beautiful SYBIL has always possessed but little of it also, and what she had has been struck from her by Cupid's flail. Naked of the saving grace, they face ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... as I could do. I am sure strength must have been granted me for the task. For a long while, or what seemed to me a long while, nobody heard. Seth was making a great noise with his flail, and if my shout reached his ears he only thought it child's play; but when it kept on and on, so shrill and so full of distress, he dropped his flail at last ...
— Aunt Madge's Story • Sophie May
... had come to understand was the cause of all his misery. There would come into his great eyes a look of such pitiful melancholy that one might almost fancy tears rolling out. Then he would be roused by an exasperated driver, who jerked cruelly on the lines and used his whip as if it had been a flail. ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... not go alone, for his men leapt after him like hounds. But he fought his way in the lead with a clubbed rifle, and stood over Kagig's body working the weapon like a flail. That was all I saw of that encounter, for Mahmoud decided to attempt escape by the upper way again, and it was I who captured him. I landed on him through the darkness with my clenched fist under the low hung angle of his jaw and, seizing his leg, threw ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... has generally fallen, pull up the male plants, leaving only the females to mature. Cut the seed-plants after the first hard frost, and carry in wet, so as to avoid loss by shelling. Seed is easily separated by a common flail. After the seeds are thrashed out, they should be spread thin, and thoroughly dried, or their vegetative power will be destroyed by heat or decay. They should be spread to be kept for the next spring's planting, and not be kept in large bulk. Their vegetation ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... was in town but a few months before. I was quite ashamed of my bad memory. My sister Sarah shewed me all the beautiful places about grandmamma's house. She first took me into the farm-yard, and I peeped into the barn; there I saw a man thrashing, and as he beat the corn with his flail, he made such a dreadful noise that I was frightened and ran away: my sister persuaded me to return; she said Will Tasker was very good-natured: then I went back, and peeped at him again; but as ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... farmer class, I hasten to disclaim for it any especial consideration given it because of its contribution to the welfare of mankind. We are as useful as any other hard-working people, no more and no less. We claim no higher appreciation for muscular effort exerted in swinging the flail than for that applied to the ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... in the full of the moon carpenters refuse, as being soft, and, by reason of their moistness, subject to corruption; and in its wane farmers usually thresh their wheat, that being dry it may better endure the flail; for the corn in the full of the moon is moist, and commonly bruised in threshing. Besides, they say dough will be leavened sooner in the full, for then, though the leaven is scarce proportioned to the meal, yet it rarefies and leavens ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... kindle them to glory, I will beat the darkness back; Streaming, gleaming, I will goad them to my glory and my fame. Bring me gnarly limbs of live-oak, aid me in my frenzied fight; Strips of iron-wood, scaly blue-gum, writhing redly in my hold; With my lunge of lurid lances, with my whips that flail the night, They will burgeon into beauty, they will foliate in gold. Let me star the dim sierras, stab with light the inland seas; Roaming wind and roaring darkness! seek no mercy at my hands; I will mock the marly heavens, lamp ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... field of buckwheat that had been cut some days and had fully ripened. A woman was threshing out the grain with a flail upon a spread canvas, surrounded by a circle of purple-tinted cones, the sheaves leaning together. Now the wide level moor returned, but Nature was not quite the same here as she had been before. The vast expanse was dotted over with dark little juniper bushes. These were ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... and myself into the fray, however, turned the tide of battle in our favor. Joe had caught up the chair to which he had been bound, and wielded it like a flail, with every swing of it breaking a head or snapping an arm. And my musket took a heavy toll. The room rang with the din of battle—the shouts of the men, the whoops of the negroes, the clashing of ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... in a flash. Like lightning his right wing came round with a terrific flail-stroke, and hit Pig Head in the face at the precise instant that the surgical instrument he carried as his beak sank deep into one of Pig Head's calves. The Chieftain was upside-down at the moment, and his legs were tied together, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... category, as proved by his costume which in some countries he has worn for centuries; and by his tools, which are identical with those used by his earliest forefathers. His plough is unchanged; he carries the seed in his apron; mows with the historical scythe, and threshes with the time-honored flail. But we know that all this can be done by machinery. The agrarian question is only a question of machinery. America must conquer Europe, in the same way as large landed possessions absorb small ones. The peasant is consequently a type which is in course of extinction. ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... deep-seated in biology because it secures most joy of life with least expense. By it Eros of old ordered chaos, and by its judicious use the human soul is cadenced to great efforts toward high ideals. The many work-songs to secure concerted action in lifting, pulling, stepping, the use of flail, lever, saw, ax, hammer, hoe, loom, etc., show that areas and thesis represent flexion and extension, that accent originated in the acme of muscular stress, as well as how rhythm eases work and also makes it social. Most of the old work-canticles are lost, and ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... purpose, and the women to be assigned their tasks, and the totals of everything to be calculated, so that one may see the value of what has been done. And lastly will come winter, when in every threshing-floor the flail will be working, and the grain, when threshed, will need to be carried from barn to binn, and the mills require to be seen to, and the estate factories to be inspected, and the workmen's huts to be visited for the purpose of ascertaining how the muzhik is faring ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... this corn, Colonel Crawford saw the Newars [Picture: Flail] using a kind of flail, an implement which I have never observed in India. Three pieces of Bamboo, about eighteen inches long, were fastened together in a parallel manner, at about a finger’s breadth asunder, and then fixed to a peg, which passed through a hole in the end of a longish pole ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... the rocks when they, like ourselves, heard the sound of thrashing in a barn, which started an argument between them on their relative abilities in the handling of the flail. As they could not settle the matter by words, they resolved to do so by blows; so they made their way to the farm and requested the farmer to allow them to try their hand at thrashing corn, and to judge which of them shaped the better. The farmer ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... solitude. He describes the walk to the park at Weston Underwood, the prospect from the hilltop, touches upon his privilege in having a key of the gate, describes the avenues of trees, the wilderness, the grove, and the sound of the thresher's flail then suggests to him that all live by energy, best ease is after toil. He compares the luxury of art with wholesomeness of Nature free to all, that brings health to the sick, joy to the returned ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... Stafford, ecclesiastics like Archbishop Plunkett, and commoners like Langhorne and Pickering, were dragged to death on the testimony of the vilest of the vile, without a voice being raised in their behalf; or how it could be considered a patriotic act on the part of an English Protestant to carry a flail loaded with lead beneath his cloak as a menace against his harmless neighbours who differed from him on points of doctrine. It was a long madness which has now happily passed off, or at least shows itself in a ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... know the charm of his manner and the delight of his conversation. If I had been even more prejudiced than I was, I could not have withstood that easy grace, that winning cordiality. Every one knew where he had stood during the war, and how he had wielded the flail of his "lashing hail" against the South and the Southern cause and "Southern sympathizers." But that warfare was over for him, and out of kindly regard for my feelings he made no allusion to the great quarrel, ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... the gate by a little green man with a queer cap who had been seen slipping under a culvert? Canon Atkinson told us of this lady who knew all these strange things, and of the Hart Hall "Hob" who worked so hard with his flail, and of many other curious folk who frequented the Yorkshire moors in olden days. The last witch had just died before he went to Danby, but he found the whole atmosphere of the folklore firmament so surcharged with the being and work of the witch, that he seemed ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... should not be removed far from her body. A beautiful microscopic hawk, which would have made a lovely watch-charm, was attached by a thread to a necklace of small plates of blue glass, to which was hung also a sort of amulet in the shape of a flail, made of turquoise-blue enamel. Some of the plates had become semi-opaque, no doubt owing to the heat of the boiling bitumen which had been poured over them, and ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... the water had devoured the antelope; something beneath the water had dragged the leopard to its doom, and swish! a huge flail tore the speargrass to ribbons and sent Adams flying backward with the wind of ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... think I've expressed my meaning quite plainly, (reads) "Farmer Flail, I'm instructed by lord Austencourt, your landlord, to inform you, by word of letter, that if you can't afford to pay the additional rent for your farm, you must turn out." I think that's clear enough. "As to your putting in the plea of a large family, we cannot allow ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... solid forest gives fluid utterances, They tumble forth, they rise and form, Hut, tent, landing, survey, Flail, plough, pick, crowbar, spade, Shingle, rail, prop, wainscot, lamb, lath, panel, gable, Citadel, ceiling, saloon, academy, organ, exhibition-house, library, Cornice, trellis, pilaster, balcony, window, turret, porch, Hoe, rake, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Kater Murr, Hoffmann's favorite but unfinished work. In the third and last volume, Kreisler was to end, not in composure and illumination, as the critics would have required, but in utter madness: a sketch of a wild, flail-like scarecrow, dancing vehemently and blowing soap-bubbles, and which had been intended to front the last title-page, was found among Hoffmann's papers, and engraved and published ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... which was her landmark. The path she was following ended at a sort of shed covered with a furze-roof, supported by four stout trees with the bark still on them. A mud wall formed the back of this shed, under which were a cider-mill, a flail to thresh buckwheat, and several agricultural implements. She stopped before one of the posts, unwilling to cross the dirty bog which formed a sort of courtyard to the house which, in her Parisian ignorance, she had taken ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... farm the historical Jock Howison asked and got from our gay James the Fifth, "the gudeman o' Ballengiech," as a reward for the services of his flail, when the King had the worst of it at Cramond Brig with the gypsies. The farm is unchanged in size from that time, and still in the unbroken line of the ready and victorious thrasher. Braehead is held on the condition ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... doors, which led in to the barn floor. He climbed up a tall ladder to a loft under the roof of the barn, and threw down some sheaves of wheat,—as many as he thought would be necessary to produce the quantity of grain which the farmer had ordered. He then descended the ladder, and got a flail, and began to ...
— Jonas on a Farm in Winter • Jacob Abbott
... noticed separately, but one thing is absolutely certain, that a much higher standard of usefulness, both in equality of length, amount of anchylosis, and position, is needed in the lower than in the upper limb. For a leg hanging like a flail, or shortened by some inches, is not so good for purposes of locomotion as a wooden leg is, while an arm, even though powerless at the elbow, and perhaps much shortened, can be so strengthened and supported by slings and bandages as to give a most ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... Ghost" he revelled in the delights that await the bibliomaniac in the future state, where there is no admission to the women folk who, "wanting victuals, make a fuss if we buy books instead"; while in "Flail, Trask and Bisland" is the very essence of bibliomania, the unquenchable thirst for possession. And yet, despite these self-accusations, bibliophily rather than bibliomania would be the word to characterize his conscientious purpose. ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... in 1505, when—Queen Isabella being dead—King Ferdinand discovered that Gonzalo de Cordoba was playing him false in Naples. The Spanish king conceived a plan—according to the chronicles of Zurita—to employ Cesare as a flail for the punishment of the Great Captain. He proposed to liberate the duke, set him at the head of an army, and loose him upon Naples, trusting to the formidable alliance of Cesare's military talents with his hatred of Gonzalo—who had betrayed him—to work the will of his ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... idle and lurk, For this nobleman saw him go daily to work, With his flail and his bag, and his bottle of beer, As cheerful as those ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... cows and geese, the boy was in due course promoted to the rank of team-leader, and was also set to assist his father in the threshing barn. "John," his father used to say, "was weak but willing," and the good man made his son a flail proportioned to his strength. Exposure in the ill-drained fields round Helpstone brought on an attack of tertiary ague, from which the boy had scarcely rallied when he was again sent into the fields. Favourable weather having set in, he recovered his health, and ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... the laying of the foundation stone I had the pleasure of witnessing a rough-and-tumble fight between two of the most powerful men in Coolgardie. The excitement was intense as one seized his antagonist, and, using him as a flail, proceeded to clear the room with him; he retaliated by overpowering the other man, and finally breaking his leg as they fell heavily together out through the door on to the hard street beyond. How much ill-feeling this little incident ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... sinuous, flexile gliding, resembled somewhat a serpent's crawl. And now he neither roared nor growled. The lolling tongue dragged the sand; the beating of the tail was like pounding with a flail; the mane all erect trebly enlarged the head; and the eyes were like live coals in a burning bush. The people hushed. Nilo stood firm; thunder could as easily have diverted a statue; and behind him, not less steadfast and watchful, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... militia threw away their arms, and fled panic-struck in all directions, at the first sight of their terrible foe. Two Spaniards lost their lives and two thousand Netherlanders. It was natural that these consummate warriors should despise such easily slaughtered victims. A single stroke of the iron flail, and the chaff was scattered to the four winds; a single sweep of the disciplined scythe, and countless acres were in an instant mown. Nevertheless, although beaten constantly, the Netherlanders were not conquered. Holland and Zealand had read the foe a lesson which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... toss, conveys nothing at all. It was the sort of fall you dream of—almost too good to be true. And my uniform-case, of which he never let go, described a very beautiful parabola, and then came down upon the weigh-bridge, as the swiple of an uplifted flail comes down upon grain.... ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... banner of her sway; And Monagas, with fearful clasp, Plucks down the chief that stops the way; The reckless Urdaneta rides, Where rives the earth the iron hail; Nor long the Spanish foeman bides, The stroke of old Zaraza's flail. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... lunge at me with his fist. But the sword of Gideon missed its aim, and skinned its knuckles on the stone wall. I saw now to my great comfort that the man was beside himself with fury, and was swinging his arms wildly like a flail. Three or four times I avoided his rushes, noting with satisfaction that one of the countrymen had got hold of the shrieking Isobel. Then my chance came, for as he lunged I struck from the side with all my force on his jaw. I am left-handed, and the blow was unlocked for. He staggered ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... puzzle-headedness. The young man's farmer life qualified him to be highly popular at the Holt. He was curious about English husbandry, talked to the labourers, and tried their tools with no unpractised hand, even the flail which Honor's hatred of steam still kept as the winter's employment in the barn; he appreciated the bullocks, criticized the sheep, and admired the pigs, till the farming men agreed 'there had not been such an one about the place ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the farm the historical Jock Howison asked and got from our gay James the Fifth, "the gudeman o' Ballengiech," as a reward for the services of his flail, when the King had the worst of it at Cramond Brig with the gypsies. The farm is unchanged in size from that time, and still in the unbroken line of the ready and victorious thrasher. Braehead is ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... little old roan, with a bright eye and legs like gate-posts, but he never fell down with us boys, for all that. If we fell off he stopped still and began to feed, so that he suited us all to pieces. We soon got sharp enough to flail him along with a quince stick, and we used to bring up the milkers, I expect, a good deal faster than was good for them. After a bit we could milk, leg-rope, and bail up for ourselves, and help dad brand the calves, which began to come pretty thick. There ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... his distressed fellow-creatures, including noblemen, squires, yeomanry, farmers, and all yearly subscribers in the New Proprietary Agricultural Anti-Innovating-Shire Weekly Gazette. At the head of his newspaper Uncle Jack caused to be engraved a crown, supported by a flail and a crook, with the motto, "Pro rege et grege." And that was the way in which Uncle Jack printed his pats ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the eerie side of an auld thorn, in the dreary glen through which the herd-callan maun bicker in his gloamin route frae the fauld!—Be thou a brownie, set, at dead of night, to thy task by the blazing ingle, or in the solitary barn, where the repercussions of thy iron flail half affright thyself, as thou performest the work of twenty of the sons of men, ere the cock-crowing summon thee to thy ample cog of substantial brose. Be thou a kelpie, haunting the ford or ferry, in the starless night, mixing thy laughing yell with the howling of the storm and the roaring of ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... brief work; to them one would apply the besom, try to sweep them, with some rapidity into the dust-bin, and well out of one's road, I should rather say. Fill your thrashing-floor with docks, ragweeds, mugworths, and ply your flail upon them,—that is not the method to obtain sacks of wheat. Away, you; begone swiftly, ye regiments of the line: in the name of God and of His poor struggling servants, sore put to it to live in these bad days, I mean to rid myself of you with some degree of brevity. ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... would get control of those about her if she moved. Sometimes there is a development of this symptom from others which seem to be ideational in their origin. For instance, Charles O. began making flail-like movements. These passed over into slow circular motions which finally subsided into the maintenance of ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... after me!" cried Andrew, darting through the doorway, for he felt that without more space to fight he would be easily overpowered. The dragoons, recovering, darted after him. The farmer caught up a huge flail with which he was wont to thresh out his oats. It fell on the headpiece of the first trooper, causing it to ring like an anvil, and stretching its owner on the ground. The second trooper fared no better, but the head of the flail broke into splinters on his iron cap, and left ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... ground, and enclosing it in boards 14 inches wide, set on edge. Into this bed the partially dried peat is thrown, and, as it cracks on the surface by drying, it is compressed by blows with a heavy mallet or flail, or by treading it with flat boards, attached to the feet, somewhat like snow shoes. By this treatment the mass is reduced to a continuous sheet of less than one-half its first thickness, and becomes so firm, that a man's step gives ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... saw his oaken flail Take bud, and bloom before his eyes; From frozen pools he saw the pale, Sweet ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... with a boyish smile to Fannie, who was rising to move to a lounge, "it's a mighty old——" He was going to say "debt," but before Ravenel could more than catch his breath or John start half a step forward she had struck the lounge like a flail. ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... banners, and on went Sigmund before, And his sword was the flail of the tiller on the wheat of the wheat-thrashing floor, And his shield was rent from his arm, and his helm was sheared from his head: But who may draw nigh him to smite for the heap and the rampart of dead? White went his hair on the wind like the ragged drift of the cloud, And his ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... not be removed far from her body. A beautiful microscopic hawk, which would have made a lovely watch-charm, was attached by a thread to a necklace of small plates of blue glass, to which was hung also a sort of amulet in the shape of a flail, made of turquoise-blue enamel. Some of the plates had become semi-opaque, no doubt owing to the heat of the boiling bitumen which had been poured over them, and then had ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... peer through the leaves of Plug Street Wood at No Man's Land between the lines, where every creature had been killed by the sweeping flail of machine-guns and shrapnel. Along the harvest-fields there were many barren territories like that, and up by Hooge, along the edge of the fatal crater, and behind the stripped trees of Zouave Wood there was no other gleaning ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... the parish, when bread was dear and the loaf was really life itself, then that stern inscription had meaning enough. The granaries were full, the people half starved. The wheat was threshed by the flail in full view of the wretched, who could gaze through the broad doors at the golden grain; the sparrows helped themselves, men dare not. At night men tried to steal the corn, and had to be prevented by steel traps, like rats. To-day wheat is so cheap, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... nearly half-past twelve. He had just come back from church, hoarse and weary with preaching. He preached with fury, with passion, an iron man beating with a flail upon the souls of his congregation. But the souls of the faithful at Crome were made of india-rubber, solid rubber; the flail rebounded. They were used to Mr. Bodiham at Crome. The flail thumped on india-rubber, and as often as not ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... not in love with easy dreams might have known it would be driven back—here and then here and then here. It has been fighting night and day. It has made the most splendid fight—and the most ineffectual fight.... You see the vast swing of the German flail through Belgium. And meanwhile we have been standing about talking of the use we would make of ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... him. He had expected to see the furious Fogg join the mob and aid them in finishing up their dastardly work. Instead, like some madman, Fogg had waded into the ranks of the group, swinging his formidable weapon like a flail. It rose, it fell, it swayed from side to side, and ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... said Mr. Grewgious. 'Let's talk. Mr. Bazzard's father, being a Norfolk farmer, would have furiously laid about him with a flail, a pitch-fork, and every agricultural implement available for assaulting purposes, on the slightest hint of his son's having written a play. So the son, bringing to me the father's rent (which I receive), imparted his secret, and ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... customers appeared to have discovered urgent engagements elsewhere. There was little for the Mongol to collide with except empty tables and chairs. But he did manage to swipe one of the lumpy-faced men on the side of the head with one flail of his arms. The lumpy-faced man said "Yoop!" and went staggering away into Petkoff, who spun him around and threw him away in the general direction of the bandstand. The diversion provided Malone with just enough time ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... did not know what a flail was!" said Guido. "I hit old John with the flail, and Ma gave him a shilling ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... Pickering, were dragged to death on the testimony of the vilest of the vile, without a voice being raised in their behalf; or how it could be considered a patriotic act on the part of an English Protestant to carry a flail loaded with lead beneath his cloak as a menace against his harmless neighbours who differed from him on points of doctrine. It was a long madness which has now happily passed off, or at least shows itself in a ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They went through the world, like Sir Artegal's iron man Talus with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... times, the crops of wheat and oats, rye and barley, were gathered with a sickle; the grain was thrashed with a flail; the grass in the meadows was cut with a scythe. But, now, all this is changed; on the great prairies of the West, the wheat, rye and oats are cut by the reaper, and with a steady hum the thrashing-machine does its ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... no wish to be roasted. Once more using his knife to cut down a sheaf of stems, he made a flail of these, and beat out the fire to windward. And as he worked on the one side of the little clearing the fire grew on the other side, and then raced along, leaving behind in the blackened area many separate fires, where masses ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... the men in the early morning was rather unique. A man with a stick—a heavy stick that reminded me of an Irish flail—thumped the bare floor, and, to my astonishment, there was a rush of this savage-looking, naked crowd to the door. As I knew no reason for the excitement, I ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... damsel, what strange chance has brought you to this island in so flail a ship? Who are you, and whence? Surely you are some king's daughter; and this boy has somewhat more ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... had often heard them making butter, and had seen the butter smeared all over the gate by a little green man with a queer cap who had been seen slipping under a culvert? Canon Atkinson told us of this lady who knew all these strange things, and of the Hart Hall "Hob" who worked so hard with his flail, and of many other curious folk who frequented the Yorkshire moors in olden days. The last witch had just died before he went to Danby, but he found the whole atmosphere of the folklore firmament so surcharged with the being and work of the witch, that he seemed able to trace her presence ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... that no spur can drive forward towards the pursuit of any worthy designs. One of the most unprofitable of God's creatures, being as he is a thing put clean beside the right use; made fit for the cart and the flail, and by mischance entangled amongst books and papers. A man cannot tell possibly what he is now good for, save to move up and down and fill room, or to serve as animatum instrumentum, for others to work withal in base employments, or to be foil for better wits, or to serve (as they say ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Boy," said Genvil; "nor shake your sword my way. I tell thee, Amelot, were my weapon to cross with yours, never flail sent abroad more chaff than I would make splinters of your hatched and gilded toasting-iron. Look you, there are gray- bearded men here that care not to be led about on any boy's humour. For me, I stand little upon that; and I care not whether one boy or another commands me. But I am the ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... rigorous Quartermaster: the very Ostlers have stable-forks and flails. The rigorous Quartermaster, half-saddled, cuts out his way with the sword's edge, amid levelled bayonets, amid Patriot vociferations, adjurations, flail-strokes; and rides frantic; (Declaration de La Gache in Choiseul, p. 134.)—few or even none following him; the rest, so sweetly constrained consenting ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... rather ridiculously, theatrical lodgings, provincial theatres, the arcades at Birmingham. And a blue straw hat that he had bought for her long ago; and at last her name. Kitty Messenger, and her mother, a golden-haired actress with a tongue like a flail in one temper, like the honey-seeking proboscis of a bee ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... are right glad to meet you here, Christmas comes but once a year, But when it comes it brings good cheer, And when it's gone it's no longer near. May luck attend the milking-pail, Yule logs and cakes in plenty be, May each blow of the thrashing-flail Produce good frumenty. And let the Wassail Cup abound, Whene'er the ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fell as thick as harvests beneath hail, Grass before scythes, or corn below the sickle, Proving that trite old truth, that life 's as frail As any other boon for which men stickle. The Turkish batteries thrash'd them like a flail, Or a good boxer, into a sad pickle Putting the very bravest, who were knock'd Upon the head, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... this board Burke's, Goldsmith's knees Were often thrust—so runs the tale— 'Twas here the Doctor took his ease And wielded speech that like a flail Threshed out the golden truth. All hail, Great souls! that met on nights like these Till morning made the candles pale, And revellers left the ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... my heart is with you. But what can be done? Can a poor village, a poor commune, struggle with any chance of success against a rich company and a government? Can a stalk of wheat resist the sickle? Can an ear of wheat resist the threshing-flail? I have told you the story of Don Quixote della Mancha. Would you fight the empty ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... pointed to a bed in the corner of a large apartment, whose beautiful painted ceiling and cornice, and fine chimney-piece with caryatides of white marble, ill accorded with the heaps of oats and corn, the thrashing cloth and flail, which lay ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... in a tank of steaming vapour. The oppression of the atmosphere was like a physical weight. And ever the rain beat down, rattling, incessant, upon the tin roof above her head. She thought of Nemesis again, Nemesis wielding an iron flail that never missed its mark. There was something terrible to her in this perpetual beating of rain. She had never ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... furious wings, Each one upon each shoulder; With a sting in his tail as long as a flail, Which made him bolder and bolder. He had long claws, and in his jaws Four and forty teeth of iron; With a hide as tough as any buff, ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... plan of campaign may be crudely stated as follows: Regard that extended line as a flail ready to fall, hinged near Verdun, moved in a circle until the northern tip, under command of Von Kluck, should fall with all the energy Germany could put into the blow on Paris. In the meantime, the other armies would ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... cheese. Yet when the [12] meal Was ended, Luke (for so the Son was named) And his old Father both betook themselves To such convenient work as might employ 105 Their hands by the fire-side; perhaps to card Wool for the Housewife's spindle, or repair Some injury done to sickle, flail, or scythe, Or other ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... are harvested with a sickle, and you may wake up some morning to see the field opposite your house invaded by some twenty to thirty reapers, men and women, boys and girls, patiently sawing their way through the wheat or barley, or whatever it is. The corn is threshed out with the flail, or trodden out by the oxen—all operations fair to look upon. Forms of cultivation interesting to watch are the very primitive ploughing, the hoeing of the maize, and all those connected with the culture of the vines and the orange and other fruit trees, and especially the irrigation, ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... MacLure came out from Annie's room and laid hold of Tammas, a heap of speechless misery by the kitchen fire, and carried him off to the barn, and spread some corn on the threshing floor and thrust a flail into his hands. ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... like Carlyle. While the genius of that great writer is indisputable, I submit that one Carlyle in a generation is enough; another is impossible. That rugged Titan did his appointed work with fidelity. But is every author to lay about him with an iron flail? Is there no place for playful satirists of manners, for essayists who dissolve philosophy and science, who teach truth, manliness, and courtesy by epigram, and who make life beautiful with the glow of poetry? The magnolia cannot be the oak, although ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... And sprung like mushrooms in a day! They think it mean, to condescend To know a brother or a friend; They blush to hear their mother's name, And by their pride expose their shame. As cross his yard, at early day, A careful farmer took his way, 10 He stopped, and leaning on his fork, Observed the flail's incessant work. In thought he measured all his store, His geese, his hogs, he numbered o'er; In fancy weighed the fleeces shorn, And multiplied the next year's corn. A Barley-mow, which stood beside, Thus to its musing master cried: 'Say, good sir, is it fit or right To treat me with ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... in a shroud of mist, come the measured sounds of the thresher's flail, now in sudden volleys, now slowly and with a dragging cadence, now in sharp, crackling bursts, and now again with a dull and hollow beat. Sometimes there is the noise of one flail only, but presently others have joined in on all sides. The children ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... next upon a Glow-worm light (You must suppose it now was night), Which, for her hinder part was bright, He took to be a devil, And furiously doth her assail For carrying fire in her tail; He thrasht her rough coat with his flail; The mad King feared ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... made a flail and set to work. And he threshed so hard that all the grain was beaten to powder and the straw was broken up into useless pieces. But when Untamo saw this, he grew very angry, and cried out that Kullervo was a wretched workman who spoiled whatever ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... the Scotchman's room, And eats his meat and drinks his ale, And beats the maid with her unused broom, And the lazy lout with his idle flail; But he sweeps the floor and threshes the corn, And hies him away ere ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... intent; I haunted meetings, Used zealous greetings, Crept full of devotion; Smectymnuus won me first, then holy Nye prevail, (111) Then Captain Kiffin (112) slops me with John of Leyden's tail, Then Fox and Naylor bangs me with Jacob Beamond's flail. (113) Alas! poor ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... temperatures tell. The missing yak herd. Mystery of the turning water wheel. The mill and workshop. Their home. "Baby" learning civilized ways. The noise in the night. The return of the yaks. The need for keeping correct time. Shoe leather necessary. Threshing out barley. The flail. The grindstone. Making flour. Baking bread. How the bread was raised. What yeast does in bread. Temperature required. The "Baby" and the honey pot. The bread with large holes in it. George's trip to the cliffs. A peculiar sounding noise and spray from ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... somewhat in its appliances, but the philosophy of it was pretty much the same as it is now. Oxen were occasionally used for team labour and were shod like horses; wheat was universally reaped with a sickle, and as universally threshed with a flail, the bent figure of the wheat-barn tasker being a familiar object in the "big old barn with its gloomy bays and the moss upon the thatch." An honest pride he took in his work and has found a fit memorial in the delightful Sketches of Rural Life by Mr. Francis Lucas, of Hitchin, who says of the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... him a little child lay among the broken corn that was strewn over the whole platform. Where the battlements had once frowned, now stood sheaves of smiling corn, golden and nodding in the wind and the sun. Suddenly the lad who had led me hither seized the flail and began to beat the corn and stalks strewn over the floor, while the old man, quavering a little, sang a long-drawn-out gay melody, and the little girl beat her tiny hands in time to the work and the music. ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced, Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail; And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... far end, with my hand on the dribbling stern-gland, there came a sudden thump and a grinding shock. The turning shaft shook and chattered before my eyes, the propeller outside caught in something, shuddered, broke clear and beat like a flail. Then the ship lifted bodily and fell, bump, bump, bump. I stood there transfixed. What could it be? I looked along the dark tunnel to where the lights of the engine-room showed in a pale glint and I could have sworn I saw the whole ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... The whip fell flail-like, with absolute precision and regularity. It spared no part of him. His coat was nearly torn off. In one place, on the shoulder, the white shirt was exposed, and this also ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the discovery of the plank, made the first rush up and was immediately knocked from his perch by Tod, whose pole swung around his head like a flail. Then Scootsy tried it, crawling up, protecting his head by ducking it under his elbows, holding meanwhile by his hand. Tod's blows fell about his back, but the boy struggled on until Archie reached over the gunwale, and with a twist of his wrist, using all his strength, dropped ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... on which were three hundred ships so as to leave nothing but a dry strand. He was broad-chested). Rhacymwri, the attendant of Arthur (whatever barn he was shown, were there the produce of thirty ploughs within it, he would strike it with an iron flail until the rafters, the beams, and the boards were no better than the small oats in the mow upon the floor of the barn). Dygyflwng and Anoeth Veidawg. And Hir Eiddyl, and Hir Amreu (they were two attendants of Arthur). And Gwevyl the son of Gwestad (on the day ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... sheltering a temporary house and the thatch will last as long as the shack. While the real pioneer uses whatever material he finds at hand, it does no harm for him to know that to make a really good thatch one should use only straw which is fully ripe and has been thrashed clean with an old-fashioned flail. The straw must be clear of all seed or grain and kept straight, not mussed up, crumpled, and broken. If any grain is left in the straw it will attract field-mice, birds, domestic mice and rats, domestic turkeys and chickens, and these creatures ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... look from the isle, o'er its billows of green, To the billows of foam-crested blue, Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen, Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue: Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray As the chaff in the stroke of the flail; Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way, The sun ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... chained like a dog, and never suffered to be at liberty, for you do more harm in an hour, than a body can set right again in a month!' Will then took up hats full of the corn and chaff, and threw it in the two men's faces; afterwards taking up a flail, he gave Simon a blow across his back, saying, at the same time, 'I will show you the way to thresh, and separate the flesh from the bones.' 'O! will you so, young squire?' said John; 'I will show you the way to make naughty boys ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... are seen. The convulsions may consist only of a rapid trembling, or the limb or limbs may be flung about like a flail. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... hoarded gold; and the Merchant, whom the same inexorable hand tears away from his ships and his merchandise;—the storm-tossed ship, with Death snapping the mast;—a Count, dressed in the extreme of courtly splendor, who recognizes Death in the disguise of a peasant who has flung down his flail to seize his lordship's emblazoned shield and dash it to pieces;—a Duchess, whom one skeleton drags rudely from her canopied bed, while another scrapes upon a violin;—a Peddler;—a Ploughman, of whose four-horse team Death is the driver;—Gamblers, Drunkards, and Robbers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... skipper hauled at the heavy sail: "God be our help!" he only cried, As the roaring gale, like the stroke of a flail, Smote the boat on its starboard side. The Shoalsmen looked, but saw alone Dark films of rain-cloud slantwise blown, Wild rocks lit up by the lightning's glare, The strife and torment of sea ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... with an iron-heeled one. Others proposed the "anguille," another kind of recreation, in which a handkerchief is filled with sand, pebbles, and two-sous pieces, when they have them, which the wretches beat like a flail over the head and shoulders of the unhappy sufferer. "Let us horsewhip the fine gentleman!" ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... readily guess the struggle of feeling to which this honest young fellow fell a prey when we read the letter that he now indited, in which every stroke of the flail which scourged his conscience will be found to ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... inside, like the beating of a flail, continued. Amy craned her head around the door ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... crowns and orbs and sceptres starred his breast. All gleamed compact and green with scale on scale, But special burnishment adorned his mail And special terror weighed upon his frown; 20 His punier brethren quaked before his tail, Broad as a rafter, potent as a flail. So he grew lord and master of his kin: But who shall tell the tale of all their woes? An execrable appetite arose, He battened on them, crunched, and sucked them in. He knew no law, he feared no binding law, But ground them with inexorable ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... thus singled out for show seemed neither resentful nor distressed, ready enough most times to exhibit his merits, anxious only for the chance of a good master and the momentary avoidance of the lictor's flail. At the praefect's bidding he cracked his knuckles or showed his teeth, strained the muscles of his arm to make them stand up like cords, turned a somersault, jumped, danced or stood on his head if ordered ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... wall, out through the gate and to the entrance of the alley. The boys were so intent upon their game that they never noticed his approach until he was close upon them. Then they sprang up with wild yells, but the lash descended on them like a well-aimed flail; they rolled over and over in a writhing heap. After the heap had broken up and its shrieking units scattered, the irate priest calmly pocketed the marbles and, whip in hand, stalked ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... men of the Revolution; how its activity had outdone the activity of all other hands in clearing and cultivating those very fields where her feet loved to run; how, in its pride of strength, it had handled the scythe, and the sickle, and the flail, with a grace and efficiency that no other could attain; and how, in happy manhood, that strong hand had fondled, and sheltered, and led, the little children that now had grown up and were gone! Strength and activity, ay, and the fruits of them, were passed away; his children ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... 'll fight Beelzebub if he be aught I can hit; but these same boggarts, they say, a blow falls on 'em like rain-drops on a mist, or like beating the wind with a corn-flail. I cannot fight with naught, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... is one shower, to evil and to just, And health, and strength, and length of days, and to all the common dust: But as the snake throws off its skin, the soul throws off its clay, And soars, till purpled are its wings with everlasting day; God, having winnow'd with his flail the chaff from out the wheat, When those, who seem'd alike when here, approach'd ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... seeds, harvesting should begin when three fourths of the leaves have fallen and most of the pods are ripe. Do not wait, however, until the pods are so dry that they have begun to split and drop their seeds. A slight amount of dampness on the plants aids the cutting. The threshing may be done with a flail, with pea-hullers, or with a ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... for a time threw him with the supporters of Mary. But the adventures of Arthegal mainly preserve the memory of Lord Grey's terrible exploits against wrong and rebellion in Ireland. These exploits are represented in the doings of the iron man Talus, his squire, with his destroying flail, swift, irresistible, inexorable; a figure, borrowed and altered, after Spenser's wont, from a Greek legend. His overthrow of insolent giants, his annihilation of swarming "rascal routs," idealize and glorify that unrelenting policy, of which, though condemned in England, Spenser continued ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... Her head's like the island folks tell on, Which nothing but monkeys can dwell on; Her heart's like a lemon—so nice She carves for each lover a slice; In truth she's to me, Like the wind, like the sea, Whose raging will hearken to no man; Like a mill, like a pill, Like a flail, like a whale, Like an ass, like a glass Whose image is constant to no man; Like a shower, like a flower, Like a fly, like a pie, Like a pea, like a flea, Like a thief, like—in brief, She's like nothing on ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... how the drudging goblin sweat To earn his cream-bowl duly get, When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail had thresh'd the corn That ten day-labourers could not end; Then lays him down the lubber-fiend, And, stretch'd out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength, And crop-full, out of door he flings Ere the ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... shown a short-handled flail, which is about 2-1/2 ft. long with a dark handle of wood, studded with brass or steel nails. A steel band is placed around the handle near the top. The imitation of the steel band is made by gluing a piece of tinfoil on a strip of ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... the halves of a flail, depend on it: wan no use wi'out t'other. Then theer's the singing of the auld song: who's gwaine to say that's the least part ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... was evidently at its last gasp when we left the schooner. It soon rolled over on its side. The mysterious flail stopped beating the huge body and the water seemed churned excitedly at the nose of ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... compare the most celebrated European ministers to him seems to us as unjust as it would be to compare the best baker in London with Robinson Crusoe, who, before he could bake a single loaf, had to make his plough and his harrow, his fences and his scarecrows, his sickle and his flail, his mill ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and instead of dismounting, as she expected him to do, he lifted his arm and brought his crop hard down on the mare's quarters, so that she leaped forward, and the next moment he was sending her along as fast as she could gallop, while his arm rose and fell like a flail, thrashing her unmercifully. They fled past Ann at racing speed, and she watched, dumb with amazement, while Brett steered a huge semicircular course on the downs, keeping the animal he rode at full stretch the whole time. ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... had his adversary—the audience—conquered before he struck a blow. His glance was terrific, his "nerve" enormous. What he did afterward didn't much matter. He usually accomplished a hard day's threshing with those flail-like arms of his, and, heavens, how the poor piano objected to being taken for ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... accompany us from London. On Tuesday he must leave Town for Hampshire, but time-tables were consulted, and it was discovered that he could travel across country on Christmas Eve, and, by changing from one station to the other at the market town of Flail, arrive at Red ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... leaders of the church were called up by the Japanese, who stepped down and ran his fingers along the floor. "Look at this dust," he said. Ordering the two men to sit down on the floor, he beat them with a flail, ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... marshes, clearing up land, chopping cord-wood, threshing, &c. I have known the women go into the barn as soon as they could see in the morning, and work as late as they could see at night, threshing rice with the flail, (they now have a threshing machine,) and when they could see to thresh no longer, they had to gather up the rice, carry it up stairs, and deposit it in ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Stanley could have believed him guilty of such mean, despicable trickery—there was the sting. Stanley had felt the blows of Wyndham on his face, but that was as nothing to the torture endured at that moment by Paul. It was as a flail cutting deep down ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... condition of farm-hands has been markedly improved of late years. They have now a shorter day, higher wages, better food, and superior house accommodation. Mechanical appliances have made farm-work lighter and more agreeable. The drudgery of the threshing flail is now unknown; the hook and the scythe have given way to the reaping-machine: in every way hand labour has been lightened. But it is precisely this machinery that lessens the need for large numbers of agricultural labourers. It is also notorious that shoemakers, tailors, and blacksmiths, are ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... upstairs, but there was a man up there threshing, and goody! how he knocked me down with his flail!" ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... been up to Colina tracking round after a woman." Her verbal strokes were swift and hard as a flail. And again Flick started in surprise. His cheeks ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... shield to shake: We speak not of the powers divine, ne yet of furious sprites; We do not seek high hills to climb, nor talk of love's delights. We do not here present to you the thresher with his flail, Ne do we here present to you the milkmaid with her pail: We show not you of country toil, as hedger with his bill; We do not bring the husbandman to lop and top with skill: We play not here the gardener's part, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... judge or recorder, His house was as big and as strong as a jail; With a cruel four-pounder, he kept in great order, He'd murder the country, would Larry M'Hale. He'd a blunderbuss too, of horse-pistols a pair; But his favorite weapon was always a flail. I wish you could see how he'd empty a fair, For he handled it neatly, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... saw his one chance and took it. He did not give back. And he did not offer the poor defense of one arm against the flail of blows. Instead he stooped low, very low, jerking his body double, dropping suddenly under Brayley's threshing arms, and hurled himself bodily to meet the attack, his left shoulder thrust forward, striking Brayley with the full impact ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... the creature to enthral him. Perhaps some such story as this may account in part for Mrs. Frere's sad looks. Why do I speculate on such things? I seem to do violence to myself and to insult her by writing such suspicions. If I was a Flagellant now, I would don hairshirt and up flail. "For this sort cometh not out but ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... dozen young men in gay sylvan costumes are standing in a circle, armed with flails, and vigorously threshing the ground. Jolly, hearty young fellows they are, and a merry chant they raise. One eager thresher in his zeal breaks his flail at the bend, and a shout from ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... brave man—an extraordinarily brave man. You English, you are brave. But he was no soldier. He rode at me alone, handling that sabre of his like a flail. We'd hardly crossed blades before he knew his fate. 'You've got me, sir,' said he, splashing about with his sword. I said nothing. 'Maybe I hadn't ought to ha stuck her,' he gasped. He wasn't whining. He wasn't that sort. He knew he had to have it. 'It was tit for tat: ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... consideration given it because of its contribution to the welfare of mankind. We are as useful as any other hard-working people, no more and no less. We claim no higher appreciation for muscular effort exerted in swinging the flail than for that applied to the ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... phase of farm telephony. The cost of an efficient farm system is now so little—not more than two dollars a month, that the present trashy lines are certain sooner or later to go to the junk-heap with the sickle and the flail and all the ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... and holding by the chair, he stood trembling and quivering with gladness, while, summoned by the dog's bark, Patience, pail in hand, appeared on one side, and Ben, tall and slight, with his flail, on the other. ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... red light from the fire on her face, and on her hair, and on her bare arms, I was minded o' th' angel that walked i' the fiery furnace with th' men in holy writ. And when a pounded away at a shoe, and her young arm going like a flail—chink, chank—chink, chank—and th' white spatters o' hot iron flying this way and that from th' anvil, meseemed 'twas as though Dame Venus (for thou knowest how in th' masque twelve year gone this Yuletide 'twas shown as how ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... the two men held their breath. All at once at some little distance they heard a continuous, rapid sound, as if something was beating the earth with a flail. The nauseating and penetrating odor which exhales from these large serpents became stronger and stronger. "The serpent is furious; it is his tail which is beating the earth thus," said John in a feeble voice. "Colonel, let us ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... the district even to his very porch with heavy stones and opprobrious epithets. Once when he thought he had left her far behind did he alight to draw breath and take a pinch of snuff, and she was upon him like a flail. With a terror-stricken cry he leapt once more upon his horse and fled, but not without leaving his snuff-box in the hands of the derisive enemy. Meggy has long gone to the kirkyard, but the snuff-mull ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... with friend and foe, At home che hold the plough by th' tail: Che dig, che delve, che zet, che zow, Che mow, che reap, che ply my flail. A pair of dice is thy delight, Thou liv'st for most part by the spoil: I truly labour day and night To get my living by my toil. Chill therefore sure this issue make: The best deserver draw ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... plough, he seemed alone, unaided by his poor horse, to cleave the yielding bosom of the earth, or when, about St. Peter's Day, he plied his scythe with a. furious energy that might have mown a young birch copse up by the roots, or swiftly and untiringly wielded a flail over two yards long; while the hard oblong muscles of his shoulders rose and fell like a lever. His perpetual silence lent a solemn dignity to his unwearying labour. He was a splendid peasant, and, except for his affliction, any girl would have been glad to marry him.... But ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... "make-believe" blow would have implied a "make- believe" hammer and a "make-believe" curtain. No!—hammer away, like Charles Martel; "fillip me with a three-man beetle;" be to me a malleus hreticorum; come like Spenser's Talus—an iron man with an iron flail, and thresh out the straw of my logic; rack me; put me to the question; get me down; jump upon me; kick me; throttle me; put an end to me in any ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... this. According to him, God, in punishment for sin delivers over people to shameful affections, to a reprobate sense; he suffers them to be a hell unto themselves. And nature seldom fails to avenge herself for the outrages suffered. She uses the flail of disease and remorse, of misery and disgust, and she scourges the culprit to the verge of the grave, often to the yawning pit ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... farm of Jesse Wingate on the Yamhill the wheat was in stack and ready for the flail, his deer-skin sacks made ready to carry it to market after the threshing. His grim and weather-beaten wagon stood, now unused, at the ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... moan broke from her lips. For a moment it was a physical impossibility for her to speak. She could only shrink, mute and quivering, beneath the flail of his scorn. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... covetous eyes ranged from the treasure in his hand to the threatening east. A puff of wind caught the sail and sent the boom athwartships, like a mighty flail. Both men ducked instinctively, to escape ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... meddle, Tam; it's niver no good a threshin' other folk's corn; ye allays gits the flail agin ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... ferret. The bull ran, tossing his nose with pain and bellowing: Uxmoor dragged by the tail and compelled to follow in preposterous, giant strides, barely touching the ground with the point of his toe, pounded the creature's ribs with such blows as Zoe had never dreamed possible. They sounded like flail on wooden floor, and each blow was accompanied with a loud jubilant shout. Presently, being a five's player, and ambidexter, he shifted his hand, and the tremendous whacks resounded on the bull's left side. The bull, thus belabored, and resounding ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Harrigan's enveloping arms found him less readily; came a change when Harrigan had to stand up and fight. And then, with deadly, insensate purpose which made the other's madness a wild and futile thing, Stephen O'Mara set himself to chop his face to pieces. Flail-like blows he side-stepped, and whipped to the other's eyes. That open guard he feinted wider and laid flesh open raw. Harrigan could no longer curse, for his lips were puffy things pulped between his own teeth and ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... when the Indians came. My father says Sheepscott is a very old place, and the Pilgrims came here for corn. Close by our field is an old barn where the Indians came when some men were threshing, and fired on them, and killed two and took their scalps off, and one man hit back at them with his flail, and broke an Indian's arm, and they carried him prisoner to Canada. It says so on his old grave-stone, and I have seen it. My grandfather shot bears, but there are none here now. The people here build little houses on the ice, and catch lots of smelts through a hole in ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... When other weapons fail, With club to thrash invaders rash, Like barley with a flail? Hath Seville any Perez still, To lay his clusters low, And ride with seven turbans green ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... envelope, or a piece of mineral coal. From the farmer we should have to take the reaper, the drill, the mowing machine, and every kind of improved rake and plow, and give him back the scythe, the cradle, and the flail. From our houses would go the sewing machine, the daily newspaper, gas, running water; and from our tables, the tomato, the cauliflower, the eggplant, and many varieties of summer fruits. We should have to destroy every railroad, every steamboat, every ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... been built in shelter of the bamboos, only a little place, a cluster of fifteen or twenty huts. But every house lay in ruins as if the place had been knocked about the villagers' ears with a huge flail. Near at hand a man lay dead, his body horribly crushed and battered. No sign of life was to be observed ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... sense of fear; no thought but to kill and be killed. I felt within me strength—desperate, insane strength. The rifle butt splintered in my hands, but the bent and shapeless barrel rose and fell like a flail. I saw it crush against skulls; I jabbed it straight into red faces; I brought it down with all my force on clutching arms. For an instant Tim was beside me. He had lost his gun and was fighting with a knife. It was only a glimpse I ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... fond Joe and Bob (with their cash to spend), Widow Precious (with her beer laid in), and Widow Carroway, with a dole at last extorted from the government; while Anerley Farm was content to hearken the creak of wagon and the ring of flail, and the rector of Flamborough once more rejoiced in the bloodless war ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... scores of armed men. No sword could reach him, and no bullet appeared to strike him, though dozens of the rebels discharged muskets and even revolvers at him, at close range, when it began to be apparent on which side he was fighting. Up went that mighty flail, and down it came again on the heads of the human tares of rebeldom who so needed threshing out in the very garner of wrath. More than one of the Union men in the vicinity of the strange spectacle, who happened to have been classic readers in other ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... a flash, not all of steel, Where the rolling caissons wheel, Brought a rumble and a roar Rolling down that velvet floor, And like blows of autumn flail Sharply threshed ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... powerless and dead they denied Him and fell back to their natural instinct of self-defence, and the first Church died with the death of Christ. It was like the green corn in the field smitten by a flail to the very root. The owner of the corn walks in the field and looks with despair on his perished corn. But it happens often that after a few days the field begins under the sunshine to flourish anew, and the corn grows beautifully and brings forth ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... should fail in such a trivial matter? But it happened so long ago while I was courting your mother, to be exact. My father-in-law, rest his soul, was an atrocity at table. The viands, my son, scattered from his knife over the board, like chaff before the flail. Yet, will you believe it? Any time he chose to speak his mouth was always full. I watched him, watched him with wonder—or was it horror?—I cannot remember which. And I resolved to go, to go anywhere, but never to do likewise. The result ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... his feet with that throat grip. He whirled him like a flail, and smashed him down upon the deck, and let him go. And there Yankee Swope lay, sprawled, and still, his head bent back at a fatal angle. A broken neck, as a glance at the lolling head would inform; and, as we discovered later, a broken back as well. It was death that Newman's bare ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... country gentlewoman, who kept five men-servants "to use the spade and flail," and five women-servants "to carry the milken-pail." The five men loved the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... administer it. Such was Father Roche, as the pastor of a large but poor flock, who had few sympathies to expect, save those which this venerable man was able to afford them. Very different from him, on the other hand, was his curate, the Rev. Patrick M'Cabe, or M'Flail, as he was nicknamed by the Orangemen of the parish, in consequence of a very unsacerdotal tendency to use the horsewhip, as a last resource, especially in cases where reason and the influence of argument failed. He was a powerful young ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... thing as self-indulgence;—this daughter of the Puritans had her seed within her. Aerial in her delicacy, as the blue-eyed flax-flower with which they sowed their fields, she had yet its strong fibre, which no stroke of the flail could break; bruising and hackling only made it fitter for uses of homely utility. Mary, therefore, opened the kitchen-door at dawn, and, after standing one moment to breathe the freshness, began spreading the cloth for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... in silence for a time. Cadillac scowled and beat his palm upon his knee as a flail beats grain, and I knew he needed no words of mine. I thought that he was going over his defenses in his mind, and I began to calculate how many rounds of shot I had in my canoes, and to hope that my men would not prove cravens. I knew, without argument with myself, that the beaver ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... but I saw him escape and get away over the fence. Then they all set upon Tom, but by G—— it was glorious to see the way in which he held his own. Out came that cross of his, four foot and a half long, with a thong as heavy as a flail. He soon had the road clear around him, and the big black horse you remember, stood as steady as a statue till he was bidden to move on. Then when he had the hounds, and Barney Smith and the whips to ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... "There's the flail I told Mr. Blake I'd bring him," said the farmer to Aunt Lolly, who had come to the door when he rang ...
— Daddy Takes Us to the Garden - The Daddy Series for Little Folks • Howard R. Garis
... rigour, Who thunders to his captives blood and death, I cannot judge; but, to conclude with truth, Their weapons like to lightning came and went, Our soldiers',—like the night-owl's lazy flight, Or like an idle thrasher with a flail— Fell gently down, as if they struck their friends. I cheer'd them up with justice of our cause, With promise of high pay and great rewards, But all in vain; they had no heart to fight, And we in them no hope to win the day; So that we fled: the king unto ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... fell, her arm she brak, A compound fracture as could be; Nae leech the cure wad undertak, Whate'er was the gratuity. It 's cured! she handles 't like a flail, It does as weel in bits as hale; But I 'm a broken man mysel' Wi' her and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... masse, he seized a chair, and swung it flail-like about his head. For a few moments, there was a crashing of glass and china, and a clatter of furniture and a chaos of struggle. At its center, he stood wielding his impromptu weapon, and, when two of his assailants had fallen under its sweeping ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... with them were three men, their drovers, and they drew nigh him as he was amidst of the sheep, so that he could scarce see the way. Each of these three had a weapon; one a pole-axe, another a long spear, and the third a flail jointed and bound with iron, and an anlace hanging at his girdle. So they stood in the way and hailed him when the sheep were gone past; and the man with the spear asked him whither away. "I am turned toward Higham-on-the-Way," quoth ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... a flash. Like lightning his right wing came round with a terrific flail-stroke, and hit Pig Head in the face at the precise instant that the surgical instrument he carried as his beak sank deep into one of Pig Head's calves. The Chieftain was upside-down at the moment, and his legs were ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
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