"Barbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like a savage boar, Through streams of blood, through dust and dirt he ran, O'er heaps of bodies wallowing in their gore, The squadrons close his sword to ope began, He broke their ranks, behind, beside, before, And, where he goes, under his feet he treads The armed Saracens, and barbed steeds. ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... of herbage and patches of bright verdure. As we glide along among the islands which line the shore, we are pretty sure to fall in with one of the little propellers, with a small swivel gun at the bow, in search of whales. The projectile which is used consists of a barbed harpoon, to which a short chain is affixed, and to that a strong line. This harpoon has barbs which expand as soon as they enter the body of the animal and he pulls upon the line, stopping at a certain angle, which renders the withdrawal of the weapon impossible. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... arguments, it is true, were merely an elaboration of those with which he had favored some of us already; but they were pointed by a concise exposition of the several definite principles they represented, and barbed with a caustic rhetoric quite admirable in itself. In a word, the manner was worthy of the very foundation it sought to shake, or we had never swallowed such matter without a murmur. As it was, there was a demonstration in the wilderness when the voice ceased ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... importance in his own opinion! Have done with thy wheezing,"—he continued, vehemently thumping the struggling old gentleman on the back—"Here is another one of the minstrel craft thou hatest,—hast aught of bitterness in thy barbed tongue wherewith to welcome him ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... too, I thought it would send me mad, I longed to kill myself to get out of it. But, in an attack, when you've seen your own jolly pals, who have lived in the trenches with you, bleeding and tattered, spatchcocked against barbed wire, and had to leave them sticking to it, their eyes haunt you, your blood gets up, you long for a hundred hands to shoot with, instead of only two. When you've seen the result of Prussian militarism on decent ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... the yacht might be doing here; I ran my sailboat close under the overhanging rocks and anchored. Then I saw a small boat in the moonlight, pulling from the yacht toward shore, where the crescent cove had already been thoroughly staked and the bottom closely covered with barbed wire as far as the edge of the deep channel which curves ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... and working class are mostly confined in barbed-wire internment camps outside the city, and guarded by Sengalese. Twenty per cent get permission to go into the city each day. The seventy or eighty thousand indigent Russians in Constantinople belong mostly to the upper classes. Very ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... the Indian mode of warfare is, without exception, the most inhuman and revolting. But I do not know that those who die by the barbed and poisoned arrow linger in any more unendurable torment than those who are mangled with powder and lead balls, and the custom of scalping among Christian murderers would save thousands from groaning days, and perhaps weeks, ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... balloons and flying machines and their distinctive component parts, together with accessories and articles recognizable as intended for use in connexion with balloons and flying machines; (9) fuel; lubricants; (10) powder and explosives not specially prepared for use in war; (11) barbed wire and implements for fixing and cutting the same; (12) horseshoes and shoeing materials; (13) harness and saddlery; (14) field glasses, telescopes, chronometers and all kinds ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... meanwhile, he felt the dire penetration of two or three of the words she had used; so that after a painful minute the quaver with which he repeated them resembled his-drawing, slowly, carefully, timidly, some barbed ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... answer and said to him: "Most noble son of Atreus, why urgest thou me that myself am eager? Verily with such strength as is in me forbear I not, but ever since we drave them towards Ilios I watch with my bow to slay the foemen. Eight long-barbed arrows have I now sped, and all are buried in the flesh of young men swift in battle; only this mad dog can I ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... these high explosive bombs at the zero hour on the morning of the attack. That hill, famous for its strength through four years of struggle between the French and Germans, dis-appeared completely as an enemy standpoint. Nothing remained but torn and broken barbed wire, bits of concrete pill-boxes, and trenches filled with debris, and a few scattered ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... showers, now with the proper tramp and rattle of the tropics. All this while I met no sight or sound of man, except the voice which was now silent, and a damned pig-fence that headed me off at every corner. Do you know barbed wire? Think of a fence of it on rotten posts, and you barefoot. But I crossed it at last with my heart in my mouth and no harm done. Thence at last to C's.: no C. Next place I came to was in the zone of woods. They offered me a buggy and set a ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... courage so sublime and unafraid, It wears its sorrows like a coat of mail; And Fate, the archer, passes by dismayed, Knowing his best barbed arrows needs must fail To pierce a soul so armored and arrayed That Death himself might look on it ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... red-hot pokers down their throats; by hugging red-hot stoves; by stripping themselves naked and allowing themselves to freeze to death on winter snow-drifts out of doors, or on piles of ice in refrigerator-cars; by lacerating their throats on barbed-wire fences; by drowning themselves head downward in barrels; by suffocating themselves head downward in chimneys; by diving into white-hot coke-ovens; by throwing themselves into craters of volcanoes; ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... beyond. A sentry challenges us, and we produce our permit. Then we dismount, and I look out upon a wide stretch of what three months ago was swamp, or wet plough land. Now its 250 acres are enclosed with barbed wire, and patrolled by sentries night and day. A number of small buildings, workshops, stores, etc., are rising all over it. I am looking at what is to be the great "filling" factory of the district, where ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dipping, digging, hooking and grasping; weapons for striking, whether clubs, missiles or projectiles; edged weapons of capture, which were rare in America; piercing devices for capture, in lances, barbed spears, harpoons and arrows; traps for enclosing, arresting and killing, such as pens, cages, pits, pen-falls, nets, hooks, nooses, clutches, adhesives, deadfalls, impalers, knife traps and poisons; animals consciously and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... would thus be doubled, he made them of a peculiar construction, to enable one man to do the work of two. There is no occasion to describe the rows of ditches, dry and wet; the staked pitfalls; the cervi, pronged instruments like the branching horns of a stag; the stimuli, barbed spikes treacherously concealed to impale the unwary and hold him fast when caught, with which the ground was sown in irregular rows; the vallus and the lorica, and all the varied contrivances of Roman engineering genius. Military students ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... September 12, assisted by a limited number of tanks manned partly by Americans and partly by the French. These divisions, accompanied by groups of wire cutters and others armed with bangalore torpedoes, went through the successive bands of barbed wire that protected the enemy's front line and support trenches, in irresistible waves on schedule time, breaking down all defense of an enemy demoralized by the great volume of our artillery fire and our sudden approach out ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... death or capture. Our orders were under no circumstances to leave the gun as long as a shell remained and a man lived. Deuced pleasant! The ground in front of us was well drilled with concealed holes all the way from four to six feet deep, in each of which strands of barbed wire had been placed and the opening carefully concealed with clumps of ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... than my mother, and she had one son. He was a sulky, handsome boy, with a selfish, cruel nature. He seemed to be happy only when he was tormenting some one. He used to come to Uncle's to visit when I was there, and he delighted in annoying me. He stretched barbed wire where he knew I was going to pass in the dark, to throw me down and tear my clothes. He threw a quantity of burrs in my hair, and once he led me into a hornet's nest. After we went to live at my uncle's, Richard was not there so ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... built a shed for it. When she sniffed contemptuously at his notion of fencing a hog corral with sod walls, he made a spiritless beginning on the structure—merely to "show his temper," as she put it—but in the end he went off quietly to town and bought enough barbed wire to complete the fence. When the first heavy rains came on, and the pigs rooted down the sod wall and made little paths all over it to facilitate their ascent, he heard his wife relate with relish the story of the little pig that built a mud house, to the minister at the dinner table, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... happened at court, or befell the courtiers; and inasmuch as his subjects were frequently of a licentious nature, his lines were generally of a scandalous character. He therefore became the public censor of court folly; and so unerringly did his barbed shafts hit the weaknesses at which they aimed, that his productions were equally the terror of those he victimized, and the ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... and extracted the backbone, so that it was in two flaps. Then taking the large hook, he passed it in at the tail, drew the pilchard carefully up the shank, and then held up the hook for Arthur to see, with the broad flaps hanging down on either side of the curve and barbed point. ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... devout heart, forgets his longings after righteousness, flings away the joys of Divine communion, darkens his soul, ends his prosperity, brings down upon his head for all his remaining years a cataract of calamities, and makes his name and his religion a target for the barbed sarcasms of each succeeding generation of scoffers. "All the fences and their whole array," which God's mercies and his own past had reared, "one cunning sin sweeps quite away." Every obligation of his office, as every ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... The quills were rayed out and flattened on the hinder part of its back, even as if it had lain on that part, but were erect and long between this and the tail. Their points, closely examined, were seen to be finely bearded or barbed, and shaped like an awl, that is, a little concave, to give the barbs effect. After about a mile of still water, we prepared our camp on the right side, just at the foot of a considerable fall. Little chopping was done that night, for fear of scaring the moose. We had moose- meat ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... privileges of an individual. One fourth of the capital stock was at once paid into the hands of the treasurer, the lease and cattle on hand were transferred to the new company, and the executive committee began operations for the future. Barbed wire by the carload was purchased sufficient to build one hundred miles of four-strand fence, and arrangements were made to have the same freighted one hundred and fifty miles inland by wagon from the railway terminal to the new ranch ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... the pale features now deform'd with blood. Then, with his spear, unseen, his time he took, Aim'd at the king, and near his elbow strook. The thrilling steel transpierced the brawny part, And through his arm stood forth the barbed dart. Surprised the monarch feels, yet void of fear On Coon rushes with his lifted spear: His brother's corpse the pious Trojan draws, And calls his country to assert his cause; Defends him breathless on the sanguine field, And o'er the body spreads his ample shield. Atrides, marking ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... with one disease and come out of it with ten. Had Shakib been forewarned of Khalid's mind, had he even seen him at the gate before he entered, he would have given him a few hints about the cross-signs and barbed-cordons therein. But should he not have divined that Khalid soon or late was coming? Did he not call enough to him, and aloud? "Get thee behind me on this dromedary," our Scribe, reading his Al-Mutanabbi, would often say to his comrade, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... not all down there," growled Ned. But his barbed wit failed to penetrate the tough skin of the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Ozarks • Frank Gee Patchin
... but made no further objection when they saw who wanted it and why. King wondered at their sudden change of mind, the Pathan looked actually grieved that a fight should have been spared him. He tried, with a few barbed insults, to rearouse a spark of enmity, but failed, to his own ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... the heart of the rock. Even there the wind blew dank and howling through all the cavernous hollows. As he approached the last chamber, out of the Devil's Window flew, with clanging wing, an arrow barbed seagull, down to the grey veiled tumult below, and the joy of life for a moment seized his soul. But the next, the dismay of that which is forsaken was upon him. It was not that the once lordly structure lay abandoned to the birds and the gusts, but that she would never think ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... ended in black claws! Snarling, grinning teeth in faces of dead-white flesh! Barbed tails that hissed through the air as they swung down upon him! And Chet Bullard, his blond hair shining like the gold that was inlaid and encrusted upon the walls of the room—Chet Bullard, Master Pilot, once, of a distant Earth—did not wait for the assault to ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... coincides with the domestication of the dog, an epoch in hunting life. The appearance of arrow heads indicates the invention of the bow, and the rise of man from a defensive to an offensive mode of life. The introduction of barbed arrows shows how inventive talent was displaying itself; bone and horn tips, that the huntsman was including smaller animals, and perhaps birds, in his chase; bone whistles, his companionship with other huntsmen, or with his dog. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... so near to the front; the Triarii, from having been arrayed behind the first two lines as a body of reserve, armed with the pilum, thicker and stronger than the Grecian lance,—four and a half feet long, of wood, with a barbed head of iron,—so that the whole length of the weapon was six feet nine inches. It was used either to throw or thrust with, and when it pierced the enemy's shield, [Footnote: Liv. viii. 8.] the iron head was bent, and the spear, owing to the twist in the iron, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... not going to interfere with that girl's matrimonial affairs, sir, not for any one. That child, bless her heart, is like my own child to me. If she wants the moon, and there's nothing else to stop her having it but my consent, why, I guess that moon's as good as fenced in with triple-barbed wire an' registered in her name in the Government ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... lived from the age of twenty, might have rivalled Shakespeare's own; which even now asserts its force by a hundred little never-to-be-forgotten phrases scattered through his poems, which stick, like barbed arrows, in the memory of every reader. And as for his tenderness—the quality without which all other poetic excellence is barren—it gushes forth toward every creature, animate and inanimate, with one exception, namely, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... two hundred feet was enclosed by a barbed wire fence, and this space was quite as interesting ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... bees are often more virulent than those of wasps, and attended with more painful effects. The sting being barbed, it is always left in the wound. When therefore a person is stung by a bee, the sting should be instantly extracted, or it will communicate more of its poison, according to the time it is permitted to remain. It should be carefully pulled out with a steady hand, for if any ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... together with a trusty war-horse, which he entreated him to use upon the field of battle; for Bertha had not omitted to intimate Count Robert's want of the means of knightly equipment. The horse was brought before the pavilion accordingly, completely barbed or armed in steel, and laden with armour for the knight's body. Godfrey himself put the bridle ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... mind. That large low head seemed to have been created for butting rather than for anything else. There he stood, four-square and menacing in the doorway of reform; and it remained to be seen whether, the bulky mass, upon whose solid hide even the barbed arrows of Lord Raglan's scorn had made no mark, would prove amenable to the pressure of Miss Nightingale. Nor was he alone in the doorway. There loomed behind him the whole phalanx of professional conservatism, the stubborn supporters of the out-of-date, the worshippers and the victims ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... with blood trickling from it down the wall. The fierce bolt, slightly barbed, had gone through it and deep into the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... and fairly with Labour. There are not only parish boundaries, but park boundaries and class and sect boundaries. You will find the Bocking-Braintree line too at a dozen points on a small scale map of Europe.... These Braintree-Bocking lines are the barbed-wire entanglements between us and the peace of the world. Against these entanglements in every country the new spirit struggles in many thousands of minds. Where will it be strongest? Which country will get clear first, get most rapidly ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... drawing its weapon for a few instants longer and to avenge the deceased before being itself overcome with death's inertia. This vindictive persistency serves me to perfection. There is another circumstance in my favour: the barbed sting remains where it is, which enables me to ascertain the exact spot pierced. A needle withdrawn as soon as inserted would leave me doubtful. I can also, when the transparency of the tissues permits, perceive the direction ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... this that the nations will have to fix up some other way to settle their differences. About that Zeppelin, Tubby; don't you see how they might be able to drop a few bombs on the enemy's trenches; or where the Belgians have fixed barbed-wire entanglements to stop the rush of the charging German troops? Just to think that here we are really watching a battle that isn't like one of the sham rights they have every summer at home. ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... of loops of small diameter fastened to stakes, or wire laid along the ground and attached at the ends, or spirals of barbed wire in racks, is used for entanglements. It is reported that this form is coming into considerable use, but the details have not been published. Such entanglements are much harder ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... my blood. I caught the spear, and tested it across my knee. It was pliant but tough, and wickedly barbed,—a weapon for a man to respect. "So you wanted the color of my blood," I called angrily. "You have a good spear; all that was lacking was a man to aim it;" and with a contemptuous laugh I tossed the spear ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... and on fote, with suche actiuitie and force, that thei are almoste inuincible in bothe. Their weapons are bowe and arrowes, Launces and Armynge swordes. Their beltes aboute their waste, the ornament of their heades, and their pollerone, are garnished with golde. Their Horses are barbed on the brest, with barbes of gold. Their reines, bridles, and trappour are all of golde. The heades of their Launces are of Brasse, and their Quiuers armed with Brasse. As for Siluer and Iron thei occupie none. Eche manne marieth one wife, and yet are the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... start everybody was ordered to attend prayers, and as they were embarking about twenty naked savages came running and shouting towards them, each carrying a long barbed spear, but the English made all haste to ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... almost in every respect. Their other fishing implements are large and small hooks. The last are composed entirely of pearl-shell, but the first are only covered with it on the back, and the points of both commonly of tortoise-shell; those of the small being plain, and the others barbed. With the large ones they catch bonnetos and albicores, by putting them to a bamboo rod, twelve or fourteen feet long, with a line of the same length, which rests in a notch of a piece of wood, fixed in the stern of the canoe for that purpose, and is dragged ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... of barbed wire all along the bottom of the fence. That will stop the pig from rooting, I'll ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... window. If it should, by any chance, be unlocked. But that was foolish to expect. Perhaps it would be possible to twist a rope from the bed-clothes and throw it up over the chevaux-de-frise; but even then there would be a long hand-over-hand climb to accomplish; and the barbed and pointed spikes had looked very formidable. In any event, she had the whole night before her; she must not act hastily; she must wait and watch; perhaps some other means would present ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... He cut steps with his ax in the slippery carcass, and got up to it as well as he could, extracted it by cutting and pulling, and threw it down into his boat, but not till he had taken the precaution to stick a great piece of blubber on the barbed point. He then sawed and hacked under difficulties, being buffeted and bothered with thousands of birds, so eager for slices that it was as much as he could do to avoid the making of minced fowl; but, true to ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... hand on a post and vaulted the fence. But Anderson had to climb laboriously and painfully over the barbed-wire obstruction. Lenore marveled at his silence and his persistence. Anderson hated wire fences. Presently he got over, and then he divided his time between searching in the wheat and peering after the strange car that was drawing ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... "Morning Post" (articles in which he attacked the snobs of England before Thackeray did), and other of Punch's permanent butts; but his chief merit lies in his having set up the hereditary sins of Society as targets, and shot his barbed darts into them with unerring accuracy of aim. Of his bitterness it was said that it was "healthy—healthy as bark," just as Thackeray—was it not?—had previously said of his ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... If you come in peace, you shall be welcome, and we will make a feast for you. We will hunt the nimble deer with you, and show you where the mighty eagle roosts, and where the fish with shining scales abides. If you come painted, your war-pipe filled, your bow bent, your arrow sharp and barbed, your heart strong, and your cry loud, we too will paint ourselves; we will smoke our pipe of war, we will bend our bow, make sharp our arrows, and stout our hearts, and will cry our war-cry, till the startled heron shall wing his way from the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... more than wily; he was something wicked. The suggestion of danger to Kingsley's life had made her wince, and he had added another little barbed arrow to keep the first company. The cause was a good one. Hurt now to heal afterwards—and Kingsley was an old friend, and a good fellow. Anyhow, this work was wasting her life, and she would be much better back in England, living a civilised life, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... with the force of a barbed arrow from a strong-bow. Struggle as she might, she could not henceforth ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... up in, circumvest. vest, clothe, array, dress, dight[obs3], drape, robe, enrobe, attire, apparel, accounter[obs3], rig, fit out; deck &c. (ornament) 847; perk, equip, harness, caparison. wear; don; put on, huddle on, slip on; mantle. Adj. invested &c. v.; habited; dighted[obs3]; barbed, barded; clad, costume, shod, chausse[Fr]; en grande tenue &c. (show) 882[Fr]. sartorial. Phr. "the soul of this man is ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... it with all our might, and as we drew near, the captain ordered Tom Lokins to "stand up", so he at once laid in his oar, and took up the harpoon. The harpoon is an iron lance with a barbed point. A whale-line is attached to it, and this line is coiled away in a tub. When we were within a few yards of the fish, which was going slowly through the water, all ignorant of the terrible foes who were pursuing him, Tom Lokins raised the harpoon high above his head, and darted it deep into ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... the river practising every day, watched by approving groups on the shore. Men were at work on the forts five miles below the city, where, also, Dr. Franklin was arranging his three rows of iron-barbed beams in the channel, which were called chevaux de frise. In a letter of that day, written to Captain Richard Varick, of New York, I find these French words spelt thus: "Shiver de freeses." Committees were going about Philadelphia during this spring buying lead from house to house at ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton
... shot forth a deadly shaft, And smote Phylodamas, Polites' friend, Beneath the jaw; the arrow pierced his throat. Down fell he like a vulture, from a rock By fowler's barbed arrow shot and slain; So from the high tower swiftly down he fell: His life fled; clanged his armour o'er the corpse. With laughter of triumph stalwart Molus' son A second arrow sped, with strong desire To smite Polites, ill-starred Priam's son: But with a swift ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... afterwards. I don't give because I see things are needed, but because I can't spend my income unless I do give. If I could have my way I'd buy you a good house in Buffalo, right side of mine; take your beggarly little income and manage it for you; build a six-foot barbed wire fence round the lot so 't the neighbors couldn't get in and eat you out of house and home, and in a couple of years I could make ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... defence known as the 'line of resistance.' They might be ordered to make a counter-attack. When no fighting was taking place their work was likely to consist in carrying up rations and R.E. materials (wooden pickets, sandbags, coils of barbed wire, etc.) to the front line. This work had to be done at night, because in winter 'communication trenches' (which alone made daylight movement possible from place to place in the forward zone) were so choked with mud as to be impassable. ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... out of pasture and into the corn; the pigs, like the chickens, evinced decided preference for the garden. The horse would break his halter and dart down the street, or, if in pasture, would leap the barbed-wire fence, at the risk of laming his legs for life, and dash into a neighbor's yard where children and babies were sunning ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... entrenchments and earthworks, not made recently, because grass had clothed them, afforded splendid cover for the French batteries. Bomb-proof shelters were dotted about the fields, and for miles away, as far as the Belgian frontier, were lines of trenches and barbed-wire entanglements. To the eye of a man not skilled in military science all these signs of a strong defence were comforting. And yet I think they were known to be valueless if the enemy broke through along the ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... The weak man with his Faith equivocated: Fraudful, beneath the self-same roofs he raised Altars to Christ and idols. By degrees That Truth he mocked forsook him. Year by year His face grew dark, and barbed his tongue though smooth, Manner and mind like grass-fields after thaw, Silk-soft above, yet iron-hard below: Spleenful that night at Sebert's blithe discourse He answered thus, with seeming-careless eye Wandering from wall ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... the report thereof went current, that salt-beef will make one find the way to the wine without a candle, though it were hid in the bottom of a collier's sack, and that with his drawers on he were mounted on a barbed horse furnished with a fronstal, and such arms, thighs, and leg-pieces as are requisite for the well frying and broiling of a swaggering sauciness. Here is a sheep's head, and it is well they make a proverb of this, that it ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... from the killing and already frozen. An early spring cold-snap was on, and the wildness of the scene was painted in a temperature of thirty below zero. Woven cloth was not in evidence. Furs and soft-tanned leather clad all alike. Boys passed with bows in their hands, and quivers of bone-barbed arrows; and many a skinning-knife of bone or stone Smoke saw in belts or neck-hung sheaths. Women toiled over the fires, smoke-curing the meat, on their backs infants that stared round-eyed and sucked at lumps of tallow. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... either fly over the water or live in the water. The hunting of the last is called fishing; and of fishing, one kind uses enclosures, catching the fish in nets and baskets, and another kind strikes them either with spears by night or with barbed spears or barbed hooks by day; the barbed spears are impelled from above, the barbed hooks are jerked into the head and lips of the fish, which are then drawn from below upwards. Thus, by a series of divisions, we have arrived at the definition of ...
— Sophist • Plato
... 'Thanase was in high spirits. His jests came thick and fast, and some were hard and personal, and some were barbed with truth, and one, at length, ended in the word "deserter." The victim grew instantly fierce and red, leaped up crying "Liar," and was knocked backward to the ground by the long-reaching fist of 'Thanase. He rose again and dashed at his assailant. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... expansion were merely the cost of subduing naked savages, the business was a remunerative one; but when, to these ordinary costs must be added the stupendous price of capturing trenches protected by barbed wire entanglements, of bombing whole countrysides, of desolating states and wiping out industries, not to mention the cost of building forty million dollar ships that can be sunk in six or seven minutes with one well aimed torpedo, the limit has been ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... built in the time of the Ten Years' War (1868-1878) as a barrier against the revolutionists operating in eastern Cuba. It was restored for use in the revolution of 1895, but its blockhouses at every kilometre, and its barbed wire tangles, were entirely ineffective against Gomez and Maceo and other leaders, all of whom crossed it at their own sweet will, although not without an occasional vicious little contest. We reached Ciego de Avila soon after noon, and had to wait there over night for a further ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... which proved them to be possessed of much ingenuity and taste. The description of their weapons reminds one of those remains of prehistoric man which we find treasured in our museums, for they had arrows barbed with horn, flint, iron, and copper, spears shod with bone, daggers of horn and bone, and axes made of brown or grey stone. The latter were from six to eight inches long and two thick, having the inside flat and the outside round, and tapering to an edge, and ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... the single women; the two hospitals, one general, the other for infectious diseases; and last of all, the house where the half-dozen disorderly women are confined, surrounded by a double fence of barbed wire and guarded by ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of scientific truth as they ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the Mosaic Law, or whether it be the law of our own country, or whether it be the laws written upon men's consciences. These all partake of the one characteristic, that they help nothing to the fulfilment of their own behests, and that they are barbed with threatenings of retribution. Like some avenging goddess, law comes down amongst men, terrible in her purity, awful in her beauty, with a hard light in her clear grey eyes—in the one hand the tables of stone, bearing the commandments which we have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... "Daughters of Jerusalem," said he, to the sympathizing women, "weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children." As though he had said, "You have a right to weep; weep, then, in that great catastrophe which is coming, when barbed affliction shall pierce your hearts, and the dearest ties shall be cut in sunder. Those ties are tender; those hearts are ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... the rudiments of trench warfare. Trenches had been dug, with barbed-wire entanglements, bombing saps, dug-outs, observation posts, and machine-gun emplacements. We were given a smattering of trench cooking, sanitation, bomb throwing, reconnoitering, listening posts, constructing and repairing barbed ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... until the grass should be sufficiently dry to burn; there were two varieties: that upon the slopes and hollows of the stony soil of the Atbara valley had been a pest ever since it had ripened; as the head formed three barbed darts, these detached themselves from the plant with such facility, that the slightest touch was sufficient to dislodge them; they immediately pierced the clothes, from which they could not be withdrawn, as the barbed heads broke off and remained. It was ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... are even more clinging than those of the Burdock. These are the Acaenas; they are mostly natives of America and New Zealand, and some of them (especially A. sarmentosa and A. microphylla) form excellent carpet plants, but their points being furnished with double hooks, like a double-barbed arrow, they ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... dimpled the sea like a hailstorm, and clanged on our shields and smote the decks with a sharp click from end to end of the vessel. Even at that time I saw that some of the arrows were British, but more of some outland make with cruelly barbed heads. One or two went near my helm, and I had several in my shield, but none of us ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... thine may be, No wealth, no pow'r, to set the captive free; Though only to thy ravish'd sight is given The golden path that HOWARD trod to heaven; Thy slights can make the wretched more forlorn, And deeper drive affliction's barbed thorn. Say not, "I'll come and cheer thy gloomy cell With news of dearest friends; how good, how well: I'll be a joyful herald to thine heart:" Then fail, and play the worthless trifler's part, To sip flat pleasures from thy glass's brim, And waste the precious ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... glass or crockery—that the heavy creature was capable of making; but, I became as highly incensed by it as if it had been barbed with wit, and I immediately rose in my place and said that I could not but regard it as being like the honorable Finch's impudence to come down to that Grove,—we always talked about coming down to that Grove, as a neat Parliamentary ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... play. But what a chance for arrows now, with that threatening band preparing for the rush and leap together, and, while out of reach of spear or ax, within easy reach of the singing little shafts! Oh, for the shafts now, those slender barbed things which were hurled in his new way! And, even as he thus raged, there came a feeble shout from down the valley behind him and ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... the antiquary, poet, and romance-writer of modern times? But to return, the Scottish archers were first formed into a company and obtained a charter, granting them great privileges, under the reign of queen Anne, for which they were to pay to the crown, annually, a pair of barbed arrows. One of these allowances was, that they might meet and go forth under their officer's conduct, in military form, in manner of weapon-showing, as often as they should think convenient. "But they have made no public parade since ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... him on the shoulder, then danced on into the center of the set, stopping to direct some barbed remark at Marilyn. ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... seductive Smiles. —Slow rolls the Cyprian car in purple pride, And, steer'd by LOVE, ascends admiring Ide; Climbs the green slopes, the nodding woods pervades, Burns round the rocks, or gleams amid the shades. 225 —Glad ZEPHYR leads the train, and waves above The barbed darts, and blazing torch of Love; Reverts his smiling face, and pausing flings Soft showers of roses from aurelian wings. Delighted Fawns, in wreathes of flowers array'd, 230 With tiptoe Wood-Boys beat the chequer'd glade; Alarmed Naiads, rising into ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... cigar. She accompanied her action with a charming glance, one in which all the woman in her was uppermost, and one which made Monsieur d'Agreste's pale cheeks flush like a boy's. He was a philosopher and a scientist; but all his science and philosophy had not saved him from the barbed shafts of a certain mischievous little god. He, also, was visibly ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... portion, and (2) a pair of darts of marvellous delicacy. These darts we cannot see in position because they lie on the other side of the gouge-like piece. But to the left you will notice a long sword-like blade, drawn separately, with a curiously crooked handle and a sharp barbed point. This is one of the pair of darts. Those who have had the misfortune to be stung may be interested to know that this painful wound was inflicted thus: When the bee alighted on you, he first thrust through the skin this hard, pointed gouge; then one of the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... was mystifying and oppressive. They saw before them the beautiful country, the hills and valleys, the forest and the blue loom of the mountains, so much that appealed to the eye, and yet the horizon, looking so peaceful in the distance, was barbed with spears. Jackson was there! The sergeant's theory had become conviction with them. Distance had been nothing to him. He was at hand with a great force, and Lee with another army might fall at any time upon their flank, ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of a mile inland was the gravel road that followed the windings of Plum Run, to cut across at the wagon bridge. Two stealthy figures hurried through the woods and across the fields, to emerge on the other side of a barbed wire fence and trudge off down ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... Some call this barbed shaft Cruelty; some Superstition; some Ignorance; some Priestcraft; maybe its poison is drawn from all four; be it how it may, it is the duty of all Italians to pluck hard at the arrow of hell, so that the smile of God alone shall remain with ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... it!" said the Son of the Mist, looking after him with an air of exultation; "the barbed arrow is in thy side! Spirits of the slaughtered, rejoice! soon shall your murderers' swords be ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... are of two kinds: (a) the barbed-headed (ki pliang), and (b) the plain-headed (sop). Both are made out of bamboo. The first kind is used for hunting, the latter for archery matches only. Archery may be styled the Khasi national game. A description of ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... Perhaps they have strayed among the company? Would it not be well to summon them, that they may hear the father's instructions, and join in the song which we shall all sing as we draw near to Shiloh?" Cruel words! and they do their work. Like barbed arrows, they stick fast in the sore heart of this injured one. Her head sinks, but she utters no reply. She only draws nearer to her husband, and walks more closely ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... broad-gauge railway. On one side of it huge stacks of sleepers stretched away in long rows that were soon lost to sight in the wintry atmosphere. On the other side was a barbed wire fence. Beyond it lay flat fields on which the snow had settled evenly. In one of the fields was the dim form of a farm-building, barely visible through the rush and turmoil ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... than Methuselah because she knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of. Then he mentioned a number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by saying, "What did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?" ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... midst one day, borrowed a hole from a local rabbit, and took up his residence therein. Now this mud-pushing Todd had a cousin in the same division, one of those highly trained specialists who trickles about the country shedding coils of barbed wire and calling them "dumps"—a sapper, in short. One afternoon the sapping Todd, finding some old sheets of corrugated iron that he had neglected to dump, sent them over to his gravel-grinding cousin with his love and the request of a loan of a dozen of soda. The earth-pounding ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... not a pleasant companion as all persons know who have had any experience with it. Its needles are not only very sharp, but also finely barbed, and they penetrate and cling fast like a burr the moment that they are touched. Cowboys profess to believe that the plant has some kind of sense as they say that it jumps and takes hold of its victim before it ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... west; a seemingly endless succession of diminishing posts. He estimated that there must he at least forty thousand acres under fence. According to location, this was The Spider's ranch—the Olla—Pete reined around and rode along the fence for a mile or so, searching for a gateway; but the taut barbed wire ran on and on, toward a sun that was rounding swiftly down to the western horizon. He dismounted and pulled the staples from several lengths of wire until he had enough slack to allow the top wire to touch the ground. He stood on the wires and jockeyed Blue Smoke ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... mankind—shall he be tasked To beg of Time for mercy? Rather he Would girdle up his loins, like Baldwin be. Aged he is, but of a lineage rare; The least intrepid of the birds that dare Is not the eagle barbed. What matters age, The years but fire him with a holy rage. Though late from Palestine, he is not spent,— With age he wrestles, firm in ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... not a very great deal larger than the common British hedgehog; the quills, however, are longer and stronger, and varied with alternate clouded marks of pure white and dark brownish grey; they are minutely barbed, so that if one enters the flesh it is with difficulty extracted, but will work through of itself in an opposite direction, and can then be easily pulled out. Dogs and cattle often suffer great inconvenience from getting their muzzles filled with the quills of the porcupine, the former when ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... cloud shadow, the great Wolfhound streaked across the thirty yards of moonlit paddock which divided the camp from the ring-barked bush, and melted away among that crowded assembly of tree ghosts. The barbed wire fence of the paddock was no more than four feet high, and this Finn took in his stride, without ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... bitter pang of bereavement. As yet my flight, I was sure, was undiscovered. I could go back and be his comforter—his pride; his redeemer from misery, perhaps from ruin. Oh, that fear of his self-abandonment—far worse than my abandonment—how it goaded me! It was a barbed arrow-head in my breast; it tore me when I tried to extract it; it sickened me when remembrance thrust it farther in. Birds began singing in brake and copse: birds were faithful to their mates; birds were emblems of ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Which bears a sword Can pierce an armed man. It hurls its barbed syllables,— At once is mute again. But where it fell The saved will tell On patriotic day, Some epauletted brother ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... circumstances of the American War and the politics of the Great Rebellion. These, of course, have lost their interest with the passing away of the times which gave them birth. The points of many of the jokes have corroded, and the barbed head of many an arrow of Artemus's wit has rusted into bluntness with the decay of the bow ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... suppressed, whether in a parliamentary manner or not I am unable to say. Here we should have discussed the matter at length if it had taken us until midnight, or adjourned over until next day, "the spinsters and widows" having been the target for all our barbed arrows until ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... about to sniff at him inquiringly. Had he done so, the result would have been disastrous. He would have got a slap in the face from the porcupine's active and armed tail; and his face would have straightway been transformed into a sort of anguished pincushion, stuck full of piercing, finely barbed quills. He would have paid dear for his ignorance of woodcraft,—perhaps with the loss of an eye, or even with starvation from a quill working through into his gullet. But fortunately for him the ewe understood the peculiarities of porcupines. Just in time she noted his danger, and rudely ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... been saved by the intercession of the Virgin Mary—the word Thuin meaning in Flemish "an enclosed space, such as a garden plot," an allusion to the barrier of thorns which had so well kept the enemy away from the walls—a sort of predecessor of the barbed-wire entanglements used in ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... apparently from the snow,—nowhere touching it, the clear sky seen between it and the mountain edge, yet never leaving it—poised as a white bird hovers over its nest? Or those war clouds that gather on the horizon, dragon-crested, tongued with fire,—how is their barbed strength bridled? What bits are those they are champing with their vapourous lips, flinging off flakes of black foam? Leagued leviathans of the Sea of Heaven,—out of their nostrils goeth smoke, and their eyes are like ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... successfully practiced during his reign of terror in the coke regions. Secretly, and while peace negotiations were being purposely prolonged, Frick supervised the military preparations, the fortification of the Homestead Steel Works, the erection of a high board fence, capped with barbed wire and provided with loopholes for sharpshooters. And then, in the dead of night, he attempted to smuggle his army of hired Pinkerton thugs into Homestead, which act precipitated the terrible carnage ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... a target full and fair. Now, as always in the moment of imminent crisis, his nerves were steady, never had they been more steady, and his eyes pierced the darkness. Never before and never again did he bend so well the bow of Ulysses. The arrow, feathered and barbed, hummed through the air, going as straight and swift as a bullet to its mark, and then it pierced the throat of the wolf so deep that the barb stood out on one side and the feathers on ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... wide and florid arch, over which, cut in high relief in stone, and painted and gilded, was the sign of the inn. This was the Flying Dragon, with wings of brilliant red and gold, expanded, and its tail, pale green and gold, twisted and knotted into ever so many rings, and ending in a burnished point barbed like the dart ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... range, then another lot fifty yards on, and so on, so it was no good hurrying on, as you only came in for the next lot. Then they very nearly got us just when we had got to a hopeless-looking place—the railway, with thick fence and ditch on each side of the track and a barbed-wire fence as well, with signal wires knee high just where you expected to be able to jump down on to the track. Luckily Catley, my groom, had some wire nippers; but just as he was cutting at the wire, and we of the Brigade Staff were all standing round close ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... said, Whene'er the snow came feathering down, Four barbed steeds,—from the Bull's head, Carried thy master ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... which the Malays are very skilful. At the right time of tide, the fluid is thrown into the stream. The effect is to stupefy and sometimes kill the fish. With dip-nets the fish are picked up, though some of them are so large that they can be secured only with a kind of barbed spear." ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... Plays the light gas, or kindles into flame. If rests the traveller his weary head, Grim MANCINELLA haunts the mossy bed, Brews her black hebenon, and, stealing near, 190 Pours the curst venom in his tortured ear.— Wide o'er the mad'ning throng URTICA flings Her barbed shafts, and darts ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... the barbed end down into the hole. Down, down it went, fifteen, twenty feet, then struck with a dull thud. He began twisting the sapling over and over, then drew it slowly and gently up, but the end came into view with nothing adhering to it. Again and again was the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... fascinating sight. Few things could be finer than to see him snatch away a barbed-wire entanglement of blackberry-bushes, clutch a three-inch thorn sapling with his hairy left, and with one swing of his terrible right cut the taproot through. I had figured that it would take a month to clear away that ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... imperious in her resentments; and, when she strongly disapproved, was apt to express her censure in terms that gave a very humiliating sensation to the person against whom it was directed. Her displeasure however never assumed its severest form, but when it was barbed by disappointment. Where she expected little, she was not very rigid in ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... history weighs most heavily with me. Changed man as I am, I abhor myself in the recollection. May none who hear this tale ever have felt as I. A horse driven to fury by a rider armed with barbed spurs, was not more a slave than I to the violent tyranny of my temper. A fiend possessed my soul, irritating it to madness. I felt the voice of conscience within me; but if I yielded to it for a brief ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... savage head-hunters, the terror of all the plainsmen of no matter what origin. It is interesting to read [51] that "among other measures taken by the Japanese authorities to 'control' the aborigines was the erection of barbed wire entanglements charged with electricity," the idea being, after surrounding a savage position by these entanglements, to have the troops drive the savages upon them. Many people have refused to believe that this ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... like putting up barbed wire, not so much, I think, from any real deep-seated affection for the stuff itself, or from any confidence in the protection it affords—its disintegration being one of the assumed preliminaries of an attack—as for the satisfaction of writing in the Weekly Work Report, "In front ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... not allowed to drop at this point. Many a barbed shaft of wit-winged sarcasm was shot by the light-armed scholar against the ranks of the Reformers. "Where Lutheranism reigns," he wrote Pirckheimer, "sound learning perishes." "With disgust," he confessed to Ber, "I see the cause of Christianity ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... hill, Thrilling and horrible it rang, Around, beneath, above; The wild beast from his cavern sprang, The wild bird from her grove! Nor fear, nor joy, nor agony Were mingled in that midnight cry; But like the lion's growl of wrath, When falls that hunter in his path Whose barbed arrow, deeply set, Is rankling in his bosom yet, It told of hate, full, deep, and strong, Of vengeance kindling out of wrong; It was as if the crimes of years— The unrequited toil, the tears, The ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... over the barbed-wire fence which marked the dividing-line between the Centipede Ranch and their own, staring mournfully into a summer night such as only the far southwestern country knows. Big yellow stars hung thick ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... narrow below, broad above. Fair, flaxen, golden hair upon him, and a proper fillet around it. A brooch of silver in his mantle, and in his hand a gold-hilted sword. A shield with five golden circles upon it: a five-barbed javelin in his hand. A visage just, fair, ruddy he hath: he is also beardless. Modest-minded is ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... armour is a large target, made of the skin of an animal called Danta, which is very difficultly pierced; and their principal weapons are azagays or light darts, which they throw with great dexterity. These darts are pointed with iron, the length of a span, and barbed in different directions, so that they make dangerous wounds, and tear the flesh extremely when pulled out. They have also a Moorish weapon, much-bent like a Turkish sword or cimeter, and made of iron, without any steel, which they procure from the negroes on the river Gambia, as they either ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... with its barbed hooks was torn out of my heart; and the question then was, how the inward sanative power of youth could be brought to one's aid? I really put on the man; and the first thing instantly laid aside was the weeping and raving, which I now regarded ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... betrayed, was hardest. The whispers of her young maids of honor, "Really, Aimee, he looks so young! One would never surmise," were more galling in their intended consolation, more revealing in their betrayal of her friends' own shrinking from that arrogant, dandified old man than the barbed dart of the uncaring, inquisitive, "How do you find him, my dear? He has ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... slowly toward the fire indicated by his departed friend. As he reeled, he bethought him of the welcome his comrades would give him. He had a conviction that he would soon feel in his sore heart the barbed missiles of ridicule. He had no strength to invent a tale; he would ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... he threw his challenge down before Fate, before Germany, before barbed wire entanglements—before everything and everybody. He did not know whether they ever paroled ordinary prisoners, but he hoped they would not parole him, because then he would be bound by honor. And he did not want to be bound by honor. He kept ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... ordering us out of their territories, to the south. Seeing us, however, motionless and silent, their courage returned, and again they advanced, uttering their war cries with renewed energy. Again the spears would have been amongst us; but I, not relishing even the idea of barbed spears being stuck through my body, determined not to permit either my own or any of my party's lives to be lost for the sake of not discharging my firearms. Consequently we at length succeeded in causing a rout, and driving ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... close by the roadside, and a little higher than ourselves. The grave was marked by four short, rough posts on which was strung barbed wire; a white flag; a white cross of painted wood, very simply but neatly made; a faded wreath. We could distinguish a few words of an inscription. "Comrades, 66th Territorials..." Soldiers were buried where they fell, and this was the tomb of him who fell nearest to Paris. It marked the last homicidal ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... parting. The two sergeants—James Blaise and Roger Barlow—went to a distant part of the intricate trench system, while the two corporals, Robert Dalton and Ignace Pulinski and Sergeant Franz Schnitzel were together in a ditch near the middle of the barbed wire entanglements. And now, by a strange turn of fate, they were all together again, waiting for the final word that might send then all into eternity, or cause them to ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... brick wall dead-blank, at least twelve feet high, which ran for eighty or ninety yards along the straight line of the path. Across the canal a row of unkempt cottage gardens sloped to the water, the most of them fenced from the brink of it with decayed palings, a few with elder bushes and barbed wire to fill up the gaps, while at least two ended in moraines of old meat tins and shards of crockery. And between these containing banks wound the canal, shallow and waveless, with noisome weeds trailing on its surface afloat amid soot and iridescent patches or pools of tar. In the ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the gravel. The companies were going back to their barracks. He wanted to smile but he didn't dare. He wanted to smile because he had a pass till midnight, because in ten minutes he'd be outside the gates, outside the green fence and the sentries and the strands of barbed wire. Crunch, crunch, crunch; oh, they were so slow in getting back to the barracks and he was losing time, precious free minutes. "Hep, hep, hep," cried the sergeant, glaring down the ranks, with his aggressive bulldog ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... a straw stack loomed large within a fenced enclosure. The youth wormed his way between the barbed wires determined at last to let nothing prevent him from making a cozy bed in the deep straw beside the stack. With courage radiating from every pore he strode toward the stack. His walk was almost a swagger, for thus does youth dissemble the bravery it yearns for but does not possess. ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... coolly, with a smile, Felling a seam with utmost care, meanwhile. "The caustic tongue of Vivian Dangerfield Is barbed as ever, for my sex, this morn. Still unconvinced, no smallest point I yield. Woman I love, and trust, despite your scorn. There is some truth in what you say? Well, yes! Your statements usually hold more or less. Some women write weak letters—(some ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... to this lonely veld tavern. He watched it growing into ugly, sordid shape as the waggon drew nearer. To this horrible place, miscalled the Free State Hotel—a mere jumble of corrugated-iron buildings, wattle and mud-walled stables for horses, and a barbed-wire waggon-enclosure—he had brought his beloved at the end of their last journey together. He shuddered at ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... again with them in the boats for a short time to see them spear salmon. A man holding a large torch made of strips of resinous wood stood in the bow of the boat, and on either side of him stood an Ostjak holding a long barbed spear. In a short time there were swirls on the surface of the river. These increased till the water round the boat seemed to boil. The Ostjaks were soon at work, and in half an hour twenty fine ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... at it with nails that bit like teeth. They wound thongs about him, bound him, tied weights to him, tried to pull him down with them; but still he floated, floated, danced on the fiery waves of pain, with barbed light pouring down on him from an ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... a bag of wool. "A big herd of sheep went by this afternoon," she explained, "and they left a lot of fine wool on the barbed-wire fences. See, I have gathered enough for a pair of ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... porches and wide windows; further down the coulee, at the base of a gentle slope, were the sheds, the high, round corrals and the haystacks. Great, board gates were distributed in seemingly useless profusion, while barbed wire fences stretched away in all directions. A small creek, bordered with cottonwoods and scraggly willows, wound ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... exact, it was not the cow-puncher, who was merely a gawky, loud-mouthed and uncouth importation from a Middle Western farm, broken to ride after a fashion, to rope and brand when necessary and to wield pliers in mending barbed wire, the sort of product, in fact, that had disillusioned De Launay. It was his clothes ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... horsemen down each bank, warning farmers and townspeople against us. They did their work thoroughly, all right. The erstwhile hospitable farmers met us with the icy mit. Also, they summoned the constables when we tied up to the bank, and loosed the dogs. I know. Two of the latter caught me with a barbed-wire fence between me and the river. I was carrying two buckets of milk for the pale Vienna. I didn't damage the fence any; but we drank plebian coffee boiled with vulgar water, and it was up to me to throw my feet for another pair of trousers. ...
— The Road • Jack London
... more engineers, a lot of hand grenades, trench mortars, periscopes and tools. The barbed wire bothers me! Am specially keen about trench mortars; if it comes to close fighting on the Peninsula with its restricted area trench mortars may make up for our lack of artillery and especially of howitzers. Luckily, they ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... could not live here without the plant on their farms. Once given a chance to naturalize itself, no composite is slow in seizing it. The vigorous elecampane, rearing its fringy, yellow disks above lichen-covered stone walls in New England, the Virginia rail fence, and the rank weedy growth along barbed-wire barriers farther west, now bids fair ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... her eyes, her fine white hands were folded in her lap. There was in voice and manner an air of finality, which was as impervious as a barrier of barbed wire. Not for any bribe in the world would I have attempted ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... up. A cold hand seemed suddenly to have been placed on her heart. Joan,—it was Joan, the girl who, once before, at Martin's house, had sent the earth spinning from under her feet and put Martin suddenly behind barbed wire. What hideous trick was this of Fate's? Why was this moment the one chosen for the appearance of this girl,—his wife? ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... autumn sun that hung over the park. It seemed to her that she had never passed through them, never felt anything, never suffered anything. It seemed to her that she was curling up within herself, growing smaller and shrinking, like that withered leaf that hung upon the barbed wire of the fence, all ready to drop and be hurled down into the abyss of death by that light breath of wind. Then again it seemed to her that she was ripping to pieces, like that spider web that ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... house stretched a sloping patch of growing wheat, perhaps about thirty acres in extent. This was the real business of the homestead, and, in spite of the crazy fencing of barbed wire about it, it ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum |
