"Flax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of his dress and armour, a lion's skin and a club; and from the nature of many of his exploits, the destruction of wild beasts and robbers. This part of the history of Hercules seems to have related to times before the invention of the bow and arrow, or of spinning flax. Other stories of Hercules are perhaps of later date, and appear to be allegorical, as his conquering the river- god Achilous, and bringing Cerberus up to day light; the former might refer to his turning the course of a river, and draining ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... who think themselves the strongest and the wisest. Thou, my child, be ready to act upon the call of thy religion and country; and remember, each earthly bond which thou canst form is, compared to the ties which bind thee to them, like the loose flax to the twisted cable. Thou hast not forgot the face or form of ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... exportations consists of raw or first materials, such as flax, hemp, flax-seed, oil, tallow, leather, woad, metals, and of which to the aggregate value in 1841, of 59,773,354 silver rubles was exported; an amount nearly stationary as compared with the three previous years. But the export of Russian manufactures, viz. woollens, cottons, linens, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... interesting reasons. Just as dog, used as a prefix, expresses an idea of worthlessness to them, so toad suggests a spurious plant; the toadflax being made to bear what is meant to be an odious name because before flowering it resembles the true flax, linum, from which the ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... been remarked that Vinet praised weak things. If so, it was not from any failure in his own critical sense; it was from charity. "Quench not the smoking flax,"—to which I add, "Never give unnecessary pain." The cricket is not the nightingale; why tell him so? Throw yourself into the mind of the cricket—the process is newer and more ingenious; and it is what ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Baltimore Oriole, also called the Baltimore Bird, is a distinguished weaver. With strong stalks and hemp or flax, fastened round two forked twigs corresponding to the proposed width of nest, it makes a very delicate sort of mat, weaving into it quantities of loose tow. The form of the nest might be compared ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... is favourable to the growth of hemp, flax, tobacco, and all kinds of grain. The greater portion of the soil is rich loam, black, or mixed with reddish earth, generally to the depth of five or six feet, on a limestone bottom. The produce of corn is about sixty bushels on an average per acre, ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... lions, wolverines, wild cats, beavers, and otters. The women sometimes made theirs of fawnskins, but rabbitskin robes were far more common. These rabbitskins were tanned with the fur on, and cut into strips; then cords were made of the fiber of wild flax or yucca plants, and round these cords the strips of rabbitskin were rolled, so that they made long ropes of rabbitskin coils with a central cord of vegetal fiber; then these coils were woven in parallel strings with cross ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... Fritz platted together into very good whiplashes. I remarked, as they were working, how strong and pliant these strips seemed, and, examining them closely, I found they were composed of long fibres, or filaments, which made me suspect it to be Phormium tenax, or New Zealand flax, a most important discovery to us, and which, when I communicated it to my wife, almost overwhelmed her with joy. "Bring me all the leaves you can without delay," cried she, "and I will make you stockings, shirts, ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... silent prayer of Blessed Francis, "remember Thine ancient mercies and the promise which Thou hast made never to quench utterly the smoking flax nor wholly to break the bruised reed. Thou who wiliest not the death of the sinner, but rather that he should be converted and live, make happy the last moments ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... time came to corral the stock a new calamity was discovered. The cattle wandered into the edge of a field of flax as they neared the barn. Luther, following them, dropped from the back of his pony and stopped to examine the grain. The girl was excitedly getting the straying animals crowded on toward the pens and it was not till she had the gate shut fast on them that she ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... candle-wicks. When she came to get tea, she tied the white fleecy rolls together, a great bundle of them, and hung them up in the cellar-way, over the stairs, to be out of the way. They were extra fine wicks, being made of flax for the company candles. "I've got a good job done," said Mrs. Dorcas, surveying them complacently. Her husband had gone to Boston, and was not coming home till the next day, so she had had a nice chance to work at them, without as much ...
— The Adventures of Ann - Stories of Colonial Times • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a long while concealed a secret resolution of revenge, and could no longer hide fire in the flax, nor oil in the flame, for envy is like lightning, that will appear in the darkest fog, it chanced on a morning very early he called up certain of his servants, and went with them to the chamber of Rosader, which being ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... how fine and fair were the things which she wove in her loom! Flax, wool, silk—she worked with them all; and when they came from her hands, the cloth which she had made of them was so thin and soft and bright that men came from all parts of the world to see it. And they said that cloth so rare ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... murmur of the unreposing brooks, And the green light which, shifting overhead, 670 Some tangled bower of vines around me shed, The shells on the sea-sand, and the wild flowers, The lamp-light through the rafters cheerly spread, And on the twining flax—in life's young hours These sights and sounds did nurse my spirit's folded ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... give in exchange, most people have to be content with the earthenware cooking-pots and the cloth they can make themselves. The women draw water and prepare the food and look after the children. Then they weave flax and wool into cloth. Their dress is something like that of the poor Egyptians. The children have to herd the sheep and goats, which at night sleep in the house with their owners. The men hoe the gardens and grow the millet and barley for food, and the flax for ...
— People of Africa • Edith A. How
... leathern girdle, and a clasp of bone; And, with no artful coloring on her cheeks, His lady leave the glass. The sons I saw Of Verli and of Vecchio, well content With unrobed jerkin, and their good dames handling The spindle and the flax.... One waked to tend the cradle, hushing it With sounds that lulled the parents' infancy; Another, with her maidens, drawing off The tresses from the distaff, lectured them Old tales of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... into a room as large as a meadow where some of all the seeds in the world was stored. There were lettuce-seeds, and radish-seeds, flax-seeds and grains of rice, fine seeds of flowers and small seeds of grass, all mixed and mingled till ...
— The Story-teller • Maud Lindsay
... wont to say that his sister's accomplishments were innumerable. After only a few months on the border she could prepare the flax and weave a linsey dresscloth with admirable skill. Sometimes to humor Betty the Colonel's wife would allow her to get the dinner, and she would do it in a manner that pleased her brothers, and called forth golden praises from the cook, old Sam's wife who had been with the family ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... Teutons, or, as Mr. Latham thinks, Sclavonians with Teuton leaders, still intimately connected with our own English race both by their language and their laws, struggling for existence on the bleak brown bogs and moors, sowing a little barley and flax, feeding a few rough cattle, breeding a few great black horses; generation after generation fighting their way southward, as they exhausted the barren northern soils, or became too numerous for their marches, or found land left waste in front of them by the emigration of some Suevic, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the Alleghany. Here is a country but a little less than the size of England; its surface covered with a rich vegetable loam capable of the highest cultivation, and of producing wheat, barley, rye, Indian corn, hemp, oats, flax. Here too are mighty forests supplying woods of every kind, abounding too in wild game and venison, equal to any in England. The rivers are full of fish, oysters, and crabs in abundance. On the coast the most ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... would in the night visit farmers' houses, and help the maids to break hemp, to bolt[5], to dress flax, and to spin and do other work, for he was excellent in everything. One night he came to a farmer's house, where there was a good handsome maid: this maid having much work to do, Robin one night did help her, and in six hours ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... her seat and crossed to the picture of Millet representing a peasant girl with a distaff of flax in her hand. Fenton sat a moment looking after his betrothed, critically though fondly, then with a deliberate movement he left his seat ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... the words of the prophecy applied to his teacher: "He shall not strive, nor cry; neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory." (Matt. xii. ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... seaport of Russia, on the Dvina, near its mouth, on the White Sea, is accessible to navigation from July to October, is connected with the interior by river and canal, and has a large trade in flax, timber, tallow, and tar. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 3d, 1837. Almost in despair of ever being what I ought to be. I feel so poor in every good thing, and so amazingly rich in every bad thing. Still this little spark of love that remains, seems to hope in Him "who will not quench the smoking flax." ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... declared Mr. Carter triumphantly. "Set him at his father's heels and tell him to bring me the six articles I'm after. Then you boys flax round and get me ten new firms to advertise in the Echo and I'll sign a contract with you to print your ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... making the voyage to the Philippines, sailing whence they make a landfall on this coast. This port is sheltered from all winds * * * and is thickly settled with people, whom I found to be of gentle disposition, peaceable, and docile; * * * they have flax like that of Castile, and ...
— The March of Portola - and, The Log of the San Carlos and Original Documents - Translated and Annotated • Zoeth S. Eldredge and E. J. Molera
... come and go, and my child sickened and died, and the summer passed, and the autumn, and all the while I looked—looked—looked; for the brigs are all much alike; only his I always saw as soon as she hove in sight because he tied a hank of flax to her mizzen mast; and when he was home safe and sound I spun the hank into hose for him; that was a fancy of his, and for eleven voyages, one on another, he had never missed to tie the flax nor ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... "poor hungry fishes," while she prattled in Norsk to the sailors, who were mostly Swedes and Finns. But whether they understood her or not, they liked to watch her blue eyes sparkle, and her yellow hair fly out like freshly spun flax, as she merrily danced about the slow old jagt; and they called her "Heldig Hanne," or "happy Hanne." But they were now approaching land, and fogs set in which were more to be dreaded than high winds, and the helmsman looked anxious, and Lars could not sleep. The atmosphere seemed to get thicker ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... made than that of the foregoing species; it is likewise less deep internally. It was composed of the dry stalks of 'forget-me-not,' compactly held together by the intermixture of a quantity of moss interwoven with fine flax and seed-down, and lined with fine grass-stalks. Internal diameter 31/2 inches; external 6 inches; depth 11/2 inch, forming a flattish cup, of which the sides are about 11/2 inch thick. The depth, therefore, is less by 1 inch than in ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... no instance to match this. A year before, Joan of Arc, a low-born peasant girl, had occupied herself in tending sheep and spinning flax; her hours of leisure being given to dreams and visions. Now, clad in armor and at the head of an army, she was gazing in triumph on the flight of a hostile army, driven from its seemingly assured prey by her courage, intrepidity, and enthusiasm, while veteran soldiers obeyed ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... Whether if all the idle hands in this kingdom were employed on hemp and flax, we might not find sufficient vent ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... a salmon he swam in the River. But even for the fishes that swam beside him Loki had hatred. Out of flax and yarn he wove a net that men might have the means of taking ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... attention had been diverted from the thread of his own reminiscences by the fact that the little flax-wheel of Peninnah Penelope Anne had ceased to whirl, and the low musical monody of its whir that was wont to bear a pleasant accompaniment to the burden of his thoughts was suddenly silent. He lifted his eyes and saw that she was gazing dreamily into ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... eighteen inches long, and two and a half feet in diameter, having two hundred wrought nails with their points projecting. It is turned by a crank, like a fanning mill. The corn is held in a convenient handful, like flax on a hatchel. Where large quantities are to be cleaned of the seed, power is used to turn the machine. Ground or boiled, the seed makes good feed for most animals. Dry, it has too hard a shell. Fowls, with access to plenty of gravel, ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... there dwelt his sister Peg, Once a wild lass as ever shook a leg When the blithe bagpipe blew—but, soberer now, She DOUCELY span her flax and milk'd her cow. And whereas erst she was a needy slattern, Nor now of wealth or cleanliness a pattern, Yet once a month her house was partly swept, And once a week a plenteous board she kept. And, whereas, eke, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... Herdman, J.P., of Sion Mills, Co. Tyrone, should know something of the Irish people. The model village above-named belongs to him. Travellers to Londonderry via the Great Northern will remember how the great Herdman flax-spinning mills, with their clean, prosperous, almost palatial appearance, relieve the melancholy aspect of the peaty landscape about the Rivers Mourne and Derg. Mr. Herdman pays in wages some L30,000 a year, a sum of which the magnitude assumes colossal proportions in ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Enniscorthy will be too little for the cuts and bruises I have on me. Ah, if you only knew what I have gone through for you! When I got to the kitchen fire, looking for a sod of lighted turf, what should be there but an old woman carding flax, and you may see the marks she left on my face with the cards. I made to the room door as fast as I could, and who should I stumble over but a cobbler and his seat, and if he did not work at me with his awls and his pinchers you may call ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... dealt with lived on farms and villages where, although youthful pleasures might be frowned upon and crushed out, the young people still had a chance to find self-expression in their work. Plowing the field and spinning the flax could be carried on with a certain joyousness and vigor which the organization of modern industry too often precludes. Present industry based upon the inventions of the nineteenth century has little connection with ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... Smith of Deanston and Grey of Dilston descend on North Devon? When will some true captain of industry, and Theseus of the nineteenth century, like the late Mr. Warnes of Trimmingham, teach the people here to annihilate poor-rates by growing flax upon some of the finest flax land, and in the finest flax climate, that we have in England? The shrewd Cornishmen of Launceston and Bodmin have awakened long ago to 'the new gospel of fertility.' When will ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... doorway of her home in a sheltered dale among the hills. The birch trees were breaking out into fresh buds, the young lambs gambolled on the flowery knolls, and the air was musical with the songs of birds. Thora was considered the fairest woman in all Thrandheim. Her hair was as fair as the flax upon her spindle, and - her eyes were as blue as the clear sky above her head. Her heart was lightsome, too; for she had won the love of the great Earl Hakon—Hakon, the conqueror of the vikings of Jomsburg, the proud ruler of all Norway. It was he who had given her the gold ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... globe lamps us'd at Vauxhall have in keeping them clean, learn to have such holes in their street lamps. But, these holes being made for another purpose, viz., to communicate flame more suddenly to the wick by a little flax hanging down thro' them, the other use, of letting in air, seems not to have been thought of; and therefore, after the lamps have been lit a few hours, the streets of London are ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... of fate which makes the spinning of cotton fiber possible. There are many other short vegetable fibers, but cotton is the only one which can profitably be spun into thread. Hemp and flax, its chief vegetable competitors, are both long fibered. The individuality of the cotton fiber lies in its shape. Viewed through the microscope, the fiber is seen to be, not a hollow cylinder, but rather a flattened cylinder, shaped in cross-section ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... lake-dwellings in Switzerland were well contrived for shelter and defense. Every hut had its hearth. It is probable that most of them were furnished with a loom for weaving. Fragments of pottery are found, and flax was grown and made into cord, nettings, etc. Stalls were constructed near the huts for the ox, the goat, the horse, sheep, and pigs. The lake-dwellers cultivated wheat and barley. The Bronze Age, when implements were made of copper or of a mixture ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... plenishing of the minister's house was often furnished in the latter part of the eighteenth century by the annual "Spinning Bee." On a given day the women of the parish, each bearing her own spinning-wheel and flax, assembled at the minister's house and spun for his wife great "runs" of linen thread, which were afterward woven into linen for the use of the parson and his family. In Newbury, April 20,1768, "Young ladies met at the house of the Rev. Mr. Parsons, who ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... truly detestable set of beings; both men and women being ferocious in their appearance, and in their conversation horrible and disgusting. They have coarse, vulgar features, and hair which puts one wonderfully in mind of refuse flax, or the material of which mops are composed. Their complexions, when not obscured with grime, are rather fair than dark, evidencing that their origin is low, swinish Saxon, and not gentle Romany. Their language is the frowsiest English, interlarded ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... became subject to the influence of labour. From the clay of the ground, man manufactured the vessels which were to contain his food. Out of the fleecy covering of sheep, he made clothes for himself of many kinds; from the flax plant he drew its fibres, and made linen and cambric; from the hemp plant he made ropes and fishing nets; from the cotton pod he fabricated fustians, dimities, and calicoes. From the rags of these, or from ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... The place of offering which they chose was the spot whereon the altar of the Temple at Jerusalem stood later.[11] Abel selected the best of his flocks for his sacrifice, but Cain ate his meal first, and after he had satisfied his appetite, he offered unto God what was left over, a few grains of flax seed. As though his offense had not been great enough in offering unto God fruit of the ground which had been cursed by God![12] What wonder that his sacrifice was not received with favor! Besides, ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... stern and altered, With looks cast on the ground; With anxious faces, one by one, The women gathered round; All talk of flax, or spinning, Or work, was put away; The very children seemed afraid To ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... and wonderfully stitched of blue, white, scarlet and purple—representing the universe in its four elements—scarlet standing for fire and blue for air by their colours, and the white linen for earth and the purple for sea on account of their derivation, the one, from the flax of the earth and the other from ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... gas, pins, paper, ink, and leather, are to be taxed. It was at first proposed that wheat flour should be taxed, but that item has, I believe, been struck out of the bill in its passage through the House. All articles manufactured of cotton, wool, silk, worsted, flax, hemp, jute, India-rubber, gutta-percha, wood (?), glass, pottery wares, leather, paper, iron, steel, lead, tin, copper, zinc, brass, gold and silver, horn, ivory, bone, bristles, wholly or in part, or of other ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... in a wild state, as well as nuts and fruit. Barley was one of the cereals early discovered, and from that bread was made. Then ramie, a well-known fiber, was found in the early days of their occupation, as well as flax, and a wild species ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... Crimea of the New World—yield harvests too abundant for the commerce of native cereals to be efficaciously protected by the prohibitive system of the custom-house, in an island near the mouth of the Mississippi and the Delaware. Analogous difficulties oppose the cultivation of flax, hemp, and the vine. Possibly the inhabitants of Cuba are themselves ignorant of the fact that, in the first years of the conquest by the Spaniards, wine was made in their island of wild grapes.* (* De muchas parras monteses con ubas ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... of troops below the hill now—infantry of the line trudging along the dusty road in fairly good order, and below the vineyard, among the uncut fields of flax, more infantry crouched, probably supporting the three-gun battery ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... wine, cordials, and physic; you built your own house, made your own roads, fenced your own lands, contrived your own plows, wains, wagons, wheelbarrows, and all manner of tools. But much more than that. You grew your own hemp, had your own ropewalk, twisted your own twine; you grew your flax and wove your linen; you tanned and dressed your own leather, cut and spun your own wool, made, no doubt, your own clothes. Indeed, you stood four-square to fate in Tusser's time; and in that particular, as well as in another which I must speak ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... considerable thickness, technically over one inch in circumference. Ropes are made of hemp, manila, flax, cotton or other vegetable fiber or of iron, steel or other metallic wire. A rope is sometimes called a line. They are composed of threads which are spun or twisted into strands and the finished ropes have special names, according to the number of the strands, ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... flax plant (Linum usitatissimum) is grown in India solely for the sake of the linseed. Linen is never made, and the stalk of the plant, as ordinarily grown, is too short for the manufacture of fibre. The attempts to introduce flax manufacture into India, though not ultimately successful, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the muffled roar of two organs. It is the Gloria in Excelsis. As the music rolls down the pillared nave out into the crowded piazza, where it dies away in harmonious murmurs, an iron cresset, suspended from the vaulted ceiling of the nave, filled with a bundle of flax, is fired. The flax blazes for a moment, then passes away in a shower of glittering sparks that glitter upon the inlaid floor. Sic transit gloria mundi is the motto. (Now the lighting of this flax is a special privilege accorded to the ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... he passed through a village of flax-weavers whose settlements lay in the low flatts that bordered the rushing river Rawthey a mile or two ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... through the wilderness from infant Kentucky to Mother Virginia. Along the way a pleasant reminder of an almost forgotten past is that of the Wilderness Road Weavers busy at loom and wheel. They process cloth from wool and flax before your eyes and explain with care the art of making homemade dyes from herb and bark. An older woman pauses with shuttle in hand. "See the hollow tree off yonder, a mother and her babe hid there to escape the Indians. And the cabin over there with the picketin' fence around, that's ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... accomplished were as astonishing to us as to the Rebels, who would have lain unsheltered upon the sand until bleached out like field-rotted flax, before thinking to protect themselves in this way. As our village was approaching completion, the Rebel Sergeant who called the roll entered. He was very odd-looking. The cervical muscles were distorted in such a way as to suggest ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... for a brighter sphere; but vot can one do, cooped up at home without men of henergy for companions? No prospect of improvement either; for I left our old gentleman alarmingly well just now, pulling about the flax and tow, as though his dinner depended upon his exertions. I think if the women would let me alone, I might have some chance, but it worries a man of sensibility and refinement to have them always tormenting of one.—I've no objection to be led, but, dash my buttons, I von't be driven." "Certainly ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... statements of ancient writers. At the famous ball at the Hotel de Saint Pol in Paris, in 1393, King Charles VI. and five noblemen were dressed in close-fitting suits of linen, thickly covered from head to foot with tow or flax, the colour of hair, so as to look like "savages." In this attire nobody recognized them, and the Duke of Orleans, in his eagerness to make out who they were, brought a torch too near, so that the ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... said that she had been sitting too near the fire, and had burnt all the flax that was upon ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... for?" And she answered: "Do what I tell you! Never mind what it's for—that's my business!" So the old man made a straw ox and smeared him over with pitch. Then his wife got ready in the early morning and drove the ox to pasture. She sat down under a tree, and began spinning flax and saying to herself: "Feed, feed, ox, on the fresh green grass. Feed, feed, ox, on the fresh green grass!" And she went on spinning and spinning, and fell asleep. Suddenly from out of the thick wood, from out of the dark forest, a bear came running, and ran right up against ...
— More Russian Picture Tales • Valery Carrick
... productive spots for his plantations. When he desired muslin, calico, and camel's-hair shawls for his family, he put his finger on India; and when he called for those great staples of commerce, indigo, saltpetre, jute, flax, and linseed, India sent them at his bidding. When he required coffee, he found Ceylon a Spice Island, and at his demand it furnished him with an annual supply of sixty millions of pounds. He required more sugar for his coffee, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... they mounted the ladder. This was about seven o'clock, which was then as late an hour as it was thought that respectable people ought to be about. But by two o'clock the next morning, Bertha was sweeping the kitchen, and Avice carding flax in the corner. They did not trouble themselves about breakfast; it was an unknown luxury, except for people who were very old or very delicate. Two meals a day were the rule: dinner, at nine in the morning: supper, at three in the afternoon. In those days they lived in a ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... he lurked in the Oldtown fen, Or the gray earth-flax of the Devil's Den, Or swam in the wooded Artichoke, Or coiled by the Northman's Written Rock, Nothing on record is left to show; Only the fact that he lived, we know, And left the cast of a "double head" In the scaly mask which he yearly shed. For he carried a head where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... winter wear and to fill the sledges with warmth and comfort when the northwest wind freezes the snow to fine dust and the aurora borealis moves in stately possession, like an army of spear-men, across the northern sky. The harvests of the colonists, the corn, the wool, the flax; the timber, enough to build whole navies, and mighty pines fit to mast the tallest admiral, were stored upon the wharves and in the warehouses of the Bourgeois upon the banks of the St. Lawrence, with iron ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... lifted out of Tempe, Swung like a censer betwixt the earth and sky! He who in Greece sang of flocks and flax and hemp,—he Here might recall ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... revenue; a considerable sum was expected from stamps; and three per cent. was exacted from all annual incomes over six hundred dollars and less than ten thousand, and five per cent.—afterwards increased to ten per cent.—on all incomes exceeding ten thousand dollars. Manufactures of cotton, wool, flax, hemp, iron, steel, wood, stone, earth, and every other material were taxed three per cent. Banks, insurance and railroad companies, telegraph companies, and all other corporations were made to pay tribute. The butcher paid thirty cents for every beef slaughtered, ten cents for every ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... of that has been the means of bringing out a wonderful study, that is explained by the nature of the soil itself. In every country certain sections will spontaneously produce product alike, in almost every essential quality. Thus, flax, for instance, is found, identical in its character, in Kamscatska, and in Minnesota; in the Siberian wilds and in Central America; on the heights of the Himalayas, and in the lowest plains ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... up to the ranges, which sweep away to run together into a high hill called Marahemo, about three miles behind us. The little eminence, on which stands the shanty, slopes down on the left to a flat, where originally flax and rushes did most abound. Through this flat a small creek has channelled a number of little ponds and branches on its way to the ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... these advantages; such as those who may be possessed of the Missisippi, or by the Germans, Russians, Turks, &c. who have plenty of lands, and labour cheap: by which means they make more of our staple of North America, tobacco, than we do ourselves; while we cannot make their staple of hemp, flax, iron, pot-ash, &c. By that means our people are obliged to interfere with their mother country, for want of the use of those lands of which there is such plenty in North America, to produce these commodities that are so ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... The flax plant grows spontaneously, and may, with the assistance of proper implements and other necessaries, be ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... potato, and supplied their place with the parsnip, cole, and rape. Garlic, radishes, and lettuce were widely used, the former being valued in proportion to its power of overcoming any other odour. Flax seems to have been widely grown, and rushlights were then ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... also a considerable production of hemp, flax, and tobacco, but not for export in any large quantity. The tobacco grown in the colony was coarse and ill-flavored. It was smoked by both the habitant and the Indian because it was cheap; but Brazilian tobacco was greatly preferred by those who ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... of these cabins were the poorest habitations that can be imagined; and these were given rent free, that is, the rent was to be worked out on whatever days, or on whatever occasions, it was called for. The grazing for the cow, the patch of land for flax, and the ridge or ridges of potato land were also to be paid for in days' labour in the same manner. The uncertainty of this tenure at will, that is, at the pleasure of the landlord, with the rent in labour and time, ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... Abraham! I sell neither hops, nor eider-down, nor honey, nor wax, nor hemp-seed, nor salt meat, nor caviare, nor wood, nor wool, nor ribbons, nor, hemp, nor flax, nor morocco, nor furs." ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... Diaz's "Storm" and "Autumn Scene in the Forest of Fontainebleau"; Rousseau's "Le Givre"; Decamps's "Suicide"; Daubigny's large "Sunset on the Coast of France"; Delacroix's "Christ on the Cross"; and Millet's "Breaking Flax." One of the finest Millets I have ever seen is here, lent by Mr. Walters. This is the "Sheepfold at Night," which with several others of Mr. Walters's paintings here shown, was in the exhibition of "One Hundred Masterpieces" held at Paris in 1883. In its foreground a line of sheep pass ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... turning quickly to fetch another armful from the heap, when her grandfather stopped her. "Wait a moment," he said, and he climbed down the ladder again and went towards his bed. He returned to the loft with a large, thick sack, made of flax, which he threw down, exclaiming, "There, that is better ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... island, where they had found the Prince's arms, trees so large that they had never seen the like, for among them was one which was 108 palms round at the foot. Yet this tree, the famous baobab, was not much higher than a walnut; "of its fibre they make good thread for sewing, which burns like flax; its fruit is like a gourd and its kernels like chestnuts." And so, we are told, all the captains put back along the coast, in a mind to enter the aforesaid River of Nile, but one of the caravels getting separated from the rest ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... into the idea seriously," Joan Peters returned. Her head was bent over the square frame she held in her lap, her fingers busy with the strands of flax. "Miss Frean comes to camp every few evenings and reads aloud to us. She insists that we are too frivolous in our own summer reading and wishes to read us something ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... little furnace before her, roasting chestnuts. Grandmother, a wrinkled old woman, with a red handkerchief wound about her head, was a chestnut merchant. The sailors, children, and Italians coming over the border bought her wares, and when she was not employed in serving them she twisted flax on a distaff. ...
— Harper's Young People, September 28, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... those of China. The cotton of Japan seems to be of the same kind as that of our West Indian colonies. It furnishes the ordinary dress of the great mass of the people, and also serves all the other purposes for which we employ wool, flax, furs, and feathers. The culture of it is, of course, very extensive; but the fabrics are all coarse: Golownin could hardly make himself believe that his muslin cravat was of this material. There is some hemp, which is manufactured into cloth for sails, &c.; but cables and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... and collided with the rug again, which I threw in the fire. Mrs. McWilliams sprang out of bed and rescued it and we had some words. I had another trifling interval of sleep, and then got up, by request, and constructed a flax-seed poultice. This was placed upon the child's breast and left there to do ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... manner until I reached the cabin of my father, when she bid me good night and departed. I entered the cabin and found my father, who was bent with age, sitting by the great fire-place, mending his nets. My mother was at her wheel, spinning flax. She was a tidy little body, of the old school. Her notions of the world in general were somewhat narrow and antiquated; while the steeple-crown cap she wore on her head so jauntily, and her apron of snow-white muslin, that hung so neatly over ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... turning them out and eating up their riches. "They had a great quantity of cotton cloths, and they held their markets in the open squares, where they traded. They had a manufactory where they made cordage of a sort of nequen, which is like carded flax; the cord was beautiful and stronger than that of Spain, and their cotton canvas was excellent. The Indians were very civilised in their way of life, like those of Mexico, for they were a people who had come from that country, and they had ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... rearing of calves; and every farmer was, under a penalty of 6s. 8d. (about L3 of our currency), compelled to rear all his calves for a period of three years; and in the 24th Henry VIII. the act was further continued for two years. The culture of flax and hemp was also encouraged by legislation. The 24th Henry VIII., cap. 14, requires every person occupying land apt for tillage, to sow a quarter of an acre of flax or hemp for every sixty acres of land, under a penalty ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... Jermyn Street, and went with Mr. Goodenough to Silver's, where an outfit suited for the climate of Central Africa was ordered. The clothes were simple. Shirts made of thin soft flannel, knickerbockers and Norfolk jackets of tough New Zealand flax, with gaiters of the ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... seem to be stepping from a door or window that opens on a trim and beautiful garden, where mulberry-tree is married to mulberry by festoons of vines, and where the maize and sunflower stand together in rows between patches of flax and hemp. But it is not in order to survey the union of well-ordered husbandry with the civilities of ancient city-life that we break the journey at Parma between Milan and Bologna. We are attracted rather by the fame of one great painter, whose work, though it may be studied piecemeal in ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... he is," said Grushenka, taking Mitya up to him. "I was combing his hair just now; his hair's like flax, and ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... eyes as the fairy-flax, Her cheeks like the dawn of day, And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds That ope ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... sisters of mercy: a dress which leaves scope for a certain refinement rather contradicted by the physical appearance of the women themselves. Men and women, in fact, belong for the most part to the peasantry, and pass their simple lives labouring in the fields, beating out flax, cultivating their little gardens, so that such an official as the gravedigger becomes an important personage amongst them. We came across him, at his melancholy work, but could make no more of him than we made of the people of Roscoff. He understood no word of ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... 1862. "Thus," he concluded, "it is that even in Lancashire and other manufacturing districts no open demonstration has been made against the blockade[676]." Manufactures other than cotton were greatly prospering, in particular those of woollen, flax, and iron. And the theory that the cotton lords were not, in reality, hit by the blockade—perhaps profited by it—was bruited even during the war. Blackwood's Magazine, October, 1864, held this view, while the Morning Post of May 16, 1864, went to the extent of describing the "glut" of ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... panel itself and the bolt too offered such resistance that I could not open the door; so I had to cut into the wood; yet in the end I got it open, and shouldering the strips of linen which I had rolled up like bundles of flax upon two sticks, I went forth and directed my steps towards the latrines of the keep. Spying from within two tiles upon the roof, I was able at once to clamber up with ease. I wore a white doublet with a pair of white hose and a pair of half boots, into which ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... pretty little frocks, the boys went off together. They simply had to think of something, and it would never do to copy the girls. They came back later with the quaintest little breeches, made out of broad flax leaves, stitched together with the points downwards. It was clever of the boys! They had also stuck some of the red-brown flowers in their hair. The girls were vexed that they hadn't thought of that, but they went one better. They made strings of the scarlet nikau berries and hung ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke
... soil near the river is good, and produces a luxuriant growth of grass and weeds; among these productions the sunflower holds a very distinguished place. For several days past we have observed a species of flax in the low grounds, the leaf-stem and pericarp of which resemble those of the flax commonly cultivated in the United States: the stem rises to the height of two and a half or three feet, and spring to the number of eight ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... of a wand, they all stop short and listen. The sun is behind them, low and calm, there is not a breath of wind to stir their flax, not even the feather of a last year's bloom has moved, unless they moved it. Yet signal of peril has passed among them; they curve their soft ears for the sound of it, and open their sensitive nostrils, and pat upon the ground with one little foot to encourage themselves against ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... formerly sent over seas to fetch Lace from Flanders.' At this time the lace trade flourished greatly, although there was always a difficulty in competing with Belgium, because of the superiority of its silky flax, finer than any spun in England. Later the workers fell on evil days, for during the American War there was little money to spend on luxuries; and, besides, about this time the fashion of wearing much lace came to an end. In 1816 the introduction of 'machine ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... that when he first received them he hid them until the next day in a rotten birch log, bringing them home wrapped in his linen frock under his arm.* Later, she says, he hid them in a hole dug in the hearth of their house, and again in a pile of flax in a cooper shop; Willard Chase's daughter almost found them once by means of a peek-stone ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... chalk-brush in hand move about the platform at the base of this blackboard, catching the quotations from the clicking instruments and altering the figures on the board to keep pace with the changing information. A glance at this great blackboard will furnish the latest quotations on wheat, oats, barley, flax, corn, etc., ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... as play compared with the home manufacture of dry goods. Ralph, Jack and Jim had no time for such work, so two other men were all winter kept busy in the barn at "crackling flax" and afterward passing it through a coarse hetchel to separate the coarsest or "swingling tow." After this the flax was made up into switches or "heads" like those which we see in pictures, or that which Faust's Marguerite so temptingly wields. These were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... which, in the original state, it is too strong. The rich meadows by the side of the rivers, (more especially such as are annually overflowed,) are ready without farther preparation, for tobacco, hemp, and flax. The lower meadows, and meadows adjoining Beaver dams, which are abundant, produce at this moment enormous quantities of natural hay and pasture; and the rest of the land, for the production of potatoes, Indian corn, wheat, and other grain, is at least equal, if not superior, ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... and hopeless progeny of crime: one, which could never recompense the outlay of the crown, either by its vigour or its gratitude. The projects entertained, in connection with commerce, were the growth of flax and the supply of naval timber, both of which had been reported by Cook as indigenous to Norfolk Island. "When viewed in a commercial light," Captain Tench observes (writing in 1789), "the insignificance of the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... holy faith, Thank God, we've the original in keeping, We have his hand and seal to it—we - And I shall lead him easily to think How very dangerous for the state it is Not to believe. All civic bonds divide, Like flax fire-touched, where subjects don't believe. Away ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... a time, near a castle in a lonely wood, there lived an orphan maiden named Olga. She would have been all alone in the world had it not been for an old woman who befriended her. This woman was an old flax-spinner, and lived in a humble thatched cottage near the castle. She had taken pity on Olga when the little orphan was a helpless baby, and so kind had she always been that Olga had grown to maidenhood without feeling the lack ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... She began by coaxing the Captain and smiling upon him in her most winning way, as she helped to arrange his dinner and set his humble apartment in order. She was sure his linen wanted mending (and indeed the Captain's linen-closet contained some curious specimens of manufactured flax and cotton). She would mend his shirts—all his shirts. What horrid holes—what funny holes! She put her little face through one of them, and laughed at the old warrior in the most winning manner. ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Jendrek[1] minds the cows and performs strange antics meanwhile to amuse himself. If you look more closely you will also find the eight-year-old Stasiek[2] with hair as white as flax, who roams through the ravines or sits under the lonely pine on the hill and looks ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... had given to her, as curiosities, two of the large nets which the Indian women use for carrying all sorts of burdens. They are woven out of the fibres of a flax-like plant, and are strong as iron. The meshes being large, they are very light; are gathered at each end, and fastened to a band which goes around the forehead. In these can be carried on the back, with comparative ease, heavier loads than could be lifted ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... might have excited mirth. His body was encased in a kind of basket from which his head, arms, and legs protruded, giving him the appearance of a gigantic insect. To the top of the basket, or tamgky, to give it its native name, was attached a rope of flax, the end of which had been thrown over a branch of one of the trees to the height of about forty feet from the ground. By command of Ackbau, a file of warriors now began to pull upon this rope, when the victim was drawn up to the branch over his head, where Melannie told me he would ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... the oath. But he could find not one. Then, disguised as a fair maiden, he went to Fensal Hall, where dwelt Balder's mother. The fair Asa-queen was busy at her distaff, with her golden spindles, spinning flax to be woven into fine linen for the gods. And her maid-servant, Fulla of the flowing hair, sat on a stool beside her. When the queen saw Loki, ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... destruction of numerous forests, and had even assisted in laying waste the country. But one night an avalanche had buried a hamlet from which only one living soul had escaped, and that was a young child—a mere sprig of a girl, with hair like the flax and eyes like its flowers, a little, timid, crying child—whom B.B. had actually taken in his arms and carried all the way out of the woods, over the mountains, and finally into Frozen Nose's own palace by the ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... is severed as flax that falls asunder at the touch of fire. Let the lot of bitter poverty be mine, and the hand of man blight every hope of earthly enjoyment, and I would prefer it to the condition of any man who lives at ease, and shares in ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... were of cotton and hemp, or mallow, resembling flax. The older Egyptians never knew silks in any form, nor did the Israelites, nor any of the ancients. The earliest account of this material is given by Aristotle (fourth century). It was brought into Western Europe from ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... but as it rises it becomes more and more steep, until it terminates in a broken summit. Imagine it divided, as the eye ascends, into three regions or belts: the first and lowest is covered with villages, gardens, vineyards, olive-groves, oranges, and fields of grain and flax, and the date-bearing palm. The second region, which commences about four thousand feet above the sea, is called the Regione Sylvosa, or woody region. Here chestnuts, hexes, and on the north pines of great size flourish. This belt reaches to the elevation of about seven thousand feet, where ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... those only, and those that grow upon churchyard graves, are serviceable, remember that. Those you must pluck, though they will burn your hands into blisters. Break these nettles to pieces with your feet, and you will have flax; of this you must plait and weave eleven shirts of mail with long sleeves: throw these over the eleven swans, and the charm will be broken. But recollect well, from the moment you begin this work until it is finished, even though it should ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... those of any other State. The Wheat crop of 1861 was estimated at 35,000,000 bushels, while the Corn crop yields not less than 140,000,000 bushels besides the crop of Oats, Barley, Rye, Buckwheat, Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Pumpkins, Squashes, Flax, Hemp, Peas, Clover, Cabbage, Beets, Tobacco, Sorgheim, Grapes, Peaches, Apples, &c., which go to swell the vast aggregate of production in this fertile region. Over Four Million tons of produce were sent out the State of Illinois during the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... they wanted from the Western races; while these Western races had at least one article which they could barter for the much-prized jade implements, viz. linen cloth, the weaving of which was practised in the oldest settlements, hanks of unspun flax and thread, nets and cloth of the same material having been found not ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... sweet peas, sweet alyssum, morning glories, larkspurs, canary flowers, cucumber-leaved sunflowers, verbenas, petunias, corn flower, Drummond phlox, double and single poppies, snapdragons, Phacelia, Gilia, Clarkia, candytuft, red flax, tassel flowers, blue Anchusa, Gaillardia, and a multitude besides of seasonable annuals, which can all be raised quite easily without a frame or green-house, and what excuse has any farmer for having a flowerless ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... colours ready—red, yellow, and blue—all in powders ground up so fine that it was necessary to shut out the breeze which came in at the window, Alfred learned how the monk made his brushes, by taking a tuft of badger's hair and tying up one end carefully with a very fine thread of flax. ...
— The King's Sons • George Manville Fenn
... I've humped logs on the selection, "burning-off," with loads of fencing-posts and rails and palings out of steep, rugged gullies (and was happier then, perhaps); I've carried a shovel, crowbar, heavy "rammer," a dozen insulators on an average (strung round my shoulders with raw flax)-to say nothing of soldiering kit, tucker-bag, billy and climbing spurs—all day on a telegraph line in rough country in New Zealand, and in places where a man had to manage his load with one hand and help himself climb with the other; and I've helped hump and drag telegraph-poles ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... is pained, My soul is sick with every day's report Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled. There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart, It does not feel for man. The natural bond Of brotherhood is severed as the flax That falls asunder at the touch of fire. He finds his fellow guilty of a skin Not coloured like his own, and having power To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey. Lands ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... exceeding large countries adjoining, there is nothing which our east and northerly countries of Europe do yield, but the like also may be made in them as plentifully, by time and industry; namely, resin, pitch, tar, soap-ashes, deal-board, masts for ships, hides, furs, flax, hemp, corn, cables, cordage, linen cloth, metals, and many more. All which the countries will afford, and the soil is apt to yield. The trees for the most in those south parts are fir-trees, pine, and cypress, all yielding gum ...
— Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage to Newfoundland • Edward Hayes
... into the town, sabre in hand." (Moniteur (in Hist. Parl. vii. 29).) Ought not a National Assembly to occupy itself with these objects? Military France is everywhere full of sour inflammatory humour, which exhales itself fuliginously, this way or that: a whole continent of smoking flax; which, blown on here or there by any angry wind, might so easily start into a blaze, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of rooms will be abolished sooner or later in Paris, for no one will afford to live in the great houses built by our forefathers. What a disgrace for our age if none of its books should last! Dutch paper—that is, paper made from flax—will be quite unobtainable in ten years' time. Well, your brother told me of this idea of your father's, this plan for using vegetable fibre in paper-making, so you see that if I succeed, you have a ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... him. The aunt, two sisters, and as many of the others, including the children, as were within sight or hail at the time—most of them could not by any possible means have had the slightest connection with the business in hand—accompanied the teacher to the cottage. August took to the flax directly she caught sight of her relations, and was with difficulty induced to return. There was a lot of talk in Maori, during which the girl and her aunt shuffled and swung round at the back of each other, and each talked over her shoulder, and laughed foolishly and awkwardly ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... from the sea and the lochs, and I was able sometimes to add to the general stock of provisions by the aid of my gun. The feathers and oil from the wild sea fowl I shot were sold or bartered for other commodities; and the wool of the few sheep we kept, and the flax we grew, were helpful in supplying us ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... Scottish, however, it is old in this sense, so that it is an example of a dialect word that has risen late in life. Its southern form hatchell is common in Mid. English in its proper sense of "teasing" hemp or flax, and the metaphor is exactly the same. Tease, earlier toose, means to pluck or pull to pieces, hence the name teasel for the thistle used by wool-carders. The older form is seen in the derivative tousle, the family name Tozer, and the dog's name Towser. Feckless, a common Scottish ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... Lambourne; "why, thy limber bit of a thigh, thrust through that bunch of slashed buckram and tiffany, shows like a housewife's distaff when the flax is half spun off!" ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... over, Agnes took her distaff, wound with shining white flax, and went and seated herself in her favorite place, on the low parapet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... round their firesides. Christmas arrived with it games and carol-singing. Then came the Feast of Lovers, called the Buscou,{4} on the last day of the year, where, in a large chamber, some hundred distaffs were turning, and boys and girls, with nimble fingers, were winding thread of the finest flax. Franconnette was there, and appointed queen of the games. After the winding was over, the songs and dances began to the music of a tambourin. The queen, admired by all, sang and danced ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... lesson for snobbish young ladies, who would think it lowerin' to hem a napkin! What would they think to tackle 'em in the flax? And then there wuz a hat made by England's Queen, and gin to her grand-daughter; and there wuz six pictures painted by her, original sketches from nater. One view wuz from the Queen's own ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... the capacity and sure future destiny of that plain and prairie area (larger than any European kingdom) it is the inexhaustible land of wheat, maize, wool, flax, coal, iron, beef and pork, butter and cheese, apples and grapes—land of ten million virgin farms—to the eye at present wild and unproductive—yet experts say that upon it when irrigated may easily ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of firelight in the windows of the nearest house. It was Tom Daly's house. They could see Tom's shadow as he sat at his loom, weaving flax into beautiful white linen cloth. They could hear the clack! clack! of his loom. It made the Twins feel much safer to hear this sound and see Tom's shadow, for Tom was a friend of theirs, and they often went into his house and watched him weave ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... products, lead and zinc smelting, electronics (including military electronics), trucks, electric power equipment, wood products, textiles, chemicals, machine tools Agriculture: dominated by stock breeding (sheep and cattle) and dairy farming; main crops are potatoes, hops, hemp, and flax; although self-sufficient and having an export surplus in these commodities, Slovenia must import many other agricultural products and has a negative overall trade balance in this sector Illicit drugs: ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... beard as white as snow, All flax-en was his poll; He's gone, he's gone, And we cast away moan; God ha' ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... it," Dame Alianora replied. "That man we passed just now I killed. Those other men and women—my folly slew them all. And little children, my Osmund! The hair like flax, blood-dabbled!" ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... nothing there inside, mother, But wool and thread and flax, And bits of faded silk and velvet And ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... for an immediate illustration of the products of the business toward which he was hastening I might have taken him by the arm and led him across two sets of tracks and shown him men in the prime of life who were hatcheled like flax, and mauled like blocks, and riddled like sieves, and macerated out of the living image of ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... employment, to which the attention of the fair has been directed from the remotest times. Specimens of Egyptian network, performed three thousand years since, are still in existence; and, from that time, the art, in connection with that of spinning flax, was there carried to its highest state of perfection. With these specimens, are preserved some of the needles anciently used in netting. They are to be found in one of the museums at Berlin. The Egyptian nets were made of flax, and ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... months without working, and you will corrupt him for ever, so inured to rags and vagrancy will he grow. And what is the good of that piece of pasture there—of that piece on the further side of those huts? It is a mere flooded tract. Were it mine, I should put it under flax, and clear five thousand roubles, or else sow it with turnips, and clear, perhaps, four thousand. And see how the rye is drooping, and nearly laid. As for wheat, I am pretty sure that he has not sown any. Look, too, at those ravines! Were they mine, they would be standing under timber which ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... other natives of the wood and hedgerow, such as the purple bugloss, the yellow iris, the star thistle, the common mallow; and, a convolvulus which was brilliantly pink, in contrast to his white brother before- mentioned. Besides these, Nellie had also gathered some sprays of the "toad flax" and "blue succory," a relative of the "endive" tribe, which produces the chicory-root so much consumed in England, as in France, as a "substitute" for coffee. A splendid sprig of yellow broom and dear little ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... and within fifteen days of their first acquaintance they were bound together as friends and partners. Altotas, in the course of a long life devoted to alchymy, had stumbled upon some valuable discoveries in chemistry, one of which was an ingredient for improving the manufacture of flax, and imparting to goods of that material a gloss and softness almost equal to silk. Balsamo gave him the good advice to leave the philosopher's stone for the present undiscovered, and make gold out of their flax. The advice was taken, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... their collars they wear about their bodies like bandeliers a handful broad, all hollow pieces like the other, but somewhat shorter, four hundred pieces in a collar, very fine and evenly set together." He adds: "I am persuaded they have great store (of flax) growing upon the main, as also mines and many other rich commodities, which we, wanting time, ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... Joe ran away from Palermo, and went to Messina. Here he said he fell in with a venerable humbug, named Athlotas, an "Armenian Sage," who united his talents with Beppo's own, in making a peculiar preparation of flax and hemp and passing it off upon the people of Alexandria, in Egypt, as a new kind of silk. This feat made not only a sensation but plenty of money; and the two swindlers now traversed Greece, Turkey, and Arabia, in various directions, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... heavy sands to Keene, where we dined, and whence the road up the valley to the Keene Flats becomes firmer and less tedious. The way was bordered by rich fields of grass and grain, potatoes in abundance, flax in pale azure flower, and acres blue with the beautiful campanula or harebell. At the inn in Keene we met our rebellious friend Spart, who, having tired of his chase, had returned to his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sun was sinking we were led at once to a very beautiful tent made of woven flax and ornamented as I have described, where we found food made ready for us in plenty, milk in bowls and the flesh of sheep and oxen boiled and roasted. Bes, however, was taken to a place apart, which made Karema even more angry than she ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... Linum usitatissimum (Cooper's capitalization varies) is the botanical name for the variety of flax from which ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... arrangements for irrigation appearing much more modern and unsystematic here than in Lombardy. The land is cultivated in strips as in France—first Wheat (the great staple), then Rye, then Potatoes, then Clover, then Beets, or Hemp, or Flax, and so on. For a small part of the way, Grass seems to preponderate, but generally Wheat and Rye cover more than half the ground, while Potatoes have a very large breadth of it. Rye is now being harvested, and is quite heavy: in fact, all the crops promise abundant harvests. ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... hampered there would now be four Ulsters instead of one. Even in the days before restrictions were placed on the production of Irish linen for the better encouragement of the English trade, the North of Ireland was far ahead of the rest of the country in the matter of flax-spinning, and this pre-eminence was mainly due to the fact that the climate there is more suited to that plant than in ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... husbands that loved France better than Italy. One kept awake to tend her child in its cradle, lulling it with the household words that had fondled her own infancy. Another, as she sat in the midst of her family, drawing the flax from the distaff, told them stories of Troy, and Fiesole, and Rome. It would have been as great a wonder, then, to see such a woman as Cianghella, or such a man as Lapo Salterello, as it would now be to meet with a Cincinnatus or ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Though younger than himself full twenty years. 80 She was a woman of a stirring life, Whose heart was in her house: two wheels she had Of antique form; this large, for spinning wool; That small, for flax; and if one wheel had rest, It was because the other was at work. 85 The Pair had but one inmate in their house, An only Child, who had been born to them When Michael, telling o'er his years, began To deem that he was old,—in shepherd's phrase, With one foot in ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... himself, but it had been told him two years before by his uncle, who was mate of a ship that traded to the North Sea. "The ship," said he, "was the John and Thomas, named after the owner's two brothers, and bound to Stockholm for flax and iron. One day they were becalmed near the Island of Oland, and let go the anchor in twelve-fathoms water, when soon afterwards they saw, as they supposed, two men swimming towards the ship. They soon after came alongside, and made signs for a rope to be thrown to ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... all good housewives described by the prudent mother of King Lemuel, it should be said of the emigrant's wife, "She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff." "She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands." "She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... territory, and with exceptional advantages as to custom dues and admiralty jurisdiction. As an inducement to accept the king's offer the citizens were assured that the country was well watered and suitable for breeding cattle; it grew hemp and flax better than elsewhere; it was well stocked with game and had excellent sea and river fisheries, and it contained such abundance of provisions as not only to supply the plantation, but also assist towards the ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... Scotland for felts, hides, and wool in the fleece; and with Prussia, High Germany, and the east countries for beer, bacon, almond, copper, bow-staves, steel, wax, pelt ware, pitch, tar, peats, flax, cotton, thread, fustian, canvas, cards, buckram, silver plate, silver ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... crops, ruin under the name of improvements and methods; in short, mortgaged lands as the inevitable result of experiments. To her, prudence was the true method of making your fortune; good management consisted in filling your granaries with wheat, rye, and flax, and waiting for a rise at the risk of being called a monopolist, and clinging to those grain-sacks obstinately. By singular chance she had often made lucky sales which confirmed her principles. She was thought to be maliciously clever, but ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... proper carrying on methods and surroundings absolutely destructive to health. In all preparation of hemp and oakum dust is excessive; far beyond that of the cotton-mill, which itself breeds consumption. In the spinning of flax great heat and water are both necessities. "Nothing is more wretched," writes Jules Simon, "than a linen-spinner's surroundings. Water covers the brick floor. The odor of the linen and a temperature often exceeding ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... sat in her tall chair in the chimney corner, her distaff, with its load of flax in her hand, while she twisted and drew out the thread, and her spindle danced on the floor. Opposite to her sat, sleeping in his chair, Sir Eric de Centeville; Osmond was on a low bench within the chimney corner, ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unthought of, by us at least, and the navigation of the Mississippi was carried on in small boats that could be drawn up along the river bank by means of oars, spikes, poles, and hooks. The articles most in demand were axes, hoes, cotton cards, hatchels for cleaning flax, hemp and cotton, spinning wheels, knives, and ammunition, guns, and bar shears for plows. In exchange for such goods the people traded beef, hides, furs, tallow, beeswax, and honey. Money was not needed or used by anyone - everything was trade ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... this time Mr. Auburn Risque, packed away in the omnibus train, with a cheap cigar between his lips, and a face like a refrigerator, was scudding over the rolling provinces of France, thinking as little of the sunshine, and the harvesters of flax, and the turning leaves of the woods, and the chateaux overawing the thatched little villages, as if the train were his mail-coach, and France were Arkansas, and he were lashing the rump of the "off" horse, as he had done for the better part ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... the mother of this maiden, nine bushels of flax were sown therein, and none has yet sprung up, neither white nor black; and I have the measure by me still. I require to have the flax to sow in the new land yonder, that when it grows up it may make a white wimple for my daughter's head, ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... should be sold to the Trustees' agent at 15 shillings per 1,000, two-thirds of the price to be applied on their debt, and one-third to be paid them in cash. Moreover several English boys should be apprenticed to them to learn the trade. Hemp and flax seed should also be given them, and he urged them to weave the linen, for they had men who understood the art, and cloth was scarce and dear in Georgia. He also advised them to buy oxen to use in cultivating ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... andirons, and a carved mantel carried to the ceiling. It was both baronial and colonial in its decoration; there was part of a suit of imitation armour under a pair of moose antlers on one wall, and at one side of the fireplace there was a spinning-wheel, with a tuft of flax ready to be spun. There were Japanese swords on the lowest mantel-shelf, together with fans and vases; a long old flint-lock musket stretched across the panel above. Mr. Brandreth began to show things ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... in England, increase and decrease according to the higher or lower price of corn during the preceding year. (Tooke, Thoughts and Details, III, 105 ff.) The cotton famine after 1861 increased the price of flax-yarn in a short time fifty per cent., although the raw material of flax did not rise in price, but only because care was not taken to increase the number of flax-spinners. (Ausland, I, 1865.) However, there were in 1864, 490,000 flax-machine spindles in course ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher |
