"Sickle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that the storm had washed out the bridges on either side of them and the roadway had been closed to traffic. They sat peering into the darkness like Columbus looking for land and wondering why no one came along to whom they could appeal for a tow into the village. The moon shone, a slender sickle in the west that Gladys said reminded her of the thin slices of melon they used to serve for ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... dull animal, yet in reality he is very active and bright, and when at home displays his marvellous genius in many ways! His upturned hands become powerful shovels, and by the aid of an extra bone, the sickle, which belongs to the inside of the thumb, he is enabled to work like an athlete. His velvet-like hair stands straight up, like the pile on velvet, and his tiny eyes are so hidden by hair that they do not get injured. ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... conspicuous gifts of Unionism to Ireland have been, as all the world knows, poverty and police. Soon after 1830, that is to say when the first harvest of government from Westminster was ripe to the sickle, Irish destitution had assumed what politicians call men-acing proportions. One person in every three of the population never had any other alimentary experience than the difference between hunger and starvation. In these circumstances a Royal Commission was appointed to consider the advisability ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... cave Where young Apollo prophet first became, Verona, Mantua were not sole in fame, But Florence, too, her poet now might have: But since the waters of that spring no more Enrich my land, needs must that I pursue Some other planet, and, with sickle new, Reap from my field of sticks and thorns its store. Dried is the olive: elsewhere turn'd the stream Whose source from famed Parnassus was derived. Whereby of yore it throve in best esteem. Me fortune thus, or fault perchance, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... pricking the ribs of the pale horse. His parchment-like skin betrayed the lines and hollows of his skeleton. The front of his skull-like face was twisted with the sardonic laugh of destruction. His cane-like arms were whirling aloft a gigantic sickle. From his angular shoulders was hanging a ragged, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... little I asked the Ghurka to show me his knife, but he would not. The Ghurka knife is a weapon of wonderful grace. It is short and sharpened on both edges, while it is broad and curved almost to the angle of a sickle. It is used in a flat sweeping movement, which, when wielded by an expert, severs a limb or a head at one blow. I was told that at twenty yards, when they throw it, ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... we see the same perfect adaptation of their construction to their peculiar wants which is found throughout the whole animal creation. This is beautifully exhibited in the sickle-bill, which is occasionally found in Bogota. Its bill is very short and sharply curved, in order that it may enter the short, curved flowers of that region. It is generally of a duller hue than most of its tribe. Its head and small crest are blackish-brown, each feather having a spot of buff ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... her their fairest tints for dye, But ever through her twirling thread There spires one strand of warmest red, Tinged from the homestead's genial heart, The stamp and warrant of her art; With this Time's sickle she outwears, And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... then push back the soil with the foot. One weeding alone is required before the grain comes to maturity. This simple process represents all our subsoil plowing, liming, manuring, and harrowing, for in four months after planting a good crop is ready for the sickle, and has been known to yield a hundred-fold. It flourished still more at Zumbo. No irrigation is required, because here there are gentle rains, almost like mist, in winter, which go by the name of "wheat-showers", and are unknown in the interior, where no winter ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... burst from the multitude below as the red-robed priest drew from beneath his garments a sickle-shaped knife that glittered evilly in the light of the flaming suns. Still chanting, he stooped and quickly made a deep incision over the heart of the victim. While a piercing, agonized shriek ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... Ecce Homo. There was also a rude crucifix, from which I gather that this is a Roman Catholic family. There were two teapots of tea on a chair, a big tub of pommeloes on the floor, and a glazed red earthenware bowl full of ripe bananas on another chair. A sort of sickle, a gun, and some bullock gear hung against the wall. In the middle of the room there was a sort of trap in the floor, and there was the same in two other apartments. Through this all rubbish is conveniently dropped. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... instance, the wife of Lot was cut off as in a moment: she was ripe for the sickle, and justice delayed not to gather her into the storehouse of wrath; she cumbered the ground by her impieties, and was worthy of no additional cultivation. Here we behold an awful specimen of the obstinacy of sinners, the effect of disobedience, and the determination of God, in a visible ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... person appears in it. Let the end come as it may, here I am ready to profit by it: here I am, facing both ways, with perfect ease and security—a moral agriculturist, with his eye on two crops at once, and his swindler's sickle ready for ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... twice, for no obvious reason, he drew aside the tent flap and looked out. The sky was cloudless and darkly blue, and a sickle moon gleamed in it, keen and clear with frost. Below, the hills were washed in silver, majestic, but utterly cheerless; and lower still the serrated tops of the rigid firs cut against the dreary whiteness. After each glimpse ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... splinters of jasper, which at first did not seem very well adapted to any purpose; and yet, although mere fragments, they had every appearance of having been purposely shaped, and not of accidental resemblances to a hook or sickle blade. When I got home I read that perfect specimens, mine being certain pieces of the same form, had been found off in Norway; and Professor Nilsson, who has carefully studied the whole subject, says they are fish-hooks made of flint, the largest being bone. Hooks of exactly the same ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... had risen again and was driving dark masses of cloud across the sky; in the west a sullen red flared up from behind the hills, touching the lower edges of the vaporous mountains with purple. In a small, clear space above the red hung the silver sickle of the new moon, and near it shone a single star.... Lydia was like that star, he told himself—as wonderful, ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... splendid determination. "It was the onset of battle," said a Federal officer present, "with the good order of a review." But the iron hail of grape and canister, laying the ripe wheat low as if it had been cut with a sickle, and tossing the shocks in air, rent the advancing lines from end to end. Hundreds fell, hundreds swarmed back to the woods, but still the brigades pressed on, and through the smoke of battle the waving colours led the charge. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the imagination that, the wrong thing being done, an inward good would result, and it does not; for even if the immediate object be secured, other results, all unforeseen, force themselves on us which spoil the hoped for good. The sickle cuts down tares as well as wheat, and the reaper's hands are filled with poisonous growths as well as with corn. There is a revulsion of feeling from the thing that before the sin was done attracted. The hideous story of the sin of David's son, Amnon, puts in ugliest ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bowed the woods beneath ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... its bosom,—that we are so unwilling to reap corruption in our bodies, and yet we are so earnest and laborious in sowing to the flesh. Be not deceived, for you are daily reaping what you have sown. And, O! that it were all the harvest; but death is only the putting in of the sickle of vengeance, the first cut of it: but, O! to think on what follows, would certainly restrain men, and cool them in their fervent pursuits ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... foot festered, and had not yet healed when the sickle was first put to the barley. He hobbled out, however, to the reapers, for he could not bear to be left alone with his violin, so dreadfully oppressive was the knowledge that he could not use it after its nature. He began to think whether his incapacity was not a judgment upon him for taking it away ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... vintage, admits no augmentation of terror. "And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat, like unto the Son of Man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle. And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice, to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle and reap: For the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe. And he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth, ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... again. But after a time he got up deliberately and trotted down to the encircling line of old courtyarded tombs. There were nooks and crannies between and behind these along the wall into which the caretaker could not penetrate with sickle, rake and spade, that ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... preach on the ugliness of the demon, prayed God that a devil be shown him in order to fight. It happened that a poor, old woman was passing who was dumb from birth, was very ugly and poorly dressed, and had sickle in her hand. The lad, thinking that she was the devil, furiously assailed her, and taking away her sickle, cut off her hands, her ears, and her nose. The afflicted woman shouted but as she was dumb ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... The cows are kept up for the greater part of the year, and every green thing is collected for them. Every little nook where the grass prows by roadside, and river, and brook, is carefully cut with the sickle, and carried home, on the heads of women and children, in baskets, or tied in large cloths. Nothing of any kind that can possibly be made of any use is lost. Weeds, nettles, nay, the very goose-grass which covers ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... are fickle, That love is sorrow, that life is care; And the reaper Death, with its shining sickle, Gathers ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... abounds in the elements of poetical excitement, awaiting; only fit utterance. The harvest is rich and ripe—and nothing now is wanting but laborers to put in the sickle. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... a stroll up to the Eperquerie in the cool of the gloaming, and showed him more shooting stars than ever he had seen in his life, and a silver sickle of a moon, and a western sky still smouldering with the afterglow of a crimson and amber sunset, and he acknowledged that, from some points of view, Sark had advantages over ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... ages, lost in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy chronicles: Such, whose supine felicity but makes In story chasms, in epoch's mistakes; O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down, Till, with his silent sickle, they are mown. 110 Such is not Charles' too, too active age, Which, govern'd by the wild distemper'd rage Of some black star infecting all the skies, Made him at his own cost, like Adam, wise. Tremble, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Van Sickle. Riverside reader, 2nd. (Adapted.) Compare with Little red hen in Blaisdell. Child life, in tale and fable. 2nd reader. Lansing. Rhymes and stories. Treadwell. ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... reminds me of an anecdote appropriate to the topic, in that very entertaining book, Dean Ramsay's "Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character." At one time when the crops were much laid by continuous rains, and wind was earnestly desired in order to restore them to a condition fit for the sickle,—"A minister," he says, "in his Sabbath services expressed their wants in prayer, as follows: 'O Lord, we pray thee to send us wind, no a rantin' tantin,' tearin' wind, but a noohin', (noughin?) soughin', winnin' wind.'" In like manner, I have heard of a prayer preferred by ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... lazy ages lost in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy chronicles; Such whose supine felicity but makes In story chasms, in epochas mistakes, O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down, Till with his silent sickle they ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... times; he became, in turn, baker, carpenter, forester, and farm-labourer. He appeared to have little affection for his mother and still less for his father, with whom he had come to blows on one occasion. At the age of twenty, in a quarrel with some companions, one of them struck him with a sickle and fractured his skull. He had been convicted several times of ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... their plain home-made cheese. Yet when the meal Was ended, Luke (for so the Son was named) And his old Father both betook themselves To such convenient work as might employ 105 Their hands by the fireside; perhaps to card Wool for the Housewife's spindle, or repair Some injury done to sickle, flail, or scythe, Or other ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... picturesque blue dress (save white, no other colour is worn in summer by the country-people) working in the fields. Their implements are rude and primitive enough. The plough is simply a sharpened stick covered with iron. The sickle is used for reaping. Threshing is done by means of an axle with thin iron wheels. If such primitive means can attain such satisfactory results, what could not modern agricultural science be made ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... while on the east it is separated from Chango-khang by the Chachoo, which cuts a deep east and west trench along the base of Kinchinjhow, and then turns south to the Tunguchoo. The course of the Chachoo, where it turns south, is most curious: it meanders in sickle-shaped curves along the marshy bottom of an old lake-bed, with steep shelving sides, 500 to 600 feet deep, and covered with juniper bushes.* [These, which grow on an eastern exposure, exist at a ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... nest Told of the love that broods o'er every living thing. He watched the shepherd bring His flock at sundown to the welcome fold, The fisherman at daybreak fling His net across the waters gray and cold, And all day long the patient reaper swing His curving sickle through the harvest-gold. So through the world the foot-path way he trod, Drawing the air of heaven in every breath; And in the evening sacrifice of death Beneath the open sky he gave his soul to God. Him will I trust, and for my Master take; Him will I follow; ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... of red (top) and black with a centered yellow emblem consisting of a five-pointed star within half a cogwheel crossed by a machete (in the style of a hammer and sickle) ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... see their fourteen stones, and thou, alas, Who from thy misery wouldst gladly pass To death, dost kiss the tombs, O wretched one, Where lies thy fruit so cruelly undone. Thus blossoms fall where some keen sickle passes And so, when rain doth level them, green grasses. What hope canst thou yet harbor in thee? Why Dost thou not drive thy sorrow hence and die? And thy swift arrows, Phoebus, what do they? And thine unerring bow, Diana? Slay Her, ye avenging gods, if not in rage, Then out of ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... hundred or a hundred and fifty nights and place ten or twenty thousand dollars in the writer's purse. His original poverty kept him poor. He could not afford to wait until the seed he had sown had grown and ripened for the sickle; so he fell into the hands of usurers, who purchased the crop while it was yet green, and made the harvest yield them profits of fifty or seventy-five ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... right hand stole to my hip, a short sharp bark, and the treacherous cacique fell over with a crimson stain on his forehead. At the same moment a weird, uncanny yelp pierced the night, and a tremendous shaggy phantom cloud obscured the slender sickle of the moon. Terrified, the Indians screamed "El Perro! El Perro de la Malinche!" and shrilly the voices of frightened squaws took up the refrain, "Perro! ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... that it has had much effect since, though an excellent little book by Mr. Ramakrishna on the village life of South India is a step in the right direction. We want, however, quite a small library of works of that kind before the harvest that is ready for the sickle of intelligent native observers is gathered in.—The Right Hon. Sir M.E. Grant Duff, ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna
... 5 Behold, the field was ripe, and blessed are ye, for ye did thrust in the sickle, and did reap with your might, yea, all the day long did ye labor; and behold the number of your sheaves! And they shall be gathered into the garners, that they ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... be just as reactionary in the political world as it would be in the industrial world to revert back to hand-tool production; to substitute the ox-team for the railway system, the hand-loom for the power-loom, the flail for the threshing-machine, the sickle for the modern harvesting-machine, the human courier for the ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... [4:27]and sleeps and wakes, night and day, and the seed germinates, and grows he knows not how. [4:28]The earth produces spontaneously, first the stalk, then the head, then the full wheat in the head. [4:29]And when the wheat delivers itself, he immediately sends out the sickle, because the harvest has come. [4:30]And he said, To what shall I liken the kingdom of God? or with what parable shall I present it? [4:31]It is like a mustard seed, which when sown in the earth is the least of all seeds on the earth; ...
— The New Testament • Various
... now will I accuse thee of the seeds thou hast sown: the harvest is gathered and the sickle is broken. Abjure thy dark Galdra [95], and turn as I to the sole light in the future, which shines from the tomb ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... driving, with his right arm extended, four white horses at a gallop; and Ceres, in a chariot drawn by oxen, is advancing towards him with a sickle in her hand. ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... seen. Any farmer, on viewing it, would have said that Jason must wait weeks before the green blades would peep from among the clods, and whole months before the yellow grain would be ripened for the sickle. But by and by, all over the field, there was something that glistened in the moonbeams like sparkling drops of dew. These bright objects sprouted higher and proved to be the steel heads of spears. Then there was a dazzling gleam from a vast ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... his chosen vessel, refers to the harvest of the tare class, saying, "The harvest of the earth is ripe. And he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth; and the earth was reaped." (Revelation 14:15,16) This gathering of the elements of Christendom, the vine of the earth, and the reaping of it for destruction, is now in progress. It is one feature of the Lord's work, which proves his ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... peasants, there are many picturesque aspects of rural life. The driving of large herds of cattle by mounted men, armed with long goads, is an interesting as well as an artistic sight, and the same may be said of the primitive agricultural occupations. The crops are harvested with a sickle, and you may wake up some morning to see the field opposite your house invaded by some twenty to thirty reapers, men and women, boys and girls, patiently sawing their way through the wheat or barley, ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... Sickle moon just hiding in a red cloud, and the morning stars just vanished in light. But we've had nearly three weeks of dark weather, so we mustn't think it poor ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... clouds came a light, a dull copper glow, without rays, high up where the stars were; it set golden edges to the hem of the clouds; the heaven remained black. There appeared a little streak of glowing copper, which grew and grew, became a sickle, a half-disk and at last a great, round, giant gold moon, which rose and rose. It went up like a huge round orange behind the heaven and, more and more swiftly, shot up into the sky, growing smaller and smaller, till it ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... peoples, to the region of the good, green grass. She is the true grazing animal. That broad, smooth, always dewy nose of hers is just the suggestion of green sward. She caresses the grass; she sweeps off the ends of the leaves; she reaps it with the soft sickle of her tongue. She crops close, but she does not bruise or devour the turf like the horse. She is the sward's best friend, and will make it thick and ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... safe!" said he, with an arrogant little air of satisfaction. "I was born under an indolent star, but I confess to you, privately, of the two I would rather gather my harvests with the sickle than the sword. How does ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... king, Polydectes, who sought to marry Danae; failing in his suit, and to compel her to submission, he ordered Perseus off to fetch him the head of the Medusa; who, aided by Hermes and Athena, was successful in his mission, cut off the head of the Medusa with the help of a mirror and sickle, brought it away with him in a pouch, and after delivering and marrying Andromeda in his return journey, exposed the head before Polydectes and court at a banquet, which turned them all into stone, whereupon he gave the Gorgon's head to Athena to place on her shield, and set out for Argos; Acrisius ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... era differed somewhat in its appliances, but the philosophy of it was pretty much the same as it is now. Oxen were occasionally used for team labour and were shod like horses; wheat was universally reaped with a sickle, and as universally threshed with a flail, the bent figure of the wheat-barn tasker being a familiar object in the "big old barn with its gloomy bays and the moss upon the thatch." An honest pride he took in his work and has found a fit memorial in the delightful Sketches of ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... in the poderi, you will hear the rispetti and stornelli of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sung perhaps by some love-sick peasant girl among the olives from sunrise till evening falls. And the ancient ways are not forgotten there, for they still reap with the sickle and sing to the beat of the flail; while the land itself, those places "full of nimble air, in a laughing country of sweet and lovely views, where there is always fresh water, and everything is healthy and pure," of which Leon Alberti tells ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... according to what he's afraid of, Monsieur Louis. Give me a good sickle and a good cudgel, and I'm not afraid of a wolf; give me a good gun and I'm not afraid of any man, even if I knew ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... weeks. When a noise like the brushing skirt of a visitor was heard on the doorstep, it proved to be a scudding leaf; when a carriage seemed to be nearing the door, it was her father grinding his sickle on the stone in the garden for his favourite relaxation of trimming the box-tree borders to the plots. A sound like luggage thrown down from the coach was a gun far away at sea; and what looked like a tall man by the gate at dusk was ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... cobwebs, which neither sun nor step of man had yet dispelled. There were the smell of the straw, the cawing of the rooks in the glen, the hissing to the breeze of the barley still standing, the swish of the scythe and the gling of the sickle, the bending and rising of the shearers, the swaying of the binders dragging the sheaves, the gluck of the wheels of the cart, the merry head of a child peeping out of a stook like a young bird out of the broken egg, and a girl in scarlet, whom Philip recognised, ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... a woman of 60 years of age, being seized by some soldiers, they ordered her to say a prayer to some saints, which she refusing, they thrust a sickle into her belly, ripped her up, and then cut ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... had arrived. Then the war-cry rang out, and with one splendid dash the Zulus were amongst the densest mass of their foes. Nothing could withstand the fury of their onslaught and the Makalakas tell under their spears like corn to the sickle. ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... red, within marked by transverse calcareous ridges, supporting in part the calcareous system of the capillitium; capillitium of delicate, rigid, reticulating yellow tubules or threads with numerous free, uncinate or sickle-shaped branchlets, and large, irregular, calcareous plates, more or less transverse to the axis of the sporangium, attached to the peridial walls, as if to form septa, ordinary calcareous nodules few; spore-mass jet-black, spores, by transmitted light, violaceous, minutely roughened, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... Romans before Gamala and, with his followers, burned their camp one night and well nigh destroyed them; and how, when he goes into the fight, the Roman javelins drop off without harming him; and how, when he strikes, the Romans fall before his blows like wheat before a sickle." ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... these instruments was the strigilla or scraper, bent like a sickle and hollowed in a sort of channel. With this the slave curried the bather's body. The poor people of that country who bathed in the time of the Romans—they have not kept up the custom—and who had no strigillarii at their service, rubbed themselves against the wall. ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... fancifully was intended to illustrate the dealings of Providence in ordering the earthly destiny of humanity. "So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground and the seed should grow up; but when the fruit is ripe he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come." Men are seed sown in this world to ripen and be harvested in another. The figure, taken on the scale of the human race and the whole earth, is sublime. Whether such an image were originally suggested by the parable or not, the conception is consistent with Christian ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... passed, what a view presents itself! The long perspective of the bay, the densely wooded hills and lower slopes teeming with agricultural produce, rich corn-fields, ripe for the sickle; picturesque dwellings, hid in shadowy foliage, and flowers and fruit trees, to which the purity and rarity of the atmosphere lend a brilliancy of colouring and distinctness of outline, impossible to describe; the clear blue water, with here ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... for play! Gait, dress, domicile, furniture, throughout all his poetry, are Scottish as their dialect; and sometimes, in the pride of his heart, he rejoices by such nationality to provoke some alien's smile. The sickle, the scythe, and the flail, the spade, the mattock, and the hoe, have been taken up more cheerfully by many a toil-worn cottar, because of the poetry with which Burns has invested the very implements of labour. Now and then, too, here and there peals forth ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... his blade on bucklers, South went through the land to whet Brand that oft hath felled his foeman, 'Gainst the forge which foams with song;[48] Mighty wielder of war's sickle Made his sword's avenging edge Hard on hero's helm-prop rattle,[49] Skull of ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... adopt a similar line of conduct: the officer turns his sword into a ploughshare, and his lance into a sickle; and if he be seen ploughing among the stumps in his own field, or chopping trees on his own land, no one thinks less of his dignity, or considers him less of a gentleman, than when he appeared upon parade in all the pride of military etiquette, with sash, sword and epaulette. Surely this is as ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... knowing at all how this should be—he feels The great bare barrenness o' the outside world. He thinks on Time and what it has to say; He thinks on God, but God has changed His hand, Sitting afar. And as the moon draws on To cover the day-king in his eclipse, And thin the last fine sickle of light, till all Be gone, so fares ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... bride-seat, and, with eyes fixed in horror, watched the waxing of the war. Near to her stood Swanhild, marking all things with a fierce-set face, and calling down curses on her folk, who one and all cried "Eric! Eric!" and swept the thralls of Ospakar as corn is swept of the sickle. ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... and manure freely, but in the spring finding the appearance of his crop unequal to that guanoed, he gave it a top dressing of fine manure and a good working with the harrow. At harvest the guanoed portion was ready for the sickle several days earlier than the other, and yielded 135 bushels of a quality so very superior, it was all reserved for seed ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... disappeared half a hundred years before. She had gone out to look for herbs in the forest, and there had never been any more news of her afterwards, except that, three or four days later, some woodcutters who were descending the mountain had found her sickle and her apron a few steps ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... human step The fierce hyena frighted from the walls Bristled his rising back, his teeth unsheathed, Drew the long growl and with slow foot retired. Yet were remaining some of ancient race, And ancient arts were now their sole delight: With Time's first sickle they had marked the hour When at their incantation would the Moon Start back, and shuddering shed blue blasted light. The rifted rays they gathered, and immersed In potent portion of that wondrous wave, Which, hearing ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... life pleasanter than that in which serene old age reviews the exploits and the prodigies of boyhood. Ah, my gay fellows, harvest your crops diligently, that your barns and granaries be full when your arms are no longer able to wield the sickle! ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... of all noble talent; such exigent and hungry need of the true teacher, statesman, seer,—of the word of inspiration and the act of leadership! How shall one who feels in him the power and sees the need; who grasps in his hand the keen sickle, yet is held back, while before his eyes the fields are white with the harvest which threatens, unreaped, to perish,—how shall he reconcile himself to his lot? How escape the thought that he and all mankind are but playthings in the grasp of cruel ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... flutterer's folded mail, Clings the cooled wax, and hardens to a scale. Swift, at the well known call, the ready train, (For not a buz boon Nature breathes in vain,) Spring to each falling flake, and bear along Their glossy burdens to the builder throng. These with sharp sickle or with sharper tooth, Pare each excrescence, and each angle smooth, Till now, in finish'd pride, two radiant rows Of snow white cells one mutual base disclose. Six shining panels gird each polish'd round, The door's fine rim, with waxen fillet bound, While walls so ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... short chase and a merry one. Two birds rose from the heather and flew screaming, skimming low, as from behind them moved on the shadows of death, still as clouds, with great noiseless sweeps of sickle-shaped wings. Behind came the gallopers; Marjorie on her black horse, Robin on Cecily, seeming to compete, yet each content if either won, each, maybe—or at least Marjorie—desiring that the other should win. And the wind screamed past them as ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... needn't tell you how important that is. There is one man, old General Van Sickle, who has had considerable training in these matters. He's ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... or the stacks when it was ready; but there were no patent rakes or mowing or reaping machines for them to draw. All the wheat, and a good deal of the other grain, was cut down with the old-fashioned hook or sickle, the reapers stooping low to their work. It was tedious and exhausting labour, and slow, too. Shenac's "faculty" and perfect health stood her in good stead at this work as at other things. She tired herself thoroughly every day, but she was young and strong; and though the summer nights ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... the wheat in this locality. That consists of cutting it with the sickle and having the women and children glean. The main crop is scattered on the floor, as it is called, being a hard piece of ground near the house, and then the wheat is treaded out by a pair of donkeys attached to a roller about as big as our ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... one of the octagonal compartments towards the quay, at the foot of which are seen two children; the one armed with a sickle, the other leaning ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... For example, you, as the female dancer will come upon the stage, with a distaff, twirling it, or with a pail to draw water; or with a spade for digging. Your companion will come next perhaps driving a wheel-barrow, or with a sickle to mow corn, or with a pipe a-smoaking; and though the scene should be a saloon, no matter, it will come soon to be filled with rustics or sailors. Your companion to be sure will not have seen you, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... who ploughed and sowed and reaped, and if, as happened occasionally, it was needful to get the work done quickly, the brownie called in some of his friends, and as soon as it was light a host of little dwarfs might have been seen in the fields, busy with hoe, fork or sickle. But by the time the people were about all was finished, and the little ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... the three mast-heads. The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Sea! whose ancient ripples lie On red-ribbed sands where seaweeds shone; O moon! whose golden sickle's gone, O voices all! like ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... mistress, this woven crown, beautifully made up of flowers of the pure untouched meadow—where never shepherd thinks it fitting to feed his flock, nor the sickle comes; but the bee ever passes over the pure meadow breathing of spring, and modesty waters it as a garden with the river-dews. To them who have, untaught, in their nature the gift of chastity, to these only it is at all times an allowed sanctity to cut these flowers, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... what was properly her keel, a hole was bored. The end of the hook was inserted from the outside, and Charley, on the inside, screwed the nut on tightly. As it stood complete, the hook projected over a foot beneath the bottom of the schooner. Its curve was something like the curve of a sickle, but deeper. ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... the hill-tops, and poured their murderous fire into our advancing ranks. It would seem impossible that men could stand, much less advance, under such a galling fire. They were mowed down as wheat before the sickle, but they faltered not. The vacant places of the fallen were instantly filled, and inch by inch they gained the heights of Vicksburg. When the precipice was too steep for the horses to draw up the artillery, our brave boys did the work themselves, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... meadow shadowed by the trees of a wood. It is bordered with the cool green of brake fern, from which a rabbit has come forth to feed, and a pheasant strolls along with a mind, perhaps, to the barley yonder. Or a foxglove lifts its purple spire; or woodbine crowns the bushes. The sickle has gone over, and the poppies which grew so thick a while ago in the corn no longer glow like a scarlet cloak thrown on the ground. But red spots in waste places and by the ways are where they have escaped ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... dark night, with a few lonely stars in mid-heaven, a sickle moon cutting the horizon cloud-rim and a noisy March wind that boded snow from The Labrador, or ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... contrast with the old days of household economies, the days of the ox-chain, the sickle, and the leach-tub. All of these, some happily and some unhappily, have been swept away by the besom of Progress. But in any case life was too serious in those days for effeminate luxury, or for aught but proper pride in defending ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... went whistling up the road toward the new house with sickle, hoe and trowel. As he passed the Kelso cabin he whistled the tune of Sweet Nightingale. It had haunted his mind since he had heard it in the woods. He whistled as loudly as ever he could and looked at the windows. Before he had passed Bim's face ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... and the last gleam of a sickly twilight rapidly faded. A keen, damp, north-east wind swept over the earth; thin, black, ragged clouds flitted before it, like uneasy ghosts. A stray star twinkled here and there in the firmament, and the sickle-shaped moon hung in the west. But the light of those pale luminaries was wan and fitful. They seemed to be aware of the hopelessness of their struggle, and to mourn in anticipation of the moment when they should faint in fight, and unrelieved darkness should lord it over ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... helmet and wallet, and armed with a sickle, the gift of Hermes, he attached to his feet the winged sandals, and flew to the abode of the Gorgons, whom he found fast asleep. Now as Perseus had been warned by his celestial guides that whoever looked upon these weird sisters would be transformed into stone, he stood with ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... appear doubly so. Not since the plains of middle India had we seen anything forming so fine a rural picture as this. Though it was only the last of February the clover fields were being mowed, and a second crop would follow; the barley and wheat were nearly ready for the sickle, while the peas and beans, both in full blossom, were picturesque and fragrant. As we progressed through this attractive region the pastures became alive with sheep, goats, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... gave up her place to the children. Her expression was noble, like a queen rebuked before her people. There was comfort in that, too. A great, solemn, mutual understanding drew this death-bed group together. Within the sickle's compass so they stood: the woman God gave this man to found a home; the son who inherited his father's gentleness and purity of purpose; the fair flower of the generations that father's sacrifice had helped him win; the bud of promise on the topmost bough. Those astonished ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... go in and have tea with Bobby and Alice. It was quite late when he got there, and stars were in a sky that was so delicate in colour that it seemed as though it were exhausted by the glorious day that it had had; a little sickle moon was poised above ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... bower, my bonnie May, When autumn's yellow fields, That wave like seas o' gowd, before The glancin' sickle yields; When ilka bough is bent wi' fruit— A glorious sight to see!— And showers o' leaves, red, rustling, sweep Out owre the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... hill-top, the sky had turned from blue to saffron and from saffron to grey. The plaintive voices of homing cows floated up to him from the valley below. A bat had left its shelter and was wheeling around him, a sinister blot against the sky. A sickle moon gleamed over the trees. George felt cold. He turned. The shadows of night wrapped him round, and little things in the hedgerows chirped and chittered mockery at him as he stumbled down ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the back-ground of the picture, the coasts of Lancerota presented a more smiling aspect. In a narrow pass between two hills, crowned with scattered tufts of trees, marks of cultivation were visible. The last rays of the sun gilded the corn ready for the sickle. Even the desert is animated wherever we can discover a trace of ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... clouds. Here the camp was pitched and a tent run up with the oars, sails, and mast. And here Amalu, at no man's bidding, from the mere instinct of habitual service, built a fire and cooked a meal. Night was come, and the stars and the silver sickle of new moon beamed overhead, before the meal was ready. The cold sea shone about them, and the fire glowed in their faces, as they ate. Tommy had opened his case, and the brown sherry went the round; but it was long before ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne |
