"Scythe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to-day, and the fleece of a sheep often weighed less than two ounces. Farm implements were few and clumsy. The wooden ploughs only scratched the ground. Harrowing was done with a hand implement little better than a large rake. Grain was cut with a sickle, and grass was mown with a scythe. It took five men a day to reap and bind the harvest of ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... unfavorable, on moves that were not safe to make. He then saw a dagger lying on the checker-board, an object belonging to his father, but transferred to the checker-board by his phantasy. Then a sickle was lying on the board; next a scythe was added; and, finally, he beheld the likeness of an old peasant mowing the grass in front of the boy's distant parental home. A few days later I discovered the meaning of this series of pictures. Disagreeable family relations had made the boy ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... void time had wrought in the circle of his friends. He held the fort silently, while the long scythe cut another swathe very near him. He heard that his friend, James Anthony Froude, who had been lying ill in Devonshire, was ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... to vast age no illness knew, Till Time's scythe, waiting for him, rusty grew. He lived and wrought; his labors were immense, But ne'er declined to ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... no appeal to souls in the modern sense. The effect aimed at is that of horror, of solemn preparation for the advent of death, as by one who fears, in the flutter of mortality, to lose some peculiarity of the skeleton, some jag of the vast crooked scythe of the spectre. The most ingenious of poets, the most subtle of divines, whose life had been spent in examining Man in the crucible of his own alchemist fancy, seems anxious to preserve to the very last his powers of unflinching spiritual observation. The Dean of St. Paul's, whose reputation ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... done, my men. You see, I lead the field! I'm an old man, but I can swing a scythe Better than most of you, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... as the opportunity for service. Never mind about the future, let it take care of itself. Work! That clears away cobwebs from our brains, as when a man wakes from troubled dreams, to hear 'the sweep of scythe in morning dew,' and the shout of the peasant as he trudges to his task, and the lowing of the cattle, and the clink of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... cried the gardener, letting his hand slide down to Scarlett's biceps, "why, you haven't got the muscle in your arm to handle a scythe, let alone a sword to ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... here's a bloody hand to shake, And oh, man, here's good-bye; We'll sweat no more on scythe and rake, ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... to me, now, one day as I was a mowin' of the grass in the court, close by the white horse that spout up the water high as a house from his nose-drills? Says he to me—for he come down the grand staircase, and steps out and spies me at the work with my old scythe, and come across to me, and says he, "Why, Thomas," says he, not knowin' of my name, "Why, Thomas," says he, "you look like old Time himself a mowing of us all down," says he. "For sure, my lord," says I, "your ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... on the withdrawal of the barbarians, had still an empire to rule, and he may be supposed to have commenced some attempts at re-organizing and re-invigorating the governmental system to which the domination of the Scythe must have given a rude shock. But he had not time to effect much. In B.C. 626 he died, after a reign of forty-two years, and was succeeded by his son, Asshur-emid-ilin, whom the Greeks called Saracus. Of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... beautiful Macmonie's Fountain at the other, its Goddess of Liberty seated aloft in her chair on the deck of her bark, erect and beautiful, with her eight maiden gondoliers plying the oars at the sides, while old Father Time steered the vessel, his scythe fastened to the tiller, Fame as a trumpet-herald stood on the prow with her trumpet in her hand, while in the gushing waters below sported the tritons with their plunging horses, the terraced fountain still lower with its clouds ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... the flourish set on youth, And delves the parallels in beauty's brow; Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth, And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... on the contrary, the plateau would reel and roll like a ship in a storm, coasting past abysses in which fragments of the mountain were falling, tearing up trees by the roots, and leveling, as if with the keen edge of an immense scythe, every projection ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... full of the ruins of cities and empires. "Innumerable Paradises have come and gone; Adams and Eves many," happy one day, have been "miserable exiles" the next; and always because some satanic ambition or passion or person entering has cast baneful shadow o'er the scene. Men talk of the scythe of time and the tooth of time. But, said the art historian: "Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm; we who smite like the scythe. Fancy what treasures would be ours to-day if the delicate statues and temples of the Greeks, if the broad roads and massy walls of the Romans, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... as if a scythe-blade were being held against a rapidly-revolving grindstone, and then ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... lesson for the moral nature. If we are to find sermons in stones, we are to look for them in the relations of the stones to other things—when they are out of place, when they press down the grass or the flowers, or impede the plow, or dull the scythe, or usurp the soil, or shelter vermin, as do old institutions and old usages that have had their day. A stone that is much knocked about gets its sharp angles worn off, as do men. "A rolling stone gathers no moss," which is not bad for the ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... victorious army gathered about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon him; and one furious peasant, whose brother's feet had been cut off by Ecelino's command, dealt the helpless monster four blows upon the head with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of these wounds alone; but by others it is related that his death was a kind of suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past surgery by tearing off the bandages from his hurts, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... the covering stone. Such a legend lived among us. Now it is fulfilled. The Russians shot there three Bolsheviki and the Chinese two Mongols. The evil spirit of Beltis Van broke loose from beneath the heavy stone and now mows down the people with his scythe. The noble Chultun Beyli has perished; the Russian Noyon Michailoff also has fallen; and death has flowed out from Uliassutai all over our boundless plains. Who shall be able to stem it now? Who shall tie ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... cetera—why, no, not one: and it is greatly to your honor. But, mind you, if a master wants his tanks tapped and his hardening-liquor run into the shore or his bellows to be ripped, his axle-nuts to vanish, his wheel-bands to go and hide in a drain or a church belfry, and his scythe-blades to dive into a wheel-dam, he has only to be wrong with your Union, and he'll be accommodated as above. I ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... and the same moment. This triumphal chariot was an enormous car drawn by buffaloes, black all over and painted with skeletons and white crosses; and upon the highest point of the car stood a colossal figure of Death, scythe in hand, and right round the car were a number of covered tombs; and at all the places where the procession halted for the chanting of dirges, these tombs opened, and from them issued figures draped in black cloth, upon which were ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... half-closed eyes for the door to open. The younger, pale, but full of irrepressible vitality, stood looking at the rich, warm human life which she had renounced for ever. A young wife, with an infant on her arm, had brought her husband his midday meal, and he had flung down his scythe to kiss her under the trees. Those two faces, browned with the sun, flushed with the bloom of the flower, seemed the natural product of the beautiful earth. You could almost hear the myriad sounds of summer; waters trickling through ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... Father Time swings round his scythe, Intomb me 'neath the bounteous vine, So that its juices, red and blithe, May cheer these ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... girl 'tends like she's mad, An' says folks got to walk the chalk When she's around, er wisht they had, I play out on our porch an' talk To th' Raggedy Man 'at mows our lawn; An' he says "Whew!" an' nen leans on His old crook-scythe, and blinks his eyes An' sniffs all round an' says,—"I swawn! Ef my old nose don't tell me lies, It 'pears like I smell custard-pies!" An' nen he'll say,— "'Clear out o' my way! They's time fer work an' time fer play! Take yer dough, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... such as these;" and he pointed to the master of the horse, to young Beauvau, and to De Thou. "It is only in them that we can place our hope for the future. Such men are indeed very rare now, for the great leveller has swung a long scythe over France." ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... fire showed the whole outline of the horrid machine. I saw the glitter of the very axe that was to drop upon my head. My first sensation was that of deadly faintless. Ghastly as was the purpose of that axe, my imagination saw even new ghastliness in the shape of its huge awkward scythe-like steel; it seemed made for massacre. The faintness went off in the next moment, and I was another man. In the whole course of a life of excitement, I have never experienced so total a change. All my apathy was gone. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... scythes an extraordinary sharpness, asked him whether he was willing to dispose of it. Odin, however, threw the whetstone in the air, and in attempting to catch it as it fell, each thrall brought his scythe to bear on the neck of one of his comrades, so that they were all killed in the scramble. Odin took up his night's lodging at the house of Suttung's brother, Baugi, who told him that he was sadly at a loss for labourers, his nine ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... do something for my own enjoyment," and began again to make all the noise he could. At last the father and mother were awakened, and they ran to the room-door and peeped through the chink, and when they saw a wolf in occupation, they ran and fetched weapons—the man an axe, and the wife a scythe. ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... so. You know my mode of living here, and it is far worse in this cold stormy weather. My continued solitude only still further enfeebles me, and really my weakness often amounts to a swoon. Oh! do not further grieve me, for the scythe of Death will grant ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... morn the birds ha' waked me and I as merry as any grig—Lord love their beaks and wings! There's hay-time o' the evening full o' soft, sweet smells—aye, sweet as lad's first kiss; there's wheat-time at noon wi' the ears a-rustle and the whitt-whitt o' scythe and whetstone; there's night, Martin, and the long, black road dipping and a-winding, but wi' the beam o' light beyond, lad—the good light as tells o' journey done, of companionship and welcomes ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... three, four, half a dozen, strokes behind it; all are in sufficiently near accord, to leave a resonance in the air, as if the winged father who devours his children, had made a sounding sweep with his gigantic scythe ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... covered but their eyes were closed, their cheeks, hands, and feet like wax. In front of them the young man who had sat on the stove in the kitchen all night and watched us at work was mowing the tall grass with a scythe. He was going to dig graves. He wore a white shirt and white trousers and had long ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... all the time we were in the Island, cut under every possible disadvantage, and yet cut with marvellous persistency. With this labour, of course, the frost mounds interfere, being most disastrous to the scythe, and yet the natives never leave a single blade of grass, cutting round and round, and between these curious little hillocks. On the hay crop so very much depends, for when that fails, ponies die, sheep and cattle ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... the small-pox rumor became prevalent betimes, and the subtle aroma of the asafetida-bag permeated the graded schools "from turret to foundation-stone"; the still recurring expose of the poor-house management; the farm-hand, with the scythe across his shoulder, struck dead by lightning; the long-drawn quarrel between the rival editors culminating in one of them assaulting the other with a "sidestick," and the other kicking the one down-stairs and thenceward ad libitum; ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... I will hope that Time's broad wing Will shed around some dews of spring: But if his scythe must sweep the flowers Which bloom among the fairy bowers, Where smiling youth delights to dwell, And hearts with early rapture swell; If frowning age, with cold control, Confines the current of the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... come at him—now let me come at him.— [Viewing his wound.] Oops I what a gash is here! why, sir, a man may drive a coach and six horses into your body. Lord Fop. Oh! Probe. Why, what the devil have you run the gentleman through with—a scythe?—[Aside.] A little scratch between the skin and the ribs, that's all. Love. Let me see his wound. Probe. Then you shall dress it, sir; for if anybody looks upon it I won't. Love. Why, thou art the ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... would that I could prove my manhood against thine in any trial of strength and endurance. Let it be a match of mowing, in a rich meadow-land, on the longest day in spring, and let us ply the scythe together, fasting, from dawn till eve. Or give me a stout pair of oxen, mighty beasts, equal in strength, and both well filled with fodder, and set me to plough a field of four acres, of rich, deep soil—then wouldst thou see if I could drive a ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... cattle." [Footnote: "He saw hogs and cattle turned into fields of ripe wheat, for lack of laborers to gather it in. The fertile soil had given Illinois five million bushels of wheat, and it was too much. It was more than the sickle and the scythe could cut. Men toiled and sweltered to save the yellow affluence from destruction. They worked by day and by night; and their wives and children worked. But the tragic aspect of the grain crop is this—it ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... invigoration. He knew nothing of boxing, or rowing, or billiards, but he could run and jump well, and ride very fairly, and, above all, he could endure. In the last harvest he had for the first time wielded a scythe, and had held his own with the rest, though, it must be allowed, with a fierce struggle. The next spring—I may mention it here—he not only held the plough, but by patient persistence and fearless compulsion trained two young bulls to go in it, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... you're my cousin, but you've gone too fur.' He laffed, and we went into the field together to mow. He was just startin' on his swath when I cum behind him and cut his head clean off with my scythe." ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... been converted into a kind of lumber-room, and was filled from end to end with every kind of unclean things—mops, slop-pails, chimney-pots, ladders, broken benches, rejected broken cabinets, two long ladders, and an old rusty scythe were the things that met the eye, and all covered with half an inch of venerable dust. There is at the end of the room a kind of gallery or gangway, by which the undergraduates used to find their way to my lecture-room, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... looking at the sunlit blind, in the stillness of early morning he heard a sound always delightful, always soothing, that of scythe and whetstone; then the long steady sweep of the blade through garden grass. Morton, old stick-in-the-mud, would not let his gardener use a mowing machine, the scythe was good enough for him; and Harvey, recalled to the summer mornings of more than thirty ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... have fled to the forest and lurk on its outskirts, Waiting with anxious hearts the dubious fate of the morrow. Arms have been taken from us, and warlike weapons of all kinds; Nothing is left but the blacksmith's sledge and the scythe of ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... The inner walls of the towers have been cut away, completely adapting them for transepts, the towers being supported on great pointed arches. In the large east window the stained glass commemorates St. Sidwell, a lady murdered in the eighth century at a well near Exeter by a blow from a scythe at the instigation of her stepmother, who coveted her property. The cathedral is rich in monumental relics, and it has recently been thoroughly restored. Little remains of the ancient convent-buildings beyond the chapter-house, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... season, and on the return of the sun are enabled to perforate their cells, and to open themselves a passage from these recesses into the sunshine. The yellow wasps, which build under ground, in our meadows, are much more to be dreaded, for when the mower unwittingly passes his scythe over their holes they immediately sally forth with a fury and velocity superior even to the strength of man. They make the boldest fly, and the only remedy is to lie down and cover our heads with hay, for it is only at the head they ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... unstained as yet by unhallowed union with the riotous Missouri, flowed calmly on its way amid strange and unique beauties; a wilderness, clothed with velvet grass; forest-shadowed valleys; lofty heights, whose smooth slopes seemed levelled with the scythe; domes and pinnacles, ramparts and ruined towers, the work of no human hand. The canoe of the voyagers, borne on the tranquil current, glided in the shade of gray crags festooned with blossoming honeysuckles; by trees mantled with wild grape-vines, dells bright with, the flowers ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... prairie countries which have been settled, where the grazing of stock, by diminishing the quantity of grass, renders the annual fires less destructive to the growth of wood. The prairie (i. e., land destitute of wood) is covered with grass, much of which is of suitable length for the scythe." ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... grapes withal, Dark melons cased in rushes against the garden wall, Brown chestnuts, ruddy apples. Divinities bide here, Fair Ceres, Cupid, Bacchus, those gods of all good cheer, Priapus too—quite harmless, though terrible to see— Our little hardwood warden with scythe of ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... and marching, as it were, into the very jaws of death. Though exposed to a storm of bullets, which consumed them like a withering fire, they would press on, often dropping down as wheat before the scythe. Such determination and bravery called forth the admiration of our men. There is, however, a difference between valour as displayed by the British and valour as displayed by the Boers. Without wishing to rob the British officer and soldier of their martial honours, ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... in it, and very narrowly escaped ramming the Angamos. The latter had by this time approached to within half a mile of the Union, and now got her machine-guns to work, mowing down the Peruvians who were not under cover as with a scythe, for the deck of the corvette ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... uninterrupted thunder. On it came with a magnificent roar that shook the very earth, and revealed itself at last in the shape of a mighty whirlwind. In a moment the distant woods bent before it, and fell like grass before the scythe. It was a whirling hurricane, accompanied by a deluge of rain such as none of the party had ever before witnessed. Steadily, fiercely, irresistibly, it bore down upon them, while the crash of falling, snapping, and uprooting trees mingled with the dire artillery of that sweeping ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... miss, I ain't afraid of dyin', not a bit, only I don't want to die if I can help it. My time must be nigh at hand now, for I be aud, and a hundred years is too much for any man to expect. And I'm so nigh it that the Aud Man is already whettin' his scythe. Ye see, I can't get out o' the habit of caffin' about it all at once. The chafts will wag as they be used to. Some day soon the Angel of Death will sound his trumpet for me. But don't ye dooal ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... "O Man, O the dreams of Man!" something within him unceasingly cried. He stood on the granite margin, turning toward the Coliseum, whose mountain ridges of wall stood high in the moonlight, with the deep gaps which had been hewn in them by the scythe of Time. Sharply stood the rent and ragged arches of Nero's golden house close by, like murderous cutlasses. The Palatine Hill lay full of green gardens, and, in crumbling temple-roofs, the blooming death-garland of ivy was gnawing, and living ranunculi ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... below. The lake has no lofty shores and no level ones, but a series of undulating hills, fringed with woods from end to end. The profaning axe may sometimes come near the margin, and one may hear the whetting of the scythe; but no cultivated land abuts upon the main lake, though beyond the narrow woods there are here and there glimpses of rye-fields that wave like rolling mist. Graceful islands rise from the quiet waters,—Grape ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... for this, preparation was made almost every Sunday in the year. They fought with deadly weapons, sticks loaded with lead, and stones. Pensioners, who were accustomed to firearms, were hired for the occasion; but the weapon chiefly used was a short scythe, and men may still be found bearing its mark in contracted legs and arms: one man having Tim Halisy, his mark; another, Paddy Murphy, his mark, indelibly inscribed on his body. They had little or no agriculture—no wheeled cart, and scarcely ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... gray headed old weaver, who is never still, but sets up there in that ancient loom of hern a weavin', while her pardner is away mowin' with that sharp scythe of hisen from mornin' till night, and from night till mornin', jest so stiddy did she keep on weavin'. Noiseless and calm would the quiet days pass into her old shuttle (which is jest as good to-day as it wuz at the creation). Silent days, quiet days, in a broad stripe, not glistenin' or shiny, ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... New Army men were being reviewed but a furlong or two away from that Invisible Man who was wielding a scythe which had no mercy for unripe wheat. Out of those lines of eyes stared the courage of men's souls, not shirking ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... the head of the Persian army, was one of the first to die; and when the Persians saw their companions falling around them like ripe grain under the mower's scythe, they were seized with terror, rushed toward the sea, and embarked in their vessels in ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... likewise," and began once more to scream with all his strength. At last his father and mother were aroused by it, and ran to the room and looked in through the opening in the door. When they saw that a wolf was inside, they ran away, and the husband fetched his axe, and the wife the scythe. "Stay behind," said the man, when they entered the room. "When I have given him a blow, if he is not killed by it, thou must cut him down and hew his body to pieces." Then Thumbling heard his parents, voices and cried, "Dear father, I am here; I am in the wolf's body." Said the ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... at the throat of Gaznak and aimed with Sacnoth, and again Gaznak lifted his head by the hair; but not at his throat flew Sacnoth, for Leothric struck instead at the lifted hand, and through the wrist of it went Sacnoth whirring, as a scythe goes through the stem of ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... false infidel! shalt writhe Beneath avenging Monkir's scythe; And from its torment 'scape alone To wander round lost Eblis' throne; And fire unquenched, unquenchable, Around, within thy heart shall dwell; Nor ear can hear, nor tongue can tell The tortures ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... of 'remedy' for a wound in the leg, did the work of two while she sang songs which made even Maciek blush, until the afternoon, and then took her 'remedy'. The cure then pulled her down so much that the scythe fell from ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... told that we are friends to the spread of liberty: indeed, we think she may "triumph over time, clip his wings, pare his nails, file his teeth, turn back his hour-glass, blunt his scythe, and draw the hobnails out of his shoes;" but to show how this may be done, we must run over a few varieties of liberty for the benefit of such as do not enjoy the inestimable blessings of being free ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... hypnotic fiction is its inhumanity. An experience is not human in the proper artistic sense (with which alone we are concerned) merely because it has befallen a man or a woman. There was an Irishman, the other day, who through mere inadvertence cut off his own head with a scythe. But the story is rather inhuman than not. Still less right have we to call everything human which can be supposed by the most liberal stretch of the imagination to have happened to a man or a woman. A story is only human in so far as it is governed by the laws which are recognized as determining ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sign that the great Apostle of Beauty lives in this very old-fashioned spot. Big boulders are to be seen here and there where Nature left them, tangles of vines running over old stumps, part of the meadow cut close with a scythe, and part growing up as if the owner knew the price of hay. Then there are flowerbeds, where grow clusters of poppies and hollyhocks (purple, and scarlet, and white), prosaic gooseberry-bushes, plain Yankee pieplant (from ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... Canadian settlers call a "Bee" is a neighbourly gathering for any industrious purpose a friendly clubbing of labour, assisted by an abundance of good cheer. ** The cradle is a scythe of larger dimensions than the common hay- scythe, and is both wider in the blade and longer. A straight piece of wood, called a standard, thirty inches long, is fixed upright; near the end of the snaith, or handle, are four fingers made of ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... by steep descents, we approached this new chapter in our history. We came again upon a few trees here and there, all with their tops cut off in a plane inclined upwards away from the sea. For the sea-winds, like a sweeping scythe, bend the trees all away towards the land, and keep their tops mown with their sharp rushing, keen with salt spray off the crests of the broken waves. Then we passed through some ancient villages, with streets narrow, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... and no more Found speech. They tramped on sternly. To the brow Of a long hill they came, whence they could see The village and blue ocean; then they sank Into a region of low-lying fields Half-naked from the scythe, and others veined With vines that 'midst dismantled, fallen corn Dragged all athwart a weight of tawny gourds, Sun-mellowed, sound. And now the level way Stretched forward eagerly, for hard ahead It made the turn that rounded Reuben's house. Between the still road and the tossing sea Lay ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... by and by and passed his forefinger across his forehead, brushing the sweat away from above his quiet eyes. He moistened the tip of his thumb and slid it along the blade of his hemp hook—he was using that for lack of a scythe. Turning, he walked back to the edge of the brier thicket, sat down in the shade of a black walnut, threw off his tattered head-gear, and, reaching for his bucket of water covered with poke leaves, ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... highest ridge, Where oft the stormy winter gale Cuts like a scythe, while through the clouds It sweeps from vale to vale; Not five yards from the mountain-path, This thorn you on your left espy; And to the left, three yards beyond, You see a little muddy pond Of water, never ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... shall these lingering notes redeem, Decaying on Oblivion's stream; Such notes as from the Breton tongue Marie translated, Blondel sung? O! born Time's ravage to repair, And make the dying muse thy care; Who, when his scythe her hoary foe Was poising for the final blow, The weapon from his hand could wring, And break his glass, and shear his wing, And bid, reviving in his strain, The gentle poet live again; Thou, who canst give to lightest lay An unpedantic moral gay, Nor less the ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... through the gleaming folds of the twilight for the last time at their city; and they looked half in anger and half in regret, then turned and went away for ever. But they sent back a Death, who bore a scythe, saying to it: 'Slay half in the city that forsook us, but half of them spare alive that they may yet remember ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... haymaking began in earnest: the maids were out, spreading in the wake of the machine, and Grindhusen was set to work with a scythe in the corners and awkward parts where the machine could not go. And I got out my stone-grey paint ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... flamed up within him as he lay on the hard bed in his little room, with the summer scents floating in and the out-of-doors sounds,—a woman's voice calling a child afar off, the lowing of cattle, the rhythmic whetting of a scythe-blade, the echoing strokes of an axe, the mellow fluting of a robin,—all coming to him a little muted, as if he were ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... animals! They who built their pyramids, not with carved traceries, nor lacy spires, but with solid blocks of granite fifty feet square! How they must have laughed in the depths of those sepulchres as they watched Time dull its scythe and pashas wear out their nails in vain against them. Let us build pyramids, my dear Sir John. They are not difficult as architecture, nor beautiful as art, but they are solid; and that enables a general to say four thousand years later: 'Soldiers, from the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... flew to her mate. "Nip's got 'em!" cried one of the men, and, picking up a stone, he ran to the thicket, from whence now issued yelps of anguish. "He'll not trouble them again, I reckon," the man said, with a grin, as he picked up his scythe. ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... which is holding its nose with one hand in order not to feel the stench of the dead and corrupted Kings. In the middle of this scene is Death, who, flying through the air and draped in black, is showing that she has cut off with her scythe the lives of many, who are lying on the ground, of all sorts and conditions, poor and rich, halt and whole, young and old, male and female, and in short a good number of every age and sex. And because he knew that the people of Pisa ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... left the door opened and I wandered into His Treasure House, so I guess I'll get busy and grab what I can before the Night Watchman comes around. Ever see the Night Watchman, Boston? I have. He's a grave old party with a long beard, and he carries a scythe. You see him when you're thirsty, and—well, in the pursuit of my inborn hobby for taking chances, I'll introduce you to him this trip. Permit me to remind you once more of the consequences if you help yourself to the water without ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... plateau, from which broad, dry, sterile slopes descended; while lower ground stretched away on their left. Then, behind them, spread the woods with deep thickets parted by clearings, full of herbage which no scythe had ever touched. And not a soul was to be seen around them; there was naught save wild Nature, grandly quiescent under the bright sun of that splendid April day. The earth seemed to be dilating with all the sap amassed ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... on the eaves At daybreak, when the mower whets his scythe, And stock-doves murmur, and the milkmaid leaves Her little lonely bed, and carols blithe To see the heavy-lowing cattle wait Stretching their huge and dripping mouths across ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... disadvantageous mode of employment of making Negroes collect grass for the cattle, by picking it by the hand blade by blade. Are no artificial grasses to be found in our islands, and is the existence of the scythe unknown there? But it is of no use to dwell longer upon this subject. The whole system is a ruinous one from the beginning to the end. And from whence does such a system arise? It has its origin in slavery alone. It is practised no where but in ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... his long plough and goad on his shoulder, and with him his wife lugging the yoke and his boy leading the oxen. Alas, the sun shall not set on these bright, glowing, green terraces, whose walls are very ramparts of flowers. There, the boy with his scythe is paving the way for his father's plough; the grass is mowed and given to the oxen as a bribe to do the ugly business. And all for the sake of the ugly mulberries, which are cultivated for the ugly silk-worms. Come, let us to the heath, where the hiss of the scythe and the 'ho-back' ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... hill—in the valley— rushing forward, unresisted, the red and blue of the Union, mixed with the stars and bars of the rebellion; but, worse than all, the ranks of gray were sweeping in overwhelming masses quite behind the lines of blue, cutting them down as a scythe when near the end of the furrow. To the eastward Sherman still clung desperately to the crests he had won, but Jack saw with agony that, slipping between him and the river, a great wedge of gray was hurrying forward. His last despairing glance caught a body ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... the tall thick grass was as full of hopping, fluttering, and creeping things as a wheat beard is of grain. These tiny little creatures seemed to find life so pleasant and comfortable, and the glisten and "swish" of John Goodnow's scythe so very odd and amusing, that they kept only a little out of his way as he mowed, and when he stopped to whet his scythe they flocked around and settled on his boot-legs, on the brim of his hat, and even in the creases of his shirt sleeves, to see how ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... adopted by most painters. But it is pleasing to the mind of sensibility to know that, as science expanded, sounder views were adopted. One author contends for a pitchfork, St. Chrysostom for a sword, Irenaeus for a scythe, and Prudentius for a hedging-bill. This last writer delivers ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... spectacle on the streets of London one day, just after Elizabeth had become England's Queen. As she was riding by the little conduit at the upper end of Cheapside an old man came out of it, carrying a scythe and bearing a pair of wings. He represented Father Time coming out of his dark cave to greet the young Queen. He led by the hand a young girl clad in flowing robes of white silk, and she was his daughter, Truth. Truth held in her hands an English Bible, on which was written "Verbum Veritatis," and ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... Don Luis saw the great blade of a scythe cleaving the air at the height of his head. Had he hesitated for a second, for the tenth of a second, the awful weapon would have beheaded him. As it was, he just had time to flatten himself against the ladder. The scythe whistled past him, ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... might of Germany was on the move, and still the thin brown line lay tense and silent, until only forty paces separated the two. Then, at a word, The Royals' line broke into a storm of flame which swept the line of the advancing men as a scythe sweeps through the corn; and for the British infantry the ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... treat our native ferns with sufficient respect. Homage is paid in literature to the palm, and it is an emblem of honour, but our New England ferns, many of them equally majestic, are tossed into heaps for hay and mown down by the ruthless scythe of the farmer every autumn when he shows his greatest agricultural energy by stripping the waysides of their beauty prior to the coming of the roadmender with his awful "turn-piking" process. If, by the way, the automobilists succeed ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... the vale beneath, Death swung his scythe with long, sweeping strokes. The two machine guns poured a flaming sheet of lead into the little camp below. The shacks fell like houses of cards. The tents caught fire, and were whirled blazing aloft by the brisk wind. Men dropped like chaff from a mill. Hysterical, screaming ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... these insects, you may not be aware, are made in the ground. These nests are frequently found in meadows, about the time the grass is mowed; and it not unfrequently happens that the mower disturbs one of these nests with his scythe, in which case, the first information the poor man obtains of the existence of the nest is from a score or two of the bumble-bees themselves—(we'll call them bumble-bees, for the sake of peace, though ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... goin' too fur. A silky mustache the same color of his hair, and both with a considerable number of white threads a-shinin' in 'em, jest enough so's you could tell that old Time hadn't forgot him as he went up and down the earth with his hour-glass under his arm, and his scythe over his shoulder. ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... wooded donga, and a valley; along its westward face ran a line of kopjes, ending in a detached rocky hill; and it was supported by fire from Railway Hill. The nearer kopjes were carried without much difficulty, but a sweeping movement to clear the plateau as with the swing of a scythe, was checked by heavy fire from the east, and failed to gather in the rocky hill which commanded the outlying kopjes, and which the enemy succeeded in reinforcing during the fight, and in ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... none of the carrying, and had slept along time that day in the shade of a tree, I was awake an hour or more after they were snoring. Every flash lit the old room like the full glare of the noonday sun. I remember it showed me an old cradle, piled full of rubbish, a rusty scythe hung in the rotting sash of a window, a few lengths of stove-pipe and a plough in one corner, and three staring white owls that sat on a beam above the doorway. The rain roared on the old roof shortly, and came dripping down through the bare boards above us. A ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... also in the sharpening of a scythe and it is worth describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you will see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet it. Then also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it is a good thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all your day's ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... Forced Labor, Premature Labor, hard, grinding, destructive Labor such as wastes the tissues of strong men; and The Child went down before it like grass before the scythe, for Childhood is meant for Growth and not for Waste and Toil. The Mind of The Child was dulled, the Body of The Child was stunted and crippled and broken: accidents fell upon him, with the Special Diseases of Labor and ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... a mower stands Among the morning wheat and whets His scythe, and for a space forgets The labor of the ripening lands; Then bends, and through the dewy grain His long scythe hisses, and again He swings it in ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... fellows o' Todtnau, if ever I told you the Scythe-Ghost[C] Was a spirit of Evil, I've now got a different story. Out of the town am I,—yes, that I'll honestly own to,— Related to merchants, at seven tables free to take pot-luck. But I'm a Sunday's child; and wherever the ghosts at the cross-roads Stand in the air, in vaults, and cellars, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... sword flashed out. Prosper vaulted over the gallery, dropped down into the thick of them, and began to kill. Kill indeed he did. Right and left, like a man with a scythe, he sliced a way for himself. There were soldiers, pikemen, and guards in the press: there was none there so tall as he, nor with such a reach, above all, there was none whose rage made him cold and his anger merry. However they were, they could scarcely have faced the ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... trouble thou hast given me in coming here." In saying this, he opened his horrible jaws, and advanced to devour her; but she, being on her guard, jumped back, and had just time to pluck out a hair; and pronouncing two or three words, she changed it into a sharp scythe, with which she immediately cut the lion in two pieces, through ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... the prophets. In Isaiah you would see the elect as rare as the grapes which are found after the vintage, and have escaped the search of the gatherer; as rare as the blades which remain by chance in the field, and have escaped the scythe of the mower. The evangelist would still have added new traits to the terrors of these images. I might have spoken to you of two roads—of which one is narrow, rugged, and the path of a very small ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... stones from the side of the cone, and watching them bound down the steep declivity, dashing the scori like spray before them, and bearing down the dwarf trees in their path like grass beneath the mower's scythe, until they rumbled away with many a crash in the depths of the forest at the base of the mountain, and after making over to the grateful old man of the viga the remnants of Doa Maria's profusion in the shape of sandwiches and cold chicken, we commenced our descent, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... where the river flowed round a headland of the meadows, we stopped a while for rest and victuals, and settled ourselves on a beautiful bank which almost reached the dignity of a hill-side: the wide meadows spread before us, and already the scythe was busy amidst the hay. One change I noticed amidst the quiet beauty of the fields—to wit, that they were planted with trees here and there, often fruit-trees, and that there was none of the niggardly begrudging of space to a handsome tree which ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... of Doubt, the stern ideas, the specious formulas of Dispute. He convoked the various antagonistic worlds of philosophy and religion, and they all appeared, in the guise of a fleshless shape, like that in which art embodies Time,—an old man bearing in one hand a scythe, in the other a ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... at last his toils are over, Summer ended, autumn near, May he and his flock, like clover Ripened for the scythe, appear; And when falling, Guardian ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... unfamiliarity with bees. It seemed strange to find that in this up-to-date and efficient institution the biggest implement for cutting grass which was in use, a sickle of course, had a blade no longer than 8 inches. Hung up at the back of a shed I noticed a rusty scythe. When I tried to show what it could do it was suggested that the implement was "too heavy, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the huntsman, as well as of the baron, who entered into the spirit of the chase with all the juvenile ardour of twenty. "May the foul fiend, booted and spurred, ride down his bawling throat, with a scythe at his girdle," quoth Albert Drawslot; "here have I been telling him that all the marks were those of a buck of the first head, and he has hollowed the hounds upon a velvet-headed knobbler! By Saint Hubert, if I break not his pate with my cross-bow, may I never cast off ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... stepped on the sands of the Continent to the day of my quitting them, I had been folded in a dream: I had stretched my hands to the highest things of earth, and here now was the retributive material money-question, like a keen scythe-blade! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
