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Trefoil   Listen
noun
Trefoil  n.  
1.
(Bot.) Any plant of the genus Trifolium, which includes the white clover, red clover, etc.; less properly, applied also to the nonesuch, or black medic. See Clover, and Medic.
2.
(Arch.) An ornamental foliation consisting of three divisions, or foils.
3.
(Her.) A charge representing the clover leaf.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Trefoil" Quotes from Famous Books



... Henry III.'s Chapel in Westminster Abbey is another chair, similar, but lacking the trefoil Gothic arches, which are carved on the sides of the original chair; this was made for and used by Mary, daughter of James II. and wife of William III., on the occasion of their double coronation. Mr. Hungerford Pollen has given us a long description of this chair, with quotations from the different ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield

... of both counties are in great measure flat and sandy, and are the home of many rare plants. A number of species of light soils and of gravelly shores have here their Irish headquarters, such as the Round-headed Trefoil (Trifolium glomeratum) the Sea-Stock (Matthiola sinuata), the rare Sea-Cudweed (Diotis candidissima), and the Wild Asparagus (A. officinalis). The Murrough, a great gravel beach backed by salt marshes which extends from Greystones ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger

... took the place of a sofa, there being no sofa in the room. Both these boxes of wood and iron, immensely artistic, though merely copies of authentic relics, served as places in which to keep objects of art, and served as seats also. Besides these, there were only a few stools, with arms carved in trefoil shape (fourteenth and fifteenth century), and still fewer armchairs, immensely deep and wide—so-called cathedras—covered with most wonderful stuffs; but everything was there which was needed, if the dwelling was to preserve a purely Middle Age character ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)

... bloom on the hedgerows, and tall foxgloves stood like crimson sentinels at the margins of the woods. The fields were white with moon-daisies, growing among the long, lush grass; and all the roadsides were a tangle of vetches, campion, bugle, trefoil and speedwells. The wind was fragrant with the scent of newly turned hay; everywhere the mowers were busy, and the daisies were falling fast beneath the swinging scythe or the blades of the reaping-machine. In the Manor garden the roses had reached ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil

... Triality[obs3], trinity; triunity[obs3]. three, triad, triplet, trey, trio, ternion[obs3], leash; shamrock, tierce[obs3], spike-team [U.S.], trefoil; triangle, trident, triennium[obs3], trigon[obs3], trinomial, trionym[obs3], triplopia[obs3], tripod, trireme, triseme[obs3], triskele[obs3], triskelion, trisula[obs3]. third power, cube; cube root. Adj. three ; triform[obs3], trinal[obs3], trinomial; tertiary; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... trembled in the grass, The delicate trefoil that muffled warm A slope on Ida; for a hundred years Moved in the purple gyre of those dark flowers The Grecian women strew upon the dead. Under the earth, in fragrant glooms, I dwelt; Then in the veins and sinews of a pine On a lone isle, where, from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... man did not appear taller than a dwarf. However, Autaritus recognised a shield shaped like a trefoil on his left arm. "A Carthaginian!" he exclaimed, and immediately throughout the plain, before the portcullis and beneath the rocks, all rose. The soldier was walking along the edge of the precipice; the Barbarians gazed at him ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... figure, it is true, bears some resemblance to a spade, but no giant of fiction is depicted with a club with a triple head. The explanation is that we have adopted the French pattern, carreau (see p. 161), diamond, c[oe]ur, heart, pique, pike, spear-head, trefle, trefoil, clover-leaf, but have given to the two latter the names used in the Italian and Spanish pattern, which, instead of the pike and trefoil, has the sword (Ital. spada) and mace (Ital. bastone). Etymologically both spades are identical, the origin being Greco-Lat. ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley

... and clerestory, there are three tall windows of two lights each, the central being carried above the others, and distinguished by a more ornate tracery, here taking a cruciform pattern above the trefoil-headed divisions, instead of a foliated circle as in the side windows. The arcading in which they are all placed is severely simple in character, the slightly pointed headings resting on plain shafts, with moulded ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley

... beautifully alludes in one of his odes. "O whilst thy season of flowers, and thy tender sprays thick of leaves remain, I will pluck the roses from the brakes, the flowerets of the meads, and gems of the wood; the vivid trefoil, beauties of the ground, and the gaily-smiling bloom of the verdant herbs, to be offered to the memory of a chief of fairest fame. Humbly will I lay them on the grave of Iver." On a grave in the church-yard at Hay, or the Hay, as it is commonly spoken, flowers had evidently been planted, but ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield

... noticed something else. The trefoil ornament in the middle did not look the same as I recalled them. I took Thorndyke's card out of my pocket and looked at the stereo. I compared the picture against the real thing before me and I knew that ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... between it and the enclosing arch is very clumsily filled by a rib which, springing from the apex of either light, runs concentrically with the enclosing arch till it meets the larger circle. The whole building is surmounted by brick battlements, everything else being of granite, resting on a good trefoil corbel table, and, as the roofs are perfectly flat, there ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson

... instituted an Order. His Highness had his St. Hubertus to give, and she desired to have an Order of her own to distribute. Everybody laughed covertly, but the insignia of the Order of the White Trefoil were much coveted nevertheless, and the white riband and beautifully designed three-leaved badge of the Graevenitz's Order were proudly worn by the highest dignitaries, and at Ludwigsburg the courtiers who were fortunate enough to possess the decoration were careful ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... separated into three towns, quite distinct one from the other, yet joined, like a trefoil. As you stand on the broad boulevard leading above the first town, the other two spread out beneath on either hand. The churches of Notre Dame, of St. Eutrope, and the cathedral of St. Pierre, each ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... more generally accredited supposition, that Herbert built the presbytery with its encircling procession path and the original trefoil of Norman chapel radiating therefrom;—the choir and transepts with the two chapels projecting eastwards and the first two bays of the nave. Harrod advances a theory that he completely finished the whole of the cathedral church, as well as the offices ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell

... execute: our notorious contemporary, the Day, engages smashers out of doors to utter forgeries against individuals, and calls in auxiliary cut-throats to murder the reputation of those who offend him. A black-vizarded ruffian (whom we will unmask), who signs the forged name of Trefoil, is at present one of the chief bravoes and bullies in our contemporary's establishment. He is the eunuch who brings the bowstring, and strangles at the order of the Day. We can convict this cowardly slave, and propose ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... been fed on fresh trefoil, was killed and opened immediately,—that is, before the process of rumination had commenced. He (M. Flourens) found the greatest part of this herb (easily recognised by its leaves, which were still almost entire,) in the paunch; but he also found a certain ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey

... corner, near the open hearth, a carved desk, bearing on one slope the largest copy of the 'Bishops' Bible'; on the other, one of the Prayer-book. The ornaments of the oaken mantelpiece culminated in a shield bearing a cross boutonnee, i.e. with trefoil terminations. It was supported between a merman with a whelk shell and a mermaid with a comb, and another like Siren curled her tail on the top of the gaping baronial helmet above the shield, while two more upheld the main weight of the chimney-piece on ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to the uproar made by his companions, and was not in the least out of countenance. With measured steps he went up to the stove, flung down his load, straightened himself, took out of his tail-pocket a snuff- box, and with round eyes began helping himself to a pinch of dry trefoil mixed with ashes. At the entrance of this noisy party the fat man had at first knitted his brows and risen from his seat, but, seeing what it was, he smiled, and only told them not to shout. 'There's a sportsman,' said he, 'asleep in ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev

... with birdfoot-trefoil are the grass-glades; Yellow with cinquefoil of the dew-grey leaf: Yellow with stonecrop; the moss-mounds are yellow; Blue-necked the wheat sways, yellowing to the sheaf. Green-yellow, bursts from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... buttresses of simple form against the south wall, and two at each of the north and south angles of the east wall. In the south wall, and in the usual position near the east end, there are remains of a triple sedilia; there is a piscina in a pointed recess, having a trefoil-headed niche ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... 1760, we find him sowing clover, rye, grass, hope, trefoil, timothy, spelt, which was a species of wheat, and various other grasses and vegetables, most of them to all intents and purposes unknown to the Virginia agriculture of ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth

... of this watercourse was covered with a plant resembling clover or trefoil, but it had a yellow flower, and a perfume like that of woodrooffe.* A fragrant breeze played over this richest of clover fields and reminded me of new-mown hay. The verdure and the perfume were new to my delighted senses, ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... height and space exhilarating. A fringe of harebells, of orange hawkweed and dwarf red sorrel bordered the road. Every small oasis of turf, amongst the heath and by the wayside, carried its pretty crop of centaury and wild thyme, of bed-straw, milkwort, and birdsfoot trefoil. Furzechats tipped about the gorse bushes, uttering a sharp, gay, warning note. A big flight of rooks, blue-black against the ethereal blue of the distance, winged their way slowly homeward to the long avenue of dark trees leading to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... by the green curve of the banks which the lovers saw from the heights of Bruges that our fairy travellers met. They were reclining on the water-side, playing at dominos with eye-bright and the black specks of the trefoil; namely, Pipalee, Nip, Trip, and the lord treasurer (for that was all the party selected by the queen for her travelling cortege), and waiting for her Majesty, who, being a curious little elf, had gone round the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... otherwise unprotected animals, nestling in the bed of dry leaves which it has spread upon the ground, find shelter and repose. The squirrel subsists upon the kernels obtained from its cones; the rabbit browses upon the Trefoil and the spicy foliage of the Hypericum which are protected in its conservatory of shade; and the fawn reposes on its brown couch of leaves, unmolested by the outer tempest. From its green arbors the quails may be roused in midwinter, when they resort thither to find the still sound berries ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... doctor. Mr. Treves A complaint Tic Doloreux A play Timon of Athens A state in the Union Tennessee A musical instrument Trombone A poet Tennyson A flower Trefoil A mineral Tin A lake Tanganyika A tree Tulip A country Turkey An author Trollope An artist Tadema ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... The maize is now up, and about three inches high. It is sowed in rows two feet or two and a half feet apart, and is pretty thick in the row. Doubtless they mean to thin it. There is a great deal of a forage they call farouche. It is a species of red trefoil, with few leaves, a very coarse stalk, and a cylindrical blossom of two inches in length, and three quarters of an inch in diameter, consisting of floscules, exactly as does that of the red clover. It seems to be a coarse food, but very plentiful. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... ancients, was drawn in the form of a sweet and beautiful child, standing upon tiptoes, and a trefoil or three-leaved grass ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various

... Trefoil, vervain, John's-wort, dill, Hinders witches of their will, Weel is them, that weel may Fast upon ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... bigger than grasshoppers and mice, and a very little well as big as my mug to draw up my water from, and a little green paddock the size of my pocket-handkerchief, and another of yellow corn, and another of crimson trefoil. And I would have a blue farm-wagon no larger than Hobb's shoe, and a haystack half as big as a seed-cake, and a duckpond that I could cover with my platter. And I'd live there and play with it all day long, ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon

... here, at arm's length from me, in this old room where I sit all day: and when my head aches or wanders or strikes work, as it now or then will, I take my chance for either green-covered volume, as if it were so much fresh trefoil to feel in one's hands this winter-time,—and round I turn, and, putting a decisive elbow on three or four half-done-with 'Bells' of mine, read, read, read, and just as I have shut up the book and walked to the window, I recollect that you wanted me to find faults there, and ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... strawberry, and clover, fostering the same in their simple manner. I suppose it to be the most savage and natural of notions about Deity; a prismatic idol-shape of Him, rude as a triangular log, as a trefoil grass. I do not find how long Triglaph held his state on St. Mary's Hill. "For a time," says Carlyle, "the priests all slain or fled—shadowy Markgraves the like—church and state lay in ashes, and Triglaph, like a triple porpoise under the influence of laudanum, stood, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... sooner grew up than he went back to preach the Gospel to them, and deliver them from a worse bondage than they had made him suffer. So many did he convert, and such zealous Christians were they, that Ireland used to be called the Isle of Saints; and it has never forgotten the trefoil, or shamrock leaf, by which St. Patrick taught his converts to enter into the great mystery, how Three could ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... and had been ranged along the walls of the church, leaning against the string-course. The remaining space had been levelled, except a broad walk which led up to the church, and past it to the opposite gate; and it had been all sown with various kinds of trefoil, which had shot ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... Under our feet was the purple heath with great patches of whortleberry, that tiny shrub that bears the little purply grey fruit. Then there was short elastic wiry grass and orange-yellow bird's-foot trefoil. Anon we came to great patches of furze of a dwarf kind with small prickles, and of an elegant growth, the purple and yellow making the place look like some ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn

... pleasure of finding it under a brake of holly—'Oh, look! look! I am sure that this is the wood-sorrel! Look at the pendent white flower, shaped like a snowdrop and veined with purple streaks, and the beautiful trefoil leaves folded like a heart,—some, the young ones, so vividly yet tenderly green that the foliage of the elm and the hawthorn would show dully at their side,—others of a deeper tint, and lined, as it were, with a rich and changeful purple!—Don't ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... Bernard, and love must not pick and choose. For it was love still, the old inexplicable fascination: in the middle of one of his tirades, when he was at his most wayward, she would lose herself in the contemplation of some small physical trait, the scar of a burn on his wrist or the tiny trefoil-shaped birthmark on his temple, as if that summed up for her the essence of his personality, and were more truly Bernard Clowes then his intemperate insignificance of speech. . . . Even when others suffered for it she yielded to Bernard, ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... refined yet massive simplicity. Towards eventide the shadows of the turrets and pinnacles creep, day by day, over the surrounding bands of greensward, their cool greys advancing inch by inch until they reach the spacious pavements, whereon they cast the symbols of our Christian faith in ruddy trefoil-headed slants of glory. ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath

... not increase fast enough to require to spread out in search of more food. Thus I should explain a case which I heard of lately of Anthocera trifolii, abundant for years in one corner of a certain field, and only there; while there was just as much trefoil all round for its larvae as there was in the selected spot. I can, I say, only give hints: but they will suffice, I hope, to show the path of thought into which I want young naturalists to ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... prophets and very similar queens stand meditative in, one of the extraordinary side bays where the Arab trefoil is so conspicuous. At Angers the statues are weather-beaten, almost ruined, but it can be seen that they were less stately, merely human; they are no longer chastely slender, fit for Heaven, but earthly queens. At Le Mans, where they are in better preservation, they vainly ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... has sent the sweet, refreshing rains. The trefoil and the barley grass wave high upon the plains, The tanks all overflowing and the saltbush fresh and green, It’s a pleasure for to ramble ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson

... could be in three. St. Patrick, instead of attempting a theological definition of the faith, thought a simple image would best serve to enlighten a simple people, and stooping to the earth he plucked from the green sod a shamrock, and holding up the trefoil before them he bade them there behold one in three. The chief, struck by the illustration, asked at once to be baptised, and all his ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... wayfaring tree, the raspberry, strawberry, and cherry, the wild garlic of starlike flowers, the woodruff, fragrant as new-mown hay; the yellow pimpernel on the hedge side. I see in the fields and meadows the bird's foot trefoil, the oxeye daisy, the lady smocks, sweet hemlock, butterbur, the stitchwort, and the orchis, the "long purpled" of Shakespeare. By the margin of the pond the yellow iris hangs out its golden banners over which the ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale

... near the head of the River Stort; a very rare broom-rape, Orobanche caerulea, at Hoddesdon, where it is parasitic on the milfoil; and an almost equally rare bedstraw, Galium anglicum, on an old wall of Brocket Park. A rare trefoil, Trifolium glomeratum, is known only at Easneye near Ware; and Hatfield Park is our only locality for the water-soldier (Stratiotes aloides) except where it has evidently been planted. Two species, usually of rare occurrence, Polygonum dumetorum and Apera spica-venta, are frequent ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins

... Mrs. Small, the Vicar and his wife, and the curate, were all there talking and teaching. Beth remembered nothing about the teaching except that, on one occasion, Mr. Macbean, the rector, tried to explain the meaning of the trefoil on the ends of the pews to Mildred and herself; but she could think of nothing but the way his beard wagged as he spoke, and was disconcerted when he questioned her. He had promised to be a friend to Beth; but he was a delicate man, and not able to live much at Castletownrock, where the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... battle of Gettysburg called her again into the field. Arriving several days after the battle, she went directly to the Second Corps Hospital, and labored there until it was broken up. For her services in this hospital she received from the officers and men a gold medal—a trefoil, beautifully engraved, and with an appropriate inscription. She went next to Camp Letterman General Hospital, where she remained for some weeks, her stay at Gettysburg being in all about two months. Her health was impaired by her excessive labors at ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... violet and yellow flowers, the gaudy poppy, the large- flowered hollyhock or the sunflower, the flaunting dandelion, the pretty pink willow-herb, the clustered blossoms of the mustard and turnip flowers, the bright blue forget-me-not and the delicate little yellow trefoil, all these are visited by insects, which easily catch sight of them as they pass by and ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley

... night, except our great mastiff dog, which we could not induce to follow us, for I think he was ashamed of our cowardly behaviour. The land here is of an excellent soil, and the climate is quite healthy; the soil being full of good herbs, as mints, calamint, plantain, ribwort, trefoil, scabious, and such like. We set sail from Saldanha bay on the 27th of December, and doubled the Cape of Good Hope on the last day ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr

... This trefoil badge of the scouts is now used, with slight local variations, in almost every civilized country as the mark of brotherhood, for good citizenship, ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America

... in Ireland by William Allingham (second edition, green cloth, gilt trefoil design, previous owner's name on ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... far as is known only three of these curious instruments are in existence; two in the museum of the Conservatoire, Paris, and one in Brussels; all three bear a trefoil as maker's mark; the smallest, in F, is reproduced in the Catalogue of the Musical Instruments exhibited at the Royal Military Exhibition, London, 1890, by Capt. C. R. Day (London, 1891), pl. iv. F. It is also described (without illustration) in Mahillon's Catalogue, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... in the dry grass, upon the gold bits of bird's-foot trefoil of the cliff's edge, and looked out to sea. A warm, drowsy calm ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... was of leaf ornament, the second zigzag, and the third a conventional floral design, suggesting a combination of the trefoil and Greek honeysuckle. The zigzag moulding forming the innermost order was continuous along the jambs and arch. Close to this doorway, on its eastern side, there is a smaller, but equally interesting, relic in the remains of a Holy-water Stoup. It is fixed in a large and deep recess, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley

... been among the colonists who had been planted by the Emperors on the northern frontier to occupy the land conquered from the heathen. He seems himself to have been a man of substance and position; he already used the arms, the double trefoil, which are still borne by all the branches of his family. His descendants are often mentioned in the records of the Guild; his son or grandson, Rudolph or Rule, represented the town in a conflict with the neighbouring Dukes of Brunswick. It was his son Nicolas, or Claus as ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... feet thick, while the other walls are only 2 1/2 or 3 feet. In this old wall is the fine transitional doorway here pictured, with round arches, but with the well-known dog-tooth moulding. Its inner trefoil arch is of a form very uncommon in this country, but more usual on the Continent. Having gone beyond the old wall, Ernulf had to raise a new one; this ran from the south-east corner of the city to the corresponding corner of the bishop's ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer

... middling-size purse silk over fine silk cord of the same colour as the silk. Before beginning to work this pattern, thread the beads which take the place of purl stitches, and which are slipped in between two double stitches. When the row of stitches is of the length required, form the trefoil leaves, and sew a few beads over the places where they are joined. These trefoil leaves are made separately, ...
— Beeton's Book of Needlework • Isabella Beeton

... (Lower specimen III, Fig. 19 characteristic of Boeotia.) Dark paint on natural clay (sometimes lightened by a white slip, e. g. Laconia) differs distinctly from Mycenaean. Shapes fewer and curves less flowing. Amphorae, plates, bowls, and jugs. Trefoil ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various

... rambles, I entered a green lane which I had never seen before. At first it was rather narrow, but as I advanced it became considerably wider. In the middle was a drift-way with deep ruts, but right and left was a space carpeted with a sward of trefoil and clover. There was no lack of trees, chiefly ancient oaks, which, flinging out their arms from either side, nearly formed a canopy and afforded a pleasing shelter from the rays of the sun, which was burning fiercely above. Suddenly a group of objects attracted my attention. Beneath one of the ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... he said, "as inseparable as the holy trefoil; and, as they say the wearer of that sacred herb mocks at magical delusion, so we, while we are true to each other, may set ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... sedge, and the curious balls of the bur-reed, very like the horrid German weapon called a morning star. Also meadow-sweet, meadow-rue, and comfrey of every shade of purple, the water avens and forget-me-not, also that loveliest plant the bog-bean, with trefoil leaves and feathery blossoms. Orchis latifolia is in plenty, and also Orchis incarnata, sometimes called the Romsey orchis. Of late years the mimulus has gilded the bank of one of the ditches. Is it compensation for the Pinguicula vulgaris, ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... of Duke Charles and the town of the Duchess of Luxembourg. On the 9th of August a letter from Arlon reached Orleans. About the middle of the month a pursuivant arrived at Arlon. He was called Coeur-de-Lis, in honour of the heraldic symbol of the city of Orleans, which was a lily-bud, a kind of trefoil. The magistrates of Orleans had sent him to Jeanne with a letter, the contents of which are unknown. Jeanne gave him a letter for the King, in which she probably requested an audience. He took it ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... varieties were introduced into Ireland two hundred years ago from England and are not Irish at all! The true shamrock is the delicate little wood-sorrel, Oxalis acetosella, which has a beautifully formed three-split or trefoil leaf of the most vivid green colour, and a white flower like that of a geranium. It is called "fairy-bell" by the Welsh, and was believed to ring chimes for the elfin folk. It was also greatly esteemed for its ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... you?' said Masquerier. 'That's the artistic temperament. You can do a lot with it. And I'm Bat Masquerier,' he went on. He dropped his chin in his fists and scowled straight in front of him.... 'I made the Silhouettes—I made the Trefoil and the Jocunda. I made 'Dal Benzaguen.' Here Ollyett sat straight up, for in common with the youth of that year he worshipped Miss Vidal Benzaguen of the Trefoil immensely and unreservedly. '"Is that a dressing-gown ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... almost on every kind of trees, Young firs, the ilex, and the oak we crop: Sweet trefoil fragrant juniper, and yew, Wild olives, thyme,—all freely ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... Art is contained in that remarkable and very characteristic system of foliations and cuspidations in tracery, which were suggested by the leaf-forms in Nature. In this adaptation, when first it was initiated in the earliest phases of Gothic, there is something like Greek Love. The simple trefoil aperture seems a fair architectural version of the clover-leaves. But the propriety of the use of these clover-lines was hinted by a constructive exigency, the pointed arch. The inevitable assimilation of the natural forms of leaves with this feature was too evident not to be improved ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... archivolt, as in Fig. V., from the Corte del Forno at Santa Marina. The pierced cusp gives a peculiar lightness and brilliancy to the window, but is not so sublime. In the richer buildings the surface of the flat and solid cusp is decorated with a shallow trefoil (see Plate VIII. Vol. I.), or, when the cusp is small, with a triangular incision only, as seen in figs. 7 and 8, Plate XI. The recesses on the sides of the other cusps indicate their single or double lines of foliation. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... air, and filmy silvery mist had begun to float off the dark bogland in vanishing wreaths, soft and dim as the frail sloe-blossom, already stolen out over the writhen black branches up on the ridge. A jewel had been left in the heart of every groundling trefoil and clover-leaf, and the long rays that twinkled to them were still just tinged with rose. Here and there a flake of gold seemed to have lit upon the clump of sombre green furze-bushes, by which neighbours ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... again; defeated them on the Serchio, near Lucca; entered the Pisan territory by the Val di Serchio; and there, cutting down a great pine tree, struck their florins on the stump of it, putting, for memory, under the feet of the St. John, a trefoil "in guise of a little tree." And note here the difference between artistic and mechanical coinage. The Florentines, using pure gold, and thin, can strike their coin anywhere, with only a wooden anvil, and their engraver ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... amphitheatre of hills. LAKE GLAZIER lies above and beyond Lake Itasca, and its waters have an elevation of probably seven feet above that lake, being connected therewith by a small, swift stream. Lake Itasca is composed of three arms, extending in the form of a trefoil, having a length of five miles and an average width of about one mile. The upper, or southern end of its middle arm apparently terminates in a swamp, which might easily have deceived any one not familiar with the ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... Treasurer kasisto. Treat (to feast) regali. Treat (medicinally) kuraci. Treat (to discuss) trakti. Treatise traktato. Treatment (medical) kuracado. Treaty kontrakto, traktajxo. Tree arbo. Trefoil trifolio. Trellis palisplektajxo. Tremble tremi. Trembling tremo—ado. Tremendous grandega. Tremor tremeto, skueto. Tremulous trema, skueta. Trench fosajxo. Trenchant akra. Trencher ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... Trefoil and Quatrefoil! What shaped those destinied small silent leaves Or numbered them under the soil? I lift my dazzled sight From grass to sky, From humming and hot perfume To scorching, quivering light, Empty blue!—Why, As I bury my face ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... easily "explode" the showy tick-trefoil. A bumblebee alights upon a flower, thrusts his head under the base of the standard petal, and forces apart the wing petals with his legs, in order to dislodge them from the standard. This motion causes the keel, also connected with the standard, to ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... subterraneous trefoil, is another plant, which buries its seed, the globular head of the seed penetrating the earth; which, however, in this plant may be only an attempt to conceal its seeds from the ravages of birds; for there is another ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin

... I was sketching a picturesque trefoil-headed door leading into this part of the vault; and the place being at that time in great confusion with coffins, remains of bodies, some of which were dried like mummies, &c., I could find no better seat than one of the coffins. The sexton's ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... the varied beauties of the lotus, the hosts of ministering intelligences, the luxuriant symbolism, the purple clouds, the wheel of the law, the swastika[29] or double cross, and the vagra,[30] or diamond trefoil. All that color, perfume, sensuous delights, art and luxury can suggest, are here, together with all the various orders of beings that inhabit the Buddhist universe; and these are set forth in their fulness and detail. In the six conditions of sentient existence are devas or gods, men, asuras or ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... Many and various as the breeds of men, or the trees of a forest, were the stalks that made up that greenish jungle with the waving, fawn-colored surface; of rye-grass and brome-grass, of timothy, plantain, and yarrow; of bent-grass and quake-grass, foxtail, and the green-hearted trefoil; of dandelion, dock, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... all its varieties, including the trefoil and the shamrock, are barometers. When rain is coming, the leaves shut together like the shells of an oyster and do not open again until fine weather is assured. For a day or two before rain comes their stems swell to an appreciable ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson

... Geometrical). Pointed arches. Pillars with detached shafts. Moulded or carved capitals. Narrow and high pointed windows. Later period—Geometrical trefoil and circular tracery ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes

... the interior of the building is that we have here a church on the trefoil plan, similar to S. Mary of the Mongols (p. 272) or S. Elias of Salonica, for the central area is flanked by two semi-domes, which with the eastern apse form a lobed plan at the vaulting level. A closer examination ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... a queer vegetable called the daicum, of which great use is made by the people. It resembles an elongated turnip, is about as large round as one's wrist, and milk white. On the path leading round the base of the bluff were many pretty wild-flowers, among which the blooming trefoil and the harebell were seen intermingled with a large and handsome species of daisy. The starwort, a great favorite with the Japanese, was met in abundance. It will be remembered that this flower forms part of the Mikado's arms. It was November, but the ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... beautiful arcade runs completely round the walls. It is of trefoil arches, deeply and richly moulded, supported on marble columns carved with foliage. Over the arches is a hood mould terminating with heads. In the spandrels are a series of deeply-sunk and moulded quatrefoils, two of which contain ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • J. E. Bygate

... dark columns banded together in joyful unity, all copied from nowhere, but designed by this holy stone poet to the glory of God. The pierced tympanum has a quatrefoil for the four cardinal virtues, or a trefoil for faith, hope, and charity. Compared with the lovely Angel Choir which flowered seventy years later, under our great King Edward, it may look all unpractised, austere; but Hugh built with sweet care, and sense, and honesty, never rioting in the disordered emotion ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... wonderful treasure has been preserved by the Count's descendants with jealous care, even until this day. I have said that no man could read the inscriptions on the rings: they were all the same—the three as like as the leaves of a trefoil. They were all large enough for the largest man's thumb, and made of the purest crown gold: the shield was of a circular form, bearing in the centre the figure of a Knight Templar in full armour, with spur and shield, keeping watch before the Temple at Jerusalem; but what the characters around ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... tufted elegance, what richness of open-work tracery this encroachment of the ivy throws upon the rather gaunt and sharp gable-end of the building, which on this front has for ornament but four narrow-pointed windows, surmounted by three trefoil quadrilobes. ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin

... the furniture and the designs for carving were architectural, and a careful study of the Gothic cathedrals of France, Belgium, and England will give a very satisfactory idea of this wonderful time. The idea of the pointed arch, rose window, trefoil, quatrefoil, animal grotesques, and geometric designs, as well as the beautiful linen-fold design, were all adapted for use as carving in the panels of the furniture of the day, which consisted of chests that served as seats, ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop

... is by some supposed to have been a temple of the Gauls converted into a Christian place of worship; the nave and tower having been added to the old temple, which consists of a triple apse forming a regular trefoil, each of which has a domed top. We drove on to Nacqueville, the chateau of Comte Hippolyte de Tocqueville. The park is prettily laid out, a stream of water runs in front of the house, and a row of blue hydrangeas blazed forth in great beauty, with the relief of a background ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser

... mode of preparing old clover and trefoil seeds by a process called doctoring, became so prevalent as to excite the attention of the House of Commons. It appeared in evidence before a committee, that the old seed of the white clover was doctored by ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage

... plur. of Shurrafahcrenelles or battlements; mostly trefoil-shaped; remparts coquets which ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton

... columns, and runs with some complacency up the groining and fret-work, and alights finally and fatally on a red chimney-top. He might as well have built a Gothic aisle at an entrance to a coal wharf. We have no scruple in saying that the man who could desecrate the Gothic trefoil into an ornament for a chimney has not the slightest feeling, and never will have any, of its beauty or its use; he was never born to be an architect, and never will ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin

... Dr. Trefoil, the dean of Barchester, Mr. Slope had not shrunk from urging the bishop to recommend his chaplain ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... green lane which I had never seen before; at first it was rather narrow, but as I advanced it became considerably wider; in the middle was a driftway with deep ruts, but right and left was a space carpeted with a sward of trefoil and clover; there was no lack of trees, chiefly ancient oaks, which, flinging out their arms from either side, nearly formed a canopy, and afforded a pleasing shelter from the rays of the sun, which was burning fiercely above. Suddenly a group of ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... probably joined the creek I had left below the place of our last encampment. In the lower part of the gully, we came upon some fine Nymphaea ponds and springs surrounded by ferns. The whole valley, though narrow, was beautifully grassed. Trichodesma, Grewia, Crinum, and the trefoil of the Suttor, grew on the flats; the apple-gum, rusty-gum, the mountain Acacia and Fusanus, the last in blossom, grew on ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt

... is very amusing. He confesses his part heresies, which are mere opinions, while his orthodoxy is full of heretical errors. His Trinity is a mere trefoil, a 31, which is no mystery at all, but a common object of the senses. The mystery is, that one is three, that is, each being ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... Eleanor and Miss Bold. The dean leaning on a gaunt spinster, his only child now living with him, a lady very learned in stones, ferns, plants, and vermin, and who had written a book about petals. A wonderful woman in her way was Miss Trefoil. Mr. Finnie, the attorney, with his wife, was to be seen, much to the dismay of many who had never met him in a drawing-room before. The five Barchester doctors were all there, and old Scalpen, the retired apothecary and tooth-drawer, who was first taught ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... story, my good Q.M. Wait till I get clear of this clumsy fellow ahead. So, so, gently. Now, Miss Trefoil; the Trefoil is a girl whose success I can understand perfectly. To begin with—the girl is educated. In the second place, she is, beyond all dispute, a beautiful woman. There is not another pair of violet eyes in all Paris—I mean in the season—to ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold

... presages well of this work, but is afraid of inaccuracies—so am I—but things must be as they may. There is a kind of glamour about me, which sometimes makes me read dates, etc., in the proof-sheets, not as they actually do stand, but as they ought to stand. I wonder if a pill of holy trefoil would dispel this fascination. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... figure of the Divine Infant are full of majesty, as he holds his hands in blessing towards the spectator, who symbolizes the world which He has come to save. Close to him on the ground, on his right branch in trustful repose; on his left springs a plant of the meadow-trefoil. Thus lightly and reverently has the master touched the mystery of the Blessed Trinity: the goldfinch symbolizing by its colours, the trefoil by ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler

... comes the tree-peony, and then the iris, with its trefoil flowers broader than a man may span, and at all colors under the sky. To one who has seen the great Japanese fleur-de-lis, France looks ludicrously infelicitous in her ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... lifted high above the surrounding country and having a free horizon of sea and land. It consisted of a chancel, nave and south porch. Its bell cote held one bell; and within was a Norman font, a trefoil headed piscina, and sitting room ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... the former from Carrara, Italy, the latter from Paros, an island in the Aegean Sea. 21. NIMBE TRILOBE; the Virgin was often represented in early paintings with a halo of three rounded lobes, in the shape of a trefoil, symbolizing the Trinity. ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... Lancastrian reigns the Collar of SS. had no pendant, though, afterwards, it had a pendant called "the king's beast." On the effigy of Queen Joan the collar certainly has no pendant, except the jewelled ring of a trefoil form. But on the ceiling and canopy of the tomb of Henry IV., his arms, and those of his queen (Joan of Navarre), are surrounded with Collars of SS., the king's terminating in an eagle volant (rather an odd sort of a beast), whilst the pendant ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various

... (not to be confounded with Lourdes), at which place—being the railway station for St. Bertrand—carriages can be hired for the drive, a distance of six miles there and back. Traversing the village and crossing the bridge, we issued again on a vista of fields bright with trefoil and waving flowers, and backed up by finely-wooded hills. Away to the right, nestling among the trees, stands a pretty little village and castle, and as we passed on, St. Bertrand came in view over the crest of a wooded hill; and, ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough

... Noyon plainly excels, and there is found nowhere else in France the perfect trefoil effect produced by the apsidal terminations of both transepts and choir. So far as the transepts are concerned, they are of the manner affected by the builders on the Rhine, notably in the Minster at Bonn, at Cologne, and again ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... Master Fibbet swears he is sober. I have called my own secretary Gibbet, though his name chances to be only Gibeon, a worthy Israelite at your service, but as pure a youth as ever picked a lamb-bone at Paschal. But I call him Gibbet, merely to make up the holy trefoil with another rhyme. This squire of thine, Colonel Everard, looks as if he might be worthy to be coupled with the rest ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... behind his head and rolled over to lay a scarred cheek on his arm, smiling to himself. Well, here was Earth beneath him. No longer a green star high in alien skies, but warm soil, new clover so near his face he could see all the little stems and trefoil leaves, moist earth granular at their roots. An ant ran by with waving antennae close beside his cheek. He closed his eyes and drew another deep breath. Better not even look; better to lie here like an animal, absorbing the sun and the ...
— Song in a Minor Key • Catherine Lucille Moore

... rigging must now be described in some detail. The envelope is made up of three longitudinal lobes, one above and two below, which when viewed end on gives it a trefoil appearance. The internal rigging is attached to the ridges formed on either side of the upper lobe, where it meets the two side lobes. From here it forms a V, when viewed cross sectionally, converging at he ridge formed by the two lobes on the underside of the envelope ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale

... ascent is often interrupted and traversed by gentle descents and valleys; and the inequalities that are formed by the different combinations of these gradual swellings of the ground; are most beautifully diversified with large lawns, which are covered with a very fine trefoil, intermixed with a variety of flowers, and are skirted by woods of tall and well-spread trees, most of them celebrated either for their aspect or their fruit. The turf of the lawns is quite clean and even, and the bottoms of the woods in many places clear of all bushes and underwoods; and the woods ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... the remains of a smaller recessed arch, and the only portion of the north wall which is still standing contains one bay of a trefoil-headed arcading which formerly was carried round the walls of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse

... flowers, which are different from those found at a lower elevation. Amongst the most noticeable of these is the blue Hepatica, Anemone, Hepatica L., apink variety of which is sometimes met with, the pink cyclamen-like flower, Erythronium Dens Canis L. with its trefoil-like and spotted leaves; in shady places the Primrose, Primula acaulis All.; everywhere over the summit of the mountain the Cowslip, Primula veris; two species of Gentian, Gentiana verna and G. acaulis L.; Ophrys fusca Link, also a ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... and gold, and blue and white; every flower that can be made to grow in our climate grows there, we may be sure. But there is no need of garden flowers now, when the fields and hedges, even the railway banks, are painted with the lovely blue of wild geraniums and harebells, the gold of birdsfoot trefoil and Saint John's wort, and the white and pink of convolvulus or bindweed. We are passing through some of the richest scenery in the Thames valley. There, on the right, is Mapledurham, a grand mediaeval building, surrounded by such a wealth of stately trees as you will see nowhere ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs

... earliest work—is in the form of a hexagon resting upon nine columns; the central pillar is set on a strange group, a man, a griffin, and animals; three others are poised on the backs of lions; while three are set on simple pediments on the ground; and three again support the steps. A "trefoil arch" connects the six chief pillars, on each of which stands a statue of a Virtue. It is here that we came for the first time upon a figure not of the Christian world, for Fortitude is represented as Hercules with a lion's cub on his shoulder. In the spandrels ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... South America," vol. ii., p. 55) says, a root called the oca is cultivated in several of the colder provinces of Peru. "This plant," he states, "is of a moderate size, in appearance somewhat like the acetous trefoil; the roots yellow, each about five or six inches long, and two in circumference. They have many eyes, and the roots, several of which are yielded by one plant, are somewhat curved. When boiled it is much ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... in some places nothing but wood, in others breaks of prospect. The lawn, which is extensive, is new grass, and appears to be excellently laid down, the herbage a fine crop of white clover (trifolium repens), trefoil, rib-grass (plantago lanceolata), and other good plants. Returned to Dublin, and made inquiries into other points, the prices of provisions, etc. The expenses of a family in proportion to those of London are, as five ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young



Words linked to "Trefoil" :   Trifolium pratense, yellow trefoil, moon trefoil, alpine clover, Trifolium reflexum, sickle alfalfa, dutch clover, prairie trefoil, Medicago falcata, tick trefoil, hop clover, herb, medick, white clover, black medick, Italian clover, Medicago sativa, Medicago lupulina, Medicago, lucerne, Medicago arborea, shamrock, genus Medicago, nonesuch clover, crimson clover, buffalo clover, medic, bird's foot trefoil, lesser yellow trefoil, Medicago intertexta



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