"Spavined" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... distinction, indeed, had a sure enemy in Mr. Johnson. We met a friend driving six very small ponies, and stopped to admire them. "Why does nobody," said our Doctor, "begin the fashion of driving six spavined horses, all spavined of the same leg? It would have a mighty pretty effect, and produce the distinction of doing something worse than the ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... sup, liquid. Souple, supple. Souter, cobbler. Sowens, porridge of oat flour. Sowps, sups. Sowth, to hum or whistle in a low tune. Sowther, to solder. Spae, to foretell. Spails, chips. Spairge, to splash; to spatter. Spak, spoke. Spates, floods. Spavie, the spavin. Spavit, spavined. Spean, to wean. Speat, a flood. Speel, to climb. Speer, spier, to ask. Speet, to spit. Spence, the parlor. Spier. v. speer. Spleuchan, pouch. Splore, a frolic; a carousal. Sprachl'd, clambered. Sprattle, scramble. Spreckled, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... arrant jokers were in conflict, a vast throng filled the tavern-yard where the pair were to draw conclusions. At the appointed hour the court functionary dragged upon the scene a most dilapidated simulacrum of man's noblest conquest—blind, spavined, lean as Pharaoh's kind, creeking in every joint—at the same time that his fellow wagerer carried on under his long arm a carpenter's horse—gashed with adze and broadax, bored with the augur, trenched with saw and draw-knife—singed, paint, and tar-spotted, ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... three months' service. And he tells the youth that if he says he is sorry for the bargain he must lose his wages and part with a strip of his skin, an inch wide. He rode on a bob-tailed, big-headed, spavined and spotted horse, from his neck to his heel. Oh, he is an unkind man, my gossip, the Churl of the Townland ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... help bein' one," snarled the Cap'n. "They're about all named Todd or Ward round here but one, and his name is Todd Ward Brackett, and he's due next. And they're all tryin' to borry money off'm me and sell me spavined hosses. Now, let's see if they can take a hint." He tentatively wriggled the toe some more, and groaned. "The Todds and the Wards ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... deep humanity of the British people. I really believe that in no other race could you find such universal interest and anxiety to recover a hat. Say what you will, we are a great nation, who only, need rousing to show our best qualities. Do you remember the words of the editor: 'In the spavined and spatch-cocked ruin to which our inhuman enemies have reduced civilization, we of the island shine with undimmed effulgence in all those qualities which mark man out ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ears.' The suggestion came from the contemptuously self-commiserating thought that I was rather like a worn-out 'bus horse, to whom some benevolent minor Providence was offering the freedom of a fine grazing paddock. 'You're too much galled and spavined, you poor devil, to be moved by verbal assurances. Wait till you scent the breezy upland, and your feet feel the turf. You'll know better what it all ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... and vexed by the strange sight of a dozen men of capacity working and playing together in harmony. He and his fellows are always fighting. With them familiarity naturally breeds contempt. If they ever praise each other's bad drawings, or broken-winded novels, or spavined verses, nobody ever supposed it was from admiration; it was simply a contract between themselves and a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... woes an' cling together for comfort. She allus used to sit by his side in the twilight, singin' sorrowful love songs to him, an' once I caught him holdin' her hand. You see she was just naturally hungry for somethin' to pet an' care for; luck offered a spavined Englishman, an' she was tryin' to ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... of old spavined furniture which would bring about tu'pence at public sale. Some of it was your great-aunt's. All of it has been in the family from time immemorial; and its peculiar and considerable value, your aunt ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... way, he did not telegraph, but hired a cart and pair at the station. The driver was a young fellow in a nankeen coat, with a belt below his long waist. He was glad to talk to the gentleman, especially because while they were talking his broken-winded white horse and the emaciated spavined one could go at a foot-pace, which they always ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... was still a Young Man he made the Important Discovery that the honest Laborer who digs Post-Holes for 11 Hours at a Stretch gets $1.25 in the Currency of the Realm, while the Brain-Worker who leads out a Spavined Horse and puts in 20 Minutes at tall Bunko Work, can clean up $14.50 and then sit on the Porch all Afternoon, reading "The ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... of the head, "small matter of wonder if I cannot attain unto so high an estate; for I beg you to observe that though I am tolerably efficient in the use of my weapon" (here he laid his hand lightly upon the silver hilt of his small-sword), "though I can tell a spavined horse from a sound one, and can lose a trifle without positive tears, yet—and I say it with a sense of my extreme unworthiness—I have an excessive and abiding horror of mud, or dirt in any shape or form. But is ...
— The Honourable Mr. Tawnish • Jeffery Farnol
... an hour, again caught sight of the swan-maiden, the daughter of Father Rhine, she was so surpassingly lovely that he forgot to inquire for her chaperone. The chaperone, therefore, without difficulty, effected a clandestine retreat, found her way to a carriage and drove home as fast as the spavined droschke horse would convey her. Twenty minutes later she slipped into the dressing-room at the Schuetzenhaus, accompanied by a second daughter of Father Rhine, whom that worthy parent himself could scarcely have told from ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... it comin' quite a while back, pains in my knees an' all that—thought mebbe you'd notice me hobblin' about. I can't git around good—feel sort of stove up an' spavined on my feet." ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... always a great fight at town-meetings for these school board positions, especially when the school-book agents became numerous, for these committees could secure from said agents unlimited free books, and get high prices for all their spavined horses, dried up cows, and sick pigs in return for voting for ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... said wearily, "this is a rotten corncrib. It's sprained and spavined and Lord knows what. It's full of bugs and ants and spiders and dust and passe corncobs and it's architecturally incorrect, but if you and the marshal will hike off somewhere else and brag about his badge, I'll buy it. I've got ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... have a good try. I want these two towns to be one. That'll be good for your town lots, Jowett," he added whimsically. "If my policy is carried out, my town lot'll be worth a pocketful of gold- plated watches or a stud of spavined mares." He chuckled to himself, and his fingers reached towards a bell on the table, but he paused. "When was it they said the strike would begin?" ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... first. Over this is the garret. I needn't tell a New England boy what—a museum of curiosities is the garret of a well-regulated New England house of fifty or sixty years' standing. Here meet together, as if by some preconcerted arrangement, all the broken-down chairs of the household, all the spavined tables, all the seedy hats, all the intoxicated-looking boots, all the split walking-sticks that have retired from business, "weary with the march of life." The pots, the pans, the trunks, the bottles—who may hope to make an inventory of the numberless odds and ends collected in this ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... way," Ryder explained to the three as they sat around the spavined table in the grimy back room of Ryder's "office." "It's this way. There's a scoovy after Paa, I'm told; he says he was there before 'Rosemary,' which is a lie, and that his Gov'ment has given him title. He's got a kind of dough-dish up Portland way and starts for Paa as soon as ever he kin ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... there is where my lode of information turns to an old spavined crowbait, and folds its wings, ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... A spavined horse starts out lame for a few steps or rods and then goes sound. A lame shoulder causes dragging of the toe and rolling when in motion. A ring-bone causes an extra long step and lameness increases with exercise. Stifle lameness ...
— Pratt's Practical Pointers on the Care of Livestock and Poultry • Pratt Food Co.
... their temperaments, nervous animals possessing no particular congenital structural defects of the hock and having no history of spavined progenitors, are subject to spavin when kept at work likely to produce tarsal sprain. Spavin usually develops early in such subjects and examples of this kind may be frequently observed in agricultural sections of the country. Where spavin develops ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... once there was not a carriage in sight. I stumbled sleepily down into Panama and for some distance along Avenida Central before I was able to hail an all night hawk chasing a worn little wreck of a horse along the macadam. I spread my lanky form over the worn cushions and we spavined along the graveled boundary line, past the Chinese cemetery where John can preserve and burn joss to his ancestors to the end of time, out through East Balboa just awakening to life, and reached Balboa docks as day was breaking. I was not long there, and the equine ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... their passsengers, while without such trouble they continue to reap rich harvests. Very likely the idea of loading a lot of hot water upon their cars, for passengers to stand upon, would strike them as a good joke. Their poor, broken down, spavined horses, could not stand ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... noticing the absurd figure of his guide, whose legs stuck out like a pair of compasses beneath his tattered gown, his shaking head threatening dislodgment to hat and wig, while his elbows churned at every jolt, making play with the shuffling gait of his spavined and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of spavined old croakers. Old Plain Talk had a shrew for a wife, and that's made him shrewish; and Old Prudence, when a boy, broke down in an apple-stall, and that discouraged him for life. No better sport for a knowing spark like me than to hear Old Plain ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... horses, and he handled them with a careless ease that never failed to excite in me a secret envy; for—I here confess it—I always have been a bit afraid of horses, whether spirited or not; not much, but just enough to make me cautious. I never take any liberties with even a blind and spavined derelict. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... their brains; for instance, the daemon belief of Socrates and the ludicrous superstitions of Pythagoras; and you have laid your finger on the softened spot in Mill's skull, 'suffrage.' That is a jaded, spavined hobby of his, and he is too shrewd a logician to involve himself in the inconsistency of 'extended suffrage' which excludes women. When I read his 'Representative Government' I saw that his reason had dragged anchor, the prestige ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans |
