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More "Spike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... French artillery-men running out as we ran in. The directions of the captain were very positive, not to remain in the battery a minute after it was taken, but to board the gunboats, leaving only one of the small boats, with the armourer to spike the guns, for the captain was aware that there were troops stationed along the coast, who might come down upon us and beat us off. The first lieutenant, who commanded, desired O'Brien to remain with the first cutter, and after the armourer had spiked the guns, as officer ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... hard job—you don't want me to draw the moral, do you? I never was good at that, though I've known fellows with that peculiar cast o' brain as could draw a moral out of a marline-spike if they were hard put to it. Seems to me that it's best to let morals draw themselves. For instance, that time when I was wrecked on the South American coast, I came to a shallow river, an' had to wade across, but was too lazy to pull off my ...
— Jeff Benson, or the Young Coastguardsman • R.M. Ballantyne
... entertainment was of maize, "which is a sort of corn which grows here, with a spike like a spindle." The Indians and their guests parted with regret that they could not understand each other's conversation. All this passed in the house of the elder Indian. The younger then took them to his house, where a similar collation was served, and they then returned to the ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... a yell of agony as the spike, by the force of his weight and speed, was driven home ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... and odds and ends of old canvas, while he was not averse to licking the galvanised compound off the newly painted quarter-deck stanchions whenever an opportunity of doing so presented itself. He was a healthy goat of voracious appetite. His gastric juices would have dissolved a marline-spike, and he even made short work of the greater portion of a pair of ammunition boots belonging to the Sergeant-Major of Royal Marines, and devoured with every symptom of relish a sheaf of official and highly important documents lying on the ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... Mr. Merrill, with a tinge of impatience, "don't repeat all the old gossips' tales about Madero. Why, if one believed half of them, he would be endowed with hoofs and horns, not to mention a tail with a spike on the end. If either you or Redman or Jennings wishes to leave the mine, you may. I'll write you a check for the amount I ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... and Swiss, rushed through the Ottoman fire and carried the first redoubt, held by Ibrahim-Aga-Stamboul. They found six pieces of cannon, which the Turks, notwithstanding their terror, had had time to spike. This misadventure, for they had hoped to turn the artillery against the intrenched camp, decided Ali's men on attacking the second redoubt, commanded by the chief bombardier. The Asiatic troops of Baltadgi Pacha rushed to its defence. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... He took the helmet by the spike and put it on the mantel. "Lord knows, I'm not presenting that as a token of valor to any one. It belonged to a poor chap who died on the field the night I was wounded. My orderly packed ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... here, sir," she answered, "who know how terrible they are. There's one—it comes up like my hand—a long spike. A boat once struck upon that, and it's as though it'd been sawn through ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Clifford, with singular energy. "It is as clear to me as sunshine,—were there any in the sky,—that the greatest possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home! The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cleanly and straightly cut with a crosscut saw. The window openings, one or more, may next be cut, commencing beneath the second log from the top, and taking in three beneath it. Replace the logs above, and on the ends of those thus cut, both in windows and doors, proceed to spike a heavy plank, driving two nails into each log, about five inches apart, one above the other. This will hold them firmly in place, and offer a close-fitting jam for the door, and neat receptacle for the window sashes, which latter may now be put in ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... spines on his back and a double row of them down his tail. Fishermen are careful to avoid the lash of this armed tail. The Sting Ray shows us still another weapon. At the end of its long tail it has a horrible, jagged three-inch spike. As this fish likes to bury itself in wet sand, bathers sometimes tread on it. In a flash the tail whips round! A poisonous slime covers the spike, causing great pain ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... again. It was brassy, with a white stone and some sort of pattern on it. He had the treasure, and he had not the least idea what it was, with its bells that jangled such pretty music, and its white spike so hard and smooth. He did not know—but I know. It was a rattle—a baby's old-fashioned rattle—or, if you would rather call it ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... what the enclosed little globular brown Orchid is. I have only seen pollen of a Cattleya on a bee, but surely have you not unintentionally sent me what I wanted most (after Catasetum or Mormodes), viz. one of the Epidendreae?! I PARTICULARLY want (and will presently tell you why) another spike of this little Orchid, with older flowers, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... approached he was upon his knees, and with his knife-blade was digging around a plant, as if to raise it by the roots. It was a small herbaceous plant, with erect simple stem, oblong lanceolate leaves, and a terminal spike of not very conspicuous white flowers. Though I knew it not then, it was the famed ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... sunflowers by the glaring pike Lift shields of sultry brass; the teasel tops, Pink-thorned, advance with bristling spike on spike Against the furious sunlight. Field and copse Are sick with summer: now, with breathless stops, The locusts cymbal; now grasshoppers beat Their castanets: and rolled in dust, a team,— Like some mean life wrapped in its sorry dream,— ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... enthusiastically, as he was slung across the deck in a batter of spray. "Fends 'em off an' fends 'em off, an' 'Don't ye come anigh me,' she sez. Look at her—jest look at her! Sakes! You should see one o' them toothpicks histin' up her anchor on her spike ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... been left at Fort Clifton with orders to spike the guns, blow up the magazine, destroy everything which could be of value to the enemy, and rejoin the command. The order was obeyed, and every man of the detail resumed his ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... Scouts can and took a shoe lace for a bow string. I had hard work getting the first tiny blaze, but after that I've kept a bed of coals covered with sand as a reserve. I found a piece of wreckage and used part of it for a shelter. One part had a long spike in it and that I sharpened by scraping it on some of the shells. Then I got a piece of fat pine that had washed ashore and made me a torch. With this sharp spike and the torch I went fishing at night and got three dandy ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... Texan's throat. The cavalry had charged again, and again the leading line had gone down. Now they were retreating, with the infantry beside them. Seeing it was of no use to remain longer, the cannoneer attempted to spike the four-pounder, but a Texan sharpshooter cut ...
— For the Liberty of Texas • Edward Stratemeyer
... society at the house was that although the major was as well known as the flag on Spike Island, yet somehow, no officer above the rank of an ensign was ever to be met with there. It was not that he had not a large acquaintance; in fact, the "How are you, Major?" "How goes it, Dalrymple?" that kept everlastingly going on as he walked the streets, proved the reverse; but strange ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... animal would be wounded and torn with the spikes and thorns, but the elephant's hide is as strong as a board. He does not mind prickles, and the only sensitive part of him is just behind the ear, so when he is tamed a man sits on his neck, and with a little sharp-pointed spike pricks him behind the ear on the side he wants him to go. It does not hurt, but the elephant feels it and soon understands, and follows the directions as a horse follows the pull of the reins in driving. Elephants live entirely on green food and vegetables, and never want to eat flesh. In their forests ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... tempted and wavering a moment; then, abruptly stepping towards him, with a look of dissolved surrender, said: "When mermaid songs move figure-heads, then may glory, gold, and women try their blandishments on me. But a good fellow, singing a good song, he woos forth my every spike, so that my whole hull, like a ship's, sailing by a magnetic rock, caves in with acquiescence. Enough: when one has a heart of a certain sort, it is in vain ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... after that, one after the other, many rash Jacobite heads, in 1715 and 1745, arrived at the same bad eminence. In many a royal procession and many a City riot, this gate has figured as a halting-place and a point of defence. The last rebel's head blew down in 1772; and the last spike was not removed till the beginning of the present century. In the Popish Plot days of Charles II. vast processions used to come to Temple Bar to illuminate the supposed statue of Queen Elizabeth, in the south-east niche ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... youth some directions. I will explain to you afterwards the cause of his being sent away.—This line, Mariano, is all you need. It is long enough to reach from the city walls to the ground. You will go towards the tower to the west of Bab-Azoun gate. There is an iron spike on the wall there, on which is fixed the head of your poor friend Castello. Fasten the rope to the spike and lower yourself. The ground reached, leave the rope hanging, it will serve for your ascent on returning; then speed round the back of the town, and over the hills by Frais ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... had many a merry squeeze. I am highly delighted with Mr. Allan's etchings. "Woo'd an' married an' a'," is admirable! The grouping is beyond all praise. The expression of the figures, conformable to the story in the ballad, is absolutely faultless perfection. I next admire "Turnim-spike." What I like least is "Jenny said to Jockey." Besides the female being in her appearance * * * *, if you take her stooping into the account, she is at least two inches taller than her lover. Poor Cleghorn! I sincerely sympathize with him. Happy I am to think that he yet has a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was brought Mr. Sparling snatched it from the hands of the tentman. Raising the pole, assisted by the boss canvasman, he was able to reach the loop. The iron spike in the end of the pole was thrust through the loop, and by exerting considerable pressure they were able to force the ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... left exposed in the yard at night. One of the prowling, thieving peons climbed the wall and attempted to abstract the cap,—not because he was in want of a brass cap to a dynamite bomb; he would have stolen a railroad spike or an iron tie all the same. He hadn't fooled with this instrument more than sixty seconds before it was discharged in his hands with a report like a cannon. The consequence was, that not enough of that would-be thief could be found to give the body ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... daughter. The bow and stern are ornamented with a sort of comb, and with grotesque figures of men or animals, sometimes five feet high, composed of small pieces of wood, skilfully inlaid and morticed, without a spike of any kind. Their bowls or troughs are scooped out of a block of wood; in these they boil their food. Their best manufacture is a sort of basket, of straw-work or cedar bark, and bear-grass, so closely ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... reed-mace or club-rush, a plant growing in lakes, by edges of rivers and similar localities, with a creeping underground stem, narrow, nearly flat leaves, 3 to 6 ft. long, arranged in opposite rows, and a tall stem ending in a cylindrical spike, half to one foot long, of closely packed male (above) and female (below) flowers. The familiar brown spike is a dense mass of minute one-seeded fruits, each on a long hair-like stalk and covered with long downy hairs, which render the fruits ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... bard shall sit In foremost row before the astonished pit, And grin dislike, and kiss the spike, And twist his mouth and roll his head awry, The arch-absurd quick glancing from ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... crossed the threshold when Sisera awakened and begged for water to quench his burning thirst. Jael gave him wine mixed with water, which caused him to drop into a sound sleep again. The woman then took a wooden spike in her left hand, approached the sleeping warrior, and said: "This shall be the sign that Thou wilt deliver him into my hand if I draw him from the bed down on the ground without awaking him." She tugged at Sisera, and in very truth ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... dark and wicked as he had done that night when he had thrilled Tim's heart by his shocking conduct. The boy drew slowly near, half fearful of his own daring. What if the dark man should not at first recognize him as a kindred spirit, and should leap at him with a hand-spike? John ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... case-spike hanging from his neck, listened with generous interest to Tom's simple, unboastful account of all that had happened ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... they exist, must reflect the Sambaquis of the opposite Brazilian shore. The house was guarded by three wooden figures, "clouterly carved," and powdered with ochre or red wood; two of them, representing warriors in studded coatings of spike nails, with a looking-glass fixed in the stomach, raised their hands as if to stab each other. These figures are sometimes found large as life: according to the agents, the spikes are driven in before the wars begin, and every one promises the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... fireworks, pounced upon every expression of mine that was not altogether clear, once even put me to confusion over some monument of the sixteenth century.... But the most important thing was, he suspected my intentions; my last soap-bubble struck on him as on a spike, and burst. The inspector, whom I had not got on with from the first, set the director against me. A scene followed. I was not ready to give in; I got hot; the matter came to the knowledge of the authorities; I was forced ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... of the records (messages, records of oral orders, and the like) from which the journal is compiled. Each item of the file bears a serial number corresponding to that of its entry in the journal. An ordinary spike-file is frequently adequate for safe-keeping of these records while in use. When the journal is closed, the corresponding journal-file is filed with the journal, in accordance with standing instructions or in compliance ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... motto." He took a piece of cord and an axe with him, went out to the wood, and again told the men who had been sent with him to remain outside. He hadn't to search long, for the unicorn soon passed by, and, on perceiving the tailor, dashed straight at him as though it were going to spike him on the spot. "Gently, gently," said he, "not so fast, my friend"; and standing still he waited till the beast was quite near, when he sprang lightly behind a tree; the unicorn ran with all its force ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... Most like the centre-spike of gold Which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb What time, with ardors manifold, The bee goes singing to her groom, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... our experience, that the best articles for traffic at these islands, are iron tools in general. Axes and hatchets, nails, from the largest spike down to tenpenny ones, rasps, files, and knives, are much sought after. Red cloth, and linen, both white and coloured, looking-glasses and beads are also in estimation; but of the latter those that are blue ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... you they will bleed for you; the fount of tears feeds a river as well as betrays a hidden well. Good, then; good, then! He saw a future in all this. From the other spike of the dilemma he saw nothing but his impaling; in this case, if he was impaled, balm at least would be laid upon his wounds. Fra Battista determined to brazen it ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Horse and foot, carbines and petronels, swords and pole-axes, are mingled in one struggling mass. Rupert and his men seem refreshed, not exhausted, by the weary night,—they seem incapable of fatigue; they spike the guns as they cut down the gunners, and, if any escape, it is because many in both armies wear the same red scarfs. One Puritan, surrounded by the enemy, shows such desperate daring that Rupert bids release him at last, and sends afterwards to Essex to ask his name. One Cavalier bends, with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... Bright purplish blue, including filaments, anthers, and style; crowded in a dense spike; quickly fading; unpleasantly odorous. Perianth tubular, 2-lipped, parted into 6 irregular lobes, free from ovary; middle lobe of upper lip with 2 yellow spots at base within. Stamens 6, placed at unequal distances on tube, 3 opposite ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... nuggets, her crew is asleep, Then board her, and take her, for dead men are cheap, We'll spike them and pike them, like so many sheep. With a Heave! Ho! Blow the ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... so, my lord. Your years, indeed, are fewer than mine, by seven or thereabout; but your knowledge is far higher, your experience richer. Our wits are not always in blossom upon us. When the roses are overcharged and languid, up springs a spike of rue. Mortified on such an occasion? God forfend it! But again to the business. I should never be over-penitent for my neglect of needy gentlemen who have neglected themselves much worse. They have chosen their profession with its chances and contingencies. If they had ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... a tobacco-box of dough, painted and decorated it with artificial flowers of the same material, so that it was not distinguishable from porcelain; another had forged an axe-blade of steel, etched the surface and fixed it upon a polished ebony rod with a terminal spike, forming a miniature ice-axe, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... stream of electric fire that splits an ash is not a ponderable thing, and the way in which the lodestone reaches the ten-pound weight and makes it jump is not perceptible. You would think the man had pretty good molars that should gnaw a spike like a stick of candy, but a bottle of innocent-looking hydrogen-gas will chew up a piece of bar-iron as though it ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the peg and the holes in the wall. Sherry questioned him. "Why do you spike the wall with the little ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sides of the body; yet it is apparently a mere matter of chance whether it be the right or the left side that undergoes so singular an amount of change. One plant is known to me[125] in which the flower, according as it stands on the one or other side of the spike, is unequally developed. In all the foregoing cases the two sides of the animal are perfectly symmetrical at an early period of growth. Now, whenever a species is as liable to be unequally developed ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... hawser, lasso, lariat, cabestro, tether, tow; pl. shrouds, ratlines. Associated Words: marline, marline spike, marling, strand, oakum, winch, windlass, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... were of the following nature. There is a small shrine and in it a golden eagle, which is found in all the legions that are on the register, and it never moves from the winter-quarters except the whole army goes forth on some errand. One man carries it on a long shaft, which ends in a sharp spike for the purpose of setting it firmly in the ground. Now of these so-called eagles one was unwilling to join him in his passage of the Euphrates at that time, but stuck fast in the earth as if planted until many took their places around it and pulled it out by force, so that ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... the projections of the cape, evidently placed there by the crew to attract the attention of vessels passing. The mizen mast and main topmast had been cut away, and there were a few marks of the axe upon her mainmast. The natives appeared to have taken notice of the ironwork, for some spike nails were found about their fireplaces; these traces, however, were not very recent, nor was it probable that any natives were upon the island at ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... very broad at base, half clasping the stem and rapidly narrowed to an acute tip; hardly at all spreading from the thread-like twigs; flowers pinkish, in spike-like clusters ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... vanquished by Calmer's words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away. And was he then neither calm like the one nor godly like the other? He was neither as much as he would have liked to be either. But could he not have endeavoured to have found again as in his youth ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... white-ant hillocks shot upwards here and there euphorbias, with boughs like the arms of a candle-stick. In the sky vultures soared, and lower there flew from acacia to acacia birds of the raven species with black and white plumage. The grass was yellow and, in spike, looked like ripe rye. But, nevertheless, that dry jungle obviously supplied food for a great number of animals, for several times each day the travelers met considerable herds of antelopes, hartbeests, and ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Mr. Murphy declared to the American consul and dropped his marline-spike, as Matt Peasley ripped left and right, right and left into Ole Peterson's dish face. "Watch the skipper—our skipper, I mean. Regular young human pile-driver." He raised his voice and called to Matt Peasley. "He's rocking on his legs now, ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... heaven's sake, Corydon, look here! Just now a bramble-spike Ran, there, into my instep—and oh how deep they strike, Those lancewood-shafts! A murrain light on that calf, I say! I got it gaping after her. Canst thou ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... the officers as an active lad and willing seaman, and by the crew as a lively, hearty fellow, and a good shipmate. He was going aloft to fit a strap round the main top-mast-head, for ringtail halyards, and had the strap and block, a coil of halyards and a marline-spike about his neck. He fell from the starboard futtock shrouds, and not knowing how to swim, and being heavily dressed, with all those things round his neck, he probably sank immediately. We pulled astern, in the direction in which he fell, and though we knew that there was no hope ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... was flourishing his sword with as much apparent knowledge of how to use it as if it had been a marlin-spike. Ralph pushed it aside with a stout stick that he carried, and was passing on, when the singing soldier came up and said, "Never mind his name; but whether he be Presbyter Jack or Quaker George, he must drink to the health of the King. Here," he cried, filling a drinking-cup from the ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... ingratitude of republics. It is well-nigh thirty years since I was walking by the Owego and Ithaca Railroad,—a crooked road, not then adapted to high speed. Of a sudden I saw that a long cross timber, on a trestle, high above a swamp, had sprung up from its ties. I looked for a spike with which to secure it. I found a stone with which to hammer the spike. But at this moment a train approached, down hill. I screamed. They heard! But the engine had no power to stop the heavy train. With the presence of mind ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... in vain; step by step they were driven back, the battery was recaptured, and the guns, which in the excitement of the advance the captors had omitted to spike, were ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... your mainslacks, and splice your marline-spike. Where are you coming to?" cried Peeler, the coastguardsman—for such, we need hardly say, was the rank ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... this point the young fool, whose hands were clasped behind him and concealed a marlin-spike, up and killed the old sailor, and so rounded off this ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the meeting-point, though at Promontory, fifty miles west of Ogden, the last spike was driven. A thousand people met at that place in May, '69, to see the short space of track closed and the road finished. A Central train and locomotive from the Pacific came steaming up, and an engine and cars from the Atlantic pulled ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... insubordination was rife in the garrison, which found itself hemmed in on all sides. At midnight of the 27th, the troops rose, seized the guard and posterns, reversed the field pieces commanding the gates, and began to spike the guns. Many of them left the fort with their arms; and the rest, except one company of planters, firmly refused to fight any longer. The men were largely foreigners, and with little interest in the Secession cause; but they also probably saw that continued resistance ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... 92,381 skidded crazily on the icy pavement of Atlantic Avenue. Spike Walters, its driver, cursed roundly as he applied the brakes and with difficulty obtained control of the little closed car. Depressing the clutch pedal, he negotiated the frozen thoroughfare and parked his car in the ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... root-stem, like a nipa-palm, and Mr Hooker had told me that when it is nearly fifteen years old it sends up an immense terminal spike of flowers, after which it dies. It is not so tall as the cocoa-nut tree, but is thicker and larger. The mid-ribs of its immense leaves are twelve or fifteen feet long, and sometimes the lower part is as thick as a man's leg. They are ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... keep it level, or you'll shake out the priming. Ship it here; turn out that one, and heave it into that boat, if they come alongside. Steady now—so! Rummage about, and find me a bolt or two, a marlin-spike, anything. Quick, or the captain will ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... children gather from afar; every one in Haifa under the age of fourteen is there I should say. They glue themselves to the fence and force their little faces between the posts, or spike their chins on the top and then watch in solemn deadly earnest the ways of these strange beings whom fate has so kindly sent to amuse them. The rest-house attendant does not approve of these manners, so he slips ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... pop-guns, and flint-locks, and such; But now! They will not find it pleasant, When once this huge touch-hole I touch. Mighty CAESAR! I guess they won't like it; Great SCOTT! won't it just raise a din? And don't they just wish they could spike ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... French Canadian sharp-shooters and one hundred Indians. De Salaberry does not court defeat by neglecting precautions because he is weak. Windfall is hurriedly thrown up as barricade along the trail. Where the path narrows between the river and the bleak forest, De Salaberry has tree trunks laid spike end towards the foe. At the last moment comes McDonnell of Brockville with six hundred men, but De Salaberry's three hundred occupy the front line facing the ford. McDonnell is farther along the river. By the night of October 25 the American army is close on the dauntless little band hidden in ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... plant, which was introduced into England in 1596 from the Levant.[809] The petals of the original flower, says Mr. Paul, were narrow, wrinkled, pointed, and of a flimsy texture; now they are broad, smooth, solid, and rounded. The erectness, breadth, and length of the whole spike, and the size of the flowers, have all increased. The colours have been intensified and diversified. Gerarde, in 1597, enumerates four, and Parkinson, in 1629, eight varieties. Now the varieties are very numerous, and they were still more numerous a century ago. Mr. Paul remarks ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... below to get a nap until four. They took their drenched clothing off, wrung the water out, hung it on a line round the bogey fire to dry, and turned into their hammocks as naked as they were born. At three the hand-spike knocked heavily on the deck and a loud voice called down the scuttle hatch, "Larboard watch, ahoy! All hands to the ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... plucked fresh from the tree will furnish an abundant meal, and the water of a green cocoa-nut all the drink they desire. The plantain tree grows to about twenty feet in height, its round, soft stem being composed of the elongated foot-stalks of the leaves, and its cone of a nodding flower-spike or cluster of purple blossoms that are very graceful and beautiful. Like the palms, this tree has no branches, but its smooth, glossy leaves are from six to eight feet in length and two or more in breadth. At the root of a leaf ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... from an old ink-bottle can help coming out more or less black; although, if sufficiently pretentious, they can monstrously caricature, especially if they begin with the modest time-worn admission that they are more familiar with the marling-spike than with the pen. But even the caricature born of pretentiousness will not prevent the unpremeditated betrayal of conditions, facts, and incidents, which help reconstruct the milieu; how much more, then, the unaffected simplicity of the born story-teller. I do not know how Froissart ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... being about to commence his fifth egg, to the no small anxiety of Martha and Jane, into whose limited and innocent minds the possibility of such a feat had never entered. "Wot, me! Why, capting, if they was biled as hard as the head of a marline-spike—" ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... prove on the face of my plans that I cannot in any way benefit beyond the satisfaction I shall derive from putting another spike in the "System's" coffin. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... lady's conversational gifts, and after a spirited but brief tourney, conquered with flying colours. My aim was to pin her down to something definite ... like an impaled butterfly: hers was to flutter over a vast garden of irrelevances; but she did not long evade the spike. I tipped its point with the subtly poisonous suggestion that all arrangements must be made in the hour, otherwise complications might arise. There seemed to be so many people who had been attracted by that simple little advertisement of mine, and ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... arm, he led him into a shop where he bought a huge lump of solid iron, so big that they could hardly lift it between them. However, they just managed to carry it to a blacksmith's where Rosald directed that it should be beaten into a thick club, with a sharp spike at one end. When this was done to his liking he took ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... fattening the geese, and her tongue was busily employed in wishing them every misfortune, both in time and eternity. Badgers are very numerous in the district, and they continue to increase and multiply, while the peasants jeopardise their immortal interests by cursing them every time they see a spike of ripening maize pulled down and half stripped of its corn. In the daytime these animals sleep comfortably, digesting their ill-gotten meal in the holes of the rocks, which are so honeycombed that dogs cannot ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... plants in full blossom. Her self-respect was whole again; her spirits rose at a bound. 'I don't know why you admire them so much. They have no scent, and they are only pretty in the lump,' and she broke off a spike of blossom, studied it a little disdainfully, and threw ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... though, struck me as fully equal to the finest fourteenth-century European work in their extreme minuteness and wonderful delicacy of detail. The young priest, whom I should suspect of being what is termed in ecclesiastical circles "a spike," was evidently very familiar with the Liturgy of the Church of England, but it came with somewhat of a shock to hear him apply to Buddha terms which we are accustomed to ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... withers or chafing the back, you are possessed of the handiest machine made for the purpose. Should individual fitting prove impracticable, get an old LOW California riding-tree and have a blacksmith bolt an upright spike on the cantle. You can hang the loops of the kyacks or alforjas—the sacks slung on either side the horse—from the pommel and this iron spike. Whatever the saddle chosen, it should be supplied with breast-straps, ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... back may spike And pierce him with a thorn; The humble bee A tramp is he And there is none ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... affair ended in a great passionate outburst of popular revolution. Spike Foster was a friend of Cortright, and one day, when the latter was indisposed, Spike came to him and borrowed the hat. He had been drinking heavily at the "Red Light," and was in a supremely reckless mood. With the terrible gear hanging jauntily over his eye and his two guns ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... wood cut at the end of this book.) In the Memoriale of Henry, prior of Canterbury, A.D. 1285, the term prikett denotes, not the candlestick, but the candle, formed with a corresponding cavity at one end, whereby it was securely fixed upon the spike. p.413, n. 1. Henry VIII.'s allowance 'unto our right dere and welbilovede the Lady Lucy,' July 16, 1533, included 'at our Chaundrye barr, in Wynter, every night oon preket and foure syses of Waxe, with eight Candells white lights, and ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... hire a donkey, and then sham she'd rather not ride, for fear of being too heavy; and to take Spike out for a run, and then carry him to save him the trouble of walking. But she's very good; she made all our cocked hats, and at the review she and Dolly and Spike were the loyal crowd. Dick and Tom and Harry were the troops, and I was the General, and Mother looked quite like a Queen ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the boat's painter carefully round a spike of coral and landed on the reef, and with a shellful of rum and cocoa-nut lemonade mixed half and half, he took his perch on a high ledge of coral from whence a view of the sea and the coral strand ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of Gino now relaxed its efforts, and the gondola approached a flight of steps over which, as usual, the water cast its little waves. Stepping on the lowest flag, he thrust a small iron spike to which a cord was attached, into a crevice between two of the stones, and left his boat to the security of this characteristic fastening. When this little precaution was observed, the gondolier passed up lightly beneath the massive arch ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... her Cashmere robe were relieved at the throat by a knot of lilac ribbon, and amid its loops were secured clusters of violets, that matched in hue the long spike of hyacinth which was fastened in one side of the coiled hair, twined just behind the ear, and drooped low on the snowy neck. Before her on a gilded stand was the purple pyramid of flowers she had brought from the theatre, and beside them lay several perfumed envelopes with elaborate monograms. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... did all it could to bite through the thread, but whether this was too strong or its teeth too poor, we managed after a lot of trouble to coax the marlinspike up again, and the interfering rascal, who had to come up to the surface now and then to take breath, got the spike of a ski-pole in his thick hide. This unexpected treatment was evidently not at all to his liking, and after acknowledging it by a roar of disgust, he vanished into the depths. Now we got on better. The marlinspike sank and sank until it had ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... on the average, there are ten stars (say) to a field, we should find a certain small portion having 100 or more to a field, then, on HERSCHEL'S first hypothesis, rigorously interpreted, it would be necessary to suppose a spike-shaped protuberance directed from the earth, in order to explain the increased number of stars. If many such places could be found, then the probability is great that this explanation is wrong. We ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... with which they cut the throats of all whom they could master, and then, cutting off their heads, carried them away with them. They sang and danced when the enemy were likely to see them. They carried also a spear of about fifteen cubits in length, having one spike.[34] They stayed in their villages till the Greeks had passed by, when they pursued and perpetually harassed them. They had their dwellings in strong places, in which they had also laid up their provisions, so that the Greeks ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... to the track boss and her voice hardened. "If these spikes were forced out by the impact of the engine, we ought to find torn spike holes inclining toward the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... sometimes called spear-grass, and grows to about the size of a mole-hill, all over the back country everywhere, as thick as mole-hills in a very mole-hilly field at home. Its blossoms, which are green, insignificant, and ugly, are attached to a high spike bristling with spears pointed every way and very acutely; each leaf terminates in a strong spear, and so firm is it, that if you come within its reach, no amount of clothing about the legs will prevent ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... policemen of the army—gorgeous in uniforms of bottle-green and silver and mounted on sleek and shining horses. After them came the infantry: solid columns of grey-clad figures with the silhouettes of the mounted officers rising at intervals above the forest of spike- crowned helmets. After the infantry came the field artillery, the big guns rattling and rumbling over the cobblestones, the cannoneers sitting with folded arms and heels drawn in, and wooden faces, like servants on the box of a carriage. These were the same guns that had ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... said the victor, placing his foot on the body of the vanquished, and holding to his throat the point of the axe, which terminated in a spike ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... shouted, but the sound had not ceased to echo when, out of the horrible tangle about us, rose, with a swift, sinuous motion, a monstrous anacondalike arm, flesh pink in the electric beam, but covered with spike-edged spiracles! It curled itself over the edge of the hovering air ship and drew ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... His cold, Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived, And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave; Only, she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not her life, (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun) Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe, And in her old bounds buried her despair, Hating and loving warmth ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... part in value, to the rest of Britain) and with respect to the profit that England gains from hence, not the forty thousandth part. Although I must confess, that a mote in the eye, or a thorn in the side, is more dangerous and painful than a beam, or a spike at a distance. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... communications made by the enemy before the assault, until they came to the end of the street. Lieutenant Hallowes, with a similar party, was to take the left side. If they found any guards within the houses, they were to overpower these; and, rushing straight on, to attack the battery, and spike the guns. Should they find the houses deserted, they were to gather in the houses nearest the battery, when Peters was to fire his pistol as a signal to Hallowes, and both parties were to ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... armor. A cap of blue steel, with a silver spike on the crown—neck and shoulders covered with a hood of mail—body in a shirt of mail, a bead of silver in each link—limbs to the knees in mail. From the knees down there were splints of steel inlaid with silver; his shoes were of steel, and on the heels long ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... hand brought me to the edge of the shelf, when, throwing my arm around the granite spike. I swung my body upon the shelf and lay down to rest, shouting to Cotter that I was all right, and that the prospects upward were capital. After a few moments' breathing I looked over the brink and directed my comrade to tie the barometer to the lower end of the lasso, which ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... the impaled and injudicious Richard [Sir J. Hooker's youngest son, who had managed to spike himself on a fence.] is none the worse. It is wonderful what boys go through (also what ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... descended to a hole far beneath by a rope ladder, life depending on a spike driven in the rock above and a secure handhold, for the handful of "pay dirt" two peons were grubbing down out of a lower veta, a long narrow alleyway of soft earth and small stones that stretched away into the interior of ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... her own room. Upon a piece of black stuff on the wall, were hung two swords, one a sabre, and one a rapier in a three-cornered case, and above them a leathern helmet with a gilded spike. Beneath these weapons was a heavy old carved chest. With Hilda's help she lifted the lid. Within were uniforms and military trappings of all sorts, and in one corner, folded together, a roll of faded bunting. This ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... whose experience that day had been hard, soon fell asleep with her brothers. Henry did not feel sleepy at all; he was bright and happy and rejoiced. This certainly was an adventure. He wondered what Dick and Joe and Spike and the other fellows of his troop would think when he wrote them about it. He did not realize that he had saved the lives of the children, who would assuredly have frozen ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Delpino. Mr. Farrer also has given a remarkably clear description of the mechanism by which cross-fertilisation is effected in this genus, in the 'Annals and Magazine of Natural History' volume 2 4th series 1868 page 260. In the allied genus Isotoma, the curious spike which projects rectangularly from the anthers, and which when shaken causes the pollen to fall on the back of an entering insect, seems to have been developed from a bristle, like one of those which spring from the anthers in some of or all the species of Lobelia, as described by Mr. ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... had to wrap them up carefully in a paper, and put them into his waistcoat pocket, in order to get them home safely. The children found several other curiosities besides shells. They collected pebbles, and specimens of sand, of different colors. Mary found an old iron spike, perhaps part of a vessel, with the sand and gravel concreted around it. It looked like stone growing upon iron. Rollo also found a small piece of wood, battered and worn by the long-continued action of the waves, and he thought it was very curious indeed. In fine, the children filled ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... interrupted their narrative to inquire in their turn what had passed? What was the cause of the general discouragement? why had the cannon been abandoned to the enemy untouched? Had they not had time to spike them, or at least to spoil ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... in fact. It is asserted that the wretch was gibbeted alive, that he lived for several days, and that his sweetheart kept him alive with milk. Another tale is to the effect that a loaf of bread was placed just within his reach, but fixed on an iron spike that would enter his throat if he attempted to relieve the pangs of hunger ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... children were divided and warned not to lean over the sides and fall out—a somewhat superfluous caution—as most of them, though unused to riding in any legitimate manner, were pretty well used to balancing themselves behind any vehicle which offered as much as a spike to sit on, out of sight of the driver. Then came the rush into the vans. Grey and Tom took up their places next the doors as conductors, and the procession lumbered off with great success, and much ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... met with are the spike, raceme and panicle. When the spikelets are sessile or borne directly along an elongated axis as in Enteropogon melicoides the inflorescence is a spike. If the spikelets borne by the axis are all stalked, however short the ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... the Major, were several men with elephant spears or goads. These consist of a long, pliant, polished bamboo, with a sharp spike at the end, which they call a jhetha. These men now came hurrying round the ridge, among the opener grass, and as we emerged from the heavy cover, they began goading the elephants behind and urging them to their most ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... served under him. "Father Tadeusz" was the name by which his soldiers called him. Invariably he spent some part of his day among his beloved peasants, and daily he recited with them public prayers. Often at night he and they together went up to the teeth of the Russian batteries on expeditions to spike the cannon. His inseparable companion, Niemcewicz, who slept with him in his tent till the-end came, describes how the silence of these nights was broken hideously by the wild, shrill cry of the reapers, by the sudden roar of the cannon ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... happened again and again—there slowly unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler colouration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and, it may be, even immortality. For the new miracle of nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient as that of its discoverer? "John-smithia"! There ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... one short eager blast, and angled in between the herd and a straggler on the edge of it, a yearling elk, a spike bull, his first antler growth consisting of two pointed spikes eighteen inches long. He was not alarmed,—but it was a new kind of coyote that faced him now, one that had learned pack hunting under the ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... there is a shelf of grass meadows which is very beautiful in springtime with a great multitude of wild flowers. More particularly is this so in early June, when the slender asphodel Saint Bruno's lily, with its spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the westward of this delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded trench, a great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which arise great precipices very ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... suppose you will have a hard time wading through my scrawl but I know you will be generous and remember that I went to sea when a little over nine years of age and had my pen been half as often in my hand as a marlin spike, I would now be able to ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... junction of the branch with the parent branch, as, if this is not done, the free circulation of the sap is checked. It runs up the branches, and, of course, cannot readily get on when it meets with a spike of wood sticking out of the branch. This spike or stump may be green or half or quite dead, but whatever state it is in the free circulation of the sap will be checked, and the quantity of sap in circulation for the benefit of the main ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... great reeds or hollow canes[5], some of which, are a foot or eighteen inches round, and are applied to many useful purposes. Two days journey beyond this river is the famous city of Carianfu, in which great quantities of silks and cloth of gold are made. This country produces ginger, galuigal, spike, and many spices; and the inhabitants are idolaters. Proceeding seven days journey westwards, we pass through many cities, and towns, and fine fields, and gardens, and everywhere there are plantations of mulberries for feeding silk-worms, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... three-pointed vermilion-and-tinsel splendor. His Majesty the King fitted it on his royal brow. The Commissioner's wife had a face that children instinctively trusted, and her action, as she adjusted the toppling middle spike, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... understand she had not committed suicide. Her heart had just stopped. I saw her, with the long lashes on the cheeks, with the smile about the lips, with the flowers all about her. The stem of a white lily rested in her hand so that the spike of flowers was upon her shoulder. She looked like a bride in the sunlight of the mortuary candles that were all about her, and the white coifs of the two nuns that knelt at her feet with their faces hidden might have been two swans that were to bear her away to kissing-kindness land, or wherever ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... more," said the prince. "I know there are guards in every gallery, bolts to every door, cannon and soldiery at every barrier. How will you overcome the sentries—spike the guns? How will you break through ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... weakness gave Mr. Hamlin a new idea. He put up the penknife with which he had been paring his nails while wondering why his hands had become so thin, and awaited events. She presently turned, approached the buckeyes, plucked a spike of the blossoms with great girlish lightness, and then apparently discovering Mr. Hamlin, started in deep concern and said with somewhat stentorian politeness: "I BEG your ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Gad, wedge or spike of iron, Gainest, readiest, Gar, cause, Gart, compelled, Gentily, like a gentleman, Gerfalcon, a fine hawk, Germane, closely allied, Gest, deed, story, Gisarm, halberd, battle-axe, Glaive, sword, Glasting, barking, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... keep a sort of iron bolt which he used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order to preserve it from the rats," as he said. As Thenardier was kept in sight, no objection had been made to this spike. Still, it was remembered afterwards, that one of the jailers had said: ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... as the diameter of the earth, yet in this brief period it has completely changed its aspect; the upper part of the flame has, indeed, broken away, and is now shown in that part of the drawing between the two figures on the line above. The same plate also shows various instances of the remarkable spike-like objects, taken, however, at different times and at various parts of the sun. These spikes attain altitudes not generally greater than 20,000 miles, though sometimes they soar ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... as the country became embroiled in political turmoil. Algeria's financial and economic indicators improved during the mid-1990s, in part because of policy reforms supported by the IMF and debt rescheduling from the Paris Club. Algeria's finances in 2000 benefited from the spike in oil prices and the government's tight fiscal policy, leading to a large increase in the trade surplus, the near tripling of foreign exchange reserves, and reduction in foreign debt. The government continues efforts to diversify the economy by attracting ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... oil of blossoms get? Take it from my Julia's sweat: Oil of lilies and of spike? From her moisture take the like. Let her breathe, or let her blow, All rich spices ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... departed to resume his lonely tramp along the road-bed with a sledge over his shoulder to replace any spike or frogs dislodged by ...
— The Bradys Beyond Their Depth - The Great Swamp Mystery • Anonymous
... shows us that each drop of water is a sheath for electric forces sufficient to charge 800,000 Leyden jars, or drive an engine from Liverpool to London. Some Sir William Thomson tells us how hydrogen gas will chew up a large iron spike as a child's molars will chew off the end of a stick of candy. Thus each new book opens up some new and hitherto unexplored realm of nature. Thus books fulfill for us the legend of the wondrous glass that showed its owner all ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... When you swing, spike the right-hand rail lightly. Then string your gangs again and set a line of spikes for the outside of the standard-gauge right-hand rail straight through ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... arms upon the transverse beam; the spikes were sharp—a few blows, and they were driven through the tender palms; next, they drew his knees up until the soles of the feet rested flat upon the tree; then they placed one foot upon the other, and one spike fixed both of them fast. The dulled sound of the hammering was heard outside the guarded space; and such as could not hear, yet saw the hammer as it fell, shivered with fear. And withal not a groan, or cry, or word of remonstrance from the sufferer: nothing at which an enemy ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Sambaquis of the opposite Brazilian shore. The house was guarded by three wooden figures, "clouterly carved," and powdered with ochre or red wood; two of them, representing warriors in studded coatings of spike nails, with a looking-glass fixed in the stomach, raised their hands as if to stab each other. These figures are sometimes found large as life: according to the agents, the spikes are driven in before the wars begin, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... little mountain town at which the junction was to be made between the line running up from the south and that running down from the north, over which we had come. The ceremony of driving the last spike was conducted with due solemnity, after which a "banquet" was given to us by the Mayor and citizens of the small community. After the banquet—which was really a luncheon—we again boarded our train to complete the run to the southern ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... bench under the trees and looked at the harbor—its waters cut by many a flying keel, at Spike Island lying in the sun, all its fortifications as silent and lonely looking as if no convict nor any other living creature was there. Steamboats for "a' the airts the winds can blaw," were passing out and away, leaving ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... has, besides its two ivory prongs at the end of the staff, three divergent ones in the middle of it, with several small double barbs upon them turning inward. The spear for salmon or other fish, called kakeewei, consists of a wooden staff, with a spike of bone or ivory, three inches long, secured at one end. On each side of the spike is a curved prong, much like that of a pitchfork, but made of flexible horn, which gives them a spring, and having a barb on the inner part of the point turning downward. Their fishhooks (kakliokio) ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... product of the ground, were obliged to continue the chase because of the materials and implements which they got from the animals. They used the jaw of a fish, with the teeth in it, as a knife; the arm and leg bones of apes as arrow points; the tail spike of a skate for the same; the two front claws of the armadillo to dig the ground (a process which the animal taught them by the same use of his claws); the shell of a river mussel as a scraper to finish wooden tools. "These people were ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... done very well in his way; but he is a man who has risen too fast, as other men rise too slowly. Nothing in him; no substance, madam; I knew him as a youngster, and I could have tossed him on a marling-spike. And instead of feeding well, Sir, he quite wore himself away. To my firm knowledge, he would scarcely turn the scale upon a good Frenchman of half of the peas. Every man should work his own way up, unless his father did it for him. In my time we had fifty ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... hands, some men climb into trees and wait for the herd to pass, whilst others drive them under. The hippopotami, however, are not hunted, but snared with lunda, the common tripping-trap with spike-drop, which is placed in the runs of this animal, described by every South African traveller, and generally known as far as the Hametic language is spread. The Karuma Falls, if such they may be called, are a mere sluice or rush of water between high syenitic stones, falling in a long slope ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Huntington. Imported Chinese coolies had met the labor demand and construction was speeded up. Actual building had begun in 1863 and six years later the two roads met at Promontory Point near Ogden in Utah, where the last spike was driven, ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... The man came ashore, and Hilderman began to lead us up the path. But Dennis deliberately turned and watched the sailor. Hilderman and his companion strolled ahead while I stood beside Dennis. The man with the red hair fished among a pile of wire rope, and picked out a small marline-spike. Then he lifted a large stone, held the marline-spike on the wooden planking of the landing-stage, and hammered it in with the stone. Then he threw the painter round it, and made the boat secure in ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... away with the stone, evidently with the intention of crushing the young inflorescence. With a few blows he succeeded in doing this effectually. He then drew the knife from his scarf, and, with an adroit cut, detached the upper half of the flower-spike, which fell neglected to ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... besieged welcomed them with rapture, and, as usual, made daily the most desperate sallies. In one outbreak the Harlemers, under cover of a thick fog, marched up to the enemy's chief battery, and attempted to spike the guns before his face. They were all slain at the cannon's mouth, whither patriotism, not vainglory, had led them, and lay dead around the battery, with their hammers and spikes in their hands. The same spirit was daily manifested. As the spring ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... inquired Huish. "I'm agreeable. About time, eh? Bloomin' nearly lost another ship, I fancy." He took out a bottle and began calmly to burst the wire with the spike ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... brethren of another "persuasion," who magnified that mode, and though he was willing to do as I advised in the matter, he was evidently a little inclined to the more spectacular way of receiving the ordinance. Mrs. White suggested that it might save future trouble, and "spike a gun." So Jack, with four others, was taken down to Santa Rosa Creek, that went rippling and sparkling along the southern edge of the town, and duly baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... to spike the port battery and throw the guns overboard, but it was not done, for the enemy's fire was becoming so rapid and severe that the Captain deemed it judicious to abandon the ship at once in order to save ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... and having immense pinnate spiny leaves, which completely cover the trunk till it is many years old. It has a creeping root-stem like the Nipa palm, and when about ten or fifteen years of age sends up an immense terminal spike of flowers, after which the tree dies. It grows in swamps, or in swampy hollows on the rocky slopes of hills, where it seems to thrive equally well as when exposed to the influx of salt or brackish water. ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... bear evenly and smoothly without gouging the withers or chafing the back, you are possessed of the handiest machine made for the purpose. Should individual fitting prove impracticable, get an old LOW California riding-tree and have a blacksmith bolt an upright spike on the cantle. You can hang the loops of the kyacks or alforjas—the sacks slung on either side the horse—from the pommel and this iron spike. Whatever the saddle chosen, it should be supplied with breast-straps, breeching, and ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... Triality. — N. 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; ternary; triune; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Tropics, and dreamy to look upon. Still valleys, leagues away, reposed in the deep shadows of the mountains; and here and there, waterfalls lifted up their voices in the solitude. High above all, and central, the "Marling-spike" lifted its finger. Upon the hillsides, small groups of bullocks were seen; some quietly browsing; others slowly winding into ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... ended in a great passionate outburst of popular revolution. Spike Foster was a friend of Cortright, and one day, when the latter was indisposed, Spike came to him and borrowed the hat. He had been drinking heavily at the "Red Light," and was in a supremely reckless mood. With the terrible gear hanging jauntily over his eye and his two guns drawn, he walked ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... finished copying them. And yet for a whole afternoon she worked enthusiastically at a fantastic design of dream flowers, an extraordinary efflorescence blooming in the light of a miraculous sun, a burst of golden spike-shaped rays in the center of large purple corollas, resembling open hearts, whence shot, for pistils, a shower of stars, myriads of worlds streaming into the sky, like a ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... field back of the cider mill, and, with the agent in the seat, started off on its rounds. In this field corn had been raised the year before, and it would be planted in oats this year, so the plow was omitted and the double disk and spike-toothed harrow used. Bob and his grandfather stood for a half hour watching it work, then Bob went to the barn and got out the team and began plowing the garden, which adjoined the field in which the ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... flourishing his sword with as much apparent knowledge of how to use it as if it had been a marlin-spike. Ralph pushed it aside with a stout stick that he carried, and was passing on, when the singing soldier came up and said, "Never mind his name; but whether he be Presbyter Jack or Quaker George, he must drink to the health of the ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... committed suicide. Her heart had just stopped. I saw her, with the long lashes on the cheeks, with the smile about the lips, with the flowers all about her. The stem of a white lily rested in her hand so that the spike of flowers was upon her shoulder. She looked like a bride in the sunlight of the mortuary candles that were all about her, and the white coifs of the two nuns that knelt at her feet with their faces hidden might have been two swans that were to bear her away to kissing-kindness land, or wherever ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... Seabird after 'aving had a time which made 'im shiver to think of. He said that the men was the roughest of the rough and the officers was worse, and that he 'ad hardly 'ad a day without a blow from one or the other since he'd been aboard. He'd been knocked down with a hand-spike by the second mate, and had 'ad a week in his bunk with a kick given 'im by the boatswain. He said 'e was now on the Rochester Castle, bound for Sydney, and he ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... drew the butterflies from all the surrounding plain with its luscious bean-like fragrance, until the field was full of them, red, black, yellow, and white butterflies, fluttering in flocks round every blue spike. ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... said, 'Oho! That is how it stands? So she is to be cuckoo, hey?' He sat square and intent for a moment or two, working his mouth like a man who chews a straw. Then he slapped his big hand on his knee, and rose up. 'If I cannot spike this wheel of vice, trust me never. By my soul, a plot indeed. Oh, horrible, horrible thief!' He turned gnashing upon his brother. 'Now, Eustace, what do you say to your greatest knight in the world? And what now of your sister, hey? ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... not give either musket or fusee; but they had each a halberd, or a long staff, like a quarter-staff, with a great spike of iron fastened into each end of it, and by his side a hatchet; also every one of our men had a hatchet. Two of the women could not be prevailed upon but they would come into the fight, and they had bows and arrows, which the Spaniards had ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... said he. "Pull the damn bed down and spike it to the floor!" This we did. Then we held a short but intense consultation. Whatever else might be the matter, obviously Tristan was suffering severely from shock and, for all we knew, maybe from partial electrocution. So we called up Dr. ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... bigger than a duck and more ferocious than a jackrabbit, read about Pinto and persuaded himself that he was bear-hunter enough to tackle the old fellow. He went to Fort Tejon, hired a guide and made an expedition to the Castac. The guide took the hunter to Spike-buck Spring, which is at the head of a ravine under the limestone ridge, and showed to him the footprints of a big bear in the mud and along the bear trail that crosses the spring. One glance at the track ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... on Clutching Hand, "I want you, Spike, to follow them. See what they do—where they go. It's her birthday. Something's bound to occur that will give you a lead. All you've got to do is to use ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... line too wide On the narrow crest we stood, And in pride we named it Home, As we sign'd it with our blood. And we held-on all the morning, and the tide Of foes on that low dyke Surged up, and fear'd to strike, Or on the bayonet-spike ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... roughly 7.5% of GDP in 2007 - and represent a significant drain on the economy. Foreign direct investment has increased significantly in the past two years, but the NAZIF government will need to continue its aggressive pursuit of reforms in order to sustain the spike in investment and growth and begin to improve economic conditions for the broader population. Egypt's export sectors - particularly natural gas - ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... painter carefully round a spike of coral and landed on the reef, and with a shellful of rum and cocoa-nut lemonade mixed half and half, he took his perch on a high ledge of coral from whence a view of the sea and the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... on his back and a double row of them down his tail. Fishermen are careful to avoid the lash of this armed tail. The Sting Ray shows us still another weapon. At the end of its long tail it has a horrible, jagged three-inch spike. As this fish likes to bury itself in wet sand, bathers sometimes tread on it. In a flash the tail whips round! A poisonous slime covers the spike, causing great pain ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... natives with an old man and a very wild-looking young one, covered with red ochre, total gules, came to their tree, and I went to them. I gave the old man a spike-nail sharpened, but he asked for a tomahawk, and ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... like the centre-spike of gold Which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb What time, with ardors manifold, The bee goes singing to ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... your old tub down to a flying balloon-jib and a marline-spike, and ballast the Ark with elephants until every inch of her reeked with ivory and peanuts, and she'd outfoot you on every leg, in a cyclone or a zephyr. Give me the Ark and a breeze, and your House-boat wouldn't be within hailing distance of her five minutes after the start if she had 40,000 square ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... snow aids the trapper's art and conspires to Reynard's ruin. But how lightly he is caught, when caught at all! barely the end of his toes, or at most a spike through the middle of his foot. I once saw a large painting of a fox struggling with a trap which held him by the hind leg, above the gambrel-joint! A painting alongside of it represented a peasant driving an ox-team from the offside! A fox would ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... out for the church, but the old woman of the cottage had gone before him, and had stuck an enchanted stick called 'the spike of hurt' in a crack of the door, so that he would brush against it as he stepped across the threshold. Suddenly he felt so sleepy that he could not stand up, and throwing himself on the ground he sank into a deep slumber, not knowing that the dark lad was watching him. Nothing ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... Eaton,—just the strangest old scamp you ever dreamed of. I suppose by rights he ought to have been in the hospital; he certainly was the nearest to crazy and not be it. He used to keep a long pole by him on deck,—a pole with a sharp spike in one end,—and any man who'd get near enough to him to let him have a chance would feel that spike. I've known him to keep the cook up till midnight frying doughnuts; then he'd call all hands aft and range ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... man now, and is keeping a bar in Sydney; so he is gone. The townspeople don't come any more than before. I am the only person who goes near the place. The trees are a trifle grander. I happen now and then, when I visit this Berkshire parish, upon a stump of a post or an old spike in the grass of this wood, but otherwise it is as though ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... want to spike the Major's guns, you know." He laughed a little. "And—well, yes, I think I'm promoting the general happiness too, if you must know. ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... flowering is from about the beginning of May to the middle of June, at which time it is highly ornamental in the green-house: strong healthy plants produce from five to eight blossoms in a spike: on a plant growing with Mr. COLVILL, Nurseryman, King's-Road, Chelsea, we once counted nine: a few of these usually produce seed-vessels containing perfect seeds, by which the plant is mostly propagated; it may also be raised by cuttings, but ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... moving thing. It rode out of the dark and brushed him. It touched him with soft fingers and he drew them to him. A water hyacinth, and its purple spike topped his head as he stood waist-deep. So cool its leaves, and the dripping bulbs that he pressed them to his bloody cheek. He sank his teeth into them for that coolness on his parched tongue. The spongy bulb was sweet; it exhaled odorous moisture. He seized ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... to take up any time to direct you to do it. And yet, because I cut you short in that, I will commute for it by telling you that that was told me for a secret: it is this: Dissolve gum of ivy in oil of spike, and therewith anoint your dead bait for a Pike; and then cast it into a likely place; and when it has lain a short time at the bottom, draw it towards the top of the water, and so up the stream; and it is more than likely that you have a Pike follow with more than common ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... the digger was enormously heavy and had heel-plates almost as thick as horseshoes. The boots were joined in pairs by pieces of string, and hung by these on nails stuck in the rafters, the latter being about twelve feet above the floor. When a pair had to be lifted down, a long bamboo, with a spike at right angles to the end, was placed under ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... will be well to stake the rows immediately. Keep the plants under constant observation, especially while quite young, when they are liable to destruction by garden foes. The flowering should be limited to the fourth spike, and from the time the pods appear assistance must be given in the form of liquid manure or a mulching of well-rotted dung. Remove all lateral shoots and promote vigorous healthy growth at every stage. Some means should be adopted to ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... speak a word. The master Simon Fuller, is grave man, the snows of nearly sixty winters settling on his head. He has made many voyages, and seems a fit man to command men. The first mate, too, James Festing, is every inch a seaman, but somewhat handy with his fist, a rope's end, or a marline spike, or, truth to say, whatever lies nearest, and withal not over choice in his words when angered, or desirous of getting work done smartly. Of myself, as second mate, it becometh me not to speak. I have been five years at sea, am a fair ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... ordnance being all that caused me any anxiety. And even now they do not greatly trouble me; for if they keep no better watch there on other nights than they did on this, it would be easy for a couple of resolute men to enter the place, even as I did, bind and gag the sentinels, and spike all eight of the guns, and never a man of them any the wiser until they came to put ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Pierre Balmat and his son, are some of the best-informed and most agreeable men I ever conversed with. Indeed for six months of the year they keep company with the most distinguished travellers of Europe. With these guides, each of us armed with a long pole with an iron spike, such as my uncle described to me ages ago, and which I never expected to wield, we came down La Flegere, which we mounted on mules. In talking to an old woman who brought us strawberries, I was surprised to hear her pronounce the Italian proverb, "Poco a poco fa lontano nel giorno." I thought ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... risk walking on bare feet, with a chance of cutting them. Ordinary, broad, smooth-soled slippers would leave no impression on the coarse cinders bordering the track, and nothing short of spiked shoes would leave a mark on the hard path in the lane behind. The spike-tracks were leading, not directly toward the door, but in the direction of the fence, when they stopped; somebody had handed, or thrown, the slippers over the fence, and he had changed them on the spot. The enemy had calculated ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... great leafy heads which both Sam and I strenuously ignored, while every time I went to dig around their roots somebody had done it before me! There they were, perfectly huge with their great fluted leaves, and right at the end of the row an extra-large plant had sent up a tall, green spike on the end of which a great, pink doll-blossom was shaking out her rosy skirts in the afternoon sun. I stood for a minute looking at her in utter rapture. Then I reached out my arms and gathered her in and put a kiss right in the center of her sweet heart. After that I ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... as they passed by, I should have deemed it safe, at the moment, to stake my life. The next moment, however, as the surrounding flood of moral uncleanness surged over their foot-steps, I would not have staked a spike of thistle-down on the same wager. Yet the miracle was within the scope of Providence, which is equally wise and equally beneficent, (even to those poor girls, though I acknowledge the fact without the remotest comprehension of the mode of it,) whether ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... nothing, since these romantic forests would be as empty as tunnels when Julien was not there; but closing the door of the garden gate softly behind her, she blew out the lantern and hung it to the topmost spike, that Stewart, who was leaving for England in the morning, might bequeath ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... beast, and two or three sarpents to boot, not to tell the gal all she wanted to know. You obstinate old wretch, you've gone and done it now, and no mistake. It's as much as I can do to keep from knocking you on the head with a marlin-spike, you sneakin' old sea-dog! What if she was dead now, friz stiff agin a tree, or a lyin' in the bottom of the river, what would you think of yourself, I'd like ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... laid his finger upon a paragraph and handed me the paper.... And I read where one "Spike" Frazer had been shot to death in a hand-to-hand fight with the police who were raiding a dive suspected of being the rendezvous of drug-fiends. Long wanted and at last cornered, Frazer had fought tigerishly and ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is very beautiful in springtime with a great multitude of wild flowers. More particularly is this so in early June, when the slender asphodel Saint Bruno's lily, with its spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the westward of this delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded trench, a great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which arise great precipices very high and wild. Above the asphodel fields the mountains climb ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... 280-foot wooden bridge which spanned the Emtsa River. At Verst 445, close to No Man's Land, a sixty-foot crib bridge was constructed by Lieut. W. C. Giffels. This work was completed in two nights and was entirely finished before the enemy knew that an advance was anticipated. Not a single spike or bolt was driven on the job. Railway spikes were driven into the ties behind our own lines and ties carried up and placed. Finally the rails were forced in under the heads of the spikes ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... he cried, "don't you try that game again, or I'll fix a spike to the end of a stout hickory ready for lancing those gums of yours. I'm afraid you've got toothache, or you wouldn't be so ready to bite. Now then, ring up. ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... Petingill's eyes could have reached a little farther, they would have seen that it wasn't a ladder up which the children were climbing, but a tall wooden post, with spikes driven into it about a foot apart. It required quite a stride to get from one spike to the other; in fact the littler ones couldn't have managed it at all, had it not been for Clover and Cecy "boosting" very hard from below, while Katy, making a long arm, clawed from above. At last they were all safely ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... casualty was a drummer slightly wounded. The next day both regiments returned their ammunition into the magazine. The Tower Hamlets were ordered to their headquarters, London, and disbanded. The 25th were sent to Spike Island, a ...
— A Soldier's Life - Being the Personal Reminiscences of Edwin G. Rundle • Edwin G. Rundle
... slender rush and spike of mullein, Low laurel shrub and drooping fern, Transfigured, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... also be avoided, since, on account of its strong odour, soaps containing much of it are unpopular. The odour of coal tar is considerably modified by and blends well with a perfume containing oils of cassia, lavender, spike, and ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... Waste no incense at her shrine. She'll cut the thread no sooner because you turn your back on her." Fling overboard your mythologies, dead and alive, and kneel to Nature. A budding spike of wild hyacinth is worth all the gods put together. Go hand in hand with Nature, I say. Ask nothing from her; walk humbly; be well content if she lets you but turn the corner of one page none else have read. That's how I live. My life is not a ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... reason that it was jammed by a tiny wedge. Hence, it could be opened noiselessly if need be; and lest a hinge might squeak each hinge was forthwith drenched with vaseline. Further, a tiny circlet of India rubber, equipped with a small spike, was placed ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... long, snakelike bodies, and ten reptilian legs apiece, terminating in fins which acted as wings. The bodies were of bright blue, the legs and fins were yellow. They were flying, without haste, but in a somewhat ominous fashion, straight toward them. He could make out a long, thin spike projecting from each ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... the children gather from afar; every one in Haifa under the age of fourteen is there I should say. They glue themselves to the fence and force their little faces between the posts, or spike their chins on the top and then watch in solemn deadly earnest the ways of these strange beings whom fate has so kindly sent to amuse them. The rest-house attendant does not approve of these manners, so he slips out of a side-door with a basin of water in his hand and pitches it ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... giving a most satisfactory grip. Below them was a rim of jade with a flower-pattern running round it—only the leaves were emeralds, and the blossoms were rubies sunk in the cool, green stone. The rest of the handle was a shaft of pure ivory, while the point—the spike and hook—was gold-inlaid steel with pictures of elephant-catching; and the pictures attracted Mowgli, who saw that they had something to do with his ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... you. If you look after them both for a whole year I will give you anything you like to ask; but if, on the other hand, you let either of the animals escape you, your last hour is come, and your head shall be stuck on the last spike of my fence. The other spikes, as you see, are already adorned, and the skulls are all those of different servants I have had who have failed ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... it happened, but she was at anchor off Dymchurch), and that they had better be going out of that before they got themselves arrested. For answer they jeered and made catcalls, flinging a marline-spike at me. I tried a second time to make them come ashore, but one of them said, "Let's do for him," and the other cheered the proposal with loud yells. Then they came lurching aft at me, so I just slipped over the side, and waded very hurriedly ashore. The water was not deep (it was ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... the camp; when he arrived there he kindled up his fire, and together with his fellow hunter, cooked his supper. The supper finished, the adventures of the day furnished the tales for the evening. The spike buck, the two and three-pronged buck, the doe and barren doe, figured through their anecdotes with great advantage. It should seem that after hunting awhile on the same ground, the hunters became acquainted with nearly all the gangs of deer ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... love a married woman! It's a past practice. Never! Thrust a spike in the palm of your hands drink scalding oil, rather than ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... men are tall, but wretchedly thin; the children are mere skeletons, and the entire tribe appears thoroughly starved. The language is that of the Dinka. The chief carried a curious tobacco-box, an iron spike about two feet long, with a hollow socket, bound with iguana-skin; this served for either tobacco-box, club, or dagger. Throughout the whole of this marshy country it is curious to observe the number of white ant-hills ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... that worn and rusty bar of iron with its single bent and rusty spike, I was whisked back across the years by some strange trick of memory and I saw, instead, a dimly lighted sick room, on a hot summer night—myself a little sufferer, and sitting beside me, fanning my fevered brow, my beloved father, who, notwithstanding the fatigue of a heavy and exacting practice ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty
... Cork stretches before them, a sheet of glassy water, dotted with a hundred sail, from the base of the sultry hill faced with terraces and called Queenstown, to the far Atlantic beyond the Heads. Heavy and dark loom the fortified Government buildings of Haulbowline and the prisons of Spike Island, casting forbidding shadows on the western margin of the tide. Quickly the steam-tug and her follower thread their way among islets and moored barques and guard-ships, southward to the sea. No pause anywhere; the passengers of the brig Ocean Queen are ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... impression of a stranger when observing the conduct of a mahout or driver is sympathy for the animal, which is governed through the severe authority of the iron spike. This instrument is about twenty inches long, and resembles somewhat an old-fashioned boat-hook, being a sharp spike at the extremity beyond the keen-pointed hook; it can thus be used either to drive the elephant forward ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... was seeking a reply, she passed quickly to the next group, going from one to another, and watching with interest the placing of the bouquet on the summit of the hut. One of the men brought a ladder and fastened the flowers to a spike. When they were securely attached and began to nod in the air, he waved his hat and shouted: "Hou, houp!" This was the signal for going ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... spiked ball-head, and a four-inch spike in front of that. He smashed the ball down on the back of one Ulleran's head, and jabbed another in the rump ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... Newburg grew from the capacity of turning out thirty tons of re-rolled rails to its present capacity of sixty tons, beside the addition of a puddling mill, a merchant bar mill, a wire rod mill, two blast furnaces, spike, nut and bolt works. In the meantime the small beginning had grown into such large proportions, and so many railroad corporations had centered here, that it was thought best to form the same into a stock company, embracing another rolling mill on the lake shore, within the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... those images sometimes rise to the hight of five feet; the pedestals on which these immages are fixed are sometimes cut out of the solid stick with the canoe, and the imagary is formed of seperate small peices of timber firmly united with tenants and motices without the assistance of a single spike of any kind. when the natives are engaged in navigating their canoes one sets in the stern and steers with a paddle the others set by pears and paddle over the gunwall next them, they all kneel in the bottom of the canoe and ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... his laboratory and brought out a small box with a glass front. From the top projected a spike topped with a ball. Through the glass, Carnes could see a thin sheet of metal ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... misery," cries one, driving his spike into the heart of one. "Take that for hanging of my brother," screams a second, cleaving a Moor's skull with his hatchet. "Quits for turning an honest lad into a devil," calls a third, drawing his knife across the throat of a shrieking wretch, and so forth, till ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... they have a regiment of soldiers, called Skate Runners. They wear leg gaiters for travelling in deep snow, and green uniform. They carry a short sword, a rifle fastened by a broad strap passing over the shoulder, and a climbing staff seven feet long, with a spike in the end. They move so fast in the snow that no cavalry can overtake them, and it does little good to fire cannon balls at them, as they go two or three hundred feet apart. They are very useful soldiers in following an enemy on a march. They go over marshes, ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... Skyscrapers The Northwest Wind The Golden Spike Limited Train A Tin Brass Goat A ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... with a boarding-bridge 36 feet in length, which was pulled up by a rope and fastened to a mast in the fore part of the ship. As soon as an enemy's ship came near enough, the rope was loosened, the bridge fell down, and became fastened by means of an iron spike in its under side. The boarders then poured down the bridge into the enemy's ship. Thus prepared, Duilius boldly sailed out to meet the fleet of the enemy. He found them off the Sicilian coast, near Mylae. The Carthaginians hastened to the fight as if to a triumph, but their ships were rapidly ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... that never knew a fold" are its only denizens. Here, on the mountain slopes, Mr. Wallace found Bletia Sherrattiana, the white form, very rare; another terrestrial orchid, unnamed and, as is thought, unknown, which sends up a branching spike two feet to three feet high, bearing ten to twelve flowers, of rich purple hue, in shape like a Sobralia, three and four inches across; and yet another of the same family, growing on the rocks, and "looking like masses of snow on the hill-side." Such descriptions ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... will be letting prisoners escape right under my nose, making us the laughing stock of these damned militia volunteers." (Canker entered service in '61 as a private in a city company that was militia to the tip of its spike-tailed coats, but he had forgotten it.) "I want these young idlers to understand distinctly, by George, that the first prisoner that gets away from this post takes somebody's commission with him. D'you hear that, Mr. Gray?" And Canker turned ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... in place he seen me swinging that twelve-pound sledge and near breaking my back. 'I think it's easier this way,' he says. 'Besides you can hit a lot faster if you use just one hand.' And he takes the hammer, and sends that big spike in all the way to the head with one lick. And he wondered why I didn't work the same way! Ain't got any ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... downward swing he picked up the rusty marlinespike. It was a weapon of might, indeed. Jim's blow caused Chatelard's arm to drop, limp and nerveless. But in gaining his enemy's weapon, Jim was forced to drop his own. He put a firm foot upon the spike, however, while he held Chatelard at arm's length and looked ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... back, but is sometimes found in a sitting position, as in graves recently discovered on Lord Wantage's estate, Berks. Coffins of hollowed trunks of trees were occasionally used, but these were not common. If the dead man was a warrior, his weapons were buried with him, and we find the head and spike of his spear, heads of javelins, a long iron broad-sword, a long knife, occasionally an axe, and over his breast the iron boss of his shield, the wooden part of which has of course ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... college, as he emerged from a hopeless labyrinth of postulates and preliminaries an hour long, that the guests who abused the courtesy of their hosts, upon the late transcontinental trip to drive the golden spike, may have been persons of social eminence, but were in no honorable ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... astonish the world. They will stand erect in their vast class strength and defend—THEMSELVES. They will cease to coax and tease; they will make demands—unitedly. They will desert the armory; they will spike every cannon on earth; they will scorn the commander; they will never club nor bayonet another striker; and in the legislatures of the world they will shear the fatted parasites from the political and ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... woman strode into the waiting room on spike heels. Her shoes, stockings, trench coat, bag and overseas cap were all purple, the purple the painter called "the color of ...
— 2 B R 0 2 B • Kurt Vonnegut
... we took a trip to see the great Pie Championship, where men with bulging cheeks and eyes consume vast quantities of pies. A fashionable West Side crowd beheld the champion, Spike O'Dowd, endeavour to defend his throne against an upstart, Blake's Unknown. He wasn't an Unknown at all. He was young ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... August. In drooping spikes about 1 inch long and 1/2 inch in diameter; dark purplish-red, oblong, sweet and edible; apparently a simple fruit but really made up of the thickened calyx lobes of the spike. ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... Denderah in Egypt, and on the inside of the dome, there is or WAS an elaborate circular representation of the Northern hemisphere of the sky and the Zodiac. (1) Here Virgo the constellation is represented, as in our star-maps, by a woman with a spike of corn in her hand (Spica). But on the margin close by there is an annotating and explicatory figure—a figure of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms, and quite resembling in style the Christian Madonna and Child, except ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... not last an instant. With my first blow I cut off his sword-arm at the wrist; my second I levelled at his head. I said that he wore a steel cap, with a gilt iron spike of six inches, and a hood of chain mail. I rose in my stirrups and delivered "ST. GEORGE;" my sword caught the spike exactly on the point, split it sheer in two, cut crashing through the steel cap and hood, and was only stopped by a ruby which he wore in his ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is shown at M, so that the leverage of the oars may be longer. And the said ship may be one foot and a half thick, that is made with cross beams within and without, with planks in contrary directions. And this ship must have attached to it, a foot below the water, an iron-shod spike of about the weight and size of an anvil; and this, by force of oars may, after it has given the first blow, be drawn back, and driven forward again with fury give a second blow, and then a third, and so many as to destroy the other ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... jealousy does not add a certain zest to love? On this particular evening, however, he was in a hopeful mood. At the Clarendon Club, where he had gone, a couple of hours before, to verify a certain news item for the morning paper, he had heard a story about Tom Delamere which, he imagined, would spike that gentleman's guns for all time, so far as Miss Pemberton was concerned. So grave an affair as cheating at cards could never be kept secret,—it was certain to reach her ears; and Ellis was morally certain that Clara would never marry a man who had been proved ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... ould sinner, can't you keep the spike of your crutch out o' my stomach! If you love me tell me so; but, by the livin' farmer, I'll take no such ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... following day it moved rather less, namely, 1/500 in 3 h., and 2/500 in an opposite direction during the next 6 h. The two lobes, therefore, seem to be constantly closing or opening, though to a very small distance; for we must remember that the little triangle of paper affixed to the marginal spike increased its length, and thus exaggerated somewhat the movement. Similar observations, with the important difference that the petiole was left free and the plant kept under a high temperature, were made on a leaf, which was healthy, but so old that it did not close when its sensitive hairs ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... went on Aunt Verbeny, "an' when she las' come home, she wuz a-warin' spike-heeled shoes en er veil uv skeeter nettin'. 'Tain' so long sence Rhody's Viney went to Philadelphy, too, but she ain' had no luck sence she wuz born er twin. Hit ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... real bayonet sword, weighted with a cross-bar, and two 18-lib. dumb bells. In order to vary this performance, the sword-swallower allows only a part of the weapon to pass into his body, the remainder being "kicked" down by the recoil of a rifle, which is fixed to a spike in the centre of the bar, and fired ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... standing on the bench that served instead of dining-chairs, each with a plate and a pancake on the table in front of them. Jack held a hammer and spike, Scott Burton a hatchet, Geoffrey a saw, and Philip a rifle. Bell was nothing if not intuitive. No elaborate explanations ever were needed to show her a fact. Without a word she flung the plate of flapjacks she held as far into a thicket as she had force to fling it, and ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Hibernicus (see Fig. 2), of mayhap not smaller proportions than our monarch of the British ferns, Osmunda regalis, associated with a peculiar lepidodendron, and what seems to be a lepidostrobus,—possibly the fructiferous spike or cone of the latter, mingled with carbonaceous stems, which, in the simplicity of their texture, and their abundance, give evidence of a low but not scanty vegetation. Ere passing to the luxuriant carboniferous flora, I shall make but one ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... Before long, in fact, he acquired the ability to doze placidly through almost any sort of business conference in the outer office. It was his practice to sleep from nine-thirty until eleven, when "Bob" fetched him a glass of orange juice with a "spike" in it. This refreshing beverage filled him with new energy to tackle the issues of the day, and thereupon began a routine as fixed as some religious ritual. First, he smacked his lips, then he cleared his throat loudly several times, after ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... to licking the galvanised compound off the newly painted quarter-deck stanchions whenever an opportunity of doing so presented itself. He was a healthy goat of voracious appetite. His gastric juices would have dissolved a marline-spike, and he even made short work of the greater portion of a pair of ammunition boots belonging to the Sergeant-Major of Royal Marines, and devoured with every symptom of relish a sheaf of official and highly ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... a mule, like his companion, but a strong hackney for the road, to save his gallant war-horse, which a squire led behind, fully accoutred for battle, with a chamfron or plaited head-piece upon his head, having a short spike projecting from the front. On one side of the saddle hung a short battle-axe, richly inlaid with Damascene carving; on the other the rider's plumed head-piece and hood of mail, with a long two-handed sword, used by the chivalry of the period. ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... too poor to return home; indeed, we had no home to which we could return. We were even too poor to live ashore. But we made some penny excursions in the little boats that plied back and forth, and to us children at least the weeks of waiting were not without interest. Among other places we visited Spike Island, where the convicts were, and for hours we watched the dreary shuttle of labor swing back and forth as the convicts carried pails of water from one side of the island, only to empty them into the sea at the other side. It was merely "busy work," to keep them occupied at hard labor; ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... pedestal below the canvas, was the sentence, "Seguid vuestro jefe" (follow your leader); while upon the tarnished headboards, near by, appeared, in stately capitals, once gilt, the ship's name, "SAN DOMINICK," each letter streakingly corroded with tricklings of copper-spike rust; while, like mourning weeds, dark festoons of sea-grass slimily swept to and fro over the name, with every hearse-like roll of ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... stated. "And Ainnesley—why, Ainnesley wouldn't have a roof over his head if we failed in our obligations! You must know as well as I do why the banking interests took our paper to those amounts which made it possible for us to drive the first spike." ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... ARBOREA.—The grass gum tree of Australia, also called black boy. This is a liliaceous plant, which produces a long flower-stalk, bearing at the top an immense cylindrical flower-spike, and when the short black stem is denuded of leaves, the plants look very like black men holding spears. The leaves afford good fodder for cattle, and the tender white center is used as a vegetable. A fragrant resin, called acaroid resin, is ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... weigh thirty yet! I'm awful little fer my size—I'm purt' nigh littler 'an Some babies is!—an' neighbers all calls me 'The Little Man'! An' Doc one time he laughed an' said: 'I 'spect, first think you know, You'll have a little spike-tail coat an' travel with a show!' An' nen I laughed-till I looked round an' Aunty was a-cryin'— Sometimes she acts like that, 'cause I ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... generally connected with its lesser perfection, and he judges of perfection by priority of development. He also states that whenever there is a separation of the sexes in an hermaphrodite plant, which bears flowers on a simple spike, it is the females which expand first; and this he likewise attributes to the female sex being the more perfect of the two, but why the female should be thus ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... point of Li Shih-min's campaign in 621 A.D. against the two rebels, Tou Chien-te, King of Hsia, and Wang Shih-ch'ung, Prince of Cheng, was his seizure of the heights of Wu-lao, in spike of which Tou Chien-te persisted in his attempt to relieve his ally in Lo-yang, was defeated and taken prisoner. See CHIU T'ANG, ch. 2, fol. 5 verso, ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... young man (junior editor of the Boomtown Spike), threw himself down on the sod, pulled his hat rim down over his eyes, and looked away over the plain. It was the second year of Boom-town's existence, and Seagraves had not yet grown restless under its monotony. Around him the gophers played saucily. Teams were moving ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... Are we to tear the glorious flag of hospitality which has made our freedom the world-wide blessing of the oppressed? It is not agreeable to find foreign accents and stumbling locutions passing from the piquant exception to the general rule of discourse. But to urge on that account that we should spike away the peaceful foreigner, would be a view of international relations not in the long-run favourable to the interests of our fellow-countrymen; for we are at least equal to the races we call obtrusive in the disposition to settle wherever money is to be made and ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... blisters for their horses. Is that the same sort? No, take that one up; it is the bulb of a dwarf palm, each layer of the onion peels off, brown and netted, like the outside of a cocoa-nut. It is a clever plant that; from the leaves we get a vegetable horsehair; - and eat the bottom of the centre spike. All the leaves you pull have the same aromatic scent. But here a little patch of cleared ground shows old friends, who seem to cling by abused civilisation:-fine, hardy thistles, one of them bright yellow, though; - honest, Scotch- looking, large daisies ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suppressed his breath of life and forced my cousin and his people back to their belief: and whoso baulketh me, him will I destroy." Then he mounted an elephant paper-white as he were a tower plastered with gypsum, and goaded him with a spike of steel which ran deep into his flesh, whereupon the elephant trumpeted and made for the battle-plain where cut and thrust obtain; and, when he drew near Gharib, he cried out to him, saying, "O ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... flowers, but differ widely from them in being sterile and conspicuous. Not only the aborted flower-buds and their peduncles (which are elongated apparently through the principle of compensation) are brightly coloured, but so is the upper part of the spike—all, no doubt, for the sake of guiding insects to the inconspicuous perfect flowers. From such cases as these we may pass on to certain Labiatae, for instance, Salvia Horminum in which (as I hear from Mr. Thiselton Dyer) the upper bracts are enlarged and brightly ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... the pedestals on which these immages are fixed are sometimes cut out of the solid stick with the canoe, and the imagary is formed of seperate small peices of timber firmly united with tenants and motices without the assistance of a single spike of any kind. when the natives are engaged in navigating their canoes one sets in the stern and steers with a paddle the others set by pears and paddle over the gunwall next them, they all kneel in the bottom of ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... a dead gudgeon or a roach and moving it up and down the water is too easy a thing to take up any time to direct you to do it. And yet, because I cut you short in that, I will commute for it by telling you that that was told me for a secret. It is this: Dissolve gum of ivy in oil of spike, and therewith anoint your dead bait for a pike, and then cast it into a likely place, and when it has lain a short time at the bottom, draw it towards the top of the water and so up the stream, and it is more than likely that you have a pike follow with more than ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... very smart and light-looking thing, is an Iron Stick of about four-tenths of an inch in diameter, with a Hook next the Hand, and terminating at the other end in a Spike about five inches in length, which is covered by a Ferrule, the whole painted the colour of a common walking-stick; it has a light natty appearance, while it is in fact a most ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world—it had evidently been meant to go there— and then the strange thing began to happen. When ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... secondary branch, so that the bark may heal over the junction of the branch with the parent branch, as, if this is not done, the free circulation of the sap is checked. It runs up the branches, and, of course, cannot readily get on when it meets with a spike of wood sticking out of the branch. This spike or stump may be green or half or quite dead, but whatever state it is in the free circulation of the sap will be checked, and the quantity of sap in circulation for the benefit of the ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... although they lived on the product of the ground, were obliged to continue the chase because of the materials and implements which they got from the animals. They used the jaw of a fish, with the teeth in it, as a knife; the arm and leg bones of apes as arrow points; the tail spike of a skate for the same; the two front claws of the armadillo to dig the ground (a process which the animal taught them by the same use of his claws); the shell of a river mussel as a scraper to ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... simultaneously. One came in front, armed with a brick; there was one at each side, and one behind, and they closed up around me. I was struck on all sides; and, while I was attending to those in front, I received a blow on my head, from behind, dealt with a heavy hand-spike. I was completely stunned by the blow, and fell, heavily, on the ground, among the timbers. Taking advantage of my fall, they rushed upon me, and began to pound me with their fists. I let them lay on, for a while, after I came to myself, with a view of gaining strength. They ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... there on purpose, and girded it firmly on the back of the bull; through his nostrils he thrust an iron ring, to which was fixed a cord, which he brought over his neck as a bridle; and then arming his hand with a short spike, he nimbly vaulted upon the back of this ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... much skill and ingenuity is in the manufacture of weapons. One of these is known as a Man-catcher, and was invented by the natives of Hood Bay, but all over the vast island this loop of rattan cane is the constant companion of head-hunters. The peculiarity of the weapon is the deadly spike inserted ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... secured his pike-pole, with a stout spike set in the end for defense, and drove the spike into Bob's shoulder. Bob went right on killing the Terror. Again the keeper drove in his goad, and blood flowed freely; but Bob paid not the slightest ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... times. And I knew that I had an ice-ax of that very pattern at home—and so I just shoved it under the doctor's nose in court, and asked him if that hole in Crone's head couldn't have been made by the spike of it. Why? Because I knew that Carstairs would be present in court, and I wanted to see if he would catch what ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive gray square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan's orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... engineer, succeeded well in backing into the clear. Not seeing the troop train, I ran with a hammer and spike when he left the switch with the Arequipena ahead of him and spiked the track. Just then the troop train came in sight. I hurriedly boarded the Arequipena and started, Dobbie backing up ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... The sills are generally 3 inches by 8 inches, halved at the ends or corners, and nailed together with large nails. Having laid the sills upon the foundation, the next thing in order is to put up the studding. Use 4 by 4 studs for corners and door posts, or spike two 2 by 4 studs together, stand them up, set them plumb, and with stay laths secure them in position. Set up the intermediate studs, which are 2 by 4 inches, and 16 inches between centres, toe or nail them diagonally to the sill. Then put in the floor joists for first floor, each joist ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... that the best articles for traffic at these islands, are iron tools in general. Axes and hatchets, nails, from the largest spike down to tenpenny ones, rasps, files, and knives, are much sought after. Red cloth, and linen, both white and coloured, looking-glasses and beads are also in estimation; but of the latter those that are blue are preferred to all others, and white ones are thought ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... same as the “hand-board” figured by Crantz. It consists of a flat board about eighteen inches in length, having a groove to receive the staff, two others and a hole for the fingers and thumb, and a small spike fitted for a hole in the end of the staff. This instrument is used for the bird-dart only. The spear for salmon or other fish, called kākĕe-wĕi, consists of a wooden staff with a spike of bone or ivory, three inches long, secured at one end. On each side of the ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... Pard and hung it up by a stirrup on the rusty spike where she kept it, with the bridle hung over the stirrup, and the saddle blanket folded over the horn. She groped in the manger and decided that there was hay enough to last him till morning, and went out and closed the ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... the Americans spiked their largest gun, and, nailing a flag to the battery flagstaff, went in search of more ammunition. The British did not land; and the Americans, finding six kegs of powder, took the gun to a blacksmith, who drilled out the spike, and the action continued. So vigorous and well directed was the fire of the Americans, that the "Despatch" was forced to slip her cables and make off to a place of safety. That afternoon a truce was ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Antholithes by Lindley have usually been considered to be flower spikes, having what seems a calyx and linear petals (see Figure 472). Dr. Hooker, after seeing very perfect specimens, also thought that they resembled the spike of a highly-organised plant in full flower, such as one of the Bromeliaceae, to which Professor Lindley had at first compared them. Mr. Carruthers, who has lately examined a large series in different museums, ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... staves to propel myself with. At the end of each was an iron spike, and above it a guard of wicker-work, about ten inches in diameter, to prevent the stick from sinking deeper. "These staves," he added, "are very useful when the snow is soft and the skees do not glide easily. Then propelling oneself with them makes one ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... ain't. It's the easiest. It'll build itself. It's just a case of two and two makes four. All you've got to do is spike down two-inch planks till it's done, and then clap on some sort of a roof. There's no machinery, no details, just straight work. It's just a question of having the lumber to do it with, and we've got it now. It's the little ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... Verst 445, close to No Man's Land, a sixty-foot crib bridge was constructed by Lieut. W. C. Giffels. This work was completed in two nights and was entirely finished before the enemy knew that an advance was anticipated. Not a single spike or bolt was driven on the job. Railway spikes were driven into the ties behind our own lines and ties carried up and placed. Finally the rails were forced in under the heads of the spikes and ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... fortunate escape, two objects, and both visible from the inn windows, would have been sufficient. One was a mass of blackened ruins—the scathed walls of the barrack, in which the wretched garrison had been so barbarously done to death: the other a human head impaled upon a spike on the gable of the building. That blanched skull had rested on the shoulders of our traitor host, and we, doomed to "midnight murder," were mercifully destined to witness a repulsive, but just evidence, that Providence interposes often between the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... her go, very well pleased to have got so well out of the hobble he was in. The instant the village lass who had done duty for Dulcinea found herself free, prodding her "cackney" with a spike she had at the end of a stick, she set off at full speed across the field. The she-ass, however, feeling the point more acutely than usual, began cutting such capers, that it flung the lady Dulcinea to the ground; seeing which, Don Quixote ran to raise her up, and Sancho to fix and girth the pack-saddle, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... 'recherche' without him? St. Matthew without stockings or sandals; St. Jerome bare headed, and with a coarse brown blanket robe dragging the ground; St. Sebastian with scarcely any raiment at all—these we should see, and should enjoy seeing them; but would we not miss a spike-tailed coat and kids, and turn away regretfully, and say to parties from the Orient: "These are well enough, but you ought to see Talmage of Brooklyn." I fear me that in the better world we shall not even have Dr. Talmage's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... thrown into the sea, where its particles become rushes. One part of the club, however, is like a lance and does not break. When thrown into the sea, it is swallowed by a fish. A hunter catches it and taking the iron spike from its stomach lays it aside for future use. It is an arrow made from this particular spike which a little later will bring about Krishna's death. Similarly it is the iron rushes which will cause the death of the Yadavas. ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... feeling of new life and delight, when we pass from the streets of London to those of Abbeville or Rouen, as the quaint points and pinnacles of the roof gables and turrets. The commonest and heaviest roof may be redeemed by a spike at the end of it, if it is set on with any spirit; but the foreign builders have (or had, at least) a peculiar feeling in this, and gave animation to the whole roof by the fringe of its back, and the spike on its forehead, so that all goes together, like the dorsal fins and spines of a fish: ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... spoke English particularly well long before I left Switzerland. After breakfast, my dog and I would go out to catch a peculiar sort of fish called the "sting-rae." These curious creatures have a sharp bony spike about two inches in length near the tail and this I found admirably adapted for arrow-heads. The body of the fish resembled a huge flounder, but the tail was long and tapering. They would come close in-shore, and I would spear them from the rocks with a Papuan fishing-spear. The smallest ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... support the journal is merely an assembly of the records (messages, records of oral orders, and the like) from which the journal is compiled. Each item of the file bears a serial number corresponding to that of its entry in the journal. An ordinary spike-file is frequently adequate for safe-keeping of these records while in use. When the journal is closed, the corresponding journal-file is filed with the journal, in accordance with standing instructions or in compliance ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... ef the Republicans ever should git Andy Johnson or some one to lend 'em the wit An' the spunk jes' to mount Constitootion an' Court With Columbiad guns, your real ekle-rights sort, Or drill out the spike from the ole Declaration Thet can kerry a solid shot clearn roun' creation, We'd better take maysures for shettin' up shop, An' put off our stock by a vendoo ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... distantly beyond them the crisp upland fields stretch their snowy sparkle to touch the frigid-flashing sapphire of the sky, and bluer than the sky itself their shadows fall about them; every thorn, every stem, is set, a spike of crusted lustre in its icy mail; the tingling air takes the breath in silvery wreaths; and wherever the gay garment of a skater breaks the monotone with a gleam of crimson or purple, the shining feet beneath chisel their fantastic curves upon a floor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... water to drink." Scarcely had Jael crossed the threshold when Sisera awakened and begged for water to quench his burning thirst. Jael gave him wine mixed with water, which caused him to drop into a sound sleep again. The woman then took a wooden spike in her left hand, approached the sleeping warrior, and said: "This shall be the sign that Thou wilt deliver him into my hand if I draw him from the bed down on the ground without awaking him." She tugged at Sisera, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... best give me some idea about this here yarn he's spinning, so's I can lay for him with a spike." ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... of autumn burdocks. Our radishes stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes, when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August, and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as a maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall feathery spike on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about it from ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... Tadeusz" was the name by which his soldiers called him. Invariably he spent some part of his day among his beloved peasants, and daily he recited with them public prayers. Often at night he and they together went up to the teeth of the Russian batteries on expeditions to spike the cannon. His inseparable companion, Niemcewicz, who slept with him in his tent till the-end came, describes how the silence of these nights was broken hideously by the wild, shrill cry of the reapers, by the sudden roar of the ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... till we put a spike collar and chain on 'em. When Henrietta declared herself Alonzo read the riot act and declared marital law. But there was Henrietta with the collar and chain and pretty soon Lon was saying: 'You're quite right, Pettikins, and you ought to have the thanks of the community for showing our ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... this unfortunate fellow was in a very tight place. A great spike of aloe had run through the back of his skin waist-belt, though without piercing his flesh, in such a fashion that it was impossible for him to move, while within six feet of him the injured buffalo bull, thinking, no doubt, that he was ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... said the doctor, "what would you do if some one stuck a pin into your leg? Well, war and peace have driven more than one spike into the hide of humanity; and of course she howls and dances with the pain. It's just a natural reflex action. Why, they had a fox-trot epidemic just like this after the Black Death in the fourteenth century; only then they called ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... but in vain; step by step they were driven back, the battery was recaptured, and the guns, which in the excitement of the advance the captors had omitted to spike, were retaken ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... much resembling C. grandis, but somewhat taller, and flowering a little earlier; the latter quality has induced me to mention it, as it offers a fine spike for cutting purposes before ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... town of Mogador to complete the work of destruction begun the day before, spike the guns, smash up the gun- carriages, and destroy all the munitions of war in the shore batteries— all of which was performed without a shadow of opposition being offered. Then I put a garrison on the island, providing it with heavy guns, to awe the town, which we did ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... change His cold, Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived, And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave; Only she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not her life, (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun) Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe, And in her old bounds ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... concern for this ignominy, gleamed a lively pride in its overwhelming completeness. The malign eye was worn proudly as a badge of honour, so proudly that the wearer, after Winona's first outcry of horror, bubbled vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma by stepping into one of Spike Brennon's straight lefts. Nothing ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... Turning it upward as he spoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French, and battles with his own shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike-nail through his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes he expatiated on the delicious flavor of the liagden, a greasy and goose- like fowl, which the sailors catch with hook and line on the Grand Banks. He dwelt ...
— The Village Uncle (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... king, filled with terror and dejection, refused to move, notwithstanding all the persuasions of Captain Cook, who, seeing further attempts would be risky, came to the shore. At the same time two principal chiefs were killed on the opposite side of the bay. A native armed with a long iron spike threatened Captain Cook, who at last fired a charge of small shot at him, but his mat prevented any harm. A general attack upon the marines in the boat was made, and with fury the natives rushed upon them, dangerously wounding ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... tendernesse, therefore there is the greatest diligence to be vsed in the election thereof. Know then that of Barly there be diuers sorts, as namely, that which wee call our common Barly, being long eares with two rankes of Corne, narrow, close, and vpright: another called spike or batteldore-Barly, being a large eare with two rankes of Corne, broad, flat, and in fashion of a batteldore: and the third called beane-Barly, or Barly big, being a large foure-square eare, like ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... tragically. 'But you don't know, father—how should you know, who have hardly been out of Overcombe in your life?—you don't know what delicate feelings are in a real refined woman's mind. Any little vulgar action unreaves their nerves like a marline-spike. Now I wonder if you ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... thousands of spots all over the surface of the globe, it received thousands of facts, of cold, accomplished facts. It knew that a tidal wave had swept through China, a cabinet had changed in Chili, in Texas an express train had been held up and robbed, "Spike" Kennedy had defeated the "Dutchman" in New Orleans, the Oregon had coaled outside of Rio Janeiro Harbor, the Cape Verde fleet had been seen at anchor off Cadiz; it had been located in the harbor of San Juan, Porto Rico; it had been sighted steaming slowly past Fortress ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... longest diameter, and at its thickest part measures about half-an-inch. It has been chipped all over with great care, and has a sharp edge all round. This peculiar style of tool or weapon reached perfection in this specimen, which, whether used as a knife, arrow, spike, or axe, was an implement of singular beauty of design, and exhibits great skill ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... weighted with a cross-bar, and two 18-lib. dumb bells. In order to vary this performance, the sword-swallower allows only a part of the weapon to pass into his body, the remainder being "kicked" down by the recoil of a rifle, which is fixed to a spike in the centre of the bar, and fired ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... Not a spike of grass could be seen and the soil, a loose red sand, was in most places covered with a scrub like a thick-set hedge of Eucalyptus dumosa. Many a tree was ascended by Burnett, but nothing was to be seen on any side different to what we found where we were. We travelled ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... skilled in such matters than I am can detect such a sense. I cannot learn what a lady's traces are; but I suspect plaitings of her hair to be meant. "Upon the spiral sort," says Gerard, "are placed certaine small white flowers, trace fashion," while other sorts grow, he says, "spike fashion," or "not trace fashion." Whence I infer, that in his day trace ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... blossoms get? Take it from my Julia's sweat: Oil of lilies and of spike? From her moisture take the like. Let her breathe, or let her blow, All rich spices ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... determination. Thus the small mill at Newburg grew from the capacity of turning out thirty tons of re-rolled rails to its present capacity of sixty tons, beside the addition of a puddling mill, a merchant bar mill, a wire rod mill, two blast furnaces, spike, nut and bolt works. In the meantime the small beginning had grown into such large proportions, and so many railroad corporations had centered here, that it was thought best to form the same into a stock company, embracing another rolling mill on the lake shore, within the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... not realize it, his sickness was bringing him day by day nearer to his far-away boyhood in the Inverness-shire hills, and it was easy to slip into the speech of the mother-tongue. Then, after a long pause, he went on: "He wasna wearing a beard, a red beard trimmed down to a spike—this writer-man, when ye found him, ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... Black Rock, was planned by him for November 28. In preparation for it an attack was to be made shortly before daylight by two advance parties, proceeding separately. One was to carry the batteries and spike the guns near the point selected for landing; the other, to destroy abridge five miles below, by which re-enforcements might arrive to ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... natural selection. A writer in an excellent American Journal (27. The 'American Naturalist,' Dec. 1869, p. 552.) says, that he has hunted for the last twenty-one years in the Adirondacks, where the Cervus virginianus abounds. About fourteen years ago he first heard of SPIKE-HORN BUCKS. These became from year to year more common; about five years ago he shot one, and afterwards another, and now they are frequently killed. "The spike-horn differs greatly from the common ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... the worst of us to Spike Island or Dartmoor prison,' said Charley; 'but Mr. Snape, no doubt, has heard and ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... the decidedly opposite views which they took of the subject. Mr. Pitt, about to surrender the possession of power to his rival, had a very intelligible interest in reducing the value of the transfer, and (as a retreating army spike the guns they leave behind) rendering the engines of Prerogative as useless as possible to his successor. Mr. Fox, too, had as natural a motive to oppose such a design; and, aware that the chief aim of these restrictive measures ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... hot but guaranteed weather-controlled future summer day dawned on the Mississippi Valley, the walking mills of Puffy Products ("Spike to Loaf in One Operation!") began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... signing a negative Covenant against Rome, later made into a precedent for the famous Covenant of 1638. On June 1 Morton was tried for guilty foreknowledge of Darnley's death. He was executed deservedly, and his head was stuck on a spike of the Tolbooth. The death of this avaricious, licentious, and resolute though unamiable Protestant was a heavy blow to the preachers and their party, and a crook ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... moment Parker pulled the throttle. The spike-spurred driving-wheels whirred and slashed the ice and snow until the "bite" started the train, and then it moved away up the long road, leaving Ward screaming maledictions ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... I have always admired Ned Hanlon's pluck—that the national game never received so severe a set-back as it did during the last Baltimore series here. The effort to spike players, the constant flow of profanity and vulgarity, the incessant and idiotic abuse of an umpire, all combined to make the Baltimore club—that local people have been led to believe was made of a crowd of earnest, honest players—thoroughly despised and ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... to my brother, and they parted quite amiably at Shinglehurst, where Harold got out. He was then carrying his full sketching kit, including a large holland umbrella, the lower joint of which is an ash staff fitted with a powerful steel spike ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... if it were between the fort and the river; but presently when one of Hamilton's cannon spoke, M. Roussillon saw the yellow spike of flame from its muzzle leap directly toward the church, and he thought it best to make a wide detour to avoid going between the firing lines. Once or twice he heard the whine of a stray bullet high overhead. Before he had gone very ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... we shouted, but the sound had not ceased to echo when, out of the horrible tangle about us, rose, with a swift, sinuous motion, a monstrous anacondalike arm, flesh pink in the electric beam, but covered with spike-edged spiracles! It curled itself over the edge of the hovering air ship and drew ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... the significant moment some other bloom has reached its perfect hour. One can never fix the precise moment when the rosy tint the field has from the wild almond passes into the inspiring blue of lupines. One notices here and there a spike of bloom, and a day later the whole field royal and ruffling lightly to the wind. Part of the charm of the lupine is the continual stir of its plumes to airs not suspected otherwhere. Go and stand by any crown of bloom and the tall stalks do but rock a little as for drowsiness, but look off across ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... hole like a rat in a trap when there's blows to the fore, is more than flesh could stand,' said Lanty, who had seized on a hand-spike and was waving it about his head, true shillelagh fashion, by hereditary instinct in one who had never behold a faction fight, in what ought to have ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... prisoner had made a tobacco-box of dough, painted and decorated it with artificial flowers of the same material, so that it was not distinguishable from porcelain; another had forged an axe-blade of steel, etched the surface and fixed it upon a polished ebony rod with a terminal spike, forming a miniature ice-axe, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... said the prince. "I know there are guards in every gallery, bolts to every door, cannon and soldiery at every barrier. How will you overcome the sentries—spike the guns? How will you break through the ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... fifteen paces from us, and by his side the hammer, spike, and petard he had carried. He and they were visible in the glow of ruddy light that poured down on the bridge. Suddenly, while I stood panting and irresolute, longing, yet not daring—since I saw older men hang back—suddenly a hand twitched my sleeve, and I ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... big man. "Do you hear that, Spike?" and he turned excitedly to his companion. "Sumone got him for his gold, jest as he was afeared they would. An' you say 'twas your brothers who found him, an' took th' body home with them, an' gave it decent burial. Now I call ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... couldn't make out what it was that shone so brightly out here on the lake; but he soon saw that a scow with a big burning torch stuck up on a spike, aft, lay near the edge of the reeds. The red flame from the torch was clearly reflected in the night-dark lake; and the brilliant light must have lured the fish, for round about the flame in the deep a mass of dark specks ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... up to that, and they're the only ones who count; all the rest are poor Mexicans with nothing but fleas, children, goats and votes to keep Sorenson and his gang in control. They've set out to bust this company, or tire it out till it throws up the sponge. They've spiked Magney, and they'll try to spike you next, and every manager who comes. That's plain talk I'm giving you, Mr. Weir, but it's fact; and if it doesn't sound nice to your ears, you can have my ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... helmet by the spike and put it on the mantel. "Lord knows, I'm not presenting that as a token of valor to any one. It belonged to a poor chap who died on the field the night I was wounded. My orderly packed it in ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... could in any other way. I watch both Congress and our State legislatures, but the "scamps" are vastly better at promising than fulfilling. The politicians, of course, expect all this flutter and buncombe about doing something for women in New York—in California—in Iowa—is going to spike our guns and make us help the Republican party to carry all before it; but we must not be ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... spore pride wipe bide save globe stove slate pore rave snipe snore mere flake cove stone spine store stole cave flame blade mute wide stale grove crime stake hone mete grape shave skate mine wake smite grime spike more wave white stride brake score slope drone spade spoke fume strife twine shape snake wade slime strive whale strike slave mode stripe blame stroke shine smile swore scrape smoke shade ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... of the dome, there is or WAS an elaborate circular representation of the Northern hemisphere of the sky and the Zodiac. (1) Here Virgo the constellation is represented, as in our star-maps, by a woman with a spike of corn in her hand (Spica). But on the margin close by there is an annotating and explicatory figure—a figure of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms, and quite resembling in style the Christian Madonna and Child, except ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... stalled in 1992 as the country became embroiled in political turmoil. Algeria's financial and economic indicators improved during the mid-1990s, in part because of policy reforms supported by the IMF and debt rescheduling from the Paris Club. Algeria's finances in 2000 benefited from the spike in oil prices and the government's tight fiscal policy, leading to a large increase in the trade surplus, the near tripling of foreign exchange reserves, and reduction in foreign debt. The government continues efforts to ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... primitive construction, and consisted of the leg-bones of animals tied under their feet by means of thongs. Neither were the skaters quite equal to cutting "threes" and "eights" upon the ice; they could only push themselves along by means of a pole with an iron spike at the end. But they used to charge each other after the manner of knights in a tournament, and use their poles for spears. An old writer says that "they pushed themselves along with such speed that they seemed to fly like a bird in the air, or as darts shot out from the engines of war." ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... sort? No, take that one up; it is the bulb of a dwarf palm, each layer of the onion peels off, brown and netted, like the outside of a cocoa-nut. It is a clever plant that; from the leaves we get a vegetable horsehair; - and eat the bottom of the centre spike. All the leaves you pull have the same aromatic scent. But here a little patch of cleared ground shows old friends, who seem to cling by abused civilisation:-fine, hardy thistles, one of them bright yellow, though; - honest, Scotch- looking, large daisies ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... commenced my station, I started from what is called the "Beds," and God help St. Patrick if he lay upon them: they are sharp stones placed circularly in the earth, with the spike ends of them up, one circle within another; and the manner in which the pilgrim gets as far as the innermost, resembles precisely that in which school-boys enter the "Walls of Troy" upon their slates. I moved away from these upon the sharp stones with which ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... behind him. The terrified boy did as he was told immediately he found himself on land, and the giant, quick to observe his flight, dashed after him into the boathouse. Now Loki had cunningly placed a sharp spike in such a position that the great head of the giant ran full tilt against it, and he sank to the ground with a groan, whereupon Loki, seeing him helpless, cut off one of his legs. Imagine the god's dismay, however, when he saw the pieces ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... laudamus, he placed his head upon the block, and the executioner's axe fell. Although Bishop Fisher was condemned for denying the King's supremacy, he incurred the wrath of Henry by his book against the divorce, and that practically sealed his fate. His head was placed on a spike on London Bridge as a warning to others who might be rash enough to incur the ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... young Shotwell was trying to persuade himself that he had no choice of occupation for the evening; that he really didn't care. Yet, always two intrusive alternatives continually presented themselves. The one was to change his coat for a spike-tail, his black tie for a white one, and go to the Metropolitan Opera. The other and more attractive alternative ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... instruments in their hands, some men climb into trees and wait for the herd to pass, whilst others drive them under. The hippopotami, however, are not hunted, but snared with lunda, the common tripping-trap with spike-drop, which is placed in the runs of this animal, described by every South African traveller, and generally known as far as the Hametic language is spread. The Karuma Falls, if such they may be called, are a mere sluice or rush of water between high syenitic stones, falling in a long slope down ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... inappropriate at the close of this railway chapter to quote Steele's account of the ride given him out of compliment to his work and that of the Police generally, on the train which was the first to go through to the coast after Donald A. Smith had driven at Craigellachie in November, 1885, the spike which united the two oceans across Canada. Steele was back on duty in the mountains again and, as he knew some of the party, was invited to go through from Kamloops on a private car with Mr. Dickey, the government ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... danger; and also, when the boat comes to land, to step out first and hold it by the painter, that is, the rope which is fastened to the bow, while the others get out. Marco had a pole, with an iron spike and also an iron hook in the end of it, which he used to fend off with, as they called it, when the boat was in danger of running against any obstacle. This was ...
— Marco Paul's Voyages and Travels; Vermont • Jacob Abbott
... rather slowly till it reached its full development. The scape is now 10 ft. 4 in. high above the plant, 61/2 in. in circumference at the base, or 51/4 in. at a foot above the base; from there it tapers very gradually till near the apex. The flower-spike is exceedingly dense, and 5 ft. 8 in. long; the lower or naked portion, 4 ft. 8 in. long, is prominently marked by abortive flower buds, with, near the base, some bristle-like scales 31/2 in. to 4 in. long. The flowers are regularly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... to the American consul and dropped his marline-spike, as Matt Peasley ripped left and right, right and left into Ole Peterson's dish face. "Watch the skipper—our skipper, I mean. Regular young human pile-driver." He raised his voice and called to Matt Peasley. "He's rocking on ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... if she had just scored a goal in a hockey match. You understand she had not committed suicide. Her heart had just stopped. I saw her, with the long lashes on the cheeks, with the smile about the lips, with the flowers all about her. The stem of a white lily rested in her hand so that the spike of flowers was upon her shoulder. She looked like a bride in the sunlight of the mortuary candles that were all about her, and the white coifs of the two nuns that knelt at her feet with their faces hidden might have been two ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... increasing in orderly succession; the details will be given later. Manganese is often grouped with iron, nickel, and cobalt (see Crookes' lemniscates), but its fourteen protruding bodies repeat the "lithium spike" (proto-element 5) and are grouped round a central ovoid. This would appear to connect it with lithium (2 on Plate IV) rather than with fluorine (3 in Plate IV), with which it is often classed. The "lithium spike" re-appears in potassium and rubidium. ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... of some beast, for as he cautiously rose to a standing position the moonlight showed him, impaled upon the horribly sharp stake formed by fining down a good-sized tree and planting it in the bottom, a hideously wolfish-looking hyaena, which, less fortunate than himself, had fallen upon the sharp spike, which had gone completely through the wretched animal's body, leaving it writhing, snarling, and clawing the air with its paws in its vain efforts ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... 'tip' and 'top'; 'slent' (now obsolete) and 'slant'; 'sweep' and 'swoop'; 'wrest' and 'wrist'; 'gad' (now surviving only in gadfly) and 'goad'; 'complement' and 'compliment'; 'fitch' and 'vetch'; 'spike' and 'spoke'; 'tamper' and 'temper'; 'ragged' and 'rugged'; 'gargle' and 'gurgle'; 'snake' and 'sneak' (both crawl); 'deal' and 'dole'; 'giggle' and 'gaggle' (this last is now commonly spelt 'cackle'); 'sip', 'sop', ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... will carry a flour bag over moraine and glacier trusting only to the creeper spikes on his heels, and in objecting to the extra weight our guide said derisively: "We've quite enough to pack already, and I guess you don't want to dress us up with a green veil, a crooked club with a spike in the end of it, and fathoms of spun hemp, like them tourist fellows bring out to sit in ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... during a pause in the trial of Parnell v. the "Times." Other drawings, that attracted general attention, followed in rapid succession. Who that has seen it can forget the "Fancy Portrait" (by induction) "of my Laundress"—a brawny-armed woman standing over his shirts, which she belabours with a spike-studded club? or the "Automatic Policeman" at a crowded crossing, which, when a penny is dropped into the slot, puts up its arm and stops the traffic? or the "Restored Skeleton of a Bicyclist," and other "happy thoughts" of that ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... anxiety. And even now they do not greatly trouble me; for if they keep no better watch there on other nights than they did on this, it would be easy for a couple of resolute men to enter the place, even as I did, bind and gag the sentinels, and spike all eight of the guns, and never a man of them any the wiser until they came to put fire to ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Roper intercepted her father on his return to the Tower after his trial, and penetrating the circle of the Guards, hung on his neck and bade him farewell. There is a tradition that she caused her father's head to be stolen from the spike of the bridge on which it was exposed, and, getting it preserved, kept it in a casket. She and her husband, William Roper, wrote together the biography of her father, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... drawled Ben, "to dress up like that and make us wear our working togs. I've got a good mind to go and get into my spike." ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... explanation met his eyes. This time there was no need to stoop down, nor to turn any body over. The sentry whom he had left to guard both cell and guardroom stood bolt upright, with his mouth and his eyes wide open; skewered to the wall of the guardhouse by an iron spike, which ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... ponderous mountain-axe were sufficient to cut each step in the brittle ice, and in a few minutes the whole party were on the slope, every man having a coil of the rope round his waist, while, with the spike of his alpenstock driven firmly into the ice, he steadied himself before taking each ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... sees the plainest of chapels,—a kind of wooden tent, that owes whatever grace it has to its pointed windows and the high, sharp roofs—traces, both, of that upward movement of ecclesiastical architecture which soared aloft in cathedral-spires, shooting into the sky as the spike of a flowering aloe from the cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below. This suggestion of medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which a hand-bell might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was all of outward show ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... of her Cashmere robe were relieved at the throat by a knot of lilac ribbon, and amid its loops were secured clusters of violets, that matched in hue the long spike of hyacinth which was fastened in one side of the coiled hair, twined just behind the ear, and drooped low on the snowy neck. Before her on a gilded stand was the purple pyramid of flowers she had brought from ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... and if this failed to make him show game, his flesh was lacerated, and aquafortis poured into the wound. About sixty years ago a bull was put to the stake at Grimsby; but the animal proving too tame, one William Hall put a spike or brad into his stick, and goaded the poor creature until the blood flowed copiously from several parts of his body; and at length, by continually irritating the lacerated parts, the bull became enraged, and roaring in the extremity ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... Ainnesley wouldn't have a roof over his head if we failed in our obligations! You must know as well as I do why the banking interests took our paper to those amounts which made it possible for us to drive the first spike." ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... the two last do not curve back, but point forward; and as both these carry their heads low down the long sharp spike is often borne horizontally. In the form and length of their neck, the set of their ears, and other respects, the black rhinoceroses differ materially from the white ones. In fact, their habits are quite unlike. The former feed chiefly on the leaves ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... waistcoat pocket, in order to get them home safely. The children found several other curiosities besides shells. They collected pebbles, and specimens of sand, of different colors. Mary found an old iron spike, perhaps part of a vessel, with the sand and gravel concreted around it. It looked like stone growing upon iron. Rollo also found a small piece of wood, battered and worn by the long-continued action of the waves, and he ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... her! Waste no incense at her shrine. She'll cut the thread no sooner because you turn your back on her." Fling overboard your mythologies, dead and alive, and kneel to Nature. A budding spike of wild hyacinth is worth all the gods put together. Go hand in hand with Nature, I say. Ask nothing from her; walk humbly; be well content if she lets you but turn the corner of one page none else have read. That's how I live. My life is ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... two men. Both were soldiers, both black and stern. But one was a Hebrew, no less than forty-five years of age. He wore a helmet of polished metal, equipped with a visor, which, when raised, finished the front with a flat plate. The top of the head-piece was ornamented with a spike. His armor was complete—shirt of mail, shenti extending half-way to the knees, greaves ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... man, in reality more poignant than ever before, were relegated for the moment to the limbo of forgotten tribulations. Reliance on relieving expeditions was considered foolish; all our thoughts and energies were centred in a desire to stay the slaughter of the innocents, and thus in a manner to spike the ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... basal segment narrower than the occludent segment, and about half as long as it. Terga like a battle-axe, with the edge crenated and a spike behind; the handle narrower than the ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... led into the swamp, and disappeared amid the trees. Upon a post near by was an old marlin spike with something white fluttering beneath. This attracted ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... They are guided and controlled entirely by the voice and by a lead-dog who is especially trained for the purpose. The driver carries no whip, but has instead a stick about four feet in length and two inches in diameter, called an oerstel (oar'-stel). This is armed at one end with a long iron spike, and is used to check the speed of the sledge in descending hills, and to stop the dogs when they leave the road, as they frequently do in pursuit of reindeer and foxes. The spiked end is then thrust down in front of one of the knees or uprights of the runners, and drags in that position through ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... had been left at Fort Clifton with orders to spike the guns, blow up the magazine, destroy everything which could be of value to the enemy, and rejoin the command. The order was obeyed, and every man of the detail resumed his place ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... murdered!... fall on the Capuchin! Forward! Spike him!... Jesus, Mary, help me!... Look on the pretty favourite lover! On him! On him! Spike him, rascals, spike ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... or Verbascum thapsus, a faithful delineation of which will be found in Plate 1, 437, vol. vi., of Sowerby. It is a hardy biennial, with a thick stalk, from eighteen inches to four feet high, and with very peculiar large woolly and mucilaginous leaves, and a long flower spike with ugly yellow and nearly sessile flowers. The leaves are best gathered in late summer or autumn, shortly before the plant flowers. In former times it appears to have been rather highly thought of, particularly as a remedy for diarrhoea; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... and the hope was deferred. The rush of the Sea-horse did not trouble the sands of the shallow bar, or sweep, with fiercely ramping figure-head, past the long pier-spike, stretching like the hand of welcome from the hospitable shore. While they fancied her full-breasted sails, swelled as with sighs for home, bowing lordly over the submissive waters, the Sea-horse lay a frozen mass, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... that resistance would be madness. To save the gun and escape capture must be the "double event." Seizing a ramrod, he ordered an artilleryman to spike the gun, gave the command to retreat, telling the men to "duck their heads," fearing another discharge, and, leading his horse, followed by Macdonell and Glegg and the firing squad of eight artillerymen, rushed down ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... the beaters had essayed a skirmish line, and with instant result. Like a meteoric puff of gray and white, to a chorus of yells and the accompaniment of a volley of missiles, Jack had shot into space from behind his shelter and darted zigzagging through the brush. A whizzing spike, a chance shot that nearly grazed his nose, so dazzled his brainlet that the terrified creature doubled on his trail and came ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... battle-axe, the firm iron-guarded staff of which was formed of tough elm, strongly inlaid and defended with brass, while many a plate and ring were indented in the handle, to hold the wood and the steel parts together. The axe itself was composed of two blades, turning different ways, with a sharp steel spike projecting from between them. The steel part, both spike and blade, was burnished as bright as a mirror; and though its ponderous size must have been burdensome to one weaker than himself, yet the young soldier carried it as carelessly along, as ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... to fit a strap round the main-topmast head for ringtail halyards, and had the strap and block, a coil of halyards, and a marlin spike about his neck. He fell, and not knowing how to swim, and being heavily dressed, with all those things around his neck, he probably sank immediately. We pulled astern in the direction in which he fell, and though we knew that ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... wedge or spike of iron, Gainest, readiest, Gar, cause, Gart, compelled, Gentily, like a gentleman, Gerfalcon, a fine hawk, Germane, closely allied, Gest, deed, story, Gisarm, halberd, battle-axe, Glaive, sword, Glasting, barking, Glatisant, barking, yelping, Gobbets, lumps, Graithed, made ready, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... thorough tar, who had come in at the hawse-hole, and had worked his way up to his present position. Old "Rough and Ready" I found he was called. His hands were continually in the tar-bucket, and he was never so happy as when, with a marline-spike hung round his neck by a rope-yarn, he was engaged in gammoning the bowsprit, or setting up the rigging. But that I ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... took from the tree a tiny flower-bud and proceeded to dissect it. After the external covering, which consisted of seventeen scales, he came upon the down which protects the flower. On removing this he could perceive four branchlets surrounding the spike of flowers, and the flowers themselves, though so minute, were as distinct as possible, and he could not only count their number, but discern the ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... Barley-grass, which grows very commonly in our sea-marshes, the Hordeum maritimum, is apt to render cattle diseased in the mouth, from chewing the seeds, which are armed with a strong bristly awn not dissimilar to the spike of ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... created. Myriads of flowers gleam in their own atmosphere of living light, like jewels among the rich herbage, so that the feet can hardly be set down without crushing scores of them: the Orchis rubra with its splendid spike of crimson blossoms, the bee and spider orchises in great variety, whose flowers mimic the insects after whom they are named, sweet-scented alyssum, golden buttercups and hawkweeds, Roman daisies, larger ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... very entertaining from her powers of mimicry. She was fond of hearing me whistle airs, and procured me a Tibetan Jews'-harp,* [This instrument (which is common in Tibet) is identical with the European, except that the tongue is produced behind the bow, in a strong steel spike, by which the instrument is held firmer to the mouth.] with which, and coarse tobacco, which I smoked out of a Tibetan brass pipe, I wiled away the dark evenings, whilst my cheerful companion amused himself with an old harmonicon, to the enchantment of Dolly and our guards ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... of course, commanded by the steward, but the duties of his unpleasant office left him but little time for directing an invasion. Well, we got within reach of England when the wind began to blow, and before I could hitch myself up with a marling-spike, every man Jack of us was ready for ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... of all whom they could master, and then, cutting off their heads, carried them away with them. They sang and danced when the enemy were likely to see them. They carried also a spear of about fifteen cubits in length, having one spike.[229] 17. They stayed in their villages till the Greeks had passed by, when they pursued and perpetually harassed them. They had their dwellings in strong places, in which they had also laid up their provisions, so that the Greeks could get nothing from that country, but lived upon the ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... the drum Hiram passed two lengths of Number 9 wire through large screweyes, making a double loop into which the hook of a light timber chain would easily catch. Into one end of the drum he drove a headless spike, upon which the hand-crank of the grindstone fitted, and was ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... being murdered!... fall on the Capuchin! Forward! Spike him!... Jesus, Mary, help me!... Look on the pretty favourite lover! On him! On him! Spike ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... inside the house lay a hard-pine pole eighteen feet long, ending in a tapering two-foot iron. Strung on a fish-line hanging from a spike were a half-dozen swordfish darts. These were sharp, stubby metal arrows, all head and tail and no body, with a socket cast on one side to admit the top of the pole-iron. Back of the arrow-head was a hole, through which was fastened ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... watchers and the marksmen. The entrance to the fort was a large folding gate of thick slabs. It was always on the side nearest the spring. The whole structure of the fort was bullet-proof and was erected without an iron nail or spike. In the border wars these forts withstood all attacks. The savages, having proved that they could not storm them, generally laid siege and waited for thirst to compel a sortie. But the crafty besieger was as often outwitted by the equally cunning defender. ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... day had been hard, soon fell asleep with her brothers. Henry did not feel sleepy at all; he was bright and happy and rejoiced. This certainly was an adventure. He wondered what Dick and Joe and Spike and the other fellows of his troop would think when he wrote them about it. He did not realize that he had saved the lives of the children, who would assuredly have frozen to death ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the reed-mace or club-rush, a plant growing in lakes, by edges of rivers and similar localities, with a creeping underground stem, narrow, nearly flat leaves, 3 to 6 ft. long, arranged in opposite rows, and a tall stem ending in a cylindrical spike, half to one foot long, of closely packed male (above) and female (below) flowers. The familiar brown spike is a dense mass of minute one-seeded fruits, each on a long hair-like stalk and covered with long downy hairs, which render the fruits very light and readily carried ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... and after a spirited but brief tourney, conquered with flying colours. My aim was to pin her down to something definite ... like an impaled butterfly: hers was to flutter over a vast garden of irrelevances; but she did not long evade the spike. I tipped its point with the subtly poisonous suggestion that all arrangements must be made in the hour, otherwise complications might arise. There seemed to be so many people who had been attracted by that simple little advertisement of mine, and really, I must be able to say that I and my car ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Burnet says, it is not above a fortieth part in value, to the rest of Britain) and with respect to the profit that England gains from hence, not the forty thousandth part. Although I must confess, that a mote in the eye, or a thorn in the side, is more dangerous and painful than a beam, or a spike at ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... "persuasion," who magnified that mode, and though he was willing to do as I advised in the matter, he was evidently a little inclined to the more spectacular way of receiving the ordinance. Mrs. White suggested that it might save future trouble, and "spike a gun." So Jack, with four others, was taken down to Santa Rosa Creek, that went rippling and sparkling along the southern edge of the town, and duly baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. A great crowd covered the bridge just below, and the banks of the stream; ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... gone through all the stuff they taught at the Spike Crick School, an' was studyin' some advance stuff with the teacher who was ambitious to finish her own edication. This was a big surprise to me; I had allus supposed that a teacher knew everything, but it seems not. The' 's lots they don't know, an' the front they put ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... closer to the track boss and her voice hardened. "If these spikes were forced out by the impact of the engine, we ought to find torn spike holes inclining toward the end ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... French or Germans came over to invade this land, I'd—" Peggy seized the ruler and waved it in the air with a gesture of fiercest determination—"I'd fight them! There! I'd shoot at them; I'd go out and spike the guns; I'd— I'd climb on the house-tops and throw stones at them. You needn't laugh, I tell you I should be terrible! I feel as if I could face a whole regiment myself. The spirit—the spirit of my ancestors is in my breast, Arthur Reginald, and woe ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... Leaves very broad at base, half clasping the stem and rapidly narrowed to an acute tip; hardly at all spreading from the thread-like twigs; flowers pinkish, in spike-like clusters 6. Tamarix. ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... our friend was doing the amiable to the lively Julia, although we never could persuade him to confess his penchant; and, on this occasion, he had attached himself to their immediate sleigh. Provided, like the Canadians, with poles terminated by an iron hook at one end and a spike at the other, we made our way after their fashion, but in quicker time than they possibly could, harnessed as they were in the sledges. With the aid of these poles, we cleared, with facility, chasms of from ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... Mont Blanc so clear by day and night that it was difficult to believe in intervening chasms and precipices, and almost impossible to resist the idea that one might sally forth and climb up easily. I went into all sorts of places; armed with a great pole with a spike at the end of it, like a leaping-pole, and with pointed irons buckled on to my shoes; and am all but knocked up. I was very anxious to make the expedition to what is called 'The Garden:' a green spot covered with wild flowers, lying across the Mer de Glace, and among the most ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... exist, must reflect the Sambaquis of the opposite Brazilian shore. The house was guarded by three wooden figures, "clouterly carved," and powdered with ochre or red wood; two of them, representing warriors in studded coatings of spike nails, with a looking-glass fixed in the stomach, raised their hands as if to stab each other. These figures are sometimes found large as life: according to the agents, the spikes are driven in before the wars begin, and every one promises the hoped-for death of an enemy. Behind ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... inflorescence usually met with are the spike, raceme and panicle. When the spikelets are sessile or borne directly along an elongated axis as in Enteropogon melicoides the inflorescence is a spike. If the spikelets borne by the axis are all stalked, however short the pedicels ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... delicate that he had to wrap them up carefully in a paper, and put them into his waistcoat pocket, in order to get them home safely. The children found several other curiosities besides shells. They collected pebbles, and specimens of sand, of different colors. Mary found an old iron spike, perhaps part of a vessel, with the sand and gravel concreted around it. It looked like stone growing upon iron. Rollo also found a small piece of wood, battered and worn by the long-continued action of the ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... Next thing I know some of 'em will be letting prisoners escape right under my nose, making us the laughing stock of these damned militia volunteers." (Canker entered service in '61 as a private in a city company that was militia to the tip of its spike-tailed coats, but he had forgotten it.) "I want these young idlers to understand distinctly, by George, that the first prisoner that gets away from this post takes somebody's commission with him. D'you hear that, Mr. Gray?" And Canker turned and glared at the bright blue eyes as ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... courage and determination. Thus the small mill at Newburg grew from the capacity of turning out thirty tons of re-rolled rails to its present capacity of sixty tons, beside the addition of a puddling mill, a merchant bar mill, a wire rod mill, two blast furnaces, spike, nut and bolt works. In the meantime the small beginning had grown into such large proportions, and so many railroad corporations had centered here, that it was thought best to form the same into a stock company, embracing another rolling ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... of Vermont, "this name," writes a correspondent, "is given to a door, four inches thick and closely studded with spike-nails, dividing the chapel hall from the staircase leading to the belfry. It is called Calvin's Folly, because it was planned by a professor of that (Christian) name, in order to keep the students out of the ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... become spiral in the bud? Your bird is, I have no doubt, the Molothrus mentioned in my "Journal of Travels," page 52, as representing a North American species, both with cuckoo-like habits. I know that seeds from same spike transmitted to a certain extent their proper qualities; but as far as I know, no one has hitherto shown how far this holds good, and the fact is very interesting. The experiment would be well worth trying with flowers bearing different numbers of petals. Your explanation agrees beautifully ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of his unpleasant office left him but little time for directing an invasion. Well, we got within reach of England when the wind began to blow, and before I could hitch myself up with a marling-spike, every man Jack of us was ready ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... out one of the spikes of the frame on which the line was faked and the boy carefully hauled it up, then drove it into the ice as hard as he could, using his heavy boot for a hammer. He next took the line, and wound it around the spike to help him in ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... attracted general attention, followed in rapid succession. Who that has seen it can forget the "Fancy Portrait" (by induction) "of my Laundress"—a brawny-armed woman standing over his shirts, which she belabours with a spike-studded club? or the "Automatic Policeman" at a crowded crossing, which, when a penny is dropped into the slot, puts up its arm and stops the traffic? or the "Restored Skeleton of a Bicyclist," and other "happy thoughts" of that period? It was obvious that the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... a large part of the enterprise and enthusiasm of the place. He had his head full of railroads long before the first spike was driven for an iron pathway to the village. We were much together and ardently attached; went fishing together on long summer days, he catching the fish, and I watching the process. When we dedicated the first Brooklyn Tabernacle, ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... hope of saving the guns, I directed Captain Stewart-Mackenzie, who had assumed command of the 9th Lancers on Cleland being disabled, to make a second charge, which he executed with the utmost gallantry,[11] but to no purpose; and in the meanwhile Smyth-Windham had given the order to unhook and spike the guns. ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... called him. Invariably he spent some part of his day among his beloved peasants, and daily he recited with them public prayers. Often at night he and they together went up to the teeth of the Russian batteries on expeditions to spike the cannon. His inseparable companion, Niemcewicz, who slept with him in his tent till the-end came, describes how the silence of these nights was broken hideously by the wild, shrill cry of the reapers, by the sudden roar of the cannon and crack of gunfire, ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... hill-sides. It is thicker than the cocoanut palm, but it does not grow quite so tall, being about thirty feet high when full grown, and perhaps twenty inches in diameter. What looks like the root of the sago-tree is really a creeping underground stem, from which a spike of flowers grows up when the tree is about ten or fifteen years old. For some years, while the plant is young, the upright growing stem is covered and completely hidden by very large spiny leaves. These are rather like enormous feathers, of which the centre ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... blue, including filaments, anthers, and style; crowded in a dense spike; quickly fading; unpleasantly odorous. Perianth tubular, 2-lipped, parted into 6 irregular lobes, free from ovary; middle lobe of upper lip with 2 yellow spots at base within. Stamens 6, placed at unequal distances on tube, 3 opposite each lip. Pistil 1, the stigma minutely toothed. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... said, stopping before a splendid line of plants in full blossom. Her self-respect was whole again; her spirits rose at a bound. 'I don't know why you admire them so much. They have no scent, and they are only pretty in the lump,' and she broke off a spike of blossom, studied it a little disdainfully, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and peak upon peak, all bathed in the Indian haze of the Tropics, and dreamy to look upon. Still valleys, leagues away, reposed in the deep shadows of the mountains; and here and there, waterfalls lifted up their voices in the solitude. High above all, and central, the "Marling-spike" lifted its finger. Upon the hillsides, small groups of bullocks were seen; some quietly browsing; others ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... with an immortal blazon. The venerable Mar-Isaac in Cologne, Sat in his house at prayer, nor lifted lid From off the sacred text, while all around The fanatics ran riot; him they seized, Haled through the streets, with prod of stick and spike Fretted his wrinkled flesh, plucked his white beard. Dragged him with gibes into their Church, and held A Crucifix before him. "Know thy Lord!" He spat thereon; he was pulled limb from limb. I saw—God, that I might forget!—a ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... pulls hand over hand brought me to the edge of the shelf, when, throwing my arm around the granite spike. I swung my body upon the shelf and lay down to rest, shouting to Cotter that I was all right, and that the prospects upward were capital. After a few moments' breathing I looked over the brink and directed my comrade to tie the barometer to the lower end of the lasso, which he did, and that precious ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... fifth egg, to the no small anxiety of Martha and Jane, into whose limited and innocent minds the possibility of such a feat had never entered. "Wot, me! Why, capting, if they was biled as hard as the head of a marline-spike—" ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... to land. It was the design of general Harrison while the troops under Dudley were destroying the enemy's batteries on the north-west side of the river, and general Clay was fighting the Indians above the fort on the south-east side, to send out a detachment to take and spike the British guns ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... pile of rails a good deal. They afforded anything but a comfortable resting place. Finally he seemed to decide that he would change his seat. He edged along with the apparent intention of reaching a heap of spike kegs. He never, however, took his eye away from Ralph. Ike, too, held his weapon at a continual menace, and gave his captive no chance to act against him or ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... earth, yet in this brief period it has completely changed its aspect; the upper part of the flame has, indeed, broken away, and is now shown in that part of the drawing between the two figures on the line above. The same plate also shows various instances of the remarkable spike-like objects, taken, however, at different times and at various parts of the sun. These spikes attain altitudes not generally greater than 20,000 miles, though sometimes they soar aloft to ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... were standing on the bench that served instead of dining-chairs, each with a plate and a pancake on the table in front of them. Jack held a hammer and spike, Scott Burton a hatchet, Geoffrey a saw, and Philip a rifle. Bell was nothing if not intuitive. No elaborate explanations ever were needed to show her a fact. Without a word she flung the plate of flapjacks she held as far into a thicket as she had force to fling it, and then ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... which it belongs." How land-lubbers would be able to understand the marine technicalities Mr. RUSSELL introduces into his stories without explanations such as this, it would be difficult to say. But with such assistance, a studding-sail-boom becomes as easy of identification as a marling-spike lashed to a forecastle spinaker-boom, close hauled aport under trysails, blowing out like flags from the grips of clew-lines and leech-lines towards the close of a second dog-watch! Shiver LINDLEY MURRAY'S ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... bewildered, was seeking a reply, she passed quickly to the next group, going from one to another, and watching with interest the placing of the bouquet on the summit of the hut. One of the men brought a ladder and fastened the flowers to a spike. When they were securely attached and began to nod in the air, he waved his hat and shouted: "Hou, houp!" This was the ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... capture and a confession. Peg Tatem in the toils. Timber pirates get prison terms. The lumberjacks' big Christmas. "Sit down, you rough-necks!" roars Hippy. Spike bares his soul. What the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... with it, for the tree's sake, if for nothing more; let the Conservatism that would preserve cut it away. Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living substance;—nay is far worse; for in every wind-storm ('commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... rusty marlinespike. It was a weapon of might, indeed. Jim's blow caused Chatelard's arm to drop, limp and nerveless. But in gaining his enemy's weapon, Jim was forced to drop his own. He put a firm foot upon the spike, however, while he held Chatelard at arm's length and looked into ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... crossing stem are in red and green, and blue and green; the brown stalks are worked in stem stitch. Loops are worked round the outside of the leaf here as in all the bigger leaves on this work. The spike on the left of the sketch is in herring bone ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... saw on the long spike which held the horseshoe over the door a pail of water so delicately hung that whoever first entered there must receive its contents in one fell unmitigated deluge ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... turning the ground well, a little deeper than it had been plowed before. I didn't realize what I was doing, then. I simply had been brought up to do my work well. I thought I was doing a good job, that was all. When I was through plowing I got my old harrow, a spike-tooth, and harrowed the ground. I had a roller. They were manufactured in our town. The firm bursted and I had a chance to buy one very cheap. I had a roller, harrow, and plow. That was all the tillage implements. The harrow had moved the lumps around a little. I ran the roller ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... covered with splashes of grease and liquor; and the few fly-marked pictures on the walls were coarsely suggestive. Scattered among them haphazard, in one instance through a lithographic print, were round holes as large as a spike-head, through which, by closely applying the eye, one could view the world without. When the place was new, similar openings had been carefully refilled with a whittled stick of wood, but the practice had ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... the same desire for cheap pioneer construction which in Ontario brought in the narrow gauge, was the wooden railway built in 1870 from {102} Quebec to Gosford. The rails were simply strips of seasoned maple, 14'x7"x4", notched into the sleepers and wedged in without the use of a single iron spike. The engine and car wheels were made wide to fit the rail. In spite of its cheap construction the road did not pay, and the hope of extending it as far as Lake St John was deferred for a generation. A similar wooden railway was built ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... over the crest and making straight for the gun. He was astounded; and well he might be, since the fisherman's path had been reported impassable by troops. But he instantly changed the order he happened to be giving from 'Try a longer fuse!' to 'Spike the gun and follow me!' With a sharp clang the spike went home, and the gunners followed Brock downhill towards Queenston. There was no time to mount, and Alfred trotted down beside his swiftly running master. The elated Americans fired hard; but their bullets ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... attention, of his own accord, and bore what he had to bear, not only without a flinch, but showing his gratitude by licking the hand that was tending him. So again, when he was once badly stubbed, he went to the same quarter, showed his foot, and then lay down, staying perfectly quiet while a spike was looked for, at last found, and then pulled out with a ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes, when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August, and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as a maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall feathery spike on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... charnels of the West, And a hecatomb of lives, Than the foul invader as a guest 'Mid your sisters and your wives— But a spirit lurketh in every maid, Though, brothers, ye should quail, To sharpen a Judith's lurid blade, And the livid spike of Jael! To arms! to arms! for the South needs help, And a craven is he who flees— For ye have the sword of the Lion's Whelp, And ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... alive. When I spoke to the old fellow of marrying Claudine he swore fiercely, and eight days after, he sent me to Porto on a schooner belonging to one of our neighbours, just to give me a change of air. I came back, at the end of six months, thinner than a marling spike, but more in love than ever. Recollections of Claudine scorched me like a fire. I could scarcely eat or drink; but I felt that she loved me a little in return, for I was a fine young fellow, and more than one girl had set her cap at me. Then my father, seeing that he could do nothing, that I ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... some men'll pick up a golf-stick to go walking with, and I've done that myself, hundred of times. And I knew that I had an ice-ax of that very pattern at home—and so I just shoved it under the doctor's nose in court, and asked him if that hole in Crone's head couldn't have been made by the spike of it. Why? Because I knew that Carstairs would be present in court, and I wanted to see if he would catch what ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... that he had not time to make the least movement to avoid it. He fell at once where he stood, but attempted to rise again, when I gave him another prick which settled his business. He fell back heavily against the counter with a groan. One of the heads above was shaken off its spike by the concussion and struck him on the shoulder as he lay. His eyes, opening and shutting convulsively, seemed to gaze upon the ghastly object. He groaned again, and in a few moments was dead. I bent over ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... quiver, with their points downwards, and their feathered shafts straight up. When the time for action comes, the sun-heat peels them off, from below and above, so quickly that you can see them cue under your eyes, and turn into a spiral by their continued contractions. They fall, spike downward, by the weight of the seed, and the sun finishes the work he began. Closer still the gimlet winds, and as it does so it bores down into the hardest soil: and such is their strange power of penetration, as ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... of the men are tall, but wretchedly thin; the children are mere skeletons, and the entire tribe appears thoroughly starved. The language is that of the Dinka. The chief carried a curious tobacco-box, an iron spike about two feet long, with a hollow socket, bound with iguana-skin; this served for either tobacco-box, club, or dagger. Throughout the whole of this marshy country it is curious to observe the number ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... believed that the country would rise to liberate him. The country, however, showed no disposition to do anything of the sort. He was tried in Dublin, found guilty, sentenced to fourteen years' transportation, and a few days afterwards put on board a vessel in the harbour and conveyed to Spike Island, whence he was sent to Bermuda, and the following April in a convict vessel to the Cape, and finally ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... branches of the tree were covered with long thorny spikes that pointed in every direction; but one branch in particular occupied their attention. Upon this there was about a dozen of these spikes pointing upward, and upon each spike ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... axils. Flowers small, yellow-green, in round axillary clusters and in long terminal spikes. The pistillate flowers are sometimes separated from the staminate, sometimes mixed with them in the lower part of the spike. Staminate: No corolla, calyx 2-5 parts, stamens 4-5. Pistillate: Style and stigma 2 or 3, otherwise the same as the staminate. Seed vessel with ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... diligence with which that time had been improved by some of our people to another purpose. While the attention of the officers was engrossed by the transit of Venus, some of the ship's company broke into one of the store-rooms, and stole a quantity of spike-nails, amounting to no less than one hundred weight: This was a matter of public and serious concern; for these nails, if circulated by the people among the Indians, would do us irreparable injury, by reducing the value of iron, our staple commodity. One of the thieves ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... other animal would be wounded and torn with the spikes and thorns, but the elephant's hide is as strong as a board. He does not mind prickles, and the only sensitive part of him is just behind the ear, so when he is tamed a man sits on his neck, and with a little sharp-pointed spike pricks him behind the ear on the side he wants him to go. It does not hurt, but the elephant feels it and soon understands, and follows the directions as a horse follows the pull of the reins in driving. Elephants live entirely on green food and vegetables, and ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... of telling him so sence—'twas in Surinam 'long in '72. Well, anyhow, Perkins fed us on spiled salt junk and wormy hard-tack all the way out, and if a feller dast to hint that the same wa'n't precisely what you'd call Parker House fare, why the skipper would knock him down with a marline-spike and the first mate would kick him up and down the deck. 'Twan't a pretty performance to look at, but it beat the world for taking the craving for fancy cooking out ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... furious rage, but being terribly afraid of her daughter, she controlled herself, and bade the boy go and find the field guarded by eighteen millions of demons, warning him on no account to look back after having plucked the tallest spike of rice, which ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... so much afraid for Minucianus, lest he should light upon the Germans now they were in their fury, that he went and spike to every one of the soldiers, and prayed them to take care of his preservation, and made himself great inquiry about him, lest he should have been slain. And for Clement, he let Minucianus go when he was brought to him, and, with many other of the senators, affirmed the action ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Fortunately no one was killed, and the only casualty was a drummer slightly wounded. The next day both regiments returned their ammunition into the magazine. The Tower Hamlets were ordered to their headquarters, London, and disbanded. The 25th were sent to Spike Island, a convict settlement near ...
— A Soldier's Life - Being the Personal Reminiscences of Edwin G. Rundle • Edwin G. Rundle
... explained by signs that his tribe was only keeping off another tribe that wanted to trade with the white men. The worst trouble was from the inordinate thieving propensities of the natives. Iron, nails, belaying pins, rudders, anchors, bits of sail, a spike that could be pulled from the rotten wood of the outer keel by the teeth of a thief paddling below—anything, everything was snatched by the light-fingered gentry. Nor can we condemn them for it. Their ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... toilet soap. An excess of naphthalene should also be avoided, since, on account of its strong odour, soaps containing much of it are unpopular. The odour of coal tar is considerably modified by and blends well with a perfume containing oils of cassia, lavender, spike, and red thyme. ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... Mr Mackay with deep meaning, swinging round on his heel, all alert in an instant; and taking hold of a short bar of iron pointed at the end, lying near, which Tim Rooney told me afterwards was what is called a "marling-spike," he proceeded to rap with it vigorously against the side of the companion hatchway, shouting out at the same time so that he could be heard all over the ship: "Tumble up, all you idlers and stowaways and everybody! Below there—all hands on deck to ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... arrangin' furniture again!" cried old John. "An I'd come home some night an' break my neck before I could find the matchbox. If we was to live in a cabin I'd spike the stuff to the floor! But—maybe it won't be so bad ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... dagger, with which they cut the throats of all whom they could master, and then, cutting off their heads, carried them away with them. They sang and danced when the enemy were likely to see them. They carried also a spear of about fifteen cubits in length, having one spike.[34] They stayed in their villages till the Greeks had passed by, when they pursued and perpetually harassed them. They had their dwellings in strong places, in which they had also laid up their provisions, so that the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... (junior editor of the Boomtown Spike), threw himself down on the sod, pulled his hat rim down over his eyes, and looked away over the plain. It was the second year of Boom-town's existence, and Seagraves had not yet grown restless under its monotony. Around him the gophers played saucily. Teams were ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... Mansion's arm grew stronger daily in combat against the old foe. Then came the second attack of the enemy, when six white men beset him from behind, again knocking him insensible, with a heavy blue beech hand-spike. They broke his hand and three ribs, knocked out his teeth, injured his side and head; then seizing his pistol, shot at him, the ball fortunately not reaching a vital spot. As his senses swam he felt them drag his poor maimed body into ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... rail and the ties still remained. In one place, a ten-inch tree, bursting through at a connection, had lifted the end of a rail clearly into view. The tie had evidently followed the rail, held to it by the spike long enough for its bed to be filled with gravel and rotten leaves, so that now the crumbling, rotten timber thrust itself up at a curious slant. Old as the road was, it was manifest that it had ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... that Capt. Spike should arrive when his foot touched the bottom of the yawl. The men were getting impatient and anxious to the last degree, and the power of Senor Montefalderon to control them was lessening each instant. They ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... descriptive power and now my dear Mrs. Summerhayes I suppose you will have a hard time wading through my scrawl but I know you will be generous and remember that I went to sea when a little over nine years of age and had my pen been half as often in my hand as a marlin spike, I would now be able to write a much ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... gunpowder, and the other did but glimmer in its socket. Turning it upward as he spoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French and battles with his own shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike-nail through his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes he expatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden, a greasy and goose-like fowl which the sailors catch with hook and line on the Grand Banks. He dwelt with rapture on an interminable winter at the Isle ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... froth of Scum; then take it off, scumming the liquor clean. Then take a handful of Strawberry-leaves and Violet-leaves together, with a little Sprig of Rosemary and two or three little Sprigs of Spike; and so boil it again (with these herbs in it) a quarter of an hour. Then take it off the fire, and when it is cold, put it into a little barrel, and put into it half a spoonful of Ale-yest, and let it work; which done, take one Nutmeg sliced, and twice as much Ginger sliced, six Cloves bruised, ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... a stiff, three-pointed vermilion-and-tinsel splendor. His Majesty the King fitted it on his royal brow. The Commissioner's wife had a face that children instinctively trusted, and her action, as she adjusted the toppling middle spike, was tender. ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... chivalrous efforts had not yet been crowned with complete success will be understood when we say that he had seen during his first half-hour of contemplation nothing at all, during his second half-hour the left-hand top star of the Great Bear, and finally the fourth spike from the end of the iron railing which enclosed the square garden, at which he had been gazing closely for precisely fifteen minutes and a half when the ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... procession it is the implements of death and the men of blood that we parade; and not to nursemaids only is the soldier irresistible. The glamour of romance hangs round him. Terrible with knife and spike and pellet he stalks through this puddle of a world, disdainful of drab mankind. Multitudes may toil at keeping alive, drudging through their scanty years for no hope but living and giving life; he shares with very few the function of inflicting death, and moves gaily clad and light ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... moon was like a silent spike that pierced the sky right through; The small stars popped and winked and hopped in vastitudes of blue; And unto me for company came creatures of the shade, And formed in rings and whispered things that ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... frightful beast, and it is represented as suffering the most intense physical agony. Nails are driven into its head, body, legs, and feet. Each wrongdoer who wanted to relieve himself of his own guilt drove a nail, a tack, a brad, or a spike into the flesh of his god. The god suffered the pain; the man escaped the punishment. He cast his burdens on his god, and went on his way rejoicing. Here is vicarious atonement in all its pristine glory. The god is writhing and distorted with ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... before them, a sheet of glassy water, dotted with a hundred sail, from the base of the sultry hill faced with terraces and called Queenstown, to the far Atlantic beyond the Heads. Heavy and dark loom the fortified Government buildings of Haulbowline and the prisons of Spike Island, casting forbidding shadows on the western margin of the tide. Quickly the steam-tug and her follower thread their way among islets and moored barques and guard-ships, southward to the sea. ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... set out for the church, but the old woman of the cottage had gone before him, and had stuck an enchanted stick called 'the spike of hurt' in a crack of the door, so that he would brush against it as he stepped across the threshold. Suddenly he felt so sleepy that he could not stand up, and throwing himself on the ground he sank into a deep slumber, not knowing that the dark lad was watching him. Nothing could waken ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... I had ever seen in three of the largest aquariums known in England, had they been combined into one. There were some large fellows, something like pollack, cruising around, and these are called buffaloes. Insinuating their slow course through the crowd were fresh-water gar-fish with long spike noses. The catfish, with its greasy chubby body, portmanteau mouth, and prominent wattles, were precisely like those we used to catch (and eat sometimes) in Australia. Carp were present in numbers, including the mirror and leather varieties, but carp culture was not so fashionable ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... in the organic pabulum, animal and vegetable, whence it derived its fertility, that, even when laid open for years to the meliorating effects of the weather and the visits of the winged seeds, it will not be found bearing a single spike or leaf of green. But here, in smell, at least, that ancient mud, swum over by the Diplopterus and the Diplacanthus, and in which the Coccosteus and Pterichthys burrowed, has undergone no change. The soft ooze has become ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... away. The place seemed deserted. He would have gone up to the door and rapped, but suddenly a big black dog appeared at the side and regarded him. It was a huge heavy-jawed dog of some unfamiliar breed, and it, wore a spike-studded collar. It did not bark nor approach him, it just bristled quietly and emitted a single sound ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... LIDDY, the curly-pate Tory, whose noddle was stuck on a spike, And BILLY DELANEY, the "Songster,"[20] we never shall meet with his like; For his neck by a witch was anointed, and warranted safe by her charm, No hemp that was ever yet twisted his ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... that we all feel equal to anything. Mr. Struble has already killed a fine "spike" elk for camp eating. We camped in a bunch, and we have camp stoves so that in case of rain or snow we can stay indoors. Just now we have a huge camp fire around which we sit in the evening, telling stories, singing, and eating nuts of the pinon pine. Then ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... I started from what is called the "Beds," and God help St. Patrick if he lay upon them: they are sharp stones placed circularly in the earth, with the spike ends of them up, one circle within another; and the manner in which the pilgrim gets as far as the innermost, resembles precisely that in which school-boys enter the "Walls of Troy" upon their slates. I moved away from these upon the sharp stones with which the whole island is surfaced, ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... and telegraph instruments for each division, each corps, each army, and one for my headquarters. There were wagons also loaded with light poles, about the size and length of a wall tent pole, supplied with an iron spike in one end, used to hold the wires up when laid, so that wagons and artillery would not run over them. The mules thus loaded were assigned to brigades, and always kept with the command they were assigned to. The operators were ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... adorned with a few good pictures given Anne by Mrs. Allan. Miss Stacy's photograph occupied the place of honor, and Anne made a sentimental point of keeping fresh flowers on the bracket under it. Tonight a spike of white lilies faintly perfumed the room like the dream of a fragrance. There was no "mahogany furniture," but there was a white-painted bookcase filled with books, a cushioned wicker rocker, a toilet table befrilled with white muslin, a quaint, gilt-framed ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... cutting them. Ordinary, broad, smooth-soled slippers would leave no impression on the coarse cinders bordering the track, and nothing short of spiked shoes would leave a mark on the hard path in the lane behind. The spike-tracks were leading, not directly toward the door, but in the direction of the fence, when they stopped; somebody had handed, or thrown, the slippers over the fence, and he had changed them on the spot. The enemy had calculated upon the spikes leaving a track in the lane that might lead ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... ammunition from the magazine, and pass them aboard the boat. At length I learned from Captain Stewart that all the guns had been spiked, that rat-tail files had been sent up for the purpose from one of the gunboats, with orders to spike the guns. I replied that no such orders had been given by me, that the spiking of the guns should have been the last thing done." "Soon after this an artillery officer informed me that Gantt's regiment was going aboard ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... will take years and further government cooperation to develop. External factors such as the international war on terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the war between the US-led coalition and Iraq probably will drive real annual GDP growth levels back below their 3.5% spike in 2002. A long-run economic constraint is the pressure on water supplies caused by rapid population growth, industrial expansion, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... brought a blush of confusion to my cheek. A silly notion had induced me to don my full evening regalia, spike-tail coat and all. Nothing could have been more ludicrously incongruous than my appearance, I am sure, and I never felt more uncomfortable ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... the wild pranks of the German students at the university. He was, I think, in some way related to descendants of Count Orloff, who was so remarkably strong and compact of muscle that he could push an iron spike, with his thumb, to its head in the sides or ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... in backing into the clear. Not seeing the troop train, I ran with a hammer and spike when he left the switch with the Arequipena ahead of him and spiked the track. Just then the troop train came in sight. I hurriedly boarded the Arequipena and started, Dobbie backing up ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... not pronounced a single word, but his face had grown pale for a moment. Letting go of his hand-spike, ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... will let herself be stabbed without dreaming of employing her venomous fangs. Here craft triumphs over strength; and this craft is not inferior to mine, when, wishing to capture the Tarantula, I make her bite a spike of grass which I dip into the burrow, lead her gently to the surface and then with a sudden jerk throw her outside. For the entomologist as for the Pompilus, the essential thing is to make the Spider leave her stronghold. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... For heaven's sake, Corydon, look here! Just now a bramble-spike Ran, there, into my instep—and oh how deep they strike, Those lancewood-shafts! A murrain light on that calf, I say! I got it gaping after her. Canst ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... birds, has, besides its two ivory prongs at the end of the staff, three divergent ones in the middle of it, with several small double barbs upon them turning inward. The spear for salmon or other fish, called kakeewei, consists of a wooden staff, with a spike of bone or ivory, three inches long, secured at one end. On each side of the spike is a curved prong, much like that of a pitchfork, but made of flexible horn, which gives them a spring, and having a barb on the inner part of the point turning downward. Their fishhooks (kakliokio) consist ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... point the young fool, whose hands were clasped behind him and concealed a marlin-spike, up and killed the old sailor, and so rounded ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... and ladies" (arum maculatum) so well known to every rustic as common throughout Spring in almost every hedge row, has acquired its name from the colour of its erect pointed spike enclosed within the curled hood of an upright arrow-shaped leaf. This is purple or cream hued, according to the accredited sex of the plant. It bears further the titles of Cuckoo Pint, Wake Robin, Parson in the Pulpit, Rampe, Starchwort, Arrowroot, Gethsemane, Bloody ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... delighted with Mr. Allan's etchings. "Woo'd an' married an' a'," is admirable! The grouping is beyond all praise. The expression of the figures, conformable to the story in the ballad, is absolutely faultless perfection. I next admire "Turnim-spike." What I like least is "Jenny said to Jockey." Besides the female being in her appearance * * * *, if you take her stooping into the account, she is at least two inches taller than her lover. Poor Cleghorn! I sincerely sympathize with him. Happy I am to think that he yet has ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... end of the drum Hiram passed two lengths of Number 9 wire through large screweyes, making a double loop into which the hook of a light timber chain would easily catch. Into one end of the drum he drove a headless spike, upon which the hand-crank of the grindstone fitted, and was ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... brought into the first battalion, and to be driven upon the van of the Romans. When the beasts, trampling upon many, soon caused disorder, Flavius, a tribune of soldiers, snatching an ensign, meets them, and wounding the first elephant with the spike at the bottom of the ensign staff, puts him to flight. The beast turned round upon the next, and drove back both him and the rest that followed. Marcellus, seeing this, pours in his horse with great force upon the elephants, and upon the enemy disordered by their flight. The horse, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... there was but one affirmation. He believed absolutely in the Devil. He knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was red, and cloven-footed and that his tail ended in a hard, sharp, spike, like Mammy Flathers' ice-pick. He also knew that when he breathed, it was in groans and hisses, such as he was hearing at the present moment. Chick's hair would have risen on his head, it wanted to, but it was not ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... grew up to wolf-like men, Worse than the wolves. And King Leodogran Groan'd for the Roman legions here again, And Caesar's eagle: then his brother king, Urien, assail'd him: last a heathen horde, Reddening the sun with smoke and earth with blood, And on the spike that split the mother's heart Spitting the child, brake on him, till, amazed, He knew not whither ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... worked on a farm, you drove copper nails into the fruit-trees, which caused them to die; if you packed apples, you stuck your thumb-nail into one, which made sure that the whole box would be rotten when it arrived; if you worked in a saw-mill, you drove a spike into a log; if you worked in a restaurant, you served double portions to ruin the boss, and spit in each portion to make sure the customer did not derive any benefit. All these things you did in a fervour of exaltation, a mood of frenzied martyrdom, because of the blaze of hate which had been ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... set fire to the shipping on the north side of the town, while he himself with his men should advance upon the nearby fort and spike the guns. As the fort was an old one and had a small garrison, the intrepid commander had but little trouble in capturing it, particularly as none of the British dreamed of a raid and small wonder, for their shores had been safe ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... he had got one end of the improvised rope over one of the iron spikes, then he criss-crossed them and got the other end over the next spike, making ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... Spanish equipment. Besides the ship named, there were some small armed vessels and a shore battery, with which the English for four hours kept up a weak contest with their foes. Then the fleet sailed past the defences and up the river before a strong breeze, and Oglethorpe was obliged to spike the guns and destroy the war-material at Fort St. Simon's and withdraw to the stronger post of Frederica, where he proposed to make his stand. Not long afterward the Spaniards landed their five thousand men four miles below Frederica. These marched ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and Jim came to work, still feeling shaky. Jim went below, crawled along the drive, lit his candle, and stuck it in the spiked iron socket and the spike in the wall of the drive, quite close to the hole, without noticing either the hole or the increased freshness in the air. He started picking away at the 'face' and scraping the clay back from under his feet, and didn't hear Kullers come to work. Kullers came in softly and decided to try a bit ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... what's pretty in the place,' said Bob tragically. 'But you don't know, father—how should you know, who have hardly been out of Overcombe in your life?—you don't know what delicate feelings are in a real refined woman's mind. Any little vulgar action unreaves their nerves like a marline-spike. Now I wonder if you ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... the bids. There were only a few of the crowds that did not spike him; three who were manifestly not of his style and two who never presumed to enter the game until the others had made their winnings. All sorts of methods had been used. The first bid came early; he was given twenty-four hours to answer it, as "the Gamma Chi Tau never wait for a man." ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... secured a magneto out of an old telephone, then drove a spike in a damp place under the porch, attached a wire to the spike and ran the wire to one of the poles of the magneto. Then I set the garbage-can on some blocks of wood, being careful not to have it touch the ground at any point. I next ran a wire from ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... was about up to Jim Parker, who broke a bear's back with a hand-spike in driving him out of his corn field, just as he was climbing over the fence." [Footnote: Facts which transpired in the early history of Bloomfield. ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... rebelled, and he was dragged up and put in the open air. There the aggrieved Belgian saw him, and, maddened by drink, took advantage of his exhaustion to kick him viciously in the ribs; but Jones promptly laid the Dutchman out with a hand-spike. ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... men on the Dead Man's Chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! The mate was fixed by the bo'sun's pike An the bo'sun brained with a marlin spike. And the cookie's throat was marked belike It had been clutched by fingers ten, And there they lay, all good dead men, Like break o' day in a boozin' ken— Yo-ho-ho and ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... cross-bar, and two 18-lib. dumb bells. In order to vary this performance, the sword-swallower allows only a part of the weapon to pass into his body, the remainder being "kicked" down by the recoil of a rifle, which is fixed to a spike in the centre of the bar, and fired by ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... pocket, Charley rapidly mounted a tall tree that stood close beside the truck. As luck would have it, the tree stood all by itself, its nearest neighbors having been cut in making the road. Two-thirds of the way up the tree, Charley drove a spike deep into the wood. He sank a second spike not far from the first. Then he drove home a third. The lead-in wire dangled behind him at his belt. He unfastened it and twisted it tight to the spikes, wrapping ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... your marline spikes And each belaying pin; Come, stir your stumps to spike the pumps, Or ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... decrease their value by arithmetical retrogression. Besides, that brings you up against the Fence once more, and I'm done with the beggars for good and all. You talk about your editors and publishers, you literary swine. Barabbas was neither a robber nor a publisher, but a six-barred, barbed-wired, spike-topped Fence. What we really want is an Incorporated Society of Thieves, with some public-spirited old forger to run it for us ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... hints may be acceptable upon points that, although not absolutely essential, tend much to the comfort of the traveller. A couple of large carriage umbrellas with double lining, with small rings fixed to the extremities of the ribs, and a spike similar to that of a fishing-rod to screw into the handle, will form an instantaneous shelter from sun or rain during a halt on the march, as a few strings from the rings will secure it from the wind, if pegged to the ground. Waterproof calico sheeting should ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... Its enormous lips act like a mowing-machine, and form a path of short-cropped grass as it feeds. We never saw it eat aquatic plants or reeds. The tusks seem weapons of both offence and defence. The hippopotamus trap consists of a beam five or six feet long, armed with a spear-head or hard-wood spike, covered with poison, and suspended to a forked pole by a cord, which, coming down to the path, is held by a catch, to be set free when the beast treads on it. Being wary brutes, they are still very numerous. One got frightened by the ship, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler colouration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and, it may be, even immortality. For the new miracle of Nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient as that of its discoverer? "Johnsmithia"! There ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... variety: Cruikshank's lupin, the two-coloured lupin, the scented lupin, and the last to appear, Lupin's lupin. They are all there, resplendent, in serried ranks like an army of soldiers, each striving to outstrip the others and to hold up the thickest and gaudiest spike to the sun. They are all there; and, at the entrance to the walk that leads to their motley beds, is a streamer with this device, taken from an exquisite sonnet ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... experience, that the best articles for traffic at these islands, are iron tools in general. Axes and hatchets, nails, from the largest spike down to tenpenny ones, rasps, files, and knives, are much sought after. Red cloth, and linen, both white and coloured, looking-glasses and beads are also in estimation; but of the latter those that are blue are preferred to all others, and white ones are thought the least valuable. A string ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... in its overwhelming completeness. The malign eye was worn proudly as a badge of honour, so proudly that the wearer, after Winona's first outcry of horror, bubbled vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma by stepping into one of Spike Brennon's straight lefts. Nothing ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... most agreeable men I ever conversed with. Indeed for six months of the year they keep company with the most distinguished travellers of Europe. With these guides, each of us armed with a long pole with an iron spike, such as my uncle described to me ages ago, and which I never expected to wield, we came down La Flegere, which we mounted on mules. In talking to an old woman who brought us strawberries, I was surprised to hear her pronounce the Italian proverb, "Poco ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... Majesty's fleet was here, he wouldn't be backward in saying who is right and who is wrong. I say, brothers, if there is a man among you all who has had the advantage of a sea education, let him speak, in order that the truth of this matter may not be hid, like a marling-spike jammed between a brace-block and ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... formulate conclusions about them. He was the first real Thinker, Then air-philosophy and element-philosophy grew up—beast-worship, animalism, fire-worship, and the rudiments of simple scientific learning, as, for instance, when men found that they could make a tool to cut, a spike ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... shrike His back may spike And pierce him with a thorn; The humble bee A tramp is he And there is none ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... her son, a sturdy boy of fourteen, and two horses, for the trip to Heath Falls. The neighbor-woman hesitated; but when Hannah threw in the two pewter candlesticks, which came from her mother's family, she could resist no longer. In her own family they had only spike-iron candlesticks, and it was her one chance of acquiring a pair of fine ones. So she wheedled her husband into agreeing to the bargain; and there was ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... steel top from the ashpole, and then breaking through and engaging in hand-to-hand conflict with the knights. Behind the latter sat their squires, with extra spears and arms ready to hand to their masters; and in close combat, the heavy maces with their spike ends were weapons before which the light-clad horsemen went down like reeds before ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... broad at base, half clasping the stem and rapidly narrowed to an acute tip; hardly at all spreading from the thread-like twigs; flowers pinkish, in spike-like clusters ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... Dan, "'twas just the same with me." They shanghaied little Tim O'Shane, they cached him safe away, An' though he objurgated some, they "cured" him night an' day; An' pretty soon there came the change amazin' to explain: "I'll never take another drink," sez Timothy O'Shane. They tried it out on Spike Muldoon, that toper of renown; They put it over Grouch McGraw, the terror of the town. They roped in "tanks" from far and near, an' every test was sure, An' like a flame there ran the ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... imagination by a statue of him, and find out the colouring from Suetonius and Tacitus. Truth is, you might have spared one side of your Medal: the head would be seen to more advantage if it were placed on a spike of the Tower, a little nearer to the sun, which would then ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... immoral or unchaste; so that in neither sex does wine produce that moral and mental wreckage which abbreviates the length of human existence among those of other creeds. Radical fanaticism, that drives a tack with a maul and a twenty-penny spike with a tack-hammer, cannot be expected to study this or any other question in any rational manner; but to the sociologist, the question as to what produces this remarkable soberness, in the midst of the habitual and ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... economic indicators improved during the mid-1990s, in part because of policy reforms supported by the IMF and debt rescheduling from the Paris Club. Algeria's finances in 2000 benefited from the spike in oil prices and the government's tight fiscal policy, leading to a large increase in the trade surplus, the near tripling of foreign exchange reserves, and reduction in foreign debt. The government continues ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... good, jolly adventure, such as you read of in books. Now, what we've got to do is to wait till they're asleep, cut off all their heads with their own cutlasses, seize the boat, row off to the lugger, wait till old Joe comes back, and then spike him with the points of cutlasses till he pilots us out safely. Then we've got to sail home as prize crew of the lugger, which would be ours. Stop! there's something we ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... you've vegetated a great while in these slow parts. I feel it in my bones, sore as they are, that some day I'll give you a new dress that will make you look like a spike of red hollyhocks. You'll see changes ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... Old Folks never made such a fuss about flies as we make nowadays. You cannot pick up a magazine without running plump into an article on the deadly housefly—with pictures of him magnified until he looks like the old million-toed, barrel-eyed, spike-tailed dragon of your boyhood mince-pie dreams. The first two pages convince you that the human race is doomed to extermination within eighteen months by ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... to the "George" at Hereford I had L7, 13s. 6d. left out of the L10. I slept in workhouses or in the fields; the professional term for the former is the "spike," for the latter the "skipper." I went on "spike" and "skipper" both. I had sent a little portmanteau on before me to the "George" at Hereford, with the initials "D.C.M." at the side. In it I had ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... have many times found and seen them swimming two leagues out at sea without anything to rest upon. Their arms are bows and arrows very well made, save that (the arrows) are not (tipped) with iron nor any other kind of hard metal: and instead of iron they put animals' or fishes' teeth, or a spike of tough wood, with the point hardened by fire: they are sure marksmen, for they hit whatever they aim at: and in some places the women use these bows: they have other weapons, such as fire-hardened spears, and also clubs with knobs, beautifully carved.... Warfare is used amongst them, which ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... a staff. Mary Anderson had managed to find one of Cushman's, but the point having become smooth through use, she told one of the people of the theater to put a small nail at the bottom. Instead of this, he affixed a good-sized spike, and one night Mary Anderson, coming out as usual, drove this right through her foot, in her sudden stop on the cliffs brink. Without flinching, or moving a muscle, with Spartan fortitude she played the scene to the end, though almost fainting with pain, till on the fall of the curtain the spiked ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... wavy, glabrous. Petioles with a pair of spines in their axils. Flowers small, yellow-green, in round axillary clusters and in long terminal spikes. The pistillate flowers are sometimes separated from the staminate, sometimes mixed with them in the lower part of the spike. Staminate: No corolla, calyx 2-5 parts, stamens 4-5. Pistillate: Style and stigma 2 or 3, otherwise the same as the staminate. Seed vessel with ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... all snug, when for a time he leaves off casting. For instance, the end fly was fixed in the lowest ring of the butt, and the slack of the line reeled up so that the collar lay close to the rod itself. Moreover, in such a rocky place, a bed to receive the spike could not have been found without some searching. For a moment I was reassured. Most likely George himself was near—perhaps in quest of blueberries (which abound at the foot of the shingles-and are ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... dead gudgeon or a roach, and moving it up and down the water, is too easy a thing to take up any time to direct you to do it. And yet, because I cut you short in that, I will commute for it by telling you that that was told me for a secret: it is this: Dissolve gum of ivy in oil of spike, and therewith anoint your dead bait for a Pike; and then cast it into a likely place; and when it has lain a short time at the bottom, draw it towards the top of the water, and so up the stream; and it is more than likely that you have a Pike follow ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... flower, but the spike is short and only two or three blooms are open at one time. It was originated by Dr. Van Fleet by crossing Mrs. Beecher and Cruentus. Burbank crossed Princeps and America, and quite a number of the seedlings show the markings of ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... said Bob; and he drove a spike into the end of the log, tied one end of a rope to the spike, and the other to a pliant young hickory, ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... aloft another trophy of the search—a metal spike and some tarnished and corroded metal ornaments. They had lain ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sunshine,—were there any in the sky,—that the greatest possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home! The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hat toward the Grdznth. "Spike cracked it," he said. "Spike is a sort of Grdznth genius." He tossed the coffee cup over his shoulder and it ricochetted in graceful slow motion against the far wall. "Now why don't you go ...
— PRoblem • Alan Edward Nourse
... the damn bed down and spike it to the floor!" This we did. Then we held a short but intense consultation. Whatever else might be the matter, obviously Tristan was suffering severely from shock and, for all we knew, maybe from partial electrocution. ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... tints, the twin spires of Lichfield rising in the distance, the park and forest ground through which the little hunting-party rode rich with purple heather, illuminated here and there with a bright yellow spike or star, and the rapid motion of her brisk palfrey animated the Queen. She began to hope that Humfrey had after all brought a false alarm, and that either he had been mistaken or that Langston was deceiving ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tway-blades and the rattlesnake plantain. In bogs, two species of piperia, with long spikes of greenish flowers, are abundant. In drier situations, a small form of the ladies' tresses is easily recognized by its spiral spike of small white flowers, which are more or less fragrant. In some of the swamps at the base of the mountain grows Limnorchis leucostachys. This is one of our most fragrant flowers, as well as one of the most beautiful, with its long ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... see," Pierce's voice came apologetically after a pause in which some background noise sounding like a crash came over the televiewer speaker. "It started swinging around when I came in sight, so I just rammed it with that pretty ornamental nose spike. I'm backing off now with the forward ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... size of a mole-hill, all over the back country everywhere, as thick as mole-hills in a very mole-hilly field at home. Its blossoms, which are green, insignificant, and ugly, are attached to a high spike bristling with spears pointed every way and very acutely; each leaf terminates in a strong spear, and so firm is it, that if you come within its reach, no amount of clothing about the legs will prevent ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... thirty yet! I'm awful little fer my size—I'm purt' nigh littler 'nan Some babies is!—an' neighbers all calls me "The Little Man!" An' Doc one time he laughed an' said: "I 'spect, first thing you know, You'll have a little spike-tail coat an' travel with a show!" An' nen I laughed—till I looked round an' Aunty was a-cryin'— Sometimes she acts like that, 'cause I ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... on waking in the morning, we found that he had not been negligent in the charge assigned to him. Our party consisted of five officers, with five servants, for whose accommodation we found ten asses at the door, each attended by its driver, who wielded a long pole tipped with an iron spike, for the purpose of goading the animal whenever ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... collar your marline spikes And each belaying pin; Come, stir your stumps to spike the pumps, Or more will ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... castle, there was a ring of spikes all round the castle and men's heads on nearly every spike there. ...
— Stories to Read or Tell from Fairy Tales and Folklore • Laure Claire Foucher
... College, "Open your classes to woman; it needs be that she should learn." The moment you give her the ballot, you take bonds of wealth and fashion and conservatism, that they will educate this power, which is holding their interest in its right hand. I want to spike the gun of selfishness; or rather, I want to double-shot the cannon of selfishness. Let Wall Street say, "Look you! whether the New York Central stock shall have a toll placed upon it, whether my million shares shall be worth sixty cents in the market or eighty, depends upon whether ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... climb this ten-foot fence, And, careless where his feet may strike, He tumbles, bang! And there will hang, His rope being caught by vine or spike. ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... brown mare with an open fetlock joint due to a spike-nail puncture. Lameness was excessive, and joint greatly swollen. Tincture of iodin was injected into the wound and towels dipped in hot antiseptic solutions were applied for several hours daily until the ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... with complete success will be understood when we say that he had seen during his first half-hour of contemplation nothing at all, during his second half-hour the left-hand top star of the Great Bear, and finally the fourth spike from the end of the iron railing which enclosed the square garden, at which he had been gazing closely for precisely fifteen minutes and a half when the Prophet darted into ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... obtained permission to keep a sort of iron bolt which he used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order to preserve it from the rats," as he said. As Thenardier was kept in sight, no objection had been made to this spike. Still, it was remembered afterwards, that one of the jailers had said: ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Island was traversed all over; and a spike nail, with the king's broad arrow upon it, was brought on board, and excited many conjectures as to whence it came.* The plantations, huts, images, skulls, and hands, were found similar to those of Darnley's Island. Amongst the trees, there was one resembling an almond, ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... you," Jim answered, with a laugh. "The bed of the creek's simply full of rocks—you can see a spike sticking up here and there in the rapids. We've seen sheep come down in flood-time—they get battered to bits. I don't think I'll try any ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... the illustrations of this number are lanterns and torch-bearers. The lanterns were in reality torch-bearers, as they were made for holding masses of combustible material which were held in place by the central spike. ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various
... mayoress—we might have been schoolchildren in the same townland we are so cordial. Everything proceeds amid plaudits, and winds up in acclamation. Their Excellencies depart. Great is the no-politics era—you can so quietly spike the guns of many an old politician—and keep him safe. The social amenities do this. Their Excellencies have gone, but they do not forget. There is a warm word of thanks for recent hospitality. Perhaps the mayor has a daughter about to be married, or a son has died; it ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... know some of 'em will be letting prisoners escape right under my nose, making us the laughing stock of these damned militia volunteers." (Canker entered service in '61 as a private in a city company that was militia to the tip of its spike-tailed coats, but he had forgotten it.) "I want these young idlers to understand distinctly, by George, that the first prisoner that gets away from this post takes somebody's commission with him. D'you ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... the boat-hook, it eluded the touch, turning round and round, or bobbing under the water, and coming up again, as if in sport: but accident saved them any further trouble; for the bowman, reproached by the boat's crew for not hooking the body, got angry, and darting the spike of the boat-hook into the abdomen, the pent-up gas escaped with a loud whiz, and the corpse instantly sank like a stone. Many jokes were passed on the occasion; but I was not in humour for joking on serious subjects: and before the watch was out I had made up my mind to go home, and ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... tablecloth she had placed on one side a black-handled fork with two prongs, and a knife of the same pattern (this was for Frank) and on the other a small pewter tea-spoon and a knife, of which the only handle was a small iron spike from which the wood had fallen away. (This was for herself.) Then there was a tooth-glass for Frank, and a teacup—without a handle, but with a gold flower in the middle of it, to make up—for herself. In the center of the pocket-handkerchief ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... the Saxon, in which spannan means to stretch. Hence span-new is fresh from the stretchers, or frames, alluding to cloth, a very old manufacture of the country; and spick and span is fresh from the spike, or tenter, and frames. This is Johnson's derivation, and I cannot but think it preferable ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... Right acrost their bows was Trumet, with the town clock strikin' ten. Over the flat place between the hills they could see the light on the ocean side. And they was anchored right in the deep hole inside the breakwater, as sure as I'm knee high to a marlin spike! ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... (erica); The yellow, gorse—call'd sometimes "whin." Cruel boys on its pickles might spike a Green beetle as if on a pin, You may roll in it, if you would like a Few ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... for me to go off and leave you." Later in the day, news brought by the carrier confirmed him in his resolution. Baillie of Jerviswoode had been hanged in Edinburgh on the previous day, and his head now adorned a spike on the Nether Bow. The death of his best friend was a great shock to Sir Patrick, perhaps an even greater one to Lady Home, and to little Grisell, for could not their imagination readily paint a picture of their dear "traitor" hanging where his friend had hung. No time was to be ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... them drunken devils come a-tumblin' out of the fore hatch, picks up half a dozen capstan bars and some belyin' pins and a marlin spike or two and runs aft a-hollerin' and yellin'. I gives 'em ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... materials, and when these reached Omaha, trains loaded with them were constantly pushed to the front. The chief spiker of the rail gang, taking a fancy to Bucks, invited him to go out with the rail-layers one day, and Bucks took a temporary commission as spike-dropper. ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... we were chumps to give up our revolvers. What good can a man do pokin' round in the dark with a blanky spike?' ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... that each drop of water is a sheath for electric forces sufficient to charge 800,000 Leyden jars, or drive an engine from Liverpool to London. Some Sir William Thomson tells us how hydrogen gas will chew up a large iron spike as a child's molars will chew off the end of a stick of candy. Thus each new book opens up some new and hitherto unexplored realm of nature. Thus books fulfill for us the legend of the wondrous glass that showed its owner ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... tower, a lonely hedge-sparrow poured his heart out in that peculiarly pathetic threnody which no other feathered throat contributes to the varied volume of bird lays. Poised on the point of an iron spike in the line that bristled along the wall, a mocking bird preened, then spread his wings, soared and finally swept downward, thrilling the air with the bravura of the "tumbling song"; and over the rampart that shut out the world, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... each morning with their so-called plows or other tools for aiding the growth of their crops. The Indian plow is, I believe, the crudest I have found in any part of the wide world. It consists of a simple handle with a knob at the top; a block of wood with an iron spike in it about an inch thick at one end and tapering to a point at the other; and a tongue to which the yoke of bullocks are attached. The pointed spike is, perhaps, sixteen inches long, but only a fraction of it projects ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... fear vanquished by Calmer's words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away. And was he then neither calm like the one nor godly like the other? He was neither as much as he would have liked to be either. But could he not have endeavoured to have found again as in his youth the bottle Holiness ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the town of Mogador to complete the work of destruction begun the day before, spike the guns, smash up the gun- carriages, and destroy all the munitions of war in the shore batteries— all of which was performed without a shadow of opposition being offered. Then I put a garrison on the island, providing it with heavy guns, to awe the town, which we did not care ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... into the bedroom. You observe that the scratch on that table is slight at one side, but deepens in the direction of the bedroom door. That in itself is enough to show us that the shoe had been drawn in that direction and that the culprit had taken refuge there. The earth round the spike had been left on the table, and a second sample was loosened and fell in the bedroom. I may add that I walked out to the athletic grounds this morning, saw that tenacious black clay is used in the jumping-pit, and carried away ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... drew out of a recess in the wall a marble slab, which served as a table, and reflected profoundly, with his hand to his head. "I have it!" he cried, and opening one of the cupboards next, took from it a black bottle of a form that was new to me. Sounding this bottle with a spike, he pierced and produced to view some little irregularly formed black objects, which might have been familiar enough to a woman accustomed to the luxurious tables of the rich, but which were a new revelation to a person like myself, who had led a simple ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... all bathed in the Indian haze of the Tropics, and dreamy to look upon. Still valleys, leagues away, reposed in the deep shadows of the mountains; and here and there, waterfalls lifted up their voices in the solitude. High above all, and central, the "Marling-spike" lifted its finger. Upon the hillsides, small groups of bullocks were seen; some quietly browsing; others slowly ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... hight of five feet; the pedestals on which these immages are fixed are sometimes cut out of the solid stick with the canoe, and the imagary is formed of seperate small peices of timber firmly united with tenants and motices without the assistance of a single spike of any kind. when the natives are engaged in navigating their canoes one sets in the stern and steers with a paddle the others set by pears and paddle over the gunwall next them, they all kneel in the bottom of the canoe and set on their feet. their ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... going to be tried for conspiracy among the other things. You see that pattern? It fits the foot of a man who went out one night with a spy Shackleby sent over to see how and when you would play the devil with our work in the canyon. It even shows the stump of the filed-off creeper-spike on your right boot. There's no use protesting—a friend of yours here will help us to trace your career back to the finding of the Blue Bird mine. Take him along and lock him into the galvanized ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... there euphorbias, with boughs like the arms of a candle-stick. In the sky vultures soared, and lower there flew from acacia to acacia birds of the raven species with black and white plumage. The grass was yellow and, in spike, looked like ripe rye. But, nevertheless, that dry jungle obviously supplied food for a great number of animals, for several times each day the travelers met considerable herds of antelopes, hartbeests, and particularly zebras. The heat on the open and treeless plain ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... intertwined lettering, arabesque masterpieces of penknife-ingenuity, with a general preponderance of feminine appellatives, bold incisures, at times, of some worthy professor in profile,—the whole besmutched with ink, and dotted with countless punctures, the result of the sharp spike with which every student's ink-horn is armed, that he may steady it upon the slanting board. The preceding lecture ended when the university-clock struck the hour; the next should begin within ten or fifteen minutes. One by one the students drop in and take their places,—high and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... according to my notion. Think he mistook th' False Ridge drop. Ain't no man could make it up again without th' hammer spike ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... terribly afraid of her daughter, she controlled herself, and bade the boy go and find the field guarded by eighteen millions of demons, warning him on no account to look back after having plucked the tallest spike of rice, which ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... parts of the flower, as the calyx, the corolla, the stamen and the pistil. We find that the arrangements of leaves and flowers are quite constant, that the leaves of some plants are opposite, of others alternate; of still others from the root only, that flowers are solitary, in raceme, head, spike ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... the straggling, unkempt beard, was a blank; and the worst wreck of the three which promptly followed the introduction of the new rules, was noted in his reports with the calm indifference with which he might have jotted down the breakage of a section foreman's spike-maul. ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... some part of his day among his beloved peasants, and daily he recited with them public prayers. Often at night he and they together went up to the teeth of the Russian batteries on expeditions to spike the cannon. His inseparable companion, Niemcewicz, who slept with him in his tent till the-end came, describes how the silence of these nights was broken hideously by the wild, shrill cry of the reapers, ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... as an old friend, spike or remove the chimney cowl that McWhannel at No. 3 has written you about. He has called on me twice and written three long letters, "to enlist my sympathy and support." He is the most poisonous kind of bore, and I'll gladly pay for the removal of the cowl, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various
... "sustains the earth"; it is surmounted by Indra's Valhal, or "the great city of Brahma". In Teutonic mythology the heavens revolve round the Polar Star, which is called "Veraldar nagli",[362] the "world spike"; while the earth is sustained by the "world tree". The "ded" amulet of Egypt symbolized the backbone of Osiris as a world god: "ded" means "firm", "established";[363] while at burial ceremonies the coffin was set up on end, inside the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... impressionable young man (junior editor of the Boomtown Spike), threw himself down on the sod, pulled his hat rim down over his eyes, and looked away over the plain. It was the second year of Boom-town's existence, and Seagraves had not yet grown restless under its monotony. Around him the gophers played saucily. Teams were moving here ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... be hetcheled up strongly with an iron-toothed rake, perhaps fertilized again, and then reseeded. It is unusual that a lawn does not need repairing every year. Lawns of several acres which become thin and mossy may be treated in essentially the same way by dragging them with a spike-tooth harrow in early spring as soon as the land is dry enough to hold a team. Chemical fertilizers and grass seed are now sown liberally, and the area is perhaps dragged again, although this is not always essential; and then the roller is applied to bring the surface into a smooth condition. ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... The hideous reptile is very thick and stumpy in proportion to its length, which rarely exceeds two feet, whilst its circumference may be put down at one-fifth of its total measurement. The tail is terminated by a small curved spike, which is commonly regarded as the sting; but though when touched it doubles up, and strikes with this horn, as well as bites, I do not think the tail does any material damage, but this opinion one would find it difficult to make a bushman credit. I once saw a ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... ranks came—a girl! Behind her, enormous pouch at his throat swelling in and out menacingly, in one paw a treelike, spike-studded mace, a frog-man, huger than any of the others, guarding. But of him I caught but a fleeting, involuntary impression—all ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... silver brocade tapestry, but with a dainty apple-blossom paper, were adorned with a few good pictures given Anne by Mrs. Allan. Miss Stacy's photograph occupied the place of honor, and Anne made a sentimental point of keeping fresh flowers on the bracket under it. Tonight a spike of white lilies faintly perfumed the room like the dream of a fragrance. There was no "mahogany furniture," but there was a white-painted bookcase filled with books, a cushioned wicker rocker, a toilet table ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... spoke like that. I had my eyes fixed on the face of the young girl upon the bench. I remember it so well. Her eyes were fixed, fascinated, upon my hand. I tried to move it, and found that it was stuck upon the spike on which I had jammed it. I moved it carelessly away, and only felt a little pain, as if from a pin-prick; but the blood was dripping on to the floor, pat, pat. Later on, a man lit the candles on the judge's desk, and the court looked different. There were deep shadows everywhere; and the illuminated ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... are its only denizens. Here, on the mountain slopes, Mr. Wallace found Bletia Sherrattiana, the white form, very rare; another terrestrial orchid, unnamed and, as is thought, unknown, which sends up a branching spike two feet to three feet high, bearing ten to twelve flowers, of rich purple hue, in shape like a Sobralia, three and four inches across; and yet another of the same family, growing on the rocks, and "looking like ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... Oregon through a holding company known as the Oregon & Transcontinental. In September, 1883, he took a special train, full of distinguished visitors, over his lines to witness the driving of the last spike near Helena, Montana. On the way out, they stopped at Bismarck to help lay the corner-stone for an ambitious new capitol of the Territory of Dakota. From Duluth to Tacoma the new line brought in immigrants whose freight ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... his waistcoat pocket, in order to get them home safely. The children found several other curiosities besides shells. They collected pebbles, and specimens of sand, of different colors. Mary found an old iron spike, perhaps part of a vessel, with the sand and gravel concreted around it. It looked like stone growing upon iron. Rollo also found a small piece of wood, battered and worn by the long-continued action of the waves, and he thought it was very curious indeed. In fine, ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... the streets. Some succeeded in reaching the gate by which they had entered, but only to find that their escape was cut off in this direction; for one of the Plataeans had closed the gate, using the spike of his javelin to secure the bolt. Others lost their way in the narrow and muddy streets, and wandered up and down until they were slain by the Plataeans. A few contrived to escape by an unguarded postern-gate, having cut through the bolt with an axe ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... especially trained for the purpose. The driver carries no whip, but has instead a stick about four feet in length and two inches in diameter, called an oerstel (oar'-stel). This is armed at one end with a long iron spike, and is used to check the speed of the sledge in descending hills, and to stop the dogs when they leave the road, as they frequently do in pursuit of reindeer and foxes. The spiked end is then thrust down in front of one of the knees or uprights of the runners, and drags in that position through ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... 1/500 in 3 h., and 2/500 in an opposite direction during the next 6 h. The two lobes, therefore, seem to be constantly closing or opening, though to a very small distance; for we must remember that the little triangle of paper affixed to the marginal spike increased its length, and thus exaggerated somewhat the movement. Similar observations, with the important difference that the petiole was left free and the plant kept under a high temperature, were made on a leaf, which was healthy, but so old that it did not close when its sensitive hairs ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... sergeant responsible?" asked the officer in cold, unsympathetic tones, looking the unfortunate sergeant over from the spike of his Pickelhaube to the thick soles of his regulation boots. "Surely not this sergeant? Surely not the non-commissioned officer before me—the one so quick to find fault with a sentry who seems to have been doing ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... plowed before. I didn't realize what I was doing, then. I simply had been brought up to do my work well. I thought I was doing a good job, that was all. When I was through plowing I got my old harrow, a spike-tooth, and harrowed the ground. I had a roller. They were manufactured in our town. The firm bursted and I had a chance to buy one very cheap. I had a roller, harrow, and plow. That was all the tillage implements. The harrow had ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... battery and telegraph instruments for each division, each corps, each army, and one for my headquarters. There were wagons also loaded with light poles, about the size and length of a wall tent pole, supplied with an iron spike in one end, used to hold the wires up when laid, so that wagons and artillery would not run over them. The mules thus loaded were assigned to brigades, and always kept with the command they were assigned to. The operators were also assigned to particular headquarters, and never changed ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... and short were the prayers we said, And we spike not a word of sorrow; But we steadfastly gazed on the face of the dead, And we ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... as he spoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French and battles with his own shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike-nail through his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes he expatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden, a greasy and goose-like fowl which the sailors catch with hook and line on the Grand Banks. He dwelt with rapture on an interminable winter at the Isle of Sables, where ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spirited but brief tourney, conquered with flying colours. My aim was to pin her down to something definite ... like an impaled butterfly: hers was to flutter over a vast garden of irrelevances; but she did not long evade the spike. I tipped its point with the subtly poisonous suggestion that all arrangements must be made in the hour, otherwise complications might arise. There seemed to be so many people who had been attracted by ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... his son, are some of the best-informed and most agreeable men I ever conversed with. Indeed for six months of the year they keep company with the most distinguished travellers of Europe. With these guides, each of us armed with a long pole with an iron spike, such as my uncle described to me ages ago, and which I never expected to wield, we came down La Flegere, which we mounted on mules. In talking to an old woman who brought us strawberries, I was surprised to hear her pronounce the Italian proverb, "Poco a poco fa ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... One came in front, armed with a brick; there was one at each side, and one behind, and they closed up around me. I was struck on all sides; and, while I was attending to those in front, I received a blow on my head, from behind, dealt with a heavy hand-spike. I was completely stunned by the blow, and fell, heavily, on the ground, among the timbers. Taking advantage of my fall, they rushed upon me, and began to pound me with their fists. I let them lay on, for a while, after I came to myself, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... bloom has reached its perfect hour. One can never fix the precise moment when the rosy tint the field has from the wild almond passes into the inspiring blue of lupines. One notices here and there a spike of bloom, and a day later the whole field royal and ruffling lightly to the wind. Part of the charm of the lupine is the continual stir of its plumes to airs not suspected otherwhere. Go and stand by any crown of bloom ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... which are two short lengths of brass tubing. One of these has rubbing against it a spring connected with the terminal of the battery; the other has similar communication with the - terminal. Projecting from each tube is a spike, and rising from the baseboard are four upright brass strips not quite touching the commutator. Those on one side lead to the line circuit, those on the other to the earth-plate. When the handle is turned one way, the spikes touch the ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... took a trip to see the great Pie Championship, where men with bulging cheeks and eyes consume vast quantities of pies. A fashionable West Side crowd beheld the champion, Spike O'Dowd, endeavour to defend his throne against an upstart, Blake's Unknown. He wasn't an Unknown at all. He was ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... short eager blast, and angled in between the herd and a straggler on the edge of it, a yearling elk, a spike bull, his first antler growth consisting of two pointed spikes eighteen inches long. He was not alarmed,—but it was a new kind of coyote that faced him now, one that had learned pack hunting under the leadership ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... the ground two posts, leaving at least 15 feet above ground. Spike a 10-foot piece across the top (see page 218). An ordinary ball used in bowling is used by plugging shut the holes and inserting a screw eye in one of the plugged holes. Tie tightly to this screw eye ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... come to be called, is an octagonal structure. Round-shafted pillars rise at each projecting angle. In the recesses between them are low stone benches, save in front where an open colonnade gives upon the view. The roof is leaded, and surmounted by a wooden ball and tall, three-sided spike. These last, as well as the plastered, windowless walls are painted white. Within, the hollow of the dome is decorated in fresco, with groups of gaily clad ladies and their attendant cavaliers, with errant cupids, garlands of flowers, trophies of rather ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... noticed it then, sir; but I've had a look at it since, and there's one leg broken fair off at the top. The break was half in the socket, as it were, leaving a kind of spike, and if you stick that into the socket you can make the table look as good as new. It's all right, in fac', until you try to move it, and then of course the ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... Leodogran Groan'd for the Roman legions here again, And Caesar's eagle: then his brother king, Urien, assail'd him: last a heathen horde, Reddening the sun with smoke and earth with blood, And on the spike that split the mother's heart Spitting the child, brake on him, till, amazed, He knew not whither he ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... Ragged Orchid, a near relative of the foregoing, H. psycodes, but far less fortunate in its attributes of beauty, its long scattered spike of greenish-white flowers being so inconspicuous in its sedgy haunt as often to conceal the fact of its frequency. Its individual flower is shown enlarged at Fig. 12—the lip here cut with a lacerated fringe (H. lacera). The pollen-pouches approach slightly ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... retrogression. Besides, that brings you up against the Fence once more, and I'm done with the beggars for good and all. You talk about your editors and publishers, you literary swine. Barabbas was neither a robber nor a publisher, but a six-barred, barbed-wired, spike-topped Fence. What we really want is an Incorporated Society of Thieves, with some public-spirited old forger to run it for ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... injudicious Richard [Sir J. Hooker's youngest son, who had managed to spike himself on a fence.] is none the worse. It is wonderful what boys go through ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... has done mischief, and that only: off with it, for the tree's sake, if for nothing more; let the Conservatism that would preserve cut it away. Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living substance;—nay is far worse; for in every wind-storm ('commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as your dead ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... and 1745, arrived at the same bad eminence. In many a royal procession and many a City riot, this gate has figured as a halting-place and a point of defence. The last rebel's head blew down in 1772; and the last spike was not removed till the beginning of the present century. In the Popish Plot days of Charles II. vast processions used to come to Temple Bar to illuminate the supposed statue of Queen Elizabeth, in the south-east niche ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... have here a hammer. I will drop it to the floor. Listen. Is the noise very loud? Here I have a heavy railroad spike. Hear the noise this makes as it is dropped. And now I shall drop this large nail. The noise that made is not nearly as loud as the noise occasioned by the falling hammer. Here is a small nail. You will ...
— The Children's Six Minutes • Bruce S. Wright
... incendiaries—they lay this match by stealth behind a door, which they find open, or on a window; and after setting it on fire, they make their escape. This is sufficient often to produce the most terrible ravages in a town where the houses, built with wood and painted with oil of spike, afford the easiest opportunity to the miscreant who is disposed to reduce them to ashes. The method employed by the incendiaries, and which often escapes the vigilance of the masters of the houses, added ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Chief, Commander, P.M.O., Padre, Carpenter and Stoker, Using engine-grease and poker, Hawser, marlin-spike and soap, Till at length they gave up hope, For, in spite of all they did, Edwin fitted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... the entrances to the royal residence, and secured with iron bars, is a large bowlder weighing three hundred and sixty-three pounds; in the wall above it are driven three spikes, the highest spike being twelve feet from the ground; and Bavarian historians have recorded that Earl Christoph, a famous giant, tossed this bowlder up to the mark indicated by the highest ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... marrying Claudine he swore fiercely, and eight days after, he sent me to Porto on a schooner belonging to one of our neighbours, just to give me a change of air. I came back, at the end of six months, thinner than a marling spike, but more in love than ever. Recollections of Claudine scorched me like a fire. I could scarcely eat or drink; but I felt that she loved me a little in return, for I was a fine young fellow, and more than one girl had set her cap at me. Then my father, seeing that he could do nothing, ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... quite make out whether she was really interested, or whether she was making fun of us both. Now I have a very keen sense of humor; but I don't like a joke at my expense. At last Philip offered to give us a comic poem from the "Bison Spike;" but that I couldn't stand; and I pretended that the coffee was boiling over, and Winifred jumped up to attend to it. Philip, of course, went to her assistance, and afterward, as he stood before the fire with Winifred beside him, I could not help thinking what a fine looking couple they would ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... rested them. Indeed there was more military air about this work than had been or has since been about the building of a railroad in this country. It was one big battle, from the first stake west of Omaha to the last spike at Promontory—a battle that lasted five long years; and if the men had marked the graves of those who fell in that fierce fight their monuments, properly distributed, might have served as mile-posts on the great overland ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... boys were standing on the bench that served instead of dining-chairs, each with a plate and a pancake on the table in front of them. Jack held a hammer and spike, Scott Burton a hatchet, Geoffrey a saw, and Philip a rifle. Bell was nothing if not intuitive. No elaborate explanations ever were needed to show her a fact. Without a word she flung the plate of flapjacks she held as far into a thicket as she ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the exploration of wild countries; but a few hints may be acceptable upon points that, although not absolutely essential, tend much to the comfort of the traveller. A couple of large carriage umbrellas with double lining, with small rings fixed to the extremities of the ribs, and a spike similar to that of a fishing-rod to screw into the handle, will form an instantaneous shelter from sun or rain during a halt on the march, as a few strings from the rings will secure it from the wind, if pegged to the ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... cheerfully when the gun was finally assembled on the carriage, "get a sizeable timber an' spike it to the centre o' the deck. I'll run the trail spade up against that cleat an' that'll keep the recoil from lettin' the gun go backward, clean through the opposite rail and overboard. Gimme a coupler gallons o' distillate and some waste, somebody. This cosmoline's got to come out o' the tube ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... Wool's Americans coming over the crest and making straight for the gun. He was astounded; and well he might be, since the fisherman's path had been reported impassable by troops. But he instantly changed the order he happened to be giving from 'Try a longer fuse!' to 'Spike the gun and follow me!' With a sharp clang the spike went home, and the gunners followed Brock downhill towards Queenston. There was no time to mount, and Alfred trotted down beside his swiftly running master. The elated ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... affections being out of place in Religion, is indeed an opinion which appears to be generally prevalent. The affections are regarded as the strong-holds of enthusiasm. It is therefore judged most expedient to act, as prudent generals are used to do, when they raze the fortress, or spike up the cannon, which are likely to fall into the hands of an enemy. Mankind are apt to be the dupes of misapplied terms; and the progress of the persuasion now in question, has been considerably aided by an abuse of language, not sufficiently checked in its first advances, whereby ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... in the coast range of California, there were times during our mad career over the lava-beds when visions of maimed limbs and a mutilated head crossed my mind. Should my horse stumble on a stray spike of lava, what possible chance of escape would there be? Falling head foremost on harrows and rakes would be fun to a fall here, where all the instruments capable of human destruction, from razors, saws, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... be driven home straight and at right angles with the face of the ties. When the foreman in charge of the track-laying work sees a spiker, when the spike is nearly home, strike the spike head laterally, which is done to make it lie snugly to the rail, he should at once check such imperfect work and put the man who does it at other work. The foreman in charge of gang of spikers should be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... all whom they could master, and then, cutting off their heads, carried them away with them. They sang and danced when the enemy were likely to see them. They carried also a spear of about fifteen cubits in length, having one spike.[34] They stayed in their villages till the Greeks had passed by, when they pursued and perpetually harassed them. They had their dwellings in strong places, in which they had also laid up their provisions, so that the Greeks could get nothing from that country, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... the pass the view of the several Alpine chains about is very fine, but from the entire absence of trees of any kind it is more rugged and barren than I altogether liked; going down towards Queyras we found the letters S.I.C. marked on a rock, evidently with the spike of an alpine-stock,—we wondered whether they ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... had underestimated the catapult. The crew released it. And a shower of spikes tore the invading ranks apart. Odin saw a white-skinned warrior go to his knees and scream as he tried to pull a six-inch spike from ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... made the natives another visit, accompanied by Mr Forster and Mr Hodges, carrying with me various articles which I presented them with, and which they received with a great deal of indifference, except hatchets and spike-nails; these they most esteemed. This interview was at the same place as last night; and now we saw the whole family, it consisted of the man, his two wives (as we supposed), the young woman before ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... his limitations and to form habits tamely contrary to his natural Greek likings. Then would he honorably neglect rabbits and all fur, cease pointing droves of pigs, and quit the silly chase of robins. Under check-cord and spike-collar he would become a fast and stylish dog, clean-cut in his bird work, perhaps a field-trial winner. He would learn to take reproof amiably, to "heel" at a word, to respect the whistle at any distance, ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... I've done that myself, hundred of times. And I knew that I had an ice-ax of that very pattern at home—and so I just shoved it under the doctor's nose in court, and asked him if that hole in Crone's head couldn't have been made by the spike of it. Why? Because I knew that Carstairs would be present in court, and I wanted to see if he would catch what ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... They had light hair, but were very thick-set. They looked very tired, and were covered with dust and with torn clothes: but they had good horses. They wore the Prussian helmet and spike, and were well armed, with a sabre on one side and on the other a huge horse-pistol two feet long, while they carried carbines in their hands, all ready to shoot if occasion offered. But all the French soldiers had left Versailles, ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
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