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Sickle   Listen
noun
Sickle  n.  
1.
A reaping instrument consisting of a steel blade curved into the form of a hook, and having a handle fitted on a tang. The sickle has one side of the blade notched, so as always to sharpen with a serrated edge. Cf. Reaping hook, under Reap. "When corn has once felt the sickle, it has no more benefit from the sunshine."
2.
(Astron.) A group of stars in the constellation Leo.
Sickle pod (Bot.), a kind of rock cress (Arabis Canadensis) having very long curved pods.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sickle" Quotes from Famous Books



... curiously shaped splinters of jasper, which at first did not seem very well adapted to any purpose; and yet, although mere fragments, they had every appearance of having been purposely shaped, and not of accidental resemblances to a hook or sickle blade. When I got home I read that perfect specimens, mine being certain pieces of the same form, had been found off in Norway; and Professor Nilsson, who has carefully studied the whole subject, says ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... Roman mythology a primitive god of agriculture in Italy, often confounded with the Greek Kronos, the father of Zeus, and sovereign of the Golden Age; was represented as an old man bearing a sickle. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... of labour; trees bend beneath the thick clusters of rich fruit which bow their branches to the ground; and the corn, piled in graceful sheaves, or waving in every light breath that sweeps above it, as if it wooed the sickle, tinges the landscape with a golden hue. A mellow softness appears to hang over the whole earth; the influence of the season seems to extend itself to the very wagon, whose slow motion across the well-reaped field, ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes

... reached a size scarcely larger than a calf of to-day, and the fleece of a sheep often weighed less than two ounces. Farm implements were few and clumsy. The wooden ploughs only scratched the ground. Harrowing was done with a hand implement little better than a large rake. Grain was cut with a sickle, and grass was mown with a scythe. It took five men a day to reap and bind the harvest of ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... of the sunset and populous with the sunset clouds. Here the camp was pitched and a tent run up with the oars, sails, and mast. And here Amalu, at no man's bidding, from the mere instinct of habitual service, built a fire and cooked a meal. Night was come, and the stars and the silver sickle of new moon beamed overhead, before the meal was ready. The cold sea shone about them, and the fire glowed in their faces, as they ate. Tommy had opened his case, and the brown sherry went the round; but it was long before ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... Danae; failing in his suit, and to compel her to submission, he ordered Perseus off to fetch him the head of the Medusa; who, aided by Hermes and Athena, was successful in his mission, cut off the head of the Medusa with the help of a mirror and sickle, brought it away with him in a pouch, and after delivering and marrying Andromeda in his return journey, exposed the head before Polydectes and court at a banquet, which turned them all into stone, whereupon ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... plumes in the pride of civilisation. The ruined castles on the crags and the new villages on the lowlands told their own story of Turkish and Algerine piracy, now doomed to the limbo of things that were. In the evening we were safely anchored within the zancle (sickle) of Messina-port, whose depth of water and circular shape have suggested an old crater flooded. It was Sunday, and we were greeted with the familiar sounds, the ringing of cracked bells, the screaming of harsh, hoarse voices, a military band and detached ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... the smith who worked in gold, and was called a "goldsmith," from which we get the well-known surname Goldsmith, the name of a great English writer. Then there was the "nail smith," from which trade came the name Nasmith; the "sickle smith," from which came Sixsmith; the "shear smith," which gave us ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill

... perambulator, on the hillside, and looking over the slope of the wide wheat fields, where the women, in their cotton jackets and their wide hats, were reaping. The harvesting never looked so picturesque. I could pick out, in the distance, the tall figure of my Louise, with a sheaf on her head and a sickle in her hand, striding across the fields, and I thought how a painter would have loved the scene, with the long rays of the late September sunset ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich

... Chippewas are savages. The hods carried by these girls on their heads were flat, wooden trays, square at each end: once poised on the head, they balanced themselves, and were carried around without a fall. This carrying on the head, by the women, from an eight-gallon barrel of wine down to a sickle or pocket handkerchief, helps to give them their straight forms and fine carriage of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... living among the woods, and her only son living along with her. He went out every morning through the trees to get sticks, and one day as he was lying on the ground he saw a swarm of flies flying over what the cow leaves behind her. He took up his sickle and hit one blow at them, and hit that hard he left no single ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge

... figure I am obliged to separate the feathers by white spaces, to show you them distinctly. In reality they are set as close to each other as can be, but putting them as close as I can, you get a or b, Fig. 5, for the rough section of the wing, thick towards the bird's head, and curved like a sickle, so that in striking down it catches the air, like a reaping-hook, and in rising up, it throws off the air ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... vaults of Sleaford-church in Lincolnshire. The superstitious ceremonies or histories belonging to some vegetables have been truly ridiculous; thus the Druids are said to have cropped the Misletoe with a golden axe or sickle; and the Bryony, or Mandrake, was said to utter a scream when its root was drawn from the ground; and that the animal which drew it up became diseased and soon died: on which account, when it was wanted for the purposes of medicine, it was usual to loosen and remove the earth about ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin

... possible only when the industries which furnish its material basis were revived and confidence in the medium of exchange were again established. The city owes its existence to the farm, but without the city the farm would go back to the hoe and the sickle and the "age ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson

... in the elements of poetical excitement, awaiting; only fit utterance. The harvest is rich and ripe—and nothing now is wanting but laborers to put in the sickle. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... language of prophecy, if we consider the human race as the objects of the harvest and vintage, admits no augmentation of terror. "And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat, like unto the Son of Man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle. And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice, to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle and reap: For the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe. And he that ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee

... further through his chosen vessel, refers to the harvest of the tare class, saying, "The harvest of the earth is ripe. And he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth; and the earth was reaped." (Revelation 14:15,16) This gathering of the elements of Christendom, the vine of the earth, and the reaping of it for destruction, is now in progress. It ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford

... meanwhile procured their sickles, and now exerted themselves in cutting away the bushes to which the wretched Macdonalds clung with a death grasp, the old woman exclaiming in each case, as she applied her sickle, "As you have taken so much already which did not belong to you, my friend, you can take that into the bargain. The instrument of the old woman's revenge has been for many generations, and still is by very old people in the district, called ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie

... high or higher than the valley of Mexico. It was like England to ride between large fields of wheat and barley, and to pick blackberries in the hedges. It was only April, and yet the grain was almost ready for the sickle, and the blackberries were fully ripe. Fresh green grass was growing in the woods under the oak-trees, and the banks were covered with ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... osier in their shields they weave, And shape the casque, and in the mould prepare The brazen breastplate and the silver greave. Scorned lie the spade, the sickle and the share, Their fathers' falchions to the forge they bear. Now peals the clarion; through the host hath spread The watch-word. Helmets from the walls they tear, And yoke the steeds. In triple gold arrayed, Each grasps the burnished shield, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil

... remover to remove: O no! it is an ever fixed mark That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:— If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden

... pleasant hill. The bodies of once living and brave men, slowly mouldering to dust in this sanctified soil, form but a small, a single sheaf from that great recent harvest reaped by Death with the sickle of war. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... Arrived at the works, the peat is carried upon an inclined endless apron, up to a platform 10 feet high, where a workman pushes it into the pulverizing mill, the construction of which is seen from the accompanying cut. The vertical shaft b is armed with sickle-shaped knives, d, which revolve between and cut contrary to similar knives c, fixed to the interior of the vessel. The latter is made of iron, is 3-1/2 feet high, 2 feet across at top and 1-1/2 feet wide at the bottom. From the base of the machine at g, ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson

... of Crary in his capacity of a militia brigadier at the head of his legion on parade day, with his "crop-eared, bushy-tailed mare and sickle hams—the steed that laughs at the shaking of the spear, and whose neck was clothed with thunder," and likened Crary to Alexander the Great with his war- horse, Bucephalus, at the ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... had risen again and was driving dark masses of cloud across the sky; in the west a sullen red flared up from behind the hills, touching the lower edges of the vaporous mountains with purple. In a small, clear space above the red hung the silver sickle of the new moon, and near it shone a single star.... Lydia was like that star, he told ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... found pretty easily at this season. First find the stars [eta] and [omicron] Leonis, the former forming with Regulus (now lying towards the south-west, and almost exactly midway between the zenith and the horizon) the handle of the Sickle in Leo, the other farther off from Regulus towards the right, but lower down. Now sweep from [omicron] towards [eta] with a low power.[6] There will be found a sixth-magnitude star about one-fourth of the way from [omicron] to [eta]. South, following this, will ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor

... poet has lost his daughter, his pearl, who is dead; his pearl has fallen in the grass, and he has been unable to find it; he cannot tear himself away from the spot where she had been. He entered in that arbour green; it was August, that sunny season, when the corn has just fallen under the sickle; there the pearl had "trendeled doun" among the glittering, richly-coloured plants, gilly-flowers, gromwell seed, and peonies, splendid in their hues, sweeter in their smell.[581] He sees a forest, rocks that glisten in the sun, banks of crystal; birds sing in the branches, and ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... goeth about the field, rejoicing mickle To see a sword that so surpass'd his sickle." Harrington's Ariosto, B. xiii: see Singer's Shak., ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... high on the "Privilege" ramparts, and bastioned by big bags of bullion, Is "Capital"; he's the new Jove, and each Titan would treat as his scullion, But look at the huge Hundred-Handed One, armed with the scythe and the sickle, The hammer, ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various

... quoit or club, kneeling to tie their shoes before leaping, stepping from the boat or bending to the oar, and to carve them; and when he was weary of cities I would ask him to come to your fields and meadows to watch the reaper with his sickle and the cattle driver with lifted lasso. For if a man cannot find the noblest motives for his art in such simple daily things as a woman drawing water from the well or a man leaning with his scythe, he will not find them ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... is now crest will soon be trough. Such conditions demand forbearance and mutual sympathy. Some men are born with little and some with large skill for acquiring wealth, the two differing as the scythe that gathers a handful of wheat differs from the reaper built for vast harvests and carrying the sickle of success. For generations the ancestors back of one man's father were thrifty and the ancestors back of his mother were far-sighted, and the two columns met in him, and like two armies joined forces for a vast campaign for wealth. Beside him is a brother, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... Poet sometimes row His pinnace, a small vagrant barge, up-piled With plenteous store of heath and wither'd fern, A lading which he with his sickle cuts Among the mountains, and beneath this roof He makes his summer couch, and here at noon Spreads out his limbs, while, yet unborn, the sheep Panting beneath the burthen of their wool Lie round him, even as if they were a part ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth

... airy soul aloft; The very name is lost to Sorrow, And Pain is Rapture tuned more exquisitely soft. Here the Pilgrim reposes the world-weary limb, And forgets in the shadow, cool-breathing and dim, The load he shall bear never more; Here the mower, his sickle at rest, by the streams Lull'd with harp strings, reviews, in the calm of his dreams The fields, when the harvest is o'er. Here, He, whose ears drank in the battle roar, Whose banners streamed upon the startled wind ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various

... of the Philistines," says the figurative Antonio Agapida, "Queen Isabella followed his traces as the binder follows the reaper, gathering and garnering the rich harvest that has fallen beneath his sickle. In this she was greatly assisted by the counsels of that cloud of bishops, friars, and other saintly men which continually surrounded her, garnering the first fruits of this infidel land into the granaries of the Church." Leaving her thus piously employed, the king pursued ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving

... a desolate bird that through darkness its lost way is winging, As a hand that is helplessly raised when Death's sickle is swinging, So is life! ay, the life that lends passion and ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard

... snow. It looked like a girl of fifteen—not a hair on the little fellow's face. He'd been shot through the temple, but the Malo'ts had left their mark on him. Stalky unbuttoned the tunic, and showed it to us—a rummy sickle-shaped cut on the chest. 'Member the snow all white on his eyebrows, Tertius? 'Member when Stalky moved the lamp and it looked ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling

... his dark eyes wandering about the chamber, "I have too much at stake to call out fledglings for a sop to injured pride. No, Mr. Renault, I shall first take vengeance for a deeper wrong—and the north lies like an unreaped harvest for the sickle that Death and ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers

... and they taught the people to believe that oaks on which it was seen growing were to be respected, because of the wonderful cures which the priests were then able to effect with it, particularly of the falling sickness. The parasite was cut from the tree with a golden sickle at a high and solemn festival, using much ceremonial display, it being then credited with a special power of "giving fertility to all animals." Ovid said, "Ad ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... for no obvious reason, he drew aside the tent flap and looked out. The sky was cloudless and darkly blue, and a sickle moon gleamed in it, keen and clear with frost. Below, the hills were washed in silver, majestic, but utterly cheerless; and lower still the serrated tops of the rigid firs cut against the dreary whiteness. After each glimpse of them, Carroll drew his blanket tighter round ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at harvest- time, and the moon in her ordered wanderings change from shield to sickle, and from sickle ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde

... time actively enough, casting his wary eyes to the heights and listening with the ear of a hunter to every noise. In the third field to which he came he found a woman about thirty years old, with bent back, hoeing the ground vigorously, while a small boy with a sickle in his hand was knocking the hoarfrost from the rushes, which he cut and laid in a heap. At the noise Hulot made in jumping the hedge, the boy and his mother raised their heads. Hulot mistook the young woman for an old one, naturally enough. Wrinkles, coming long before their ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac

... lost in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy chronicles: Such, whose supine felicity but makes In story chasms, in epoch's mistakes; O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down, Till, with his silent sickle, they are mown. 110 Such is not Charles' too, too active age, Which, govern'd by the wild distemper'd rage Of some black star infecting all the skies, Made him at his own cost, like Adam, wise. Tremble, ye nations, which, secure before, Laugh'd at those arms that 'gainst ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... Reaper, whose name is Death, And, with his sickle keen, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... For example, you, as the female dancer will come upon the stage, with a distaff, twirling it, or with a pail to draw water; or with a spade for digging. Your companion will come next perhaps driving a wheel-barrow, or with a sickle to mow corn, or with a pipe a-smoaking; and though the scene should be a saloon, no matter, it will come soon to be filled with rustics or sailors. Your companion to be sure will not have seen you, at first; that ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini

... serpent with a bluish gray belly, which, without the gold lines over its flanks, could easily be confused with the conger eel. From the butterfish genus, whose oval bodies are very flat, I observed several adorned in brilliant colors and sporting a dorsal fin like a sickle, edible fish that, when dried and marinated, make an excellent dish known by the name "karawade"; then some sea poachers, fish belonging to the genus Aspidophoroides, whose bodies are covered with scaly armor divided into ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... critters! I wish you had shot him! They're a terribul nuisance, tramps is. One day my wife give two on 'em a dinner an' they up afterwards an' stole my new sickle an' whetstone. Tramps ought all to be hung. Come in ...
— Guns And Snowshoes • Captain Ralph Bonehill

... CHANTECLER with a very different eye from the BLACKBIRD'S.] What I see, beneath that quivering hemlet, is Summer's glorious and favoured knight, who, from a groaning wain at evening borrowing its golden harvest-robe has arrayed himself in this, and lifts it from the dust with a gleaming sickle! ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand

... fancifully was intended to illustrate the dealings of Providence in ordering the earthly destiny of humanity. "So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground and the seed should grow up; but when the fruit is ripe he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come." Men are seed sown in this world to ripen and be harvested in another. The figure, taken on the scale of the human race and the whole earth, is sublime. Whether such an image were originally suggested ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... breach, the sturdy monk quashed and felled them down with blows, saying, These men have had confession and are penitent souls; they have got their absolution and gained the pardons; they go into paradise as straight as a sickle, or as the way is to Faye (like Crooked-Lane at Eastcheap). Thus by his prowess and valour were discomfited all those of the army that entered into the close of the abbey, unto the number of thirteen thousand, six hundred, twenty and two, besides the women and little children, which is ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bow'd the woods beneath their ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various

... the smoke drove away ahead before the wind the wall was seen to crumble into dust under the impact of the heavy iron shot, while the lighter missiles mowed down the soldiers like corn beneath the sickle, until not a man was left standing upon his feet, even the magnifico in armour going down before the hail of iron and lead, to say nothing of the Spanish standard, the staff of which was cut clean in two, so that it toppled over and fell, carrying the flag with ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... in the center of the broad field a dozen men were silhouetted in the white brilliance, looking up at the sky, where the stars winked cold and clear on the jet background of the frosty night. A slim crescent of moon gleamed in the west, a sickle of light that in no way dimmed the cold flame of ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell

... mentioned in the following miracle: "In Trayguerra, a simple lad hearing San Vicente preach on the ugliness of the demon, prayed God that a devil be shown him in order to fight. It happened that a poor, old woman was passing who was dumb from birth, was very ugly and poorly dressed, and had sickle in her hand. The lad, thinking that she was the devil, furiously assailed her, and taking away her sickle, cut off her hands, her ears, and her nose. The afflicted woman shouted but as she was dumb she could not make herself understood ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera

... will your values be invaded by it. Nature, in the midst of thy disorders, thou art still friendly to the scantiness thou hast created; with all thy great works about thee little hast thou left to give, either to the scythe or to the sickle, but to that little thou grantest safety and protection, and sweet are the dwellings which ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... the people danced about them in a circle. Devout persons, particularly old women, circumambulated the fires fourteen times, telling their beads and mumbling seven Paters and seven Aves in the hope that thereby they would feel no pains in their backs when they stooped over the sickle in the harvest field.[473] In Berry, a district of Central France, the midsummer fire was lit on the Eve of St. John and went by the name of the jonee, joannee, or jouannee. Every family according ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... Maiden sang As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work, And o'er the sickle bending;— I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various

... fortifications, long lines of rifle-pits, and sharp-shooters who fringed the hill-tops, and poured their murderous fire into our advancing ranks. It would seem impossible that men could stand, much less advance, under such a galling fire. They were mowed down as wheat before the sickle, but they faltered not. The vacant places of the fallen were instantly filled, and inch by inch they gained the heights of Vicksburg. When the precipice was too steep for the horses to draw up the artillery, our brave boys did the work themselves, and then fought and conquered. When they had ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... definitely set forth—the idea of Montsalvat, far away up the rippling river on which the white swan floated—Montsalvat, the land of eternal dawn, where all things remained for ever young, and the flowers and the corn grew always and never faded nor fell to the sickle. It is the land Mignon aspired to—"Oh let me for ever then remain young"—the impossible dream of poets and millions of men and women who were not poets: Nirvana, with a difference; that realm in which, tired with the struggles and fights in the devious ways of this dark world, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... rung for the first time at her funeral in way-off Japan, where she laid down her sickle on her ripe sheaves, and rested ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley

... the sweat of his parent's brow, as a labourer in the fields, the ill-fated hero of this story was scantily fed and clothed, until maturer years enabled him to relieve the old man's hand of the spade and sickle, and in turn labour for ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various

... quickly milks one of the cows, the other holds the animal and impatiently awaits his turn: "Be quick, while the farmer is not there." They run the risk of a beating for a potful of milk. The weeks pass, the corn has ripened, the harvest begins. The fellahin, armed with a short sickle, cut or rather saw the stalks, a handful at a time. As they advance in line, a flute-player plays them captivating tunes, a man joins in with his voice marking the rhythm by clapping his hands, the foreman ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... quicksilver in the thick part of the blade) swept round him like a gust of wind or fire, and there was no such creature in the world. My wonder was, not that he was so suddenly dispatched, but that any head was left unreaped, within a radius of fifty yards of that tremendous sickle. ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens

... the hour of separation for the night came. Everything seemed so fearfully still, except the monotonous wash of the waves on the sea-shore! And as far as she could see the landscape by the light of a bright little moon-sickle, there was nothing but a thick screen of trees and shrubbery. She groped her way to her sleeping-apartment, expecting to find Tulee there. She had been there, and had left a little glimmering taper behind a screen, which threw a fantastic ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child

... indeed these memories are of people who are passed away like the snow in harvest; and now, with the sharp-sickle reapers of full shocks of the fattening wheat of metaphysics, and fair novelists Ruth-like in the fields of barley, or more mischievously coming through the rye,—what will the public, so vigorously sustained by these, care to hear of ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... debilitating, paternal character long familiar to Canada. All emigrants with families were to be carried thither at the King's expense; and every settler was to receive in free gift a gun, a hoe, an axe, a ploughshare, a scythe, a sickle, two augers, large and small, a sow, six hens, a cock, six pounds of powder, and twelve pounds of lead; while to these favors were added many others. The result was that twelve families were persuaded ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... haunting the harvest than the crane could keep from flying south when the summer is over. She watched all the fields around Glamerton; she knew what response each made to the sun, and which would first be ripe for the reaping; and the very day that the sickle was put in, there was Annie to see and share in the joy. How mysterious she thought those long colonnades of slender pillars, each supporting its own waving comet-head of barley! Or when the sun was high, she would lie down on the ground, and look far into the little forest of yellow polished ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... not taken with a great surprise. But something like fear overshadowed him at finding his sermons come back upon him thus. Was he, an unbelieving labourer, to go reaping with his blunt and broken sickle where the corn was ripest! But he had no time to think about that now. It was nearly ten o'clock, and she would be looking for her answer at eleven. He had not to think long, however, before he saw what seemed a suitable plan to suggest; whereupon ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... intensely green; and cold and intense, with no richness of hue at all, were the colors of the flowers in the various plots and beds. Not a bird chirped as yet. Not a leaf stirred. But in this ghostly twilight the solitary gas lamps were beginning to show pale; and in the southern heavens the silver sickle of the moon, stealing over to the west, seemed to be taking the night with it, and leaving these faintly lilac skies to welcome the uprising of ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... kennel; the ring of his cheery voice was wanting to the house; and the absence of his merry whistle seemed to make Sir Marmaduke's heart sink like lead as he donned his heavy boots, and went forth in the silver dew of the summer morning to judge which of his cornfields would soonest be ready for the sickle. Until this expedition of his sons he had, for more than fourteen years never been alone in those morning rounds on his farm; and much as he loved his daughters, they seemed to weigh very light in the scale compared with the sturdy heir who loved every ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the mowing machine make very little progress in the competition between manual and mechanical labour. In the southern provinces, few owners of the soil have ever seen such contrivances. People who cling to the poetic associations of the scythe and the sickle—and who does not that has been awakened by their music in his childhood?—must not cry out against the laws which have caused the land of France to be divided up into such a multitude of small properties, for it is just this that preserves the old simplicity of agriculture ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... crab's love, if soothing, Is no sweeter than pincers are soft—and a new sickle Cuts no sharper than crab's claws nip, keen as boar's toothing! Yet crab's love's no less fervent than bard's, if less musical— 'Tis a new thing I'd ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... bands of red (top) and black with a centered yellow emblem consisting of a five-pointed star within half a cogwheel crossed by a machete (in the style of a hammer and sickle) ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency

... "thundering against them, and mightily astonishing them by the blows that he dealt." Right and left they fell. Pressing on furiously and alone, Richard cut a wide path for himself through the Turkish ranks, brandishing his sword and mowing them down like grass before the sickle. For half a mile the ground was strewn with the bodies of those who dared to oppose the irresistible warrior. At last the terrified Turks fled in every direction before the attack of Richard. In vain Saladin strove to rally the Saracens. In vain his brazen kettle-drums and ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene

... river, allowing the faintly-traced sickle of the new moon to show, as the boat once more touched land,—at the right ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... sea, And no such thing as perpetuity, What good are farmsteads, granaries, pasture-grounds That stretch long leagues beyond Calabria's bounds, If Death, unbribed by riches, mows down all With his unsparing sickle, great ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... gather slowly and with almost an apologetic air, as if it regretted the painful duty of putting an end to the perfect summer day. Over to the west beyond the trees there still lingered a faint afterglow, and a new moon shone like a silver sickle above the big barn. Sally came out of the house and bowed gravely three times for luck. She stood on the gravel, outside the porch, drinking in the sweet evening ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... In this position Peelajee can spend the day with much comfort, which is a wonderful provision of nature. At the present moment he also is engaged in the operation of weeding. In his right hand is a small species of sickle called a koorpee, with which he investigates the root of each weed as a snipe feels in the mud for worms; then with his left hand he pulls it out, gently shakes the earth off it, and contributes it to a small heap beside him. When he ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... presently reached a farmhouse set close to the road, with a barn on the other side. At a grindstone a tall, thin boy was sharpening a sickle. ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer

... ladder into the little upper room, where in ten minutes we were fast asleep on hard wooden couches covered with skins. I remember that just before I sank into oblivion a vision of a half-mile length of golden wheat floated before my heavy eyes, with Grace Carrington standing, sickle in hand, beside it. Her dress was of the color of the ear-bent stems, her eyes as the clear ether above, and the sickle was brighter than any crescent moon. Then it all changed. Powdery snow eddied through the withered stubble, and, against a background ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... totally ignorant of the whole affair the instant any second person appears in it. Let the end come as it may, here I am ready to profit by it: here I am, facing both ways, with perfect ease and security—a moral agriculturist, with his eye on two crops at once, and his swindler's sickle ready for any emergency. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... wish to reknit the relations among the peoples, must turn their hopes towards the other generation, that of those who bleed in the armies. May they be preserved! They have been ruthlessly thinned out by the sickle of war. They might even be annihilated if the war should be prolonged and extended, as may happen, for all things are possible. Mankind stands, like Hercules, at the parting of the ways. One of these ways leads (if Asia takes a hand in the ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... thankfully, lie down here in this coffin, and give your sister back to your arms. The Reaper, Death, has cut down the perfect, golden grain, and left the tares to shiver in the coming winter. Some who are useless and life-weary bend forward, hoping to meet the sickle, but it sweeps above them, and they wither slowly among ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... exquisite dream! Shall I tell it you? Well, listen. I dreamt I was standing in a meadow, and all round me was rye, so tall, and ripe as gold!... and I had a reddish dog with me—such a wicked dog; it kept trying to bite me. And I had a sickle in my hands; not a simple sickle; it seemed to be the moon itself—the moon as it is when it's the shape of a sickle. And with this same moon I had to cut the rye clean. Only I was very weary with the heat, and the moon blinded me, and I felt lazy; and cornflowers were growing all ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev

... the cannonade began to subside. Alpatych left the cellar and stopped in the doorway. The evening sky that had been so clear was clouded with smoke, through which, high up, the sickle of the new moon shone strangely. Now that the terrible din of the guns had ceased a hush seemed to reign over the town, broken only by the rustle of footsteps, the moaning, the distant cries, and the crackle of fires which seemed widespread everywhere. The cook's moans ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... appearance of his small half-hidden eyes. These features seem to mark him to the casual observer as a dull animal, yet in reality he is very active and bright, and when at home displays his marvellous genius in many ways! His upturned hands become powerful shovels, and by the aid of an extra bone, the sickle, which belongs to the inside of the thumb, he is enabled to work like an athlete. His velvet-like hair stands straight up, like the pile on velvet, and his tiny eyes are so hidden by hair that they do not get injured. The eyes are not well finished from an optician's point of view—but they serve ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon

... around us in such awful numbers as we attain middle life. What a field of battle it is!" Nor had another month quite passed before he lost, in Mrs. Macready, a very dear family friend. "Ah me! ah me!" he wrote. "This tremendous sickle certainly does cut deep into the surrounding corn, when one's own small blade has ripened. But this is all a Dream, may be, and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... 169. 'My earlier predecessors had the whole field of life before them, untrodden and unsurveyed; characters of every kind shot up in their way, and those of the most luxuriant growth, or most conspicuous colours, were naturally cropt by the first sickle. They that follow are forced to peep into neglected corners.' The Idler, No. 3. 'The first writers took possession of the most striking objects for description, and the most probable occurrences for fiction.' Rasselas, ch. x. Some years ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... the number and vitality of formulas and beliefs relative to the moon. It is probable that the majority of the readers of the male sex will have no other associations with the newly born moon than that poetic sentiment which delights in the vision of the faint sickle silver through the twilight; if they possess any further association with the planet, it is likely to be no more than a vague dread of the effect of its radiance falling on a sleeper. Women, on the contrary, will ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various

... road. A horse and cart were coming in at the open gate; the elderly driver, singing to himself, drew up abruptly at the sight of the two under the pine-tree, then drove toward them, the wheels of the cart jolting cheerfully over the cradling graves. He had a sickle in his hand, and as he clambered down from the seat, he ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland

... still being employed in agriculture. Crops were cut with scythe and sickle, while old scythe-blades fastened at one end of a wooden bench did duty to cut turnips in slices to feed the cattle, and farm work generally was largely done ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... mist? What are our joys but dreams? and what our hopes But goodly shadows in the summer cloud? There's not a wind that blows but bears with it Some rainbow promise:—Not a moment flies But puts its sickle in the fields of life, And mows its thousands, with their joys and cares. 'T is but as yesterday since on yon stars, Which now I view, the Chaldee shepherd[3] gazed In his mid watch observant, and disposed The twinkling hosts ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White

... and conscience, go ours. We envy him not his vapours, his terrors, or his shameless greed of reward. Why, then, doth he envy us our wealth, our success, our gaiety, our content? He raves. He is haunted. What is man but as grass, and the flower of grass? Come the sickle, he is clean gone. I can but repeat it, sir, our poor neighbour was crazed: 'tis Christian in ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare

... a reaper, his name is Death, And with his sickle keen, He cuts the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern

... them from their lowly Bed. For them no more the blazing Hearth shall burn, Or busy Houswife ply her Evening Care: No Children run to lisp their Sire's Return, Or climb his Knees the envied Kiss to share. Oft did the Harvest to their Sickle yield, Their Furrow oft the stubborn Glebe has broke; How jocund did they they drive their Team afield! How bow'd the Woods beneath their sturdy Stroke! Let not Ambition mock their useful Toil, Their homely Joys and ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray

... view presents itself! The long perspective of the bay, the densely wooded hills and lower slopes teeming with agricultural produce, rich corn-fields, ripe for the sickle; picturesque dwellings, hid in shadowy foliage, and flowers and fruit trees, to which the purity and rarity of the atmosphere lend a brilliancy of colouring and distinctness of outline, impossible to describe; the clear blue water, with here and there a quaint and curious-looking ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... with all dilligence constantly to beholde his Rye, which of all graines is the first that ripeneth, and if he shall perceiue that the hull of the eare beginneth to open, and that the blacke toppes of the Corne doth appeare, he may then be assured that the Corne is fully ripe, and ready for the Sickle, so that instantly he shall prouide his Reapers, according to the quantitie of his graine: for if hee shall neglect his Rye but one day more then is fit, it is such a hasty graine, that it will shale forth of the ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham

... be ordered there under their leaders of scores and half- hundreds and hundreds; and even so they did. But the banners of the Dale without the Burg were the Bridge, and the Bull, and the Vine, and the Sickle. And the Shepherds had three banners, to wit Greenbury, and ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris

... lay a high purple belt of forest which always figured in my eyes as a distant, mysterious region behind which either the world ended or an uninhabited waste began. This expanse of corn-land was dotted with swathes and reapers, while along the lanes where the sickle had passed could be seen the backs of women as they stooped among the tall, thick grain or lifted armfuls of corn and rested them against the shocks. In one corner a woman was bending over a cradle, and the whole stubble was studded with sheaves and cornflowers. In another direction ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy

... great monuments, the sight of the city under his feet, with its hills and valleys and crossing files of lamps, drew him by all he had of the poetic, and he turned that way; and by that quite innocent deflection, ripened the crop of his venial errors for the sickle ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a glorious evening, with a moon like a silver sickle floating over Guernsey. The sky was of a rare depth and purity, which changed from palest blue to faintest green, and away to the north-west, above the outer isles, the sun was sinking behind a bank of plum-coloured clouds which faded away in long thin bands along the water line. ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham

... was sheltered from the north by a high clay bluff that tempered all voices from below and made a sounding board for the winds. The beach, however, was not as broad then as now. To the east for a mile is a shallow sickle of shore with breakers on the point. In itself this indentation is but a squab of the main Pigeon Bay, which stretches around for twenty miles and is formed of Pelee Point, the most southern extension of Canada. The nearer and lesser point is like a bit of the ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... hundred or a hundred and fifty nights and place ten or twenty thousand dollars in the writer's purse. His original poverty kept him poor. He could not afford to wait until the seed he had sown had grown and ripened for the sickle; so he fell into the hands of usurers, who purchased the crop while it was yet green, and made the harvest yield them profits of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... after a couple of feints, he reared and struck high for the face, just grazing the cheek of the older bull and pulling out several of the stiff bristles on which his teeth happened to close, springing back in time to escape the double sickle-stroke of the sea-catch. The old bull roared loudly and sprang forward, getting a firm hold of the younger by the skin behind the muscles of the shoulders. But he was a second too late, for as he closed his grip, the smaller fighter shifted and struck down, a hard ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... wrote its record on forest and field. The weeks passed; summer sped to autumn, the ripe corn bowed to the sickle. The Convent's lands were rich and heavy, virgin soil reclaimed; and the Prior, watching the last great wain piled high with wealth of golden treasure, saw the porter coming ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless

... the present melancholy instance, the wife of Lot was cut off as in a moment: she was ripe for the sickle, and justice delayed not to gather her into the storehouse of wrath; she cumbered the ground by her impieties, and was worthy of no additional cultivation. Here we behold an awful specimen of the obstinacy of sinners, the effect ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox

... through the room, shrieked at her in passing, "The jacquerie! They're on us!" and dashed like an escaping hawk out through the French window. The scared mob of servants burst in on his heels, the gardener still clutching the sickle with which he had been trimming hedges, and the impetus of their headlong haste carried them, slipping and sliding, over the smooth parquet flooring towards the chair where their mistress sat in panic-stricken ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki

... a sickle moon in the sky, a tender sword whose radiance stayed in its own high places and did not at all illumine the heavy world below; the glimmer of infrequent stars could also be seen with spacious, dark solitudes ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens

... devote her life to the rehabilitation of her sex, to what a task did she pledge herself! The high road to reform which she held so dear was not even measured before her. The ground was covered with a growth of centuries. Could this small hand that held a sickle hope to cut down those forests of time-honored prejudice and superstition? What had she to work with? A silver voice, a winning smile, the great gift of a persuasive utterance. What had she to work from? A deep and abiding faith in divine justice and in man's ability to follow ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... "open his eyes, guide his tottering footsteps, and lead him from the paths of folly into those that are lovely and of good report, for lo! his days are numbered, and the sickle has been sharpened, and the corn is not yet ripe for ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie

... of Pluto's throne Hercules saw Death the Reaper. He was clothed in a black robe spotted with stars and his fleshless hand held the sharp sickle with which he is said to cut down mortals as the reaper ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various

... shyly, step by step, went down the other side of the bridge and struck up acquaintance with the soldier of the Red Army who stood there, gun in hand, and obligingly bent to show her the sign, set in his hat, of the crossed sickle and hammer of the Peasants' and Workmen's Republic. At last the Finnish lieutenant took the list of his prisoners and called out the names "Vorovsky, wife and one bairn," looking laughingly over his shoulder at Nina flirting with the sentry. Then "Litvinov," ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome

... wise Black Snake, did not know, for he had stood up more than once in his time to the charge of the wounded tiger, and, curling up his soft trunk to be out of harm's way, had knocked the springing brute sideways in mid-air with a quick sickle cut of his head, that he had invented all by himself; had knocked him over, and kneeled upon him with his huge knees till the life went out with a gasp and a howl, and there was only a fluffy striped thing on the ground for Kala Nag ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling

... Maiden sung As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work, And o'er the sickle bending; I listen'd till I had my fill; And, as I mounted up the hill, 30 The music in my heart I bore, Long after it ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth

... within their narrow ring the wretched plot of land which makes up all of life's inheritance. From ever to always the generations of men do bondsmen's service in that single field, to plough it and sow it, and harrow it and water it, to lay the sickle to the ripe corn if so be that their serfdom falls in the years of plenty and the ear is full, to eat the bread of tears, if their season of servitude be required of them in a time of scarcity and famine. Bondsmen of death, from birth, they ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... are conversing and reposing from the toils of the field. The group consists of a mower, a reaper, a harvest man stooping to bind a sheaf, a shepherd and his dog. The principal and central figure is that of a young female laden with corn, and holding a sickle in her right hand, and is a most exquisite, and, we had almost said, unparalleled piece of sculpture in its kind. In truth, the unsophisticated, self-willed, easy, rustic, grace, of this figure, is raised by the art of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various

... her speed, and did not see the dark figure of the man by the fence. A hood was drawn to her eyes and a fold of her cloak covered her chin. He could see now only a wisp of face like a sickle of a silver moon, and the feeling that disturbed him in the day did not return to him. He again imagined her cold and hard, a woman of middle age, battered by the world, an adventuress who did not fear to go forth in the night upon ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... out, high in the sunset glory gleamed a silver sickle, reaping roses. It was the heather moon, and I cried out to Sir S. as I saw it, "Wish—wish! Your first sight of the heather moon, and over our right shoulders for luck! Whatever ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... light," which is for him a source of all sorts of information which cannot be derived from experience. This "natural light" furnishes him with a vast number of "eternal truths", these he has not brought under the sickle of his sweeping doubt, and these help him to build up again the world he has overthrown, beginning with the one ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... that he was fickle, Was that great oak tree, She was in a pretty pickle, As she well might be - But his gallantries were mickle, For Death followed with his sickle, And her tears began to trickle For her great oak tree! Sing hey, Lackaday! Let the tears fall free For the pretty little flower and the great ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... to obey every call of duty! At the first summons of the note of war you would find him leaving his plow in the half-finished furrow, taking his only horse and converting him into a war-steed: his scythe and sickle would be thrown aside, and with a heart full of valor and patriotism he would rush with alacrity to the standard ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... then, what steps have trod thy border! Here On thy green bank, the woodmann of the swamp Has laid his axe, the reaper of the hill His sickle, as they stooped to taste thy stream. The sportsman, tired with wandering in the still September noon, has bathed his heated brow In thy cool current. Shouting boys, let loose For a wild holiday, ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant

... hour the galley skimmed to and fro among the anchored fleet, now running free like a white-winged gull, anon close-hauled, the razor bows cleaving a path through the dancing water in a little sickle of creaming foam. ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... refer to our own day to see how changes take place. The writer has cut grain with the old-fashioned sickle, the scythe, the cradle, and the reaper, and has lived to see the harvester cut and thresh the grain in the field. The Egyptians use until this day wooden ploughs of an ancient type formed from limbs of trees, having a share pointed with metal. {95} ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... is no great danger of that," for we have the Irish newspapers before us, where, no doubt, we shall find a fresh harvest of indigenous absurdity ripe for the sickle. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... busy at work on the side of the valley, I ascended the hill, intending to visit a corn-field in the more elevated regions, and see when it would be ripe for the sickle. But I did not visit it that day; for, as I approached, I beheld, at no great distance, Mrs. Graham and her son coming down in the opposite direction. They saw me; and Arthur already was running to meet me; but I immediately turned back and walked steadily homeward; for I had ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... seaboard nor completely mountainous. The two ports of Dellys and Bougie were their sea-cities, and gave the French infinite trouble: the plain between the two is the great wheat-growing country, where the Kabyle farmer reaps a painful crop with his saw-edged sickle. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... the contrast with the old days of household economies, the days of the ox-chain, the sickle, and the leach-tub. All of these, some happily and some unhappily, have been swept away by the besom of Progress. But in any case life was too serious in those days for effeminate luxury, or for aught but ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... no less crude than his wife's. His plough had been little improved since the days of Rameses. He sowed his wheat by hand, cut it with a sickle, flailed it out upon the floor, and laboriously winnowed ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson

... Indo-European; see Rhys, Celtic Britain, p. 200.] 'Himalaya' is 'the abode of snow.' Often, too, shape and configuiation are incorporated in the name, as in 'Trinacria' or 'the three- promontoried land,' which was the Greek name of Sicily; in 'Drepanum' or 'the sickle,' the name which a town on the north-west promontory of the island bore, from the sickle-shaped tongue of land on which it was built. But more striking, as the embodiment of a poetical feeling, is the modern name of the great southern peninsula of Greece. We ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... into fury, and the Lord Jehovah, who has already furbished his sword, and prepared the instruments of death, will speedily give that dreadful commission to the executioners of his wrath: "Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe; come, get you down, for the press is full, the fats overflow, for their wickedness is great:" Joel iii, 13. "But because God will do this to Israel, let us prepare to meet our God." Further, the Presbytery invite and entreat all who tender the glory ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery

... knife is at thy throat. The noonday sun shall not discover thy enemy, and the darkness of midnight shall not protect thy rest. Thou shalt plant in terror, and I will reap in blood; thou shalt sow the earth with corn, and I will strew it with ashes; thou shalt go forth with the sickle, and I will follow after with the scalping-knife; thou shalt build, and I will burn,—till the white man or the Indian perish from ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... drooping head. "Is THAT so, Van Sickle? ... Listen here. If you and Sage King don't get more wild running to-morrow than you ever had I'll never ride again!" With this retort ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey

... agriculture in its most rudimentary stage supposes ownership of the land, at least from the time that it is "tickled with the hoe," until it "smiles with the harvest;" or, to express it more accurately, all the time intervening between the work of the plow and the labor of the sickle. The more, afterwards, population and civilization increase, the more products must be wrung from the soil. But this can be accomplished only by means of its more intensive cultivation (higher farming), by lavishing a greater amount of capital and labor on it, and, as ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... sickening fear of something, she knew not what, crept into the heart of Katherine and spoiled for her the glory of that winter afternoon. The sun went down in flaming splendours of crimson and gold, a young moon hung like a sickle of silver above the dark pine forest, and everywhere below was the white purity of ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant

... And the world has such need of all noble talent; such exigent and hungry need of the true teacher, statesman, seer,—of the word of inspiration and the act of leadership! How shall one who feels in him the power and sees the need; who grasps in his hand the keen sickle, yet is held back, while before his eyes the fields are white with the harvest which threatens, unreaped, to perish,—how shall he reconcile himself to his lot? How escape the thought that he and all mankind are but playthings in the grasp of ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... begun to ripen, and the corn will soon be ready for the sickle; of this fact our forefathers were reminded by the Lammas Festival, which was celebrated on the first of this month. Lammas is a shortened form of the word Loaf-mass, or feast of the loaf. A loaf of bread was made of the first-ripe corn, and used in Holy Communion on this ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... caverns. Then, for the first time, he began to take some care of his appearance, and to try to make himself agreeable; he harrowed those coarse locks of his with a comb, and mowed his beard with a sickle, looked at his harsh features in the water, and composed his countenance. His love of slaughter, his fierceness and thirst of blood prevailed no more, and ships that touched at his island went away in safety. He paced up and down the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... revive no more leaves strewn o'er earth and main, The sickle never more will reap the yellow garnered grain; The rippling stream flows on, aye tranquil, deep, and still, But never glideth back again to busy water-mill. The solemn proverb speaks to all, with meaning deep and vast, "The mill ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus

... to their final consolidation into a single kingdom. It was, however, a work of time, for the turbulent spirit of the Northmen required long and judicious treatment to make them lay down the sword, and take up the spade and sickle. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... reddish purple, numerous, about 1/2 in. long, clustered in racemes from the leaf axils. Calyx 2-lipped, corolla papilionaceous, the broad standard petal turned backward, the keel sickle-shaped; stamens within it 9 and 1. Stem: From tuberous, edible rootstock; climbing, slender, several feet long, the juice milky. Leaves: Compounded of 5 to 7 ovate leaflets. Fruit: A leathery, slightly curved pod, 2 ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... work in ancient style With seedlip, sickle, share and flail, Though modes have since moved many ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy

... and has two excavations in the posterior end. The right hollow is larger and contains 5 great cirri of unequal size, the extreme right one being the largest. The left hollow contains 2 cirri, also of dissimilar size. Dorsal to the 5 right cirri are 3 sickle-formed cirri, which are usually fimbriated. These are pointed and curve regularly to the left. The peristome is wide and open, and a small pocket-like hollow on its left border indicates the region of the mouth. The adoral zone runs into this pocket and the mouth is located ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins

... the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are rising [1310], begin your harvest, and your ploughing when they are going to set [1311]. Forty nights and days they are hidden and appear again as the year moves round, when first you sharpen your sickle. This is the law of the plains, and of those who live near the sea, and who inhabit rich country, the glens and dingles far from the tossing sea,—strip to sow and strip to plough and strip to reap, if you wish to get in all Demeter's fruits in due season, and that each kind may grow in ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... learned Egyptians, but utter extinction is the doom of mighty Babylon. It is written in the Bible concerning the land where the farmer was accustomed to reap two hundred-fold: "Cut off the sower from Babylon, and him that handleth the sickle in the time of harvest. * * * Every purpose of the Lord shall be performed against Babylon, to make the land of Babylon a desolation without an inhabitant. * * * Behold the hindermost of the nations shall be a wilderness, a dry land, and a desert. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... this district. These last are an outcome of the medical work. They live in a small hamlet where the first beginning of an interest in Christianity took its rise from a man who came to me in the market-place with a bad sore in his leg, which had been caused by a wound from his own harvest sickle. The sore was cured, and friendly relations sprung up with the whole hamlet, and I am thankful to hear that, though only one family has put away its idols, all the ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour

... the immortal chants of old!— Putting his sickle to the perilous grain In the hot cornfield of the Phrygian king, For thee the Lityerses-song again Young Daphnis with his silver voice doth sing; 185 Sings his Sicilian fold, His sheep, his hapless love, his blinded eyes— And how a call celestial round him rang, And ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold

... mental attitude. Elias Howe thought of a machine for sewing, Eli Whitney of a machine for ginning cotton, George Stephenson of a tubular boiler for his locomotive engine, and Cyrus McCormick of a sickle-bar, and the world was changed by those thoughts, rather than by the machines themselves. John D. Rockefeller thought strongly that he would be rich, and this thought, and not the Standard Oil Company, changed the commerce and finance of the world. As a man thinketh ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick

... harvest comes apace; Ripen our spirits by thy grace, That we may calmly meet the blow The sickle gives ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams

... common thing to see cribs of these beans as you pass through the country; it takes them so short a time to cook, which adapts them to our use. Corn and beans are not their only productions, for they sometimes grow a little wheat, oats, tobacco and cotton. Many reap their grain with the sickle, not having known the existence of the cradle. There are no reapers to be seen, or if at all, ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear

... dimly within her crescent with what is termed "the ashen light." More wonderful still, this "glimmering sphere" is then crowned, as with a silver halo, by a thin luminous arch, forming a secondary sickle facing the one nearest the sun, and doubtless due to the refraction of his rays round the globe of the planet, through the upper regions of her twilight atmosphere. This spectacle was first observed by ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various



Words linked to "Sickle" :   hammer and sickle, sickle-cell disease, haft, sickle alfalfa, yellow-leaf sickle pine, sickle-shaped, sickle cell, common sickle pine, helve, sickle feather, sickle-cell anemia, sickle lucerne, sickle medick, sickle-cell anaemia, reap hook, edge tool, reaping hook



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