"Threshing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... harvest of which will fall to the neighboring sparrows, has carried my thoughts to the rich crops which are now falling beneath the sickle; it has recalled to me the beautiful walks I took as a child through my native province, when the threshing-floors at the farmhouses resounded from every part with the sound of a flail, and when the carts, loaded with golden sheaves, came in by all the roads. I still remember the songs of the maidens, the cheerfulness of the old men, the open-hearted merriment ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... an opportunity for repairing the ravages of a long drought, the stone is taken backwards and forwards over the yielding pise. It closes the cracks, kills the weeds that if left to themselves would soon transform the roof into a field, and makes the surface as firm as a threshing-floor. ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... the swath for a few days and then set up in shocks. The stalks are not tied into bundles as in the case of other grain crops, the tops of the shocks being bound round and held together by twisting stems round them. The threshing is done on the field in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... the next morning when John Gardner was hitching his team to the big hay wagon. Already the smoke was coming from the stack of the threshing engine, that stood with the machine in the center of the field, and the crew was coming from the cook-wagon. Two hired men, with another team and wagon, were already gathering a load of sheaves to haul ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... She heard Burns threshing his team at the well, with the sound of oaths. He was tired, hungry, and ill-tempered, but she was too desperate to care. His poor, overworked team did not move quick enough for him, and his extra long ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... now my visits here, But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick; And with the country-folk acquaintance made By barn in threshing-time, by new-built rick. Here, too, our shepherd-pipes deg. we first assay'd. deg.35 Ah me! this many a year My pipe is lost, my shepherd's holiday! Needs must I lose them, needs with heavy heart Into the world and wave ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... joyously. "What is the matter with my husband?" you asked yourself . . . . I will explain. Your husband spoke yesterday for the first time in the building, you know. He said—the sitting was a noisy one, the Left were threshing out some infernal questions—he said, during the height of the uproar, and rapping with his paper-knife on his desk: "But we can not hear!" And as these words were received on all sides with universal approbation and cries of "Hear, hear!" he gave his thoughts a more parliamentary ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... friend, I must show you many more places.' The devil gets hold of him again and drags him off to a farm. There he sees workmen threshing the grain. The dust and heat are insufferable. The overseer carries a knout, and unmercifully beats anyone who falls to the ground overcome by ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... come what might, to call to him and crave his succour. But even this hostile Fortune had disallowed her. The husbandmen were all gone from the fields by reason of the heat, and indeed there had come none to work that day in the neighbourhood of the tower, for that all were employed in threshing their corn beside their cottages: wherefore she heard but the cicalas, while Arno, tantalizing her with the sight of his waters, increased rather than diminished her thirst. Ay, and in like manner, wherever she espied a copse, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... spring crops, to which the tillage is chiefly confined, are taken off the ground, the face of the country must have a very naked and dreary appearance.[3] Near one village on the road I saw some men threshing corn in a field, and among them a peacock (which, of course, I took to be domesticated) breakfasting very comfortably upon the grain as it flew around him. A little farther on I saw another quietly working his way into ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... cut off the plants near the ground, and spread them in a light and airy situation till they are sufficiently dried for threshing, or stripping off the seeds; after which the seeds should be exposed, ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... council of war, about future proceedings. Our crew had run, to a man, the cook excepted, as usually happens, in Charleston; and we brought in the cook, as a counsellor. This man told me, that he had overheard the captain and mate laying a plan to give me a threshing, as soon as I had turned in. Bill, now, frankly proposed that I should run, as well as himself; for he had already left his ship; and our plan was soon laid. Bill went ashore, and brought a boat down under the bows of the ship, and I passed my dunnage into her, by ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... voice. After that night, he used to court her, and sing to her, but always in the dark. He never would face a candle, though he was challenged to more than once. One night there was a terrible noise heard—it is described as if a number of men were threshing out corn upon the roof—and Molly Slater was found wedged in between the bed and the wall, in a place where there was scarcely room to put your hand. Several strong men tried to extricate her by force; but both the bed and the woman's body resisted so strangely that, at last, they thought it ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... air successfully again, and then spent some time wriggling around into another position. The figure-fitting went easier this time, after threshing around through three or four near-comforts they came to rest in a pleasantly natural position and James Holden became nervously aware of the fact that his right hand was cupped over a soft roundness that filled his palm ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... so I did it, Baas. Wow! I trod him deep into the mire, I trampled him as an ox tramples corn upon a threshing-floor. Never will he come up again. After that I rose and ran into the guard-house, fearing lest there might be another whom I must silence also, for when I was a slave two always kept watch. But the place was empty, so I let the bridge down. Ah! I remembered how ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... in or about the house to remind one of its late occupant. It was used as a granary. The apartments were filled with straw; a machine for threshing or winnowing was in the parlor; and the room where he died was now converted into a stable, a horse standing where his bed had been. The position was naked and comfortless, being on the summit of a hill, perpetually swept by the trade-winds, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... fall of the forest which had flourished there for centuries. The heavy and brisk blows that he struck were soon succeeded by the thundering report of the tree, as it came, first cracking and threatening with the separation of its own last ligaments, then threshing and tearing with its branches the tops of its surrounding brethren, and finally meeting the ground with a shock but little inferior to an earthquake. From that moment the sounds of the axe were ceaseless, while the failing of the trees was like a distant cannonading; ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... West down by this time. They were struggling to handcuff him. He fought furiously, his great arms and legs threshing about like flails. Not till he had worn himself out could ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... been fetched from Uzdom at his desire. For the sheriff was exceeding wroth when he heard that the impudent fellow had attempted my child in the prison, and cried out in a rage, "S'death and 'ouns, I'll mend thy coaxing!" Whereupon he gave him a sound threshing with a dog-whip he held in his hand, to make sure that she should be ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... silence of the hillside. Bailey's horse plunged off the trail and rocketed straight down the mountain. Pete's horse, rearing from the hurtling shape that lunged from the trail above, tore the rope from his hand and crashed down the hillside, snorting. Something was threshing about the trail and coughing horribly. Pete would have run if he had known which way to run. He had seen two lambent green dots glowing above him and had fired with that quick instinct of placing his shot—the result of long practice. The flopping and coughing ceased. Pete, with ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... a grass widow. My Duncan is awa'. He scooted for Calgary as soon as his threshing-work was finished up. But that tumult is over and once more I've a chance to sit down and commune with my soul. Everything here is over-running with wheat. Our bins are bursting. The lord of the realm is secretly delighted, but he has said little about ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... taciturn. It is only when the northeaster soughs in the eaves and brings him leisure that he drops into narrative. His tales are grotesque fancies, simple yarns withal, such as fluttered from the homely life of pasture and woodland in early days of enforced idleness to light on the threshing floor of some great old barn, or to warm themselves at the big kitchen fireplace on winter nights when the wind guffawed down the throat of the big chimney and sprinkled the hearth with an attic salt of snow ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... threshing-machines mounted into the still air here and there, and hung long in a slowly drifting cloud above the land. The prairie-lark, the last of the singing birds, whistled softly and infrequently from the dry grass. The gulls were ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... especially great, for, as has often been, said, isolation is the problem of the farm as congestion is that of the city. On the frontier a cooeperative spirit manifested itself frequently in mutual helpfulness, in house raising bees, husking bees, threshing bees, and other ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... is not in use. The first threshing-machine Quito ever saw was made in 1867 by some California miners, but it remained unsold when we last saw it. The spade is not known; the nearest approach to it is a crowbar flattened at one end. Hoes are clumsy and awkward. Yankee plows are bought more as curiosities ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... something—possibly righteous indignation at being the victim of one of Hawkins' experiments—had roused a latent devil within Maud S. Her heels were viciously threshing up the dirt at the foot of the hill before I began my ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... to undergo from Susan!" added Julius. "She washed me, and soaped me, and rubbed me, till I felt as if all the threshing-machines in the county were about my head, lecturing me all the time on the profanity of flying against Scripture by trying to alter one's hair from what Providence had made it. Nothing would do; her ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are riding into the past. You will see little earthen towns, brown or golden or red in the sunlight, according to the soil that bore them, which have not changed in a century. You will see grain threshed by herds of goats and ponies driven around and around the threshing floors, as men threshed grain before the Bible was written. You will see Indian pueblos which have not changed materially since the brave days when Coronado came to Taos and the Spanish soldiers stormed the heights of Acoma. You will hear of strange Gods ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... Duck, could o'er the Queen prevail; The proverb says, No fence against a flail; >From threshing corn, he turns to thresh his brains, For which her Majesty allow him grains; Though 'tis confest, that those who ever saw His poems, think them all not worth a straw. Thrice happy Duck! employ'd in threshing stubble, Thy toil is lessen'd, and thy ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... knew the hill dialects, and gave the lama the lie of the land towards Ladakh and Tibet. He said they could return to the Plains at any moment. Meantime, for such as loved mountains, yonder road might amuse. This was not all revealed in a breath, but at evening encounters on the stone threshing-floors, when, patients disposed of, the doctor would smoke and the lama snuff, while Kim watched the wee cows grazing on the housetops, or threw his soul after his eyes across the deep blue gulfs between range ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... the bridges, and at last shot out into the Pool, where a few belated barges were drifting down stream. A number of steamers lay at anchor, some working cargo, others idle. The majority were foreigners, odd-shaped vessels, with funnels like a steam threshing-machine, and gayly painted deck-houses. ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... occasionally found, the people were too indolent to make them in any quantity. The earth was simply scratched a few inches by a mean and ill-contrived plow. When the ground had been turned up by repeated scratching, it was hoed down and the clods broken by dragging over it huge branches of trees. Threshing was performed by spreading the cut grain on a spot of hard ground, treading it with cattle, and after taking off the straw throwing the remainder up in the breeze, much was lost and what was saved ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... vengeance. I saw the blood bathing the torn ear of my antagonist. It looked beautiful. I was no longer afraid of anything. Yelling my uncle's name I came on ... I beat the knife out of the other's hand and bloodied his knuckles with the next blow. I beat him down with rapid blows, threshing at him, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Threshing was either done by hand with flails, or, if the family had a cow or two (and the tax lists indicate that they did), the grain was separated by driving the livestock around and around over the unbundled straw. Finally, the chaff was removed by throwing the grain into the air while the breeze ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... until it reached Canaan. It halted at the threshing-floor of Atad, and there they lamented with a very great and sore lamentation.[418] But the greatest honor conferred upon Jacob was the presence of the ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... says the chronicler, "they went down by different gates, and struck out with mighty blows at the English, as if they had been beating out their corn on the threshing-floor; their arms went up and down again, and every blow dealt out ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... I am able to handle a staff, To die in your debt, friend, I scorn." Then to it each goes, and followed their blows, As if they'd been threshing of corn. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... recollection, was the mischief wrought by Captain Swing. In Kent there had been an alarming outbreak of the peasantry, ostensibly against the use of agricultural machinery. They assembled in large bodies, and visited the farm buildings of the principal landed proprietors, demolishing the threshing machines then being brought into use. In some instances they set fire to barns and corn-stacks. These outrages spread throughout the county, and fears were entertained that they would be repeated in other agricultural districts. A great ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... Threshing my brains for any sort of tie with George Eliot, I remembered having often stayed at Oxford as a young woman, when Jowett of Balliol was entertaining her and Mr Lewes, in ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... said unto Ruth, "My daughter, shall I not seek rest for thee, that it may be well with thee? And now is not Boaz of our kindred, with whose maidens thou wast? Behold he winnoweth barley to-night in the threshing floor. Wash thyself, therefore, and anoint thee, and put thy raiment upon thee and get thee down to the floor, and he will tell ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... until her amens ceased. Before the sermon was ended, some of the ministers were pacing the grounds in agony because the enemy was filling the pulpit, and some of the sinners felt like taking the ministers out and giving them a threshing because they had permitted ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... sending the ball into the body just back of a fore leg. The cervus species rarely or never fall, even when stricken through the heart, knowing which, Deerfoot dashed up the slope, knife in hand, and made after the wounded buck, which could be heard threshing among the stones and underbrush. He was still floundering and running when overtaken by the youth, who quickly ended ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... the threshing. Dad lying on the sofa, thinking; the rest of us sitting at the table. Dad spoke ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... in time, as he leapt lightly off the windfall, to avoid the rush of a vast brown bulk, reeking of carrion, furry, terrible, with live-coals for eyes, and threshing the air with claws Heaven knows how long, which hurled itself like an avalanche out of the hollow at him. And that thing was ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... it was said in earnest, came sneaking in the night to carry off the sheep. But the master, who had been warned by the faithful Sultan of the wolf's intention, was waiting for him, and gave him a fine hiding with the threshing-flail. So the wolf had to make his escape, calling out ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... a sudden threshing of the brush, and it parted to disclose a girl astride a horse that was terrified and endeavoring his best to dismount his rider. Dick, surmising that horse and rider had suffered a narrow escape from the bowlder, ran toward them remorsefully, but the girl already ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... near by,—a strange sight to our eyes at first, but nothing unusual here, where many of them are employed on the farms all the year round, sowing weeding, planting, even ploughing in the spring, and in winter working at threshing or in ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... something which, heretofore, he had never done. But, heretofore, his promises had been of a strictly business nature. He would deliver so many bushels of wheat at such and such a time; he would lend such and such a piece of machinery; he would supply so many men and so many teams at a neighbor's threshing; he would pay so much per pound for hogs; he would guarantee so many eggs out of a setting or so many pounds of butter in so many months from a cow he was selling. A few such guarantees made good at a loss to himself, a few such loads delivered ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... real estate; the tenant supplies teams, tools and labor, while the landlord and tenant own equally all live stock other than teams, and bear equally all other expenses, as for seeds, fertilizers and cost of threshing. Under this system, it is customary for landlord and tenant each to receive one-half of all sales. As each owns one-half of all the live stock (teams excepted), each shares equally in all increase. The landlord pays ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt
... every good. How are the poor little children? My previous letters will have informed you of everything important. I will supply all omissions when I see you. Custis is here, much improved. I have not yet seen Rob. Farmers here are threshing out their wheat, which occupies them closely. Fitzhugh's is turning out well, and he hopes to gather a fair crop. Robert came up last Wednesday with his friend Mr. Dallam, and went down Thursday. He was very well. ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... records alone, several herbs were highly esteemed prior to our era; in the gospels of Matthew and Luke reference is made to tithes of mint, anise, rue, cummin and other "herbs"; and, more than 700 years previously, Isaiah speaks of the sowing and threshing of cummin which, since the same passage (Isaiah xxviii, 25) also speaks of "fitches" (vetches), wheat, barley and "rie" (rye), seems then to have been a ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... the inverted bowl of threshing tentacles the NX-1's crew lumbered ahead. The street at last ceased; the wide ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... laboured for, the eternal law of heaven and earth measures out to him for reward, to the utmost atom, that part which he ought to have laboured for, and withdraws from him (or enforces on him, it may be) inexorably, that part which he ought not to have laboured for until, on his summer threshing-floor, stands his heap of corn; little or much, not according to his labour, but to his discretion. No "commercial arrangements," no painting of surfaces, nor alloying of substances, will avail him a pennyweight. Nature asks of him calmly and inevitably, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... which occurs not seldom in Scripture and in the Liturgy, means affliction, sorrow, anguish; but it is quite worth our while to know how it means this, and to question 'tribulation' a little closer. It is derived from the Latin 'tribulum,' which was the threshing instrument or harrow, whereby the Roman husbandman separated the corn from the husks; and 'tribulatio' in its primary signification was the act of this separation. But some Latin writer of the Christian Church ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... by some linguistic experts, including Bloomfield, held to have originated in the chant of rhythmic labor, as in rowing or threshing.] ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... him, beak and talons, seizing the sleeve of his shirt and making gashes in the boy's arm. By a mighty effort Ralph got his balance again, and turned to meet the onslaught, waving his arms like flails, to beat down the force of those wide threshing wings. Again and again the eagle made a vicious rush, and once managed to get under Ralph's arm and to take an ugly nip in the flesh just above the eye. Maddened by the pain of this wound, and half blinded by the blood which soon began to flow from the cut, Ralph snatched the dead bird from his ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... north, there grew out a monstrous human arm, reaching higher and higher, up to the zenith, blotting the stars behind it. It looked at first—in texture and rigid outline—as the stream of straw looks that flows from the blower of a threshing machine when you stand straight in its line and behind it. But, of course, it did not curve down. It seemed to stretch and to rise, growing more and more like an arm with a clumsy fist at its end, held ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... motion picture magazines and mark the illustrations that look the most like paintings. Cut them out. Winnow them several times. I have before me, as a final threshing from such an experiment, five pictures. Each one approximates a ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... know what nor didn't stop to see. The transmission went, I knew that. The engine was still threshing and pounding when we took to our heels. We could hear it and see the two lights coming and we ran—Lord, how we ran! It seems humorous now, but it wasn't humorous then. There was a fortune at stake and a big ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... may be inclined to wonder how a respectable young shopman should have got his legs, and indeed himself generally, into such a dreadful condition. One might fancy that he had been sitting with his nether extremities in some complicated machinery, a threshing-machine, say, or one of those hay-making furies. But Sherlock Holmes (now happily dead) would have fancied nothing of the kind. He would have recognised at once that the bruises on the internal aspect of the left leg, considered in the light of the distribution ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... servants, a sudden miraculous zeal possessed them. Within a fortnight the garden rows were hoed free from grass, the hops were gathered from the fence, and the weeds on the lawn vanished beneath small black fingers. Even the annual threshing of the harvest was accomplished under the overseeing eye of "Miss Chris," as she was called by the coloured population. During the week that the old machine poured out its chaffless wheat and the driver whistled in the centre of the treadmill Miss Chris appeared at the barn at noon each day ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... the sons of Jacob were all at home, cutting down the yellow grain, and taking it away on the backs of asses to the threshing-place. Joseph, of course, worked with them, but they were always finding fault with him, and trying to vex him. He knew, however, that his father loved him, and this made him able to bear their unkindness with patience. Besides, his mind was filled with boyish thoughts of how great he ...
— Children of the Old Testament • Anonymous
... was chambermaid in a livery stable. Made my first appearance on the stage at the National Theatre in Cincinnati, Ohio, and have since then chopped cord wood, worked in a coal mine, made cross ties (and walked them), worked on a farm, taught a district school (made love to the big girls), run a threshing machine, cut bands, fed the machine and ran the engine. Have been a freight and passenger brakeman, fired and ran a locomotive; also a freight train conductor and check clerk in a freight house; worked on the section; have been a shot gun messenger for the Wells, Fargo Company. Have been with ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart
... conspicuous stage of national affairs; but perhaps the truth it contains has seldom been more amply illustrated than during the stormy days of the American Revolution. Great political convulsions sift peoples as the wind sifts the wheat on the summer threshing-floor, bringing into prominence their best as well as their worst features. They furnish occasion for the development and display of all that is noblest in mankind, and they offer equal scope and opportunity to all the baser susceptibilities and passions of ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... mean time war had been declared. When the news came that Fort Sumter had been fired on, and that Lincoln had called for troops, our men were threshing. There was only one threshing-machine in the region at that time, and it went from place to place, the farmers doing their threshing whenever they could get the machine. I remember seeing a man ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... red cedar feeds, A winter bird, comes with its plaintive whistle, And pecks by the witch-hazel, whilst aloud From cottage roofs the warbling blue-bird sings, And merrily, with oft-repeated stroke, Sounds from the threshing-floor ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... in. To them dispensations were granted, provided the husbands and parents were in Connaught building huts, &c., and that not more than one or two servants remained behind to look after the respective herds and flocks, and to attend to the gathering in and threshing of the corn. And some few, such as John Talbot de Malahide, got a pass for safe travelling from Connaught to come back, in order to dispose of their corn and goods, giving security to return within the time limited. ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... that some object was threshing the bushes furiously. Twice the woman tried to rise, but on each occasion she ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... The swift, unseen threshing of the night upon him silenced him and he was overcome. He turned away indoors, humbly. There was the infinite world, eternal, unchanging, as well as the world ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... orders:—For felling forest timber, 10s. per acre; for burning off ditto, 25s. per acre; for breaking up new ground, 24s. per acre; for breaking up stubble or corn land, 13s. 4d. per acre; for chipping in wheat, 6s. 8d. per acre; for reaping ditto, 8s. per acre; for threshing ditto, 7d. per bushel; for planting maize, 6s. 8d. per acre; for hilling ditto, 6s. 8d. per acre; and for pulling and husking ditto, 5d. per bushel.—The hours of public labour are from sunrise to eight o'clock, and (Sundays excepted) from nine to three. On Saturdays, on account ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... the Eulenberg in Saxony would once hold a marriage, and for this purpose slipped in, in the night, through the keyhole and the window-chinks into the Hall, and came leaping down upon the smooth floor, like peas tumbled out upon the threshing-floor. The old Count, who slept in the high canopy bed in the Hall, awoke, and marvelled at the number of tiny companions; one of whom, in the garb of a herald, now approached him, and in well-set phrase, courteously prayed him to bear part in their festivity. 'Yet ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... the wood-cutter, the measured thud of a single threshing-flail, the crowing of chanticleer in the barn-yard, (with invariable responses from other barn-yards,) and the lowing of cattle—but most of all, or far or near, the wind—through the high tree-tops, or through low bushes, laving one's face and hands so gently, this balmy-bright ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Mr. Poyser, misunderstanding Dinah's wish. "There's no fear but he'll yield well i' the threshing. He's not one o' them as is all straw and no grain. I'll be bond for him any day, as he'll be a good son to the last. Did he say he'd be coming to see us soon? But come in, come in," he added, making way for them; "I hadn't need keep y' out ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... fruit, Fig tree and vine yield their strength. Be glad, then, ye sons of Zion, And rejoice in Jehovah your God, For he hath given you the early rain in just measure, And poured down upon you the winter rain, And sent the latter rain as before. The threshing floors shall be full of grain, And the vats shall overflow ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... They saw a little of the farming operations, as a man ploughing with a buffalo, which looked more like a deer than a bovine; others carrying bundles of grain, one at each end of a pole on their shoulders; another threshing by beating a bunch of the stalks on a frame like a ladder or clothes-horse; but what pleased them most were the fishermen. One had a net several feet square, suspended at the end of a pole. It was sunk in the water, and then hauled up. Any fish that happened to be over it then ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... very glad to pay for it in grain, hay, or provisions. A letter from one of the emigrants to a friend in England* said that, in every settlement they passed through, they found plenty of work, digging wells and cellars, splitting rails, threshing, ploughing, and clearing land. Some of the men in the spring were sent south into Missouri, not more than forty miles from Far West, in search of employment. This they readily secured, no one raising the least objection to a Mormon who was not to be a permanent settler. Others were sent ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... respect to damaged corn, those who understood the nature of grain affirmed, that it was spoiled to such a degree as to be altogether unfit for either of these purposes, the distillers would not purchase it at such a price as would indemnify the farmer for the charge of threshing and carriage; for the distillers are very sensible, that their great profit is derived from their distilling the malt made from the best barley, so that the increase of the produce far exceeded in proportion the advance of the price. It was not, however, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... seen in the theatre of Epidaurus, of which a sketch is given in Fig. 1. The orchestra here is surrounded by a splendid theatron, or spectator place, with seats rising tier above tier. If we want to realize the primitive Greek orchestra or dancing-place, we must think these stone seats away. Threshing-floors are used in Greece to-day as convenient dancing-places. The dance tends to be circular because it is round some sacred thing, at first a maypole, or the reaped corn, later the figure of a god or his altar. On this dancing-place ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... odious vision came back again. First he seemed to hear a kind of roaring sound, such as is made by a threshing machine or the distant passage of a train over a bridge. Then he commenced to gasp, to suffocate, and he had to unbutton his collar and his belt. He moved about to make his blood circulate, he tried to read, he attempted to sing. It was in vain. His thoughts, in spite of himself, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... coming home from school, Look in at the open door; They love to see the naming forge, And hear the bellows roar, And catch the burning sparks that fly Like chaff from a threshing-floor. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... me that," said the rat. "I have seen many of your sort at Copenhagen. But what are you doing out here on the threshing-floor? I thought you kept to ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... great gap in the day, and Tom Catchpole was constantly left in sole charge. Mr. Bellamy came home one evening and told his wife that he had called at Furze's to ask the meaning of a letter Furze had signed, explaining the action of a threshing-machine which was out of order. To his astonishment Furze, who was in his counting-house, called for Tom, and said, "Here, Tom, this is one of your letters; you had better tell Mr. Bellamy how the ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... sphere. What place of martyrdom is here! Is't life, I ask, is't even prudence, To bore thyself and bore the students? Let Neighbor Paunch to that attend! Why plague thyself with threshing straw forever? The best thou learnest, in the end Thou dar'st not tell the youngsters—never! I hear ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... on the hard brown clay floor, Gibbie saw where he was, though if he had been told he was in the barn, he would neither have felt nor been at all the wiser. It was a very old-fashioned barn. About a third of it was floored with wood—dark with age—almost as brown as the clay—for threshing upon with flails. At that labour two men had been busy during the most of the preceding day, and that was how, in the same end of the barn, rose a great heap of oat-straw, showing in the light of the moon like a mound of pale gold. Had Gibbie had any education in the marvellous, he might ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... time my education was advancing at Playford. The first record, I believe, which I have of my attention to mechanics there is the plan of a threshing-machine which I drew. But I was acquiring valuable information of all kinds from the Encyclopaedia Londinensis, a work which without being high in any respect is one of the most generally useful that I have seen. But I well remember one of the most important steps that I ever made. I had ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... a relief from the great heat to mount the hills to Doheriyeh, although the road was tiresome, winding round and among the bases of almost circular hills in succession. At the village all the population was cheerfully employed in threshing or winnowing the harvest, and their flocks crouched in the shade of the trees. It was early in the afternoon, and we lay down to rest under the branches of a fig-tree growing out of a cavern, which cavern was so large that we placed all our ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... Perhaps Virginie Poucette never had shed as many tears in any whole year of her life as she did that night, not excepting the year Palass Poucette died, and left her his farm and seven horses, more or less sound, and a threshing-machine in good condition. The woman had a rare heart and there was that about Jean Jacques which made her want to help him. She had no clear idea as to how that could be done, but she had held his hand at any rate, and he had seemed the better for it. Virginie had only an objective view ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... has entered a wood where thousands of the seventeen-year cicadas were hatching has never forgotten it. A threshing machine, or a gigantic frog chorus, is a fair comparison, and when a branch loaded with these insects is shaken, the sound rises to a shrill screech or scream. This noise is supposed—in fact is definitely known—to attract the female ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... threshing grain a few hundred yards away, the steam threshing machine attracting farmers from all the country about. One a peculiar man, more refined appearing than the others, had once been a college professor; overstudy had partially unbalanced his reason. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... L2 an acre, and within twelve months thereafter made a net profit of L5 an acre from their first wheat crop. Labour-saving machinery from the United States came in to embolden the growers of cereals; the export of wheat rose to millions of bushels; and the droning hum of the steam threshing-machine and the whir of the reaper-and-binder began to be heard in a thousand fields from northern Canterbury to Southland. In the north McLean steadfastly kept the peace, and the Colony bade fair to become rich by leaps and bounds. The ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... and get my disease 'evaporated.' Since I last wrote the great heat abated, and we now have 76 to 80 degrees, with strong north breezes up the river—glorious weather—neither too hot nor chilly at any time. Last evening I went out to the threshing-floor to see the stately oxen treading out the corn, and supped there with Abdurachman on roasted corn, sour cream, and eggs, and saw the reapers take their wages, each a bundle of wheat according to the work he had done—the most lovely sight. The graceful, ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... but his own utter grief, was threshing back and forth, repeating mechanically, with ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... sufficiently cured and dry enough to thresh. These drying-houses are buildings of uniform character, two stories in height and fifty feet square, constructed so as to expose their contents to sun and air, and each provided with a carefully laid threshing-floor, extending through the building, with pent-house for movable engine. When the houses are full and the hulm in a fit state for threshing, the engine is started and the work begun. One man, relieved by others from time to time, (for the labor requires activity, and consequently ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... on the uplands when the host was running mad, I saw them threshing through the leaves and daisy tops below, And as their feet came up the hill, my tired heart grew glad— Till at the music of their throats I knew ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... water unto repentance: but he that after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire: whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing-floor; and he will gather his wheat into the garner, but the chaff he will burn up with ...
— The Spirit and the Word - A Treatise on the Holy Spirit in the Light of a Rational - Interpretation of the Word of Truth • Zachary Taylor Sweeney
... fourth gate, where stands Athene's fane Of Onke hight, another chief appears, Towering with giant bulk—Hippomedon. Broad as a threshing-floor his buckler is, And terror seized me as he whirled it round. Nor was it any common craftsman's hand That wrought the emblem which that buckler bears, A Typhon vomiting with fiery mouth, Black clouds of smoke, the wavering mate of ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... fellow. He got through several mealie cobs (and large ones too) whilst I was eating half a one. His method was peculiar, and shows what practice can do. He shoved a mealie cob into his mouth, gave it a bite and a wrench, just like one of those patent American threshing machines, brought the cob out perfectly clear of grain, and took another. After the supper was over, we had another long grace ending with: "voor spijze en drunk de Heer ik dank" (for food and drink the ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... forth e'en now. What martyrdom endurest thou! What kind of life is this to be living, Ennui to thyself and youngsters giving? Let Neighbor Belly that way go! To stay here threshing straw why car'st thou? The best that thou canst think and know To tell the boys not for the whole world dar'st thou. E'en now I hear one ...
— Faust • Goethe
... I stopped on a march by a threshing-floor where they were measuring grain. When the shares had been divided, the one who had cultivated the land received a single tumolo (less than a half bushel). The peasant, leaning on his spade, looked at his share ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... lintel. There are occupations, mechanical and theoretical, common to both men and women, with this difference, that the occupations which require more hard work, and walking a long distance, are practised by men, such as ploughing, sowing, gathering the fruits, working at the threshing-floor, and perchance at the vintage. But it is customary to choose women for milking the cows and for making cheese. In like manner, they go to the gardens near to the outskirts of the city both for collecting the plants and for cultivating them. In fact, all sedentary and stationary ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... Russian he read nothing but the reports of his bailiff, and that with great difficulty. He used, when he did not go out shooting, to wear a dressing-gown from morning till dinner-time and at dinner. He would look through plans of some sort, or go round to the stables or to the threshing barn, and joke with the peasant women, who, to be sure, in his presence wielded their flails in leisurely fashion. After dinner my friend would dress very carefully before the looking-glass, and drive off to see some neighbour possessed of two or three pretty daughters. ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... There was still enough manhood left to feel her eyes and to shrink as an earthworm from the spade. He had crawled close to the baseboard of the room. An old man's ashen beard straggled through the brown claws wrapped about the face. As the dust of the threshing floor to the summer grain, so was his likeness to one ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... to find men who were still peacefully counting up the "feminine endings" in Shakespeare's verse, and writing elaborate theses upon the sources of the Spenserian legends. Upon his excursions into the country some of these young men would tramp with him—threshing out, student-fashion, the problems of the universe; and how staggering it was to meet a man who was about to receive a master's degree in literature—and who regarded Arthur Hugh Clough as a "dangerous" poet, and Tennyson's ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... one morning for all the Mobeds and Chaldaeans, and commanded them to interpret a strange dream which he had bad. In his dream he had been standing in the midst of a dry and barren plain: barren as a threshing-floor, it did not produce a single blade of grass. Displeased at the desert aspect of the place, he was just going to seek other and more fruitful regions, when Atossa appeared, and, without seeing him, ran towards a spring which welled up through the arid soil as if by enchantment. While he ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... terribly with the "bull whip" that I had to go for the doctor, and when Dr. Heningford, the regular family physician, came, he said it was awful—such cruel treatment, and he complained about it. It was common for a slave to get an "over-threshing," that is, to be whipped too much. The poor man was cut up so badly all over that the doctor made a bran poultice and wrapped his entire body in it. This was done to draw out the inflammation. It seems the slave had been sick, and had killed a little pig ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... in the fustian JACKET His mistress bought at HARROGATE, And up in lofty ricks they stack it, There for the threshing will it wait. ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... threshing had lasted a good quarter of an hour, when a sign from Stringstriker directed the bride-groom to scatter the yew-leaves. In an instant the table was covered with them; and the guests, as if bewitched, dispersed in grotesque groups, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... The justification of those principles you will assuredly find with me in the arrangement of all the other chapters, and of the whole work, as also in the aim in view, namely, to attract all educated Englishmen to these inquiries, and show them what empty straw they have hitherto been threshing. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... winter we'll be snowed up for weeks at a time and spend the hours looking at the pictures in a mail order catalogue and threshing the affairs of our acquaintances threadbare. Twice a year we'll go to town in a second-hand Studebaker. I'll be dressed in the clothes I wore before I was married and he'll wear overalls and boots with run-over heels. A dollar will look a shade smaller than a full ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... had come, and was indeed sweeping the land like a flail. Everyone was caught up in that threshing, and staid old church-goers of years rushed into the chapels and added their groans and outcries to the rest. Parson Boase stood aside, powerless while the excitement lasted. Those were days when Methodism was at its most harsh; ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... jealous god, was wroth when he looked down and beheld mere mortals enjoying such delights. So he willed the destruction of the enchanted garden. With drought and tempest it was devastated, with fire and hail, until not a leaf was left of its luxuriant vegetation and the ground was bare as a threshing floor. But the roots of the sugar cane are not destroyed though the stalk be cut down; so when men ventured to enter the desert where once had been this garden of Eden, they found the cane had grown up again and they carried away cuttings of it and cultivated ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... in the summer, soon after the reaping and threshing were over—she was then twenty—she again stood in the bright warm afternoon sunshine in the spacious courtyard of the village tavern, among a gay group of giggling lasses, waiting with joyful impatience for the dancing to begin. The two village gipsies who made bricks during the ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... been glorious, but now there was work to be done. The mother had not taken picnics into account, and had put a large bundle of rags out on the threshing-floor to be sorted, all the wool to be separated from the cotton. Kristian and Soester could give a helping hand if they liked; but they would not be serious today. They were excited by the trip, and threw the rags at each ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... loomed the forbidding northern boundary of the Okefenokee Swamp. Unconsciously he strained his ears, then shuddered at the night noises that issued from the noisome wilderness. A frenzied threshing, then a splash, then ... silence. What drama of life and death was being played out in that strange ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... support his family. They lived so sparingly that butcher's meat was for years a stranger in the house, and they labored, children and all, from morning to night. Robert, at the age of thirteen, assisted in threshing the crop of corn, and at fifteen he was the principal laborer on the farm, for they could not afford a hired hand. That he was constantly afflicted with a dull headache in the evenings was not to be wondered at; nor ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... sufficiently indiscreet. And the growth of these habits, so discouraging to free and fearless correspondence, may be partly ascribed to the influence of journalism, which makes every subject stale and sterile by incessantly threshing and tearing at it, and which reviews biographies in a manner that acts as a solemn warning to all men of mark that they take heed what they put into a private letter. There are other causes, to which we may presently advert; but it ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... set in, and many of the settlers are threshing out their crops; and from the best information I can obtain, the return of wheat has been from twenty to twenty-five bushels per acre. Barley, may be stated at the same produce: but where sown in small quantities, and under particular cultivation, I have heard ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... that wooded bench. But at last I reached another slope. Coming out upon a canyon rim I heard R.C. and Teague yelling, and I heard the hounds fighting the grizzly. He was growling and threshing about far below. I had missed the tracks made by Teague and my brother, and it was necessary to find them. That slope looked impassable. I rode back along the rim, then forward. Finally I found where the ground was plowed deep and here I headed my horse. ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... fire. It is written: "In a day of salvation have I helped thee; and I will preserve thee," Is 49, 8. Those who will neglect this day of salvation, will find God as an avenger, for he will not do useless labor in threshing empty chaff. ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... system of schools leaves our rural people educationally on a par with the days of cradling the grain and threshing it with a flail; of planting corn by hand and cultivating it with a hoe; of lighting the house with a tallow dip, and ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... reference to Him, a thought of Him, like some sweet melody, 'so sweet we know not we are listening to it,' may breathe its fragrance, and diffuse its warmth into the commonest and smallest of our daily activities. It was when Gideon was threshing wheat that the angel appeared to him. It was when Elisha was ploughing that the divine inspiration touched him. It was when the disciples were fishing that they saw the Form on the shore. And when we are in the way of our common life it is possible that the Lord may meet us, and that our souls may ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... to mill, and perhaps there will be threshing to do before I leave. And then there's lots of other little things around the farm that I generally do when ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... its surface with other and ghastlier trove. Here the saurians of Pancha's curse worried a drowned pig, there they fought over a cow's swollen carcass; yet because of carrion taste or food plethora, they let her by. There an enormous saber, long and thick as a church, turned and tumbled, threshing air and water with enormous spreading branches, creating dangerous swirls and eddies. These she avoided, and, having swum the river at ebb and flood every day of her life from a child, she now easily clove its roar and tumble; swam on, her heat unabated ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... on an English farm and from childhood he had learned the ways of work animals and how to make them comfortable. So, for the ease of their feet, the cattle shed and its attached, roofed loafing pen had earth floors. All soil removed from the silage pits, dusty sweepings from the threshing floors, and silt from the irrigation ditches were stored near the cattle shed and used to absorb urine from the work cattle. This soil was spread about six inches deep in the cattle stalls and loafing pen. About three times a year it was scraped up and replaced with fresh soil, the urine-saturated ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... and corn-mill—this farmer was village miller as well as olive grower—all worked by water-power and erected by himself at a heavy outlay. Formerly these presses and mills were worked by horses and mules after the manner of old-fashioned threshing-machines, but in Provence as in Brittany, progress is now the order ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... you doing here gaping at strangers? Have you never seen a man before? Pack yourself off to the barn and go on with your threshing." ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... in of the harvest is sometimes emblematical of mercy,—as when the believer is gathered to his fathers by death. His sanctification being completed, he is taken home "as a shock of corn ripe in his season." Reaping and threshing, however, are most frequently symbolical of divine judgments, (Jer. li. 33;) and the apostle refers here to the same event which the Lord foretold by the mouth of other prophets. (Joel iii. 13-17; Micah iv. 12, 13.) This harvest is emblematical of divine judgment on the nations of apostate ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... in harvesting are vital factors in dry-farming, and new devices are constantly being offered to expedite the work. Of recent years the combined harvester and thresher has come into general use. It is a large header combined with an ordinary threshing machine. The grain is headed and threshed in one operation and the sacks dropped along the path of the machine. The straw is scattered over ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe |
