"Barbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fascinating sight. Few things could be finer than to see him snatch away a barbed-wire entanglement of blackberry-bushes, clutch a three-inch thorn sapling with his hairy left, and with one swing of his terrible right cut the taproot through. I had figured that it would take a month to clear away that mess along the brook, but on the evening of the fifth ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... not subscribe myself your humble servant, for that is a phrase, I think, at least fifty miles off from the heart; but I will conclude with sincerely wishing that the Great Protector of innocence may shield you from the barbed dart of calumny, and hand you by the covert snare ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... "my heat." In vi. 396, the Scottish "boune" (though it occurs twice in other parts of the poem) has been changed to "bound" in all editions since 1821; and, eight lines below, the old word "barded" has become "barbed." Scores of similar corruptions are recorded in my Notes, and need not ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... be forgotten, and that the avenging demon who had so punished their imbecility would pass away, were terrified from their obscurity. They came like moths to the candle, and sarcasms in the satire which had long been unheeded, in the belief that they would soon be forgotten, were felt to have been barbed with irremediable venom, when they ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... pointing at her, standing between her and Peter Rabbit, she was the angriest old Fox ever seen. She didn't dare touch Prickly Porky, for she knew well enough what it would mean to get one of those sharp, barbed little spears in her skin. To think that she actually had caught Peter Rabbit and then lost him was too provoking! It was more than her temper, never of the best, could stand. In her anger she dug up the leaves and earth with her hind feet, and all the time her tongue fairly ...
— The Adventures of Prickly Porky • Thornton W. Burgess
... leg cut on barbed wire some weeks ago. There is a hole about an inch and one-half deep in the center of the sore which will not heal. The inside of the sore does not seem very tender, but the leg stays swollen all of the time ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... supposed to undergo an intensive training at Harfleur in the various forms of gas and protection from it, barbed wire and methods of construction of entanglements, musketry, bombing, and ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... as they reach the summit!— Strength and stir new-primed in their plump battalions: Puffs of barbed flame blown on the lines opposing ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... afterwards. I don't give because I see things are needed, but because I can't spend my income unless I do give. If I could have my way I'd buy you a good house in Buffalo, right side of mine; take your beggarly little income and manage it for you; build a six-foot barbed wire fence round the lot so 't the neighbors couldn't get in and eat you out of house and home, and in a couple of years I could make something out of ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... opponents trickle off from him as easily as water does from a duck's back, which is the proper legal mental attitude in regard to such things. He told us that sharp, harsh, or bitter words entered his soul like barbed iron and he was upset and unstrung for hours afterward. A man with such an emotional nature as his and such an intellect is especially qualified for literature, and we are glad to say that he is now making a very flattering ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... cargo was borne overseas in the sea-going tramps, or, of course, taking equally long strings to the Seine for Rouen and Paris. It was mud and cinders underfoot, and it was walled off with corrugated-iron sheeting and barbed wire from the attentions of some hundreds of Belgian refugees who lived along the canal and parallel roads in every conceivable kind of resting-place, from ancient bathing-vans to broken-down railway-trucks. But there were trees along the ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... the four cemeteries, and the deserted brick-kilns: by the time one is through these it is generally time to go home: and even beyond it is market gardens and one can only ride on foot-paths: and there are only two foot-paths through the barbed wire defences. ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... Wants to look over his nearest jay neighbor, I should imagine, and see what sort of a curio he is. He thinks it may be necessary to put up barbed wire fences, I suppose." ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... smooth skin, Sssuri was covered with a fluffy pelt of rainbow-tipped gray fur. In place of the human's steel blade, he wore one of bone, barbed and ugly, as menacing as the spear now resting in the bottom of the outrigger. And his round eyes watched the sea with the familiarity of one whose natural home was ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... the open country. At last, leaving behind all lines of houses, she crawled under a barbed-wire fence into a broad meadow where a few cows were grazing; then over a creek into another meadow, and up to a grassy knoll just ahead. From beyond it faint shouts were coming. At the foot of the knoll Margery ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... It cannot be definitely called a Saxon church, but although 'long and short work' does not appear, there is every reason to associate this lonely little building with the middle of the eleventh century. There are mason marks consisting of crosses and barbed lines on the south wall of the nave. The opening between the tower and the nave is an almost unique feature, having a Moorish-looking arch of horseshoe shape resting on plain ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... into the heart of the abyss crashed the body of the unfortunate soldier; but a sharp thrill of pain ran through Wendot's frame, and a barbed arrow, well aimed at the joint of his leather jerkin, plunged into his neck ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... to feel a tinge of rheumatism in my arms through wearing wet clothing continuously. About the new year one of my saddle horses came into the camp with a portion of a spear stuck in his rump. We threw him and cut out the barbed head of the spear, but the wound afterwards remained a running sore. I caught the camp horse, which we always kept hobbled, and started in search of the others. In following the tracks, I found where the blacks had rounded them up—killing ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... each side laboring everlastingly to find the other's listening places and to blow them up by means of mining, so that the earth became a very rat-run. Above-ground, where were only ruin and barbed wire, there was no sign of activity, but only a great stench that came from bodies none dared bury. We were thankful that the wind blew oftenest from us to them; but whichever way the wind blew ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... horrible cemetery, surrounded by a fence of barbed wire and superannuated railroad ties, to receive that beloved clay. He pictured her as he had seen her every day for ten years, and a rush of vain regret brought the big tears to his buttermilk eyes; the chords of memory twanged ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... a good expression of the spirit of the new Finland. On the Russian side we came to the same grey old wooden station known to all passengers to and from Russia for polyglot profanity and passport difficulties. There were no porters, which was not surprising because there is barbed wire and an extremely hostile sort of neutrality along the frontier and traffic across has practically ceased. In the buffet, which was very cold, no food could be bought. The long tables once laden with caviare and other zakuski were bare. There was, however, a samovar, and we bought tea ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... made a momentary pause. In the brilliant moonlight every detail of the equipage was visible; the coach was dingy and battered, its principal color blue, and covered, according to the fashion, with gilded arabesques in cumbrous relief, in which a curious dragon, with a barbed tongue and tail, was contending in a hundred repetitions with as many little cupids. Just as these details seized upon his imagination, the window was suddenly opened, and a lady put out her head ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... all of seven feet high and made of the heaviest of woven-wire construction. It was topped with barbed wire, and went all the way down both sides of a narrow right of way until it vanished ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... her face, as if fearful that the sight of her woe might weaken his resolve. She had turned mechanically back. They walked on in gloomy silence side by side, away now from the lake—back under the barbed thorn-tree-back by the moss-grown crag-back by the hollow trunks, and over the fallen leaves of trees, that had defied the storms of centuries, to drop, perhaps, brittle and sapless, some quiet day when every ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... depopulate the earth. The illustrious person whose words even in jest are true, and who hath Dhananjaya to fight for him, is sure to win the three worlds. Who that is even beyond the influence of Death and Decay will be able to stay before Arjuna, when he will scatter his barbed and sharp-pointed arrows whetted on stone? My wretched sons, who have to fight with the invincible Pandavas are indeed, all doomed. Reflecting day and night, I see not the warrior amongst us that is able to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... I cannot say," and looking straight at me, she let go the barbed shaft, that lies hidden in fair eyes for ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... ever seen, "I seen 'em make a hole where you could 'ave put two 'underd and fifty horses. Don't think I shall ever get to like 'em. Yu don't take no notice o' rifle fire after a little—not a bit o' notice. I was out once with a sapper and two o' the Devons, fixin' up barbed wire—bullets strikin' everywhere just like rain. One o' the Devons, he was sittin' on a biscuit-tin, singin': 'The fields were white wi' daisies'—singing. All of a sudden he goes like this—" And giving a ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... beyond gratifying the Huns, had no sort of effect. Albert, in blissful ignorance of all such customs, floundered about amongst the turnips until he came across a Jack Johnson crater. From this he emerged even wetter than before. A little later he became mixed up with some barbed wire. The more be tried to get away the more inextricably he became involved with it. A star shell burst overhead, and a German sniper, seizing the chance of a lifetime, put in four rounds ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... south of the ranch. The county road was now the only link the Circle T had to the cattle shipping pens at Carson City. The dirt road arrowed south across the range but fifteen miles from the ranch, a six-strand, new, barbed-wire fence cut the road. A white metal sign with raised letters proclaimed "Road Closed. U.S. Government Military Reservation. Restricted Area. ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... squads, carrying their guns and side arms clumsily; and when, in Minister Brand Whitlock's car, we drove out the beautiful Avenue Louise, we found soldiers building a breast-high barricade across the head of the roadway where it entered the Bois; also, they were weaving barbed-wire entanglements among the shade ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... and eyed his crouching venomous assailant full in the face, majestically, as one can fancy a lion rearing his ponderous head, and looking lazily and steadily at a snake that has just hissed in a corner. Each word of Skinner's was a barbed icicle to him, yet not a muscle of his close countenance betrayed ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... races in the wide Piazza Santa Maria Novella, where the small obelisks point the start and finish of the races. These were followed by the corso dei barberi—barbed horse-races without riders—down the longest street of the town. Then followed the French Minister's masked ball, amusing as well as splendid, readers of Cooper's "Italy" will find. But more than all, on their return to Villa St. Illario, were they charmed with the brilliant ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... paying for the privilege and waging war on one another over the possession of ranges. At length, however, both had to go, as the homesteaders and land companies came and fenced in the plain and desert with endless lines of barbed wire. Already in 1893 a writer familiar with the frontier lamented the passing of the picturesque days: "The unique position of the cowboys among the Americans is jeopardized in a thousand ways. Towns are growing up on their pasture lands; irrigation schemes of a dozen sorts threaten to turn ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... sedgy and thickly grown with flaggers and bulrushes, the sport of spearing for eels commenced. Gusty first undertook the task, and, after some vigorous plunges of his implement into the water, he brought up the prey, wriggling between its barbed prongs. Furlong was amazed, for he thought this, like the salmon-fishing, was intended as a quiz, and, after a few more examples of Gusty's prowess, he undertook the sport; a short time, however, fatigued his unpractised arm, and he relinquished the spear to Theodore, or Tay, as they called ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... when he had seen it that he would allow the doctors to examine his wound. They found the head of a barbed spear sunk deep into his breast, and said that it must be pulled out. Still they hesitated to draw it out, for they feared that the rush of blood ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. All the way up the half-mile precipice it fingered and wrenched away at groaning ice-slabs. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow plowed ruler-straight ...
— Accidental Death • Peter Baily
... thin and spare Was idle mail 'gainst the barbed air, For it was just at the Christmas time; 260 So he mused, as he sat, of a sunnier clime, And sought for a shelter from cold and snow In the light and warmth of long-ago; He sees the snake-like caravan crawl O'er the edge ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... gewgaws into air, To stud a sceptre or emblaze a star; Far wealthier stores these genial tides display, And works less dangerous with their spoils repay. The Hero saw the hardy crews advance, Cast the long line and aim the barbed lance; Load the deep floating barks, and bear abroad To every land the life-sustaining food; Renascent swarms by nature's care supplied, Repeople still the shoals and ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... young America of both sexes, he had learned with a somewhat cynical shrewdness to discount it. He entered into the game, but, in his own phrase, he always knew what he was about. Lydia, on the contrary, often penetrated his armor by one of these shafts, barbed by her complete unconsciousness of any intent. He felt now, with a momentary anguish, that he could never be sure of her belonging quite to him until they were married, and cried out upon her ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... for Lola Montez in her character as a Magdalen. People who had fawned upon her in the days of her success now jeered and sneered and affected to doubt the reality of her penitence. "Once a sinner, always a sinner," they declared; and "Lola in the pulpit is rich!" was another barbed shaft. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... rewarded with food whenever he found the right box. But on April 28, the two methods were again employed, the first in the initial series and the second in a final series of trials. The animal's persistent attempts to raise the doors gave the experimenter so much trouble that on April 29 barbed wire was nailed over the windows of the entrance doors with the hope that it might prevent him from working at them. But he quickly learned to place his fingers between the barbs and raise the doors as ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... and among them was the Commanding Officer, who was killed. The command then passed to Major J.W.B. Hunt, who decided that it was useless to attempt to assault the enemy position without further artillery preparation, as the enemy's barbed wire was practically intact, and the only two gaps that were available were covered by enemy machine guns. A report on the situation was made to Brigadier-General Thesiger, and instructions were received that on no account was the Battalion to leave the front ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... Gaul, and knights of Thrace, He smiles at age. For he who never asked For quarter from mankind—shall he be tasked To beg of Time for mercy? Rather he Would girdle up his loins, like Baldwin be. Aged he is, but of a lineage rare; The least intrepid of the birds that dare Is not the eagle barbed. What matters age, The years but fire him with a holy rage. Though late from Palestine, he is not spent,— With age he wrestles, firm in ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... of tunnel in this hollow hill, and hundreds of steps lead up to the top by the palace, where there is a defence of barbed wire and guns. Look, ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... barbed arrows flew, the tears rapidly exhaled from the hot cheeks of the young lady on the sofa. Her elegant languor vanished, and she started up; but Mrs. Allen now interfered, and in tones harsh and high, very different from the previous ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... barbed hooks was torn out of my heart; and the question then was, how the inward sanative power of youth could be brought to one's aid? I really put on the man; and the first thing instantly laid aside was the weeping and raving, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... a mile inland was the gravel road that followed the windings of Plum Run, to cut across at the wagon bridge. Two stealthy figures hurried through the woods and across the fields, to emerge on the other side of a barbed wire fence and trudge off down ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... plants are protected by thorns. In fact, the drier the region, the more thorny are its plants. A little shrub called the crucifixion thorn has no leaves at all, nothing but long, sharp spines. Besides the straight thorns there are curved and also barbed ones, for every conceivable form is represented among the plants of these ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... of the Rappahannock, the travelers' boat grounded upon sand, with the tide at ebb. Awaiting the water that should lift them off, the fifteen began with their swords to spear the fish among the reeds. Smith had the ill luck to encounter a sting-ray, and received its barbed weapon through his wrist. There set in a great swelling and torment which made him fear that death was at hand. He ordered his funeral and a grave to be dug on a neighboring islet. Yet by degrees he grew better and so out of torment, and withal so hungry that he longed for supper, whereupon, ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... half-way over to his trench—and contented himself with throwing a few bombs into it and covering it with machine-gun fire. In spite of which Begbie Lyte, having now risen to the dizzy height of senior subaltern in the company, took out a small party and filled it with barbed wire. ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... blankets, with tins and cooking things, and broken bottles and all sorts of rags and debris littered about. The descriptions of the place sent home after the battle are necessarily very inaccurate. Those I have seen all introduce several lines of trenches and an elaborate system of barbed wire entanglements. There is only one trench, however, and no barbed wire, except one fence along a road. There are, however, a great number of plain wire strands, about ten yards long perhaps, made fast between bushes and trees, and left dangling, say, ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... he went out again with them in the boats for a short time to see them spear salmon. A man holding a large torch made of strips of resinous wood stood in the bow of the boat, and on either side of him stood an Ostjak holding a long barbed spear. In a short time there were swirls on the surface of the river. These increased till the water round the boat seemed to boil. The Ostjaks were soon at work, and in half an hour twenty fine salmon were lying in the bottom of the boat, and then having caught as much ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... I here, my woes entreating, In this dark alley, lest the Moon Point with her sparkling my barbed armoury ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... after his horse was shot under him, leapt on a riderless animal and came through unhurt. When the men got up close to the German guns they found themselves riding full tilt into hidden wire entanglements—seven strands of barbed wire. Horses and men came down in a heap, and few of the brave fellows who reached ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... to be able to work him in the interests of the machine, eh?" inquired the Duke, putting into brutal speech even more than his grandson's vague suspicions suggested. "Now, look here! You remember Pod McClintock and his epileptic fits? You know he fell into a barbed-wire fence in a fit, and told around afterward how he had been to heaven, and the devil met him on his way back and clawed him for spite? Well, now don't you go to imitating Pod. There's more or less barbed wire in politics—any man gets afoul of it. But don't lay it to the ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... how the Pratt girl blundered with Piggy Pennington's note would be depressing. For it holds in its barbed meshes a record of one agonizing second in which Piggy saw the folded paper begin to slip and slide down the incline of his Heart's Desire's desk, whereon the Pratt girl had dropped it; saw the two ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... proceeded to attack his ignorance with something of the fierce determination he had attacked the Hun the year before in France. He plunged through bogs of history, got hopelessly entangled in the barbed wire of mathematics, had hand-to-hand struggles with belligerent parts of speech, and more than once suffered the shell-shock of despair. But his watchword now, as then, was, "Up and at 'em!" And before long he had the satisfaction of seeing his ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... split up into two sections, and left Blackwood Camp early in the evening. General Muller took one section over the railway line near Brugspruit, whilst I took the other section across near Balmoral Station. We naturally kept as far from the blockhouses as possible, quietly cut the barbed-wire fences stretched all along the line, and succeeded in crossing it without a shot being fired. To split up into two sections was a necessary precaution, first because it would have taken the whole commando too long to cross the line at one point, ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... cast was a failure; so was the second; but the third time never fails. Will twisted the cord on his fingers, with the result that the double hook turned right over, and the barbed points, in answer to a gentle twitch, took hold of the white fabric, after passing ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... whose Burs are even more clinging than those of the Burdock. These are the Acaenas; they are mostly natives of America and New Zealand, and some of them (especially A. sarmentosa and A. microphylla) form excellent carpet plants, but their points being furnished with double hooks, like a double-barbed arrow, they have double powers ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... for Agatha's superior quickness of wit, dexterity of hand, audacity, aptness of resource, capacity for forming or following intricate associations of ideas, and consequent power to dazzle others. Her jealousy of these qualities was now barbed by the knowledge that they were much nearer akin than her own to those of Trefusis. It mattered little to her how she appeared to herself in comparison with Agatha. But it mattered the whole world (she thought) ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... as in mad pursuit, he dashed into an almost invisible fence of wire, steel colored,—which luckily was not barbed. The engineer who was a few paces behind, stopped in the nick of time, his outstretched hand easily breaking the force of ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... was hardly a living soul when three English correspondents went there, after escape from Amiens, now in German hands. A tall cuirassier stood by some bags of gunpowder, ready to blow up the bridge. The streets were strewn with barbed wire and broken bottles... In Paris there was a great fear and solitude, except where grief-stricken crowds stormed the railway stations for escape and where French and British soldiers—stragglers all—drank together, and sang above their broken ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... forest tree the fire. Thee to my father's lone retreat will quickly lead yon onward path, Oh, haste his pardon to entreat, or ere he curse thee in his wrath. Yet first that gently I may die, draw forth the barbed steel from hence, Allay thy fears, no Brahmin I, not thine of Brahmin blood the offence. My sire, a Brahmin hermit he, my mother was of Sudra race.' So spake the wounded boy, on me while turned his unreproaching face. As from his palpitating breast ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... thought so, and raved about her in uncouth convulsions. The barbed shaft of love had penetrated his dull hide. Six weeks—appropinquity—opportunity—had victimised him completely. He made a confidante of his aunt at the Rectory, of all persons in the world. She rallied him about it; she had perceived his folly; she warned him; she finished by owning that little ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... F Railroad. At a depth of eighteen feet below the surface the miners uncovered a human skull, with portions of the ribs, vertebral column, and collar-bone. With them were found two flint arrow-heads of the most primitive type, imperfect in shape and barbed. A few pieces of charcoal were also found at the same time and place. Dr. Booth was fully aware of the importance of the discovery, and tried to preserve everything found, but upon touching the skull it crumbled to dust, and some of the other ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... foot-slogged into our midst one day, borrowed a hole from a local rabbit, and took up his residence therein. Now this mud-pushing Todd had a cousin in the same division, one of those highly trained specialists who trickles about the country shedding coils of barbed wire and calling them "dumps"—a sapper, in short. One afternoon the sapping Todd, finding some old sheets of corrugated iron that he had neglected to dump, sent them over to his gravel-grinding cousin ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... was seeing, "war's going to cost so much after this that the nations will have to fix up some other way to settle their differences. About that Zeppelin, Tubby; don't you see how they might be able to drop a few bombs on the enemy's trenches; or where the Belgians have fixed barbed-wire entanglements to stop the rush of the charging German troops? Just to think that here we are really watching a battle that isn't like one of the sham rights they have every summer at home. It's ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... was perpetually finding excuses for extra cocktails. It might be the assembling of a particularly jolly crowd; a touch of anger against my architect or against a thieving stone-mason working on my barn; the death of my favourite horse in a barbed wire fence; or news of good fortune in the morning mail from my dealings with editors and publishers. It was immaterial what the excuse might be, once the desire had germinated in me. The thing was: I WANTED alcohol. At last, after a score ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... it is not serious, and not even very painful. It was irritating the first time, but no well-bred bull should condescend to be upset by such a trifle. Another pair of bandarilhas, and yet another, are fixed into his shoulders by their barbed points—or the attempt is made to fix them. Then the bull begins to play the game in a condescending sort of way. Then the great man, the espada himself, comes on the scene, and arranges and waves his scarlet flag, and walks up to the obstinate ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... second front is impossible; but, at the same time, they are desperately rushing troops in all directions, and stringing barbed wire all the way from the coasts of Finland and Norway to the islands ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... endeavour to divert his fury from the picadores, in case they have been thrown or worsted in the encounter. At the same time, the banderilleros are at pains to implant in either side of the bull's neck a number of barbed darts ornamented with cut paper, and, sometimes, charged with detonating powder. It is de rigeur to plant the barbs exactly on either side. In the third and final act, the protagonist, the matador or ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... bound with victorious wreaths, Our bruised arms hung up for monuments; Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front, And now instead of mounting barbed steeds, To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber, To the lascivious ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... of ranching began. Lew Cawley was sent out with Tresler to instruct him in mending barbed-wire fences. A distant pasture had been broken into by the roving cattle outside. Lew remained with him long enough to show him how to strain the wires up and splice them, then he rode off to ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... tone and manner of his opponent. The old man's eyes darted war-flames under his finely arched brows. He regarded the younger with a more and more hostile, even malicious air; his arguments grew personal, offensive; his shafts were many and barbed, till at last Warkworth felt his face burning and his ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... snows, were susceptible to volcanoes; they courted them as a counterbalance. Perhaps he had spoken roughly, but his temper had not been under control. One thing he recalled with grim satisfaction. He had sent a barbed arrow up the tube to disturb the felicity of the dove-cote. The duke would be rather curious to know what was meant in referring to the night she had come to his, Courtlandt's, room. He laughed. It would be a fitting climax indeed if the ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... sentence was speedily disclosed when the broken-down king exclaimed, 'I have sinned against the Lord,' and when, with laconic force as great as that which barbed the condemnation, the prophet stanched the wound with the brief words, 'And the Lord hath made to pass the iniquity of thy sin.' The intention of the accusation is the extension of the mercy and forgiveness. God, as the Apostle puts it, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Wollaston Lee, that she fairly scorned him. Then, suddenly, something occurred to her. She turned, and ran back as fast as she could, her short fleece of golden hair flying. She wrapped her short skirts about her, and wormed through the barbed-wire fence which skirted the field—the boy had leaped it, but she was not equal to that—and she hastened, leaving a furrow through the white-and-gold herbage, to the boy lying on his face weeping. She ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the sharp-barbed thorn, Why didst thou fall from Day's golden chalices? 'My tears bathe the thorn,' said the Dewdrop, 'To nourish the bloom of ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... student of Shakespeare! When the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy was raging in America (it really did rage there!) Jefferson wrote the most delicious doggerel about it. He ridiculed, and his ridicule killed the Bacon enthusiasts all the more dead because it was barbed with erudition. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... men who combine in their composition that which is most practical and imaginative alike; whose energy can subdue a continent, and whose boastfulness would awaken contempt if it were not palliated by the magnitude of their achievements. A humor that is often barbed, but which is most willingly directed against one's self; but, whether directed against the humorist or his neighbor, carries no poison upon its point and leaves ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... helped us even to win the battle of Arras. The guns which destroyed the German trenches, shattered the barbed wire—I remember, with some friends of mine whom I see here, arranging to order the machines to make those guns from America. Not all of them—you got your share, but only a share, a glorious share. So that America has also had her training. ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... turned to our plans for the treasure-hunting, we soon came to a dead stop. No plans seemed feasible in face of that rocky wilderness, all knives to the feet, and writhing serpents of fanged and toothed foliage to the eye, with brambles like barbed-wire fences ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... just outside the city in a very unattractive spot next to the railway. An outbreak of typhus fever prevented us from visiting the camp, although Mr. Jackson conversed with some of the prisoners from outside the barrier of barbed wire. When the typhus was finally driven out, Mr. Lithgow Osborne visited the camp and his report of conditions there was such that I visited it myself, in the meantime holding up his report until I had ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... in the open air, walking every day for eight or nine hours, eating sparingly, accepting every conversational opportunity, not even disdaining the discussion of possible work. And beyond mending a hole in his coat that he had made while negotiating barbed wire, with a borrowed needle and thread in a lodging house, he had done no work at all. Neither had he worried about business nor about time and seasons. And for the first time in his life he ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... dead game to the last, When he feels the barbed hook and finds that he's fast, And plunges and struggles, disdaining to yield, Till exhausted at last to the bank he is reeled, And carefully lifted from out the old stream, While he flounders and gasps and his scaly sides gleam, And you measure his length and guess at his weight— (Five ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... of touch. In throwing a stone or spear, and in many other actions, a man must stand firmly on his feet; and this again demands the perfect co-adaptation of numerous muscles. To chip a flint into the rudest tool, or to form a barbed spear or hook from a bone, demands the use of a perfect hand; for, as a most capable judge, Mr. Schoolcraft (68. Quoted by Mr. Lawson Tait in his 'Law of Natural Selection,' 'Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science,' Feb. 1869. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... do not use barbed fences. To see the lacerations that these fences have produced upon the innocent animals should be sufficient testimony against them. Many use pokes and blinders on cattle and goats, but as a rule such things fail. The better way is to separate breachy animals from the lot, as others will imitate ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... came to the end of the field and dodged into the thicket of bushes that lined the fence row. He moved more slowly now, and she followed by sound rather than by sight. At length they came to where a brook ran at right angles to the fence row. The man stopped and crawled under the barbed-wire fence and came out on the turnpike ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... in the mass is war vast. To the man in the trench it reduces itself to the man on his right, the man on his left, the man across, beyond the barbed wire, ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... take the precaution. We crossed several narrow gauge tracks on our march, and saw trains carrying supplies of all kinds to the battle front. They were pulled by gasoline engines. We also saw our first barbed wire entanglements. These were built back of the lines as a protection to the French in case the Germans should break through on that front. They were about twenty-five feet in width and extended north and ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... authority, and bowed to her decrees. If, after mature consideration, such was my resolve, it was doubly necessary that I should not lose the end of life, the improvement of my faculties, and poison its flow by repinings without end. Yet how cease to repine, since there was no hand near to extract the barbed spear that had entered my heart of hearts? I stretched out my hand, and it touched none whose sensations were responsive to mine. I was girded, walled in, vaulted over, by seven-fold barriers of loneliness. Occupation alone, if I could deliver myself up to it, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... the Vision of a dear desire! Marriage, the Ashes, whence has fled the fire! Cast into chains which you, yourself, have forged! Caught, like a sheep upon a stray barbed wire! ...
— The Rubaiyat of a Bachelor • Helen Rowland
... arm. For inflammatory swellings they sometimes tried local bleeding; but shampooing and rubbing with oil were the more common remedies in such cases. Cuts they washed in the sea, and bound up with a leaf. Into wounds in the scalp they blew the smoke of burnt chestnut wood. To take a barbed spear from the arm or leg they cut into the limb from the opposite side and pushed it right through. ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... undergrowth was dense, except near the road; it was chiefly hazel, white thorn, dogwood, young cherry, and second growth hickory and oak. We turned the corner and followed the woods for half a mile to where a barbed wire fence separated our forest from the woodland adjoining it. Coming back to the starting-point we turned north and slowly climbed the hill to the east of our home lot, silently developing plans. We drove the full half-mile ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... harvest, even but a wisp of hay under thy great face only, Harvest the wheat of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, every barbed spear under thee, Harvest the maize of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, each ear in its light-green sheath, Gather the hay to its myriad mows in the odorous tranquil barns, Oats to their bins, the white potato, the buckwheat of Michigan, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... airon, tied in a knot [to look] like a crest of plumes. This was doubtless the forerunner of the modern banderilla (barbed page 265 dart ornamented with streamers of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... the handicap of high-powered cars. He was in high humor as the buckboard was greased, a team of buckskins given a special feed and a rub-down, and various articles gathered for transportation. Among these were a spool of barbed wire and a ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... "pharmacie" and got some boxes of morphia tablets, after which we went to an ironmonger's (don't know the French for it) and each bought a ponderous pair of barbed wire cutters. So what with wire clippers and morphia tablets, we were gay. About four o'clock we calmed down a bit, and went to the same ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... more than a bunch of dry reeds, bound firmly together: the spear, a long, light pole, with an iron head, on one side barbed. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... The head is loosely slipped into a socket at the end of a staff about twelve feet long, and the two are connected by a rope. A double prong is used for catching fish, but for killing turtle a single-pronged barbed head is employed, as it pierces the shell more easily. We had not gone far when Captain Crump, standing up in the bows like an old Triton, lowered his weapon close to the water; it flew from his hand, and immediately afterwards he drew ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... for the single women; the two hospitals, one general, the other for infectious diseases; and last of all, the house where the half-dozen disorderly women are confined, surrounded by a double fence of barbed wire and guarded by ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... glorified, even the barbed wire fence on either side scintillates. The house is too small, I am going out on the River Road, and see the cherry blossoms on the hill sides and the sunlight on the water, and feel the road under my feet. I feel like a prospector who has struck gold. Whatever comes of it all, ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... and in March you can buy five oranges or ten sweet lemons for a cent. Huge watermelons are about eight or ten cents a piece. We buy so many pounds of milk and oil and potatoes and charcoal. The prickly pear, or subire, is a delicious fruit, although covered with sharp barbed spines and thorns. It is full of hard large woody seeds, but the people are very fond of the fruit. Sheikh Nasif el Yazijy was a famous Arab poet and scholar, and a young man once brought him a poem to be corrected. He told him to call in a few days and get ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... of Solutr]/e, told the tribe my style was outr]/e — 'Neath a tomahawk of diorite he fell. And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart Of a ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... The one barbed shaft that sped so truly on its fatal mission was delivered with all the strength of venomous hate, just as the canoe was passing out of the lagoon, and beyond bow-shot. It struck the gentle Has-se between the shoulders, and, ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... Yordas was a fine chess-player, as many Indian officers of that time were; and now that he was coming to his proper temperature (after three months of barbed stab of cold, and the breach of the seal of the seventy-seventh phial of Dr. Stirbacks), in gratitude for that miraculous escape, he did his very best to please everybody. To Dr. Upround he was an agreeable and penetrative companion; to Mrs. Upround, a gallant guest, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... question each time that I stopped to remove one of the poisonous spines of the cactus from my feet. Whether my horse lost me or I lost my horse, I am unable to say. I left him grazing in a gulch, and was not again able to locate the gulch. I wandered all night—or until Fate guided me into a barbed wire fence, where, as you will observe, I tore my trousers. I followed the fence, and here I am—I and my companion"—McArthur patted the skull lovingly—"this giant—the slayer of mastodons—whose history lies concealed in 'the dark backward and ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... that a man who has acquired a competence by means of honest toil becomes the target for the barbed shaft ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... meat fresh from the killing and already frozen. An early spring cold-snap was on, and the wildness of the scene was painted in a temperature of thirty below zero. Woven cloth was not in evidence. Furs and soft-tanned leather clad all alike. Boys passed with bows in their hands, and quivers of bone-barbed arrows; and many a skinning-knife of bone or stone Smoke saw in belts or neck-hung sheaths. Women toiled over the fires, smoke-curing the meat, on their backs infants that stared round-eyed and sucked at lumps of tallow. Dogs, ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... The thick cord would then gradually become unwound, and together with the shaft would trail on the ground till at length it would be caught fast in the bamboos or other thick growth, and the pig would then be at the mercy of its pursuers. The steel head, being barbed, could not be pulled out in the pig's struggles to break loose. I had one of these arrows presented to me by the chief of these Negritos, but, as a rule, they are very hard to get as the Negritos value them very highly. An American officer I met in Manila told me that he had been quartered ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... Lecky. All about, the sun shone down upon buildings with a remarkably temporary look about them, and on lawns with a remarkably lush look about them, and signboards with very black lettering on gray paint backgrounds. There was a very small airfield inside the barbed-wire fence about the post, and elaborate machine-shops, and rows and rows of barracks and a canteen and a USO theatre, and a post ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... bees are often more virulent than those of wasps, and attended with more painful effects. The sting being barbed, it is always left in the wound. When therefore a person is stung by a bee, the sting should be instantly extracted, or it will communicate more of its poison, according to the time it is permitted to remain. It should be carefully ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... Time to shoot his barbed minutes at me, suffered the trampling hoof of every hour," etc., all this confided to some childish innocent in "The child's kiss". Whom else should he tell but a child? Where is the man or woman with understanding but has the "child" ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... and forgets you for months on end, who is hard up and worldly and therefore calculating, whose job is to amuse people and who will therefore sacrifice her best, perhaps not most useful, friend to an epigram, whose wit is barbed, who has a fine nose for trouble, and who is always in at the death. Mrs. Scattergood was a small blond woman, high voiced, precise in manner, very positive in her statements which she delivered in a drawling tone, humourless, ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... to perplex them, for they saw that their interrogator knew the difference between a war and a hunting arrow—the former being barbed in order to render its extraction from the wound difficult, while the head of the latter is round and can be drawn out of game that has been ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... doors and windows of the house; and I was only allowed to go out during certain hours in the middle of the day to fetch water from the fountain, or to buy what I needed, and I was allowed to receive no books, newspapers or magazines. A high barbed wire fence, guarded by armed natives, surrounded the village, through which it would have been death to try to escape. All day the pompoms from the armoured trains, that paraded on the railway line nine miles distant, could be heard at intervals; and at night the talk of the ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... up. A cold hand seemed suddenly to have been placed on her heart. Joan,—it was Joan, the girl who, once before, at Martin's house, had sent the earth spinning from under her feet and put Martin suddenly behind barbed wire. What hideous trick was this of Fate's? Why was this moment the one chosen for the appearance of this girl,—his wife? This ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... bristling barbed fences, and trespassers were pointedly warned off, so when one had paid for the privilege, and entered the grounds, he was supposed to be safe from intrusion, except of others who had also bought the right. The part easily accessible ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... out the evening before attending a watermelon recital in the country, and having contributed a portion of his clothing to a barbed-wire fence and the balance to an open-faced Waterbury bull-dog, some one asked him what he thought of the dog as ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... dressed and superbly built fellows, principally from Andalusia, got up precisely like Figaro in the opera. Theirs is the most delicate and graceful operation of the bull-fight. They take a pair of barbed darts, with little banners fluttering at their ends, and provoke the bull to rush at them. At the instant he reaches them, when it seems nothing can save them, they step aside and plant the banderillas in the neck of the bull. If the bull has been cowardly and sluggish, and the spectators have called ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... spoke something clove the air between them and stuck in the earth beyond. They went to it. It was a large arrow having a barbed point and flighted with ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... that he was actually face to face with it, looked not so simple. He was in a country where, a few years before, his quest for "real boys"—as he affectionately termed the type nearest his heart—would have been easy enough. But before the marching ranks of fence posts and barbed wire, the real boys had scattered. A more or less beneficent government had not gathered them together, and held them apart from the changing conditions, as it had done with the Indians. The real boys had either left the country, or had sold their riding outfits and gone into business ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... with one disease and come out of it with ten. Had Shakib been forewarned of Khalid's mind, had he even seen him at the gate before he entered, he would have given him a few hints about the cross-signs and barbed-cordons therein. But should he not have divined that Khalid soon or late was coming? Did he not call enough to him, and aloud? "Get thee behind me on this dromedary," our Scribe, reading his Al-Mutanabbi, would often say to his ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... a word Which bears a sword Can pierce an armed man. It hurls its barbed syllables,— At once is mute again. But where it fell The saved will tell On patriotic day, Some epauletted brother Gave his ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... bedroom. This, too, had changed. It was newly painted and it had new furniture. He saw twin beds separated by an ornate little table with an ornate little lamp, and this looked more ominous a barrier to him than the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire fence around ...
— The First One • Herbert D. Kastle
... grand semicircle around Santiago, starting from El Caney on the north, and running in an irregular line to Aguadores on the south. Throughout this territory the Spaniards had done everything possible to hinder the advance of our troops. Barbed wire was strung in many directions, and often the brushwood would conceal dangerous pitfalls, so that any advance had to be made with ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... them the unhealthiness of the habit, I should not blame him if he gave sermons or lectures about it (with magic-lantern slides), so long as it was in Bromley and about Bromley. Cigarettes may be bad for the health: bombs and bayonets and even barbed wire are not good for the health. I never met a doctor who recommended any of them. But the trouble with this sort of man is that he cannot adjust himself to the scale of things. He would do very good service if he would go among the rich aristocratic ladies ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... the snow winds of the Engadine to blow away from her face the hot defilement of the man's breath. She clung closely to her husband's protection. She, who had hitherto abandoned herself to excessive amiability, barbed the walls of their violated paradise with the broken glass of bare civility. Every man became suspect, the German professors culling Alpine plants, the mountain maniacs with their eyes fixed on peaks to conquer. She had no word for any of them. Even the manlike womenfolk, who ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... The General telephoned to his cousin, who said that the allegation was absurd and that Pivko was one of his best officers. The orderly was therefore thrown into prison, and Pivko, having turned off the electricity from the barbed wires and arranged matters with a Bosnian regiment, made his way to the Italians. The suggestion is that, owing to the lie of the land and the weak Austrian forces, it was possible for the Italians to reach Trent; anyhow the Austrians were amazed when they ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... from bow, then balked of life, of wave-work, one monster, amid its heart went the keen war-shaft; in water it seemed less doughty in swimming whom death had seized. Swift on the billows, with boar-spears well hooked and barbed, it was hard beset, done to death and dragged on the headland, wave-roamer wondrous. Warriors viewed the grisly guest. Then girt him Beowulf in martial mail, nor mourned for his life. His breastplate broad and bright of hues, woven by hand, should the waters try; well ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... Payne, relapsing into a milder mood—"But you will forgive me, I know. I can't bear to see these worthy men blocking the way with their unassailable, unabridged, authentic editions. They are like barbed-wire entanglements: and the worst of it is that, in spite of all their holy air of triumph, they enjoy few things more than tripping each other up! They condemn each other to eternal perdition for ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... quiver, not your leniency, I am indebted for my safety. Your arrows were all skilfully barbed, and even the venom of asps distilled upon them; but you have done your worst, and failed. Parthian tactics ill suit my temper, let me tell you, and just now I should infinitely prefer the Scythian style. Were I only for one brief hour Tomyris, I would carry your head, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... print, on the front page of the town paper. And Laurence told them. He had appalling lists and figures and names and dates. The "chiel among us takin' notes" printed them. Dabney's editorial comments were barbed. ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... saw the top of the gate beneath his body, and he felt a thrill as he beheld twisted strands of barbed wire, cruel and jagged, across it; then, with a great sensation of joy, he knew that he had cleared the top, and a second later, he landed on the ground, in the country road, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... France, Russia, and Italy must have met the Crown Prince of Germany at more or less close quarters, and formed their own estimates of his character. The barbed-wire fence of protective ceremony which usually surrounds Royal personages, concealing their little human foibles, was periodically broken down in the case of the Heir-Apparent to the German Throne ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... wily; he was something wicked. The suggestion of danger to Kingsley's life had made her wince, and he had added another little barbed arrow to keep the first company. The cause was a good one. Hurt now to heal afterwards—and Kingsley was an old friend, and a good fellow. Anyhow, this work was wasting her life, and she would be much better back in England, living ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... when he slakes his thirst The rivers dwindle, and he thinks to draw The depths of Jordan dry. Wilt cast thy hook And take Leviathan? Wilt bind thy yoke Upon him, as a vassal? Will he cringe Unto thy maidens? See the barbed spear The dart and the habergeon, are his scorn. Sling-stones are stubble, keenest arrows foil'd, And from the plaited armor of his scales The glittering sword recoils. Where he reclines, Who is so daring as to rouse him up, With his cold, ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... is another phase of this pastime. The javelin is four to five feet in length, three quarters of an inch in thickness, and fitted with a barbed end, slightly heavier than the spear end. The "object of the game" is to throw the javelin as far as possible but not at a target; instead, the javelin must ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... She cast a barbed glance towards Stella as she spoke as Monck guided her to the least crowded corner of the ball-room. Stella's delicate face was flushed, but it was the exquisite flush of a blush-rose. Her eyes were of a starry brightness; she had the radiant look of one who has ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... because the townspeople believe that Ypres had been saved by the intercession of the Virgin Mary—the word Thuin meaning in Flemish "an enclosed space, such as a garden plot," an allusion to the barrier of thorns which had so well kept the enemy away from the walls—a sort of predecessor of the barbed-wire entanglements used in the ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... Boiled to the consistence of tar, it is then smeared upon the blade. The action of the poison is to corrode the flesh, which loses its fiber, and drops away like jelly, after severe inflammation and swelling. The arrows are barbed with diabolical ingenuity; some are arranged with poisoned heads that fit into sockets; these detach from the arrow on an attempt to withdraw them; thus the barbed blade, thickly smeared with poison, remains in the wound, and before it can be cut out the poison is ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... wits are more pointed than the blind mawla Abu 'l-Aina (806-96), whose tongue was venomously barbed, and who, like other blind men, often used his malady as a protection when his satire had been excessive. Viziers were his favourite butts. Being one day in the society of one of them, the conversation turned ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... did not feel the indifference he affected, for his face as he ate grew darker, and from time to time he shot a glance, barbed with suspicion, at the minister. La Tribe on his side remained silent, although the men ate apart. He was in doubt, indeed, as to his own feelings. His instinct and his reason were at odds. Through all, however, a single purpose, ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... the sovereign frequently armed himself against his subjects; subjects waged war with their sovereign; citizens gave activity to the most sanguinary hostility against each other; parents detested their offspring; children plunged the pointed steel, the barbed arrow, into the bosoms of those who gave them existence; husbands and wives disunited, became the scourges of each other; relations forgetting the ties of consanguinity, tore each other to pieces, or else reciprocally consigned them to oblivion; all the bonds of society were rent asunder; the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... appointed, the Lord High Constable and the Lord High Marshal of England, with a very great company, and splendidly arrayed, first entered the lists. About the hour of prime the Duke of Hereford appeared at the barriers on a white courser, barbed with blue and (p. 030) green velvet, sumptuously embroidered with swans and antelopes[32] of goldsmith's work,[33] and armed at all points. The King himself soon after entered with great pomp, attended by the peers of the realm, and above ten thousand men ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... there flitted impossible plans to be tried if we landed in Boche territory. After setting fire to the machine we would attempt to hide, and then, at night-time, creep along a communication trench to the enemy front line, jump across it in a gap between the sentries, and chance getting by the barbed wire and across No Man's Land. Or we would steal to the Somme, float down-stream, and somehow or other pass the entanglements placed across the river by the enemy. Wouff! wouff! ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... Baron Henry had wheeled his horse. Once again he couched lance, and again he drove down upon his bruised and wounded enemy. This time the lance struck full and fair, and those who watched saw the steel point pierce the iron breast-plate and then snap short, leaving the barbed point ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... Perhaps she had hoped to hold the King's fancy more surely than her fellows. She, too, winged her compliment, but she barbed it with ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... armour of the best temper Milan could afford, together with a trusty war-horse, which he entreated him to use upon the field of battle; for Bertha had not omitted to intimate Count Robert's want of the means of knightly equipment. The horse was brought before the pavilion accordingly, completely barbed or armed in steel, and laden with armour for the knight's body. Godfrey himself put the bridle ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... to whom Mr. Lupton presently introduced the ensigns, was a man in his fifties, rather bald, and with a decided stoop in his shoulders. At home he was a manufacturer of barbed wire, and his business, as Danny later suggested, had perhaps helped to give him some of his keenness and sharpness. He was slenderly fashioned, and reminded one, at first, of a professor ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... manager of a big lumber company. We have just leased two thousand acres of the Limberlost. Many of these trees are of great value. We can't leave our camp, six miles south, for almost a year yet; so we have blazed a trail and strung barbed wires securely around this lease. Before we return to our work, I must put this property in the hands of a reliable, brave, strong man who will guard it every hour of the day, and sleep with one eye open at night. I shall require the entire length of the trail to be walked at least twice each ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... tropical undergrowth, under barbed-wire fences and over wire entanglements, regardless 20 of casualties, up the hill to the right this gallant advance was made. As we appeared on the crest we found the Spaniards retreating only to take up a new position farther on, spitefully firing as they retired ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... government, once so sacred for the sublime and pathetic scenes enacted there during the famous siege and in the magistracy of Peter van der Werff, was accordingly enclosed by a solid palisade of oaken planks, strengthened by rows of iron bars with barbed prongs: The entrenchment was called by the populace the Arminian Fort, and the iron spear heads were baptized Barneveld's teeth. Cannon were planted at intervals along the works, and a company or two of the Waartgelders, armed from head to foot, with snaphances on their shoulders, stood ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to the light. the under side of the wings and tail are of a sooty black. it has ten feathers in the tail, sharply pointed, and those in the center reather longest, being 21/2 inches in length. the tongue is barbed, pointed, and of an elastic cartelaginous substance. the eye is moderately large, puple black and iris of a dark yellowish brown. this bird in it's actions when flying resembles the small redheaded woodpecke common to the Atlantic states; it's note also somewhat resembles that bird. ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... in that their horses are in high condition, and they talk hopefully of getting past the barbed wire one of these days and coming into their own. Meantime, they are employed on "various work as requisite," and they all sympathize with our rough-rider of Dragoons who flatly refused to take off his spurs in the trenches. If he had to die as a damned infantryman, he ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... from the Blues and Yellows of Lansmere, sad and forlorn,—yet, forced into action, the eloquence that was natural to his conversation poured itself forth. He had warm blood in his veins; and his dislike to Randal gave poignancy to his wit, and barbed his arguments with impassioned invective. In fact, Leonard could conceive no other motive for Lord L'Estrange's request to take part in the election than that nobleman's desire to defeat the man whom they both regarded as an impostor; and this notion was confirmed by some inadvertent ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... strongly disapproved, was apt to express her censure in terms that gave a very humiliating sensation to the person against whom it was directed. Her displeasure however never assumed its severest form, but when it was barbed by disappointment. Where she expected little, she was not very rigid in her censure ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... in order to give it the desired tint, others drawing a shirt from the dye-pot or hanging it up on ropes fastened to the trees. Further on, a blacksmith, busy with his rude tools making a dagger, a formidable barbed spear, or some more useful instrument of husbandry. Here a caravan appears from Gonga bringing the desired kola-nut, chewed by all who have ten kurdie to spare; or another caravan laden with natron; or a troop of A'sbenawa going off ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... the Grain Growers' Grain Company added to the list of commodities in 1912-13—fence posts, woven fence wire, barbed wire and binder twine. Followed other staples—cement, plaster, sash and doors, hardware and other builders' supplies; sheet metal roofing and siding, shingles, curbing, culverts, portable granaries, etc.; ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... Austria's envoy, who witnessed the scene from a window, is characteristic. After the solemn procession which was belle et gorgiaise he saw the king, clothed in a glittering suit of armour and mounted on a barbed charger, accoutred in white and cloth of silver, prick his steed, making it prance and rear, faisant rage, that he might display his horsemanship, his fine figure and dazzling costume before the queen and her ladies. ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... of the arrow, made of some extremely hard wood, was about ten inches in length. Affixed to it was a pointed fish-bone, sharp, but not barbed, and not fastened in a manner suggestive of much strength. The arrow was neither feathered nor grooved for a bowstring. Altogether it seemed to be a childish weapon to be used by men equipped ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... and Jose smiled as if enjoying a secret joke. They were. For they knew something of which the Americans were not aware—that Monitaya had improved on the trench-trap idea of the whites by studding the bottom of those trenches with barbed araya bones smeared ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... in addition to having more elaborately barbed points, are further embellished by incised decorations the entire length of the shaft. These incisions consist simply of a series of lines into which dirt has been rubbed so that they offer a striking contrast to the white surface ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... west; a seemingly endless succession of diminishing posts. He estimated that there must he at least forty thousand acres under fence. According to location, this was The Spider's ranch—the Olla—Pete reined around and rode along the fence for a mile or so, searching for a gateway; but the taut barbed wire ran on and on, toward a sun that was rounding swiftly down to the western horizon. He dismounted and pulled the staples from several lengths of wire until he had enough slack to allow the top wire to touch the ground. He stood on the wires and jockeyed Blue Smoke across, ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... surface to breathe. Tom Turner and one of the men were in the bow. Within his reach was one of those javelin-bombs, of Californian make, which are shot from an arquebus and which are shaped as a metallic cylinder terminated by a cylindrical shell armed with a shaft having a barbed point. Robur was a little farther aft, and with his right hand signaled to the engineers, while with his left, he directed the steersman. He thus controlled the aeronef in every way, horizontally and vertically, and it is almost impossible to conceive with what speed and precision ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... of bouquet of flames shot forth from the crater, the brilliancy of which was visible even through the vapours. Thousands of luminous sheets and barbed tongues of fire were cast in various directions. Some, extending beyond the dome of smoke, dissipated it, leaving behind an incandescent powder. This was accompanied by successive explosions, resembling the discharge of a battery ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne) |
