"Bodkin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Nymph in thy orisons Be ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... earth, the peerless wonder of the transportation world, the winged victory of the roads. Don't let your head swell, James. Better keep it solid bone than have it turn into a toy balloon; because the latter can be pricked with a bare bodkin." ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... cry'd out, but there was no one near to help us; and as I was offering to bid 'em keep the peace, Psyche fell a nipping and pricking me with her bodkin: on the other side also, the young wench half stifled Ascyltos with a dish-clout she had ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... much the fashion, visiting in the best Dublin society and making many friends, whom she had the tact to retain through life. When articles of dress or ornament are named for one, it is an unfailing sign that they have attained notoriety, if not fame, and the bodkin used for fastening the "back hair" was called "Glorvina" in her honor. Like many attractive women of decided character, she had her full share of faults and foibles. Superficial, conceited, sadly lacking in spirituality and refinement, a cruel enemy, a toady to titles, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... my name was pronounced and heard by one of the Miss Southebys, who stretched her cordial hand. "Glad—proud—glad—we'll squeeze—we'll make room for you between me and my friend Miss Fitzhugh;" and so I was bodkin, but never touched the bench till long after. I cast a lingering look at my deserted sisters twain. "No, no, we can't do that!" so, that hope killed off, I took to make the best of my own selfish position, and surveyed all beneath me, from the black heads of the reporter gentlemen, with ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Quills, or small Rockets on its Head, you may put in about an Inch and a half of dry Powder for the Bounce, but if you are to place the fore-mention'd things on the Head of a great Rocket, you must close down the Paper or Paste-board very hard, and prick two or three holes with a Bodkin, that it may give fire to them when it Expires, placing a large Cartoush or Paste-board on the head of the Rocket, into which you must put the Stars or small Rockets, Paper-Serpents, or Quill-Serpents; of which ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... the idea of the lady in the case," he muttered impatiently. "What a fool I am! As if it was likely that poor old Mal would try to make his quietus with a bare bodkin—modernised into a six-shooter—because old Brettison was huffed at his borrowing money. I must pump it out ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... pleased with Jack, and grandma continued to grumble over his misdemeanors, especially when he would rummage in her work-basket, and carry off her silver thimble or bright steel bodkin. ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... cannot tell; but it stirs me more than all your court-curls, or your spangles, or your tricks: I affect not these high gable-ends, these Tuscan tops, nor your coronets, nor your arches, nor your pyramids; give me a fine, sweet-little delicate dressing with a bodkin, as you say; and a mushroom for ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... you are going to be put through a viva voce examination. Sit down in front of the work-basket, and answer without any shuffling or trying to escape. Now then! Distinguish between a darning-needle and a bodkin." She nipped up Mrs Trevor's spectacles from a side-table, as she spoke, perched them on the end of her nose, and stared over them with an assumption of great ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... is the formula with which Apollonius of Tyana closed every prayer and gave as the summary of all: "Give me, ye Gods, what I deserve"—Doiete moi ta opheilomena. The Christian's comment on this would be in the words of Hamlet's reply to Polonius: "God's bodkin, man! use every man after his desert ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... forget you," said Emlyn, "and when we come back with the King and Prince, and drive the Roundhead ragamuffins out of Bristol, then I'll bring Stead a protection for Croppie and Daisy and all, a silver bodkin for you, and a Flanders lace collar for Patience, and a gold chain for Stead, and—But oh! wasn't that a trumpet? Stead! Stead! We must go, or we shall miss them." Then as she hugged and kissed them, "I'll tell Sir Harry and my lady how good you have been to me, and get my lady to make you a tirewoman, ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... abbe picked it up, and observing that all the sediment had remained at the bottom, he gathered together on a silver bodkin all that had coagulated on the sides of the glass and all that had sunk to the bottom, and presenting this ball, which was about the size of a nut, to the marquise, on the end of the bodkin, he said, "Come, madame, you must swallow ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... debtor and creditor between you and the Company?" He does no such thing. There lies a suspicion in his breast that Mr. Hastings must have taken some money in some irregular way, or he could not have made those payments. Mr. Larkins begins to suspect him. "Where did you lose this bodkin?" said one lady to another, upon a certain occasion. "Pray, Madam, where did you find it?" Mr. Hastings, at the very moment of his life when confidence was required, even when making up his accounts with his accountant, never told him one word of the matter. You see he had no confidence ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... else are as necessary and natural in the place. But now nothing is good that is natural; right and natural language seems to have least of the wit in it; that which is writhed and tortured is counted the more exquisite. Cloth of bodkin or tissue must be embroidered; as if no face were fair that were not powdered or painted! no beauty to be had but in wresting and writhing our own tongue! Nothing is fashionable till it be deformed; and this is to write like a gentleman. ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... hand, my wife, instead of using her hand as everybody does, pulled a little case out of her pocket, and took out of it a kind of bodkin, with which she picked up the rice, and put it into her ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... vain conceit, As if this flesh, which walls about our life, Were brass impregnable; and, humour'd thus, Comes at the last, and with a little pin[1] Bores through his castle wall, and—farewell, King!" [Footnote 1: In Hamlet's famous soliloquy the pin is a "bodkin."] ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... which they say he hath fourescore or fourescore and ten children. He sitteth in iudgement almost euery day. [Sidenote: Paper of the leaues of a tree.] They vse no speech, but giue vp their supplications written in the leaues of a tree with the point of an yron bigger then a bodkin. These leaues are an elle long, and about two inches broad; they are also double. He which giueth in his supplication, doth stand in a place a little distance off with a present. If his matter be liked of, the king accepteth of his present, and granteth his request: if his sute he not liked ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... thing, to paste, pomatum, billet-doux, and patches. Airs, languid airs, breathe around;—the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toilette is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the Goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity, is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... With this bare bodkin Harrison Gray Otis thought to puncture the Southern panic. But the slaveholders had correcter notions of the nature and tendency of the Abolition enterprise than had the Boston mayor. They had a strange, an obstinate presentiment of disaster from the first instant that the Liberator ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... judge, "I am going to hold the bodkin, of which the eye is sufficiently large, to put this thread into it without trouble. If you do put it in, I will take up your case, and will make Monseigneur offer ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... received his letter just as he was about to leave Castle Morony for the meet at Ballytowngal, the seat, as everybody knows, of Sir Nicholas Bodkin. Ballytowngal is about two miles from Claregalway, on the road to Oranmore. Sir Nicholas is known all through the West of Ireland, as a sporting man, and is held in high esteem. But there is, I think, something different in the ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... at a little table, upon which stood a prim work-box, with every reel of cotton and glistening steel bodkin in its appointed place. She was darning the coarse gray stockings that adorned her husband's awkward feet, but she did her work as daintily as if they had been my lady's ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... to be the end of it all? Though Eliza Hamlyn went straight out and despatched that syren of the golden hair with a poison-tipped bodkin (and possibly her will might be good to do it), it could not make things any the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... letters and pronounce the words. They read rapidly; and you should see them blush, poor little things, when they make a mistake. And they write, too, without ink. They write on a thick and hard sort of paper with a metal bodkin, which makes a great many little hollows, grouped according to a special alphabet; these little punctures stand out in relief on the other side of the paper, so that by turning the paper over and drawing their fingers across these projections, they can read what they have written, and also the ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... scorns of time, Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns Which patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourne No traveller returns, puzzles the will: And makes us ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... being provided with a brace of good pistols, which I was fully determined to use against any person who should presume to lay violent hands upon me, except my lord, for whom a less mortal weapon would have sufficed, such as a bodkin or a tinder-box. Nothing could be farther from my intention than the desire of hurting any living creature, much less my husband: my design was only to defend myself from cruelty and oppression, which I knew, by fatal experience, would infallibly be my lot, should ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... corner is only one-half its actual size. The kerchief itself is about twenty-two inches square and is very dainty in effect. The stars which fill in the central portion are very simple to make, and the eyelets in each are punched with a bodkin and then worked once around in point de Bruxelles or button-hole stitch. The kerchief is made of fine Brussels net and the darning is done with ...
— The Art of Modern Lace Making • The Butterick Publishing Co.
... ever got such a fright in my life. My gun had gone to the bottom along with the boat, and the only weapon I had left was a short hunting knife, which against such a beast as that would be of no more use than a bodkin. I fairly gave myself up for lost, making sure that in another moment he'd spring forward and tear ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... profession were allowed to rescind the matrimonial obligation. Whoever transgressed the permission of the law was subject to various and heavy penalties. The woman was stripped of her wealth and ornaments, without excepting the bodkin of her hair: if the man introduced a new bride into his bed, her fortune might be lawfully seized by the vengeance of his exiled wife. Forfeiture was sometimes commuted to a fine; the fine was sometimes aggravated by transportation to an island or imprisonment ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... the Lombards of the Iron Crown—it is with this mine heart is throbbing, and man saith, 'Be still!' How can I be still, unless I were still in death? And man reckoneth I shall be a-paid for my lost sword with a needle, and for my broken sceptre he offereth me a bodkin!" ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... of this essay was the activity at that time of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, founded in 1818, of which a Mr. W.H. Bodkin was the Hon. Secretary. The Society's motto was "Benefacta male collocata, malefacta existima;" and it attempted much the same work now performed by the Charity Organisation Society. Perhaps the delight ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... from beyond the mountains, for such stone was rarely found along the lower Columbia. Squaws sat in front of their wigwams sewing mats,—carefully sorting the rushes, putting big ends with little ends, piercing each with a bodkin, and sewing them all together with a long bone needle threaded with buckskin or sinew. Others were weaving that water-tight wickerwork which was, perhaps, the highest art to which the Oregon Indians ever attained. ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... on Paper, for of that they have little or none; but on a Talli-pot leaf with an Iron Bodkin, which makes an impression. This leaf thus written on, is not folded, but rolled up like Ribbond, and ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... careless of his charge, His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large, Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'ertake his sins, 125 Be stopp'd in vials, or transfix'd with pins; Or plung'd in lakes of bitter washes lie, Or wedg'd whole ages in a bodkin's eye: Gums and Pomatums shall his flight restrain, While clogg'd he beats his silken wings in vain; 130 Or Alum styptics with contracting pow'r Shrink his thin essence like a rivel'd flow'r: Or, as Ixion fix'd, the ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... epigram is the best loved form of wit among us Sodomites. We love it for its own sake, but more for the pain it gives the other fellow. We like to see him squirm, and we have many a joyous hour over our friends' misfortunes. Turn yourself into a mental bodkin, and you will find favor among us, for it is better to be feared than loved in our ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... First my bodkin I must place With my needle in their case; I like to put them by with care And then I always ...
— Aunt Kitty's Stories • Various
... to the Savage Enemy, who being taken againe were putt to sundry deathes as by hanginge, shooting and breaking uppon the wheele and others were forced by famine to filch for their bellies, of whom one for steelinge of 2 or 3 pints of oatmeale had a bodkin thrust through his tounge and was tyed with a chain to a tree untill he starved, if a man through his sicknes had not been able to worke, he had noe allowance at all, and soe consequently perished. Many ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... every man, and no woman, there comes a moment when he learns suddenly that he is held eligible for marriage. A girl gives him the jag, and it brings out the perspiration. Of the issue elsewhere of this stab with a bodkin let others speak; in Thrums its commonest effect is to make the callant's body take a right angle to his legs, for he has been touched in the fifth button, and he backs away broken-winded. By and by, however, he is at his work—among the turnip-shoots, say—guffawing and clapping his corduroys, ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... speak truth, they are but barely decent. And so, if Rose will turn herself, and put her horse out of my way," continued the tire- woman, "I will put your dress in better order in the sticking in of a bodkin, than any Fleming of them all could ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... caused them to disperse, and they discontinued the pursuit. But the principal exorcist having taken out a screw from the angle where they had first heard the noise, found in a hole in the wall some feathers, three bones wrapped up in a dirty piece of linen, some bits of glass, and a hair-pin, or bodkin. He blessed a fire which they lighted, and had all that thrown into it. But this monk had hardly reached his convent when one of the printers came to tell him that the bodkin had come out of the flames three ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... crevice, loophole, interstice, gap, spiracle, vent, bung, pothole, manhole, scuttle, scupper, muset, muse; cave, holt, den, lair, retreat, cover, hovel, burrow. Antonyms: imperforation, closure. Associated words: auger, drill, gimlet, bodkin, bore, bit, puncture, perforate, pink, awl, stylet, imperforable, imperforate, punch, wimble, pierce, eyeleteer, dibble, plug, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... conquerors, and the Scandinavian names which passed into Normandy, contained very much the same elements as our own native names, but underwent a different phonetic development. Thus I would rather explain Bawden, Bowden, Boulders, Boden, and the dims. Body and Bodkin, as Old French variants from the Old Ger. Baldawin than as coming directly from Anglo-Saxon. Boyden undoubtedly goes back to ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... would be virtually non-existent already. The end would have come, and the thing left to put an end to would no longer be a Life. It would only be a sensibility to pain, with an ample supply of it. A bare bodkin would do the business, but did not recommend itself. The right proportion of Prussic Acid had much to say on its own behalf. It was cheap, clean, certain, and the taste of ratafia was far from unpleasant. But he had a lingering favourable impression of the Warroo medicine-man, whose faith in the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Therewith a golden bodkin from her hair She drew, and from a green-tress'd birchen tree She pluck'd a strip of smooth white bark and fair, And many signs and woful graved she, A message of the evil things to be. Then deftly closed the birch-bark, fold on fold, ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... rather, who ought to accompany my lady Dona Casilda'—for that was my mistress's name. Still my husband, cap in hand, persisted in trying to accompany the alcalde, and seeing this my lady, filled with rage and vexation, pulled out a big pin, or, I rather think, a bodkin, out of her needle-case and drove it into his back with such force that my husband gave a loud yell, and writhing fell to the ground with his lady. Her two lacqueys ran to rise her up, and the alcalde and the alguacils did the same; the Guadalajara gate was all in commotion—I ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... you are making. The mesentery is a delicate, narrow membrane about twenty feet long. We will compare it to the ruffle. Folded in it at one edge are the small intestines, just as I can run this bodkin into the hem of this ruffle. The other edge of the mesentery is gathered up as you have gathered the ruffle. It is gathered into a space of about six inches in length, and is fastened up and down the spine in the region of the small of the ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... such sights, by sea and by land!—but I am not to say it is a sea, for it is now the sky: betwixt the firmament and it, you cannot thrust a bodkin's point. ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... in pushing on. No coolies were up; the tents and baggage were far behind; we had nothing to eat; we had left the fine open country, which was full of game, miles behind us, and we were in a close jungle country, where a rifle was not worth a bodkin. It was too annoying. I voted for turning back to the lovely hunting-ground that we had deserted; but after a long consultation, we came to the conclusion that every day was of such importance to V. Baker that we could not afford ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... affectionately as "children of the Sun," he exhorted them to imitate their great progenitor in his glorious career of beneficence to mankind. The novices then drew near, and, kneeling one by one before the Inca, he pierced their ears with a golden bodkin; and this was suffered to remain there till an opening had been made large enough for the enormous pendants which were peculiar to their order, and which gave them, with the Spaniards, the name of orejones.29 This ornament was so massy in the ears of the sovereign, that ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... possession. But it is a possession of which, unfortunately, he cannot rid himself when he finds that there is nothing advantageous to be done with it. Doubtless there is a way of riddance. There is the bare bodkin. Or a man may fall overboard between Holyhead and Kingston in the dark, and may do it in such a cunning fashion that his friends shall think that it was an accident. But against these modes of riddance there is a canon set, which some men still ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes; When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, To groan and sweat under a weary life; But that the dread of something after death (That undiscover'd country, from whose bourne No traveller returns) puzzles the will; And makes us rather bear those ills we have, Than fly to others that ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... that he was not able to carry home the money. It was difficult, indeed, for the poor tailor to bear what he felt; it is true he bore it as long as he could; but at length he became suicidal, and often had thoughts of "making his own quietus with his bare bodkin." After many deliberations and afflictions, he ultimately made the attempt; but, alas! he found that the blood of the Malones refused to flow upon so ignominious an occasion. So he solved the phenomenon; ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... stood by when that poor mad wretch Damiens was pulled to pieces by horses in the Greve. I have seen what the plague could do in the galleys at Marseilles. Death and I have been boon companions and bedfellows. He has danced a jig with me on a plank, and ridden bodkin, and gone snacks with me for a lump of horse-flesh in a beleaguered town; but no man can say that John Dangerous had aught but a bold face to show that Phantom who frights nursemaids ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... was right to distrust his own skill; after sundry unsuccessful attempts, the fact was patent that his genius did not lie in the direction of cutting out pretty shapes in thin cardboard with the point of a penknife. But when, at his suggestion, Brotteaux gave him some string and a bodkin, he showed himself very apt in endowing with motion the little creatures he had failed to make and teaching them to dance. He had a happy knack, by way of trying them afterwards, of making them each execute three or four steps of a gavotte, and when they rewarded his pains, a smile would flicker ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... occasion which assembled all three together, had seated himself on the board behind the carriage, "just to be in the way in case they wanted a touch before the gentlemen sat down to dinner." Between the two massive figures of Monkbarns and the clergyman was stuck, by way of bodkin, the slim form of Mary M'Intyre, her aunt having preferred a visit to the manse, and a social chat with Miss Beckie Blattergowl, to investigating the ruins of the priory of ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... assurance of sympathy and protection. Various stories got abroad as to the cause of this horror, one probably as false as another; and, for his own part, Byron met them by a false story of Miss Milbanke's lady's-maid having been stuck in, bodkin-wise, between them. As Lady Byron certainly soon got over the shock, the probability is that she satisfied herself that he had been suffering under one of the dark moods to which he was subject, both constitutionally and as the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... bit off," said Philpot, trying to stick the substance with a long bodkin, in order ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... rise to their feet, and wildly wave their hats as PREMIER passes to table. Been some effective speaking on this last night of Debate. CHAMBERLAIN, BLAKE, and JOHN MORLEY, each excellent in varied way. Only few Members present to hear BODKIN insert maiden speech in dinner-hour. A remarkable effort, distinguished, among other things, by necessity of SPEAKER twice interposing, second time with ominous threat that BODKIN could not be tolerated much longer. BODKIN, resuming thread of his discourse, humbly apologised, kept his eye (BODKIN'S ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 25, 1893 • Various
... a close jacket, reaching to their knees, with spatterdashes, all of coarse blue cloth, shoes of deer-skin, embroidered with porcupine quills, and sometimes with silver spangles; and a blanket thrown across their shoulders, and fastened before with a kind of bodkin, with necklaces, and other ornaments of ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... his bosom, and continues in a tone of fervent adjuration.) Oh! Louisa! Louisa! Fallen, perhaps already lost, daughter! Treasure in thy heart the solemn counsels of a father! I cannot eternally watch over thee! I may snatch the dagger from thy hands; but thou canst let out life with a bodkin. I may remove poison from thy reach; but thou canst strangle thyself with a necklace. Louisa! Louisa! I can only warn thee. Wilt thou rush boldly forward till the perfidious phantom which lured thee on vanishes at the awful ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... had forgotten a good deal; and every other word was linked with distracting memories: his mother leaning from her embroidery frame to follow the line with her bodkin; his mother, erect and stern, bidding Brother Ambrose bear him away and flog him for his idleness; his mother hearing his lesson with one arm around him and the other hand holding the sweetmeat she would give him if he succeeded. He did not notice that Rolf's eyes were gradually closing, ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... was afraid and shockd at so loathsome a Spectacle. She stepped back, swollen with Rage, to see if I had the Insolence to repeat it. I did, with this Addition, that her ill-timed Passion had increased her Ugliness. Enraged, inflamed, distracted, she snatched a Bodkin, and with all her Force stabbed me to the Heart. Dying, I preserv'd my Sincerity, and expressed the Truth, tho' in broken Words; and by reproachful Grimaces to the last I mimick'd the Deformity ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... assembled, after a ten hours' fast, round the luxurious profusion and delicacies of a Languedocian dinner, would appear mere babes and sucklings in the eating way, compared to a party of Germans at their one o'clock feed. The difference is nearly as great as between the Lady Amine eating rice with a bodkin, and the same fair one battening ghoulishly upon the cold meat in the cemetery. Nothing can equal the persevering industry with which a German crams himself at a public table, where, having to pay a fixed sum ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... there, but neither took much note of me—Monsieur Doltaire not at all. Those two either hate each other lovingly, or love hatefully, I know not which, they are so biting, yet so friendly to each other's cleverness, though their style of word-play is so different: Monsieur Doltaire's like a bodkin-point, Captain Moray's like a musket-stock a-clubbing. Be not surprised to see the British at our gates any day. Though we shall beat them back, I shall feel no less easy because I have a friend in the enemy's camp. You may guess who. Do not smile. He is old enough to be my father. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... gladly and with all your very heart suffer then so lytle a payne as that is? SPV Verye gladlye, yea, rather if I knewe perfectlye that my teeth would neuer ake, I would willynglye suffer too bee prycked depe with a nedle, and too haue both mine eares bored through with a bodkin. HEDO. Surely what payne soeuer happeneth in this lyfe, it is lesse and shorter, compared with the eternall paines, then is the soden pricke of a needle, incompariso of the ||E.iii.|| lyfe of man though it bee neuer ...
— A Very Pleasaunt & Fruitful Diologe Called the Epicure • Desiderius Erasmus
... [interposition by one person in another's affairs, at the intervenor's initiative] intervention, interference; intrusion, obtrusion; insinuation. insertion &c 300; dovetailing; embolism. intermediary, intermedium^; go between, bodkin^, intruder, interloper; parenthesis, episode, flyleaf. partition, septum, diaphragm; midriff; dissepiment^; party wall, panel, room divider. halfway house. V. lie between, come between, get between; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... what discreet motherhood! When Christmas came, it appears that baby hung up her stocking with the rest. Her devoted parent had bought for her a slate with a real pencil. Others provided thimble and scissors and bodkin and a spool of thread, and a travelling-shawl with a strap, and a cap with tarletan ruffles. "I found baby with the cap on, early in the morning, and she was so pleased she almost jumped out of my arms." Thus in ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... he has a patten to take up all the shields ith countrey. Hang me, if thou wantst worke heeres for Navar, the earle of Pembrok and Cavaliero Bowier. [Fight.] A thousand pound to a Taylors bodkin this fellow has a familiar; but howsomever, thou mayst thank my lame legge. ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... than the King repented him of sending one man alone into a night so dark that a bodkin might pierce a hole in it, and girding on his scimitar, he followed his guard beyond the city gates. When Vira-vara had gone thus far he encountered a beautiful and splendidly dressed lady who was weeping bitterly; and accosting ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... gown, puffed with crimson velvet, a velvet hood lined with white satin, a girdle of gold and pearls, crimson stockings, white satin slippers, a lace rebato, and a pearl necklace. Oh, how charming you would look! You would not know yourself. Then I should put a gold bodkin in your hair, and a head-drop of pearls set round a diamond, and bracelets instead of these lawn cuffs, and a fan; and wash your face in distilled waters, and odoriferous oils ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... declared. Horses fall with their masters, servants throw them down. What a happiness it is when people can send their servants on errands by coaches or railways, instead of being kept on the fidget all day, lest a fifty-pound horse should be the price of a bodkin or ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... in one of whose venerable triremes I, too, ascend the stream of time, while other hands tug at the oars!—ye Amines of parasitical literature, who pick up your grains of native-grown food with a bodkin, having gorged upon less honest fare, until, like the great minds Goethe speaks of, you have "made a Golgotha" of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of skins as soon as we get enough," said Hector.—"Louis, I think you can manufacture a bone needle; we can pierce the hole with the strong thorns, or a little round bone bodkin ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... and, as far as he could see, there was not a place where he could have hidden away a bodkin, let alone ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... towards the window, and what should he see sitting on the sill outside but a little woman tapping the pane with a golden bodkin. ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... who married Am[i]n[^e], a very beautiful woman, who ate her rice with a bodkin. Sidi, wishing to know how his wife could support life and health without more food than she partook of in his presence, watched her narrowly, and discovered that she was a ghoul, who went by stealth every night and feasted on the fresh-buried dead. When ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... were the manners to which a great Roman lady had descended in those days in which the Republic was brought to an end. On the rostra was stuck up the head and the hands as a spectacle to the people, while Fulvia specially avenged herself by piercing the tongue with her bodkin. That is the story of Cicero's death as it has been ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... against my ribs like a volley of musket-balls against an oak plank. She wore a black silk robe, such as Spanish women wear at early mass, and around the back part of her head—where the hair was gathered in a glossy knot, and secured by a gold bodkin—fell the heavy folds of a black lace mantilla, the lower end fastened sash fashion around her lithe waist. She stepped, too, like a queen on a pair of slim, long, delicate feet, with arched ball and instep, as if she were ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... came in was a tailor, With his bodkin, shears, and thimble, He swore he would be nimble Among the jovial crew: They sat and they called for ale so stout, Till the poor tailor was almost broke, And was forced to go and pawn his coat, While Joan's ale ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... Winisfarne, with pack-horses well laden—and there were women also—in especial, one very fair. Her, Tostig bore hither. But a while since, when he bade them bring her to him, behold she had stabbed herself with her bodkin. So is she dead and Tostig raging. Thus I say, ye come in an ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... have run my finger through with my bodkin sooner than have made such a fool of myself,' returned Nan. 'And to make it worse, what should come rolling to my poor brother's feet but three or four of our pearls? The pearls of Ribaumont! That was the way she kept them when she had got them, letting the string break, so that they rolled ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... careless of his charge, His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large, Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'ertake his sins, Be stopped in vials, or transfixed with pins; Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie, Or wedged, whole ages, in a bodkin's eye; Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain, While clogged he beats his silken wings in vain; Or alum styptics, with contracting power, Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower; Or, as Ixion fixed, the wretch ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... under which you are sitting, Jacky Bonhomme." Jacques incontinently shifted his position. "He chains him there, with one chain around his neck, one around his waist, and one around his ankles. Then he sticks me a bodkin through his tongue." A groan of admiration from his audience. "Then they dig, before his very eyes, a grave,—shallow enough they make it, too,—and they put into it, uncoffined, with only a long white shroud upon him, the man he murdered. Then they cover the ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... a long one, young master," spoke the robber, and he stooped to pick up Robin's little weapon. "Here is your bodkin—'tis no fault of yours that ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... first, she could not think how the squaws worked with the quills, as they could not possibly thread them through the eye of a needle; but her nurse told her that when they want to work any pattern in birch-bark, they trace it with some sharp-pointed instrument, such as a nail, or bodkin, or even a sharp thorn; with which they pierce holes close together round the edge of the leaf, or blade, or bird they have drawn out on the birch-bark; into these holes they insert one end of the quill, the other end is then drawn through the opposite hole, pulled tight, bent a little, ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... lately: it has disappeared; no one guesses who took it, but whoever he was, as my guide observed, he must have been a thief for thieving's sake truly, as he durst no more exhibit his autograph than tip himself a bare bodkin. Sad, infamous tourist, indeed! Although I saw abundance of comfortable-looking desks and arm chairs, yet this room seemed rather too large and fine for work, and I found accordingly, after passing a double pair of doors, that there was a sanctum within ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... no, Uhlwurm said once more, or ever his master had done speaking, "Gone!" in his deep, mournful voice, and again swept away crumbs, as it might be, in the air. Hereupon so great a fear fell upon me that meseemed a sharp steel bodkin was being thrust into my heart; but Kubbeling had seen me turn pale, and he turned upon Uhlwurm in high wrath, and to the end that I might take courage he cried: "No, no, I say no. What does the old fool know about it! It is only by reason that the galley tarried for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... patient merit of the unworthy takes; When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin. Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death— The undiscovered country, from whose bourne No traveler returns—puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... swords," he said, "but I am Dane enough to like the axe best. Settle it as you will. Of course he knows naught of axe play, so that you are right in not pressing it on him. He is a light man, and active, and maybe will be glad not even to try sword to sword; for look at the sort of bodkin he ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... strike the Christians for no cause, and they allowed us but half a pound of bread a man in a day, without any other kind of sustenance, water excepted. And when we came to the place where we saw the carmosel, we were not suffered to have neither needle, bodkin, knife, or any other instrument about us, nor at any other time in the night, upon pain of one hundred bastinadoes: we were then also cruelly manacled, in such sort that we could not put our hands the length of one foot asunder the one from the other, and every night they searched our chains three ...
— Voyager's Tales • Richard Hakluyt
... came to St. Helens, in Lancashire, and there looked up an old friend. He found him in a miserable, damp cellar, scarcely furnished; and when my poor friend went in, there sat poor Jack near the fire, and what did he, think you? why he sat and mended his wife's stockings with the bodkin; and as soon as he saw his old friend at the door-post, he tried to hide them. But Joe, that is my friend's name, had seen it, and said: "Jack, what the devil art thou doing? Where is the missus? Why, is that thy work?" and poor Jack was ashamed, and said: "No, I know this ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... her touch behold Transformed at once the warlike aims of old! The mighty falchion to a penknife shrinks, The mailed meshes from the purse's links; The sturdy lance a bodkin now appears, A bunch of tooth-picks once a hundred spears; A painted toy behold the keen-edged axe! See men of iron turned to dolls ...
— The Hawarden Visitors' Hand-Book - Revised Edition, 1890 • William Henry Gladstone
... country's history were dear, made more familiar by many an antique relic which hung around his own room in his father's house. Celt and sword, and spear-head of Phoenician bronze, and golden gorget, and silver bodkin, and ancient harp, and studded crosier, were there; and these time-worn evidences of arts, and arms, and letters flattered the affection with which he looked back on the ancient history of Ireland, and kept ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... removed her apron, tearing off the strings. She unfastened and stepped from the skirt of her calico dress. With one apron string she tied shut the band and placket. She pulled a wire pin from her hair, stuck it through the other string, and using it as a bodkin ran it around the hem of her skirt, so shortly she had a large bag. She put several branches inside to which the moths could cling, closed the mouth partially and held it ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... who cares no more for it than if it were the slaying of half a dozen sheep, he must needs go and pay frequent visits to Ingeborg and to Halgerda of the Foss—and—and—But I know it is all out of spite, and that he does not care a bodkin for either of them, yet I cannot bear it, and I won't bear it, so he had better look to himself. And yet I would not for the best mantle in the dale that he knew I had two ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... came of a gentle and self-controlled race of New England ministers; but now her young heart carried her away. She stood up; her embroidery, with her scissors and bodkin, slid to the ground, and she came forward with her fair curls dropping around a face pink and smiling openly with love like a child's, and was, seemingly half of her own accord, in Burr Gordon's arms with ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... brief enough, but there was plenty of husk to the grain. The old expatriate was querulous, long-winded, not niggard with his ink when he cursed the English and damned the Prussians; and he obtained much gratification in jabbing his quill-bodkin into what he termed the sniveling nobility of the old regime. Dog of dogs! was he not himself noble? Had not his parents and his brothers gone to the guillotine with the rest of them? But he, thank God, had no wooden mind; ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... secretary; carved mother-of-pearl paper-knife, gold seal, gold pencil, case full of fancy writing paper; made in Paris 1 bula work-box, elegant; inlaid 125 with silver and lined with ci-satin, fitted with gold thimble, needle, scissors, pen-knife, gold bodkin, cotton winders; outside to match French piano 1 long knitting-case to match the 40 above, fitted with needles, beads and silk of every description 1 papier-mache work-box, and 5 fitted up 1 morocco work-bag, ornamented ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... wicked aunt, wedded to Hamlet's father hard upon the murder of her mother, she would have made short work of her vengeance. No fine scruples would have delayed her; she would not have had a moment's question whether she had not better kill herself; she would have out with her bare bodkin and ended the doubt by first passing ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... longifrons), pig, red deer, goat, dog, and hare or rabbit were found near it. One of the bones had evidently been bitten by teeth. The pit dwellers also practised some domestic industries, as Dr. Stevens found a needle, an awl or bodkin, and fragments of pointed bone, probably used for sewing skins together. A rude spindle-whorl shows that they knew something of weaving, and two bored stones were evidently buttons or dress-fasteners. A large supply ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... The words between the two angry women are like rapier-thrusts, keen and aimed at the heart. 'Where did ye get the rose-water that maks your skin so white?' asks the bride; and when Annet's swift retort goes home, she can only respond with the long bodkin drawn from her hair. The word in jest costs the lives of three. Fair Janet's is another tragic wedding; love, and jealousy, and guilt again hold tryst in the little kirk whose grey walls are scarce to be traced on the green platform ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... now, ye lousie b——h, To thresh my back at sic a pitch? Losh, man! hae mercy wi' your natch, Your bodkin's bauld, I didna suffer ha'f sae ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... there went Beneath my hand, oh! manes extravagant. Beneath my trembling fingers, many a mask Of many a pleasant girl. It was my task To gild their hair, carefully, strand by strand; To paint their eyebrows with a timid hand; To draw a bodkin, from a vase of kohl, Through the closed lashes; pencils from a bowl Of sepia to paint them underneath; To blow upon their eyes with a soft breath. They lay them back ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... Bodkin mentions the case of a woman of sixty who fell on the key in a door and completely avulsed her eye. In von Graefe's Archiv there is a record of a man of seventy-five who suffered complete avulsion of the eye by a cart-wheel passing over his ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... However, they were not fighting for pay, as "Stonewall" of Company C argued, but for the "freedom of our kin." Nobly did they do this, not only at Wagner, as we have seen, but in the battles on James Island, Honey Hill, Olustee and at Bodkin's Mill. ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... the Major, "and bring it into the Castle, with every pike, sword, pistol, or gun, that is within our reach; don't leave so much as a bodkin—Lucky that I was here!—I will speak to ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... was heard at Marlborough Street police court, with Mr. Bingham sitting as Magistrate. Mr. Clarkson conducted the prosecution, and Mr. Bodkin appeared for ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... the master, but I won't tell you—partikerly him," said M'liss, indicating the parson with a bodkin-like dart of ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... my self of imploying a way, which produc'd the desir'd Effect both sooner and better. For holding betwixt my Fingers a Steel Bodkin, near the Lower part of it, I press'd the point hard against the Surface of the Diamond, and much more if I struck the point against it, the Coruscation would be extremely suddain, and very Vivid, though very Vanishing too, and this way which commonly much surpris'd and pleas'd the Spectators, ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... damned if I won't sell the lot. They can't have my private property and my public spirit-both.' He brooded in this fashion for several months till one morning, after reading the speech of a certain statesman, he telegraphed to his agent to come down and bring Bodkin. On going over the collection Bodkin, than whose opinion on market values none was more sought, pronounced that with a free hand to sell to America, Germany, and other places where there was an interest in art, a lot more money could be made than by selling ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... with your Bodkin Your Pocket-dagger, your Steletto, out with it, Or by this hand I'le kill you: such as you are Have studied the undoing of poor Cutlers, And made all manly weapons out of fashion: You carry Poniards to murder men, Yet dare not wear a sword to guard ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (1 of 10) - The Custom of the Country • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... swear at a lady of my years in that ojous vulgar way—in that ojous vulgar way I repeat—I don't see why my friends should be inconvenienced for him. Let him sit on the dicky if he likes, or come in and ride bodkin." It was quite clear that my Lady Drum hated her grandson-in-law heartily; and I've remarked somehow in families that this kind of hatred ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pirate captured and took all they money in English war. (Revolution) Dem day Ladies wear bodkin fastened to long gold chain on shoulder—needle in 'em and thimble and ting. Coming down from New York to get away from English. My great grandmother little chillun. Pirate come to her Missus. Take all they money—come cut bodkin ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... crosses, and rows of pearls; the ear-rings are of the shape of a telegraph, and reach nearly to the shoulders; the fingers are covered with rings: and various combs, studded with rows of pearl cased in gold, are placed together with a massive gold bodkin, to great advantage in beautiful hair, plaited in two tails down the back. The feet are barely introduced into a little slipper, turned up very much at the toes, and also richly ornamented. The whole ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... great loss. How patiently hot irons they did take, In crooked trannels[215] crispy curls to make. I cried, "'Tis sin, 'tis sin, these hairs to burn, They well become thee, then to spare them turn. Far off be force, no fire to them may reach, Thy very hairs will the hot bodkin teach." 30 Lost are the goodly locks, which from their crown, Phoebus and Bacchus wished were hanging down. Such were they as Diana[216] painted stands, All naked holding in her wave-moist hands. Why ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... moment I had but one idea of avoiding my fate, and that was to kill myself. 'Twas to this end I had borrow'd the bodkin of the maid. Afterward I had a notion of flinging myself from the window as they came for me. But now, as I look'd down on that coil of rope lying directly below, a prettier scheme struck me. I sat down on the floor of my cell and pull'd ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... much hair as can grow upon the head, and to increase the quantity, they use oils, and other preparations of various kinds. Of this ornament Nature has been very liberal; it is universally black, and is formed into a kind of circular wreath upon the top of the head, where it is fastened with a bodkin, in a taste which we thought inexpressibly elegant: The wreath of hair is surrounded by another of flowers, in which the Arabian jessamine is beautifully intermixed with the golden stars of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... very ill of an obstinate marasmar (?) which so consumed him that he became quite a skeleton, notwithstanding every remedy which he had tried. At length he tried a sympathetic remedy: he took an egg, and having boiled it hard in his own urine, he then with a bodkin perforated the shell in different parts, and then buried it in an ant-hill. As the ants wasted the egg he found his strength increase, and he soon was completely cured. A daughter of a French officer was so tormented by a paronychia (?) for four days together, that the pain kept her from ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... Well, I guess I know Miss Jane Cobden. She and Bart was hunched up that close you couldn't get a bodkin 'tween 'em. She had that red cloak around her and the hood up ever her head. Not know her, and she within ten feet o' me? Well, I guess I got my eyes left, ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... on the 12th instant, Dionysius Haggarty, Esq., of H.M. 120th Foot, to Jemima Amelia Wilhelmina Molloy, daughter of the late Major Lancelot Gam, R.M., and granddaughter of the late, and niece of the present Burke Bodkin Blake Molloy, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Sid was touchy himself, and not the man to bear with such humors. Every day she sat at his bountiful board, and, instead of partaking the food which he set before her, she would daintily and mincingly pick out a few grains of rice with the point of a bodkin. Sid asked her what she meant by such conduct, and whether his table was not well supplied. To this she deigned no reply. When she ate no rice, she would choke down a few crumbs of bread, not enough for a sparrow. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... trencher in his lap, was using his own jack-knife on the dilapidated fragment of the ox, with something of that nicety with which the female ghoul of the Arabian Tales might be supposed to pick her rice with the point of her bodkin. The captain drew a seat nigh the cockswain; and, with a familiarity and kindness infinitely condescending, when the difference in their several conditions is considered, he commenced ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... poore? The widow being oppressd, the orphan wrong'd; [E1] The taste of hunger, or a tirants raigne, And thousand more calamities besides, To grunt and sweate vnder this weary life, When that he may his full Quietus make, With a bare bodkin, who would this indure, But for a hope of something after death? Which pusles the braine, and doth confound the sence, Which makes vs rather beare those euilles we haue, Than flie to others that we know not of. I that, O this conscience makes cowardes of ...
— The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke - The First ('Bad') Quarto • William Shakespeare
... will not spare their coin, But thus their love is shown; Young Richard will buy a bodkin fine And give it honest Joan. There's Nancy and Sue with honest Prue, Young damsels both fair and gay, Will give to the men choice presents again For ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... form of slender filaments, shreds, rods, splints, yarn, twine and sennit or braid. All textile work was done by hand; the only devices known were the bark peeler and beater, the shredder, the flint-knife, the spindle, the rope-twister, the bodkin, the warp- beam and the most primitive harness. The processes involved were gathering the raw material, shredding, splitting, gauging, wrapping, twining, spinning and braiding. Twining and spinning were ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... embrouding or embroidering; endenting or barring; ounding or wavy; paling or imitating pales; and winding or bending; the costlewe furring in the gounes; so much pounsoning of chesel to maken holes (that is, punched with a bodkin); so moche dagging of sheres (cutting into slips); with the superfluitee in length of the gounes trailing in the dong and in the myre, on horse and eke on foot, as wel of man as of woman—that all thilke trailing," he verily believes, which wastes, consumes, wears threadbare, and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... notice she's got a kind of smart look to her? Her bein' so teeny, kind of makes it more so, somehow, too." What stunned the gossips of the windows to awed admiration, however, was the unconcerned and stoical fashion in which she wore a long bodkin straight through her head. It seemed a large sacrifice merely to make sure one's ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... talent, bade her take service at a respectable saddler's, and thus suppress the frowardness of her passion. Her rebellion was instant. Never would she abandon the sword and the wrestling-booth for the harmless bodkin and the hearthstone of domesticity. Being absolute in refusal, she was kidnapped by her friends and sent on board a ship, bound for Virginia and slavery. There, in the dearth of womankind, even so sturdy a wench as Moll ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... is little larger than a pin hole," he said. He took from his pocket a general utility knife and slipped out a thin steel needle. "Pipe cleaners may be very useful," he said, and pressed the long slender bodkin into the aperture. Instantly, and without sound, ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... "With a bare bodkin"—broke in the excited girl. "Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat beneath a weary life, but that the thought of something after death—the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns—puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear the ills ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... dizzy with the swiftness of her flight and the hot sun and the hurry of her heart. Then she looked about a moment confusedly, for she called to mind that in her nakedness she had neither knife, nor scissors, nor bodkin to let her blood withal. But even therewith close to hand she saw hanging down a stem of half-dead briar-rose with big thorns upon it; she hastily tore off a length thereof and scratched her left arm till the blood flowed, and stepped lightly first to stem and then to stern, and besmeared ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... you are in the chain; being in England. You are moved to set down the Emperor as 'the Beast' 666, of course. If he crushes 'Garibaldi you must give him up.' Yes; but what an If. If you stab Miss Heaton with a golden bodkin, right through the heart, under circumstances of peculiar cruelty, I shall have to give up you. If I bake Penini in a pie and eat him, you'll have ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... She had covered her white dress with a mantle of brown linen and over her head she wore a wimple of the same material. Her hair had been coiled and secured with a bodkin. When she put her hand under the wimple and drew it across her mouth, only her fair skin and blue eyes distinguished her from any other Egyptian lady dressed for ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... concealed in her hair, and that she killed herself with that, without producing any visible wound. Another story was, that she had an asp in a box somewhere in her apartment, which she had reserved for this occasion, and when the time finally came, that she pricked and teased it with a golden bodkin to make it angry, and then placed it upon her flesh and received its sting. Which of these stones, if either of them, was true, could never be known. It has, however, been generally believed among mankind that Cleopatra died in some way or other by the self-inflicted sting of the asp, and paintings ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... of doubtful origin. This became in English etwee, or twee, e.g., Cotgrave explains estui (etui) as "a sheath, case, or box to put things in; and (more particularly) a case of little instruments, as sizzars, bodkin, penknife, etc., now commonly termed an ettwee." Such a case generally opens book-fashion, each half being fitted with instruments. Accordingly we find it called a surgeon's "pair of twees," or simply tweese, and later a "pair of tweeses." The implement was named from the case (cf. ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... appears to me to be that of most Irish writing and people." Even in "Charles O'Malley," what a true, dark picture that is of the duel beside the broad, angry river on the level waste under the wide grey sky! Charles has shot his opponent, Bodkin, and with Considine, his second, is making his escape. "Considine cried out suddenly, 'Too infamous, by Jove: we ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... clashing steel, the battle shouts, the cries of dying men—-yea, even the death scream of those sorely stricken comes as a balm to soothe my droning age. But the youthful vigor is gone. This arm could scarcely wield a bodkin; the old friend of many campaigns rusts in its scabbard, and God knows France had never more urgent need of ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... as usual on a sofa, and closing one of her eyes, took the two lashes between the forefinger and thumb of her left hand, pulled them forward, and then, thrusting in at the external corner a sort of bodkin or probe which had been immersed in the soot, and withdrawing it, the particles previously adhering to the probe remained within the eyelashes."—CHANDLER'S Travels ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... work, and a lapboard on which the workman fixes the upsetted bottom while siding up the basket. This is the full kit. A common round or oval basket may, however, be made with no other tools than a shop-knife and a bodkin. On the continent of Europe shapes or blocks are in use on which the fabric ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... and English man of men, arrived at last in the fulness of time, is—who think you? Ye worlds, the Ithuriel javelin by which, with all these heroisms and accumulated energies old and new, the English People means to smite and pierce, is this poor tailor's-bodkin, hardly adequate to bore an eylet-hole, who now has the honor to"—Good Heavens, if it were not that men generally are very much of the canary-bird, here, are reflections sufficient to annihilate ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... roll which he had in his hand. It was a species of blotting-book made of very thin blue paper, and which seemed to be slightly oiled. Between each leaf of blue paper there was a sheet of white paper. He took out of his pocket a sort of blunt bodkin, saying, "The first thing to hand will serve your purpose, a nail or a match," and he traced with his bodkin on the first leaf of the book the word "Republic." Then turning over the leaves, he said, "Look ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... isolation; some remain in the world, mocking the ways of men and treating all life as an ugly jest; some refuse to think at all, and drag themselves into oblivion; while some take one frantic sudden step and leave the world altogether by help of bullet or bare bodkin. A man of light mind who endeavoured to reconcile all the things suggested to him by the coming of Christmas would probably become demented if he bent his entire intellect to solve the puzzles. Thousands—millions—of books have been written about the Christian theology, and half of European mankind ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... after countenance of paine and greefe, pull away your hand suddenly, holding the poynt downeward, and it will fall so out, as it will seeme neuer to haue bin thrusted into the hafte: But immediately thrust that bodkin into your lappe or pocket, and pull out another playne bodkin like the ...
— The Art of Iugling or Legerdemaine • Samuel Rid
... apples and wipe them clean, take a bodkin and run it in at the head, and out at the stalk, put them in a flat earthen pot and bake them, but not too much; you must put a quart of strong new ale to half a peck of pears, tie twice papers over the pots that they are baked in, let them stand till cold then drain them, squeeze the pears ...
— English Housewifery Exemplified - In above Four Hundred and Fifty Receipts Giving Directions - for most Parts of Cookery • Elizabeth Moxon
... man, better. Vse euerie [Sidenote: bodkin man, much better,] man after his desart, and who should scape whipping: [Sidenote: shall] vse them after your own Honor and Dignity. The lesse they deserue, the more merit is in your ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... the little parcel eagerly. It contained a small shagreen case, which in its turn proved to contain a pair of scissors of antique and curious form, an ivory tablet, yellow with age, a silver bodkin, and a silver fruit-knife, all fitting neatly in their places; the whole case closing with a spring. "It is the prettiest thing I ever saw!" cried Hildegarde. "See, Cousin Wealthy, isn't it delightful to think of that poor old dear—But what have you, Rose-red? You must be the 'pail ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... place where I had been so well-treated, not knowing where on earth to go or what next to do. Before I went, however, to show I was grateful for their kindness, I made up a little parcel which I addressed to the farmer's wife, in which I put a tobacco-box for Mr. John Bull, a bodkin-case for herself, and a little ring for Miss Mary, all of which I had made in my leisure time. I dare say they were sorry to part with me. I am sure Miss Mary was, for I fancied she suspected I was not what I seemed, and had begun to take an evident liking to me. I had taught her ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... flattery of the world, Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore? The widow being oppress'd, the orphan wronged, The taste of hunger, or a tyrants raigne, And thousand more calamities besides, To grunte and sweate under the weary life, When that he may his full quietus make, With a bare bodkin, who would this indure, But for a hope of something after death? Which pushes the brain and doth connfound the sence, Which makes us rather beare those evilles we have, Than flie to others that we know not of. I that, O this conscience ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... a drive of twenty-one hours, at our journey's end—i.e., at "Old Bell's," so called from the proprietor of the inn. Here we were to pass the night, or rather the remainder of it, the mail going on to Nashville, and taking our foetid bodkin on with it. But, alas! the two more disagreeable passengers before alluded to remained, as they had suddenly made up their minds to stay and visit ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... of the bone-setter, and his mother was not without fears that he might bring a real surgeon down on her at any moment, so she quickly drank off her cup of tea, and took her seat in Farmer Gould's gig with Babie as bodkin in front, and Joe and Armine in the little seat behind. Robin and the two Johns were to stilt themselves home, while she was taken so long and rugged a way, that at every jolt she was ready to renew her thanks for ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... supporter of the Union. Dr. Dillon, Archbishop of Tuam, wrote in September, 1799, that he had had an opportunity during his recent visitation "of acquiring the strongest conviction that this measure alone can restore harmony and happiness to our unhappy country." His neighbour, Dr. Bodkin, Bishop Galway, wrote that the Union was the only measure to save "poor infatuated Ireland" from "ruin and destruction." Dr. Moylan, Bishop of Cork, was equally emphatic. "I am perfectly satisfied," he says, "that it is impossible to ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... tenner, or unearths lost masterpieces of TURNER on a clue supplied by an old letter. The young man in question was Hugh Limner, and in his off moments he fulfilled perfunctorily the duties of hero of the story. But I can't help thinking that Mr. M. MCD. BODKIN, his creator, liked him best as an expert. Certainly I myself did. Hugh, as I say, found his buried Turner on the authority of an autograph letter from the artist, which in its turn he had found in a volume entitled "Turner's Poems," that ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... year it springs again lively as ever. Among the lowest orders of animals you shall find a creature that, if you cut it in two, straightway duplicates its existence and floats away twice as happy as before; but of the prick of a bodkin or the sting of a bee the noblest of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... uncovered and at full liberty. In wet weather the plaid was thrown loose, covering both shoulders and body. When the use of both arms was required, it was fastened across the breast by a large bodkin or circular brooch. The sporan, a large purse of goat or badger's skin, usually ornamented, was hung before. The bonnet completed the garb. The garters were broad and of rich colors, forming a close texture which was not liable to wrinkle. The ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... belong to. There was no line shown. You must remember that there isn't a doubt about that. The hounds were all astray when we joined them. It's a great question whether they brought their fox into that first covert. There are they who think that Bodkin was just riding across the Puckeridge country in search of a fox." Bodkin was Mr. Fairlawn's huntsman. "If you admit that kind of thing, where will you be? As a hunting country, just nowhere. Then as a sportsman, where are you? It is necessary to put ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... either side her brow, (as in the old engravings of Louis Philippe's good queen Amelia,) very resolute, very learned in the boundaries of all Christian and heathen countries, patient to a fault, with a marvellous capacity for pointing out with her bodkin every letter to some wee thing at its first stage of spelling, and yet keeping an eye upon all the school-room; reading a chapter from the Bible, and saying a prayer each morning upon her bended knees,—the little ones all kneeling in concert,—with an air that would have adorned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... He walked to the cases one by one and sounded them. Their lids were screwed on but the screws were dummies. He found in the side of each a minute hole under the cover of the lid and, taking out his knife, he pressed in the bodkin with which the knife was equipped and with a click the lid flew open. The box was empty. The second one answered the same test and was also empty. The third gave no better result. He flashed his lamp on the bottom of the box, but there ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pains of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death,— The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns,—puzzles the will, And makes us rather ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... not so. By and by they stopped a bit, and I thought they would sit or fall down:—but no; with Mrs. H.'s hand on his shoulder, "'Quam familiariter'"[2] (as Terence said, when I was at school,) they walked about a minute, and then at it again, like two cock-chafers spitted on the same bodkin. I asked what all this meant, when, with a loud laugh, a child no older than our Wilhelmina (a name I never heard but in the 'Vicar of Wakefield', though her mother would call her after the Princess of Swappenbach,) said, "L—d! ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... would happen. I had not long to wait. Clarimonde entered as soon as she had convinced herself that I slept. She uncovered my arm and drew from her hair a little gold pin; then she murmured under her breath, "Only one drop, one little crimson drop, one ruby just to tip the bodkin! As you love me still I must not die. Ah, poor love! I am going to drink his blood, his beautiful blood, so bright and so purple. Sleep, my only treasure; sleep, my darling, my deity; I will do you no harm; I will only take so much of your life as I need to save my own. Did I not love you so ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury |
