Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
Being once asked whether he did not seriously believe "that a well-appointed British army of five thousand veterans could march through the whole continent of America," he replied, "no doubt, if they behaved civilly, and paid well for everything they wanted; but if they should attempt it in a hostile manner, though the American men were out of the question, the women, with their ladles and broomsticks, would knock them all on the head before they had got half way through."
This is fine reasoning, and the ut ita loquar thrown in so carelessly, as if with a deprecatory wave of the hand for using a less classical locution than usual, strikes me as a very delicate touch indeed. Grimm tells us that he does not know when broomsticks, spits, and similar utensils were first assumed to be the canonical instruments of this nocturnal equitation.
"I only takes a little, father, because you mayn't take too much." "Thanky for nothing; when do I ever take too much, you scamp?" "Not too much for a man standing on his own pins, but too much for a man on two broomsticks." "Stop your jaw, Mr Tom, or I'll unscrew one of the broomsticks, and lay it over your shoulders." "Before it's out of the socket, I'll give you leg-bail.
And he hurried down the ladder and started out, accompanied by his relatives and guests. The men had turned up the bottoms of their trousers so as not to get them wet in the snow. The women held up their petticoats and showed their lean ankles with gray woollen stockings and their bony shanks resembling broomsticks.
After many preparatory manoeuvres, he stooped down, and with his knife, represented the act of cutting the hopples of horses. He then rode his tomahawk, as children ride their broomsticks, making use of his whip, as to indicate the necessity of rapid movement, lest his foes should overtake him.
According to the fallacious circular which Mademoiselle Merlin sent to the folks of the quarter, there was a garden that is to say, four broomsticks in a sandy court; and it was there, the first day during recess, that the innocent Leon burst into cries of terror when he saw the school-mistress, forced by some accident to interrupt her knitting, stick one of her great knitting-needles in her capacious head-dress.
Broomsticks were proved out of it most clearly, and also the atrocity of representative government. What a little text to contain so much! All public benefits were, in the strictest sense of the word, precarious, as depending upon prayers and entreaties to those who had an interest in refusing them. All improvements were elcemosynary; for the initial step in all cases belonged to the Crown.
Her face is corrugated with wrinkles and as tough as leather. She comes out of a high background of sky. The wind whips her skirts about her thin shanks. Her legs are like broomsticks. This is a vision of my great-grandmother's entrance into my boyhood. I had often heard of her.
A couple of hundred years, or so, They had knocked about in the world below, When an Essex Deacon dropped in to call, And a homesick feeling seized them all; For he came from a place they knew full well, And many a tale he had to tell. They long to visit the haunts of men, To see the old dwellings they knew again, And ride on their broomsticks all around Their wide domain of unhallowed ground.
And strange as may be the coincidence between your impressions of a mystic agency and those of some other brains not cognizant of the chimeras of your own, still, is it not simpler philosophy to say, 'They are coincidences of the same nature which made witches in the same epoch all tell much the same story of the broomsticks they rode and the sabbats at which they danced to the fiend's piping, and there leave the matter, as in science we must leave many of the most elementary and familiar phenomena inexplicable as to their causes, is not this, I say, more philosophical than to insist upon an explanation which accepts the supernatural rather than leave the extraordinary unaccounted for?"
Word Of The Day
Others Looking