The apparition, however, gave me a shock, for the antique flail is still the instrument commonly used for threshing in the southern provinces of France.

He seems to have exchanged his satirical scourge for the clumsy flail of Shadwell, when he stooped to use such raillery as the following description of Settle: "In short, he is an animal of a most deplored understanding, without reading and conversation: his being is in a twilight of sense, and some glimmering of thought, which he can never fashion either into wit or English.

Many of them still reaped with scythes and thrashed on the barn floor with old-fashioned flails, and one afternoon there was a curious plaintive singing under my windowa party of harvesters, oldish men and brown, barefooted peasant girls, who had finished their work on a neighboring farm, and were crossing our village on their way to their own.

"My pliant russet tail Beats like a frantic flail, Up and down.

When Henri ran a race even Joe Blunt laughed outright, for arms and legs went like independent flails.

It may well be that a man is at times horribly threshed by misfortunes, public and private: but the reckless flail of Fate, when it beats the rich sheaves, crushes only the straw; and the corn feels nothing of it and dances merrily on the floor, careless whether its way is to the mill or the furrow.