The viands, my son, scattered from his knife over the board, like chaff before the flail.

He fought furiously, his great arms and legs threshing about like flails.

[Exeunt. ACT IV., SCENE I. Enter ROBIN GOODFELLOW, in a suit of leather, close to his body; his face and hands coloured russet-colour, with a flail.

[They fight: ROBIN beateth the miller with a flail, and felleth him.

He told with some sprightliness of having seen threshings in Mexico, how the grain was beaten out with flails in the patios, and afterwards thrown up in the wind to winnow out.

We can hear the flails going at this moment.

Their weapons, swords, and spears flew about in the air, crossing and recrossing continually in all directions, like the flails of threshers in an immense barn; and the rage of each of these fiends seemed exclusively directed against Jesusthat grain of heavenly wheat descended to the earth to die there, in order to feed men eternally with the Bread of Life.

The ancient barrages, the canals, the systems of irrigation were all allowed to silt up and become useless; and at the end of the nineteenth century you would not find in all Mesopotamia an agricultural implement that was in any way superior to the ploughs and the flails of more than two thousand years ago.

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

A dance of the reapers and gleaners followed, the threshers flourished their flails, and the whole went their way.

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.

The fields were tilled with steeds of steam, Whose fearful neighing shook the vales; Along the road there rang no team, The barns were loud, but not with flails.

Yet what a wonderful difference there is between the work accomplished in a day with the flails and the daily output of the modern thrashing machine!

As it raised itself up I saw the two broken ends flapping like flails.

all the. flails whirling together in the air.

His seed was sown by hand; his hay was cut with scythes; his grain was reaped with sickles, and threshed on the barn floor with flails in the hands of his slaves.

Of what use would flails and pitch-forks prove against men who have sold themselves to the devil?

Up on these high lands there was a considerable breeze, and Mr. Taynton paused for a minute or two beside a windmill that stood alone, in the expanse of down, watching, with a sort of boyish wonder, the huge flails swing down and aspire again in the circles of their tireless toil.

In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds.

Unlike the American farmer, they were too poor to buy machines to work for them, and with scythes and sickles in hand they cut the grain; with heavy flails they beat it.

The barn was particularly notable for a threshing floor thirty feet square, with interstices one and a half inches wide left between the floor boards so that the grain when trodden out by horses or beat out with flails would fall through to the floor below, leaving the straw above.

Under the old system, a dozen men worked all the winter through, hammering away with their flails in the barns.

The engine had climbed, a proprii motu, a long ascent; had made its way partly through ploughed land to the rear of the barn, and was rattlingly busy in a fog of dust, doing the labor of a hundred flails.

Most of the sturdy blows which he dealt, using his arms like flails, fell upon the railings of the seats, and only bruised his hands.

By the trampling of the Takers, Strong march of man and beast; The flails of those earth-shakers Left a famine where they ceased.