"You spiked my only chance to dance with Miss Meade.

sharp, keen; acute; acicular, aciform^; aculeated^, acuminated^; pointed; tapering; conical, pyramidal; mucronate^, mucronated^; spindle shaped, needle shaped; spiked, spiky, ensiform^, peaked, salient; cusped, cuspidate, cuspidated^; cornute^, cornuted^, cornicultate^; prickly; spiny, spinous^, spicular; thorny, bristling, muricated^, pectinated^, studded, thistly, briary^; craggy &c (rough) 256; snaggy, digitated^,

In the theatre you see the Feldgrau heroes in dugouts in Flanders or in Galician trenches; see the audience weep when the German mother sends off her seven sons or the bearded father meets his youngest boy, schwer verwundet, on the battle-field; or cheer when the curtain goes down on noble blond giants in spiked helmets dangling miniature Frenchmen by the scruff of the neck and forcing craven Highlanders to bite the dust.

Standing on the bridge by the ancient spiked gate bristling with sharp barbs of iron, like rusty spear and arrow-heads (our ancestors loved to protect their privacy with these terrible barriers), I listened to the waterfall three hundred yards higher up, with its ceaseless music; the afternoon sun was sparkling on the dimpling water, which runs swiftly here over a shallow reach of gravelthe favourite spawning-ground of the trout.

The Manor House School, as it was called, was in a quaint and very old building, with high walls about the grounds, and great spiked, iron-studded gates.

She has cruised over the bottom of Chesapeake Bay, New York Bay, Hampton Roads, and the Atlantic Ocean, her driving-wheels propelling her when the bottom was hard, and her screw when the oozy condition of the submarine road made her spiked wheels useless except to steer with.

Darting across the yard he spiked the gun at the other corner, and was back at the door as the remnants of the garrison were hurled towards it by the rush of the assailants.

Those that stood were cut down, and in a minute the guns were spiked.

We cut down some scores of his infantry, and spiked four guns, I have not lost twenty men, and his cavalry must have lost at least a hundred from your fire, besides the damage I did at their camp.

Yet before the dawn came a German avalanche of men and guns might be sweeping across the frontier, and if I stayed a day or two in the open town of Nancy I might see the spiked helmets of the enemy glinting down the streets.

CHAPTER IV THE GIANT IN THE SPIKED HELMET Prussia in 1870.

Mortals that would follow me, Love virtue; she alone is free, She can teach ye how to climb Higher than the sphery chime; Or if virtue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her." CHAPTER IV THE GIANT IN THE SPIKED HELMET

Instantly the two sentinels stepped back in concert as if the same clock-work regulated their movements, brought their shining pieces with perfect precision to the "present," stood for an instant as if hewn from stone, the spiked helmets above the blond faces inclining backward at the same angle, then precisely together fell into the old position.

It was the spiked helmet at the entrance and again at the exit; and from entrance to exit, few places or times were free from some martial suggestion.

Casting my eyes into the yard, I saw the spiked helmet in the shape of the half-military manoeuvres of a class which the teacher of gymnastics was training for the severer drill of five or six years later.

I visited the "prima," or upper class of a gymnasium, and here was the spiked helmet in a connection that seemed at first rather irreverent.

I visited the best school for girls in Berlin, and it was singular to find the spiked helmet, among those retiring maidens even, and this time not hung upon the wall nor outside in the yard.

" Admirable schools they all were, the presence of the spiked helmet notwithstanding, and crowning them in the great Prussian educational system came the famous universities.

Where could one find the spiked helmet in the midst of the scholastic quiet and diligence of a German university?

Perhaps the university authorities found it too inveterate a thing to be done away with; perhaps, too, they felt, thinking as it were under their spiked helmets, that after all it had a value, making the young men cool in danger and accustoming them to weapons.

Here I saw too, when I ascended the steps between the great bronze groups of statuary as I entered, and again the last thing as I left, the spiked helmet on the head of the stiff sentinel always posted at the door.

I could understand the readiness, when I thought of the spiked helmet I had seen in the Prussian home that quiet summer night.

The spiked helmet is even here among the tombs; and schooled as the Prussians are among the din of trumpets and smoke of wars, no other among the mighty graves in their land holds dust, in their thought, so heroic.

The spiked helmet is never an amiable head-dress; "but," said the representative Prussian, "there is no help for it.

Let us know on what conditions we can live other than wearing our spiked helmets, and we will embrace them."