Word: grained
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Though action, and particularly rebellious action, went much against his grain, his friend St. Teresa of Avila enlisted him in her crusading reform of the Carmelite order. Anti-reform monks kidnaped and imprisoned him in a cell in Toledo's Carmelite priory for eight months, where he was taken out once a day to eat crusts and water on the refectory floor, and kneel while the monks tried to change his mind by walking in a circle around him, lashing his bare back with leather whips...
...years had France seen such rain. Farmers slogged stolidly out to their fields to harvest the sodden crops, mill the grain and send it on its way. In little (pop. 4,400) Pont-Saint-Esprit, perched on a bluff along the River Rhone in southern France, the townspeople sat glumly in their bistros sipping wine, watching the swollen river slip past the medieval bridge which gives the town its name...
What was the mysterious madness? Pont-Saint-Esprit speculated that the village idiot had hexed Baker Briand's flour, that the flour had been packed in fertilizer sacks, that rats in the grain elevator had contaminated the flour. The police knew better. They had traced the flour back from Briand's bakeshop through the government-controlled flour depot to a mill near Poitiers, nearly 300 miles away...
...been stricken by ergot poisoning, a medieval disease as old as its proud bridge, so old that it had almost been forgotten. Modern medicine knows about ergot, but has rarely seen it in the form of an epidemic disease.* It is a black fungus that grows on wet grain, contains chemicals that powerfully affect the blood vessels and the nervous system. Doctors often use ergot extracts to start contractions in the uterus in childbirth...
...Sample information: a sudden Government decision last March to buy 870,000 tons of rye.) Cullum named some of the combine's members: the Washington lobbyist for one of Chicago's grain speculators, a U.S. Senator, an ECA official and his wife, two staffers of the Senate Agriculture Committee...