Word: halter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Show horses in the paddocks at Rye, N. Y., last week craned their necks as far as halter straps permitted. A stranger was coming among them. He was an elderly gentleman rigged squarishly in black clothes; he wore gloves and a blocky black hat. One horse, a jumper, he patted on the nose. The horse wiggled the hairs on its lip. This stranger loved horses. He was, in fact Bishop William Thomas Manning who had gone with one of his daughters (Frances) to the opening of the second yearly Cathedral Horse Show. Earnings of the show fortify the endowment...
...definition of a "persuader" (TIME, Dec. 6, 1926) does not confirm my idea of the connotation of the colloquialism. My father is a Wisconsin-born farmer who has never been south of the latitude of Chicago. For 20 years he has used that term to mean a rope-made halter that tightened up on a horse when he offered any resistance to being led. The pressure of the rope around the nose "persuaded" the horse to follow the leader...
Near Kansas City, Misaji Kawahara, truck gardener, tethered his horse to a tree as a storm approached, sought shelter for himself indoors. Lightning stabbed across the sky. Thunder dinned madness into the frightened horse. Rearing, plunging, it drew the tether rope ever tighter, choked to death as the halter contracted like a hangman's noose...
Misaji Kawahara came and saw. Misaji had loved the poor horse well. Loosening the halter he tied its free end to a branch twelve feet from the ground, slipped the noose about his own neck, slid off the branch to tend his horse in another world...