Pique

“ She is the only person, for example, who could make the piqué for the beautiful scarf, which I saw later being executed in the Point de Paris room—for that she received 90 francs. It is a common saying that one must be born a piqueuse to succeed; at least it remains true that in addition to her capacity for an intricate and most meticulous labor, the piqueuse should possess a high sensitiveness to art values. ”

“ PICKET, Piquet or Piquet (Fr. piquet, a pointed stake or peg, from piquer, to point or pierce) , a military term, signifying an outpost or guard, supposed to have originated in the French army about 1690, from the circumstance that an infantry company on outpost duty dispersed its musketeers to watch, the small group of pikemen called piquet remaining in reserve. Thus at the present day the word “picquet” is, in Great Britain at any rate, restricted to an infantry post on the outpost line, from which the sentries or “groups” of watchers are sent out. ”

“ The expectation of something to do in the night made us forget the cold and hunger. An additional outlying and advanced piquet was ordered, and I was the next for duty. This piquet was thrown out about two hundred yards in front of the others—a subaltern's piquet. The first line of piquets threw out a chain of double sentinels, the extremities of which formed a link with those thrown out from the hill above, forming one-eighth of a circle round the general body. Mine was rather a piquet for reconnoitring, and, in case of alarm, to join the first piquet behind me. ”

“ This work of the piqueuse demands great skill and infinite patience. Upon her interpretation will depend the aspect of the lace, for the worker follows her indications rigidly. This pattern is pricked on a supple and resistant cardboard (in olden times it was made on parchment) and is pinned to the cushion with the selvage of the lace at the left. The worker then attaches to a row of pins placed all across the top of the pattern, the threads which she will need, often many hundreds.
o. (Top) Pattern from which piqure is made
p. (Bottom) Piqure
q. ”

“ “Because he plainly perceives that his piquette* stands in need of being enlivened by a mixture of good wine.”
*A watered liquor, made from the second pressing of the grape. ”

“ There were, however, pike in the pool when he reached it—great sluggish beauties, lazily lying under the gleaming, swaying leaves of the water-lilies. For once, he was in luck, to use his own words: ‘As our bait traversed the deep back-water, we felt the indescribable thrill, or rather shock, which proceeds from a decided run, and a three-pound pike fights as gamely as a ten-pounder.’ The small fish caught, he trudged on in the waning afternoon sunshine to the second pool; startling a kingfisher, which flashed out of the reeds behind him like a veritable gem of living colour. ”

“ THE WEDDING FESTIVAL Spring has come, and the pike are about to spawn. Grim, the great she-pike, has been lying motionless for days among the bottom vegetation, waiting the call of the sun. And now it has come. One morning it suddenly bursts through and lights up the forest of stalks in the yellow, weedy margin. In the little open spaces between the tufts there is life and movement, and a sound of splashing everywhere; dark scaly bodies rise slowly out of the water. Then the young fish gambol, their fins beating like wings in the sunshine. ”

“ Now I will tell you a story about a pike. We are apt to think fishes very stupid; that they have no feeling. A gentleman in England, a surgeon and a naturalist, told me of what he had himself seen. A pike had struck its head against a tenter hook on a post in the pond where he was swimming. His agony was so great that he darted backward and forward with the greatest rapidity, then buried his head in the mud, then whirled his tail round and round, and threw himself up into the air to the height of two or three feet, and, at last, he threw himself out of the pond upon the grass. ”

“ She was a mythical pike, one of those old-time fish about which the late lamented angler had told wonderful tales in his day. Even the regular mane of scales of a finger’s length, from the back of the neck down over the pectoral fins, was not wanting.
But her eye was evil, a mixture of yellow and green, cold and deceitful as the foam of the bog-waves; it always shone with a fierce hunger, and even on the rare occasions when the hunger was appeased, the expression of that eye was one of insatiable voracity. ”

“ The Pike it seems, is a formidable foe to tackle.
"The boldness of a pike is very extraordinary. I have seen one follow a bait within a foot of the spot where I have been standing; and the head keeper of Richmond Park assured me that he was once washing his hand at the side of a boat in the great pond in that Park, when a pike made a dart at it, and he had but just time to withdraw it. A gentleman now residing at Weybridge, in Surrey, informed me that, walking one day by the side of the river Wey, near that town, he saw a large pike in a shallow creek. ”

“ Weller, aside.
‘Then this garden,’ resumed Mr. Pickwick. ‘How am I to get into it?’
‘The wall is very low, sir, and your servant will give you a leg up.’ ‘My servant will give me a leg up,’ repeated Mr. Pickwick mechanically. ‘You will be sure to be near this door that you speak of?’
‘You cannot mistake it, Sir; it’s the only one that opens into the garden. Tap at it when you hear the clock strike, and I will open it instantly.’
‘I don’t like the plan,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘but as I see no other, and as the happiness of this young lady’s whole life is at stake, I adopt it. ”

“ The Picket-pin is an interesting and picturesque creature in some ways, but it has one habit that I cannot quite condone. In this land of sun and bright blue air, this world of outdoor charm, it comes forth tardily in late spring, as late sometimes as the first of May, and promptly retires in mid-August, when blazing summer is on the face of the earth, and the land is a land of plenty. ”

“ Weller, senior, turning suddenly to Mr. Pickwick, said—
‘Wery queer life is a pike-keeper’s, sir.’
‘A what?’ said Mr. Pickwick.
‘A pike-keeper.’
‘What do you mean by a pike-keeper?’ inquired Mr. Peter Magnus.
‘The old ‘un means a turnpike-keeper, gen’l’m’n,’ observed Mr. Samuel Weller, in explanation.
‘Oh,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I see. Yes; very curious life. Very uncomfortable.’
‘They’re all on ‘em men as has met vith some disappointment in life,’ said Mr. Weller, senior. ”

“ I met him at the top of the hill and motioned for him to keep still; asking at the same time, who next we should send down; but our sport was suddenly spoiled by the order to "saddle up." While this was being done, several of the men went down to the spring to fill their canteens; and as each filed down the hill, the squaw confronted him, with,
"Is your name Pike?" each time only to be disappointed; but requested that "Pike" would be sent down at once.
After having mounted, I rode down to the bluff and called out:
"Madam, my name is Pike; what will you have?" ”

“ You can’t play no pickle on me, not when I have the mumps. Ma passed the pickles to me this morning, and I took one mouthful, and like to had the lockjaw. But Ma didn’t do it on purpose, I guess. She never had the mumps and didn’t know how discouraging a pickle is. Darn if I didn’t feel as though I had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick. But about Pa. He has been fuller’n a goose ever since New Year’s day. I think its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with liquor on New Year’s. Now me and my chum, we can take a drink and then let it alone. ”

“ It was a lonely tarn, deep and dark, yet there the bright green leaves and snowy flowers of the water lilies floated, and the voracious pike which rose at times to snap a fly or so, went plunging to the oozy bottom at the sight of aught so unusual as a human being invading the solitude. ”

“ Perhaps no individual member of the animated kingdom, all things considered, possesses so insatiate an appetite as the most noted of our fresh-water fish,—for example, the pike, perch, and trout. I remember, some eight years ago, when at college, meeting with a singular instance of the gluttony of the pike. ”

“ Pinçard, m. (cavalry) , horseman who possesses strong thighs, and has, in consequence, a firm grip in the saddle. From pince, grip.
Pince, f. (thieves’) , hand, or “duke.” (Horsemen’s) Pince, grip of the thighs. (Popular) Chaud de la ——, fond of women. La pince is the fork.
Puis, comme c’était un chaud de la pince qui faisait des enfants à toutes les figurantes de l’Odéon.—E. Monteil.
(Card-sharpers’) Pince, a box constructed on cheating principles, and used by sharpers at the game called consolation, a game played with dice. ”

“ In some remarkable and incomprehensible manner the good old name of Pike has fallen into disuse, and is now applied in this country to a fish that is not a pike at all, but a perch, Lucio perca, the Pike Perch, Big-eyed Pike, or Glass Eye of the Lakes; while the name Pickerel, which is merely the diminutive of Pike, is appropriated to the most gigantic and ferocious monsters of the deep. ”

“ Seeing that it was useless to argue with him further, I sort of resigned myself to my fate as his pickle partner.
“I have a hunch,” says I, “that it’s going to be a whole lot worse than that. A Pickle Parlor! We’ll be the laugh of the town.” ”

“ We listened, and could distinguish a confused sound of grunting and squeaking coming from a distance amid the trees.
“Pigs, I suspect,” observed the padre. “We may shoot one or two, and they will prove a welcome addition to our larder.”
“Pigs they certainly are; but of a species which I have no wish to encounter unless I am safe out of their reach,” exclaimed the doctor. “My friends, it is no joke; if they once get up to us, we are as good as dead men. They are peccaries,—terrible little brutes, with tusks as sharp as lancets, savage as jaguars, and too stupid to know fear. ”

“ Then he told them the story of other pike, and particularly of the pike that was king of a river, and made the little fish come together on the top of the water so that the young hunter could cross over with dry feet. And he told them of the pike that hid the lover of the princess by swallowing him and lying at the bottom of a deep pool, and how the princess saw her lover sitting in the pike, when the big fish opened his mouth to snap up a little perch that swam too near his nose. ”

“ Pike thrust his head into the doorway. He did not address me, but he favoured me with a most sour look of disapprobation. Mr. Pike's countenance is almost petrified. Any expression seems to crack it--with the exception of sourness. But when Mr. Pike wants to look sour he has no difficulty at all. His hard-skinned, hard-muscled face just flows to sourness. Evidently he condemned my consuming Mulligan Jacobs's time. ”

“ Another derivation would connect both pica and picus with the root pic- of pingere, to paint, from the parti-coloured appearance of the bird. It is this “pied” or black and white look of the page that probably gave the name of pica, “pie” or “pye,” to the ordinal printed in black-letter (see Pie) , and thence to a size of type in printing coming next to “ English ” (see Typography) . The Gr. κίσσα and Lat. pica were used of a perverted craving for unnatural foods ”

“ When I cross one on a fence, I love to pause in mid-passage and look down into the water, and study its bottom, its little mystery. There is none so small but you may see a pickerel regarding you with a wary eye, or a pigmy trout dart from under the bank, or in spring perchance a sucker will have found its way far up the stream. You are sometimes astonished to see a pickerel far up some now shrunken rill where it is a mere puddle by the roadside. ”

“ Those who have no arms let them bring poles for pike-handles, and your brothers and myself will busily make pike-heads of iron until they come. Tell them they are called to action by a lord from the Archbishop of Treves himself, and that I shall lead them. ”

“ There was a tradition of a pike that weighed a quarter of a hundredweight but one day the tradition was put into the shade by the capture of a pike that scaled a little over thirty pounds. There are supposed to be several more such monsters of the deep, since every now and then some labourer passing by on a sunny day, when jack approach the shore and bask near the surface, declares that he has seen one as big as a man’s leg. ”

“ Dissolve gum of ivy in oil of spike, and therewith anoint your dead bait for a pike, and then cast it into a likely place, and when it has lain a short time at the bottom, draw it towards the top of the water and so up the stream, and it is more than likely that you have a pike follow with more than common eagerness. ”

“ On the left hand of the illustration are two examples of the same principle taken from Nature, one belonging to fresh and the other to salt water.
PIKE-JAWS. SHARK-JAWS. CATCHPOLL. DEER-TRAP.
The upper figure represents the jaws of a Pike, with their terrible array of reverted teeth. The Pike, as every one knows, feeds upon other fish, and eats them in a curious manner. It darts at them furiously, and generally catches them in the middle of the body. ”

“ Standing at defence, the fore-ranks, well nigh to kneeling, stoop low before their fellows behind, the one end of the pike against their right foot, the other against the enemy, head high, their followers crossing their pike-points with their foreward, and thus each other so nigh as time and place will suffer, that as easily shall a bare finger pierce the skin of an angry hedgehog, as any encounter the point of their pikes. ”

“ Pickwick, ‘a hideous dream. The idea of a man’s walking about all day with a dreadful horse that he can’t get rid of!’ The depressed Pickwickians turned moodily away, with the tall quadruped, for which they all felt the most unmitigated disgust, following slowly at their heels. ”

“ Even animals shun the things which they have once found harmful. Cattle which have once fallen into a pit seek not again the same road. The bird once snared shuns bird-lime. The pike buries himself in deep sand, that he may escape the drag-net, and when it has scraped his back leaps nimbly into the waves and expresses by his gambols his joy for his deliverance. ”