The harvest is fast ripening; and it behoves the reapers to get their sickles in readiness.
"The White Gauntlet"
Mayne Reid
Later on, when the ears of wheat are ripe and the reapers are sharpening their sickles, if you walk here, with the corn on either hand, every ten or twenty yards a cloud of sparrows and small birds will rise from it, literally hiding the hawthorn bush on which they settle, so that the green tree looks brown.
"Wild Life in a Southern County"
Richard Jefferies
The Burdell and sickles cases, through the unclean reading they afforded to millions of people long ago, led their thousands into abandoned lives and pitched them off the edge of a lost eternity.
"Around The Tea-Table"
T. De Witt Talmage