Grocott & Ward, comps. Grocott’s Familiar Quotations, 6th ed. 189-?.
Hands
There is a hand that has not heart in it, there is a claw or paw, a flipper or fin, a bit of wet cloth to take of, a piece of unbaked dough or the cook’s trencher, a cold clammy thing we recoil from, or greedy clutch with the heat of sin, which we drop as a burning coal. What a scale from the talon to the horn of plenty, is this human palm-leaf! Sometimes it is what a knife-shaped, thin-bladed tool we dare not grasp, or like a poisonous thing we shake off, or unclean member, which, white as it may look, we feel polluted by!
C. A. Bartol.—The Rising Faith: Training.