Span Long

It resembled a span-long plesiosaurus, afflicted with elephantiasis, and a forked, lolling, tongue extruded from a head that swayed ominously right and left. ❋ Unknown (2003)

Great was the surprise of Mariana, great the scorn of Barbara, when the napkin being loosened gave to view a perplexed multitude of span-long puppets. ❋ Unknown (1917)

The frying-pan was invented by Calvin, and by him used in cooking span-long infants that had died without baptism; and observing one day the horrible torment of a tramp who had incautiously pulled a fried babe from the waste-dump and devoured it, it occurred to the great divine to rob death of its terrors by introducing the frying-pan into every household in Geneva. ❋ Unknown (1911)

This is the Original Sin, inherited, innate, unacquired; for this are "babes span-long" to suffer, as the famous or infamous preacher declared. ❋ Andrew Lang (1878)

Watch these living specks as they glide through their forests of algæ, all 'without hurry and care,' as if their 'span-long lives' really could endure for the thousand years that the old catch pines for. ❋ John Lubbock (1873)

"But we that have but span-long lives" must ever bear in mind our limited time for acquisition. ❋ Herbert Spencer (1861)

To propagate the yucca the stalk is cut, particularly under the thick part, into span-long pieces, which are stuck obliquely into the earth. ❋ Johann Jakob Von Tschudi (1853)

Whose fires of torment burned for span-long babes? ❋ Oliver Wendell Holmes (1851)

I heard my mother's dying pangs, her prayers, her doubts, her agonies, for my reprobate soul, dissected for the public good by my old enemy, Mr. Wigginton, who dragged in among his fulsome eulogies of my mother's "signs of grace," rejoicings that there were "babes span-long in hell." ❋ Charles Kingsley (1847)