Crossword-Solution: FERRULES 8 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 11

Now we have to balance them upon a narrow ledge; and ladies, as they pass, dip the ends of their cloaks into them, and gentlemen stir them up for us with the ferrules of their umbrellas, or else sweep them off into our laps with their coat tails, saying as they do so, “Oh, I beg your pardon.” Also, in those days, there were “chairmen”—affable gentlemen, who would drink anything at anybody’s expense, and drink any quantity of it, and never seem to get any fuller.

They were exactly similar one to the other: both encased in plain black leather sheaths, with steel ferrules polished to shine like silver; the handles too were of plain steel, with just the grip fashioned in a twisted basket pattern of the same highly-tempered metal.

Some of them are rather attractively decorated with brass and copper studs, and a few have red and yellow bejuco ferrules near the blade.

Throughout the Continent it forms the peaceful armament of the peasant, and no more curious sight can be imagined than the wide, uncovered market-place of some quaint old German town during a heavy shower, when every industrial covers himself or herself with the aegis of a portable tent, and a bright array of brass ferrules and canopies of all conceivable hues which cotton can be made to assume, without losing its one quality of "fast colour," flash on the spectator's vision.

The long six-inch runners have given way to the short one two inches long, and the ferrules are also much shorter than formerly.