grandam

Wailing on the altar stair Wives and grandams rend the air-- Long-drawn moans and piercing cries Blent with prayers and litanies.

Dimmesdale had taken her in charge, the good grandam's chief earthly comfort -- which, unless it had been likewise a heavenly comfort, could have been none at all -- was to meet her pastor, whether casually, or of set purpose, and be refreshed with a word of warm, fragrant, heaven-breathing Gospel truth, from his beloved lips, into her dulled, but rapturously attentive ear.

Yet, by a strange deception, owing to the duskiness of the chamber, and the antique dresses which they still wore, the tall mirror is said to have reflected the figures of the three old, gray, withered grandsires, ridiculously contending for the skinny ugliness of a shrivelled grandam.

There were the little faces of the children, peeping from their bed apart, and here the father's frame of strength, the mother's subdued and careful mien, the high- browed youth, the budding girl, and the good old grandam, still knitting in the warmest place.

"They took the grandam's blanket, Who shivered and bade them go; They took the baby's cradle, Who could not say them no."

"Wailing on the altar stair, wives and grandams rend the air, long-drawn moans and piercing cries blent with prayers and litanies"--Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, lines 184-186

Bealady Blond's other produce included Bealady Nell (by Boyne Walk), winner of two 2000 Irish Oaks heats and placed third in the Tipperary Cup, and Grandams Blond (by Dew Reward), a finalist in Kilkenny's Champion Unraced.

Such a diction, effervescent with the absurdities of transparent barricadoes, "clerestories toward the south-north" (4.2.38), and the crazy metempsychoses of avian grandams, is an idiom from which the somber steward is fittingly barred.