quillet

“Ready at all times for such emergencies, the leader would not suffer himself to be found without every conceivable legal quillet, sharpened and retouched, against the official orders.”

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843

“There is not a quip nor a quillet from the slangy pen of the daily newspaper writers that she does not brood over and worry about as heartily as if it were an overdue mortgage on her pianoforte.”

Eugene Field A Study In Heredity And Contradictions

“So far as my imperfect hearing can ascertain, he has been instructing the jury that they may utterly dismiss from their minds my highly ingenious plea of inability to offer any other kind of matrimony than a polygamous union -- surely, a very, very slipshod off-hand method of disposing of such a nice sharp quillet of the Law! ...”

Baboo Jabberjee, B.A.

“{350} into the quillet that _his_ thunderbolt had stopped the chariot of the Sun and knocked the Greenwich Phaeton off the box, is the same which betrayed him into yet grander error -- which deserves the full word,”

A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II)

“for the little cot-house to which it belongs, together with the little quillet in which it stands, being several years since mortgaged for ten pounds, the fruit of this tree alone, in a course of some years, freed the house and garden, and its more valuable self, from that burden.”

On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, with Biographical Notices of Them, 2nd edition, with considerable additions