1. pale — stake; paling, fence; enclosure; area within a defined boundary
Denys was hauled before the magistrate and fined thirteen pounds for breaking the pale around the park ‘both knowingly and feloniously’.
2. pocket Venus — beautiful small woman
Even after a strenuous trek across the desert that pocket Venus had more stamina than the paid mercenaries or porters.
3. single-tree — crossbar connecting traces to wagon or plow
The rattling chains made the only sound on the somber farm as Ernest attached them to the single-tree behind the broken down mare.
4. skint — [British] broke, out of money
Well, I shouldn’t have worked for him again, only he found us completely skint and said it’d be an easy way to pick up a tenner.
5. eglantine — sweetbrier, wild rose native to Europe and Western Asia
The fragrance of honeysuckle vied with the aroma of eglantine as we stood hand in hand at the verge of the verdant meadow.
6. volatilizing — becoming volatile, passing out as vapor, emitting vapor
As soon as the sunlight hit the rude totem the shelter became filled with an acrid, metallic smell of volatilizing chemicals long dormant in the vegetable matter which had been formed into the leering figure.
7. libration — oscillatory motion, as of a scale at point of balance or the apparent movement of a heavenly body
More than half the surface of the moon is viewable by an earthbound observer, due to the latitudinal and diurnal lunar librations, caused respectively by the relative tilt in the two planets’ axes and by the distance from which morning and evening observations are made.
8. flatus — intestinal gas
The pressurized contents of his febrile brain have now burst forth as poetry, and a more rank flatus of blank verse can hardly be imagined.
9. diathesis — habitual tendency or predisposition, esp. towards morbidity
In these sunny climes she exhibits little evidence of that asthenic diathesis which seemed always to plague her in those overcast and stormy lands of your family demesne.
10. lapwing — large plover
We stood at the edge of the lake and watched the ungainly almost doddering flight of a deceit of lapwings.
Bonus Vocabulary
(19th c. Turkish military)
bashi-bazouk — irregular mounted soldiers of Ottoman army, lit. ‘crazy head’
Notorious for their insensate brutality, the leaderless bashi-bazouk were accused of butchering wounded Russian soldiers during the siege of Plevna.