[back-formation from FUGLEMAN.]
1. intr. To do the duty of a fugleman; to act as guide or director; to make signals. lit. and fig.
1837. Carlyle, Fr. Rev., III. V. vii. (1871), 207. Wooden arms with elbow-joints are jerking and fugling in the air, in the most rapid mysterious manner!
1863. De Morgan, in From Matter to Spirit, Pref. 35. The case fugles admirably for a very large class of the philosophical principles.
b. trans. To give an example of (something) to.
1868. Pall Mall G., 29 June, 12/2. The cost of keeping a few thousand good men to fugle all the public and domestic virtues to the benighted millions of Roman Catholics.
2. Comb.
1837. Carlyle, Fr. Rev., III. V. iv. (1871), 191. The French nation is of gregarious imitative nature; it needed but a fugle-motion in this matter.
1842. Miall, in Nonconf., II. 377. The fugle-word [Martyrdom] of our present article, is a venerable expression.
Hence Fugling vbl. sb.
1858. Carlyle, Fredk. Gt., II. ii. (1868), I. 81. No Czech blows into his pipe in the woodlands, without certain precautions, and preliminary fuglings of a devotional nature. Ibid., IV. viii. 468. A certain handy and correct young fellow who already knew his fugling to a hairs-breadth, was Drill-master.
1863. Reader, 5 Dec., 656. What the author calls, metaphorically, Fugling, or the representation of a corporate process of mind by some single exaggerated instance of the same process stationed in front of it.