Branchless

Gentle Octavia, Let your best love draw to that point, which seeks Best to preserve it: if I lose mine honour, I lose myself: better I were not yours Than yours so branchless.

1866, Mark Twain, “Equestrian Excursion,” March, 1886, in Letters from the Sandwich Islands Written for the Sacramento Union by Mark Twain,, Stanford University Press, 1938, p. 40, A mile and a half from town, I came to a grove of tall cocoa-nut trees, with clean, branchless stems reaching straight up sixty or seventy feet and topped with a spray of green foliage sheltering clusters of cocoa-nuts—not more picturesque than a forest of colossal ragged parasols, with bunches of magnified grapes under them, would be.

1886, [Henry H. Sweet], Palmistry; or, the Science of Reading the Past, Present and Future, in the Language of the Hands, New York: The Serial Leaflet Publishing Co., p. 21, One long, clear, branchless line indicates great distinction in some one thing; but if dividing into branches, or accompanied by parallel lines of strength equal to its own, there is danger that multiplicity of aims will strangle success.

“[…] At the end of this corridor I shall come to a spiral runway which I must follow down instead of up; after that the way is along but a single branchless corridor.”

These days it looks as though more Americans than ever are willing to let go. They are traveling through coinless tollbooths, banking at branchless banks, riding in tokenless subways and paying for everything from taxi rides to mortgages with the swipe of a card or the blip of an electronic transfer.