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More "Excruciating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at all unheavenly hours, Crew with excruciating powers, Cats on the woodshed rang and roared, Fat citizens ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... from the awful frenzy of the male, in whom the "gentlest passion" degenerated in Saturnalia of revolting cruelty. The Duke killed Marie because doing so gave him the most damnable pleasure,—her the most excruciating pain. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... how excruciating and remediless his grief must be, to be so cut off from all equal community of experience and destiny with mankind, to see all whom he loves, generation after generation, fading away, leaving him alone, to form new ties again to be dissolved, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... myself to quiet; to sleep. I must find some refuge from anticipations so excruciating. All extremes are agonies. A joy like this is too big for this narrow tenement. I must thrust it forth; I must bar and bolt it out for a time, or these frail walls will burst asunder. The pen is a pacifier. It checks the mind's career; it circumscribes her wanderings. It traces out and compels ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... high in the heavens when she again awoke. A burning fever consumed her, and delirium had fastened on her with fearful spasmodic and excruciating pains internally. She endeavored to rise, but fainted in so doing. She shrieked wildly for assistance, but none heeded her cries. For hours she was thus, left alone, the pains increasing, and her brain in a constant whirl. Again she slept, how ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... the family, with the most excruciating anxiety, and Miss Brook Dingwall was formally introduced to her future companions. The Miss Crumptons conversed with the young ladies in the most mellifluous tones, in order that Miss Brook Dingwall might be properly impressed with ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... of snow. They continued their march the next morning. The effects of the rays of the sun reflected from the snow upon the eyes, produces a disease, which the Peruvians call surumpi. It occasions blindness, accompanied by excruciating pains. A pimple forms in the eye-ball, and causes an itching, pricking pain, as though needles were continually piercing it. The temporary loss of sight is occasioned by the impossibility of opening the eye-lids for a single moment, the smallest ray of light being absolutely insupportable. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... he hurried out of the room, quitted the castle with the utmost precipitation, and hid himself in the lodgings of an acquaintance who lived near, where he flung himself upon the first bed that presented itself, and had every appearance of a man suffering the most excruciating torture. His friend, who had been apprised by the servant of the state he was in, and who naturally concluded that he was ill, offered him some wine. He refused, saying, "No, no, that will not help me: I have ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... since we cannot, as St. Paul says, imagine the happiness of Heaven, neither can we imagine the misery of Hell. Sometimes you will find frightful descriptions of Hell in religious books that tell of the horrible sights, awful sounds, disgusting stenches, and excruciating pains the lost souls endure. Now, all these descriptions are given rather to make people think of the torments of Hell than as an accurate account of them. No matter how terrible the description may be, it is never as bad as the reality. We know that the damned ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... appalling work of destruction was being accomplished with a deadly swiftness that left no time for lamentation,—that the nations of the world were as flying straws swept into the burning, without space or moment for a parting prayer or groan. Tortured by an excruciating agony too great for tears, he suddenly found voice, and lifting his face towards the lurid sky he ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... shores of the Hudson and returned to his home at Bardstown, Ky., where he died in 1798. The unsuccessful struggles of Fitch make a melancholy history. In his last appeal he used this language: "But why those earnest solicitations to disturb my nightly repose, and fill me with the most excruciating anxieties; and why not act the part for myself, and retire under the shady elms on the fair banks of the Ohio, and eat my coarse but sweet bread of industry and content, and when I have done, to have my body laid in the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... little dead man; and, although few qualities are commoner than physical courage, the whole catalogue seemed ridiculous and tawdry until the being came to the two words, "Victoria Cross". The being, having lived his glorious moments, withdrew. The Funeral March of Chopin tramped with its excruciating dragging tread across the ruins of the soul. And finally the cathedral was startled by the sudden trumpets of the Last Post, ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... the modes of traveling in Japan, the jin-riki-sha is the most pleasant. The kago is excruciating. It is a flat basket, swung on a pole and carried on the shoulders of two men. If your neck does not break, your feet go hopelessly to sleep. Headaches seem to lodge somewhere in the bamboos, to afflict every victim entrapped in it. To ride in a kago is as pleasant ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... doubtless tokens of delirium. The excruciating agonies which now seized upon my head, and the cord which seemed to be drawn across my breast, and which, as my fancy imagined, was tightened by some forcible hand, with a view to strangle me, were incompatible with sober ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... about, and large heavy cans, and many bottles, and metal galleys, and nameless fragments of metal. Everything contributed to the impression of immense ponderosity exceeding the imagination. The fancy of being pinned down by even the lightest of these constructions was excruciating. You moved about in narrow alleys among upstanding, unyielding metallic enormities, and you ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... terrible curse, desiring that Ootah's shadow, wherein exists the soul, might depart from his still-living body, and thus cause the most excruciating bodily anguish, Sipsu sank exhausted to the ground. ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... enthusiasm was over, the O. P.s became anxious for a confirmation of the intelligence, and commenced a loud call for Mr. Kemble. He had not then returned from the Crown and Anchor; but of this the pitites were not aware, and for nearly half an hour they kept up a most excruciating din. At length the great actor made his appearance, in his walking dress, with his cane in hand, as he had left the tavern. It was a long time before he could obtain silence. He. apologized in the most respectful terms for appearing before them in such unbecoming costume, which was ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... time he came back and lit a fire in the sheet-iron stove. As the circulation that meant life flooded back into her chilled veins Sheba endured a half-hour of excruciating pain. She had to clench her teeth to keep back the groans that came from her throat, to walk the floor and nurse her tortured hands with ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... that followed they were all cast upon the shore, as they thought, dead men. Reaching Sfax they reported their adventures and offered prayers in gratitude for their extraordinary escape; but five days later all three began to suffer excruciating torment from internal burns, the skin upon their heads and bodies began to peel off, and they died ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... the innocent. Thus it was in the present case. Merciless flogging soon became an ordinary punishment for political misdemeanours of no very aggravated kind. Men were sentenced, for words spoken against the government, to pains so excruciating that they, with unfeigned earnestness, begged to be brought to trial on capital charges, and sent to the gallows. Happily the progress of this great evil was speedily stopped by the Revolution, and by that article of the Bill of Rights which condemns ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... would come to him in dreams, the horror of which would remain on into his waking time. They were not necessarily horrible things at all, but their clearness in the dream, and their total, if slow, disappearance as the actual world came back, became sometimes an excruciating torment. Who could say that they, or some equivalents, might not reach him out of the past ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... in Sharpe's MS., and I attribute this redundant stanza to Scott's copy. The Captain, remember, has a shot "through his head," and another which must have caused excruciating torture. In these circumstances would a poet like Scott put in his mouth a speech which merely reiterates the previous verse? No! But the ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... not agree to violate their almost newly sworn covenant, by approving of the admission of these wicked malignants into public places of power and trust;—in defence of which many of them faced the awful gibbet, banishment, imprisonment, and other excruciating hardships;—whereas several hundreds of the resolutioners, on the very first blast of temptation, involved themselves in fearful apostacy and perjury; some of them became violent persecutors of these their faithful brethren, and not a few of them absolute monsters of iniquity.—The ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... Paradise, for want of shoes. At last he allows Beckmesser a hearing, provided he will permit him to mark the faults with his hammer upon the shoe he is making. The marker consents, and sings his song, "Den Tag seh' ich erscheinen," accompanied with excruciating roulades of the old-fashioned conventional sort; but Sachs knocks so often that his shoe is finished long before Beckmesser's song. This is his first humiliation. Before the act finishes he is plunged into still further trouble, for David suspects him of designs upon Magdalena, and ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... he had the newspaper read to him, and made his comments, as usual. Thursday night brought with it a convulsive hiccough. Friday, his spirit was clear, peaceful and full of love. But Friday night extinguished the last hopes of his friends. The pains he endured were excruciating. With an indescribably affecting and deeply tender voice, before which no eye remained tearless, he exclaimed, "Would to God I could sleep." Saturday he was clamorous for the servant to bring him his clothes, that he might ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... excruciating grimace. "My good fellow, spare me! That's just where the shoe pinches. I've broken faith with her already. But—damnation!—what else could I do? I didn't choose the part of virtuous hero. It was thrust upon me. The gods are making sport of ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... I suffered from incapacity with an appalling sense of misery and general apprehension of coming evil. I passed sleepless nights and was troubled with irregular action of the heart, a constantly feverish condition, and the most excruciating tortures in my stomach, living for days on rice water and gruel, and, indeed, the digestive functions seemed ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... apprehension of his death during this cruel interim, caused an agony of suspense, which, by representing him to her distracted fancy in a state of suffering, made him, if possible, still dearer to her. In the excruciating anguish of uncertainty, she walked with trembling steps through all weathers (when she could steal half a day while her parents were employed in labour abroad) to the post town, at six miles' distance, to inquire ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... than at any other period since the birth of Christ, the medical and surgical world have centralized their minds for the purpose of relieving locally inside, below the kidney of the male or female, excruciating pain, which appears in both sexes in ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... did not heed it. The mountains looked higher than in summer, and the old castles more grim and frowning. From the hard roads and freezing wind, my feet became very sore, and after limping along in excruciating pain for a league or two, I filled my boots with brandy, which deadened the wounds so much, that I was enabled to go on in a kind of trot, which I kept up, only stopping ten minutes to dinner, till we ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... exile Theodore found a shelter in the monastery which he had restored in his prosperous days. But there also, for some two years longer, the cup of sorrow was pressed to his lips. A malady from which he suffered caused him excruciating pain; his sons were implicated in a political plot and thrown into prison; Andronicus II., between whom and himself all communication had been forbidden, died; and so the worn-out man assumed the habit of a monk, and lay ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... came. Sickness and pain entered our dwelling, and seized upon one of my family. My youngest son was taken ill. He was racked with excruciating pain. It seemed as if the agony would drive him to distraction, or cut short his days. And there I stood, watching his agony, and distracted with his cries, unable to utter a whisper about a gracious Providence, or to offer up a prayer for ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... ceased, my chest was relieved, but the inflammation seemed to have seized my brain, and I could not move my head without the most excruciating pain. I informed Oroboni of my condition; and he too was even worse than usual. "My dear friend," said he, "the day is near when one or other of us will no longer be able to reach the window. Each time we welcome one another may be the last. Let us hold ourselves ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... his blood, assuring her that it contains an effectual charm against all infidelity on the part of her husband. Afterwards, on hearing that Hercules is in love with Iole, Deianira sends him the tunic, that it may have the supposed effect. As soon as he puts it on, he is affected with excruciating torments, and is seized with such violent fits of madness, that he throws Lychas, the bearer of the garment, into the sea, where he is changed into a rock. Hercules, then, in obedience to a response of the oracle, which he consults, prepares a funeral pile, and laying himself upon it, his friend ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... to the little pile of red and white, and lifted it with his uninjured arm, though the stooping caused him excruciating torture. The child was bleeding from four deep, cruel scratches, extending diagonally from the right shoulder down the back; but he found upon examination that the soft, yielding bones were unbroken, and that her unconsciousness came from the rough contact of the little forehead ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... them, cherish them; you are even expected to take an interest in their clothes, in their hair! You even have to go and help put the finishing touches, when all the time you dread seeing her dressed up. It is excruciating, it is brutal. It is inhuman, Lord Henry! Shall I tell you the truth,—though it's dreadful, wicked. Well, I hate my sister. I loathe her with a deadly loathing. My fingers itch to—oh, all through the night I think of some means of disfiguring her. It is the most diabolical cruelty ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... looked away from him. He had seen courage, but never like this, and deep down in his soul he prayed—prayed that death might come to him first, so that he might not have to look upon the agonies of this other, whose end would be ghastly in its fearless resignation. His own suffering had become excruciating. Sharp pains darted like red-hot needles through his limbs, his back tortured him, and his head ached as though a knife had cloven the base of his skull. Still—he could breathe. By pressing his head against the post ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... would have been considered inquisitive even at Tilling to put direct questions to the combatants, and (still hoping for the best) ask them point-blank "Who won?" or something of that sort; but until she arrived at some sort of information, the excruciating pangs of curiosity that must be endured could be likened only to some acute toothache of the mind with no dentist to stop or remove the source of the trouble. Elizabeth had already succumbed to these pangs of surmise and ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... Freedom sprung, Whence flow these wishes for the common good, By feeling hearts alone best understood; I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat; What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labor in my parents' breast? Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd; Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... them off. Even after having gnawed off a leg they are so guileless that they never seem to learn to know and fear traps, for some are occasionally found that have been caught twice and have gnawed off a second foot. Many other animals suffering excruciating pain in these cruel traps gnaw off their legs. Crabs and lobsters are so fortunate as to be able to shed their limbs when caught or merely frightened, apparently without suffering any pain, simply by giving themselves a little ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... amorous kind, characterized, it is said, by great simplicity, natural and pleasing metaphor, and extremely soft and melodious rhyme. They sing their poems to certain popular airs, which are committed to memory. Malay music, though plaintive and less excruciating than Chinese and Japanese, is very monotonous and dirge-like, and not pleasing to a European ear. The pentatonic scale is employed. The violin stands first among musical instruments in their estimation. They have also the ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... The other was almost too far gone to swallow. The hoarse cries of the soldiers, mingled occasionally with a sobbing scream, came from the houses above, telling what they had tried so desperately to escape from. They lay there helpless, evidently in excruciating pain, under a brazen sun that beat down on the deserted dusty road. There was no one within reach to come to their assistance. And there was nothing for it but to leave them there, as many under similar circumstances had had to be left ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... remission of the doom pronounced by the martyr on Pere Lactance was not added to their number; and at a quarter-past six on September 18th, exactly a month to the very minute after Grandier's death, Pere Lactance expired in excruciating agony." ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... time, you may be sure. And here, sure enough, she found poor Harry lying in excruciating pain, and with a great white swelling on his knee, which her experienced eyes saw at once was no ...
— The Good Ship Rover • Robina F. Hardy
... ineffectual and laughable attempts to manipulate in the approved fashion, you throw on one side. After the decks are cleared the young ladies bring out their sam-sins, and whilst we smoke Japanese pipes, they delight our ears with an overture, which we pronounce excruciating in English, though with our eyes we ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... a terrible sight to see the varied expressions of anxiety, fear, or dogged resolution depicted in the faces of these men. Some of them knew well that death, accompanied by excruciating torture, was certain to be their portion when the bombardment should be over. Others hoped that a severe bastinado might be the worst of it. None expected anything more—even though the British should win the day—than that there would be some modification in ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... knee which gives its owner excruciating pain, and shows only a little swelling and no sign of diseased matter whatever. The hot fomentation and cold towels have both been tried, but there are now and again symptoms that show us that the root of the evil has not been reached. We try cold cloths on this knee, but they ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... an especial affinity for the bony structures. It will work its way through the vertebrae of the spine and the bones of the skull into the nerve matter of the brain and spinal cord, causing inflammation, excruciating headaches, nervous symptoms, girdle pains, etc. These stages of acute inflammation are followed in a few years by sclerosis (hardening) of nerve matter and blood vessels, resulting in paresis, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... The excruciating agonies which Nature inflicts on men (who break her laws) to be represented as the work of human tormentors; as the gout, by screwing the toes. Thus we might find that worse than the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition are daily ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... proposed to begin the rehearsal at four o'clock; I counted the minutes as they passed; their flight was at once too rapid and too slow; my sensations were of an excruciating kind; I could taste no food, nor apply to any task, nor enjoy a moment's repose: when the hour arrived, I hastened to ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... but who else would or could have done so well? If not a war genius, he was the personification of dogged, obstinate persistency, never allowing a word of discouragement or doubt to escape during the entire day, not even to his personal staff, though suffering excruciating pain from the recent injury from the fall of his horse. To him and to the valor of his officers and soldiers the country owes much for a timely victory, though won at great cost of life and limb. To him and them are due praise, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... astonished the Goths and Vandals of the north, could hold a candle—we had almost said a fiddle—to this sable descendant of Ham, who, squatted on his hams in the midst of an admiring circle, drew forth sounds from his solitary string that were more than exquisite,—they were excruciating. ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... *Cor, cordis heart core, discord, courage Corpus body corpse, incorporate Credo, credituin believe creed, discreditable Cresco, cretum grow crescendo, concrete, accrue *Crux, crucis cross crucifix, excruciating Cura care curate, sinecure Curro, cursum run occur, concourse *Derigo, directum direct dirge, dirigible, address *Dexter right, right hand ambidextrous, dexterity Dico speak, say abdicate, verdict *Dies day diary, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... "what are you doing here?" He looked at me with an expression of excruciating pain ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... that night with tight boots and stiff collars no pen can fitly tell. But only to one another did they confide these sufferings and the rare moments of repose when they could stand on one aching foot with heads comfortably sunken inside the excruciating collars, which rasped their ears and made the lobes thereof a pleasing scarlet. Brief were these moments, however, and the Spartan boys danced on with smiling faces, undaunted by the hidden anguish which preyed upon them "fore and aft," ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... of his return, my melancholy was excruciating, but the cause was unknown to me. I had nothing to wish, with regard to you, but to see you occasionally, to hear your voice, and to be told that you were happy. It never occurred to me that Talbot's return would occasion any difference in this respect. Conscious of nothing ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... direct violation of the articles, as well as in contempt of common humanity, delivered up above twenty men of the garrison to the Indians, in lieu of the same number they had lost during the siege; and in all probability these miserable captives were put to death by those barbarians, with the most excruciating tortures, according to the execrable custom of the country. Those who countenance the perpetration of cruelties, at which human nature shudders with horror, ought to be branded as infamous to all posterity. Such, however, were the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... painting, seems to have been, the delineation of an affecting scene or interesting occurrence; they have endeavoured to tell a story by the variety of incidents in a single picture; and seized, for the most part, the moment when passion was at its greatest height, or suffering appeared in its most excruciating form. The general character, accordingly, of the school, is the expression of passion or violent suffering; and in the prosecution of this object, they have endeavoured to exhibit it under all its aspects, and display all the effects which it could possibly produce on the human form, ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... An excruciating pain shot through me. I set my teeth to keep from screaming and closed my eyes to hide the anguish ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... his leg above the knee, to choke back the first excruciating pang. Rocking backward and forward, he began to repeat scattered ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... sinks in Hell. One who is endued with an opposite disposition and who is righteous in acts, is born as a handsome man. The man who is endued with cruelty, goes to Hell, while he that is endued with compassion ascends to Heaven. The man who goes to Hell has to endure excruciating misery. One who, having sunk in Hell, rises therefrom, take birth as a man endued with short life. That man who is addicted to slaughter and injury, O goddess, becomes, through his sinful deeds, liable to destruction. Such a person becomes disagreeable to all creatures and endued with a short ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... sent, after five years' captivity, on parole to Rome with proposals of peace, dissuaded the Senate from accepting the terms, and despite the entreaties of his wife and children and friends returned to Carthage according to his promise, where he was subjected to the most excruciating tortures. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of London, from which, in all probability, Fox drew the materials for his description, makes one shudder at the reckless, cold-blooded acquiescence of its author in the excruciating tortures of a fellow-creature suffering for his faith's sake. In his eyes, heretics were detestable pests; and an abhorrence of heresy seems (p. 346) to have quenched every feeling of humanity ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... lecture. I asked him whether it was pleasant to a writer of plays to see them performed; and he said it was intolerable, the presentation of the author's idea being so imperfect; and Dr. ——— observed that it was excruciating to hear one of his own songs sung. Jerrold spoke of the Duke of Devonshire with great warmth, as a true, honest, simple, most kind-hearted man, from whom he himself had received great courtesies and kindnesses ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... members are not only found on the Vigilance Committees, (tribunals organized in opposition to the laws of the states where they exist,) but uniting with the merciless and the profligate in passing sentence consigning to infamous and excruciating, if not extreme punishment, persons, by their own acknowledgment, innocent of any unlawful act. Out of sixty persons that composed the vigilance committee which condemned Mr. Dresser to be scourged in the public square of Nashville, TWENTY-SEVEN were members of churches, and one of them ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... time I had enjoyed uninterrupted good health, the pneumonia now seized me violently; and after a week of "heroic treatment," I was put into a box-car and started for the hospital at Nashville. This was the dreariest ride of my life thus far. Alone, in darkness, suffering excruciating pain, going perhaps to die and be buried in an unhonored grave, my "Christmas" was any thing but "merry." And yet the month following my arrival in Nashville was the most pleasant, on many accounts, that I had yet spent in Dixie. ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... his age, a stubborn, painful, and malignant ulcer, broke out upon his left thigh; which, for near five years, defeated all the art of the surgeons and physicians, and not only afflicted him with most excruciating pains, but exposed him to such sharp and tormenting applications, that the disease and remedies were equally insufferable. Then it was, that his own pain taught him to compassionate others, and his experience of the inefficacy ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... cat is repulsive to the ear of the human adult. Consequently, what does your baby do but betake itself to a practical study of the caterwaul! After a few conscientious rehearsals a creditable degree of perfection is usually reached, and a series of excruciating performances are forthwith commenced, which last with unbroken success until the stage arrives when correction becomes possible. This process may check the child's taste for imitating the lower animals in some of their less engaging peculiarities, but his dramatic instincts will be diverted with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... much—and a pretty woman's more than much. It is no exaggeration to say that Shiel would have lain down and died for Gladys ten times over. For her sake—if only to see her smile, no mere physical pain would have been too excruciating for him to bear. And when she put the finishing touches to the bandages, and quite by chance, of course, their eyes met, he looked at her as if he never meant to leave off looking at her, as if he never meant to do anything else but look ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... ordered six fires to be lighted simultaneously in Paris. The Convention, as we know, limited itself to a single guillotine in the same city. It is probable that the sufferings of the victims were not very excruciating; the insensibility of the Christian martyrs had already been remarked. Believers are hypnotised by their faith, and we know to-day that certain forms of hypnotism ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... Philamaclink, as her natives love to call her, is afflicted with a terrible disease—a fearful attack of chronic Legislature. Even when the active symptoms of this dread malady have subsided, the effects linger, and the consequent suffering is excruciating. One of the direst of the effects of the last attack is a dreadful bill—not a bile—which has caused a utilization sewage company to appear upon her body corporate. It is almost impossible for sister cities to understand the torments of such an affliction. Nobody ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... midnight, and the street was deserted. My carriage stopped, I got out, and it then drove on to the mews. I was in the act of opening the door with my latch-key when, by an unknown hand, there was flung full into my eyes some corrosive fluid which burned terribly, and caused me excruciating pain. I heard a man's exultant voice cry, 'There! I promised you that, and you have it!' The voice I recognised as that of the blackguard standing before you. Since that moment," he added in a blank, hoarse voice, ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... tumour of the right elbow, attended for three years with excruciating pains, was nearly cured by four doses of the juice taken once a month. Ib. p. 43. ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... was a small, shrapnel gun carriage, by which stood a toothless, old man who told, in that excruciating Wallon tongue, a pathetic story of one of the dogs which had probably drawn it. His mate doubtless was killed in battle, but he returned three days later, lay down beside the broken wheels and ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... of self-contempt as he appeared to be. He never laid aside his hair shirt; his bed was a mat, and his pillow a stone; his sustenance was hard coarse bread and water. At fifty years of age, he began to be grievously afflicted with the stone and nephritic colic; but bore with cheerfulness the most excruciating pains of his distemper. The emperor Leo, the Armenian, in 814, renewed the persecution against the church, and abolished the use of holy images, which had been restored under Constantine and Irene. Knowing the great reputation and authority ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Peterkin's remark about each man doing his duty, and said that, "if each man did not do his duty—" Here his majesty paused for a minute, and wrought his countenance into horrible contortions, indicative of the most excruciating agony, and wound up with an emphatic repetition of that dire threat about the unnatural treatment of eyes, heart, liver, and carcass, which had on the previous evening sounded so awful in our ears, and had been treated with such profound ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... uttered these words, when the excruciating torment which I suffered caused me to faint away. When I recovered, I found myself in a prison-cell, with a bandage over my damaged optic, and a physician feeling ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... drenched in their blood. It is enough; you are a menace and danger to the nation, and you must die. In the old days of the reign of M'Bongwele—those days which you were so anxious to restore—your dying would have been a lingering, long-drawn-out, excruciating torment; but under the teaching of those who put me on this throne I have learned to be merciful, and my sentence is that you be led forth and hanged by the neck from the bough of the tree that ended M'Bongwele's ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... rabbit, reddening to the neck with stupefaction, excruciating sheepishness and annoyance. Never in the whole course of his life had he been caught in such an ineffable predicament. He strode to and fro in futile speechless rage and shame. The situation was intolerable. He felt that at no matter what cost he must get Titus Blackhurst ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... speedily to cease to breathe. Such scenes are rendered familiar to us in romance, but to gaze on the reality, and to feel that, pity as we may, no joyful denouement can be furnished to avert the contemplated sacrifice, occasions for the time excruciating sorrow. But while I felt this, and was persuaded that each of all who were with me (however idle the curiosity which brought him there) would have been glad for himself to have given them life and freedom, I admired ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... individual son of Alma Mater, he ought to be ashamed of himself, and not to fail to assume a certain less dignified, but expressive, three-lettered qualification. But before those Tripos Papers I bow my head in humble adoration. They sometimes take my breath away even to read the terrible excruciating things, which seem to turn one's brain round and round, and contort the muscles of one's face, and stop the pulsation of one's heart, when one tries ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... illness of which no one took account, had ended all for the unhappy wife, had been the beginning of a joy beyond words for the other two. She had kept her bed for two days, suffering from a nervous attack, accompanied by excruciating neuralgia, and had died quite suddenly from the bursting of a vessel on ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... ought to be tight, it contracts the nerves, and so shortens the limbs that a tall man finds all the comeliness of his stature taken from him while he is still unmutilated. It is in truth a living death; and when the excruciating torment is gone, it leaves an almost worse legacy behind it—inability to move. Even debtors in the torture chamber have the weights sometimes removed from their feet; but this cruel malady, when it has once taken hold of a man, seems never to relinquish possession. A ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... they dance the sand dance to it.' And he expounded the sand dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long, 'Hush!' with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes, 'he's going to play "Auld Robin Gray" on one string!' And throughout this excruciating movement,—'On one string, that's on one string!' he kept crying. I would have given something myself that it had been on none; but the hearers were much awed. I called for a tune or two, and thus introduced ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Brigade. This and a severe outbreak of Spanish 'flue provided him with a regular hundred patients a day. He himself had bitter personal experience of the boils. We never saw him without one for ten weeks. His own method of dealing with their excruciating tenderness was to swathe his face in cotton-wool and sticking-plaster. "Damn me, doctor, if you don't look like a loose imitation of Von Tirpitz," burst out the adjutant one day, when the doctor, with a large boil on either side of his chin, ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... was not quite so easy as to advance. The rapids presented innumerable difficulties in the way of ascent, with an enemy lining the banks of the river. And that which was more annoying forced itself strongly upon his mind—the Canadians were both loyal and brave. His agony was most excruciating when he received a letter from Hampton to the effect that the Plattsburgh-Grand-Junction-Invading-Army was marching as expeditiously as circumstances would allow out of Canada; that, in a word it had been defeated and was in full retreat upon Champlain. An anathema was about ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... who dropped her h's, or called Maria Marire! How are you to introduce her into society? My dear Mrs. Pendennis, I will name no names, but in the very best circles of London society I have seen men suffering the most excruciating agony, I have known them to be cut, to be lost utterly, from the vulgarity of their wives' connections. What did Lady Snapperton do last year at her dejeune dansant after the Bohemian Ball? She told Lord Brouncker that he might bring his daughters or send them with a proper chaperon, but ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... be equal. Again I repeat it, let me have the side where I take no risks when viewed from the skeptic's standpoint, and where I can "repose in a paradise of illusions," in preference to the skeptic's excruciating doubt. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... with apparent effort. Her hands were clasped over the region where hot corn-meal cakes are said to lie heavily at times. Her face was screwed into an expression indicative of excruciating inner torment. As she made her way, moaning softly, to the farther door that opened into the cheerless corridor, there was audible a suppressed but decided giggle. It proceeded from Freckles. The monitor warned her, but, unheeding, ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... the sand dance to it." And he expounded the sand dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long "Hush!" with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes; "he's going to play 'Auld Robin Gray' on one string!" And throughout this excruciating movement,—"On one string, that's on one string!" he kept crying. I would have given something myself that it had been on none; but the hearers were much awed. I called for a tune or two, and thus introduced myself to the notice ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... before the battle, and telling them that they were about to enter, not upon a single action, but upon a long war,—that from success, then, would follow a series of victories,—and that therein lay their only salvation from a death at once excruciating and infamous. They must, he said, live upon victory after victory,—an expression that showed he had a clear comprehension of the nature of his situation. In the battle that followed, Varinius was beaten, unhorsed, and compelled to fly for his life. All his personal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... first to realize the necessity of a rapid push for Rome. He was faint from loss of blood and excitement; besides, his shattered arm throbbed violently and gave him twinges of excruciating pain. He felt himself sinking and urged his friend to hasten. Esperance acquiesced, and, supporting the young Italian as best he could, they resumed the homeward journey. Scarcely a mile had been traversed, ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... prospect of once more enjoying the luxury of heaven's sunlight unimpeded by the bars of a prison cell; of running rampant through the land, and feeling upon his sunken cheeks the deliciously invigorating air of the open fields. His high spirit had been effectually tamed by that rigid, excruciating torture of close confinement during the dog days, with no other companion than despair. By this time personal liberty and fresh air seemed to him the only things greatly to be desired. He was cognizant of a sensation of thankfulness that his trial had come on at ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... I could feel it clinging to me all over. It compressed the air in my lungs, it retarded the circulation, and gave me the most excruciating cramp, and pins and needles. My sufferings were so acute that I groaned, and, on attempting to stretch my jaws, found that they were encased in tight, clammy bandages. By prodigious efforts I eventually managed to gain a certain amount of liberty for my head, and ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... bed, face down, his grasping fingers clutching spasmodically at the covering as his nerves twitched with remembered pain. Thirteen jolts. Thirteen searing jolts of excruciating torture. It was over now, but his synapses were still crackling with the memories of those burning ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... hands wholly numb—but the will rules even bodily exhaustion. He would not tolerate the thought of weakness; he would get warm; and his reluctant blood was forced at last to resume its course through his veins. Warmth returned with excruciating pain. He conceded his worn body a little rest—for he knew they could not get their horses before morning—but in an hour, dressed, and with his pack and his gun on his back, he was crawling back ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... asked two searching questions of a witness, she showed no sign of perturbation, and avoided meeting the eyes in the jury-box, as though they belonged to basilisks. Was it only three days since the beginning of this excruciating martyrdom of soul; and how much longer could she endure ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... autumn of 1804. During that season I was in London, having come thither for the first time since my entrance at college. And my introduction to opium arose in the following way. One morning I awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face, from which I had hardly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... good a place as any to emphasize, that if the bride has a very strong, tough and resistant hymen, the new husband should not use brute force in rupturing it. First, because the pain may be too excruciating and this may create in the wife an aversion to intercourse which may last for many months or years—in some cases forever. Second, a severe hemorrhage may result, which may require the aid of a physician to stop. Wherever a case of very resistant hymen is encountered, the husband ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... began to take stock of the situation. First of all came his head. The pain of the wound was an ache, a dull ache that sharpened into shooting pains if he moved. Still, he told himself that it might be worse. There was much worse pain in the world. It could not be called unbearable or excruciating. ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... Men, the outlaws of the jungle, and it proved their enmity to the Golden City. The Ragged Men greeted them joyously and fed them, and enlisted their aid in a savage attack on a land-convoy on the way to the city. Their weapons carried the convoy, and they watched wounded prisoners killed with excruciating tortures.... ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... that could be wished for; that of Jesus, expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, abused, insulted, cursed by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be feared. Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, blessed indeed the weeping executioner who administered it; but Jesus, in the midst of excruciating tortures, prayed for his merciless tormentors. Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God. Shall we suppose the evangelic history a mere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not the marks of fiction; on the contrary, the history ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... often excruciating in adults. It may be felt over the temple, side and back of the head and neck, and even in the lower teeth, as well as in the ear itself. The pain is increased by blowing the nose, sneezing, coughing, and stooping. There is considerable ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... admired and envied. He was a poet without an exclusive sense of the poetic, a man without the finer discriminations, enjoying everything with the unreasoning enthusiasm of a boy. He was the poet of the dung hill as well as of the mountains, which is admirable in theory but excruciating in verse. In the same paragraph he informs you that, "The pure contralto sings in the organ loft," and that "The malformed limbs are tied to the table, what is removed drop horribly into a pail." No branch of surgery is poetic, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... throbbing. He recognized his physician, and his livid lips murmured almost inaudibly, "Ivan, I have taken poison, that which you gave me one day in Russia; but it has lost its efficacy! It does not kill, while it causes me excruciating pain." ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... in their souls," and are "moved by concord of sweet sounds," the tones of a harsh voice are excruciating; and if among our statesmen and other public speakers "silver tongues" are rare, they are much more so among our preachers. The Church of Rome does not admit into the priesthood men who have any bodily shortcoming or defect; it would ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... on the shelf. But was it? It was not! Yes? No! It curved; it straightened; it curved again. The excitement was as keen as that of watching a drowning man attempt to reach the shore. It was simply excruciating. It could not be borne any longer, and when it could not be borne any longer the tower sprawled irrevocably and seven dozen plates fell in a cascade on the violet hat, and so with an inconceivable clatter to the floor. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... at the sight, and were astonished at the intrepidity of the sufferers. Some of the martyrs were obliged to pass, with their already wounded feet, over thorns, nails, sharp shells, &c. upon their points, others were scourged till their sinews and veins lay bare, and after suffering the most excruciating tortures that could be devised, they were destroyed by the most ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... I'm sick of the hideousness of life, of the excruciating lower middle-class arrangement of this room. I don't know how I've stood it all these years. My soul must have been starved—stifled. I want to live in another atmosphere, to be surrounded by beautiful things. Don't laugh like that,—I know I'm not an artist; I couldn't ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Mr. Judson writes, "My sweet little Maria lies by the side of her fond mother. Her complaint proved incurable. The work of death went forward, and after the usual process, excruciating to a parent's feelings, she ceased to breathe on the 24th inst., at 3 o'clock P.M., aged 2 years and 3 months. We then closed her faded eyes, and bound up her discolored lips, and folded her little hands—the exact pattern of her mother's—on her cold ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... it is rarely sought as a means of escape from bodily suffering. If we feel that we have a competence at our backs, so that we can die warm and quietly in our beds, with no need to worry about expense, we live our lives out to the dregs, no matter how excruciating our torments. Job probably felt the loss of his flocks and herds more than that of his wife and family, for he could enjoy his flocks and herds without his family, but not his family—not for long—if he had lost all his money. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... climbed the high steps laboriously, dropping a five-cent piece into a slot as he rounded a little barrier. Claude sprang up after him, dropping in a similar piece of money. Its tinkle as it fell shivered through his nerves with the excruciating sharpness ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... but, by some accident, failed to continue the quest to the refuge of the wounded man. He bled profusely, but the haemorrhage was finally arrested by some rude bandaging, and at night he was helped astride a donkey, and conveyed across the frontier into France. He told me he had suffered excruciating torments at every jolt of the jog-trotting animal on that mountain journey. Had the bullet struck him an inch higher he would have had to suffer amputation; but his luck stood to him, and at the time we met he was getting on fairly towards recovery, thanks to youth, a good ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... gypsy witch-wife and her daughter to flight. The Welshman administered some oil, which, after two hours of suspense, and with the help of an opiate, saved the life of Lavengro. During this companionship Borrow found that Williams suffered excruciating spiritual terrors from the conviction that he had committed the sin against the Holy ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... the discovery taught me something further, namely, that my head was liable to excruciating little throbs of pain. I raised a hand to it. My forehead was swathed in bandages, like a turbaned Turk's. Oh, to be sure, in the castle at Prezelay, as we were retreating up the staircase, Schwartzmann had fired ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... that they were his enemies. Siswani, however, the present victim, was not undergoing any experimental form of torture of M'Bongwele's own invention; he was simply suffering a form of death that, from the protracted and exquisitely excruciating character of its agonies, enjoys a very wide popularity among African savages. It consists in the eyelids of the victim being cut off, to expose the unprotected eyeballs to the fierce glare of the sun—and, later, to other and even worse torments—after which he is led out ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... they can." (465.) In the Pope, Luther had recognized the Antichrist; and the idea of treating, seeking an agreement, and making a compromise with the enemy of his Savior, was intolerable to him. At Smalcald, while suffering excruciating pain, he declared, "I shall die as the enemy of all enemies of my Lord Christ." When seated in the wagon, and ready to leave Smalcald, he made the sign of the cross over those who stood about him and said: "May the Lord fill you with His blessing ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... would naturally suppose. How calmly the brave boys endure the wounds they have received in defence of their beloved country! Only now and then can be heard a subdued sob, or a dying groan; while those who are fully conscious, though suffering excruciating pain, are either engaged in silent prayer or meditation, or reading a Testament or a last letter from loved ones, and patiently awaiting their turn with the surgeon or ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... occupied the palace, and were in complete possession of the city of Delhi, consoled Nicholson on his deathbed. From the first there was little hope that this valuable life could be saved. He was taken into hospital in a fainting condition from internal hemorrhage, and he endured excruciating agony; but, wrote General Chamberlain, 'throughout those nine days of suffering he bore himself nobly; not a lament or sigh ever passed his lips.' His every thought was given to his country, and to the last he materially aided the military authorities ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... induced the writer hereof to speak so slightingly of the residence of Basileus. These evils are now cured and forgotten. This is written off the leaden flats and mounds which they call the Troad. It is stern justice alone which pronounces this excruciating sentence. It was a farce to make this place into a kingly capital; and I make no manner of doubt that King Otho, the very day he can get away unperceived, and get together the passage- money, will be off for dear old ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gave up his journal in 1845 he moved to Dresden, and he began to suffer severely from the dreadful disorder to which he fell a victim twelve years later. This disease—an abnormal formation of bone in the brain—afflicted him with excruciating pains in the head, sleeplessness, fear of death, and strange auricular delusions. A sojourn at Parma, where he had complete repose and a course of sea-bathing, partially restored his health, and he gave himself up to musical composition again. During the next ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... painters was that they painted the extremes of emotion. Their subjects represented the ecstacy of bliss or the most excruciating agony. They did not seem to have as much middle ground or to know as much of moderate emotions as the painters of other nations. Ribalta was no exception to this rule, and some of his pictures are painful to look at. His portraits are fine, and represent the most powerful ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... of a set out altogether, sir: three British gentlemen and a respectable servant going out for a ride in the night in a place like this a-top of these excruciating animals, along with so many silent blacks dressed in long white sheets. It all seems mad to me, sir, and as if we ought to be in bed. I fancy I am sometimes, and having uncomfortable dreams, like one does after cold boiled beef for supper, and keep expecting ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... they had done upon earth. Domestic affection, friendships, and the memory of good offices rendered to one another,—all were effaced from their minds: nothing remained there but an inexpressible regret at having been exiled from the world of light, and an excruciating desire to reach it once more. The threshold of Allat's palace stood upon a spring which had the property of restoring to life all who bathed in it or drank of its waters: they gushed forth as soon as the stone was raised, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... showed herself the direct offspring of the infernal regions. Her voice sounded like the hiss of fiery serpents, and her frame quivered as if she stood in a current of consuming vapor. Her eyes, too, wore that painful expression of depth of agony as though her disappointment were excruciating. With his pardon, love, protection and fortune, she might have defied Von Sendlingen and his league, but, alone, she was a stormy petrel flapping its insignificant pinions in the face of the God of Storms. Felix refused to be cheated by ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... Eternal Life. The quality of the Eternal Life alone makes the heaven; mere everlastingness might be no boon. Even the brief span of the temporal life is too long for those who spend its years in sorrow. Time itself, let alone Eternity, is all but excruciating to Doubt. And many besides Schopenhauer have secretly regarded consciousness as the hideous mistake and malady of Nature. Therefore we must not only have quantity of years, to speak in the language of ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... that I'm sick of the hideousness of life, of the excruciating lower middle-class arrangement of this room. I don't know how I've stood it all these years. My soul must have been starved—stifled. I want to live in another atmosphere, to be surrounded by beautiful things. Don't laugh like that,—I know I'm not an artist; I couldn't paint ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... evenings, was privileged to strike false notes with painful iteration, even to the actual distress of auditors, without a word of criticism from the leader or the manager. Excruciating discord from the flute, on three or four nights of a season, was accepted as part payment for such playing, upon every other night, as seldom had been heard from any flute in any ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... step to step and snatching us with them, forcing us to lift our feet as high as our breasts every time, and do it rapidly and keep it up till we were ready to faint, who shall say it is not lively, exhilarating, lacerating, muscle-straining, bone-wrenching and perfectly excruciating and exhausting pastime, climbing the Pyramids? I beseeched the varlets not to twist all my joints asunder; I iterated, reiterated, even swore to them that I did not wish to beat any body to the top; did all I could to convince ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... though bold in professing her own religious views, she was just as firm in refusing to implicate any of her former associates. Threatenings and promises were alike found useless. Then she was subjected to the most excruciating torture; but, though every limb was dislocated, the noble girl remained true to her friends and to her God. So enraged was the chancellor at her fortitude, that when the lieutenant of the tower refused to obey his ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... Marine Anglaise will see that it reaches les Pays Bas, and then when it is of return your sailors so splendid, with sang-froid so perfect, will gobble it up. Just gobble it up. As I will gobble up this cold beef upon your table. Peste, I am of a hunger excruciating. I have not eaten for ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... of her life—months of excruciating physical sufferings, vividly described for us by her contemporaries—the woman's rectitude and wisdom, her swift tender sympathies, were still, as ever, at the disposal of all who sought them. With unswerving energy ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... Physical pain has always been one of the great sources of fear. Now ether and other anaesthetics have eliminated the chief pains of major operations. Older people can still remember their fear of the dentist, when killing a nerve or pulling a tooth caused excruciating pain. Now local anaesthetics even in minor troubles have made dentistry almost painless. We have not conquered these fears of pain—rather their cause has ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... evidently a prey to the most excruciating anguish, followed them with her distended, terrified eyes. When the door closed behind them, she hastily laid her hand on her husband's shoulder, and looked at him with an ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... stood there, her hands pressed to her ears until, with a final excruciating dig into the strings, he dropped his ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... perfection as a soldier at Shiloh, but who else would or could have done so well? If not a war genius, he was the personification of dogged, obstinate persistency, never allowing a word of discouragement or doubt to escape during the entire day, not even to his personal staff, though suffering excruciating pain from the recent injury from the fall of his horse. To him and to the valor of his officers and soldiers the country owes much for a timely victory, though won at great cost of life and limb. To him and them are due ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... I now found severe shooting pains, more racking than the sharpest rheumatism I had ever suffered, pervading my whole body. They increased until I suffered the most excruciating agony, as if my bones had been converted into red—hot tubes of iron, and the marrow in them had been dried up with fervent heat, and I was obliged to beg that a hammock might be spread on deck, on which I lay down, pleading ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... and painful that I have to shut myself up in the dark for hours together. Lock myself up. Sometimes—now and then. Not at present, certainly. At such times the slightest disturbance, the entry of a stranger into the room, is a source of excruciating annoyance to me—it is well ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... easily put a period to his existence, but she still hoped to wrest the secret from him. She was assured, moreover, that his recovery was hopeless. At the expiration of about two hours, he was aroused by the excruciating anguish of his sore. He had again become delirious, and raved as before about coffins, corpses, graves, and other loathsome matters. Seeing, from his altered looks and the livid and gangrenous appearance ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... pain is intense, the foot is held in an elevated position and swung back and forth. In hind legs the member is often flexed in abduction and held in this position for several minutes, being rested on the ground only during short intervals. When compelled to walk, if pain is excruciating, the animal hops with the sound leg, no weight being supported by the ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... as those eloquent and high-spirited ladies, under less offensive provocation, were wont to lavish on the officials of an oppressive law. I have read a good deal of bad verse, but anything like the metre of this play I have never come across in all the range of that excruciating experience. The rare and faint indications that the writer was or had been an humorist and a poet serve only to bring into fuller relief the reckless and shameless ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... They who cry "Wolf!" whenever they see a leveret are not believed when Lupus comes. They who suffer "excruciating agony" whenever a thorn pricks, can say no more under exquisite pain, and their familiar words are powerless to evoke the sympathy which they have repelled so long. They are more likely to receive the severe rebuke administered by a gruff old gentleman to his maudlin, moribund ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... he supposed to be slaughtered. There, Lieut. Speke, who could scarcely breathe from the pain of the blow, asked a captor to tie his hands before, instead of behind, and begged a drop of water to relieve his excruciating thirst. The savage defended him against a number of the Somal who came up threatening and brandishing their spears, he brought a cloth for the wounded man to lie upon, and lost no time in ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... declaring of war; after which, there are no excesses to which their rage and ferocity do not incite them. Even their feasting upon the dead bodies of their enemies, after putting them to death with the most excruciating tortures they can devise, is rather a point of revenge, than of ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... state of confused imaginings. As I look back now to that time, I find I have no specially distinct recollection of what afterward happened to me. I know I suffered intense, intolerable pain—that I was literally tortured on a rack of excruciating anguish—and that through all the delirium of my senses I heard a muffled, melancholy sound like a chant or prayer. I have an idea that I also heard the tinkle of the bell that accompanies the Host, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Jackson Easton, do hereby testify, that, by taking your excellent Parr's Life Pills, I have derived greater benefit than in using all the other medicines I have tried since 1841; about which time I was attacked with severe illness, accompanied with excruciating pain and trembling, with large rupture. For the last six months I have had no return of this illness, nor the least appearance of the last-mentioned symptom. Through the mercy of God, I do at present feel perfectly recovered from it. I still ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... got out, and it then drove on to the mews. I was in the act of opening the door with my latch-key when, by an unknown hand, there was flung full into my eyes some corrosive fluid which burned terribly, and caused me excruciating pain. I heard a man's exultant voice cry, 'There! I promised you that, and you have it!' The voice I recognised as that of the blackguard standing before you. Since that moment," he added in a blank, hoarse voice, "I have ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... dropping of his hand was considered as the signal for my death. The string was tightened, and buried itself, cutting deeply into the flesh of a neck once as fair and smooth as the polished marble of Patras. For the first moments my torture was excruciating—my eyes were forcing out of their sockets—my tongue protruded from my mouth—my brain appeared to be on fire—but ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... glance over her shoulder, she quickened her pace. Louis Fores in all his elegance was pursuing her! Nothing had happened to him. He was not ill; he was merely a little late! After all, she would sit by his side at the supper-table! She had a spasm of shame that was excruciating. But at the same time she was wildly glad. And already this inebriating illusion of an ingenuous girl concerning a common male was helping ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... city an old woman was wheeled into the church in an invalid's chair. I knew by the expression of her countenance that she was suffering. When I met her after the service and asked her about her story she said as the most excruciating pain convulsed her body, "I have not been free from pain in twenty years and have scarcely slept a night through all that time," and then, brushing the tears from her eyes, and with an expectant face, she exclaimed, "but if I could tell you all that ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... garden with Nehushta that morning, and it at once occurred to her that, if the king returned on the following day, it would be an easy thing to appear while he was with the princess, and by veiled words and allusions to Zoroaster, to make her rival suffer the most excruciating torments, which she would be forced to conceal from ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... consciousness, and then, between them, carried him as gently as possible to the nearest house, when they managed, with some difficulty, to get a vehicle to convey them the rest of their journey. It was a sad, silent journey. To Tom, the pain caused by every jolt was excruciating. They did their best to ease him, holding him lying across their knees, while Jim drove along the level footpath; but by the time the school was reached the sufferer was again insensible, and so he remained till the surgeon ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... have them lashed fast to the log with a cord. My feet were also tied to the other, and there I had to lie all that night with my back across this stick of wood, and my feet and hands tied. I suffered that night under the most excruciating pain. From the tight binding of the cord the circulation of the blood in my arms and feet was almost entirely stopped. If the night had been much longer I must have died ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... and I was wet and cold and exhausted, and the pain in my blistered hands was excruciating. But not soon shall I forget that ride down the shore with the sea so rippling and moon-blanched, and the boom of the surf on the rocks, and the peaks of the island standing bold and dark against the ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... epaulets changed to a pair of roosters with flaming red combs, that flapped their wings and crowed. And the barber, approaching Frank with his red-hot sword, made him lie on his back to be shaved. Then followed an excruciating sense of having his hair pulled and his face scraped and burnt, which made him move and murmur in his sleep; until, a ruthless attempt being made to thrust the sword ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... to have a perfectly clear and easily understandable plan which could be dinned into the whole nation and silence the criticism of all possible opponents. Copies of his little book came to Moscow. Lenin read it and caused excruciating jealousy in the minds of several other Communists, who had also been trying to find the philosopher's stone that should turn discouragement into hope, by singling out Gusev for his special praise and insisting that his plans should be fully discussed at the Supreme ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... arrangements of Nature for free and easy movement. It loosens what ought to be tight, it contracts the nerves, and so shortens the limbs that a tall man finds all the comeliness of his stature taken from him while he is still unmutilated. It is in truth a living death; and when the excruciating torment is gone, it leaves an almost worse legacy behind it—inability to move. Even debtors in the torture chamber have the weights sometimes removed from their feet; but this cruel malady, when it has once taken hold of a man, seems never to relinquish possession. ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... over land, over sea, through crowds, deserts, woods, and happy fields, ever tracking silently in horrid calmness; the oppression of indefinite Guilt, with that Holy Eye still watching; the consciousness of instant danger, the sense of excruciating pain, the intolerable tyranny of vague wild fear, without will or power to escape: spurring for very life on a horse of marble: flying upward to meet the quick-falling skies—O, that universal crash!—greeted in a new-entered world with the execrations ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... him. He made no effort to deny his identity, but boldly avowed himself and his deed. He was brought back to the house, where he immediately underwent a preliminary examination before the city magistrates. He was afterward subjected to excruciating tortures; for the fury against the wretch who had destroyed the "father of the country" was uncontrollable, and William the Silent was no longer alive to intercede—as he had often done before—in behalf of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... would be excruciating! And I certainly am going to have a stab at it. Let's see who will go into it. Steve Edwards—no, Steve wouldn't, of course. Tom Hall will, I'll bet. And Roy Draper and Harry Wescott, probably. We ought to ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... drove us to bed early. Our beds consisted of a place on the dirt-floor with a blanket under us. Soon all were asleep; but long before morning first one and then another of our party began to cry out with excruciating pain in the eyes. Not one escaped it. By morning the eyes of half the party were so swollen that they were entirely closed. The others suffered pain equally. The feeling was about what might be expected from ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... tenderness. And he grew daily more conscious of a great peace and happiness—peace and happiness such as he had never known since his boyhood's days. He, who had found the ways of modern society dull to the last point of excruciating boredom, was not aware of any monotony in the daily round of the hours, which, laden with simple duties and pleasures, came and went softly and slowly like angel messengers stepping gently from one heaven ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... again with the scurvy. The effect of these nuts alone, in checking this disease, is astonishing: Many whose limbs were become as black as ink, who could not move without the assistance of two men, and who, besides total debility, suffered excruciating pain, were in a few days, by eating these nuts, although at sea, so far recovered as to do their duty, and could even go aloft as well as they did before the distemper seized them. For several days about this time, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... Every fibre of his strong nature was strained and tortured by the iron grip of his suffering. Every pulse of his body beat with a frantic rage for which no outlet was possible. His eyeballs burned with excruciating pain as he attempted to read again the letter he still held in his hands. He was one of those habitually calm men who become almost insane when they are angry, and in whose placid strength passion of any sort, when ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, abused, insulted, cursed by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be feared. Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, blessed indeed the weeping executioner who administered it; but Jesus, in the midst of excruciating tortures, prayed for his merciless tormentors. Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God. Shall we suppose the evangelic history a mere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not the marks of fiction; on the contrary, the ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... to begin the rehearsal at four o'clock; I counted the minutes as they passed; their flight was at once too rapid and too slow; my sensations were of an excruciating kind; I could taste no food, nor apply to any task, nor enjoy a moment's repose: when the hour arrived, ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... hundred copies of his journal. And now Philamaclink, as her natives love to call her, is afflicted with a terrible disease—a fearful attack of chronic Legislature. Even when the active symptoms of this dread malady have subsided, the effects linger, and the consequent suffering is excruciating. One of the direst of the effects of the last attack is a dreadful bill—not a bile—which has caused a utilization sewage company to appear upon her body corporate. It is almost impossible for sister cities to understand the torments ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... but I never imagined anything half so terrible as this. In various parts of the room I saw machines, and instruments of torture, and on some of them persons were confined who seemed to be suffering the most excruciating agony. I paused, utterly overcome with terror, and for a moment imagined that I was a witness to the torments, which, the priests say, are endured by the lost, in the world of woe. Was I to undergo such tortures, ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... been mercifully pleased to bestow on their conscious frauds. The vindictiveness of a purposeless hell has, of course, failed ignominiously as a deterrent from crime. We cannot conceive infinite Intelligence inflicting an excruciating and endless punishment simply for punishment's sake. We are superior to such methods ourselves; we refuse to associate them with God. What we do believe in, what we are sure of, is that a man's sin must find him out, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... She had now no reason to conceal the ravages of disease, and her color was something frightful. Still, she did not suffer as much, for her mind had overborne her body to such an extent that she had the mastery for the time, to a certain extent, of those excruciating stabs of pain. People looked at her incredulously. They could not believe that she felt as she talked, that she was as happy and resigned as she looked, but it was all true. It was either an abnormal state into which ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... get the boat that far. He was sick with nausea from his exertions, and at times it seemed that blindness smote him, for he could not see, his eyes vexed with spots and points of light that were as excruciating as diamond-dust, his heart pounding up in his throat and suffocating him. Elijah betrayed no interest, did not move nor open his eyes; and Daylight fought out his battle alone. At last, falling on his knees ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... example, but spoke with fear and trembling. Having in vain exhorted him to confess, the Inquisitors ordered the Monk to be put to the question. The Decree was immediately executed. Ambrosio suffered the most excruciating pangs that ever were invented by human cruelty: Yet so dreadful is Death when guilt accompanies it, that He had sufficient fortitude to persist in his disavowal. His agonies were redoubled in consequence: Nor was He released till fainting from excess of pain, insensibility rescued him from the ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... death, an almost insane brilliancy; as, for instance, in the case of a noted theologian, who occupied the last minutes of his ebbing life with a very subtile mathematical discourse concerning the exceeding, the excruciating smallness of nothing divided into infinitesimal parts. And strange as it may seem, I once heard this identical instance cited as a triumphant vindication of the most sublime article of either Pagan or Christian faith. Nay, from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... severe illness, as sudden as it was mysterious. Physicians were hastily summoned from Paris, only, to Louis' despair, to declare that they could do nothing to save the life of the Comtesse. "Tortured by excruciating pain," says de Goncourt, "struggling against a death which was full of terror, and which seemed to point to the violence of poison, the dying woman sent for a confessor. She died almost instantly in ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... their whole heart, and their neighbor as themselves; that they were poor in spirit, humble, pure, patient in adversity, and that perhaps some of them laid down their lives for God, amidst the most excruciating torments. Here is a correct judgment. For it is precisely their heroic virtue, and not the mere accident of birth or the smile of fortune, which gives them the superior beauty, glory, and ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... reach the height of great works. Goethe has shown this in the Laocoon, and every man feels it in constant experience. One of the grand themes of modern painting is the great tragedy of history, the Crucifixion. Materially it is repulsive, as the spectacle of a man in excruciating bodily torture; spiritually it is overwhelming, as the symbolized suffering of God for sin. If, now, the pictures which treat this subject were indeed only imitations of the scene, so that the spectator listened for the groans of agony and looked to see the blood drop from the brow crowned ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... first intense, the tendons of the legs and arms being dreadfully strained, and the spinal column bent so as nearly to be broken in two. The shoulder-blades forced into close contact, pressed the vertebrae inwards, and caused excruciating pains along the lumbar vertebrae, where the ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... avoid worrying somewhat about the outcome of the battle. If our forces should be defeated, we sick fellows would certainly be in a bad predicament. I could see, in my mind's eye, our ambulance starting on a gallop for Devall's Bluff, while every jolt of the conveyance would inflict on me excruciating pain. But this suspense did not last long. The artillery practice soon began moving further towards the west, and was only of short duration anyhow. And we saw no stragglers, which was an encouraging sign, ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... little a while, I, and the English language, and the bones of my descendants, will have ceased to be a memory! And yet - and yet - one would like to leave an image for a few years upon men's minds - for fun. This is a very dark frame of mind, consequent on overwork and the conclusion of the excruciating EBB TIDE. Adieu. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has occasional fits of insanity. This is by no means the case, but it must be admitted that the peculiar malady to which I referred above, and which is as yet not eradicated from his system, causes him, at times, days of the most excruciating pains all over the back and side of his head, and it is scarcely surprising that at such moments the emperor should act in a way which astonishes the uninitiated. Indeed, William II. displays extraordinary force of character in suppressing physical ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... lifetime. People vowed that he carried on the old traditions, the tortures and human sacrifices, and even improved upon them in his blithe Renaissance manner. They were ready to supply circumstantial and excruciating details of how, disguised, down to the minutest details of costume, in the semblance of the Evil One, he had sought to prolong his life and invigorate his declining health with the blood of innocent children, artfully done to death after fiendish, lingering agonies. Father ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... muscles, and prevented the wheel from turning at all. Frere gave him fifty more lashes, and sent him the next day to grind cayenne pepper. This was a punishment more dreaded by the convicts than any other. The pungent dust filled their eyes and lungs, causing them the most excruciating torments. For a man with a raw back the work was one continued agony. In four days Rufus Dawes, emaciated, blistered, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... her happiness proudly, like a banner. The deliciousness of being loved; the intoxication of it, after the last spark of hope had been quenched by that excruciating engagement! Her volcanic heart held a capacity for happiness as tremendous as her capacity for daring and suffering. But the first had so long eluded her, that now she dared scarcely ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... hobbling along just able to walk. He had strained a tendon in his right leg the previous morning, and had been enduring the most excruciating pain all day. He wanted to stay and help us skin the sheep, but I would not let him We were a long way from camp, and it would require all his strength ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... neighbour, some sallow-faced workingman's wife, who sat mending linen, from time to time producing handkerchiefs and stockings riddled with holes from a little basket patched up with string. Moreover, Mademoiselle Saget had plenty of acquaintances here. Amidst the excruciating squalling of the children, and the ceaseless rumble of the traffic in the Rue Saint Denis, she took part in no end of gossip, everlasting tales about the tradesmen of the neighbourhood, the grocers, the butchers, and the ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... boils that had descended upon the Brigade. This and a severe outbreak of Spanish 'flue provided him with a regular hundred patients a day. He himself had bitter personal experience of the boils. We never saw him without one for ten weeks. His own method of dealing with their excruciating tenderness was to swathe his face in cotton-wool and sticking-plaster. "Damn me, doctor, if you don't look like a loose imitation of Von Tirpitz," burst out the adjutant one day, when the doctor, with a large boil on either side of his chin, ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... dynamite and scientific breeding. My touching faith in these saves me from pessimism: I believe in the future; but this only makes the present—which I foresee as going strong for a couple of million of years or so—all the more excruciating by contrast. ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... plume in her hat, and a very large "repayther" on her stomach, which she used to ring on all occasions, narrating how it had been presented to her by her fawther, as she stipt into the car'ge after her mar'ge; and these ornaments, with other outward peculiarities of the Major's wife, gave excruciating agonies to Captain Osborne, when his wife and the Major's came in contact; whereas Amelia was only amused by the honest lady's eccentricities, and not in the ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... painful muscular spasms occurring in the muscles of the calf of the leg, the toes, etc. The expectant mother in the later months of pregnancy awkwardly turns in bed, is suddenly awakened and without a moment's warning, is seized with a most excruciating pain in her leg or toe. The most effectual treatment for these cramps is quickly to apply a very cold object to the cramping muscle. Extremes of either heat or cold usually relieve as well as the vigorous grasping or kneading of the muscle. A hot foot bath on going to bed will ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... more serious than a flesh-wound on the hip. But alas! the wild months of dissipation before he had met Mathilde were before long to be paid for by that long, excruciating suffering which is one of the most heroic spectacles in the history of literature. It is the paradox of the mocker that he often displays the virtues and sentiments which he mocks, much more manfully than the professional sentimentalist. Courage and laughter are old friends, ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... was irksome and painful. My blood became impoverished, and I suffered from incapacity with an appalling sense of misery and general apprehension of coming evil. I passed sleepless nights and was troubled with irregular action of the heart, a constantly feverish condition, and the most excruciating tortures in my stomach, living for days on rice water and gruel, and, indeed, the digestive functions seemed ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... (see Nosco) *Coquo, coxi, coctum cook decoction, precocious *Cor, cordis heart core, discord, courage Corpus body corpse, incorporate Credo, credituin believe creed, discreditable Cresco, cretum grow crescendo, concrete, accrue *Crux, crucis cross crucifix, excruciating Cura care curate, sinecure Curro, cursum run occur, concourse *Derigo, directum direct dirge, dirigible, address *Dexter right, right hand ambidextrous, dexterity Dico speak, say abdicate, verdict *Dies ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... took a corner of the blanket, and with some difficulty, for Singing Bird suffered excruciating pain with every motion, they got her into the wagon and started for the camp, driving slowly ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... that he would sleep... The stillness was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if it were hurt. Then he understood that it must be in pain: pain so excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through his own body. He tried in vain to roll over in the direction of the sound, and stretched his left arm out across the snow. And now it was as though he felt rather than heard the twittering; it seemed to be under his palm, which ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... humanity, delivered up above twenty men of the garrison to the Indians, in lieu of the same number they had lost during the siege; and in all probability these miserable captives were put to death by those barbarians, with the most excruciating tortures, according to the execrable custom of the country. Those who countenance the perpetration of cruelties, at which human nature shudders with horror, ought to be branded as infamous to all posterity. Such, however, were the trophies that, in the course of the American war, distinguished ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... say; "it's a great favourite with performers; they dance the sand dance to it." And he expounded the sand dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long "Hush!" with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes; "he's going to play 'Auld Robin Gray' on one string!" And throughout this excruciating movement,—"On one string, that's on one string!" he kept crying. I would have given something myself that it had been on none; but the hearers were much awed. I called for a tune or two, and thus introduced myself to the notice of the brother, who directed his talk to me for some ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... out with a family of six on his hands, some idea of the situation may be had. I can recall having been without food many a day, and the pangs of hunger drove me almost to desperation. But mother and father would come late at night from a day of depressing toil and excruciating inward pain, the result of their inability to relieve our suffering, and pacify us for the night with such things as they had been able to get. When I awoke the next morning they were gone again on ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... rocks, I limped a short distance, though every step wrung from me a cry of agony. Several times I stopped to rest, and to wipe the sweat from my brow; twice in less than five minutes I was obliged to sit down, and at last the pain in my foot became so excruciating that I ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... of other kinds came. Sickness and pain entered our dwelling, and seized upon one of my family. My youngest son was taken ill. He was racked with excruciating pain. It seemed as if the agony would drive him to distraction, or cut short his days. And there I stood, watching his agony, and distracted with his cries, unable to utter a whisper about a gracious Providence, or to offer up a prayer ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... coming often. The men of the Sand farm had always been plagued by witchcraft. They might be working in the fields, and bending down to pick up a stone or a weed, when all of a sudden some unseen deviltry would strike them with such excruciating pains in the back, that they could not straighten themselves, and had to crawl home on all fours. There they would lie groaning for weeks, suffering greatly from doing nothing, and treated by cupping, leeches and good advice, till one day the pain would ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... happiness yesterday of a letter from Charles, but I shall say as little about it as possible, because I know that excruciating Henry will have had a letter likewise, to make all my intelligence valueless. It was written at Bermuda on the 7th and 10th of December. All well, and Fanny[199] still only in expectation of being otherwise. He ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... human affections, how excruciating and remediless his grief must be, to be so cut off from all equal community of experience and destiny with mankind, to see all whom he loves, generation after generation, fading away, leaving him alone, to form new ties again to be dissolved, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... exhibit the impulse to obedience in the elephant, than the patience with which, at the order of his keeper, he swallows the nauseous medicines of the native elephant-doctors; and it is impossible to witness the fortitude with which (without shrinking) he submits to excruciating surgical operations for the removal of tumours and ulcers to which he is subject, without conceiving a vivid impression of his gentleness and intelligence. Dr. DAVY when in Ceylon was consulted about an elephant in the government Stud, which was ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... authenticity of my divine flatulence, please find inclosed herewith copy of complimentary verses, written by myself on hearing of Poet AUSTIN'S selection. Indulgence is kindly requested for very hasty composition, and circumstance of being greatly harrowed and impeded at time of writing by an excruciating full sized boil on back of neck, infuriated by collar of shirt, ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... may be almost, or completely inhibited, by firmly fixing the Attention upon something else. As an extreme proof of this latter fact, the student is asked to remember the fact that men have been known to suffer excruciating torture, apparently without feeling, owing to the mind being intently riveted upon some idea or thought. As Wyld has said, "The martyr borne above sensuous impressions, is not only able to endure tortures, but is able to endure and quench them. The pinching and cutting of the flesh ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... no oasis. They found no wady other than stone-dry. By day they slept, by night pushed forward. Day by day they grew weaker and less rational. The increasing nerve-strain that possessed them was companioned by the excruciating torture of their bodies racked by ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... a long time before a cure can be effected. In some instances where the powers of the stomach were too weak to prevent the food from undergoing perhaps both a vinous and acetous fermentation, and where, in consequence of the disengagement of gas and the formation of acid, the most excruciating pains were felt, the most dreadful sickness experienced, and all the symptoms of indigestion present in the most aggravated state; after almost every article in the materia medica, generally employed, had been tried without success, I have cured the patient ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... lamp-lit streets, and ready interchange of books and other amenities we had left behind us. We were not accustomed to have our nearest neighbours separated from us by two miles of dirty lane, or road mended with excruciating stones, nor were they very congenial when we did see them. The Fordyce family might be interesting, but we younger ones could not forget the slight to Clarence, and, besides, the girls seemed to be entirely in the schoolroom, Mrs. Fordyce was delicate and ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have a profound horror of earwigs; I firmly believe that they do get into the ear. That is a subject on which it is useless to argue with me upon philosophical grounds. I have a vivid recollection of a story told me by Mrs. Primmins,—how a lady for many years suffered under the most excruciating headaches; how, as the tombstones say, "physicians were in vain;" how she died; and how her head was opened, and how such a nest of earwigs, ma'am, such a nest! Earwigs are the prolifickest things, and so fond ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... should have tried to the north-west a degree and back again without water. I have been suffering dreadfully during the past three weeks from pains in the muscles, caused by the scurvy, but the last two nights they have been most excruciating. Violent pains darted at intervals through my whole body. My powers of endurance were so severely tested, that, last night, I almost wished that death would come and relieve me from my fearful torture. I am so very weak that I must with patience abide my time, ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... cold, it seems to me that they are the people who should apply to those who have anything to bestow in charity; not those who are the only people, as it would appear, who can take pleasure in this excruciating weather. See if your club cannot do something for these poor sufferers instead of collecting merely for your own personal amusement; contribute to their necessities, and then come and see me again. I ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... about his melodies despite their evidently FORCED unlikeness to familiar phrases, an utter ignorance of design everywhere apparent in his lengthened works...The entire works of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony. When he is not THUS singular, he is no better than Strauss or any other waltz compounder... such as admire Chopin, and they are legion, will admire these Mazurkas, which are supereminently ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... no one is moved by pity at the punishment of a parricide or of a betrayer of his country. Vexation is a pressing grief. Mourning is a grief at the bitter death of one who was dear to you. Sadness is a grief attended with tears. Tribulation is a painful grief. Sorrow, an excruciating grief. Lamentation, a grief where we loudly bewail ourselves. Solicitude, a pensive grief. Trouble, a continued grief. Affliction, a grief that harasses the body. Despair, a grief that excludes all hope of ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... walk home," said Mr. Alwynn, slowly. It gave him excruciating pain to say anything so severe as this; but he ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... extended to the utmost, whilst agonising wrenches were given of the most fearful character, as the screws and ropes of the horrid instrument were set in motion. Not a word did he utter; scarcely a groan escaped from his bosom, though every limb was suffering the most excruciating torture; the blood gushed from his nostrils and mouth, his eyes well nigh started from their sockets. His physical nature at length gave way, though his courage did not fail him. He fainted. Death would have been ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... sharp, incessant pain had grown out of what was in the first ten or fifteen minutes a tired feeling in the arms—that excruciating, nerve-torturing pain which comes as a result of a ceaseless muscular action that knows no variation or relaxation. To forget it, I began to watch the eight others at our particular table. There were four Italians, ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... helped into the skiff. It was beyond him to get in by himself. It was six miles to Skaguay, and he had a blissful thought of sleeping those six miles. But the man did not know how to row, and Churchill took the oars and toiled for a few more centuries. He never knew six longer and more excruciating miles. A snappy little breeze blew up the inlet and held him back. He had a gone feeling at the pit of the stomach, and suffered from faintness and numbness. At his command, the man took the baler and threw ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... circumstances connected with it, I remember that it must be referred to the autumn of 1804. During that season I was in London, having come thither for the first time since my entrance at college. And my introduction to opium arose in the following way. One morning I awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face, from which I had hardly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... and had thus fallen into his power. A happy thought struck some of the mandarins—that she might be passed off as the sister of the barbarian Queen. She was accordingly put into a cage, and carried about for exhibition; but Elepoo delivered her from the excruciating death she would have suffered as Queen Victoria's sister, and restored her to her countrymen. The whole cabinet was indignant; he was summoned to appear immediately before his exasperated sovereign, and sentenced to transportation to the deserts ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... being warm from walking, we did not heed it. The mountains looked higher than in summer, and the old castles more grim and frowning. From the hard roads and freezing wind, my feet became very sore, and after limping along in excruciating pain for a league or two, I filled my boots with brandy, which deadened the wounds so much, that I was enabled to go on in a kind of trot, which I kept up, only stopping ten minutes to dinner, ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... punishing adulterers was first instituted amongst the Athenians. The victim being securely tied, a mullet was thrust up his fundament and withdrawn, the sharp gills of the fish causing excruciating torment to the sufferer during the process of its withdrawal, and grievously lacerating the bowels. Sometimes an enormous radish was substituted for the mullet. According to an epigram quoted by Vossius from the Anthologia, Alcaeus, the ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... ardent revolutionist, you know. This morning the servant at my own home on East Broadway was also stricken, and - who knows? - perhaps it will be my turn next. For to-night Saratovsky had an even more violent return of the fever, with intense shivering, excruciating pains in the limbs, and delirious headache. It is not like anything I ever saw before. Can you look into the case before it grows ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... laughing, so loud as to drown the sound of our lamentations.—After they had told Manuel they should carry us to Matanzas as prisoners of war, they proceeded to pinion our arms as they had Capt. Hilton's, so tight as to produce excruciating pain. ...
— Narrative of the shipwreck of the brig Betsey, of Wiscasset, Maine, and murder of five of her crew, by pirates, • Daniel Collins
... Council; then it capped the climax of cruelty and crime; it resorted to demoniacal subterfuge to condemn good men as heretics and burn them alive, believing that death by fire would inflict the most exquisitely excruciating tortures; at the Council of Constance it sought to condemn Wickliffe, by making an inference from some of his principles that he propagated the doctrine,—"God is obliged to obey the Devil,"—nowhere to be found in the Trialogue, Dialogue, and ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... cannot be silent when I meet with perverse opinions. While you have been away I have had much to hear and to say; it would have exhausted the strength of the strongest. I only wonder you don't find me more worn out, for what can be more excruciating for a woman, that to be obliged to enter the lists for manly decisiveness against a man who is defending a perfectly antagonistic view? ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... cried the Frenchman, now completely restored, "my real life is lived in the land of the poppies; my other life is but a shadow! Morbleu! to be an outcast from that garden of bliss is to me torture excruciating. For the past three months I have regularly met ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... substance, however minute, in the eye, is very painful; but a piece of burning lime is excruciating. Shakspeare gives a graphic description of the pain from the presence of any foreign substance, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... accomplished with a deadly swiftness that left no time for lamentation,—that the nations of the world were as flying straws swept into the burning, without space or moment for a parting prayer or groan. Tortured by an excruciating agony too great for tears, he suddenly found voice, and lifting his face towards the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... this may be, it is certain that for the rage of the people Nero must have a victim, and Tacitus tells us that he charged the Christians with the crime. Then opened in Rome the awful carnival of bloodshed that the orator never mentions, in which horrible modes of torture and excruciating methods of producing pain vied with each other in satisfying the demands of death. Women bound to raging bulls and dragged to death were not without the companionship of others who, in the evening, in Nero's garden, were coated ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... universal law of the wild, deprived him of many toothsome morsels. As for the many kinds of fungus which grew upon the mountain, he knew not which were edible and which poisonous. After an experiment with one pleasant-smelling red-skinned specimen, which gave him excruciating cramps, he left the whole race ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... horrible, horrific, horrifying; offensive. nauseous, nauseating; disgusting, sickening, revolting; nasty; loathsome, loathful[obs3]; fulsome; vile &c. (bad) 649; hideous &c. 846. sharp, acute, sore, severe, grave, hard, harsh, cruel, biting, caustic; cutting, corroding, consuming, racking, excruciating, searching, grinding, grating, agonizing; envenomed; catheretic[obs3], pyrotic[Med]. ruinous, disastrous, calamitous, tragical; desolating, withering; burdensome, onerous, oppressive; cumbrous, cumbersome. Adv. painfully &c. adj.; with pain &c. 828; deuced. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... four or five miles per hour, halting here and there to avoid the wrecks of the war, panting for breath, longing, 'as the heart panteth for the water-brook,' to see once more the shores of our beloved New England. Never will this excruciating sail be forgotten. All day—all night, for long, long, weary hours, the wretched little steamer groaned and screamed its melancholy way over the yellow, ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... because of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss, and, you would hardly believe it, did I not vouch for its truth, she actually rhymed Floss and me. It was excruciating." ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... bill and the bugs at the inn which induced the writer hereof to speak so slightingly of the residence of Basileus. These evils are now cured and forgotten. This is written off the leaden flats and mounds which they call the Troad. It is stern justice alone which pronounces this excruciating sentence. It was a farce to make this place into a kingly capital; and I make no manner of doubt that King Otho, the very day he can get away unperceived, and get together the passage- money, will be off for dear old Deutschland, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fed." The little man seems rather disappointed at my diagnosis of my case—the effect due to a new and tight boot which I had not been able to change since leaving Ispahan. Notwithstanding, I cannot put foot to ground without excruciating pain. Spreading the rugs out on the dirty earthen floor, I make up my mind to twenty-four hours here at least. It is, perhaps, the dirtiest post-house we have seen since leaving Teheran; but moving under the present circumstances is ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... opinions, amazed many. For who can abstain from wonder when simple women willingly undergo tortures in order to give a proof of their faith, and, while led to death, call upon Jesus Christ their Saviour, and sing psalms; when maidens hasten to the most excruciating torments with greater alacrity than to their nuptials; when men leap for joy at the terrible sight of the preparations for execution, and, half-burned, from the funeral pile mock the authors of their sufferings; when, with indomitable ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... more than much. It is no exaggeration to say that Shiel would have lain down and died for Gladys ten times over. For her sake—if only to see her smile, no mere physical pain would have been too excruciating for him to bear. And when she put the finishing touches to the bandages, and quite by chance, of course, their eyes met, he looked at her as if he never meant to leave off looking at her, as if he never meant to do anything else but look ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... mug down sudden and put his bandanna to his mouth, and I believe spit out the most on't. He looked as if he wuz sufferin' the most excruciating ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... brought hither during the day, and finding they had arrived, we encamped under the shelter of some enormous boulders (at 13,500 feet), part of an ancient moraine, which extended some distance along the bed of the narrow valley. Except an excruciating headache, I felt no ill effects from my ascent; and after a supper of tea and biscuit, I ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... he swam thus, he did not know; but after many strokes he was conscious of a sense of happiness that, after all, it wasn't necessary to reach land or to struggle any more. Rest and respite from excruciating effort were to be had for the taking—why had he withstood them so long? The sea rocked him, the surge filled his ears, his limbs relaxed their tension. Then it was that a strong hand grasped him, and a second later the same hand dealt him a violent ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... box and rang. The concierge, assisted by a female attendant, took Germinie's arms and led her up-stairs to one of the four beds in the salle d'accouchement. Once in bed, her pains became somewhat less excruciating. She looked about her, saw the other beds, all empty, and, at the end of the immense room, a huge country-house fireplace in which a bright fire was blazing, and in front of which, hanging upon iron bars, sheets and cloths and ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... to the prim splendours of Georgy's state chambers; and the cool lawn and shrubberies of Hyde Lodge were a hundred-fold more pleasant to her than the stiff little parterre at Bayswater, wherein scarlet geraniums and calceolarias flourished with an excruciating luxuriance of growth and an aggravating brilliancy of colour. She liked any place better than the hearth by which Philip Sheldon brooded with a dark thoughtful face, and a mind absorbed by the mysteries and complications of ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... he dragged himself to a sitting posture; his head throbbed cruelly, and when he put his hand to his forehead he found that it was bleeding. He tried to stand, but when he placed his weight upon his left foot it gave him excruciating pain. ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, where the first criminal proceedings were instituted against them, after they had long before been accused by the people of poisoning the wells; similar scenes followed in Bern and in Freiburg, in 1349. Under the influence of excruciating suffering, the tortured Jews confessed themselves guilty of the crime imputed to them; and it being affirmed that poison had in fact been found in a well at Zofingen, this was deemed a sufficient proof to convince the world; and the persecution of the abhorred ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... hour of visitation, and necessity and danger again obliged me to attempt forcing my hand in, which at length, after excruciating torture, I effected. My visitors came, and everything had the appearance of order. I found it, however, impossible to force out my right ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... his bed, face down, his grasping fingers clutching spasmodically at the covering as his nerves twitched with remembered pain. Thirteen jolts. Thirteen searing jolts of excruciating torture. It was over now, but his synapses were still crackling with the memories of those ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... cast upon the shore, as they thought, dead men. Reaching Sfax they reported their adventures and offered prayers in gratitude for their extraordinary escape; but five days later all three began to suffer excruciating torment from internal burns, the skin upon their heads and bodies began to peel off, and they died ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... black and healthier; he no longer lacks it and has no fear of lacking it. Formerly, he entertained a lugubrious phantom, the fatal image of famine which haunted him day and night for centuries, an almost periodical famine under the monarchy, a chronic famine and then severe and excruciating during the Revolution, a famine which, under the republic, had in three years destroyed over a million of lives.[3252] The immemorial specter recedes and vanishes; after two accidental and local recurrences, in 1812 and 1817, it ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... New World themselves often exhibited cruelty such as even Indians seldom surpass. See below, vol. ii. p. 444. In spite of such cases, however, it must be held that for artistic skill in inflicting the greatest possible intensity of excruciating pain upon every nerve in the body, the Spaniard was a bungler and a novice as compared with the Indian. See Dodge's Our Wild Indians, pp. 536-538. Colonel Dodge was in familiar contact with Indians for more than thirty years, and ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... for many days, When duty led him to distrain, And serving writs, although it pays, Gave him excruciating pain. ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... into his hands, which was susceptible of pain. In that way he learned to use his implements of war effectually, and at the same time blunted all those fine feelings and tender sympathies that are naturally excited, by hearing or seeing, a fellow being in distress. He could inflict the most excruciating tortures upon his enemies, and prided himself upon his fortitude, in having performed the most barbarous ceremonies and tortures, without the least degree of pity or remorse. Thus qualified, when very young he was initiated into scenes of carnage, by being ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... Tenn., who was so seriously injured by an unprovoked and cowardly attack, is, we are happy to learn, slowly improving. Suffering, both from excruciating pain and from great nervous prostration, all that a human being can endure and live, yet he has borne it uncomplainingly. Large expenses have been necessarily incurred for surgeon's, doctor's and nurse's bills, and Mr. Lawrence is a poor man, working on a missionary ...
— American Missionary, August, 1888, (Vol. XLII, No. 8) • Various
... Brant traversed the blood-stained field he bent over the wounded form of Gabriel Wisner, who was a magistrate of Orange county. The fallen man, though suffering excruciating pain, was still able to speak, but the chieftain saw that he was dying. There were wolves in the forest, and these would soon visit the scene of carnage. To bear Wisner from the field would avail nothing. For a moment the War Chief debated what ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... productions. On the contrary, his conception of music and his own musical execution had no admirers beyond himself. For hours he would scrape the chords of a small, red violin, drawing from them most excruciating sounds, himself lost in ecstasy, and most amazed when he was begged to cease his concert, which was somewhat calculated to give his ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... which we do not even wish to exchange but for a very real enjoyment, obtained in relieving our object. Even extremes in this class of our dispositions, as they are the reverse of hatred, envy, and malice, so they are never attended with those excruciating anxieties, jealousies, and fears, which tear the interested mind; or if, in reality, any ill passion arise from a pretended attachment to, our fellow creatures, that attachment may, be safely condemned, as not genuine. If we be distrustful or ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... him—Maskull. He spoke some words, but they were incomprehensible. A terrible expression came over the newcomer's face, and he grasped his neck with a pair of hairy hands. Maskull felt his bones bending and breaking, excruciating pains passed through all the nerves of his body, and he experienced a sense of impending death. He cried out, and sank helplessly on the floor, in a heap. The chamber and the company vanished—the light ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... They did not hear any further firing behind them. On and on they trudged. Night turned to day. Day rolled slowly on into night once more. And still they staggered on, footsore and weary. Mallory suffered excruciating agony from his wound. There were times when it seemed that it would be impossible for him to continue another yard; but then the thought that Barbara Harding was somewhere ahead of them, and that in a short time now they must be with ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... thing remarkable about these temperance ships, that when they arrive in harbour, their crews, excited to madness by long abstinence from their favourite liquor, and suffering in consequence all the excruciating torments of thirst, run into violent excesses the moment they get on shore. St. Jago is famous for a kind of liquid fire, called aguadente, which is smuggled on board ship in the shape of pumpkins and watermelons. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... of floating in the sky among weird faces and animals, and wondering all the while if you are really awake, or only dreaming, foretells that all trouble, the most excruciating pain, that reach even the dullest sense will be distilled into one drop called jealousy, and will be inserted into your faithful love, ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... particular patient had a crippled and paralyzed leg, and to restore its usefulness, it was necessary to cut deeply into the heel, stretch the "Achilles tendon," and make other changes which, without the usual anesthetic, would involve excruciating suffering. According to the attendant nurses, the child belonged to the "noisy" class; that is, he was extremely sensitive to pain, screamed at the approach of the surgeon, and could be examined only when ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... that is a great festivity among the Japanese, the guechas at Chemulpo were hard at work, and from morning till night and vice versa they were summoned from one house to the other to entertain with their—to European, ears excruciating—music on the Shamesens and Gokkins, while sake and foreign liquors were plentifully ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... could she be, the daughter of peasants, what could she have ever been? Probably some one knew the truth about her, in all that great society. Such things might be known. Francesca Campodonico's delicate noble face rose faintly between her and the sky, and she realized with excruciating suddenness the distance that separated her from the woman she hated, the woman who perhaps knew that Gloria Dalrymple was the daughter of a peasant and a fit wife by her birth for Angelo ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... awoke it was nearing sunset, and time to drive on to Aaron Slade's. But he could only open his eyes to a narrow slit, and that for a moment, when they would close. The pain was excruciating. ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... two men and the Prince as room-mates was so excruciating that I suddenly felt equal to bearing any hardship; but Mamma hasn't the same sense of humour I have, and she said that she knew she was ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... fixed on the mysterious words, Mariette lost herself in conjectures and suppositions, fully convinced that so short a letter, after a prolonged absence, must inevitably bring unexpected news. In her poignant perplexity Mariette endured torments and excruciating torture, to which the uneducated are continually exposed. To hold in our grasp, and beneath our eyes, the few lines that bring us joy or sorrow, and be unable to penetrate the secret; to be under the necessity of asking a stranger to read these ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... voice was strangled in the spasm of his throat. But he took Rowcliffe's hand and wrung it, discharging many emotions in that one excruciating grip. ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... himself sinking; the room was blurred; the excruciating agony of tortured nerves melted into a lethargy that swept through him. Dimly he sensed that the monstrous, quivering, bell-topped thing was still launching its devastating rain of vibrations; they ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... ear of the human adult. Consequently, what does your baby do but betake itself to a practical study of the caterwaul! After a few conscientious rehearsals a creditable degree of perfection is usually reached, and a series of excruciating performances are forthwith commenced, which last with unbroken success until the stage arrives when correction becomes possible. This process may check the child's taste for imitating the lower animals in some of their less engaging peculiarities, but his dramatic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... said mother had been years dead before I was born. As I sat down, a pang sharper than some of those endured by the Spartans ran through my right leg. I was instantly aware that I had plumped down on a needle, as well as a piece of fancy-work, but I had not the courage to rise and extract the excruciating thing. ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... me away from here, so that I can see your little girl. I want so much to see her." Madame Braux, her features illuminated, exclaimed: "Yes, mother, that I will," while Mdme. Caravan, the younger, became pale, and seemed to be enduring the most excruciating agony. The two men, however, gradually drifted into conversation, and soon became embroiled in a political discussion. Braux maintained the most revolutionary and communistic doctrines, gesticulating and throwing about his arms, his eyes darting like a blood-hound's. "Property, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... two months did she receive a letter. Fear for his health, apprehension of his death during this cruel interim, caused an agony of suspense, which, by representing him to her distracted fancy in a state of suffering, made him, if possible, still dearer to her. In the excruciating anguish of uncertainty, she walked with trembling steps through all weathers (when she could steal half a day while her parents were employed in labour abroad) to the post town, at six miles' distance, to inquire ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... effort. Her hands were clasped over the region where hot corn-meal cakes are said to lie heavily at times. Her face was screwed into an expression indicative of excruciating inner torment. As she made her way, moaning softly, to the farther door that opened into the cheerless corridor, there was audible a suppressed but decided giggle. It proceeded from Freckles. The monitor warned her, but, unheeding, ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... plunged the whole city into mourning; each family felt as if it were about to lose a mother, and day and night heaven was besieged by one uninterrupted supplication that she might be spared yet longer. Finding that remedies only aggravated her excruciating sufferings, the physicians determined at last to leave her in the hands of God, whose will it seemed to be that the remainder of her life should be passed on the cross. That life of crucifixion was destined ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... faculty save that of suffering. He went down into a darkness that swallowed him, soul and body, blotting out all finite things, loosening his frantic clutch on life, sucking him down as it were into a frightful emptiness, where his only certainty of existence lay in the excruciating agonies that tore and convulsed him like devils in ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... to rising with the sun. In fact, he objected to rising at all. He groaned a great deal, and he swore with great fluency and complained of excruciating pains here and there. The only thing to which he did not object was eating the breakfast that Johnny had cooked. And since Johnny could not remember the time when riding had been really painful, and therefore discounted the misery of his guest, he refused to concede the point of Bland ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... pretty 'Liza!" These sounds I continued to hear when far in the distance, and after I had long lost sight of the amiable vocalists, as their horses, which appeared to be gifted with characters of extreme German deliberation, were spurred and lashed in a most excruciating style. In no place is the skinning alive of horses carried to such an extent as in Goettingen; and often, when I beheld some lame and sweating hack, which, to earn the scraps of fodder which maintained his wretched life, was ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... after his removal from his father-in-law's, to the same extent as he had previously done, but yet he had got to be such a victim to the habit as now to become intoxicated at every favorable opportunity, which not only caused his wife excruciating pain, but was also the source of annoyance and sorrow to his parents and sister. But though Mr. Sealy was sorely troubled by his son's conduct, and was led to realize, at least to some extent, the worry and shame that is associated ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
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