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More "Gruesome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gruesome. I sneaked away, and had already reached the foot of the hill, when, to my horror, I noticed the grey man approaching. He took off his hat, bowed humbly, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... acquainted with Etruscan works of art, themselves the result of a knowledge of Greek art and myth.[849] Early in the second century B.C. Plautus in the Captivi alluded to these paintings as familiar;[850] and we must not forget that the Etruscans habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for illustration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his work on the Roman ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... cripples, blind, deaf and dumb; and Luther declared that the doctors who treated such infirmities as natural had a great deal to learn in demonology. One or two of his stories of possession are extremely gruesome. With his own lusty love of life, Luther could not understand suicide, so he attributed that also to the Devil. Satan made the suicides think they were doing something else; even praying, and thus he killed them. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... the Jackal shivered and shook with fear, and when the Crocodile, in a gruesome growl, remarked that he was hungry and wanted a good meal, the wretched creature ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... quarry than he scuttled off in alarm, and nothing would induce him to return, nor could any other butcher be prevailed upon to officiate, so that, my friend declared, he was obliged to roll up his sleeves and perform the gruesome, ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... it was a gruesome sight, to see those phantoms toil; Each to his own small garden bent; each spaded up the soil; (I never knew Ghosts laboured so.) Each scattered seed, and watched, till lo! ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... tried. If one is doing time one self, it is a very good way to obtain inside information, though it is a bit like being at your own hanging..... not exactly, of course, but enough to make the anticipation peculiarly gruesome. Each searching question of the judge seems to draw the noose around the plaintiff's neck tighter and tighter; you will hold your breath: a word, and the six months' exile and more are all in vain..... Not until the final ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... this instruction because it is gruesome, or because it may seem like intimidation, is sentimentalism: in this matter, as elsewhere in the realm of knowledge, the truth should scare no one who does not need to be scared. It is better to be safe than sorry; and it is ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... collectively; that is to say, without reckoning on individual idiosyncrasies of expression in speech. Of course we know that joy is apt to make us raise the voice and sadness to lower it. For instance, we have all heard gruesome stories, and have noticed how naturally the voice sinks in the telling. A ghost story told with an upward inflection might easily become humourous, so instinctively do we associate the upward inflection with a non-pessimistic trend of thought. Under stress of emotion we emphasize words ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... professionally, a thing which does not often happen in my house, for I think, of all "shop," ours is the most unsuitable for general conversation because of the morbid fascination it has for most people. Ladies especially will listen with avidity to medical matters, perceiving nothing gruesome in the details at the moment; but afterward developing nerves on the subject, and probably giving the young practitioner good reason to regret unwary confidences. I tried to stave off the topic, but the will-power of the majority was against me, and finally I found myself ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... of purest Rajput descent from beyond Nanakpur, who had borne him a son, commonly reported to be the apple of his eye. There had been an elder son, but no one knew whether he was alive or dead, though a gruesome tale was whispered of his father's having ordered his eyes to be torn out. A faithful foster-brother was said to have sacrificed himself to save him, and to have died in the prison after his eyes had been duly exhibited ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... say so, I think the picture of Catherine is the gem of the book. She reminds me of her namesake of Siena—and would as little have failed in any duty, however gruesome. You remember Sodoma's picture. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... much ease at himself as at anything else. "A woman scientist, ay? Funny things womenll do when they can't get a man. But longbearded or flatchested it's all the same. Gruesome, that's what they are, gruesome. Forget it. After we get this cleaned up we'll take care of any others that start, but personally I don't think therell be any. Sounds like a lot of ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... genealogical thread, to follow its mazy meanderings down the generations, dropping in curious bits of unwritten history—some of it spicy enough, some of it boisterously funny, some of it somber and gruesome, but all of it alive with the very color and savor of the land that was a part of himself, his inheritance from the generations of sturdy pioneers. Possibly Westbury's history was not always authentic, but ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of the wrappings in yonder to take off the hardness, but even with the matting over them they will be gruesome things to sleep upon. They would bewitch your dreams. But mayhap ye will not suffer from one ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... seen in Cagayan, as for instance, the Door of the Bloody Hand, a most gruesome memento of a night attack on the place some time before, when several insurgents, fleeing from avenging Americans, tried to force their way into one of the native houses and seek protection from its inhabitants. Then there was the Amazon ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... peculiar ring in it as he left Leverich's, but it lost somewhat of its alertness as he turned down the street that led to the factory, unaltered, since his first coming to it, save for the transformation of the neglected house he had noticed then, with its gruesome interior, which had been turned into a freshly painted shop long ago. The effect of association is inexorable. There was not a corner, not a building, along that too familiar way, that was not hung with some thought of care. There were moments ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... next is as follows. Every rustic-cottage contains gruesome china-ornaments and excruciating-cheap German-prints of such subjects as "The Tryst" (always spelt "The Trist" on the German print), "The Saylor's Return," "The Warior's Dreem," "Napoleon at Arcola," and so forth. Point to a china-ornament and say, "I never knew ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... and home and that weary prison of the sick-chamber in which I lay so long in durance. "Robinson Crusoe"; some of the books of that cheerful, ingenious, romantic soul, Mayne Reid; and a work rather gruesome and bloody for a child, but very picturesque, called "Paul Blake"; these are the three strongest impressions I remember: "The Swiss Family Robinson" came next, longo intervallo. At these I played, conjured up their ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his boast at evening: up he bounded, grasped firm his foe, whose fingers cracked. The fiend made off, but the earl close followed. The monster meant — if he might at all — to fling himself free, and far away fly to the fens, — knew his fingers' power in the gripe of the grim one. Gruesome march to Heorot this monster of harm had made! Din filled the room; the Danes were bereft, castle-dwellers and clansmen all, earls, of their ale. Angry were both those savage hall-guards: the house resounded. Wonder it was the wine-hall firm in the strain ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... have looked upon some gruesome sights, and I have heard such tales of ruthless cruelty as you would deem almost passing possibility. I have read of the awful doings of the Lord Bernabo Visconti at Milan in the olden time, but I believe that compared with this monster of ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... their home with Dr. Mary Samuel, the Indian member of the staff, as their house mother. Just behind it is the thatched shed, carefully walled in, which serves as the dissecting room. To the uninitiated it is a place of gruesome smells and sights, for cadavers, whole or in fragments, litter the tables. The casual visitor sympathizes with the Hindu student who confides to you that during her first days of work in the dissecting room she could only sleep when firmly flanked by a friend on each side of ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... There was a gruesome sequel to this incident. Some days following the drowning of the runaway, Sam Clemens, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys went to the spot and were pushing the drift about, when suddenly the negro rose before them, straight ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... or blush. All the glamour of their flight had fallen from her. The old cemetery with its gruesome headstones oppressed her. The purple shadows of the twilight seemed to circle ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... of the bonita and rushed off with it, tearing the line out of the captain's hands. Then we looked at one another. It had all happened in a minute. We were all wringing wet and panting from excitement and exertion. This is a gruesome tale of the sea and I put it here only to illustrate the incomparable savageness of these ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... Nor does it relieve depression to be set down in a solemn courtyard, lighted by a solitary gas-lamp. This in itself would be quite sufficient to make a weary traveller melancholy, without the tolling of a gruesome bell to announce our arrival. This dispiriting sound seems to affect nobody in the house, except a lengthy young man in a desperate state of unwakefulness, who sleepily resents our arrival in the midst of his first slumber (he must have ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... Sharon at this his first view of his car's more intimate devices. "She's got innards like a human, ain't she?" He instantly beheld a vision of the man in the front of the almanac whose envelope is neatly drawn back to reveal his complicated structure in behalf of the zodiacal symbols. "It's downright gruesome," he added. But his guest was viewing the neat complexities of metal with real pleasure and with what seemed to the car's owner a practiced and ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... The great stockade which Cartier saw at Hochelaga, with its palisades and fighting platforms, bore witness to the ferocity of the struggle. At that place Cartier and his companions were entertained with gruesome tales of Indian fighting and of wholesale massacres. Seventy years later, in Champlain's time, the Hochelaga stockade had vanished, and the Hurons had been driven back into the interior. But for nearly ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... eight wounded, and out of a force of over one hundred men only twenty escaped unhurt. The news of this second disaster brought Major Wilkins up from Fort Niagara, with every available man, to chastise the Indians. But when Wilkins and his men arrived at the gruesome scene of the massacre not a red man was to be found. The Indians had disappeared into the forest, after having stripped their victims even of clothing. With a heavy heart the troops marched back to Niagara, ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... As her gruesome yell from the gate-post fell She followed it down to earth; And that snapdog wears a placard that bears The inscription: ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... 'twas sad, and a gruesome night, when the maiden fair said, "No!" And gave response to the Knight's demand ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... so much," I said nastily. (When people presage a remark by saying that they only say it because they love you, you may lay long odds that it's going to be disagreeable!) "It certainly sounds a gruesome prospect. Not even a choice between bankruptcy and mania, but a certainty of both! And within a year, too! Such a short run for one's money! Aunt Eliza had some suggestion to make, then? And you evidently approved. Would you mind telling me ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Edward Crown wedged in at the bottom of Quill's Chimney, weighted down with stones and earth, alone served as an obstacle to the enterprise. He shrank from certain gruesome possibilities,—such as the dislodgment of stones at the bottom of the crevice and the consequent exposure of a thing that would haunt him forever. And even though the stones remained in place there would still remain the fact ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... seats, ladies belonging to some of the best families in Lancashire had gathered. They, too, were eager, hungry for excitement. Some of them were educated women, delicately nurtured, and it seemed strange that they should find an interest in such gruesome proceedings. Yet, with a kind of reversion to the savage instincts of former days, they had gathered with the rest. After all, civilisation is only a veneer, and the old, elementary, savage feelings lie dormant in ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... sparks with flint and steel, and ate their supper consisting only of pounded parched corn and dried meat. This they shared with Ree, and though he ate heartily he was thinking of other things. Every time he looked across the fire he could see the gruesome scalp at the belt of the chief of the party. Little wonder that he became apprehensive for his safety. It would not do, however, he thought, to let the Indians see that he was worried, and he began to whistle. The savages gazed at ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... future prospects, Charles of Burgundy was in a mood to prove to his subjects his excellence as a paternal ruler. Wherever he paused on his journey easy access was permitted to his presence and he was lavish in the time given to receiving petitions from the humblest plaintiff. The following gruesome incident is an illustration of the summary methods ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... count them the next time you have one for dinner," the other remarked. As this was evidently meant for a joke, Tom had the tact to laugh, and a very gruesome and ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... The shadows under his eyes were deeper, his cheeks more sunken. He had lost something of the sprightliness of his bearing. His attitude, indeed, was almost dejected. He was like a man who sees into the future and finds there strange and gruesome things. ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... surely 'tis gruesome To gaze all around. When bloodred through heaven Drives cloudrack o'er head; Air soon shall be deep hued With dying men's blood When this our ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... us. It turned its head. In the pale light of the cage interior, I had a closer view now of its face. It was a metal mask, welded to a gruesome semblance of a man—a great broad face, with high, angular cheeks. On the high forehead, the corrugations were rigid as though it were permanently frowning. The nose was squarely solid, the mouth an orifice behind which there were ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... decaying; scaffoldings, which seemed to have been erected for the sake of making repairs and then left; the windows were curtainless, the floors bare, and rats ran hither and thither among the rubbish accumulated in the corners. Nothing could possibly look more desolate and gruesome. We saw no pictures; but as we did not explore every part of the rooms, they may have been there without our seeing them. We were further informed by the people of the town that in order to visit the rooms at night it was necessary to wear a special costume, and that ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... as Death, that gruesome carl, Was driving to the tither warl' A mixtie—maxtie motley squad, And mony a guilt-bespotted lad— Black gowns of each denomination, And thieves of every rank and station, From him that wears the star and garter, To him that wintles in a halter: Ashamed himself ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... tags escaping from between his white wasted fingers. A pulpit lamp came between Carmichael and the Rabbi's face, but he could see the straining hand, which did not relax till it was lifted in the last awful appeal, and the white and red had a gruesome fascination. It seemed as if one had clutched a cluster of full, rich, tender grapes and was pressing them in an agony till their life ran out in streams of blood, and dripped upon the heads of the choir sitting beneath, in their fresh, hopeful ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... had been that I would complete my high school studies. I cannot pretend to diligence. The passing months found me less frequently in the classroom than in secluded spots along the Calcutta bathing GHATS. The adjoining crematory grounds, especially gruesome at night, are considered highly attractive by the yogi. He who would find the Deathless Essence must not be dismayed by a few unadorned skulls. Human inadequacy becomes clear in the gloomy abode of miscellaneous ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... form in the clothes I had worn on the preceding day, even to the dressing-gown which I had put on upon retiring to my apartments, while I donned his somewhat travel-worn suit of tweed. Having completed this gruesome task, I left the body in much the same position in which it had originally fallen, lying slightly upon the right side, the right arm extended on the floor, and, to give the appearance of suicide, I placed my own revolver—first emptying one of the chambers—near his right hand. On going ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... across his shoulder, and seizing his gun, G. W. tore on down the hill straight toward the gruesome place below, and right into it. No one noticed him. The surgeons were too busy to look up as he ran around the table scanning the faces upon the boards. The men carrying the helpless burdens, or ministering to their wants, had no ...
— A Little Dusky Hero • Harriet T. Comstock
... tail in the act of swallowing St. Margaret, whose skirts and feet are shown inside the capacious jaws, while the head is beginning to appear somewhere behind the dragon's neck. To the right is shown a gruesome representation of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence, and then follow Adam and Eve by the Tree of Life (a twisted piece of foliage), the martyrdom of St. Andrew, and what seems to be ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... petition of a presbytery or general assembly. It was here that those terrible instruments of torture, the caschielawis, the lang irnis, the boot and the pilliewinkis, were used to wring confessions from the wretched victims. It is all a strange and gruesome story of horrors told in detail in the state trial records, and elsewhere, from the execution of Janet Douglas—Lady Glammis—to that of the poor old woman at Dornoch who warmed herself at the fire set for her burning. So firmly seated in the Scotch mind was the belief in witchcraft as a sin ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... was logic in his contention and so I gave in and made the Children's Hell. It is a gruesome doctrine, that a child who kills himself does not really die. It is the one thing in the whole book that makes me feel most intellectually unclean for writing it. But I wrote it and when the book was finished and His Majesty had signed ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... Out of the gruesome darkness and the gloom I saw it peering; and, in still despair, I watched it gliding swift across the room, Until it came and stood ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... had to be rowed ashore, he had to be one of the crew of four, he pulling the bow oar, and, as soon as the rest landed, he was left in charge of the boat. The sequel to an incident of this kind is one of the most gruesome in the annals of maritime life. The captain of a vessel, anchored in Elsinore Roads, was rowed into the harbour. The crew of the boat were told that he would require them at 10.30 that night. The cabin-boy was left in charge, and the two A.B.'s and the oldest apprentice proceeded ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... entanglement of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for a moment misty and aboriginal time big with portent. There is a ridiculous Scotch story in which one gruesome touch lives. A clergyman's female servant was seated in the kitchen one Saturday night reading the Scriptures, when she was somewhat startled by hearing at the door the tap and voice of her sweetheart. Not ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... a true one based on natural truth. Allowing for the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the dramatis personae of the gruesome scene—extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, could one ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... at this sign, until he became conscious of deep weariness at so long standing on his feet. Then he saw, blossoming, the multiplying lights of an early winter's dusk—so numbly had the time slipped by. And in the gruesome close of this dreadful day, the desperate and perplexed man stole timidly down the stairways—avoiding the elevator—and across the street to the ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... I had chosen a gruesome house, but not if I had described the forest from which I came, and I was in need of any spot wherein I could rest my mind from ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... meant he was badly frozen and probably out of his mind before he got back to the shack. He wasn't able to keep up a fire, of course, or do anything for himself—and I suppose the poor boy simply froze to death. He was alone there, and it was weeks and weeks before his body was found. But the most gruesome part of it all is that his horses had been stabled, tied up in their stalls without feed. They were all found dead, poor brutes. They'd even eaten the wooden boards the mangers were built of. Hugh Cochrane ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... front door and exhort them to particular care with each sentimental item, crying "Be careful with that little chair; that's the one the Urchin uses when he eats his evening prunes!" Or shall he adopt a gruesome sarcasm, hoping to awe them by conveying the impression that even if the whole van should be splintered in collision, he can get more at the nearest department store? Whatever policy he adopts, they ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... barge which so often carried its owner to pleasure or business lay moored on the river ready to carry him that last sad journey to the Tower; and sadder still, to bring back the devoted daughter when the execution was accomplished, and later also when she bore her gruesome burden of a father's head, said to have been buried ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... the only light, besides that from the open door, proceeding from a stained-glass window at the farther end—a gruesome window representing in vivid colours the death ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... warfare; it was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave." In my experience as a campaign correspondent in several conflicts, I have necessarily seen more or less of gruesome sights, the result of disease and wounds, but I have seen nothing in any way comparable, in horror and pitifulness, to the victims of this abominable system. To describe their condition in detail would ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... Cheney, Loomis has found some of his most powerful inspirations in the work of our lyrist, Aldrich,—such as the rich carillon of "Wedded," and his "Discipline," one of the best of all humorous songs, a gruesome scherzo all about dead monks, in which the music furnishes out the grim irreverence of the words ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... that amphibious creature, "as slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark too", who exhibited a bloated pair of shoes "as interesting relics that he had taken from the feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore". This type of the gruesome long-shoremen whom Dickens had encountered in his waterside rambles, as he collected the materials for Great Expectations, was afterwards elaborated in the Rogue Riderhood ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... para contenerle cinendose a la suministracion de polvora, balas y efectos de treta con la cantata posible para no dar a los Americanos justos motivos de gueya."] There is an unconscious and somewhat gruesome humor in this official belief that the Americans could have "no just cause" for anger so long as the Spaniards' ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... might have been, he was no faint heart, and despite the shock of the gruesome discovery he continued his investigation of the silent ship. Apparently some attempt had been made when first the Buena Ventura was caught in the deadly embrace of the Sargasso to convey her treasure to the boats, for, at the head of the main companion-way, Bluewater Bill found ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... had reasons to believe I had solved it. I found the Rhamda and the Nervina. I had iron will and courage—also strength. The Rhamda was never able to control me. My life is gone but not my will. Now I have left him another. Do not surrender, Harry. It is a gruesome task; but hold on to the end. Help me up the steps. There now. Just wait a minute till I ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... aboard the military postzug (post train) that left the important military centre of L—— at 1:30 A.M. and started to crawl toward the front with a mixed cargo of snoring field chaplains, soldiers rejoining their units, officers with iron crosses pinned to their breasts, ambulance men who talked gruesome shop, fresh meat, surgical supplies, mail bags, &c. Sometimes the train would spurt up to twelve miles an hour. There were long stops at every station, while unshaven Landsturm men on guard scanned the car windows in search of spies by the light of their electric flash ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... repulsive figure of Jean Paul Marat. She knew nothing of his associates, Danton and Robespierre. It was in Marat alone that she saw the monster who sent innocent thousands to their graves, and who reveled like some arch-fiend in murder and gruesome death. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... years, whereas the gradual extension of our poverty-stricken classes has been going on for centuries. To us poverty, besides being a horror, was more or less of a mystery; but America exhibited the development of the gruesome monster with lurid distinctness. In the old countries the men who first were able to seize the land gradually sublet portions either for money or warlike service; the growth of manufactures occupied a thousand years before it reached its present extent; and with the rising of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... seemed difficult. In the little clusters of bushes, behind trees, in gullies, and in every conceivable place that seemed to offer shelter, lay the dead. What a shudder thrills the whole frame when you stand and contemplate the gruesome faces of the battle's dead. In every posture and all positions, with every conceivable shade of countenance, the glaring, glassy eyes meet you. Some lay as they fell, stretched full length on the ground; others show a desperate ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... literature, and is worthy to be ranked with the works of Edgar A. Poe. Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius. It is a ghastly and gruesome creation. Not one bright ray redeems it. It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience. But it fascinates. Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... bones," was the remark King made a few minutes later. The storm was at its height; the sheets of rain that swept down the pebbly glen elicited the gruesome sentence. He stood directly behind the quaking Loraine, quite close to the open door; there is no doubt that the observation was intended for her ears, maliciously ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... in some fight, and far away from physicians or nurses, and then the metaphor is interpreted by the plain facts of hostile invasion, flaming cities, devastated fields. It destroys the coherence of the verses to take the gruesome picture of the wounded man as a description of men's sins; it is plainly a description of the consequences of their sins. In accordance with the Old Testament point of view, Isaiah deals with national calamities as the punishment of national sins. He does not touch on the far worse results ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... I found myself unable to read. My mind was bent on returning to what had just occurred on deck, and, against my will, the most gruesome ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... being his antagonist. I need hardly add that his shadow never got the better of him and when at the end he gave a great big shout and whacked it on the head with a victorious smile, it lay submissively prone at his feet. His singing, nasal and out of tune, sounded like a gruesome mixture of groaning and moaning coming from some ghost-world. Our singing master Vishnu would sometimes chaff him: "Look here, Munshi, you'll be taking the bread out of our mouths at this rate!" To which his only reply would be ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... these things in a detached, impersonal manner, as one who states commonplace facts. He had not particularly desired to speak of them. For him those gruesome incidents of war and invasion held no special horror. They might have rested heavily enough on his mind once. But he had come apparently to accept them as the grim collateral of war, without reacting emotionally to their terrible significance. And when ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... saw it, a small black, oblong bundle hovering beside us. It was perhaps a hundred feet away, circling us. Held by the Planetara's bulk, it had momentarily become our satellite. It swung around us like a moon. Gruesome satellite, by nature's laws forever ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... "that low in her spirits," and Fred replied, by gosh, he didn't blame her one mite; whereat they wandered off and spent the evening at a very comfortable distance from the house, but fairly close together, revelling in a wealth of gruesome facts and suppositions. Katherine said she certainly never would marry at all, men were such dreadful creatures, and Molly said, yes, indeed, but what else could a girl marry?—while Edith determined to devote the rest of her life to attending ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... hours I have been plying my knife, and look at those who have yet to come"—he swept the circle of wounded with an outstretched bloody hand. "O God! If you know how to write, write to your papers and tell Europe she must stop this gruesome war." Then, tired out and enervated, he swooned into the arms of the medical orderly. As he came to to be apologized. "That," he said, "is the third time I have fainted; I suppose I must waste precious time in eating something to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... two groups still kept their oddly separated formation. Behind them the two egg-masses of jelly were now seething in new activity after a brief lessening of their gruesome shivering. Blake now saw that there was a direct and unmistakable connection between the activity of the jelly and the ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... a curious sky, which looks like a young grainer's first attempt at imitating "birds'-eye maple." Upon a second glance it seems possible that the "hose" is a snake, the tail of which the devil is gnawing. The gruesome design illustrates a yet more gruesome Interlude, entitled, "The Bat and the Devil." But it gives no fair idea of the contents of the volume, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... back of his chair and watched his tea getting cold. The suggestion of something having happened to Bobby had changed his anger to sharp solicitude. Gruesome tales of brutality toward foreigners in Eastern ports ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... pass and who were roused from sleep by the rattling of chains and the dragging of the ponderous bodies through brush and fallen timber, created no little excitement, and a wide berth was given the gruesome procession. By midnight the work had ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... to find there I could not imagine. Whatever it had been he was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning perplexedly, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick which reminded me of gruesome things we had ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... then I sat down on the broad top of the ladder and forgot everything. It was a savage history of ferocious hate and barbarous reprisals. It had been a feud waged between two clans for three generations. The story of Dark Malcolm and Ian Red Hand was only part of it, but it was a gruesome thing. Pages told of the bloody deeds they wrought on each other's houses. The one human passion of Dark Malcolm's life was his love for his little daughter. She had brown eyes and brown hair, and those who most loved her called her Wee Brown Elspeth. Ian Red ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray, with a fine ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... less of verbiage and of pretended justice. You have his Majesty here a prisoner. You have, through my own folly, my neck at the mercy of your axe or your rope. There stands the executioner eager for his gruesome work. Finish that which you have already decided upon, and as sure as there is a God in heaven there will be quick retribution for the crimes committed in ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... from the gruesome into the mawkish, were counteracted and balanced by more serious influences undergone at school at the hands of my teachers and schoolfellows. Even there, it was chiefly the weird that aroused my keenest interest. I can hardly judge whether I had what would be ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... corpses are laid, and no sooner are they there than the awaiting vultures descend and consume the flesh. I saw these grisly birds sitting expectantly in rows on the coping of the towers, and the sight was almost too gruesome. Such is their voracity that the body is a skeleton in an hour or so. The Parsees choose this method of dissolution because since they worship fire they must not ask it to demean itself with the dead; and both earth and water they hold also too sacred to use ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... the court and cloisters, so that she could hear what every one was saying. The dinner indeed had been prepared amid much merriment; it had been both good and abundant, for they had sacrificed many victims; but the supper was yet to come, and nothing can be conceived more gruesome than the meal which a goddess and a brave man were soon to lay before them—for they had brought their ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... with that she puts on an absurdly skittish manner—oh, so ruthlessly bright—talks what she thinks is smart slang, poses continually, and wears clothes that would not be out of place at Ascot, but are a positive offence to the little grey town. I hadn't realised how gruesome provincial smartness could be until ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... If this is gruesome why should one be asked to present a subject which cannot be adequately presented without showing what pygmies we are and how helpless in the grasp ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... further elaboration, until, in the Middle Ages, it was so universally accepted, that only now and then did some bold thinker dare openly to gainsay it. The idea that a conviction of personal immortality has a specially ennobling influence on the moral nature of man, is not confirmed by the gruesome history of mediaeval morals, and as little by the psychology of ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... began. Mr. Mostyn found himself wholly unable to sleep. Many relics have curious histories, and the experienced archaeologist becomes callous to that uncanniness which seems to attach to some gruesome curios. But the slipper of the Prophet was different. No mere ghostly menace threatened its holders; an avenging scimitar followed those who came in contact with it; gruesome tragedies, mutilations, murders, ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... paused but for the fraction of a second, had she stopped to read the placard setting forth this odious law, had she only reflected, then she would even now have turned back, and fled from that gruesome box of infamies, as she would from a dangerous and noisome ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... perhaps the most conspicuous example of a whole people burdened throughout its history with a heritage of malignant gossip. In the town of Lincoln, in England, there exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous "Jew's House," associated with the gruesome legend of "the boy of Lincoln"—a child, it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their pastoral feasts. Such a wild belief in child-sacrifice by the Jews was widespread in the Middle Ages, and is largely responsible, I understand, even at the present ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... historian's brief record of the titanic struggle five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along miles ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... Italy, the land of passion, for all these years, found record in a novella of Boccaccio's followers. The Novelle answered in some respects to our newspaper reports of trials and the earlier Last Speech and Confession. But the example of Boccaccio raised these gruesome topics into the region of art. Often these tragedies are reported of the true actors; still more often under the disguise of fictitious names, that enabled the narrator to have more of the artist's freedom in dealing with ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... an arm. She caught her breath and fought down the sudden rising of her heart. It was nothing—only lying there so detached in the moonlight, thrust up out of the shadow out of nowhere, it did look gruesome, like something dead, something completely and irrevocably dead. It lay without a sign of movement, with the fingers slightly curled up under the palm and clutching at the coverlet. Gradually, her calm returning, she listened with her head ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... a poet—you may not know it, But I am and hard up for "tin," So I've written these clever verses And I hope they'll get put in. Yet Life is an awful lottery With a gruesome lot of blanks, And I wish the Editor hadn't slips That are printed "Declined with Thanks." For it's rather hard On a starving bard When his last trump card Is played, and he wishes himself bisected When his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... kinship. This receives curious corroboration in the fact that when, towards the close of the story, the scene shifts to America and the main motive—the unfolding of the fraternal fortunes of the tragic brothers, is made minor to a series of gruesome adventures (however entertaining and well done) the reader, even if uncritical, has an uneasy sense of disharmony: and rightly, since the strict character romance has changed to ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... charitable to ascribe to this reason the gruesome happenings of that afternoon. They ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... of hollow, glassless iron rims which he had found in the street. They may or may not have belonged to Dowd, and Dowd may have been an Irishman in the neighborhood, or he may not; he may have died, or he may not; but there was something in the mere gruesome mention of his spectacles which related itself to all the boy had conceived of the ghostly and ghastly, and all that was alarming in the supernatural; he could never say in the least how or why. I fancy no child can ever explain just why it ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... bonds of the king which were laid upon them, but their bodies were saved from harm. For their beauty was no wise injured, nor was any harm come upon their garments, nor their hair singed by the fire, but in God's protection they came forth gladly from that gruesome horror, wise of heart and favoured ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... to an unpleasant old woman in Northumberland. The old woman had lived in the country, and her relatives had hovered over her like vultures awaiting her decease. The household had been gloomy and gruesome enough to have driven into melancholy madness any girl not of the sanest and most matter-of-fact temperament. Emily Fox-Seton had endured it with an unfailing good nature, which at last had actually awakened in the breast of her ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a great gruesome carl!" said Black, echoing in Scotch the Dutchman's expression as he ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... the country songs describing crime and death have refrains of a startling joviality like cock crow, just as if the whole company were coming in with a shout of protest against so sombre a view of existence. There is a long and gruesome ballad called "The Berkshire Tragedy," about a murder committed by a jealous sister, for the consummation of which a wicked miller is hanged, and the chorus (which should come in a kind ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... been a nice Christmas Day in any way. Nan had toothache and Susan had red eyes, and assumed a weird and gruesome flippancy of manner to deceive us into thinking she hadn't; and Jims had a bad cold all day and I'm afraid of croup. He has had croup twice since October. The first time I was nearly frightened to death, for father and mother were ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... cooked after this fashion. None of us—not even Master E. Smith, in whom I had previously remarked an unfailing appetite—cared to indulge in the dish. Indeed, it was not until I had removed the unsightly and gruesome object—these are the only adjectives that properly describe it—to a point considerably remote from our camping place that I deemed myself to be sufficiently revived to join the others in a frugal supper consisting of the remaining sandwiches and a ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... is revealed in 'Le Horla,' the appalling story in which he took for his own Fitzjames O'Brien's uncanny monster, invisible, and yet tangible. In the hands of the clever Irish-American this tale had been gruesome enough; but the Frenchman was able to give it an added touch of terror by making the unfortunate victim discover that the creature he feared had a stronger will than his own and that he was being hypnotized to his doom by a being whom he could not see, but whose presence ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... the Back of Beyond, but we prefer the little tracks worn by the feet of the natives, which criss-cross everywhere. Jean won't stir a step without a horrid, dilapidated rag doll called Topsy. I do dislike the faces of rag dolls, their lack of profile is so gruesome, and Topsy is a most depressing specimen of her kind; but Jean lavishes affection on her. A woman-child is an odd thing. I remember being taken into a shop to choose a doll, and I chose a most hideous ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... when he came forth to start for the Platte was a gruesome sight. "He looked," said the unfeeling linesman, after he'd gone, "as though he'd ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... Wind woke her, and puffed himself up, and blew himself out, and made himself so stout and big, 'twas gruesome to look at him; and so off they went high up through the air, as if they would never stop till they got to the ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen
... in reluctantly to fetch it. I also brought out from the dresser a few raw eggs, to break into a tumbler and swallow whole; for Hilda and I needed food almost as sorely as the poor beast herself. There was something gruesome in thus rummaging about for bread and meat in the dead woman's cupboard, while she herself lay there on the floor; but one never realises how one will act in these great emergencies until they come upon one. Hilda, still calm with unearthly calmness, took a couple of loaves from my hand, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... pronounce "uncertain" because owing to several inexplicable eventualities sportsmen innumerable, therefrom return empty handed, whilst others, Mr. Chairman, make up, we know, pretty good bags. The Son of Apollo, whilst thus hunting one gruesome, windy morning, fortunately for us, sank in a boggy, yielding quicksand. Luckily he extricated himself in time, and on reaching the margin of the swamp, there stood an old pet of his tethered as if waiting for its loved ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Valley. They had passed and repassed it constantly; they had hunted for flowers in it; they had made short cuts through it when they wished to go straight from the village to the valley. But never again! After the night when Mary Vance told them its gruesome tale they would not have gone through or near it on pain of death. Death! What was death compared to the unearthly possibility of falling into the clutches of Henry Warren's ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... window he could see the active city below, with the adored castle; to his nostrils came the breath of summer from the coveted valley, filling him with almost insupportable longing and desire. Cold were the winds that swept about his lofty home; ghastly, gruesome the nights, pallid and desolate the days. Out of the world was he, dreary and heartsick, while at his feet stretched life and joy and love in their rarest habiliments. How he endured the suspense, the torture of uncertainty, the craving for the life that ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... this account of Gibbon with Johnson's nervous twitches, his scarred face and his St. Vitus' dance, to realize that these, the two most solid English writers of their generation, were each heir to the same gruesome inheritance. ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... passing the bungalow which leads away to the Back of Beyond, but we prefer the little tracks worn by the feet of the natives, which criss-cross everywhere. Jean won't stir a step without a horrid, dilapidated rag doll called Topsy. I do dislike the faces of rag dolls, their lack of profile is so gruesome, and Topsy is a most depressing specimen of her kind; but Jean lavishes affection on her. A woman-child is an odd thing. I remember being taken into a shop to choose a doll, and I chose a most hideous thing with curly white hair. No one could understand why, and I was too shy ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... Mausers, stood directly behind them to see that they failed not in their duty. Again, there was but one victim; for it seems to have ever been the custom of the Spanish rulers to associate in these gruesome affairs some real criminals with the political offenders, no doubt with the intentional purpose of confusing the issue in the general mind. Rizal standing alone, the occasion of so much hurried preparation and fearful precaution, is a pathetic testimonial to the degree of incapacity ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... mystery to mystery, apprehension to apprehension, fear to fear. And it strikes me that, though my own experience has been bizarre enough, your observations and that of this other doctor who is dead are even more fantastic. What do you hope to accomplish by telling me this gruesome, unnatural ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... disposed of the remains decent as I could, for Doc Carey was leisurely coming down National pike from Jane Aydelot's, an' it was gettin' late, an' no cheerful plate nor job in a crowd in sunshiny weather, let alone there in the dusk of the evening. Wow! I dreamt of that there gruesome thing two weeks. I throwed the shovel in the crick. Would you like me to show you where to go to dig, so's you can be sure your plan with Tank Shirley worked and you didn't drown, after all? And are you sure you ain't been misrepresenting ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... first witness. He described in his own fashion the finding of Archibald McBride's body. Then a few skilful questions by Moxlow brought out the fact of his having met John North on the Square immediately before his own gruesome discovery. The little lamplighter was excused, and Colonel Harbison took his: place. He, in his turn, quickly made way for Andy Gilmore. Moxlow next interrogated Atkinson, Langham's client, who explained the nature of his business ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... have always found it so. This was my first lesson in this particular direction, and I came to the conclusion that the average observer has no faculty for reading the expression of human emotion at all. Only for the sake of that reflection have I ventured upon this really gruesome story. ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... water-lilies rocked on the water and dragon-flies hummed on their great stiff wings. Up on the surface the lake was clear as a mirror. But whether we wished it or not, we had to run right down by the bottom, where it was dark and gruesome. And this I could not endure. I longed for the sunbeams. I knew them so well from the time I used to run in the brook. There they used to peep down through the leaves and pass over me in fleeting gleams. I longed so much to see them again that I stole up ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... vantage looked down upon the savage horde beneath. He counted fifty Arabs and estimated that there were five times as many Manyuema. The latter were gorging themselves upon food and, under the very noses of their white masters, preparing the gruesome feast which is the PIECE DE RESISTANCE that follows a victory in which the bodies of their slain enemies ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a cement-floored corridor, the smell of formaldehyde thickening as they went, then into a small office with an open door, on the far side through which Les King was confronted with a frankly gruesome sight—a dissecting room with parts of cadavers lying around like orders in ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... loneliness, impatient for its meal. The grim king of terrors is very close to thee, poor honest soldier of the Fatherland; but thou canst face him as boldly as thou hast faced the foe, with the help of the little book of which thy frost-chilled fingers have never lost the grip. The gruesome bird falls back as thou ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... must be borne in mind that we are looking at the matter collectively; that is to say, without reckoning on individual idiosyncrasies of expression in speech. Of course we know that joy is apt to make us raise the voice and sadness to lower it. For instance, we have all heard gruesome stories, and have noticed how naturally the voice sinks in the telling. A ghost story told with an upward inflection might easily become humourous, so instinctively do we associate the upward inflection with a non-pessimistic trend of thought. Under stress of emotion we emphasize words ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... looked at me for some time. They were intent on watching the fire and the steaming crock. The smell from this article was by no means unpleasant, evidently some savoury meat was being cooked, and I began to feel the place to be less gruesome than I had at first anticipated. I noticed, too, that a great many things were stowed away which could have no connection with the unseen world. Evidently the cave was used by smugglers ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... house, for I think, of all "shop," ours is the most unsuitable for general conversation because of the morbid fascination it has for most people. Ladies especially will listen with avidity to medical matters, perceiving nothing gruesome in the details at the moment; but afterward developing nerves on the subject, and probably giving the young practitioner good reason to regret unwary confidences. I tried to stave off the topic, but the will-power of the majority was against me, and ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... all good boys to be, And sailed away across the sea, At London Bridge that Bishop he Arrived one Tuesday night; And as that night he homeward strode To his Pan-Anglican abode, He passed along the Borough Road, And saw a gruesome sight. ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... been that I would complete my high school studies. I cannot pretend to diligence. The passing months found me less frequently in the classroom than in secluded spots along the Calcutta bathing GHATS. The adjoining crematory grounds, especially gruesome at night, are considered highly attractive by the yogi. He who would find the Deathless Essence must not be dismayed by a few unadorned skulls. Human inadequacy becomes clear in the gloomy abode of miscellaneous bones. My midnight ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... awful gradations of gentleness lead from such as these down to those cabins where wallow the inventions of Nature's infancy, when, like a child of untutored imagination, she drew on the slate of her fancy creations in which flitting shadows of beauty serve only to heighten the shuddering, gruesome horror. The sweet sun and air, the hand of man, and the growth of the ages, have all but swept such from the upper plains of the earth. What hunter's bow has twanged, what adventurer's rifle has cracked in those leagues of mountain-waste, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... our hobbies," Heneage answered. "Take the Colonel, for instance, the most harmless, the most good-natured man who ever lived. Nothing in the world fascinates him so much as the details of a tragedy like this, however gruesome they may be. I have seen him handle a murderer's knife as though he loved it. His favourite museum is the professional Chamber of Horrors in Scotland Yard. My own interests run in a slightly different direction. I like to look at an affair ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... remembering something I had read not long before, 'it is indeed a wonderful, subtle thing. We live in the midst of the unknown. Unseen forces drag us hither and thither. At times we are brought face to face with the occult, the eerie, the gruesome. Charcot says in his superb work on the subject that—er—that—well, we will hardly go into it now. Some other time. The matter is a profound one, and not to be touched upon lightly. How is my ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... fingers and yelling out curses, as an accompaniment to her ballet. Her luxurious white hair streamed out during her gyrations, and with her grotesque appearance and the faint light of the candle, she presented a gruesome spectacle. ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... hands had gruesome tales to tell of accidents that had happened during gun-practice. Once while being loaded, a gun had prematurely exploded backwards, making a great hole through gunner No. 3, right through his chest, a hole just the same size as the bore of the gun. As the corpse ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... out of his mind before he got back to the shack. He wasn't able to keep up a fire, of course, or do anything for himself—and I suppose the poor boy simply froze to death. He was alone there, and it was weeks and weeks before his body was found. But the most gruesome part of it all is that his horses had been stabled, tied up in their stalls without feed. They were all found dead, poor brutes. They'd even eaten the wooden boards the mangers were built of. Hugh Cochrane couldn't get over ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... the branches of the sacred ash Yggdrasil when, growing suddenly faint, she loosed her hold and dropped to the ground beneath, and down to the lowest depths of Nifl-heim. There she lay, pale and motionless, gazing with fixed and horror-struck eyes upon the gruesome sights of Hel's realm, trembling violently the while, like ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... of Gimp's quarters, the bundles were opened; the contents, some of them dried and gruesome, all of ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... she made this remarkable statement. Her eyes were intent on exact quantities of tea, milk, and sugar, and she passed the cup to the engineer with a smile. Each of the men admired her coolness, but Tollemache, who had been quietly scrutinizing the nearer hills, gave painful emphasis to this gruesome topic by exclaiming: ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... was a gruesome one, and it was a most pathetic sight to watch the drivers, with tears running down their cheeks, bidding a last farewell to their lost charges before burial, for the men become exceedingly attached to their ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... confess, this applies only to the space on the side of the bed next the fire. The bed itself—not to mention the shadowy region beyond it—on which the body of the pirate had lain, he could not regard without a sense of the awfully gruesome: itself looked scared at its own consciousness of the fact, and of the feeling ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... humiliation. The disordered garments—stained with blood and dirt, the distended limbs, the bleeding wound in His side, the face smeared with bloody sweat and dust, the torn brow and hair, and the swollen features, must have combined with all the horrible surroundings to make one of the most gruesome sights that ever man saw. And it was at this moment, in His extremity, that He says: "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." "Father, I have done all that I can do; now I leave Myself ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... harmless people unhappy, and if it were ill done it would drive away sympathy. I only say that all the horrors of those places are due to alcohol alone. Do not say that idleness is answerable for the gruesome state of things; that would be putting cause for effect. A man finds the pains of the world too much for him; he takes alcohol to bring on forgetfulness; he forgets, and he pays for his pleasure by losing alike the desire and capacity for work. The man of the slums ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... up the skulls and bones of Incas that were strewn about and amused themselves by playing ten pins on the hard sand, sticking the bones up and rolling the skulls at them. Don Nicholas paid no attention to the gruesome sport; but stood calmly conversing with the ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... right," answered the young man. "Things are not often so serious as they are supposed to be. It's like being in a house that's supposed to be haunted—on All Hallow E'en, for instance—it's awfully gruesome and creepy at night when the wind moans and the owls screech. And then, the next morning, one wonders how one could have been such an idiot. Other things are often like that. You think the world's coming to an end—and then it doesn't, ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... upon some gruesome sights, and I have heard such tales of ruthless cruelty as you would deem almost passing possibility. I have read of the awful doings of the Lord Bernabo Visconti at Milan in the olden time, but I believe that compared with this monster of Cesena ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... at his house as soon as I arrived in Paris. As he was not in I turned back into the street, where I met him on his way home, and noticed that the sight of me occasioned a convulsive movement of fright, which showed itself in his whole physiognomy and bearing in a way which was almost gruesome. I saw at a glance how matters stood between us, but concealed my own uneasiness under an appearance of natural concern about his state of health, which he immediately assured me was one of torture, and ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... chuckle over his gruesome suggestion, and lazily getting to his feet, selected another tune for ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... woman-hating uncle. Contemplating a resumption of the conjugal state almost before the old gentleman was cold in his grave! It was contemptible. In no little dread he wondered if his uncle would come back to haunt him. There was, at any rate, no getting away from the gruesome conviction, ludicrous as it may seem, that he would be responsible for the brisk turning over of ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... a gruesome sequel to this incident. Some days following the drowning of the runaway, Sam Clemens, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys went to the spot and were pushing the drift about, when suddenly the negro rose before them, straight and terrible, about half his length ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... poorer houses there was a great stir and bustle and laying out of coats and dresses, for many were planning to go to the seashore to see the Princess offered up to the Stoorworm,—though a gruesome sight 'twould be to see. Ashipattle's father and brothers were planning to go with the rest, but his mother and sister wept, and said they would not see it ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... over her left shoulder and as she played she was holding forth animatedly to a girl friend who had evidently dropped in from some store or office during the lunch hour. Now and again the fat man paused in his vocal efforts to reprimand her for her slackness. She paid no heed. There was something gruesome, uncanny, about the way her fingers went their own way over the defenceless keys. Her conversation with the frowzy little girl ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... of our doings in diary form. Last week we had a kind of general introduction to war. The last few days we have seen a few of its more gruesome details. ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... beleaguering army told me, alas! that it was our champion who had been worsted. And now a dissevered head raised high on sword-point by Prince Hasan told the bloody tale with final certainty. Gholab Khan was not only down but dead. At this display of the gruesome trophy of victory there were further frantic yells of delight from the assembled hosts across the valley. The sack of our citadel and town seemed ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... the moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing for the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the dramatis personae of the gruesome scene—extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... failings might have been, he was no faint heart, and despite the shock of the gruesome discovery he continued his investigation of the silent ship. Apparently some attempt had been made when first the Buena Ventura was caught in the deadly embrace of the Sargasso to convey her treasure to the boats, for, at the head of the main companion-way, Bluewater Bill found a chest of ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... strained look, as he realised what it would mean if he could not get the Janequeo off; the Peruvians would give very short shrift to a body of men who had been caught in the attempt to torpedo their fleet. Moreover, he had heard certain gruesome stories from the Chilian seamen to the effect that some of the half-caste troops which the Peruvians had with them were rather addicted to the pastime of torturing any prisoners who might be unlucky enough to fall into their hands—a relic, ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... 104 looked over at Martin and Ferguson. "If it isn't the gruesome twosome," he called. "Where have you two been? We thought the front office had finally caught up with you and found out that neither one of you could read or write and that they had ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... buffaloes were killed near Fort Dodge in three months. During the summer of 1874, an expedition composed of sixteen hunters killed 2,800 buffaloes, and during that same season one young trapper boasted of having killed 3,000 animals. The sight of such a slaughter scene was gruesome to behold. Colonel Dodge writes of it: "During the fall of 1873 I rode across the prairie, where a year ago I had hunted several herds. At the time we enjoyed the aspect of a myriad of buffaloes, which were grazing ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... not answer to that fling. The truth of the matter was he shivered at the gruesome picture Steve's words drew before his mental vision; for Toby was not ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... "seldom fails to rivet the attention of children, especially if well told. The last two words should be said loudly with a start." Many modern story-tellers seem to prefer modified forms of this story, presumably owing to a feeling on their part that the bone and the churchyard have gruesome suggestions. Carolyn S. Bailey gives one of the best of these modified forms in her Firelight Stories, where the woman goes into a field instead of the churchyard, finds a hen at the foot of a tree, thinks this is a chance ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... cease! For seventy-two hours I have been plying my knife, and look at those who have yet to come"—he swept the circle of wounded with an outstretched bloody hand. "O God! If you know how to write, write to your papers and tell Europe she must stop this gruesome war." Then, tired out and enervated, he swooned into the arms of the medical orderly. As he came to to be apologized. "That," he said, "is the third time I have fainted; I suppose I must waste precious time in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... by a very glum, grim, gruesome, gory, but connubially-minded gentleman, whose ugly blue beard was ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... stooping visitors rustled beneath them, slimy walls and ringing floors, all went to make up the vast grave in which she was to bury all hope of escape. Immense were the iron-bound doors that led from one room to another; huge the bolts and rusty the hinges; gruesome and icy the atmosphere; narrow the steps that led to regions deeper in the bowels of the earth. Dorothy's heart sank like lead as she surveyed the impregnable walls and listened to the mighty groans of long-sleeping doors as the shoulder of the sturdy Turk awoke ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... the King. "Should the Queen," she added, "send for another eye and hand, I will transform myself again, and you can give them to her." No sooner had she finished speaking than she mounted a cloud and disappeared in space. The two ministers reached the palace and presented to the Queen the gruesome remedy which they had brought from the temple. She, overcome with gratitude and emotion, wept copiously. "What Immortal," she asked, "can have been so charitable as to sacrifice a hand and eye for the King's benefit?" Then suddenly her tears gushed forth ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... find there I could not imagine. Whatever it had been he was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning perplexedly, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick which reminded me of gruesome things we had lived through in ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the city, evidently, too, in a low quarter, for from the windows of such business rooms and shops as bore any evidence of respectability the lights had been turned out and the doors locked for the night. Only a gruesome green light was blazing in a little drug-store just opposite, while at our left, as we turned the corner, a tumble- down saloon sent out on the night a mingled sound of clicking billiard-balls, discordant voices, the harsher rasping ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... was it; nothing but a dream,—a gruesome, haunting dream. With an instinct of wiping out the dreadful memory, I raised my hand wearily to my forehead. As I did so, I became conscious again of how it hurt me. I looked at it. It was covered with half-dried ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... inartistic arrangement of the room. Why should the horsehair sofa be placed straight against the wall, and those ghastly wax flowers under glass covers adorn the stiff chimneypiece, which might be made so pretty? The memorial cards, that are framed and hung on the wall—how gruesome they appear in the spring sunshine! She longs to pull them down, and burn them, but to do so would be to violate poor Mrs. Grebby's most ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... Morgan." He lied as he had lied to his victims when posing as a surveyor on the Pottawattomie. He lied as he had done when he crept through the darkness of the night on his sleeping prey. He lied as he had a hundred times about those gruesome murders. He lied for his ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... may be with others in such emergencies, but with me it always happens that the sense of fear departs with the presence of actual danger. Before the gruesome fancies of imagination I may quake and burn like any maiden alone upon a city street at night, until each separate nerve becomes a very demon of mental agony; but when the real and known once fairly confronts me, ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... but it was late before he had it skinned and dressed. When the carcase was hoisted to the gallows—and it seemed gruesome enough as it hung there in the pallid light of the moon, with the night birds dismally wailing like mourners from the lonely trees—we went home ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... these wise men of the West, but if ghosts, and phantoms, and witchcraft and hag-ridings are to be accepted on such grounds, I must be allowed to put in a plea, for similar reasons, in favour of the Loup Garou, the Were-Tiger, and all their gruesome family. Wherever there are wild beasts to prey upon the sons of men, there also is found the belief that the worst and most rapacious of the man-eaters are themselves human beings, who have been driven to temporarily ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... opportunity of renewing my acquaintance with the astonishing and gruesome "Museum Archives." The second narrative was headed "Anthropological Series, 2, 3 and 4." It exhibited the same singular outlook as the first, showing that to Challoner the criminal had not appeared to be a human being ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... voluptuousness, which a man runs after for the remainder of his life. A single kiss had been enough. Never had rendezvous been spent in a manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous divinity; for the mother had remained in Henri's imagination like some infernal, cowering thing, cadaverous, monstrous, savagely ferocious, which the imagination of poets and painters had not yet conceived. In ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Abraham,—afterwards to become more justly celebrated and less notorious,—and the dead body, enclosed in an iron cage, was left hanging for months at the top of Cape Diamond, a terror to children and a gruesome ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... lively and bustling; the flower market at the base of the Palazza Strozzi was gay with pinks and carnations and early roses. They drove out of the city, passed innumerable villas, out into the open country where the only blot upon the fair landscape was a funeral train, the coffin borne by those gruesome beings, the Brothers of the Misericordia, with their black robes and black face cloths pierced only with holes for ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... told him the whole gruesome story. He saw, he could not help but see what a deep impress the events of the night had made on me. He heard me to the end with every appearance of sympathy,—and then all at once I discovered that all the time papa had been concealed behind a large screen which was in the room, ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... to his gruesome sentry-go and turned back into the room. A man of fifty, with a tawny moustache, a long and rather narrow face and eyeglasses, was sitting at an office table with some papers in front ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... group of songs by John Vance Cheney, Loomis has found some of his most powerful inspirations in the work of our lyrist, Aldrich,—such as the rich carillon of "Wedded," and his "Discipline," one of the best of all humorous songs, a gruesome scherzo all about dead monks, in which the music furnishes out the grim irreverence of the words with ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Brr.... How cold it is! The wind blows out of the empty theatre as though out of a stone flue. What a place for ghosts! The shivers are running up and down my back. [Calls] Yegorka! Petrushka! Where are you both? What on earth makes me think of such gruesome things here? I must give up drinking; I'm an old man, I shan't live much longer. At sixty-eight people go to church and prepare for death, but here I am—heavens! A profane old drunkard in this fool's dress—I'm simply not fit to look at. I must go ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... father! Oh, my child! unsay these words that be freighted with death for thee, and ruin for all that be near to thee. Shake of this gruesome dream. Call back thy poor wandering memory. Look upon me. Am not I thy mother that bore thee, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... nice Christmas Day in any way. Nan had toothache and Susan had red eyes, and assumed a weird and gruesome flippancy of manner to deceive us into thinking she hadn't; and Jims had a bad cold all day and I'm afraid of croup. He has had croup twice since October. The first time I was nearly frightened to death, for father ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The general opinion of the Boche among the British troops is that he is only good at one thing, and that is destroying other people's property. One of Mr. Punch's correspondents writes to say that while the flattened villages and severed fruit trees are a gruesome spectacle, for him "all else was forgotten in speechless admiration ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... ride away and say nothing for a while. He could let it appear that he had not been at the house at all and so had not discovered the crime when he did. That would give Aleck Douglas more time to get away. But there was Jean, due at any moment now. He could not go away and let Jean discover that gruesome thing on the kitchen floor. He could not take it up and hide it away somewhere; he could not do anything, it seemed ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... DALZIEL, at the outset of his appeal to the Government to make another attempt to settle the Irish Question, promised that he would not "explore the noxious vapours of the past," I feared the worst. But he was as good as his word, and spared us any gruesome excavations in ancient Irish history. Major HILLS did even better by implying that it was only during the last ten years that the question had warped and diverted our domestic politics. If all Irishmen were as reasonable and moderate as Mr. RONALD MCNEILL showed himself this afternoon it would not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... and slept and worked again before their gruesome task was done and Rawson was ready to begin the other work ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... and then, meeting with no response from me, he collapses. Nor does it relieve depression to be set down in a solemn courtyard, lighted by a solitary gas-lamp. This in itself would be quite sufficient to make a weary traveller melancholy, without the tolling of a gruesome bell to announce our arrival. This dispiriting sound seems to affect nobody in the house, except a lengthy young man in a desperate state of unwakefulness, who sleepily resents our arrival in the midst of his first slumber (he must have gone to bed at nine), and drowsily expresses a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... cheer. You'd think I had said something. At least they were reminded of the summary powers granted the F.B.I. to deal with telepaths, because of the gruesome danger they are to ...
— Tinker's Dam • Joseph Tinker
... council, on the petition of a presbytery or general assembly. It was here that those terrible instruments of torture, the caschielawis, the lang irnis, the boot and the pilliewinkis, were used to wring confessions from the wretched victims. It is all a strange and gruesome story of horrors told in detail in the state trial records, and elsewhere, from the execution of Janet Douglas—Lady Glammis—to that of the poor old woman at Dornoch who warmed herself at the fire set for her burning. So ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... will hear a good deal about a gruesome and insidious animal called the Water Horse. This fell beast, though able at need to transform itself into the shape of a human being, is normally like a horse, though much bulkier and fiercer. Its usual abode is in the deep lochs, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... these lights and those that illumine the King's Highway! They shine from above, with increasing splendor, while these cast forth, from below, their uncertain lights. It seems to me that the farther we go the darker becomes the way, and its lights the more inconstant,—so fitful is their gruesome glare." ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... not always enthuse over the hard drudgery of practice. Those that witness only the final games of the year, little realize the gruesome task of preparedness. Every football player will acknowledge that some day he has ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... The gruesome thought of those rats and of that long night drove me mad with fear. I rolled about on the floor, I struck out with my arms and legs, like one possessed, in violent, childish fury. Then, worn out, I let my arms and legs rest; at last, tired, swallowed up in my helplessness, left without ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... God." No one is now astonished at the absurd contradiction in terms involved in speaking of "Christian warfare." Few theologians or churchmen have dared to swim against the stream. In his admirable book La Guerre infernale,[58] Gustave Dupin has pilloried gruesome specimens of militarist Christianity. Nicolai gives other samples, which it would be a pity to leave unrecorded. In 1915, Professor Baumgarten, a Kiel theologian, placidly pointed out that there is opposition between the morality of bellicose nationalism and the morality of the Sermon ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... little village church was still piled up to the windows with the corpses of those that had fled there for sanctuary. Skulls with gray hairs still attached to them, tresses which had once adorned the heads of young girls, and the rotting limbs of small children were mingled in one gruesome heap. It is said that the Ottoman High Commissioner, who was sent by the Turkish Government with the British commission to investigate, on beholding this sight, turned to one of the perpetrators who was present and asked him how much Russia had paid him ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... near by while he harnessed the dogs; he accompanied every step the woodsman took—wild horses could not have dragged him away in his present frame of mind—and finally, when they set out back toward the Canadian Line, he shambled along ahead of the team with head down and eyes averted from the gruesome bundle that lay in the sled. His punishment had overtaken him and he was unequal ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... cried I. "Stop your rude reviling!" Then I wheeled my office-chair in front of bird and bust and door; And upon its cushion sinking, "I," I said, "will smash like winking This impeachment you are bringing, O you ominous bird of yore, O you grim, ungainly, ghastly, grumbling, gruesome feathered bore!" Croaked the ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... like pins planted in the ground. To the travelled man the view suggests many a nook in the Pacific islands. The bathing is here excellent: natural breakwaters of black rock exclude the shark. The place derives its gruesome name from olden days, when the smooth waters and the abundant fish and fruit tempted the fiery filibusters to a relache. It was given in 1726 by Mr. Smith, surveyor to the Royal African Company, after Roberts the pirate, who buried 'his loot' in the Isles ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... of past years, a very short time indeed, and what would happen after that? Claire had read gruesome tales of the struggles of women in like positions, overtaken by illness, losing the salaries which represented their all, brought face to face with actual starvation, and in the midst of the midsummer heat, little shivers of fear trickled ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... deviltry began. Mr. Mostyn found himself wholly unable to sleep. Many relics have curious histories, and the experienced archaeologist becomes callous to that uncanniness which seems to attach to some gruesome curios. But the slipper of the Prophet was different. No mere ghostly menace threatened its holders; an avenging scimitar followed those who came in contact with it; gruesome tragedies, mutilations, murders, had marked its ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... Markham gave the order that they should be taken there, and Scarlett was deputed to see that the work was properly carried out—a gruesome task enough; but he was growing used to such scenes, and the feeling of doing good and affording help to those in need robbed the duty of much of ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... tongue for water, or for help to loosen a bandage which in the shimmering heat has become unbearable. And as the rifle cracking rises to the storm it always does every few hours, more men will be brought in and laid on that gruesome operating table. The very passageways have been already invaded by men lying on long chairs, because there are no more beds. Even they are happy; they have crept to a place where they can gasp in quiet; that ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... is gruesome why should one be asked to present a subject which cannot be adequately presented without showing what pygmies we are and how helpless in the grasp of ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... rather gruesome is that there are the most persistent rumours that the young man has been adopted by Melrose, and will probably be his heir. I can't give you any proofs, but I am certain that all the people about the Tower believe it. If so, he will no doubt ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Come to the feast prepared for thee." She lowered her hand and with a contemptuous smile indicated the gruesome results of the ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... like me, found a crowd the safest hiding-place in those days. A few seemed drawn together by a love of horror in any form. Others were there for what they might steal. Others, sucked in by the rush, were there by no will of their own, involuntary spectators of a gruesome spectacle. ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... this species of woodcock was not adapted by nature for being cooked after this fashion. None of us—not even Master E. Smith, in whom I had previously remarked an unfailing appetite—cared to indulge in the dish. Indeed, it was not until I had removed the unsightly and gruesome object—these are the only adjectives that properly describe it—to a point considerably remote from our camping place that I deemed myself to be sufficiently revived to join the others in a frugal supper consisting of the remaining sandwiches and ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... her go to Eleanore; she did not want to do it, but she could not help it. She was naturally vigilant, and she wished to ward off misfortune if possible. She was obsessed with an uncanny feeling, a gruesome curiosity. She dogged her sister's steps in secret. One time she saw from a distance that Eleanore had started off with a man who had been waiting for her. She could not move from the spot; ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... much time on this gruesome thought, they hurried to a window commanding the best view of the parsonage, and raised it. Then they clustered behind the curtains, and watched, and listened. There was plenty to hear! From the parsonage windows came the sound of scampering feet and banging doors. ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... much," I said nastily. (When people presage a remark by saying that they only say it because they love you, you may lay long odds that it's going to be disagreeable!) "It certainly sounds a gruesome prospect. Not even a choice between bankruptcy and mania, but a certainty of both! And within a year, too! Such a short run for one's money! Aunt Eliza had some suggestion to make, then? And you evidently approved. Would you mind telling me ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... consider that we were working in a post that was not more than twelve feet in diameter, you may well imagine my feelings as I saw these boys fall. I fully expected that my turn would come at any minute, but I kept at work so as to keep my mind off the gruesome surroundings. ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... that Sheeta, the panther, hunting, chanced to glance upward into the blue sky where his attention was attracted by Ska, the vulture, circling slowly above the bush a mile away and downwind. For a long minute the yellow eyes stared intently at the gruesome bird. They saw Ska dive and rise again to continue his ominous circling and in these movements their woodcraft read that which, while obvious to Sheeta, would doubtless have meant nothing to ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... be of a somewhat gruesome turn of mind. My sympathies are always with the melancholy side of life and nature. I love the chill October days, when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden underneath your feet, and a low sound as of stifled sobbing ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... it is always advisable to accept such accusations with extreme reserve and to consider the probability of their having been perpetrated. In the case of Turk and Kurd versus Armenian, however—and unfortunately—there is little reason to doubt even the most gruesome stories that could possibly be written. It is a feud as old as the hills, and no historic battle field of the world was ever so liberally drenched with human blood as the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... the one thing worth living for or thinking about. Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat. We do not set about digging our graves, we do not carry our coffins about with us, still less do we sleep in them—a gruesome practice which has attracted some fanatical folk. To us, death is a fact, not an effect, an incident as natural as birth, in no wise affecting the real, the spiritual, man. We therefore utterly disavow all sympathy with the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... all the chances and changes of seven hundred years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... breaking some fiscal law and hanged for killing a man, the tendency, under stress of circumstances is obvious. Aye, have we not a proverb about it: as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb?... There are gruesome stories about your free traders—and gruesome endings to them. I well remember, in my young days, the clanking gibbet on the sands near Preston and the three tarred and iron-riveted carcases hanging, each in its chains, with the perpetual guard of carrion crows.... Hanging ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... songs describing crime and death have refrains of a startling joviality like cock crow, just as if the whole company were coming in with a shout of protest against so sombre a view of existence. There is a long and gruesome ballad called "The Berkshire Tragedy," about a murder committed by a jealous sister, for the consummation of which a wicked miller is hanged, and the chorus (which should come in ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... many customs in Paris equally foreign to our, shall I say, Imperial ways; together with a plethora of scientific chefs who could metamorphose anything—rats as well as horses. There were revolutionaries in France in sufficient numbers to make traffic in gruesome dietary pay; and plenty of fodder, besides, with which to "fatten" beasts. All this gammon respecting Continental precedent and taste was beside the question; it only invited gratuitous vituperation of the French nation. An ugly feature ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... this with a gruesome double-take that gave his face the fleeting appearance of an ancient ...
— The Mercenaries • Henry Beam Piper
... on to explain, whilst the doctors occupied themselves with their gruesome task, and Vivie was being persuaded to take some nourishment, that her great grandfather had been a soldier servant who had married a Belgian woman and settled down on the site of this very shop a hundred years ago. He and his wife had even then made a specialty ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... mouth had been open, the nostrils of her fine little nose had quivered. Hans Fuellenberg was correct in his observation that her eyes, as she held her head back, had been closed. The second time, she seemed to be drawn against her will by a gruesome something, which alternately aroused fear, horror, and curiosity. She held her eyes wide open, and now and then covered them with both hands, as if in dread ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... for, before long, he took a newspaper out of his pocket, and, a propos to one of his own remarks, began to read a highly decorated account of the fearful injuries under which the last victim of the last diabolical explosion had been in danger of succumbing. Sir Roger read his gruesome narrative with much emphasis, and as he laid ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... of trees and rock Priscilla set up her own god. She had found the bleached skull of a cow in one of her father's pastures; this gruesome thing mounted upon a forked stick, its empty eye-sockets and ears filled with twigs and dried grasses, was sufficiently pagan and horrible to demand an entirely unique form of worship, and this Priscilla proceeded to evolve. She invented ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... herbal drink known as Hop Bitters is said to owe many of its supposed virtues to the bryony root, substituted for the mandrake which it is alleged to contain. The true mandrake is a gruesome herb, which was held in superstitious awe by the Greeks and the Romans. Its root was forked, and bears some resemblance to the legs of a man; for which reason the moneymakers [67] of the past increased the likeness, and attributed supernatural powers to the plant. It was said to grow only beneath ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... grand total of twenty-four at a stringing. It was first used for the learned Dr. John Story, who, upon June 1st, "was drawn upon a hurdle from the Tower of London unto Tyburn, where was prepared for him a new pair of gallows made in triangular manner". There is rather a gruesome tale of how, when in pursuance of the sentence the executioner had cut him down and was "rifling among his bowels", the doctor arose and dealt him a shrewd blow on the head. Doctor Story was followed by a long line of priests, ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... coffin and search the pockets of the dead. He did so, and found the money; but in nailing on the coffin lid again, a part of his soutane was fastened down with it. The priest turned to go, advanced a step, and, being suddenly held, dropped dead with fright. These gruesome stories were happily followed by an hour or two of song and pleasantry in Mr. McKenna's tent, ending in "Auld Lang Syne" and "God Save the Queen." It was a unique occasion in which to wind up so laborious a day; and ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... all but unseated the clinging girl. In a second it was over and the herd thundered on. Patty closed her eyes, and with white, tight-pressed lips, wondered when her horse would go down. She pictured the bloody, battered thing that had been herself, lying flattened and gruesome, in the moonlight when the ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... gored and rent as by a blast; Grim heaps of grey where once were heaps of brown; A ragged ditch—the Hun first line at last. All smashed to hell. Their second right ahead, SO ON YOU CHARGE. There's nothing else to do. More reeking holes, blood, barbed wire, gruesome dead; (Your puttee strap's undone—that worries you). You glare around. You think you're all alone. But no; your chums come surging left and right. The nearest chap flops down without a groan, His face still snarling with the rage of fight. Ha! here's the second trench—just like ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... logic in his contention and so I gave in and made the Children's Hell. It is a gruesome doctrine, that a child who kills himself does not really die. It is the one thing in the whole book that makes me feel most intellectually unclean for writing it. But I wrote it and when the book was finished and His Majesty had signed the manuscript, for the first time in over a century ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... tell the tale were human skulls and other bones lying where the wolves and coyotes had left them, with scraps of clothing caught here and there upon the vines and bushes. Dr. Charles Brewer, the assistant army surgeon who was sent with a detail to bury the remains in May, 1859, says in his gruesome report:— ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... developed a fondness for the morbid and the abnormal. This is revealed in 'Le Horla,' the appalling story in which he took for his own Fitzjames O'Brien's uncanny monster, invisible, and yet tangible. In the hands of the clever Irish-American this tale had been gruesome enough; but the Frenchman was able to give it an added touch of terror by making the unfortunate victim discover that the creature he feared had a stronger will than his own and that he was being hypnotized to his doom by a being whom he could not see, but whose presence he could ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... left the Chinese to settle their own affairs after their own fashion. Opium dens flourish as a matter of course, for opium and Chinese are synonymous words. You can tell an opium fiend as far as you can see him; his face looks like wet parchment stretched over a skull and dried, making a truly gruesome sight. Every ship that comes into the bay from the Orient is searched for opium, and quantities of it are found hidden away under the planking, or in other places less likely to be detected by the sharp-eyed officials. When found it is ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... revolver in its place, deciding to drown himself instead. Yet every time that he walked down to the Trestle Bridge over the Ossawippi he found it was quite unsuitable for drowning—too high, and the water too swift and black, and the rushes too gruesome—in fact, not at all the kind ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... corpse of the murdered stool-pigeon. For the first time, Edward Gilder, as his glance unconsciously followed the officer's movement, looked and saw the ghastly inanimate heap of flesh and bone that had once been a man. He fairly reeled at the gruesome spectacle, then fumbled with an outstretched hand as he moved stumblingly until he laid hold on a chair, into which he sank helplessly. It suddenly smote upon his consciousness that he felt very old and broken. He marveled dully over the sensation—it was wholly new to him. Then, ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... was still in his pajamas and the morning was cold, but he suddenly felt a great drop of perspiration on his forehead. It was the sort of thing, this, which he had expected—had been prepared for, in fact—but it was none the less, in its way, gruesome. There was a further knock at the door, and the ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Jekyll and Mr Hyde." I read it first in manuscript, alone, at night; and, when the Butler and Mr. Urmson came to the Doctor's door, I confess that I threw it down, and went hastily to bed. It is the most gruesome of all his writings, and so perfect that one can complain only of the slightly too obvious moral; and, again, that really Mr. Hyde was more of a gentleman than the unctuous Dr. Jekyll, ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... destruction of all the public books and papers in which its odious accounts were recorded, only illustrates the intensity of the common sentiment against the dire hydra evoked by Mr. Pitt for the destruction of the regicide power of France, and sent back again to its gruesome limbo after the ruin of Napoleon. From 1842 until 1874 the question of the income-tax was the vexing enigma of ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... the whispering ceased. A wave of excitement went round the room. Some people shouted, others pressed forward to gaze on the abandoned wretch who had been caught in the act of committing a gruesome deed. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... sat wriggling his toes with delight, the tale being of that gruesome nature which appeals to him. It must have been tried on countless other children, for, despite Whinnie's autobiographical interjections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primitive Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked over in his ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... she is well known, the reason for the deed, or in some of the many attendant circumstances, such as arrest, pursuit, etc. One rule must always be followed in the reporting of a murder story: the reporter must confine himself to the necessary facts and omit as many of the gruesome details as possible. He must tell it in a cold, hard-hearted way without elaboration, for the story in itself is gruesome enough. Just as soon as a murder story begins to expand upon shocking details it becomes the worst sort of ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... and walked out of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... traveled upward through the abdominal cavity, escaping the vital organs in its path until it reached the spleen, which it perforated. The bullet did not pass out of the body and was held by the Coroner as a gruesome exhibit, to be used against whomever might be accused of ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... and misery, Mazie did not stir for a full minute, then she dragged herself from the gruesome spot ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... found it quite easy to picture myself lying in the bed with a smashed head, and blood all over the pillow. Then it occurred to me that the plaster might smash me all over, and my impressions of Farringdon Meat Market added a gruesome vividness to my conception of the consequences. I always found it pleasant to imagine horrible things; it was only the reality ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... A gruesome sight met them as Eli brought the dogs to a stop. Huddled close and lying by the side of the toboggan, partially covered by drift, were the stiff-frozen bodies ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... is excitement pleasurable when reached through the intrinsically agreeable but it can be obtained from small doses of the intrinsically disagreeable. This is the explanation of the pleasure obtained from the gruesome, from the risk of life or limb, or from watching others risk life or limb. Aside from the sense of power obtained by traveling fast, it is the risk, THE SLIGHT FEAR, producing excitement, that makes the speed maniac a menace to the highways. And ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... recalled the mediaeval controversy about the moment of time at which the soul is really lodged in the foetus, since the concept of murder becomes admissible only from that point on. Doubtless you also know the gruesome poem by Lenau, which puts infanticide and the prevention of children on the same plane." "Strangely enough, I had happened to think of Lenau during the afternoon." "Another echo of your dream. And now I shall demonstrate to you another subordinate ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... When I was a young wench at school"—and then, as she folded up the loose ribbons, Letty told a gruesome story of a farmer robbed and murdered; but as she came to the part the gray horse played in the tale, Katherine slowly walked into the room, with a letter in her hand. She was white, even to her lips; and with a mournful shake of her head, she motioned to the girls to leave ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... could have walked all over it on their bodies. Gen. Grant, in substance, makes the same statement in his Memoirs. It was a fearful sight. But not far from the Peach Orchard field, in a westerly direction, was a still more gruesome spectacle. Some of our forces were in line on an old, grass-grown country road that ran through thick woods. The wheels of wagons, running for many years right in the same ruts, had cut through the turf, so that the surface of the road was somewhat ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... It was gruesome. I sneaked away, and had already reached the foot of the hill, when, to my horror, I noticed the grey man approaching. He took off his hat, bowed ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... his adventures were soon noised abroad throughout the town. He was the last tenant of the sombre house. Thenceforward no one could be induced to rent it or even to occupy it rent free. It was commonly regarded as a whisht, gruesome spot, and was totally unproductive to its owners. Its subsequent history has ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... bothered about the steering-rocket fuel, and he was uncomfortable about the business of releasing the spaceship from the launching cage. There was, too, cause for worry in the take-off rockets—if the tube linings had shrunk there would be some rather gruesome consequences—and there could always be last-minute orders from Washington to delay or ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... half ruined parapet at the end of the stone railroad bridge, in Johnstown proper, one sees sights so gruesome that none but the soulless Hungarian and Italian laborers ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... afterwards imitated in the dress of the man who removed the dead from the arena. Surely something may be said for Gaston Boissier's suggestion that Dante's Tuscan blood may account to some extent for the gruesome ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... the remains of the cabinet, with its gruesome load, into the vestibule. As for the doctor, he was bending over Jackson's still unconscious form. When he saw what the others were doing, he gave a great ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... there are ways and ways of shocking. He might wish to show us the embarrassments of a fairly respectable member of the intellectual classes, living in a highly respectable environment, when he finds that he has committed homicide; and he might make the details as gruesome as he liked. But there was no need to shock the sensitive when he made his choice of the circumstances in which the poet, Stephen Byrne, inadvertently throttles his housemaid. It is a fault, too, that his scheme ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... way into the living-room, reaching out forked tongues to lick up the bodies of the dead, one of that gruesome company whose bloody welterings had long since been stilled, moved again. It was a huge black who rolled over upon his side and opened blood-shot, suffering eyes. Mugambi, whom the Arabs had left for dead, still lived. The hot flames were almost upon him as he raised himself ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... inscription, his shadowy visitor at Troyes once more arose vividly before his imagination, and the terrible scene of Philibert's murder seemed to be enacted again upon the flight of steps before the door. Absorbed in the gruesome story with which he was so strangely connected, he returned to his ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... fireplace, stopping for just a moment to glance at the body of Stella. Then he pulled the blinds down halfway, so that the room seemed somber and gruesome. He drew a chair so that the different individuals as he examined them, would be unable to lose sight of the dead woman. His arrangements completed, ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... she raised her head with a blush and an invitation in her eyes, and he kissed her on the lips. "See here, dearest," he said, "your first dance! And as many as you will give me afterward. Did I ever mention that I was jealous? Nell, I inform you of the gruesome fact now; and that I shall endure agonies every time I see you dancing ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... the first witness. He described in his own fashion the finding of Archibald McBride's body. Then a few skilful questions by Moxlow brought out the fact of his having met John North on the Square immediately before his own gruesome discovery. The little lamplighter was excused, and Colonel Harbison took his: place. He, in his turn, quickly made way for Andy Gilmore. Moxlow next interrogated Atkinson, Langham's client, who explained the nature of his business relations with McBride which had terminated in the payment ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... the Highlands on either hand, the waters turned to a livid gray under the feeble light of the waning moon. No part of our voyage was more impressive, no scene more awe-inspiring. It was a region of such weird lights and gruesome shadows as no fancy could people with aught but gaunt goblins and dread demons, come down to us through generations untold, an unspent legacy of ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... among the British troops is that he is only good at one thing, and that is destroying other people's property. One of Mr. Punch's correspondents writes to say that while the flattened villages and severed fruit trees are a gruesome spectacle, for him "all else was forgotten in speechless admiration of ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... Dramatic "biz" preferred? There you may "boom" it like a bird. Turn on the Absolute-Absurd; By that strange tap the mob is stirred. Be dismal, deathly, dirty, dim; Grovelling, ghastly, gruesome, grim, Anything meaning morbid whim; Quidnuncs will cry, "What treuth! what vim!" Chorus—Tra-la-la! "Boom" to-day! [As long as ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... crimson over hills of purest snow, which caught a reflected glow from rock and crag. Between me and the hills lay miles of rough ice and long veins of thin black slob that had formed during the night. For the foreground there was my poor, gruesome pan, bobbing up and down on the edge of the open sea, stained with blood, and littered with carcasses and debris. It was smaller than last night, and I noticed also that the new ice from the water melted under the dogs' bodies had been formed ...
— Adrift on an Ice-Pan • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... the parterre and in the galleries whispered excitedly; the awe-inspiring names flew about hither and thither on the wings of the overheated air. Women craned their necks to catch sight of heads which mayhap on the morrow would roll into the gruesome basket at ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... word reminded her, as always, of Skip Magruder. She remembered how he had hung over the table that far-away morning and recommended ham 'n'eggs. His dirty shirt-sleeves and his grin came back to her now. The gruesome Banquo reminded her so vividly of her early guilt of plebeiancy that she shivered. The alert ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... gentleness lead from such as these down to those cabins where wallow the inventions of Nature's infancy, when, like a child of untutored imagination, she drew on the slate of her fancy creations in which flitting shadows of beauty serve only to heighten the shuddering, gruesome horror. The sweet sun and air, the hand of man, and the growth of the ages, have all but swept such from the upper plains of the earth. What hunter's bow has twanged, what adventurer's rifle has cracked in those leagues of mountain-waste, vaster than all the upper world can ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... toward the abnormal. His own view, postulating simply a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality; but he realized that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Even Larpenteur's bald statement of it fills me with the fine old Greek sense of fate. Men sickened at dawn and were dead at sunset. Every day a cartload or two of corpses went over the bluff into the river; and men became reckless. Larpenteur and his friend joked daily about the carting of the gruesome freight. They felt the irresistible, and they laughed at it, since struggle was out of the question. Some drank deeply and indulged in hysterical orgies. Some hollowed out their own graves and waited patiently beside them for the hidden hand to strike. ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... let it appear that he had not been at the house at all and so had not discovered the crime when he did. That would give Aleck Douglas more time to get away. But there was Jean, due at any moment now. He could not go away and let Jean discover that gruesome thing on the kitchen floor. He could not take it up and hide it away somewhere; he could not do anything, it seemed to him, but ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... not smile or blush. All the glamour of their flight had fallen from her. The old cemetery with its gruesome headstones oppressed her. The purple shadows of the twilight seemed to circle ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... Lestrange, stranded on a remote island with a beautiful lagoon. As children, they are cared for by Paddy Button, a portly sailor who drinks himself to death after only two and a half years in paradise. Frightened and confused by the man's gruesome corpse, the children flee to another part of Palm Tree Island. Over a period of five years, they grow up and eventually fall in love. Sex and birth are as mysterious to them as death, but they manage to copulate instinctively and conceive a child. The birth is especially remarkable: ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... that gruesome object? Take care, don't touch it as it floats by; it looks like a bit of charred stick, but indeed ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... forward to end the discussion; but the skipper shouted out choice bits from time to time as they occurred to him, and sat steering and gibing, a gruesome ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... war dance in front of Mr. Calton, snapping her fingers and yelling out curses, as an accompaniment to her ballet. Her luxurious white hair streamed out during her gyrations, and with her grotesque appearance and the faint light of the candle, she presented a gruesome spectacle. ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... he leaned over the desk, and spoke in a gruesome whisper which made the cold run down our backs, 'that yon paper was your finger, one finger only of your hand, and it burned like that for ever and ever, and think of your hand and your arm and your whole body all on fire, never to go out.' We shuddered that you might have heard the form ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... Bill's failings might have been, he was no faint heart, and despite the shock of the gruesome discovery he continued his investigation of the silent ship. Apparently some attempt had been made when first the Buena Ventura was caught in the deadly embrace of the Sargasso to convey her treasure to the boats, for, at the head of the main companion-way, Bluewater Bill found a chest ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... of hell—how very characteristic! It is forbidden to the Ghost to communicate to 'ears of flesh and blood' the secrets of its fiery prison-house. Yet it knows how to tell enough of the horrors of that gruesome place to make the hair of a stronger mortal than Hamlet is, stand on end, 'like quills ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... a very real pirate's den, lighted only by candles. A coffin casts a shadow, and there is a regulation "Jolly Roger," a black flag ornamented with skull and crossbones. Grim? Surely, but even a healthy-minded child will play at gruesome and ghoulish games ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... me a terrific cheer. You'd think I had said something. At least they were reminded of the summary powers granted the F.B.I. to deal with telepaths, because of the gruesome danger they ...
— Tinker's Dam • Joseph Tinker
... dear, as always, and the two little boys were as cunning as possible. Sister had brought them some very small Japanese fencing armor, which they had of course put on with glee, and were clumsily fencing with wooden two-handed swords. And they had also rigged up in the dark nursery a gruesome man with a pumpkin head, which I was ushered in to see, and in addition to the regular eyes, nose, and saw-tooth mouth, Archie had carved in the back of the pumpkin the words "Pumpkin Giant," the candle inside illuminating it beautifully. Mother was waiting for me at the Navy ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... one night she was lodged with a good woman who cleaned the church and school, and who kept her awake for half the night telling her gruesome stories of happenings in disease-stricken towns, such as Latimer was at that moment supposed to be. But if she thought to frighten Nealie into consenting to go back to Hammerville without finding her father she made ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... taken a place as nursery-governess; then she had been reading-companion to an unpleasant old woman in Northumberland. The old woman had lived in the country, and her relatives had hovered over her like vultures awaiting her decease. The household had been gloomy and gruesome enough to have driven into melancholy madness any girl not of the sanest and most matter-of-fact temperament. Emily Fox-Seton had endured it with an unfailing good nature, which at last had actually awakened in the breast of her mistress a ray of human feeling. When the old woman at length ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and Peter were summoned from the field. Mrs. Patterson became hysterical, and was taken into the spare room with such remedies as could be suggested. Everybody blamed poor Dan. Cecily asked him what he would feel like if Jimmy was never, never found. The Story Girl had a gruesome recollection of some baby at Markdale who had wandered away ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... my little cell with a gruesome gesture. "This isn't my idea of a pleasant home. And yet it will be my home until someone decides that ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... I was a young wench at school"—and then, as she folded up the loose ribbons, Letty told a gruesome story of a farmer robbed and murdered; but as she came to the part the gray horse played in the tale, Katherine slowly walked into the room, with a letter in her hand. She was white, even to her lips; and with a mournful shake of her head, she motioned to the girls to leave her ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... savage horde beneath. He counted fifty Arabs and estimated that there were five times as many Manyuema. The latter were gorging themselves upon food and, under the very noses of their white masters, preparing the gruesome feast which is the PIECE DE RESISTANCE that follows a victory in which the bodies of their slain enemies ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... had merely kept on in this strain, I should have put him down as one of those human paradoxes a man is bound to meet if he vagabondizes much, and should have forgotten him and his gruesome schemes and ideals by the next day. But he touched upon a theme which, in view of the purpose which had brought us to Minorca, made me cock my ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... colour on the wall before me at night. For months and months after my vigil with the body of the man who had been garroted outside of Pamplona, I never entered a dark room but that his image rose up before me in all its gruesome details. I also passed through a period of disagreeable dreams. Some time would elapse after I awoke before I was able to tell where I was, and I was ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... started with the wheel-barrow he did not know where, his sole object being to stall and make the boss believe he was at work. Along a narrow plank walk he pushed the gruesome load, weaving, wobbling at every step, threatening to go off one side or the other at any moment, headed for the dump where all the water-soaked, discarded ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... discovered Alden's left glove and a rag of some peculiar thick material that seemed to have a metallic finish. But what aroused his gravest fears were the numerous splashes of blood that here and there streaked the snow in gruesome relief. ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... writhing convulsively, hungrily, across the ground. Another animal was taken from the cage and thrown to the waiting, serpent forms that closed about and whirled it high in air. Another—and another! The yelps of terror grew faint in the distance as the monsters passed on in their gruesome work. And the two men, palpitant with memories of their own experience, were limp and sick ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... erect attitude he was an appalling figure to behold, and the two lighted tapers in massive candelabras on each side of the desk lighted up his face with an unholy and gruesome glare. The funereal aspect of the scene was heightened by the house being in total darkness, and though many women had fainted, oppressed by the charnel-house atmosphere that surrounded us, still the audience as a whole remained spellbound in their seats. The medical man now ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... count. There seemed to be a heavy lump inside him, and his mouth was dry; but otherwise he felt all right. That was the gruesome part of it—this dreadful thing had come upon him at a moment when he could have sworn that he was sound as a bell. If this had happened in the days when he ranged the Great White Way, sucking up deleterious moisture like a cloud, it would have ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... had looked upon many a gruesome sight during my somewhat chequered career, though scarcely one more hideous than this which I had ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... characteristic series of pictures or incidents from Madame Bovary: take Bovary's bungling and gruesome operations on the club-footed ostler's leg, with the entire village clustering agape; take the picture of the eyeless, idiotic beggar on the road to Rouen; or the scene in which Emma offers herself ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... been assassinated. The head and body were battered and bruised by some heavy stick or poker, almost past human shape, as if the murderer had wished to wreak some awful vengeance upon the body of his victim. In fact, it would be impossible to recount the gruesome aspect of that room and of the murdered man's body such as the police and the medical officer took ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... to explain, whilst the doctors occupied themselves with their gruesome task, and Vivie was being persuaded to take some nourishment, that her great grandfather had been a soldier servant who had married a Belgian woman and settled down on the site of this very shop a hundred years ago. He and his wife had even then made a specialty of tea for English tourists. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... found it so. This was my first lesson in this particular direction, and I came to the conclusion that the average observer has no faculty for reading the expression of human emotion at all. Only for the sake of that reflection have I ventured upon this really gruesome story. ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... sir," he explained. "Harf our chance of coming out ahead is being ready beforehand, and harf our satisfaction is to keep from having any burials at sea—which are gruesome things, any way ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... the door, and asked what news?—I was ower big, and ower vexed to hear her; so, never letting on, I went to the little looking-glass on the drawers' head, and set it down on the table. Then I looked myself in it for a moment, and made a gruesome face. Syne I pulled out the little drawer, and got the sharping strap, the which I fastened to my button. Syne I took my razor from the box, and gave it five or six turns along first one side and then the other, with great precision. ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... folds of his abieh a large old volume, bound in stout leather, after the manner of religious or scientific books of a half-century ago. On the brown back a scratched gold lettering proclaimed the gruesome title: ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... in Robespierre's berline and in that four years much of the things that were prophesied have come to pass —aye, and much more besides that was undreamt of at the outset by the revolutionaries. A gruesome engine that they facetiously called the National Razor—invented and designed some years ago by one Dr. Guillotin—is but an item in the changes that have been, yet an item that in its way has become a very factor. It stands ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... of the night Gard lay awake, living over the gruesome moments spent in the ill-omened house on Washington Square. The ghastly face of the dead man seemed to stare at him from every corner ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... centuries later; it survives them all. It attains, in addition, the crowning glory, coveted by Stevenson, of appearing typical. There may never have been a Christian child who was martyred by the Jews in the particularly gruesome way described—probably there never was; but, in listening to the Prioress, it does not enter into our heads to doubt her word—the picture which she leaves with us of how the Christian regarded the Jew in the Middle Ages is too vivid to allow ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... and contemplating the gruesome remnants of the skeleton. "Mortal queer it is. Can't make it out. How'd he come ter be fixed up thataway in the middle of the tree, dyin' thar all lonesome, like a poor critter caught in a trap? How'd it ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... followed by cigars, Simms having begun to smoke of late years to discourage a tendency to stoutness. Then all would join in the diversions of the afternoon, which sometimes led to the "Edge of the Swamp," a gruesome place which the poet of Woodlands had ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... much longer without a change. He still managed to swing himself over the counter as lightly as a cork when the enemy became too troublesome, and the redoubtable iron ruler had lost none of its gruesome terrors. ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... chances and changes of seven hundred years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... horsehair sofa be placed straight against the wall, and those ghastly wax flowers under glass covers adorn the stiff chimneypiece, which might be made so pretty? The memorial cards, that are framed and hung on the wall—how gruesome they appear in the spring sunshine! She longs to pull them down, and burn them, but to do so would be to violate poor ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... up the paper which he had thrown back to me, and read the paragraph indicated. It was headed, "A Gruesome Packet." ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... from which it could drift to leeward of the point and its deadly maelstrom. With rowers bailing and the white-faced woman seated, fastening the child in the life-buoy, the boat, gunwale-deep, and the gruesome guard of sharks drifted out of sight behind the point. The boy had not understood; but he had seen his kind, and from association of ideas appreciated again his loneliness—crying and wailing for a week; but not for his mother: he had ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... magical in the spectacle of the beautiful fair face aglow with joy, the rounded limbs (visible through the robes) clinging to the sides of the harp, and the delicate white fingers flying across the strings. There was something gruesome and awful, as well, for the face of the girl was blind, and her ears heard nothing of the sounds that her fingers ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... go to Eleanore; she did not want to do it, but she could not help it. She was naturally vigilant, and she wished to ward off misfortune if possible. She was obsessed with an uncanny feeling, a gruesome curiosity. She dogged her sister's steps in secret. One time she saw from a distance that Eleanore had started off with a man who had been waiting for her. She could not move from the spot; Eleanore ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... contemplation of the gruesome object by a sharp exclamation from Mary. Looking up, he saw Clare a quarter of a mile away, hastening to them along the beach. His ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole history of the telephone. To an uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been more ghastly or absurd. How could any one have interpreted the gruesome joy of this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stood earnestly singing, whispering, and shouting into a dead man's ear? What sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman? And in ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... again in the apartment. Through the darkness only a few feet away from Jimmie Dale, the two men sat there silently, waiting, as he had waited, in the darkness, and the silence—for the Magpie. There seemed an abhorrent, gruesome analogy in the situation—this waiting for a murdered ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... told of certain houses, in different parts of the country, many weird skull stories, the popular idea being that if any profane hand should be bold enough to remove, or in any way tamper with, such gruesome relics of the dead, misfortune will inevitably overtake the family. Hence, for years past, there have been carefully preserved in some of our country homes numerous skulls, all kinds of romantic traditions accounting for their present isolated and ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... attempt, and then, meeting with no response from me, he collapses. Nor does it relieve depression to be set down in a solemn courtyard, lighted by a solitary gas-lamp. This in itself would be quite sufficient to make a weary traveller melancholy, without the tolling of a gruesome bell to announce our arrival. This dispiriting sound seems to affect nobody in the house, except a lengthy young man in a desperate state of unwakefulness, who sleepily resents our arrival in the midst of his first slumber (he must have gone to bed at nine), and drowsily ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... from behind—and now thrust out from the verge into the abyss, to go hurtling into the mist-wreathed depths.... No, Zeke must not come back. The hardness crept again into her face, as she went forward. She held her eyes averted from that gruesome cavern ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... sickness an incident of almost every voyage, and actual epidemics not infrequent. This was a peril that moved even the callous captains and their crews, for scurvy or yellow-jack developing in the hold was apt to sweep the decks clear as well. A most gruesome story appears in all the books on the slave trade, of the experience of the French slaver, "Rodeur." With a cargo of 165 slaves, she was on the way to Guadaloupe in 1819, when opthalmia—a virulent disease of the eyes—appeared among the blacks. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... spirits at the very highest pitch of exhilaration, and their nerves by so much the steadier, and such rapid progress did they make that ten minutes later saw them clustered together clinging to the rocky pinnacle before mentioned. And a gruesome-enough looking spot it was—a sharp projecting point of rock overhanging a sheer precipice some two hundred feet deep, with a narrow snow-bank immediately beneath, and then another frightful abyss of unknown depth ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... apprehension to apprehension, fear to fear. And it strikes me that, though my own experience has been bizarre enough, your observations and that of this other doctor who is dead are even more fantastic. What do you hope to accomplish by telling me this gruesome, ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... hotels—and they don't mind that. They don't mind anything—they shout themselves hoarse whenever Burrows speaks—they're as proud as Punch if he shakes hands with them—and then they tell the most gruesome tales of him behind his back, and like him all the better, apparently, for being a scoundrel. Queer but true. Well, here we are—now, darling, you may expect to be ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... repeated and even excelled at Kishinev in 1903 as a result of this propaganda. It is not necessary to go into the gruesome details of the numerous nameless sex mutilations, the awful outrages committed upon young girls and their gray-haired grandmothers, the shockingly brutal and bestial murders, the well-authenticated cases of nails driven ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... the feet of the natives, which criss-cross everywhere. Jean won't stir a step without a horrid, dilapidated rag doll called Topsy. I do dislike the faces of rag dolls, their lack of profile is so gruesome, and Topsy is a most depressing specimen of her kind; but Jean lavishes affection on her. A woman-child is an odd thing. I remember being taken into a shop to choose a doll, and I chose a most hideous thing with curly ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... these gruesome details—highly pleasing to their narrator—and went up to look at his dead grandfather. He had never seen much of him, but they had kept up a regular correspondence, and always been on terms of affection, and he ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... were killed near Fort Dodge in three months. During the summer of 1874, an expedition composed of sixteen hunters killed 2,800 buffaloes, and during that same season one young trapper boasted of having killed 3,000 animals. The sight of such a slaughter scene was gruesome to behold. Colonel Dodge writes of it: "During the fall of 1873 I rode across the prairie, where a year ago I had hunted several herds. At the time we enjoyed the aspect of a myriad of buffaloes, which were grazing peacefully over the prairies. ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... He was still in his pajamas and the morning was cold, but he suddenly felt a great drop of perspiration on his forehead. It was the sort of thing, this, which he had expected—had been prepared for, in fact—but it was none the less, in its way, gruesome. There was a further knock at the door, and the ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for even though we regard the play as but the scenic representation of the incidents of a night, the representation is of absorbing interest and is entirely free from the crudities which make Muellner's dramas more gruesome than dramatic. But Grillparzer nevertheless resolved that his next play should dispense with all adventitious aids and should take as simple a form and style as he could give it. A friend chanced to suggest to him that the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... be seen as she made her way eastward, shaping her course for Princes street, and peering, with a gruesome fear of the school-board officer, round every corner. That early bird, however, was not so keenly on the alert as she gave him the credit of being, and she reached her goal unchallenged after coasting along in parallel lines with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... of loss; for, henceforth, the Vier Marchi would lack a familiar interest; but mostly the people of Mattingley's world were wakeful through curiosity. Morbid expectation of the hanging had for them a gruesome diversion. The thing itself would break the daily monotony of life and provide hushed gossip for vraic gatherings and veilles for a long time to come. Thus Elie Mattingley would not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... servants, but they might "count upon a first-rate maid in the house." They reminded each other of this promise, the day after their arrival, and grumbled. Secundina had as much as she could do to keep the rooms in order; and the only other service she was able to give the visitors was to recount gruesome stories of the villa while she made their beds or took a top layer of dust off their dressing-tables. According to her, the Bella Vista was the cheapest furnished house to let in the principality, ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... element there might be in the story of the pawnbroker and his daughters, M. Zola much preferred the popular and gruesome legend of the little girl murdered in the scullery; and, some time later, when he consented to write a short story for 'The Star,' it was this legend which he took as his basis, building thereon the pathetic sketch of 'Angeline,' the scene of which ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... fitful lights, were huge balls of white smoke, and brown, springing into quick existence; some expanded to balloon size and swept majestically onward, upward; some, caught in a vortex of madness,—swirling, writhing, darting,—formed devilishly gruesome arabesques that yet were formless; some burst like pon-pons; some released long streamers and darted earthward. Jeb's eyes were held by this appalling grandeur; his soul was chained, numbed, ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... Frechette was one of the unfortunate. This game preserve, I pronounce "uncertain" because owing to several inexplicable eventualities sportsmen innumerable, therefrom return empty handed, whilst others, Mr. Chairman, make up, we know, pretty good bags. The Son of Apollo, whilst thus hunting one gruesome, windy morning, fortunately for us, sank in a boggy, yielding quicksand. Luckily he extricated himself in time, and on reaching the margin of the swamp, there stood an old pet of his tethered as if waiting for its loved rider, a vigorous Norman or Percheron ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... and no larger than they. Next to the silk-enveloped head of St. John the Great Sufferer, which still projects as in life, when he buried himself to the neck in the earth,—as though he were not sufficiently underground already,—in order to preserve his purity, the most gruesome sight which we beheld in those dim catacombs was a group of chrism-exuding skulls of ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... exchanged, dressing the lifeless form in the clothes I had worn on the preceding day, even to the dressing-gown which I had put on upon retiring to my apartments, while I donned his somewhat travel-worn suit of tweed. Having completed this gruesome task, I left the body in much the same position in which it had originally fallen, lying slightly upon the right side, the right arm extended on the floor, and, to give the appearance of suicide, I placed my own revolver—first emptying one of the chambers—near ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... song or two. And she's composed one gruesome thing which makes your blood run cold. It's really for orchestra, and I believe it's meant to represent the murder of a soul. . . ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... tenderness and pathos, with men and women of such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... other hill tribes of India, assassins' weapons from Italy and Spain, even the knife which was formerly carried by the slave-drivers of the Mississippi region. Death and pain of every kind were fully represented in that gruesome collection. ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... the seat, in a white evening frock, looking—for an aunt—really quite nice. On the lawn stood an incensed curate, grasping our small brother by a large ear, which—judging from the row he was making—seemed on the point of parting company with the head it adorned. The gruesome noise he was emitting did not really affect us otherwise than aesthetically. To one who has tried both, the wail of genuine physical anguish is easy distinguishable from the pumped-up ad misericordiam blubber. Harold's could clearly ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... on her hands and knees. This once done, it was often repeated, and, as surely as the night was dark and she had freely indulged at the village inn, the Truslow ghost might be seen crossing the Kennet at ten o'clock. Each fresh beholder adding some gruesome detail to the dimly-seen form in its flapping sun-bonnet, the ghost bit by bit took shape, and at last was fully created. Who can tell how many years longer it might have lived but for Biddy's scream and ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... monoplane I had acquired, a machine not suited for a novice, the mechanics had felt sure some disaster would overtake me. But, as it happened, their anticipations were not fulfilled. The journalists and photographers did not, however, have a fruitless journey. Though there was nothing gruesome to chronicle, they found ample material, when they learned of them, in the early morning adventures of myself and my friend with this 60 h.p. monoplane. Next day, in fact, our exploits were given prominence in the newspapers, and I received a number of congratulatory telegrams; ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... hand readjusted the shade of a lamp which was in danger of burning. Lady Caroom leaned back in her chair with an indrawn sobbing breath. The action at such a moment seemed grotesque. His own coolness, whilst with steady fingers he probed away amongst the wounded places of his life, was in itself gruesome. ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... notorious instance. But all blue diamonds are unlucky. I could tell you some gruesome stories connected with them. The previous wearer of the Heredith necklace—Philip's mother—died in giving birth to him. Incidentally, there is a curious legend attached to the moat-house in the form of a curse laid on it by the original builder, who ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... may not know it, But I am and hard up for "tin," So I've written these clever verses And I hope they'll get put in. Yet Life is an awful lottery With a gruesome lot of blanks, And I wish the Editor hadn't slips That are printed "Declined with Thanks." For it's rather hard On a starving bard When his last trump card Is played, and he wishes himself bisected When ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... days. A few seemed drawn together by a love of horror in any form. Others were there for what they might steal. Others, sucked in by the rush, were there by no will of their own, involuntary spectators of a gruesome spectacle. ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... Dorothy will find it a little dull," Nan observed, rather ruefully. And again she thought the name of Friary was well given to this gruesome cottage; but she cheered up when Phillis opened cupboards and showed her a light little scullery, and thought that perhaps they could make ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... almost affectionately. We were now in some strange suburb of the city, evidently, too, in a low quarter, for from the windows of such business rooms and shops as bore any evidence of respectability the lights had been turned out and the doors locked for the night. Only a gruesome green light was blazing in a little drug-store just opposite, while at our left, as we turned the corner, a tumble- down saloon sent out on the night a mingled sound of clicking billiard-balls, discordant voices, the harsher ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... things. I have always noticed, however, that most people do not raise much of a fuss over a diminutive shocking semi-occasionally, provided the act comes about as a natural course of events. There were many things about the college and clinic rooms that were, to me, gruesome and repulsive. The dissecting-room, with its stench and debris from dead bodies, was the crucial test for me. I wonder now that I stayed with it as long as ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... the bonita and rushed off with it, tearing the line out of the captain's hands. Then we looked at one another. It had all happened in a minute. We were all wringing wet and panting from excitement and exertion. This is a gruesome tale of the sea and I put it here only to illustrate the incomparable savageness of these tigers of the ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... it; nothing but a dream,—a gruesome, haunting dream. With an instinct of wiping out the dreadful memory, I raised my hand wearily to my forehead. As I did so, I became conscious again of how it hurt me. I looked at it. It was covered with half-dried blood, and two straight clean cuts appeared, one across ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... but for the flash of whiteness from the waves as they broke within a few yards of the cottage; the wind was raving, and the rain pouring down the air. A gruesome sound as of mingled weeping and howling came from somewhere in the dark. He turned again into the hut and closed the door, but could find no way ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... at the club daily, but he only once referred to our midnight search and the gruesome ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... the door amid the gruesome silence and awe of his sympathetic comrades, Mr. Darrow added the final ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... about, sat, gesticulated, conversed publicly during the day; and at night when all the lanterns but one were extinguished, their slumbering shapes covered all over by white cotton sheets on the camp bedsteads, which were brought in every evening, conveyed the gruesome suggestion of dead bodies reposing on stretchers. The food, such as it was, was served within that glorified mosquito net which everybody called the "Cage" without any humorous intention. At meal times the party from the yacht had the company of Lingard who attached to this ordeal a sense ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... which makes our soldiers exult in self-sacrifice; but scarcely any attention has been drawn to Teaism, which represents so much of our Art of Life. Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilisation were to be based on the gruesome glory of war. Fain would we await the time when due respect shall be paid to ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows. Long streamers of garments fluttered from fire-escapes. In all unhandy places there were ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... shot, en den he'll beckon back at de yuther creeturs, en den dey'll all come slippin' in on der tip-toes, en dey'll set dar en run over de ole times wid one er n'er, en crack der jokes same ez dey useter. En den ag'in," continued the old man, shutting his eyes and giving to his voice a gruesome intonation quite impossible to describe,—"en den ag'in hit look lak dat Brer Rabbit'll gin de wink all 'roun', en den dey'll tu'n in en git up a reg'lar juberlee. Brer Rabbit, he'll retch up en take down de trivet, en ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... country, and here I should like to build myself a home," he said, little deeming in what gruesome manner his words were ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... a weird contrast to the other two. This one was lean, bent, and twisted like a gnarled tree that had been starved and warped in the forest. His dress was alike native, but the grotesque ornaments of animals' skulls, tails, dried monkeys' hands, and other gruesome relics gave the wearer an appearance that was repulsive to Saxon eyes. This freak of figure and dress was Thunder-maker, the great Medicine Man of the tribe. Without his presence no state conclave was complete; ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... it was late before he had it skinned and dressed. When the carcase was hoisted to the gallows—and it seemed gruesome enough as it hung there in the pallid light of the moon, with the night birds dismally wailing like mourners from the lonely trees—we ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... the captain in the dying man's cabin and I repaired to my stateroom, very moved by this scene. All day long I was aquiver with gruesome forebodings. That night I slept poorly, and between my fitful dreams, I thought I heard a distant moaning, like a funeral dirge. Was it a prayer for the dead, murmured in that ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Gimp's quarters, the bundles were opened; the contents, some of them dried and gruesome, all of them rather wonderful, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... was away for a few hours deer hunting, Wiggate's men, accompanied by Blinky, attended to the gruesome detail of burying the ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... went to work at once, and until midnight I attended on them, preparing the lint, washing the blood-stained instruments, changing the water in the pails, and performing other necessary but more gruesome tasks which I need not particularise. At midnight the young cavalry surgeon, who had been freely dosed with brandy, professed himself ready to take over the minor casualties. The two hospital surgeons, by this time worn out, accepted the offer and ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the sensation of the hour. The newspapers had "stunted" it, and the public, always eager for gruesome sensation, had welcomed it as if it had ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... not tell which. Several of the stoutest men carried bales and bundles on poles. Some were evidently bales of tapa-cloth. The burden of one set of poles, heavier than the rest, however, was not so easily made out. My curiosity was whetted to know whether it was a roast pig or something of a gruesome nature, and I inquired about it. "I don't know," said Mrs. Stevenson, "whether this is a wedding or a funeral. Whatever it is, though, captain, our place seems to be at ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... present at the inquest wrote: "I had the evil fortune to see the body of the unfortunate woman as it lay in the mortuary; and even now the memory of that gruesome sight makes me shudder. There she lay in the mortuary shell, so starved and emaciated that she was a mere bundle of skin and bones. Her hair, which was matted with filth, was simply a nest of vermin. Over her bony chest leaped and rolled hundreds, ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... at all who enter the shrine, looking as if to see through the blood of the late brutal death, are terrible. The naked, strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished, hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face, whose expression is sinister and gruesome, like that of an unrelenting criminal violated by torture. The criminal look of misery and hatred on the fixed, violated face and in the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible. He is conquered, beaten, broken, his body is a mass of torture, an unthinkable shame. Yet his will remains ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... Gruesome anecdotes rushed tormentingly to memory. It was but last winter that he had read of the finding of a man's body, stark and cold, not fifty yards from his own threshold; he had fallen helpless, faint from incessant ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... thud he dropped to his knees, wabbling for a moment in the successful effort to maintain a poetic equilibrium. Then he began pouring forth volumes of shattered French, English and Arabic sentiment, accompanied by facial contortions so intense that they were little less than gruesome. ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... first move. Your next is as follows. Every rustic-cottage contains gruesome china-ornaments and excruciating-cheap German-prints of such subjects as "The Tryst" (always spelt "The Trist" on the German print), "The Saylor's Return," "The Warior's Dreem," "Napoleon at Arcola," and so forth. Point to a china-ornament and say, "I never knew cows in this part of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... remembered the gruesome sight he had once noted far to the north one day. Then, on one of his fishing expeditions, he had come upon the body of a man hanging in a tree, evidently treed by wolves and then frozen. He wondered if some chance ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... grim, wrathful silence the men raised the poor lifeless body, and with some difficulty brought it back to the light of day. When the gruesome business was done, Gimblet returned to the cottage, tired out with his night's work; for, like all the men on the place, he had been scouring the moors since the previous evening, when Mark's derisive words had first sent them, hot foot, ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... stones in a circle around a skull. His tools lie beside him: a ladle, bullet-mould, and eagle's-wing fan. The high voices of an invisible chorus utter the cry of the owl, which the orchestra mixes with gruesome sounds, ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... of St. Jacques de la Boucherie, 199, is an excellent example of transitional Franco-Italian sculpture; and the half-reclining bronze effigy of Prince Carpi from the great Franciscan church (the Cordeliers) of Paris, is wholly Italian in style. The gruesome figure, La Mort, in the embrasure of a window, from the old cemetery of Les Innocents, and a fine bust, 173, of John of Alesso, will also be noted. We pass to Room IV., dominated by the most eminent sculptor of the French renaissance, Jean Goujon (? 1520-1567), whose ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... to pay a last tribute of respect to my loved and honoured friend and Commander by following his body to the grave, but I could not leave the column. That march through Delhi in the early morning light was a gruesome proceeding. Our way from the Lahore gate by the Chandni Chauk led through a veritable city of the dead; not a sound was to be heard but the falling of our own footsteps; not a living creature was to be seen. Dead bodies ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... which they used as they listed, as if it were a giant canopy, beneath which they might shelter from the noontide heat their new-born love. They reigned everywhere, even among the rocks and the springs, even over that gruesome stretch of ground that teemed with such hideous growth, and which had seemed to sink and give way beneath their feet, but which they loved yet even more than the soft grassy couches of the garden, for the strange thrill of passion they had ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... end the farce with less of verbiage and of pretended justice. You have his Majesty here a prisoner. You have, through my own folly, my neck at the mercy of your axe or your rope. There stands the executioner eager for his gruesome work. Finish that which you have already decided upon, and as sure as there is a God in heaven there will be quick retribution for the crimes committed in this ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... to ascribe to this reason the gruesome happenings of that afternoon. They needed some ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... general assembly. It was here that those terrible instruments of torture, the caschielawis, the lang irnis, the boot and the pilliewinkis, were used to wring confessions from the wretched victims. It is all a strange and gruesome story of horrors told in detail in the state trial records, and elsewhere, from the execution of Janet Douglas—Lady Glammis—to that of the poor old woman at Dornoch who warmed herself at the fire set for her burning. So firmly ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... clumsy, slouching, rickety; gawky; lumping, lumpish[obs3]; lumbering; hulky[obs3], hulking; unwieldy. squalid, haggard; grim, grim faced, grim visaged; grisly, ghastly; ghost like, death like; cadaverous, grewsome[obs3], gruesome. frightful, hideous, odious, uncanny, forbidding; repellant, repulsive, repugnant, grotesque, bizarre; grody [coll.], grody to the max [coll.]; horrid, horrible; shocking &c. (painful) 830. foul &c. (dirty) 653; dingy &c. (colorless) 429; gaudy &c. (color) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... l'homme est plus delicate a cause de la nourriture que celle des aultres animaux." Every one to his taste, as the old politician said when he kissed the donkey. When you study the Lalanne etching of this gruesome alley you almost expect to see at the corner Anatole France's famous cook-shop with its ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... know, in theory, how to make The matutinal tea and coffee, And, when at school, I used to bake A gruesome mess described as toffee; But these, which form my whole cuisine, Are scarce the kind of thing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... I could think only of the two paragraphs we had read in Mrs. Wardlaw's will, and especially of the last. Might not Kato have been forced or enticed into a scheme that promised a safe return and practically no chance of discovery? What gruesome mystery had been unveiled by the anonymous letter which had ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... be taken as any indication of guilt, but was merely a recognition of the palpable fact that the American habit of lynching had so whetted the thirst for black blood that a negro suspected of crime had to face at least the possibility of a short shrift and a long rope, not to mention more gruesome horrors, without the intervention of judge or jury. Since to have a black face at such a time was to challenge suspicion, and since there was neither the martyr's glory nor the saint's renown in being killed for some one else's crime, and very ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Standish, who has so pleasantly introduced himself to me, I know none of you. So I'll have to ask— (He stops suddenly and rises, facing them all. He points slowly to the chesterfield, facing fireplace up C.) That's rather a gruesome thing there. I think we'll move it into another room. Will some of you gentlemen carry Mr. Wales' body into the other room. (There is a pause. The men all hesitate. Finally MASON starts to move to chesterfield. DONOHUE is down stage R.C.) ...
— The Thirteenth Chair • Bayard Veiller
... lying very still. Gruesome ideas presented themselves. She had just accepted them as truth when Ted wriggled. He wriggled again. Then he sat up suddenly, looked at her with unseeing eyes, and said something in a thick voice. She gave a little sob of relief. It ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... of a knowledge of Greek art and myth.[849] Early in the second century B.C. Plautus in the Captivi alluded to these paintings as familiar;[850] and we must not forget that the Etruscans habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for illustration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his work on the Roman religion of the ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... Uncle Gulian; and though I ran after him and shook it (it only looks gruesome in the dark, you know) he never stopped, and he stumbled on the first step, and then he rolled—My! how he did bump"—and naughty Peter sat down on the stalls and held his sides for ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
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