"Fetid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and more involved and unsymmetrical forms, as the columbine, monk's-hood, larkspur, aristolochia, and thus finally to the most highly specialized or involved forms of all, as seen in the orchid—the multifarious, multiversant orchid; the beautiful orchid; the ugly orchid; the fragrant orchid; the fetid orchid; the graceful, homely, grotesque, uncanny, mimetic, and, until the year 1859, the absolutely non-committal and inexplicable flower; the blossom which had waited through the ages for Darwin, its chosen interpreter, ere she ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... relate Oswald's unhappy fate, Left to these monsters, whose hate was ablaze? Both on revenge were bent; He for a menace sent, She for the merriment Caused by his lays. "Dungeon and torture-rack, These shall now pay thee back! Minstrel and poet rare, Rave in thy mad despair, And in that fetid ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... Thou Spain, hast thou not fruitful Afric nigh? And has she not in sooth offended more Than Italy? yet her to scathe, that high, And noble, enterprize wilt thou give o'er. Alas! thou sleepest, drunken Italy, Of every vice and crime the fetid sewer! Nor grievest, as a hand-maid, to obey, In turn, the nations ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... things the scum and rotten Sewer, where ordures best forgotten And unmentioned still descend! Filth and garbage, stench and poison. Thou dost bear in fetid foison! Here I ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... bridge, 37 rods (rasan) long, straight and 37 fathoms broad for the good, and crooked and narrow as sword-edge for the bad, a nymph-like form will appear to the virtuous and say, "I am the personification of thy good deeds!" In Hell there will issue from a fetid gale a gloomy figure with head like a minaret, red eyeballs, hooked nose, teeth like pillars, spear-like fangs, snaky locks etc. and when asked who he is he will reply, "I am the personification of thine evil acts!" (Dabistan i. 285.) The ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... related it briefly as I could once in my life is enough. Let me now go back to the simile of the lost wretch struggling for life in the mangrove swamp. The first sense of having set my foot on a firmer place in that slough of fetid slime, of a wholesome breath of air blown to me from outside the shadow of the black abhorred forest, was when I began to experience intervals of relief from physical pain, when these grew more and more frequent and ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... The Civet, or Vierra Civetta of naturalists, is an animal somewhat allied to the weazel; but the genus is peculiarly distinguished by an orifice or folicle beneath the anus, containing an unctuous odorant matter, highly fetid in most of the species; but in this and the Zibet the produce is a rich perfume, much esteemed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... intimating that on the first sign of treachery I should blow his brains out. However, in spite of this precaution, I felt uncomfortable to the last degree. I blamed myself for allowing the King to expose himself to this unnecessary danger; while the meanness of the quarter, the fetid air, the darkness of the night which was cold and stormy, and the uncertainty of the event lowered my spirits, and made every splash in the kennel, or stumble on the reeking slippery pavements—matters ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... requires haunted woods, and the friendly presence of ghosts. The immaterial soil of England is heavy and fertile with the decaying stuff of past seasons and generations. Here is the floor of a new wood, yet uncumbered by one year's autumn fall. We Europeans find the Orient stale and too luxuriantly fetid by reason of the multitude of bygone lives and thoughts, oppressive with the crowded presence of the dead, both men and gods. So, I imagine, a Canadian would feel our woods and fields heavy with the past and the invisible, and suffer claustrophobia in an English ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... diminutive courtyard with filthy walls punctured by round ventilators. For a broad, roomy nose endowed with a keen pituitary membrane, it would have been a curious sport to discover and investigate the provenience and the species of all the vile odours comprising that fetid stench, which was an inalienable characteristic ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... long-continued bombardment, the soldiers seemed surprisingly cheerful, going about their work in the long, gloomy passages joking and whistling. They sleep when and where they can: on the bunks in the fetid air of the casemates; on the steps of the steep staircases that burrow deep into the ground; or on the concrete floors of the innumerable galleries. But sleeping is not easy ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... trade in Europe has been largely driven into Whitechapel sweaters' shops. They call the sweater in this business a "chamber master," and in these foul chambers, in the midst of "bad smells, great heat, no ventilation, and fetid refuse," men and women swelter and die, the men getting ten shillings, and the women about five ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... it need the sand waste of Palestine or a tournament to call it into life? Down in that trading town, in the thick of its mills and drays, it could live, she thought. That very night, perhaps, in some of those fetid cellars or sunken shanties, there were vigils kept of purpose as unselfish, prayer as heaven-commanding, as that of the old aspirants for knighthood. She, too,—her quiet face stirred with a simple, childish smile, like ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... filled with increasing astonishment; for he found that the dwelling was thirty miles in circuit, and composed of one entire carbuncle, lucid and vermilion. What became of the boasted wonders of the world before this? The world itself, in the comparison, appeared but a lump of brute and fetid matter.[6] ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... red currant of the gardens, Ribes rubrum, which is a native of America. The fetid currant, Ribes prostratum, is also indigenous to this country. It has a pale red fruit, which gives forth a very disagreeable odor. Josselyn refers to the currant both in his Voyages and in his Rarities. Tuckerman found it growing wild ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... downstairs and into the blank indifferent street. But the long exhausting fast, the fetid atmosphere, the strain upon her emotions, had overtaxed her beyond endurance. Up to now the frenzy of the service had sustained her, but as she stepped across the threshold on to the pavement she staggered and fell. One of the men pouring out from the lower synagogue caught her ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... had been watered at some fetid alkali holes that had scarce given enough to slake their thirst. The effect of the water had weakened them, and the steers that had been without water for thirty-six hours were being pushed on a course slightly northwest as rapidly ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... people think for a time that he had been spirited away, but later on a fetid odor was noticeable near the grove, and some shepherds, upon investigation, found the body of the old man in a badly decomposed condition hanging from the limb of a baliti tree. When alive the old man had terrorized many by his deep and resonant voice, his sunken eyes and his silent laugh, but now ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... clearing, and over the fence into the forest beyond. No one to be seen no one to be heard! Without the cabin, as within, reigned a profound silence. Not a living thing in sight—save the black vultures—a score of which, perched on the dead-woods overhead, and fetid as their food, were infecting the air with their carrion odour. Although within easy range of my rifle, the foul birds took no heed of my movements; but sat still, indolently extending their broad wings to the ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... fins, may have burrowed, like the recent Silurus glanis or Pimelodus gulio, in a thick mud,—of the existence of which in vast quantity, during the times of the Old Red Sandstone, the dark Caithness flagstones, the fetid breccia of Strathpeffer, and the gray stratified clays of Cromarty, Moray, and Banff, unequivocally testify; and that it may have thus not only succeeded in capturing many of its light-winged contemporaries, which it would ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... stoat, polecat, skunk; assafoetida^; fungus, garlic; stinkpot; fitchet^, fitchew^, fourmart^, peccary. acridity &c 401.1. V. have a bad smell &c n.; smell; stink, stink in the nostrils, stink like a polecat; smell strong &c adj., smell offensively. Adj. fetid; strong-smelling; high, bad, strong, fulsome, offensive, noisome, rank, rancid, reasty^, tainted, musty, fusty, frouzy^; olid^, olidous^; nidorous^; smelling, stinking; putrid &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... tell how the long hot days went on: they were days of drought to the land, but they were days of paradise to me. The fever-mists were heavy and the peasants sickened. Tiber was low, and had fetid odors as its yellow shallows dried up in the sun, clouds of gnats hovered over the Lagherello and its beds of rushes, and the sullen wind blew always from the south-east, bringing the desert sand with it. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... should be well considered, and it should be borne in mind that the more sunlight that comes into the house, the healthier is the habitation. The close, fetid smell which assails one on entering a narrow court, or street, in towns, is to be assigned to the want of light, and, consequently, air. A house with a south or south-west aspect, is lighter, warmer, drier, and consequently more healthy, than one facing the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... reply— And then there comes before his muddled brain A vision of green vastitudes beneath an April sky, And clover pastures drenched with silver rain. He knows that it can never be, that he is down and out; Life leers at him with foul and fetid breath; And then amid the revelry, the song and cheer and shout, He suddenly grows grim ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... the Pescaderia the women porters there hurried out to meet them and help the sailors' wives unload. Servile before these latter, whom they regarded as bosses, they trooped in line through the narrow cell-like doors of the fish-portico, fetid air-holes, through which the stenches from inside poured out. The baskets were dumped on the marble flooring and the fish arranged in line on beds of seaweed. On every hand were trundles of big fish and barrels where the "produce" of the day before ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... evening she was looking through the better class of dance halls and drinking resorts for Clara, to get her to go up to Gussie's for a smoke. She opened a door she had never happened to enter before—a dingy door with the glass frosted. Just inside there was a fetid little bar; view of the rest of the room was cut off by a screen from behind which came the sound of a tuneless old piano. She knew Clara would not be in such a den, but out of curiosity she glanced round the screen. She was seeing a low-ceilinged room, the walls almost dripping with the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... at fixed intervals, my friend Silenus, the water-carrier, on his philosophic donkey; nearly all Gafsa draws its supply of cooking and drinking water from this fetid ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... one which in itself suggests beauty, or one which suggests ugliness. In point of fact, it is generally the most pitiable little holes and corners that bear the most ambitiously beautiful names. To any one who has studied London, such a title as 'Paradise Court' conjures up a dark fetid alley, with untidy fat women gossiping in it, untidy thin women quarrelling across it, a host of haggard and shapeless children sprawling in its mud, and one or two drunken men propped against its walls. Thus, were there an official nomenclator of streets, he might ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... we dwell Is a foul and dark latrine, And the fetid breath of living Death Chokes up each grated screen, And all, but Lust, is turned to ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... to the right. I glimpsed another concrete structure. A heavy steel door opened, then clanged shut, behind us. The fetid odor that means only one thing the world ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... fetid species of West Indian cockroach, so called on account of the knocking noise they make ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... which from time to time covered the humiliation of the king and queen from the triumph of the people. The sweat of the horses, the feverish breath of this multitude compact and excited, made the atmosphere dense and fetid. The travellers panted for breath, the foreheads of the two children were bathed in perspiration. The queen, trembling for them, let down one of the windows of the carriage quickly, and addressing the crowd in an appeal to their ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... the room he had just left, in which the body of Marr lay. The atmosphere of a house is a strange thing, and almost as definite to the mind as is an appearance to the eye. A sensitive nature takes it in like a breath of fetid or of fresh air. The atmosphere of the European Hotel had been sinister and dreary, as of a building consecrated to hidden deeds, and inhabited mainly by wandering sinners. This home of a great doctor was open-hearted and receptive, frank and refined. The sleeping dogs, heaving ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... approached the village, with its squalid and fetid huts, we caught the sound of bells, innumerable bells, tinkling at regular intervals. Many people trooped out from their houses to look at us, all flat-faced, all with oblique eyes, all stolidly, sullenly, stupidly passive. They seemed curious as to our dress and appearance, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... and without any apparent reason, were seized with violent heats in the head and with redness and inflammation of the eyes. Internally the throat and the tongue were quickly suffused with blood, and the breath became unnatural and fetid. There followed sneezing and hoarseness; in a short time the disorder, accompanied by a violent cough, reached the chest; then fastening lower down, it would move the stomach and bring on all the vomits of bile to which physicians have ever given names; and they were very distressing. An ineffectual ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... to the fetid atmosphere of bar-rooms and to the soft living of the great city, found his nerve beginning to crack under the strain. Cold drops stood out on his forehead and his hands shook from excitement and anxiety. What kind of a man was his enemy to lie there in the ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... wealth, but of health. But before the time of Richard Henry Dana, many a young man of good family and education—a Harvard graduate like him, perhaps—bade farewell to a home of comfort and refinement and made his berth in a smoky, fetid forecastle to learn the sailor's calling. The sons of the great shipping merchants almost invariably made a few voyages—oftenest as supercargoes, perhaps, but not infrequently as common seamen. In time special ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... down the alley to the narrow opening that to the uninitiated was not an opening between the buildings at all, and slipped in the old way. He had thought it all out in the night. He was sure he knew just how far beyond Sal's house it was; on into the fetid air of the close dark place, the air that struck him in the face like a hot, wet blanket as ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... returning from district school. Miss Mattie had taught at Clark's Crossing for seventeen years, had grown meek and meager and hopeless. Heavens! thought Una, would she have to be shut into the fetid barn of a small school ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... find thee foul and rank and fetid, Walt, Who cannot tell Arabia from a sty. Thou followeth Truth, nor feareth, nor doth halt; Truth: and the sole uncleanness is a lie. ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... organic matter, mineral salts, nitrogenous substances, potash, and phosphoric acid. Fresh-mixed excrementitious matter has an acid reaction, but within twelve to twenty hours it becomes alkaline, because of the free ammonia formed in it. Sewage rapidly decomposes, evolving organic and fetid matters, ammonium sulphide, sulphureted and carbureted hydrogen, etc., besides teeming with animal and bacterial life. A great many of the substances contained in sewage are valuable as ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... Krauss would linger for fifteen minutes, sometimes for longer, talking over netsukes and Hong Kong with Ah Shee. The atmosphere of the place was overpowering; such a stifling reek of a mysterious effluvium, the combination of joss sticks, stale fish, rancid oil, and a sickly taint like the fetid breath of some mortal sickness; it made Sophy feel faint and, after a short interval, she invariably made her way into the street, where the air—though by no means fresh—was an improvement on ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... I was more stirred up about it than he was; that I should hate to leave him and loathed the very idea of being cooped up in Rome amid fetid cages; caring for lions and such like. We thoroughly understood each other, and ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... mark the spot near which a huge impulse died; but we need not linger in the fetid swamps—or only long enough to say a word of justice. Do not rail too bitterly against official painters, living or dead. They cannot harm art, because they have nothing to do with it: they are not artists. If rail you must, ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... first taken aback by the violence of the general's invectives, soon recovered himself, and retorted in the most insolent terms of defiance, abusing the English for meddling in what he styled the legitimate commerce of Brazil. The state of the vessel was such as cannot be described, and the fetid effluvia, arising from it, offended the senses on approaching her within fifty yards. Although Miller took a warm bath immediately upon getting on shore, the stench of the slave ship haunted his nostrils for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... above half an inch in length. A solitary squaw was splitting salmon for drying. She remained absorbed in her work while we gathered about and regarded her with impudent curiosity. Overcome by the fetid air of the place, we re-embarked and steamed gaily miles away ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... moonlight, like some mighty beacon of evil rising up above that sleeping sea, it seemed to say to us, "Go, turn back; remember those who count upon you." And we pulled from it reluctantly out into the broad sea, and breathed a full breath as we left its vapours and its fetid shores. ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... a glorious prospect is before you! the commencement of the civilization of Africa, the extension of our knowledge of all the kingdoms of nature, the production of great material benefits to the Old World, the gradual healing of that foul and fetid ulcer, the slave-trade, the one grand disgrace and weakness of Christendom, and that has defiled the hands of all those who have had any dealings with it; and last, but not least—nay, the greatest of all, and the true end of all—the lifting up of the poor African from the earth, the ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... were approaching, the poor men and women, who, untried and uncondemned, were crowded into the bishops' prisons, experienced such miseries as the very dogs could scarcely suffer and survive. They were beaten, they were starved, they were flung into dark, fetid dens, where rotting straw was their bed, their feet were fettered in the stocks, and their clothes were their only covering, while the wretches who died in their misery were flung out into the fields where ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... The fetid odour of the creatures—which was quite as strong as that of the carrion itself—was too much for the olfactory nerves of our heroes; and they were all three glad enough to let the king-vultures ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... borne my sufferings and stood near So full of pity to relieve my pain. Not so the worthy generals of the host;— This princely patience was not theirs to show. Only thy noble nature, nobly sprung, Made light of all the trouble, though oppressed With fetid odours and unceasing cries. And now, since this my plague would seem to yield Some pause and brief forgetfulness of pain, With thine own hand, my son, upraise me here, And set me on my feet, that, when my strength After exhaustion shall ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... with the slime of life. Thus they abide, Thus fouled and desecrate, The summons of the Trumpet, and the while These Twain, their murderers, Unravined, imperturbable, unsubdued, Hang at the heels of their children—She aloft As in the shining streets, He as in ambush at some fetid stair. ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... rain-harassed street-lamps outside, and a feeble phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within, showed the dripping stone of the walls, from which all traces of whitewash had vanished; the dank, fetid and mildew-tainted hard earth floor with its obscene fungi; the rotting remains of what had been stools, chairs, and tables, and other more shapeless furniture; the heavy planks and massive beams of the ground floor overhead; the ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... half-decayed turnip stuck upon a mop-stick. Let the reader only imagine to himself a figure of this sort, constantly opening the slit that I have above described, and vomiting forth at once, from a fetid carcase, the most disgusting sound and stench, and then he will have some faint idea of the scene exhibited by this animal of a Customhouse officer. After being admonished twice to be peaceable, and not ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... is their rude coadjutor, and through the flower-sod they cut their first furrow. It is the beginning of a new home. Involuntarily one's mind jumps to the crowded cities of the Old World with their pale-cheeked children and fetid alleyways. Surely in bringing the workless man of the Old World to the manless work of the New, the Canadian Government and the transportation companies are doing a ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... formidable hinges, the clumsy nail-heads. A miser, or a pamphleteer at strife with the world at large, must surely have invented these fortifications. A leaden sink, which received the waste water of the household, contributed its quota to the fetid atmosphere of the staircase, and the ceiling was covered with fantastic arabesques traced by candle-smoke—such arabesques! On pulling a greasy acorn tassel attached to the bell-rope, a little bell ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... fetid Lung is a thing of the past, an' Benson Annie has the game to herse'f. Two days later she raises the tariff to fifty cents on shirts, instead of twenty-five, as previous with the Chink. But no ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... of the literal underworld of the great city? What of the babes who cry in fetid cellars for the light and are denied it? What of the Subway track-walker, purblind from gloom; the coal-stoker, whose fiery tomb is the boiler-room of a skyscraper; sweatshop workers, a flight below the sidewalk level, whose ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... cyclone, and the crow Come and go; Where the merchant deals in indigo and tea, Hides and ghi; Where the Babu drops inflammatory hints In his prints; Stands a City—Charnock chose it—packed away Near a Bay— By the Sewage rendered fetid, by the sewer Made impure, By the Sunderbunds unwholesome, by the swamp Moist and damp; And the City and the Viceroy, as ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... storms. If you gather them up quickly and have vessels ready to receive them, the storm will have done them no harm and the oil will be all the greener and better. If the olives be on the ground or even on the barn floor too long, the oil made from them will be fetid. Olive-oil will be always good and sweet ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... was the sublimated dust of deadly nightshade, which kindles the red fires of fever and rots the roots of the tongue. There was the fetid powder of stramonium, that grips the lungs like an asthma; and quinia, that shakes its victims like the cold hand of the miasma of the Pontine marshes. The essence of poppies, ten times sublimated, a few grains of which bring on the stupor of apoplexy; and the sardonic plant, that ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... night and day alike, squatting or lying on the cushions in these apartments. They were divided into two categories. The negresses, who formed the great majority, occupied two court-yards, and these courts exhaled a fetid odour which poisoned the whole of the Bey's palace, whenever the wind blew from that quarter. The white and sallow- complexioned women all lived together, they all wore Arab dress, with more or fewer trinkets, and ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... o'clock; but the sun was still above the edge of the horizon, and its beams had that soft, whitish, unnatural light of the northern summer night. A faint breeze came down from the waters of the gulf, lifting away the fetid odors of the huge camp, and bringing relief to the thousands of wet and dirty men who were half prostrated by heat and unwonted exercise. Ivan, who had lain gazing moodily through the lifted flap of the tent, had fallen ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... prisoner through long lines of close, musty, fetid passages, and up high flights of cold, damp stone stairs, to the very top of the building, where the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... atheistic blasphemies. The whine of mendicants, the curses, groans, and shrieks of victims, and the demoniac laughter of tyrants, commingle in one hoarse roar. Faugh! the spectacle is too horrible to be looked at; its effluvia is too fetid to be endured. What is to be done with the carcase? We cannot dwell in its neighbourhood. It would be impossible long to inhabit the same globe with it: its stench were enough to pollute and poison the atmosphere of our planet. It must be buried ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Mediterranean" is a most filthy, fetid, uncovered gutter, running down the middle of the most, even of the best streets, and with which every merciless Jehu most liberally bespatters the unhappy pedestrian. Truly la belle nation has little idea of decency, or there would be subterranean ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... take a cockney's hand, immediately after it has been washed and scented, and put it to your nose—and you will begin to be apprehensive that some practical wit has substituted in lieu of the sonnet-scribbling bunch of little fetid fives, the body of some chicken-butcher of a weasel, that died of the plague. We have seen as much of what is most ignorantly and malignantly denominated dirt—one week's earth—washed off the feet of a pretty young girl on a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various
... harmony that was in their faces when in repose. Even in the dregs of the people, in those large-headed, beady-eyed creatures with their bestial faces, their thick-set, squat bodies, those degenerate descendants of the most noble of all peoples, even in that thick, fetid muddiness there were strange phosphorescent gleams, like will-o'-the-wisps dancing over a swamp: marvelous glances, minds subtle and brilliant, a subtle electricity emanating from the ooze which fascinated and disturbed ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... with it the gurgling of the old woman. It was impossible and incredible, that mingling in the fetid air of those two sounds, as if the babble of clear spring water had suddenly broken into and merged with the turgid roll of a city sewer. Mick sat up. "But this is bloody!" ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... its climate was bitterly cold, even in its short daytime, it supported a luxuriant but outlandish vegetation. Its atmosphere, while rich enough in oxygen and not really poisonous, was so rank with indescribably fetid vapors as to ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... we all regretted the Maharajah's keenness about water-buffalo and rhinos, for this entailed long days of plodding on elephants through steamy, fetid swamps, where the grass was twenty feet high and met over one's head, where the heat was intolerable, without one breath of air, and the mosquitoes maddening. A day in the swamps entailed, too, a big dose of quinine at bedtime. Between ourselves, I was ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... troth,—and leave true love in pursuit of tinsel, and beauty, and false words, and a large income. But why should one tell the story of creatures so base? One does not willingly grovel in gutters, or breathe fetid atmospheres, or live upon garbage. If we are to deal with heroes and heroines, let us, at any rate, have heroes and heroines who are above such meanness as falsehood in love. This Frank Greystock must be little better than a mean villain, if he ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... his helmet, and lifted it. The air that struck his face was cool and clean. He breathed deeply, gratefully. And at first he did not notice the strange odor upon it: a curious, unpleasant scent, earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar. ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... rubbed shoulders with buildings of steel frame and stone fronts. Thousand dollar apartments gazed disdainfully down upon hovels scarcely fit to shelter swine. Their noses were proudly lifted high above the fetid atmosphere which rose from the offal-laden causeway below. They had no heed for that breeding ground of the germs of every disease ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... overboard, commenced dragging the boat—making, by this operation, a very curious trail, and a very disagreeable smell in stirring up the mud, as we sank above the knee at every step. The water here was still fresh, with only an insipid and disagreeable taste, probably derived from the bed of fetid mud. After proceeding in this way about a mile, we came to a small black ridge on the bottom, beyond which the water became suddenly salt, beginning gradually to deepen, and the bottom was sandy and firm. It was a remarkable division, separating the fresh waters ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... Phil noticed was that the fetid, charnel-house odour which had before assailed his nostrils was now, for some reason, not nearly so strong as when he had previously stood in the entrance of the cavern; indeed it was scarcely perceptible. The next thing to attract his attention was the fact that the cavern widened out ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... peculiar subdued form of laughter through the nose, in hopeless ridicule of a Frenchman's notions of an Englishman's occupations—presumed across Channel to allow of his breaking loose from shooting engagements at a minute's notice, to rush off to a fetid foreign city notorious for mud and mosquitoes, and commence capering and grimacing, pouring forth a jugful of ready-made extravagances, with 'mon fils! mon cher neveu! Dieu!' and similar fiddlededee. These were matters for women to do, if they chose: women and Frenchmen ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... plateau spreads out before him. It is edged on one side by a sheer drop to unimaginable depths, on the other the uprising crags overhang in horrible menace. The plateau is strewn with bleaching bones, and from beneath the overhanging rocks comes a fetid stench. Now the figure is lost again, and the dreadful straining eyes search vainly for the fair face and beckoning hand. His heart labours and great pain is in his chest. For he is high up in the mountain air, and every ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... brothers of Louis Philippe during their captivity. The elder of the two, the Duke of Montpensier, was but seventeen years of age; the younger, Count Beaujolais, was but thirteen. The brothers were confined separately, in dark, fetid dungeons, and were not allowed any communication with each other. The health of Beaujolais soon began to suffer, and it was evident that he must die unless he could have fresh air. The Duke of Montpensier writes, ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... business as I was, on the other hand, intent upon doing my duty without pause or scruple to my King. But the fool forced my hand. A Court is a foul place always, even so attenuated a Court as that which Philip of Spain encouraged. Rumour thrives in it, scandal blossoms luxuriantly in its fetid atmosphere. And rumour and scandal had been busy with the Princess of Eboli and me, though I did not ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... smoke already drifting greasily up from the foul waist of the Marie Louise. A little glare of red was beginning to reflect from the mirrored sea. The ripples of the beaching had vanished; obscurely, undramatically as she had lived, the Marie Louise sat on the bar to choke in her own fetid fumes. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... procession enters the church, they pass through it in solemn march, they find themselves in a vaulted passage. The Swiss looks around. "Dig here," said he suddenly. "Yes, dig here," said the meiga. The masons labour, the floor is broken up,—a horrible and fetid odour arises. . ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... floor, as it was black with dirt. I was afraid of the damp boards for my patient, but I covered her up as carefully as possible, and pinned some old window-curtains across the bed. Neglect and want of cleanliness had made the air of the sick-room so fetid and poisonous that one could ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... wait. The bloodhound made directly for him; he could see his eyes snapping and glaring like red coals above the black water. Harold braced himself as well as he could upon the yielding sand, and held his poignard, Oriana's welcome gift, with a steady grasp. The dog came so close that his fetid breath played upon Harold's cheek; then he aimed a swift blow at his neck, but the brute dodged it like a fish. Harold lost his balance and fell forward into the water, but in falling, he launched out his left hand and caught the tough loose skin above the animal's shoulder. He held ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... It is a cultivated variety of the common Smallage (Small ache) or wild Celery (Apium graveolens), which grows abundantly in moist English ditches, or in water. This is an umbelliferous herb, unwholesome as a food, and having a coarse root, with [95] a fetid smell. But, like many others of the same natural order, when transplanted into the garden, and bleached, it becomes aromatic and healthful, making an excellent condimentary vegetable. But more than this, the cultivated Celery may well take rank as a curative Herbal ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... up with pride at so much honour; when suddenly it was struck by a contrary reflection, saying to itself: "What am I about, that I should rejoice, and not perceive that I am now near to my death and shall leave my golden abode in this cup to enter into the foul and fetid caverns of the human body, and to be transmuted from a fragrant and delicious liquor into a foul and base one. Nay, and as though so much evil as this were not enough, I must for a long time lie in hideous receptacles, together ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... timid old man who stood in awe of his senior partner; that, after this, they had a good long period of comparative quiet, during which they held a riotous game of hide-and-seek across the lane and down among sewers and dust holes, and delightfully noisome and fetid places of a similar character; interrupted at irregular intervals by a vagrant street boy, or a daring cat, or an inquisitive cur; that this game was stopped at about ten o'clock by the advent of Mr Denham, who generally gave them, the rats, a smile ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... of Eden Centre, who thought less of their political enlightenment than the noisy saving of their souls, Shelby's meeting proved a pitiful fiasco. Hardly a score had gathered in the low-ceiled schoolhouse, fetid with reeking kerosene lamps and wilting humanity; and of this beggarly handful two-thirds were women. Shelby assumed a cheerful front, declaring that a small audience so assembled was deserving of his best, but hewing to this line was another ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... of fetid air on a hot day will bring the smell of that Sac camp to me even now. The Sacs were a migratory, brutish people, who snatched at life red-handed and growling, and as I squatted in their dirty hovels, ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... combustibility of both the flax and the tar to which it adhered, the dwarf had scarcely made an end of his brief speech before the work of vengeance was complete. The eight corpses swung in their chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass. The cripple hurled his torch at them, clambered leisurely to the ceiling, and disappeared through ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cistern with water, and after being often stirred, and standing twelve or fourteen days, yields a coarser oil used for lamps and manufactures. After these processes, they extract an oil still more coarse and fetid from the refuse of the whole. Sometimes, in order to make the olives grind the more easily into a paste, and part with more oil, they are mixed with a little hot water: but the oil thus procured is apt to grow rancid. The very finest, called virgin oil, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... overcoat over him, he fell immediately into a deep sleep. He awoke in a high fever and delirious. Some days later he came to himself, rose and went out. It was eight o'clock, and the sun had disappeared. The heat was as intolerable as before, but he inhaled the dusty, fetid, infected town air with greediness. And now his head began to spin round, and a wild expression of energy crept into his inflamed eyes and pale, meager, wan face. He did not know, did not even think, what he was going to do; he only knew that all was to ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... open, discharge black blood, and the trodden flowers lie prone upon the footways. . . . I noticed just in front of me one large bunch which had slipped off a neighbouring mound and was almost bathing in the gutter. I picked it up. Underneath, it was soiled with mud; the greasy, fetid sewer water had left black stains upon the flowers. And then, gazing at these exquisite daughters of our gardens and our woods, astray amidst all the filth of the city, I began to ponder. On what woman's bosom would those wretched ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... removed, he realized the atmosphere was fetid and stifling. A great pressure bore on his lungs, making breathing labored and difficult. And then they were in a lift that dropped into the depths of its shaft with dizzying speed. Antazzo's grin; Tom's eyes, dull and lifeless, floating there in the haze before his ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... Gum. L. E. D.—This drug has a strong fetid smell, somewhat like that of garlick; and a bitter, acrid, biting taste. It looses with age of its smell and strength, a circumstance to be particularly regarded in its exhibition. It consists of about one-third part pure resin, and two-thirds of gummy matter; the former soluble in rectified ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... He, while through Eden, by daring foray oft defaced, Marauding fiends malignant raid pursue, Winging the turbid whirlwind's frantic haste, Pointing the levin's arrowy effluence, Over the mildewed harvest's hungry waste, Breathing the fetid breath of pestilence, And crying havoc to the dogs of war, Let slip on unresisting innocence? Why suffereth He that thus a rival mar His cherished work—through devastated fields Borne on triumphant in ensanguined ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... to a dense high jungle bordering a small river. The first glance had shown his lordship that it was of no use to look beyond the river. The coast trended away northwards in another vast stretch of fetid swamps and ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... appeared on the frontiers of Egypt shrieking for a drink of clean water, and saying that the desire to drink clean water out of a glass represented everything he had to say for the moment about the desert; all the same, he continued to tell of fetid, stale, putrid wells, and of the haunting terror with which the Saharian starts in the morning lest he should find no water at the nearest watering-place, only a green scum fouled by the staling of horses and mules I Owen was as plain-spoken as Shakespeare, so Harding said once, defending his ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... sharp short flash—then crash upon crash, deluge upon deluge, and the worst is over. Summer has received its first mortal wound. But its death is more fatal than its life. The noontide heat is fierce and drinks up the moisture of the rain and the fetid dust with it. The fever-wraith rises in the damp, cool night, far out in the campagna, and steals up to the walls of the city, and over them and under them and into the houses. If there are any yet left in Rome who can by any possibility take themselves out of it, they ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... periods during which the excitability increases before it disappears. As fatigue increases, the perception of the intercurrent excitation is retarded; an odor is perceived as exciting before it is perceived as a differentiated sensation; the most fetid odors arouse feelings of well-being before being perceived as odors, and their painful quality only appears afterward, or is not noticed at all." And after recording a series of results with the ergograph ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... courts and fetid alleys where the sun never shone, my guide led the way, bringing me at last to the familiar Rue de Roi. My distrust had vanished by now, and I followed him unhesitatingly. Crossing the road and walking ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... they represent healing crises or disease crises, is perfectly natural, because the entire organism, including the mucous membranes of stomach and intestines, is engaged in the work of elimination, not assimilation. Nausea, slimy and fetid discharges, constipation alternating with diarrhea, etc., indicate that the organs of digestion are throwing off disease matter, and that they are not in a condition to take up and ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... cup the poisoned brewage of doubt. Already things were drifting toward the abyss, when the jackals suddenly emerged from the earth. A deathly and infected literature, which had no form but that of ugliness, began to sprinkle with fetid blood all ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... embedded fakir, they obtained an incantation from his lips, but still Baal-Zeboub failed. Thereupon the native Grand Master suggested that the evocation should be performed by the holiest of all the fakirs, who was produced from a cupboard more fetid than the temple itself, and proved to be in the following condition:—(a) Face eaten by rats; (b) one bleeding eye hanging down by his mouth; (c) legs covered with gangrene, ulcers, and rottenness; ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... knew just what he was about. In the past he had had experience with the rodents and vermin that infest every native village, and, while he was not overscrupulous about such matters, he much preferred the fresh air of the swaying trees to the fetid atmosphere of a hut. ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bellum custom proclaimed that "good society" in the town of X—, formerly considered the precincts of courts as unfit for ladies as the fetid air of morgues, or the surgical instruments on dissecting tables; but the vanguard of cosmopolitan freedom and progress had pitched tents in the old-fashioned place, and recruited rapidly from the ranks of the invaded; hence it came to pass, that on the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... neither General Otis nor the Imperialists! For their criminal intention it was better that the American commissioners should find war and desolation in the Philippines, perceiving from the day of their arrival the fetid stench emitted by the mingled corpses of Americans and Filipinos. For their purposes it was better that that gentleman, Mr. Schurman, President of the Commission, could not leave Manila, limiting himself to listen to the few Filipinos, who, ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... passages, was obtained from the Gebel Mokattam, on the Arabian side of the valley of the Nile. It appears to be similar to that named above, as it is described as being "a compact limestone," called by geologists "swine stone," or "stink-stone," from emitting, when struck, a fetid odour.] ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... one after another came to grief, doing nearly as much harm as good. One of their first works was to buy up lots and dwellings in the worst districts of Toronto, where miserable shanties and hovels stood in fetid slums, as foul as any in London or Glasgow. The hovels and shanties were then torn down, and respectable dwellings erected in their stead. The unfortunate wretches, the victims of drink, crime, or thriftlessness, who inhabited such places, were not turned away to ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... has just been crowned at Moscow at an expense of some millions, and whose emblem of authority is ornamented with rubies as large as eggs and ablaze with 2,564 costly diamonds—while half his people are feeding on fetid offal—is a weak-faced pigmy who would probably be peddling Russia's favorite drunk promoter over a pine bar had he not chanced to be born in the purple. Having been spawned in a royal bed—perchance the same in which his great gran'dame Catherine was wont ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the old sense of air in his lungs. Confinement had not deprived him of air. He had smiled grimly to himself once or twice, as he thought what the sisters' idea of his prison was likely to be. They probably had conjured up fetid dungeons. There were chains of a surety, certainly a clank or two. As he remembered it, there was a clanking in his mind, quite sufficient to fulfil the prison ideal. And then he thought, with a sudden desire for ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... and fear, that precede the scourge most dreaded by seamen—scurvy. Lieutenant Waxel now took command. Waxel had all a sailor's contempt for the bookful blockheads, who wrench fact to fit theory; and deadly enmity arose {25} between him and Steller, the scientist. By the middle of July, the fetid drinking water was so reduced that the crew was put on half allowance; but on the sleepy, fog-blanketed swell of the Pacific slipping past Bering's wearied eyes, there were so many signs of land—birds, driftwood, seaweed—that the commander ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... with white. Its head bears a tuft in shape like a crown; it has a strident voice, and its eye is murderous, "A look," says the "Romance of Alexander," "so piercing, that it is pestilential and deadly to all beasts, whether venomous or no." Its breath is no less fetid, nor less dangerous, for, "by its breath are all things infected, and when it is dying it is fain to disgorge it; it stinks so that all other beasts flee ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... less unhealthful; but they are far from being so very pernicious as many represent them. The waters there are fresh, which we know, by manifold experience in America, are much less prejudicial to health than the offensive fetid marshes, that are to be found every where else on the salt waters. Accordingly we are credibly informed, that some of the inhabitants of New Orleans say, they never enjoyed better health even in France; and for that reason they invite their countrymen, in their letters to them, we are told, to come ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... low and walked rapidly. Right and left of him sounded two or three low, horrible crunching noises, and right and left of him two or three blue shapes sank limply down on their faces. A sudden sickness seized him, nauseating him like a fetid odour—the crunching noise was the sound of a bullet crashing into a living human skull as the men bent forward. One man, he remembered afterward, dropped with the quick grunt of an animal—he was killed outright; another gave a gasping cry, "Oh, God"—there ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... any device; that breathed in the spiritual atmosphere itself of the place. Always, this mysterious, invisible, yet horribly potent, power of sin was like a miasma throughout the prison. Always, it was striving to reach her soul, to make her of its own. She fought the insidious, fetid force as best she might. She was not evil by nature. She had been well grounded in principles of righteousness. Nevertheless, though she maintained the integrity of her character, that character suffered from the taint. There developed ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... I remembered the threats Father Antoine had used, and in a moment I lost sight of the street with all its light and life and movement. I felt no longer the wholesome stinging of the wind. I tasted instead a fetid air, and saw round me a narrow cell and masked figures, and in particular a swarthy man is a leather apron leaning over a brazier, from which came lurid flames. And I was bound. I experienced that utter helplessness which is the last test of courage. ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... brought up the rear. The procession enters the church, they pass through it in solemn march, they find themselves in a vaulted passage. The Swiss looks around. "Dig here!" said he. The masons labour, the floor is broken up—a horrible fetid odour arises.... ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... is further remarkable for a species of limestone called the fetid, the smell of which, as its name imports, is extremely offensive. It is still manufactured in the East into amulets, and worn as a specific against the plague; and that a similar superstition existed in regard to this stone in very early ages is rendered manifest by the circumstance, that charms ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... two girls were treated with the greatest respect, and when O'Neil stepped to a bench and raised himself above their heads his welcome was not unduly boisterous. Outside, the night was clear and cold; inside the cramped quarters the air was hot and close and fetid. ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... came against the snow-drift, and fell over on my back. Next moment, the heavy body was precipitated upon me, the sharp claws pierced deep into my shoulder,—I inhaled the monster's fetid breath; and striking wildly with my right arm, still free, we rolled over ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... obtainable, for the country is but partially cultivated; great rivers, bridged at rare intervals, issue from the barren solitudes of rugged plateaus; in many low-lying regions a single storm is sufficient to convert the undrained alluvial into a fetid swamp, and tracts as large as an English county are covered with pathless forest. Steam and the telegraph, penetrating even the most lonely jungles, afford, it is true, such facilities for moving and feeding large bodies of men that the difficulties presented by untamed Nature have ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... in the damp air, the walls of houses have black perspiration and their air-holes are fetid; the loathsomeness of existence increases and melancholy overwhelms one; the seeds of vileness which each person harbors in his soul, sprout. The craving for vile debaucheries seizes austere people and base desires grow rampant in the brains ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... to whom they are then opened. When these are opened gloomy and seemingly sooty caverns are seen tending obliquely downwards to the abyss, where again there are many doors. Through these caverns nauseous and fetid stenches exhale, which good spirits flee from because they abominate them, but evil spirits seek for them because they delight in them. For as everyone in the world has been delighted with his own evil, so after death he is delighted with the stench to which his evil corresponds. ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... of his disciples. It is a woman. As she comes closer he sees that she is clad in the cheap and soiled finery of her class. At once he knows her for what she is. He reads the dark story of her sinful life. He understands the whole fetid and filthy past through which she has journeyed as through the stenchful mud of ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... fetid cell, Where the hot vapour of an agony, Struck into drops on the cold wall, runs down Horrible worms made out ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... humming-birds make common cause in rifling the honey-laden trumpets. The air around the wild-plum and redhaw trees is vibrant with the beating wings of millions of wild bees, and the bee-birds feast to gluttony. The fetid odours of the swamp draw insects in swarms, and fly-catchers tumble and twist in air in ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... obscene ugliness, of revolting contacts, of intolerable subjection. For of course he was going into the ranks as Nicky had gone. And already he could feel the heat and pressure and vibration of male bodies packed beside and around him on the floor; he could hear their breathing; he could smell their fetid ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... doorways were pale and their matted fair hair hung loose over their shoulders. The children were almost naked and the few clothes that they did wear were but rags. In the alley were some pigs wallowing in the stagnant water from which a fetid odor arose. Our guide stopped. Evidently he had lost his way. But at this moment a policeman appeared. The clerk spoke to him and the officer told him he would show him the way.... We followed the policeman down more narrow streets. At last we stopped ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... was caused by one of the six non-naturals—air, diet, lack of sufficient sleep, too little or too much exercise, defective evacuation, the passions of the mind; and although some medical writers emphasized the last of these,[12] few would have concurred with Hill that the fetid air of London was less harmful than the clearer air at Highgate. All readers of the novel of the period will recall the hypochondriacal Matt Bramble's tirade against the stench of London air. Beliefs of the variety here mentioned cause me ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... people of the Amonian worship: and we may always, upon inquiry, perceive something very peculiar in their history and situation. They were particularly devoted to the worship of the Sun; and they were generally situated near hot springs, or else upon foul and fetid lakes, and pools of bitumen. It is, also, not uncommon to find near them mines of salt and nitre; and caverns sending forth pestilential exhalations. The Elysian plain, near the Catacombs in Egypt, stood upon the foul Charonian canal; which was so noisome, that every fetid ditch and ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... rises and sets on the weary diamond-digger of the South, the crazed perfume-hunter in the East, the stifled hemp-curer in the fetid swamps of Russia, the shriveled iron-worker in the scorching furnaces of England. Here, in Paris, amid that motley herd who feed on virtue, the moon shines down calmly on purblind embroiderers and peerless beauties, on worn-out roues and squalid beggars. The breeze ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... mystery ship leaping frantically from his bed at some sudden call or commotion. A chair was smashed and broken, and the man who examined it curiously wiped from his hands a disgusting slime that was smeared stickily on the splintered fragments. There was a fetid stench within his nostrils, and he passed up further examination ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... overflowing with rapture and exultation, the gardens gay with lovely flowers, and the trees covered with delicious fruits which give eternal life. In the city of Hell nothing is to be seen but dismal dungeons, dark caverns, frightful deserts, fetid swamps filled with every imaginable species of poisonous and disgusting reptile. In Heaven you behold the happiness and peaceful union of the saints; in Hell, perpetual scenes of wretched discord, and every species of sin and corruption, either under the ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... ravages to which she had been subject. Her hair was snow-white and unmanageably coarse, falling over her back and shoulders like so much silver wire. The eyelids, the lips, the nostrils, the flesh of the cheeks, were either gone or reduced to fetid rawness. The neck was a mass of ash-colored scales. One hand lay outside the folds of her habit rigid as that of a skeleton; the nails had been eaten away; the joints of the fingers, if not bare to the bone, were swollen knots crusted with ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... feeling the pain—awaited the second charge. Again was the crushed and useless arm gripped in the yellow vise, and again was he pressed backward; but this time he used the knife with method. The great snout was pressing his breast; the hot, fetid breath was in his nostrils; and at his shoulder the hungry eyes were glaring into his own. He struck for the left eye of the brute and struck true. The five-inch blade went in to the handle, piercing the brain, and the animal, ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... rivers tenanted by strange beasts wallowing in fetid mud which, when disturbed, sent forth bubbles that burst with foul odors, and made more unbearable the tepid moisture one had to breathe. Hostile, yellow people in strange garb slunk along the banks, hiding behind bamboos and watching the boats rowed ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... certain seasons. During nearly nine months in the year, ordure is deposited around countless villages along the thousands of miles drained by the Zambesi. When the heavy rains come down, and sweep the vast fetid accumulation into the torrents, the water is polluted with filth; and, but for the precaution mentioned, the natives would prove themselves as little fastidious as those in London who drink the abomination ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... told. He had no particular affection for his partner and the prospect of his death scarcely troubled him. Yet for twenty miles and more, through fetid swamps and poisoned jungles, he had carried him over his shoulder, fighting fiercely for the lives of both of them, while there remained any chance whatever of escape. Now he knew that it was in vain, he regretted only ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling and betake ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... aided by chemical analysis, distinguished the virtue by the taste or odour of every plant. By this means their specific juices he found tasted either earthy, mucilaginous, sweet, bitter, aromatic, fetid, acrid, or corrosive. From this experience he found the observation of some botanists to be true, "That there is no virtue yet known in plants but what depends on the taste or smell, and may be known by them."[2] With ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... sulphurous coke, steaming leather, engine oil—all combined their various scents into one marvellous compound which struck the senses like a blow that stunned almost every faculty. Oh, ladies, have pity on the hardly entreated! Once or twice Ferrier was obliged to go on deck from the fetid kennel, and he left a man to watch the sufferer. The shrill wind seemed sweet to the taste and scent, the savage howl of tearing squalls was better than the creak of dirty timbers and the noise of clashing fish-boxes; but the young man always returned ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... to himself he burst into a torrent of tears, seeing now nothing in store for him but either to perish there of hunger and fetid odours beside the corpse and among the worms, or, should the tomb be earlier opened, to be taken and hanged as a thief. These most lugubrious meditations were interrupted by a sound of persons walking and talking in the church. They were evidently a numerous company, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... and odor of the bark are characteristics worthy of notice: the strong, fragrant odor of the Spice-bush; the fetid odor of the Papaw; the aromatic taste of the Sweet Birch; the bitter taste of the Peach; the mucilaginous Slippery Elm; the strong-scented, resinous, aromatic ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... window, which looked out upon the pavement of a well-like court arched over, three stories above, by a handkerchief bit of sky. Very little light or air ever entered the box-like place; during the day its atmosphere was stale and heavy, at night almost fetid. Whenever we ventured to pass an hour there our struggle was always against fate. Slyly we would leave the one door an inch ajar, or surreptitiously unclose the window a fraction as much. Scarcely, however, had we begun to congratulate ourselves upon success when half a score of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... the fruit of a tree of that name. It has an extremely fetid and disagreeable smell, which will effectually prevent the contact of flies or any other insect. On this account it is a valuable preventive to the attacks of flies upon open wounds, in addition to which ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... together. And as a proof that there must be a chemical union between the sulphur and the gas, it is sufficient to remark that they are not separated when the sulphur loses the caloric by which it was volatilized. Besides, it is evident, from the peculiar fetid smell of this gas, that it is a new compound totally different from either of its constituents; it is called sulphuretted hydrogen gas, and is contained in great abundance in ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... whose timeless disappearance from the stage of King Lear seems for once a sure sign of inexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare's part, so nauseous and so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldry of Pandarus and Thersites. I must have leave to say that the coincidence of these two in the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bearable by men who object to too strong a ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... stranger or a dog or cat, came in, it fell to hissing, and filled the room with such nauseous effluvia as rendered it hardly supportable. Thus the squnck, or stonck, of Ray's Synop. Ouadr. is an innocuous and sweet animal; but, when pressed hard by dogs and men, it can eject such a pestilent and fetid smell and excrement, that ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... strange sympathy was affected like the spirit; for when the foul and fetid smoke that arose from tithes witheld, had nearly suffocated Thurcillus, and made him cough twice, those who were near his body said that it coughed ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... be quarried extensively on Hymettus, the well-known mountain of Attica, celebrated for the quantity and excellence of its honey. The rock on which the aromatic flowers grew in such profusion for the bees, did not, however, partake of the same delightful quality. In working it a peculiar fetid odour of sulphuretted hydrogen, somewhat like that of a stale onion, was emitted, which gave rise to its modern Italian name—Marmo Cipolla. This repulsive quality, however, disappeared quickly on exposure. The finest specimens of this marble in Rome are the forty-six columns ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan |
