"Fiendish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... made it impossible for me to reply. All I can do is to fling two camellias in his face. What fiendish arts does love possess—pure, honest, simple-minded love! Here is the most tremendous crisis of a woman's heart resolved into an easy, simple action. Oh, Asia! I have read the Arabian Nights, here is their very essence: two flowers, and the question is settled. We clear the fourteen volumes of ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... kicked him as he lay defenseless, and then, spying a row of coat-hooks in an inner hallway, with fiendish ingenuity directed the others who had joined him. They strung Locke up by his thumbs so that he hung, half suspended, with his toes just off ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... mounted to her knees, then to her waist, then to her chin, then to her lips; and when she was almost stifled by the rising waves, and the bubbling groan of her last agony was reaching her fellow-martyr farther up the beach, one heartless ruffian stepped up to Margaret Wilson, and, with a fiendish grin and mocking laugh, asked her, 'What think you of your friend now?' And what was the calm and noble reply? 'What do I see but Christ, in one of his members, wrestling there? Think you that we are the sufferers? ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... the dancing of the torch-ray that his hand was trembling, Stuart concluded that he had awakened from a nightmare and that this fiendish wailing was no more than an unusually delayed aftermath of the imaginary horrors which had ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... to the loved form of her I adored. I took her cold hand and placed it on my burning brow. I can feel the death-like coldness now where that small hand lay. I closed my eyes and tried to pray; but fiendish shouts of laughter rang in my ears, and I felt that an evil spirit was by my side. My whole frame quivered with suppressed agony. I turned. I saw it move; and the shadowless hand was raised as if to touch the precious and costly form of her I loved. I can remember no more; all after ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... must take me away, we must get out of this fiendish city. Let us go into the wilderness as you said, and live as we can—I would rather starve to death than face these things. Let us get into the country, Thyrsis. You can work as a farm-hand, and earn a few dollars a week—surely that could not ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Sultan, according to Ibn Batuta, pursued Baha-ud-din southwards and arrived near the city of the prince with whom he had taken refuge. The chief abandoned his guest to the tender mercies of the tyrant, by whom he was condemned to a death of fiendish barbarity. ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... priests for scaring half-witted people into their individual folds has been telling them that they were in danger of committing the most dreadful of all sins, the "sin against the Holy Ghost." The utterly "unpardonable sin" of all sins. This blasphemous, fiendish proposition has frightened numbers of half-baked folks, and they have pestered their small modicum of brains over this mysterious say-so of priests and parsons even to the point of committing suicide, or of landing themselves ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... in, and the fight became general. A Carthaginian would grasp a Roman by the hair and hustle him around over the desk in a manner that was simply frightful, and a Roman would give a fiendish whoop and knock a Carthaginian over the head with Greenleaf's Arithmetic. Hannibal got the head of Scipio Africanus under his arm, and Scipio, in his efforts to break away, stumbled, and the two generals fell and had a rough-and-tumble fight under the blackboard. Caius Gracchus ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... danced round me after their manner, with all kinds of antics, whooping and crying out in the most horrible fashion. Then they took the burning coals and sticks, flaming with fire at the ends, and held them near my face, head, hands and feet, with fiendish delight, at the same time threatening to burn me entirely if I called out or made the least noise. So, tortured as I was, I could make no sign of distress but shedding silent tears, which, when they saw, they took fresh coals, and held them near my eyes, telling me my face was wet, and they ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the adept can summon them, assume their attributes and attain union with them. Secondly, great prominence is given to goddesses, either as the counterparts of male deities or as independent. Thirdly, deities appear in various forms, described as mild, angry or fiendish. It is specially characteristic of Lamaism that naturally benevolent deities are represented as raging in ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... starting the engine, after cranking for nearly half an hour, I was so consumed by wrath over the scurvy trick she had played upon us that I swore she should not enter my castle if I could prevent it; moreover, I would take fiendish delight in dumping her confounded ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... little group of cavalrymen formed into a hollow square, on foot, about our mounts; the Indians riding, in a wide circle around us, with blankets flapping, and streamer-decked lances waving high. And as I see, I hear again that wild, unearthly shriek and taunting yell and fiendish laughter. From every point the riflle-balls poured in upon us, while out of buffalo wallow and from behind each prairie-dog hillock a surge of arrows from unmounted Indians swept up against us. I had been ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... heavily from every tree. The noise they make whilst jumping about everywhere is indescribable. There seemed to be something positively human in the positions of the slyly bent heads of the drunken birds, and a fiendish light shone in their eyes while they were examining us from foot ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... These were posts, one side of which was roughly planed. On the upper part of each of these posts was a rude carving of a hideous human face with prominent teeth. The cheeks and teeth were slightly coloured. A most fiendish appearance was presented by these figures, called by the Koreans syou-sal-mak-i, and if looks counted for anything, they ought well to serve their purpose,—the scaring away of evil spirits from the village near which ...
— Our Little Korean Cousin • H. Lee M. Pike
... why, you slim demon!" shouted the chief inspector, roused to anger by the consciousness that he had been duped. "What fiendish trick have you played on those wretches penned up inside there? ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... over the great kettle, dancing round it, and making sudden plunges with a stick into it, in the desperate effort to stir its boiling contents—desperate, because the fire was very fierce and large, and the flames seem to take a fiendish pleasure in leaping up suddenly just under Pierre's nose, thereby endangering his beard, or shooting out between his legs and licking round them at most unexpected moments, when the light wind ought to have been blowing them quite in ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... to have some fiendish power to enrage me. As she prattled thus, her eyes demurely on the glass she dried, I felt a deep flush mantle my brow. She could never have dreamed that she had this malign power, but she was now at least to ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... idea there was an Indian near them. In the course of a half an hour they heard the second shot, and in a few minutes the Indians were upon them, and they knew that the men were both dead, because the Indians had both of their guns and were holding them up and yelling and dancing with fiendish glee. The Indians grabbed them and tied their hands behind them and then they tore down their tent, took the wagon cover off and everything out of the wagon ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... they were left alone again face to face. His father seemed quite offensive for appearing to be in just as high spirits as when the guests were there; and as for grandfather James (who had not yet left), he was quite fiendish in being ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... with all the strength of my lungs to scare them away; but as if they were as well aware that I could not escape them as I was myself, they merely left off their violent efforts to reach my projecting legs, and forming a semicircle round me, watched with upturned eyes, that seemed to possess a fiendish expression that fascinated and bewildered me, the snapping of the frail hold that supported me ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... as the people of the valleys knew Of that dread night of conflict, when the air Darkened with fiendish shadows, and the earth Quaked, and the waters swelled with Mara's wrath. Also how gloriously that morning broke Radiant with rising hopes for man, and how The Lord was found rejoicing 'neath his Tree. But many ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... strength then of the buffalo's foot,[cw] When he spurns high the dust, beholding his Near enemy; or let me have the long And patient swiftness of the desert-ship, The helmless dromedary!—and I'll bear[cx] Thy fiendish ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... invalid story to relate, and I too, so far forgot my usual taciturnity as to indulge my hearers with a detail of my late indisposition—of its origin in the Mysterious Tailor—of the wretch's inconceivable persecution—of the fiendish peculiarities of his appearance—of his astonishing ubiquity, and lastly, of my conviction that he was either more or less than man. Scarcely had the very uncourteous laughter that accompanied this narrative concluded, when a low, intermittent snore, proceeding from a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... of God. You know the man as Ivery, and you knew him as that other whom you believed to have been shot one summer morning and decently buried. You feared the second—at least if you didn't, I did—most mortally. You realized that we feared Ivery, and you knew enough about him to see his fiendish cleverness. Well, you have the two men combined in one man. Ivery was the best brain Macgillivray and I ever encountered, the most cunning and patient and long-sighted. Combine him with the other, the chameleon who ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... denunciations follow. When the author looks back upon his labours, he discerns "a scene of almost unrelieved blackness." He avers that "the deliberate burning alive of a human being simply for difference of belief, is an atrocity," and speaks of a "fiendish legislation," "an infernal curiosity," a "seemingly causeless ferocity which appears to persecute for the mere pleasure of persecuting." The Inquisition is "energetic only in evil"; it is "a standing mockery of justice, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... you, had wrought upon her—to the sudden and silent leave of home. But he has failed. At the first suspicion of his falsity, her dignity and virtue shivered all his malice. She shudders at the bare thought of that fiendish scheme which has so ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... sake, kill me! kill me! Shoot me if—you want to, but let me down from here!" The only effect of this upon Barrett was to light up his brutal face with a leer of fiendish satisfaction. He said to the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... folk-tales of every land, whether they appear as the brush, comb, and mirror of the German water-sprite;[164] or the rod, stone, and pitcher of water of the Norse Troll;[165] or the knife, comb, and handful of salt which, in the Modern Greek story, save Asterinos and Pulja from their fiendish mother;[166] or the twig, the stone, and the bladder of water, found in the ear of the filly, which saves her master from the Gaelic giant;[167] or the brush, comb, and egg, the last of which produces a frozen lake with "mirror-smooth" surface, whereon ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... Makalas, Mashonas, and others that happened to be in the way, were speedily wiped out. The Matabele, reigning in this vast now almost desolate region, soon became the terror of other tribes. The ravagers continued their fiendish operations, and finally set up military kraals and installed their chief in the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... The two masked men, grotesque and horrible, stood near the furnace, motionless as statues. The sable monster on his black throne watched them without moving a muscle in his great, coarse face, only his small eyes seemed like two scintillating sparks of infernal fire, as with a fiendish kind of pleasure he marked the agony of Ninon. Although the young girl instinctively gave up all hope of life, yet never had life seemed so sweet. Its homeliest details now appeared precious, and their poor little cottage, ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... loud shout from the rear. This announced that his presence had been discovered by one or both of the Frenchmen. Of course their first thought would be to leap into the car and try to speed after him. Josh chuckled with fiendish glee as he contemplated their disgust when they found that no matter how hard they tried they could not coax the red racer to ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow
... "Fiendish superstitions hold thee To a vile and hideous death. Break their bonds; let love enfold thee; Off, and ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... Caribbees—notably their power in matters of love and business, religion and war—in Jamaica; in the incantations of the kahuna in Hawaii; and in the devices of the voodoo or conjure doctor in the southern states; in the fiendish rites and ceremonies of the red men,—the Hoch-e-ayum of the Plains Indians, the medicine dances of the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, the fire dance of the Navajos, the snake dance of the Moquis, the sun dance of the Sioux, in the myths and tales of the Cherokees; ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... reply to his question, the sharp, shrill war-whoop of the Comanches fell upon our ears, ringing out on the still night air with a yell fiendish enough to paralyze the stoutest heart. For a single instant it lasted, and then the most unearthly din that can possibly be imagined filled the air; while the neighing of horses, the braying of mules, beating of drums, and ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... to irritate her—to provoke her into an expression of her hidden violence—succeeded quickly the curiosity she had aroused; and he felt again the fiendish delight with which, as a savage small boy, he had prodded the sleeping wild animals in ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... Satan works wonders to support his claims. He makes the weak strong, and inspires all with his own spirit and energy. He proposes to lead them against the camp of the saints, and to take possession of the city of God. With fiendish exultation he points to the unnumbered millions who have been raised from the dead, and declares that as their leader he is well able to overthrow the city, and regain his throne and ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... dragging after him hung from his shoulders, even as bewilderment and sleep clung to his mind. His senses knew that it was night, although details about him were brought into sharp relief by a thousand flashes spasmodically flooding the dug-out with fiendish brilliancy; and he knew that his body was cold, although the walls and timbers seemed to be consumed by raging fires. He felt the ground trembling in the throes of a titanic upheaval, while his entire being seemed to be hammered and torn by the ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... man; and they kept themselves in ammunition by raids on lonely ranches and by "jumping" or ambushing prospectors and lone travelers. If a man was outnumbered by Apaches he often shot himself, for he knew that if captured he would probably be tortured by one of the fiendish methods made use of by these Indians. If he had a woman with him it was an act of kindness to shoot her, too, for to her, also, even if the element of torture were absent, captivity with the Indians would invariably be an ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... which you might drop a Latin exercise and get it back faultlessly construed and written out. I had, in fact, got to the point of attempting nefariously to avail myself of its services. I had folded up the fiendish exercise on the passive subjunctive which Plummer had set us overnight, and was in the very act of consigning it to the mechanical crib, when the shot and the yell projected me, all of a heap, out of ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... master she was considered a first rate cook, and she really was very industrious. She was, therefore, greatly favored by old master, and as one mark of his favor, she was the only mother who was permitted to retain her children around her. Even to these children she was often fiendish in her brutality. She pursued her son Phil, one day, in{58} my presence, with a huge butcher knife, and dealt a blow with its edge which left a shocking gash on his arm, near the wrist. For this, old master ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... irritated her beyond bearing. She turned on him blindly and destructively, he became a mad creature, black and electric with fury. The dark storms rose in him, his eyes glowed black and evil, he was fiendish in his thwarted soul. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... black horse, wrapped in his black cloak, and long ago bareheaded (his hat had fallen off), Gaston was like some fiendish cavalier bound to the ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... clothed in human flesh, told His disciples not to resist evil, to love their enemies, and when smitten on one cheek to turn the other; and yet we are told that this same God, with the same loving lips, uttered these heartless, these fiendish words: "Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... food—were ascribed by frantic rhetoricians to the guineas of Pitt, whose very limited amount of secret-service money was quite inadequate to the performance of such wonders. When a foreign nation has given offence, it is turned by popular imagination into a fiend, and its fiendish influence is traced with appalling clearness in every natural accident that occurs. I have heard England accused of having built the Chicago Wigwam, with the building of which she had as much to do as with the building of the Great Pyramid. I have heard it insinuated that her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... be designated as "the tall, handsome bachelor." I thought that if I went through a course of exercises stretching my ligaments and tendons it would also conduce to health and strength. Growing tall ought to be healthy, all right, I thought. So I got the apparatus—a fiendish-looking thing, composed of ropes, straps, buckles, and pulleys—and I set it up in an unused shed. I had taken exercises with it a few days and liked it first-rate. One evening, about dusk, I went out to take my usual "turn" ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... out of a clear sky, or the overflow in raging lava tide of an unsuspected volcano, the most stupendous, ghastly and brutally devilish war the world has ever known was on in all its fiendish fury, sweeping from England to the Euphrates and from the Rhine and Danube on the north to the glittering sands of Africa on the south, rolling its waves of blood and sending its sickening and indescribable horrors through those lands and among those people at one time constituting ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... opposition, through knowledge of the law and allegiance thereto, can conquer every outward phase of hybrid beast and human, whose selfish pride and cruel greed have been well imaged as a devil with cloven foot and fiendish face. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... sages, at the weak terrors of those who tremble at the dogma of a malignant devil; consider that pity and compassion are not the known chemical constituents of this soulless creator. Where, then, can we fix the limit of that unconscious, fiendish force that evolved a Nero, and incarnated in human bodies the myriads of demoniac spirits that walk the earth to-day? Egotistical scientist (sciolist) calm the cyclone, quiet the engulphing earthquake, blot from human ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... this point that another notion came into my mind, so antic, so impish, so fiendish, that if there were still any Evil One, in a world which gets on so poorly without him, I should attribute it to his suggestion; and this was that the procession which Jan saw issuing from the tenement-house door was not a funeral procession, as the reader ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was never quite ready for sleep. Then, as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose himself in English or French history until sleep conquered. His room-mate did not approve of this habit; it interfered with his own rest, and with his fiendish tendency to mischief he found reprisal in his own fashion. Knowing his companion's highly organized nervous system he devised means of torture which would induce him to put out the light. Once he tied a nail to a string; an arrangement ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... There was a fiendish symbolism in their intent.... The man they called a usurper must die on the very tree that gave their home its significance, and no other instrument of vengeance would satisfy them. The old bitterness had begun generations ago when the renegade who "painted ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... With fiendish earnestness Bismarck plotted to break the bones of two democratic editors whose writings threw the Prussian mastiff into periodical black rages. Bismarck justified his cruelty by insisting that "bounds must be set for ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... until he left his home in Wisconsin. He was in California from 1857 to 1858. When he appeared in Idaho he seemed to have thrown off all restraint and to have become a common rowdy and desperado. It is said of him that "few men of his age ever had been guilty of so many fiendish crimes." ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... enough to send her writhing upon her bed in the darkness of a wakeful night. She would clench her pretty hands until the nails dug into the flesh and brought the blood. She would bite the pillow or the blankets with an almost fiendish clenching of her teeth upon them and mutter, as she did so: "I hate her! I hate ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... myself to go to Briar Hills again, but managed a meeting with Miss Gore, who told me that Marcia was in a more than usually fiendish temper most of the time—quite unbearable, in fact. She was going away to Bar Harbor, she thought, and the certainty of Miss Gore's tenure of office depended much upon Marcia's treatment of her. They had ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... the enemy's admiral (as they could surely easily do) that while most human acts were of doubtful responsibility and not really wicked, yet the invasion, and, above all, the impoverishment of the Nepioi was so foul a wrong as would certainly call down upon its fiendish perpetrator the fires ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... and tears no longer. Stealing down a side street, where he would have to pass few people, Phin gave way to his pent-up shame. Yet in it all there was nothing of repentance. He was angry with himself—-in a fiendish rage toward others. ...
— The High School Captain of the Team - Dick & Co. Leading the Athletic Vanguard • H. Irving Hancock
... perversity of that instrument—would strike off into another key with a ribald snicker or coarse guffaw, causing more turbulence and another stampede. And this preposterous condition of affairs was kept up the whole evening, the bassoon seeming to take a fiendish delight in ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... of the kind. And if I did, I didn't mean it. I don't wish to be unjust, Mr. Pepper, but I must say that to me there seems to be something positively fiendish in a man who can go out of his way to separate a husband from his wife, simply in order to amuse himself by gloating over ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... with which devilish malice has disguised you." Poor little Poinsinet looked, and came back in tears. "But," resumed the magician,—"ha, ha, ha!—I know a way in which to disappoint the machinations of these fiendish magi." ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was over. Someone drew abreast of her. A sinewy hand gripped her bridle-rein. With a gasping cry she turned to face her captor, and saw—a Red Indian! His tigerish eyes gazed into hers. He was laughing with a fiendish exultation. The eagle feathers tossed above his swarthy face. It came nearer to her; it glared into her own. And suddenly recognition stabbed her like a sword. It was the face ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... the Christ, and made light of the distinction between Jew and Gentile. In their case the natural aversion of the heart to a pure and spiritual religion was inflamed by national pride combined with mortified bigotry; and the fiendish spirit which they so frequently exhibited in their attempts to exterminate the infant Church may thus admit ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... white, thy State secure, Thy fortunes prosperous, and thy freedom sure; No glozing art deceives thee to thy bane; The tempter and the usurper strive in vain! Thy spear's first touch unfolds the fiendish form, And first, with fearless breast, thou meet'st the storm; Though hosts assail thee, thou thyself a host, Prepar'st to meet the invader on the coast: Thy generous sons contending which shall be First in the phalanx, gathering by the sea; No dastard fear appals ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... have no parallel for Madame Lalaurie in her systematic and wholesale torture of slaves, there were thousands of masters and mistresses as tolerant and kindly as she was fiendish; and these were virtually without restraint of public authority in their benevolent rule. Lawmakers and magistrates by personal status in their own plantation provinces, they ruled with a large degree of consent and cooperation by the governed, for indeed no other course was feasible ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... sickened by the ghastly spectacle. He walked aside a little way and sat down upon a rock. His face was wet with clammy sweat. A gnawing rage seemed to affect him in the pit of the stomach. This was his first experience with the fiendish work of the savages. A whirl ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... into the lowest depths of despair. Great and majestic in misfortune, by misfortune reclaimed, and led back to the paths of virtue. Such a man shall you pity and hate, abhor yet love, in the Robber Moor. You will likewise see a juggling, fiendish knave unmasked and blown to atoms in his own mines; a fond, weak, and over-indulgent father; the sorrows of too enthusiastic love, and the tortures of ungoverned passion. Here, too, you will witness, not without a shudder, the interior economy of vice; ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... be ye both! Oh Sire! 'tis wrong upon the dying lion To loose thy dog! (Turns to Triboulet) And thou, whoe'er thou art, That with a fiendish sneer and viper's tongue Makest my tears a pastime and a sport, My curse upon thee!—Sire, thy brow doth bear The gems of France!—on mine, old age doth sit; Thine decked with jewels, mine with these gray hairs; We both are Kings, yet bear a different crown; And ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... have been erelong an attempt at reconciliation, to which end the efforts of Captain Howe were ceaselessly directed. But Le Loutre made this forever impossible by an outrage so fiendish as to call forth the execration of even his unscrupulous employers. One morning the sentries on Fort Lawrence were somewhat surprised to see one who was apparently an officer from the garrison of ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... "This fiendish plot of the yellow curs seems to be a pretty clever one," he murmured; "they've simply cut off all railway connections. I can't help admiring the fellows—they've learned a lot since 1904." He threw himself into his comfortable Morris chair, and after having carefully ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... give people pain. You take a fiendish delight in torturing others. But if you think you can influence me in the slightest degree, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... ascribe it to excitement of mind, exhaustion of physical strength (for during the last few days I had scarcely tasted anything), or the antipathy I felt to the society of my fiendish companion; but just as I was about to sign the fatal paper, I fell into a deep swoon, and remained for a long time as if dead. The first sounds which greeted my ear on recovering my consciousness were those of cursing and imprecation; I opened my eyes—it was dusk; my hateful companion was ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... great clamour—as out-of-tune as out-of-tune could be. All the things of darkness raised their harsh and cracked voices against the Bright One of the sky. 'Ha, ha!' and 'Ho, ho!' and 'He, he!' mingled with chuckles of fiendish glee, until it seemed as if the very trickles and gurgles of the bog were joining in ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... with her; Useless the joys of their past to rehearse; For to increase his woe, Frederick, his jealous foe, Shares in this cruel show,— Fit for God's curse; Shameless and treacherous, Heartless and lecherous, Sabine with fiendish glee, Deaf to his every plea, Watches his agony, Quoting ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... murderous intent on the part of a potential criminal. Indeed, with most cunning wisdom, a wild-animal murderer will often conceal his purpose until outside interference is an impossibility, and the victim is entirely helpless. These manifestations of fiendish cunning and premeditation are very exasperating to those responsible for the ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... made one's blood run cold, especially under such surroundings. All the camp was now in the utmost confusion, and there was a great panic among our carriers, who flung themselves on the ground yelling with fear. Never was there such a fiendish noise! I sprang to my feet, flinging my note-book away and picking up my rifle, and ran back to where Monckton was yelling out: "Fall in, fall in, for God's ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... obey it. The thing that pleases me as I look back upon it, is the thing I must do; that sets the standard for me; that is morals and religion. If there is any chap who the day after sings with joy over being a devil—that man I never heard of—but if he takes delight in what he did that was fiendish, then he must follow and should follow that bent until he SEES that it is fiendish. He has to have more light. But I really don't believe there is any such fellow, who clearly sees what he did and rejoices in it. All ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... air was bad for him. They should have known better than to take him there. Most likely one more week would finish him. Another long railroad trip would anyway. So he might as well stay. But wouldn't Marion see the landlord and have those fiendish children kept quiet on that tennis court outside? And wouldn't Mother try to make an eggnog that didn't taste like a ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... and a good talker. His conversation compelled attention, and, like the glittering eye of the ancient mariner, held, now Mr. Perrowne and now the lawyer from much pleasanter ones with their respective ladies. He seemed to take a fiendish pleasure in capturing Wilkinson from Miss Du Plessis, and the Captain from her mother, and even sent his conversational shafts far off to the Squire and the doctor, and to the presiding matrons. Mr. Errol and the colonel were happily sheltered from him. Perhaps the new detective perceived ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... that the unfortunate little creature was in a most critical condition, from the combined effects, as I supposed, of fiendish ill treatment, violent exertion, and insufficient nourishment; and we were kept busy all that night reviving her from swoon after swoon, and in the preparation and administration of strong broth, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... significance of the episcopal city of Jaro and detracted from the social importance of the rich Chinese half-caste residential town of Molo. [220] Chiefly from these towns came the advocates of anarchy, whose hearts swelled with fiendish delight at the prospect of witnessing the utter ruin and humiliation of their rivals in municipal prestige. Yloilo, from that moment, was abandoned to the armed rabble, who raided the small shops for petroleum ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... mouth to mouth, and received permission for two missionaries to come and settle down. From there, still accompanied by Cammerhof, Zeisberger went on to the Senecas. He was welcomed to a Pandemonium of revelry. The whole village was drunk. As he lay in his tent he could hear fiendish yells rend the air; he went out with a kettle, to get some water for Cammerhof, and the savages knocked the kettle out of his hand; and later, when the shades of evening fell, he had to defend himself with his fists against a bevy of ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... ourselves in a small, paved courtyard. It was a perfect summer's night, and the deep blue vault above was jeweled with myriads of starry points. How impossible it seemed to reconcile that vast, eternal calm with the hideous passions and fiendish agencies which that night had loosed ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... destruction planned of old in fiendish ire, In the halls of Varnavata to consume us in ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... armies and navies of the world, they were powerless before this fiendish invader. Hammered with high explosives, drenched with chemicals, sprayed with machine-gun ballets, the fiery termites surged on unchecked, in ever-widening ...
— Spawn of the Comet • Harold Thompson Rich
... roses. They were rough, and their lives were rougher. They were no gentler with Spaniards than Spaniards were with them when both were fighting. But, except by way of revenge, and then very seldom, they never practised such fiendish cruelty as the Spaniards practised the whole time. "Captain John Smith, sometime Governor of Virginia and Admiral of New England" (whom the Indian girl Pocahontas saved from death) did not write The Seaman's Grammar till after ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... he said. And it was evident from the healthy colour of his face and his comfortable way of stretching and yawning that his night's sleep had thoroughly refreshed him. "But the weather is fiendish," he added, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... hell. And Leclere, with fiendish ken, seemed to divine each particular nerve and heartstring, and with long wails and tremblings and sobbing minors to make it yield up its last shred of grief. It was frightful, and for twenty-four hours after, Batard was nervous ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... eyes," said Lester. "They're almost as fiendish now as they were when they looked up at us as he came swimming around the boat. I'll wager we'll see them more than ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... o'er the sod Where once in fierce array contending armies trod; The wintry wind makes mournful music through the trees Where then the clash of arms was floating on the breeze, And deep-toned guns belched forth the screaming shell Like fiendish messengers of Death let loose from hell; Now Nature's peaceful emblem spread o'er glade and hill Enwraps beneath its folds ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... if she were about to leap into them, and back of her so close that he might have touched her, was a figure that sent a chill of horror through him. It was Woonga, the outlaw chief! He was talking, his red face was fiendish, he stretched ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... "Yes, Cloudy, he was fiendish, and I couldn't do a thing, for fear of hitting Allison; and just then I heard a motor-cycle chugging by the car. I hadn't heard it before, there was so much going on; and a big, strong fellow with his hair all standing up in the wind jumped off, and ran toward them where they were rolling ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... then I started, as well I might, for I perceived that the top of the peak, which was about eighty feet high by one hundred and fifty feet thick at its base, was shaped like a negro's head and face, whereon was stamped a most fiendish and terrifying expression. There was no doubt about it; there were the thick lips, the fat cheeks, and the squat nose standing out with startling clearness against the flaming background. There, too, was the round skull, washed into shape perhaps by ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Dick?—I saw the same accursed figure standing full front, and gazing at me with its stony and fiendish countenance, not two ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... may the idle burden they impose. Of such burdens the barbarian carries the greatest possible sum; and while he paints the heavens with his grotesque mythologies, he encumbers earth with inventions and prescriptions almost as gratuitous. The fiendish dances and shouts, the cruel initiations, mutilations, and sacrifices in which savages indulge, are not planned by them deliberately nor justified in reflection. Men find themselves falling into these practices, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... never afterwards connect the idea of joy with the place where it had happened. Here, a heart-broken woman, kneeling to her child, had been spurned from his feet; here, a desolate old creature had prayed to the Evil One, and had received a fiendish malignity of soul, in answer to her prayer; here, a new-born infant, sweet blossom of life, had been found dead, with the impress of its mother's fingers round its throat; and here, under a shattered oak, two lovers had been stricken by lightning, and fell blackened corpses ...
— The Lily's Quest (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... much difficulty; and then all hands of us swarmed up her towering side and tumbled in on deck, with our drawn pistols in our hands, for there was never any knowing what ghastly trick a pirate might play, or what fiendish trap he might set—they were capable of anything and everything—therefore it behoved us to be wary; but nothing happened. There was not a soul on deck to interfere with us, or to demand our business; and the first thing we did was ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... decorations, in which he unfolded the scale of his sparkling colours, and affirmed his spirit, his fancy and his dreamy art. Cheret's harmonies remain secrets; he uses them for the representation of characters from the Italian comedy, thrown with fiendish verve upon a background of a sky, fiery with the Bengal lights of a fairy-like carnival, and he strangely intermingles the reality of the movements with the most arbitrary fancy. Cheret has also succeeded in proving his artistic descent by a beautiful series of drawings ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... saw the face of fiendish barbarity that once was over me, when I was a miserable little school-boy! He did it; and he has ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wretch yelled aloud, to the horror of the spectators.[2] A mask taken from that dreadful head was long exhibited in different nations of Europe, and appalled the spectator by its ugliness, and the mixture of fiendish expression with that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... rays fell upon the lid. There was no denying the ownership, it was marked in large bold letters, 'John Othard.' Now, I must know what it contained; I could wait no longer; a sort of determined malice took possession of me to connect it with the newspaper, and with my husband—fiendish thought. I did not desire to prove him other than the pure and noble man I had loved; but I was not myself—I would do it just to still my excited suspicions. Putting the lamp down over the name, as if that could blot it out, I went up the creaking steps, and hastened ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... a monument which "the popularity of the general had caused to be regarded with more affectionate veneration than any other structure in the province." On Good Friday, the 17th of April, 1840,[141] a miscreant of the name of Lett introduced a quantity of gunpowder into this monument with the fiendish purpose of destroying it; and the explosion, effected by a train, caused so much damage as to render the column altogether irreparable. Lett, who was by birth an Irishman and by settlement a Canadian, had been compelled to fly into the United States for his share in the ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... whole investigation was in keeping with the spirit evinced by the bench. The witnesses seemed to come for the special purpose of swearing point-blank against the hapless men in the dock, no matter at what cost to truth, and to take a fiendish pleasure in assisting in securing their condemnation. One of the witnesses was sure "the whole lot of them wanted to murder everyone who had any property;" another assured his interrogator in the dock that "he would go to see him hanged;" and a third had no hesitation in acknowledging the attractions ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... sound of the name I started violently. Then, open-mouthed and trembling with excitement, I twisted myself round to get a glimpse of the witness as he approached the box. Could it be possible that Fate with fiendish irony had selected the ex-trooper whom we had befriended to administer to our case the coup de grace? It must be a man of another name. ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... the team, and watch the match from the Pavilion, you escape these trials, but there are others. In the first few overs of a School match, every ball looks to the spectators like taking a wicket. The fiendish ingenuity of the slow bowler, and the lightning speed of the fast man at the other end, make one feel positively ill. When the first ten has gone up on the scoring-board matters begin to right themselves. Today ten went up ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... Third could not have chosen a worse period than that in which to treat with the brave and wary Cameron. The massacre of Glencoe was fresh in the remembrance of the people, and the stratagem, the fiendish snares which had been prepared to betray the unsuspecting Macdonalds to their destruction, were also recalled with the deep curses of a wronged and slaughtered people. The game of cards, the night before the massacre, between ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... time the mysterious stranger smiled—and it was a peculiarly sweet half-grave sort of attractive smile, as far removed from the fiendish grin of the stage bandit as night ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... and we worked away. Just as the last wagon-load but one was being transferred to the omnivorous depths of the Delaware,—which I should think would have been filled ten times over with what we had put into it,—down rode the General with a fiendish joy in his bright eyes and held out a paper,—one of the familiar ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... captain. Where were they now? Making for Ponape, no doubt, with all possible speed, so that they might escape in some passing whale-ship or vessel bound China-wards. But where could they go? What civilised country would afford protection to such fiendish and cruel murderers? Neither of them dare dream of ever putting foot on Australian soil again if a single one of the survivors of the Motutapu reached there before them. Then he thought of Hendry's wife and ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... particularly insolent and troublesome, and was chastised by the captain, after which the voyage was quietly pursued, and the crew were obedient and apparently contented. But beneath this apparent calm a terrible storm was brewing. A fiendish plan was devised by Williams and Stromer, and agreed to by the rest, to murder the officers and get possession of the money, which they knew was on board. They first determined to poison the captain, supercargo, and mates, but owing to some failure in their calculations, this ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... by our arms, watching the destruction of our property, and thankful only that the wives and children of our officers and men were safe under our care, and not exposed to the fury of the wretches engaged in their fiendish work. ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... Lichnowsky is recorded in the famous No. 123. With the rather childish subsequent attempt to minimize No. 123 on the ground that the Prince was merely an amiable nincompoop who did not really represent his fiendish sovereign, neither I nor any other serious person need be concerned. What is beyond all controversy is that after that conversation Prince Lichnowsky could do nothing but tell the Kaiser that the Entente, having ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... editor's own malignant passions, and still less, if that be possible, a determination to make money by flattering the envy and cupidity, the vindictive restlessness and self-conceit of the half-witted vulgar; a determination almost fiendish, but which, I have been informed, has been boastfully avowed by one man, the most notorious of these mob-sycophants! From the commencement of the Addington administration to the present day, whatever I have written in THE MORNING POST, or (after that paper was transferred ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... away Aunt Olivia and our new uncle were ready to go. There was an orgy of tears and leavetakings, and then they drove away into the odorous moonlight night. Dan and Peter pursued them down the lane with a fiendish din of bells and pans, much to Felicity's wrath. But Aunt Olivia and Uncle Robert took it in good part and waved their hands back to us with ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and forth, many of them staggered perceptibly. Conniston saw one of them pitch forward and lie helpless. A man passed by him, swaying and lurching, and in the pale light there was something fiendish in the fellow's leering face, his open mouth, his wide, staring eyes. Off yonder he heard two men quarreling, their voices raised in windy gusts of snapping oaths; saw one of them lift his hand and strike, not ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... fiendish weapon. It is well its owner can not use it. For myself I do not know of one case where a comrade has been wounded by enemy steel. His bayonet is longer than ours, and from the tip for a few inches is a saw edge. This facilitates ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... enigmatical, with something mournful, too, in the pose, like that statue of Giugliano (I think) de Medici shading his face on the tomb by Michael Angelo, though, of course, he was far, far from being beautiful. He began by trying to make me talk nonsense. But I had been warned of that fiendish trait, and contradicted him with great assurance. After a while he left off. So far good. But his immobility, the thick elbow on the table, the abrupt, unhappy voice, the shaded and averted face grew more and more impressive. He kept inscrutably silent for a moment, and then, placing me in a ship ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... abandoned. And when the storm calmed down, they found themselves deprived of the accumulations of centuries, forced, like Noah after the deluge, but without his means, to start again from the very beginning. Indeed, as Levinsohn remarks, the wonder is that, despite the fiendish persecution they endured, these unfortunates should have preserved a spark of love of knowledge. Yet a little later it was to burst into flame again and bring light and warmth to hearts crushed ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... my knight And plunge me down this gulf of widowhood! And I not twenty yet—a girl—an orphan— That cannot stand alone! Was I too happy? O God! what lawful bliss do I not buy And balance with the smart of some sharp penance? Hast thou no pity? None? Thou drivest me To fiendish doubts: Thou, ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... vague, She plucks his lying tongue that stole Her husband's love and honour old, And smites him stark and cold, tho' loath, It peers to me her demon-ague That binds her to this perjured soul, She drinks his gore from carvels cold And leers with fiendish lips at him, Now tossed in phosphorescent holes. And as I list to aspen cries, Veiled augueries in vapours hie And spell these tokens to each Inn: Kingdoms, empires, nations, souls, Shall miss the haunts of Paradise, And in Subjection, crumbling, lie. And when the regions, wrapped in light By pillared ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... "Oh fiendish!" his interlocutor said with a short smothered laugh that might have represented for a spectator a sudden start at such a flash of analysis ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... said. "He is not coming up this morning. He is in a great fret about that field of stubble, and I suppose he is down there sketching the life out of it. These artists—they take such a fiendish interest in their work. I dare say we won't see much of him until he has finished it. Where did you say you ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... voices rushed at us, seemingly on puffs of wind. Mocking, deep echoes bellowed from the ebon shades at the back of the cave, and the walls, taking them up, hurled them on again in fiendish concatenation. ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... other missiles commenced to fly. They could not see through the windows of the room so an accurately thrown brick shivered the pane of glass. Through the open space I caught glimpses of the most ferocious and fiendish faces it has ever been my lot to witness. Men and women vied with one another in the bawling and ground their teeth when they ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... eye, like that of some fallen angel, still braving the chastener, whom he can not contend with. A strange strength—for even sin has its strength for a season—came to her relief in that moment of fiendish mockery. The strength of an evil spirit was accorded her. Her heart once more swelled with pride. Her soul once more insisted on its ascendency. She felt, though she did ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... Spaniards had sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had depopulated some of the best peopled of the islands and renewed them with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty, driving them to self-starvation and suicide, as a way of mercy and release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... these words with a fiendish kind of elation, Montignac leaped from the bed after me, releasing his dagger by pulling the curtain from its fastening, while at the same time his sword-point, directed at my neck, ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... dogging me all over the place, trying to discover by my face where the treasure might be hidden, they hit upon a new plan, by which, if the worst came to the worst, they could produce my body quite free from marks of violence, and so satisfy Antony. It was a fiendish thing, Hal. As soon as ever I went to sleep, day or night, they woke me up, and asked me if I knew where the treasure was. I stood it for two days and nights, but if it had gone on, I swear to you I must have given in; I was pretty near mad then. But curiously enough, Sher ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... streets to the churchyard. There, on one of the broadest tombstones she saw sitting a circle of lamias. These hideous wretches took off their ragged garments, as if they were going to bathe; then with their skinny fingers they clawed open the fresh graves, and with fiendish greed they snatched up the corpses and ate the flesh. Eliza was obliged to pass close by them and they fastened their evil glances upon her; but she prayed silently, and collected the burning nettles, and carried them ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... me, Floating-light, and you, ye sun, Moon, stars, and elements of Nature, every one; I did but vent my misery and spleen In utt'ring words of fury that I hardly mean. At least I do in part—but hold! why not? Oh! cease ye fiendish thoughts that rage and plot To bring about my ruin. Hence! avaunt! Or else in pity tell me what you want. I cannot live, and yet I would not die! My hopes are blighted! Where, oh whither shall I fly? 'Tis past! I'll cease to daily with ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... in Italy read the Gospels by the light of those fiendish fires which consumed their fellows. Daily made familiar with the scorching, the searing, the racking, the devilish ingenuities of torture, they transferred them to the future hell of the torturers. The sentiment within us which asserts eternal justice and retribution was stimulated to a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... accident. Over seven hundred Indians were present at our opening services. Could it be that this concourse of well-dressed people, in their new and beautiful church, but a few years ago made up the fiendish assemblies at Fort Simpson! Could it be that those voices, now engaged in solemn prayer and thrilling songs of praise to Almighty God, are the very voices I once heard yelling and whooping at heathen orgies on dismal ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... tenacity. Horribly he would have abominated the sight of the rope, and ruefully he would have sighed if I had suggested to him on the gallows any thoughts of that beautiful and quiet Elleray which he had left behind in England. Just at that moment I acknowledge that it would have been fiendish, but yet what a heaven of a luxury it would have been in the way of revenge—to have stung him with some neat epigram, that I might have composed in our walk to the gallows, or while the ropes were getting into tune, on the generosity and magnanimity of Bonaparte! Perhaps, in a sober estimate, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... hear. As if by magic the floor under his feet gave way. Down, down, down, a thousand feet he was precipitated. He tried to grasp the well-like walls of masonry, but in vain. Nothing could stay him. As he plunged into the deep water of the oubliette a fiendish laugh echoed in his ears. The Pale Avengers had destroyed one ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... which streamed her black, disordered hair. Contrasting strangely in the silver moonlight with her glistening, copper-coloured body, the mask of Little Bonsa on her head glared round with its fixed crystal eyes and fiendish smile as she turned her long neck from side to side. Seen thus she scarcely looked human, and Alan's heart was filled with pity for the poor bedizened wretch she named her husband, who had just been forced to announce the date of his ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... were going the unfortunate victim had no idea. Perhaps to some lonely spot where Ignacio could torture him to his fiendish heart's content! But there was no use in ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... slave had been murdered and placed at the bottom of the hole that was to receive it; tales of scores of slaves who had been slaughtered upon its completion; tales of animal-like orgies those walls had seen—cannibal feasts, torture of witches, fiendish carousals about the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... time he did not bring his violin again. The doctor had prevailed upon Andrews to tolerate the Eurasian's company, and I could not help noticing how Tcheriapin skilfully and deliberately goaded the Scotsman, seeming to take a fiendish delight in disagreeing with his pet theories and in discussing any topic which he had found to ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... had received a severe check. Tudor Brown had been ahead of him, he had succeeded in reaching the island first, and doubtless had carried off Patrick O'Donoghan. It was therefore hardly probable that they would succeed in finding him again. A man capable of displaying such ability in his fiendish attack upon the "Alaska," and who could adopt such energetic measures to carry off the Irishman from such a place, would assuredly exert himself to the utmost to prevent them from ever coming in contact with him. The world is large, and its waters ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... up all night in lone places on the hills, with Bibles and tremulous psalms, they will be apt to hear some of the most fiendish noises in the world: the wind will beat on doors and dance upon roofs for them, and make the hills howl around their cottage with a clamour like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stream which came down, broad and shallow in some places, narrow and tumbling in others. Here sometimes they waded in the water to escape the tangled thickets of alder interspersed with the prickly "devil's club," peculiar to all Alaska—a fiendish sort of plant covered with small spines, which grows in all fantastic shapes, but which manages to slap one somewhere, no matter where one steps upon it, and whose little prickly points detach themselves and remain in the flesh. Our young explorers, however, ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... Jones did a fiendish thing when he tied that lion to the swinging branch. It was almost worse than having him entirely free. He had a circle almost twenty feet in diameter in which he could run and leap at will. It seemed he was in the air all the time. First at Emett, than at me he sprang, mouth agape, eyes wild, ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... descriptions of Indian life, with its alternations of human affection and fiendish cruelty, of daring and cowardice, of gorging and starving, make one of the most interesting features of Radisson's book. He lived the life himself and left such a picture of it as few white men could have drawn. Accordingly, ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... magnificent palace, near the Tiber, a chapel dedicated to St. Thomas, he remarked to the architect, when instructing him to design a family vault, "That is where I hope to bury them all." The architect often subsequently admitted that he was so terrified by the fiendish laugh which accompanied these words, that had not Francesco Cenci's work been extremely profitable, he would have refused ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... who carried the milk, is a venerable man with a long white beard. He is greatly stooped from constant digging and he suffers from rheumatism in his knees. It was his appearance, no doubt, which suggested to Kitty the absolutely fiendish idea of an obstacle race for veterans. The veterans, of course, were Miss Lane, the gardener, the cook, who was a very fat woman, and myself. Miss Lane agreed to the proposal at once with apparent pleasure, and the whole fifty-six ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... was one of sorrow and of fear. The child's death had stricken us with terror no less than grief. Referring it, as we both tacitly did, to the mysterious and fiendish agency of the abhorred being whom, in an evil hour, we had admitted into our house, we both viewed him with a degree and species of fear for which ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... before Rutherford realized what he was trying to do, the shade flew upward to the top of the window. Even then, Rutherford would have thought little of it, had not Haight betrayed himself by a leer of fiendish triumph. In an instant Rutherford understood that it had ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... seemed offended. He tapped on his teeth, and remarked that the weather bad no business to be so warm in winter. "But it was fiendish before Christmas," said Agnes. ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... who it is hoped had been rendered insensible at sight of the cruelties perpetrated upon her mother, was taken by the feet and her brains dashed out on the wheels of a wagon. To this last act in the fiendish drama there was probably no witness other than the actors in it; but the child's body, mangled too terribly for description, and the bloody marks on the wagon, gave evidence so convincing that there could not be a moment's ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... Philip's treasury. The mutinous army marched through the land, pillaging city after city, and paying themselves with the spoils. The beautiful city of Antwerp was ruined. The horrible massacre of its inhabitants, and the fiendish atrocities committed by the frenzied soldiers, caused the awful outbreak to ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers |
