"Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... provision for dealing with the wounded was shockingly inadequate. When I came back from Chatalja to Kirk Kilisse, King Ferdinand sent his private secretary for me as an independent witness of the state of things at the front. I took the occasion to acquaint His Majesty frankly with the ghastly consequences that had followed from the absence of all precautions to ensure a wholesome water supply, from the neglect of latrine regulations in the camps and other failures in the medical and sanitary service. I had no reason to ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... in ghastly terror. No sound except a low gurgle came to his ears, and the horror of the stillness overmastered him. He never could recall what came next. When he knew himself again, he was in the street, running like the wind, he knew not whither. It ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... see no more than a jeu d'esprit, a graceful and trifling exercise of the imagination, in the grimy ballad of Fat Peg (Grosse Margot). I am not able to follow these gentlemen to this polite extreme. Out of all Villon's works that ballad stands forth in flaring reality, gross and ghastly, as a thing written in a contraction of disgust. M. Longnon shows us more and more clearly at every page that we are to read our poet literally, that his names are the names of real persons, and the events he chronicles were actual events. But even if the tendency of criticism ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shadows—that divided for Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a brain- eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvelously dear experience. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I was in this life to woo a second time the woman I had killed by my own neglect ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... as if M. La Tour took a certain ghastly satisfaction in telling us of the unseemly behavior of these English kings and princes who had appropriated, justly or unjustly, so much of his country's territory. The only human incident in the last hours of the great King was the devotion of his son Geoffrey, who sat through the ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... looking towards him through the door; the tears standing thick in her eyes, the color gone from her cheeks, the yearning pulses of grief and pity beating faster and faster in her heart. Ah! how pale and wan and piteously still he lay there, with the ghastly white bandages round his head, and one helpless, languid hand hanging over the bedside! How changed from that glorious creature, all youth, health, strength, and exulting activity, whom it had so long ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... without end. The reader has but to throw his memory back upon the anguish of Jupiter, in the 'Iliad,' for the approaching death of his son Sarpedon, and his vain struggles to deliver himself from this ghastly net; or upon Thetis, fighting against the vision of her matchless Pelides caught in the same vortex; or upon the Muse in Euripides, hovering in the air and wailing over her young Rhesus, her brave, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... and all the following night armed bands wandered about the streets of Laon searching everywhere for relatives, friends, or servitors of the bishop, for all whom the angry populace knew or supposed to be such, and wreaking on their persons or their houses a ghastly or a brutal vengeance. In a fit of terror many poor innocents fled before the blind wrath of the populace; some were caught and cut down pell-mell amongst the guilty; others escaped through the vineyards ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... opened my eyes. Something very atrocious surged back into the depths, carrying with it a thought of tangled woods, of big stones standing in a circle, motionless, white figures, the one form bound with ropes, and the ghastly gleam of the knife. Like smoke upon a battlefield, it ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... carcase hung down from the little man's shoulders. The huge head, with grim, wide eyes and lolling tongue, jolted and swagged with the motion, seeming to grin a ghastly defiance at the world it had left. And the last Bessie saw of them was that bloody, rolling head, with the puny legs staggering beneath their load, as the two passed out ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... as the trees around them, looking at Billie and Laura and Vi through those ghastly white masks until the girls ...
— Billie Bradley at Three Towers Hall - or, Leading a Needed Rebellion • Janet D. Wheeler
... be buried beside his father in Spain. His body, says Strada, was dismembered and secretly carried across France, onwards to Madrid, where it was, as it were, reconstructed and decked with armor to be shown to Philip, who might well weep at such ghastly display. The heart of the hero is kept, to this day, behind the high altar ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... the sound of wheels. I found that my friend the hangman had procured a cart, in which he brought the coffin, that being a much quicker mode of conveyance than by bearers so that about a quarter past nine o'clock the vehicle, with its ghastly content, stopped at ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... while she took me to Christina's room. The poor girl was under the influence of morphine and sleeping a troubled sleep. Her face was very pale from loss of blood; and her head and neck were all bound up in white bandages, here and there stained with the ghastly fluid that flowed from her wounds. It was a pitiable sight: her short, crisp yellow curls broke here and there, rebelliously, through the folds of the linen bandages; and I thought how she used to shake them, responsive to the quiverings of the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... trembling and moaning like a bruised and stricken thing. Lightning, playing across the inky heavens, blazed in constant sheets from end to end of the horizon. Its quivering glare turned the wild night into a kind of ghastly, uncertain day. Thunder, hoarse with invective, and hurled mercilessly back and forth by the fitful wind, drew farther and farther into the recess of the mountains, only to launch its anger against its own imprisoned echoes. Under ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... were totally unable to follow them and describe what was happening with anything like coherence. It was simply an inferno of death and destruction, which no human words could have properly described, and perhaps the most ghastly feature of it was the fact that there was no human agency visible in it at all. There was no Homeric struggle of man with man, although many a gallant deed was done that night which never was seen nor heard of, and many a hero went to his ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... be abandoned. An impression of the hands alone was obtainable. Decomposition had set in so rapidly that the face was distorted beyond recognition. A lead coffin was hastily brought to cover up the ghastly spectacle of nature ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... That was a ghastly Christmas. Through the whole afternoon I tramped—from Hackney to Homerton, thence to Clapton, to Stoke Newington, to Tottenham, and back. Emptiness was everywhere: no people, little traffic. Roofs and roads were hard with a light frost, and in the sudden twilight ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... chosen from among his sons or nephews, by four nobles. The one preferred was obliged to have distinguished himself in war, and his coronation did not take place until a successful campaign had provided enough captives to grace his triumphal entry into the capital, and enough victims for the ghastly sacrifices which formed an important part of all their religious ceremonies. Communication was held with the remotest parts of the country by means of couriers, who, trained to it from childhood, travelled with amazing swiftness. Post-houses were established on the great roads, and the messenger ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... calling out, with a sort of hilarious hostility. "That's quite wrong. That's the most ghastly heresy of all. It's the soul, my dear chap, the soul that's the arbiter of cosmic forces. When you see a cosmic force you don't like, trick it, my boy. But ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... to conceal her game. She was conscious of being a complete master of the situation, having once for all established her ascendancy over de Barral. She had taken all her measures against outside observation of her conduct; and I could not help smiling at the thought what a ghastly nuisance the serious, innocent Fynes must have been to her. How exasperated she must have been by that couple falling into Brighton as completely unforeseen as a bolt from the blue—if not so prompt. How she must ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... laying the bone bare. After inflicting this terrible punishment and eyeing its fallen foe for a few seconds it trotted quietly away. The wounded man succeeded in getting on to his horse and reaching his home. The hanging flesh was restored to its place and the ghastly rents sewn up, and in the end he recovered: but he was disfigured for life; his temper also completely changed; he became morose and morbidly sensitive to the ridicule of his neighbours, and he never again ventured to join them in their hunting expeditions. I inquired of ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... o'clock the victorious Duke of Lorraine rode into the rescued city and re-entered his palace. At the gates was heaped up a ghastly memorial of the steadfastness of the burghers in their devotion to his cause. This was a pile of the bones of the foul animals they had consumed when other food was exhausted, rather than capitulate to their liege's foe. To ascertain ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... of lambent light cut wide swaths through the pall. They were too high; they missed the D'Estang altogether and rested on the Barclay's smoke, which rose and tumbled and billowed and writhed like a heavy shroud in the ghastly shafts. ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... didn't know as 'twas altogether such a bad thing as they was hung for sheep-stealing.' There were parsons then, as now, in every rural parish preaching and teaching something they called the Gospel. Why did they not rise as one man and denounce this ghastly iniquity, and demand its abolition? They did nothing of the sort; they enjoyed their pipes ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... happy Christmas time in Norway, a little more than a year ago. They are carried across the sea to Portsmouth, the burial service is read over them, and they are hidden in the earth. After poor Ivan has seen the faces of his wife and sister still and pale in their coffins, their ghastly wounds concealed as much as possible, flowers upon them and the priest praying over them, his trance of misery is broken, the grasp of despair is loosened a little about his heart. Yet hardly does he notice whether the sun shines or no, or care whether he lives or dies. Slowly his ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... allowed to live alone, and perfectly free,—wealth and its gratifications would never have made him happy. He had mistaken himself in a passing fit of despair and cupidity, aided by the torturing agonies of being deeply in debt all round, and the ghastly fear of ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... and—and—(this seemed oddest of all) a row of electric buttons, which Mr. Gryce no sooner touched than the light which had been burning redly in the cage of fretted ironwork overhead changed in a twinkling to a greenish glare, filling the room with such ghastly tints that Mr. Gryce sought in haste another button, and, pressing it, was glad to see a mild white radiance take the place of the sickly hue which had added its own horror to the already solemn terrors ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... his captive into the shed the blood which had surged in Red Godwyn's veins was up and leaping. Anstruthers, his collar held by a hand with fingers of iron, writhed about and turned a livid, ghastly face upon ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... third generation. There is a school of so-called moralists who regard all this as the legitimate and providential punishment for vice, even though ten innocent be destroyed for one guilty. Such moralists, more loathsome than syphilis itself, may be left in the gathering gloom to the company of their ghastly creed. Love and man and woman are going forward to the dawn, and if they inherit from the past no God that is fit to be their companion, they and the Divine within ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... to Kenneth and the parson. The Puritan's struggles were already becoming mere spasmodic twitchings; his face was as ghastly as the trooper's had ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... was with her now—ill and exhausted from the combined effects of excitement, horror, and the unaccustomed ride across the desert—most anxious for his daughter—worried, to the verge of desperation, by the ghastly ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... the desk was a telephone. Taylor Dodge was lying on the floor at that end of the desk—perfectly rigid—his face distorted—a ghastly figure. A pet dog ran over, sniffed frantically at his master's legs and suddenly began ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... strange and often tragic reading. One of them is already famous: the disclosure of the narrow margin by which the attack of the Allied fleets upon the Dardanelles came short of victory. For that, with all its ghastly sequence of misadventure, no happy end can quite compensate. But one may read more pleasantly now of the Prussian Baron WANGENHEIM, sitting the day long on a bench before his official residence to exult publicly in what looked like the triumphal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... disposed to say that disagreeable was hardly the right word. No doubt, all things that are perilous, horrible, awful, ghastly, deadly, and the like, are disagreeable too. But when we use the word disagreeable by itself, our meaning is understood to be, that in calling the thing disagreeable we have said the worst of it. A long and tiresome sermon is disagreeable; but a venomous snake under your pillow passes beyond ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... "the whole show was hideous from beginning to end, a ghastly, terrible drama, played out amongst all the accompaniments which make hell out of earth. And yet the thing gripped. The tragedy of Ypres came and I escaped from ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Inverawe! blood has been shed. Shield not the murderer!' At the break of day he hastened, in strange agitation, to the cave; but it was empty, the stranger was gone. At night, as he strove in vain to sleep, the vision appeared once more, ghastly pale, but less stern of aspect than before. 'Farewell, Inverawe!' it said; 'farewell, till we meet ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... stretched out on the side of the road. He fetched assistance: the body was that of David Thomas. He had been shot about a hundred yards behind, but he had not been killed outright. He had run in terror up the road, spouting blood as he went, and leaving a ghastly trail behind him. ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... to us and nothing more. Whangaroa Heads, that guard the harbour of that name, with its settlements and saw-mills, is but little better, though some few, who have been industriously reading up, remember Whangaroa as the scene of the ghastly massacre of the crew of the Boyd, half a century ago. Capes Wiwiki and Brett we have no previous acquaintance with, though we have heard of the Bay of Islands, over whose wide entrance they are the twin sentinels. And then in slow succession we sight the Poor Knights ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... philosopher: Asper and Macilente, Felice and Malevole, the grim studies after Hamlet unconsciously or consciously taken by Jonson and Marston, may pass as wellnigh passable imitations, with an inevitable streak of caricature in them, of the first Hamlet; they would have been at once puerile and ghastly travesties of the second. The Queen, whose finished figure is now something of a riddle, stands out simply enough in the first sketch as confidant of Horatio if not as accomplice of Hamlet. There is not ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... but the sickly, ghastly pallor of his face frightened her. She swayed and leaned against the railing of the platform, a sinking, deadly apprehension gnawing at her, for it seemed from the expression of J. C.'s face that he had some knowledge of Corrigan's intentions. But J. C. had been through too many ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... soldier who showed a sign of discouragement or concern. Already they bore themselves with the mien of veterans, ready to joke and laugh, and swarming to the Red Triangle huts for a breath of entertainment, a glimpse of a rosy cheeked "home girl" in the midst of all this ghastly business ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... dawned gray with snow which still whirled in wreaths about the sorrowing homes of Barton; but Robert Hardy thought of the merciful covering it would make for the ghastly piles of ruin down under the bridge and along the banks of the river. He said to himself, "This is my fourth day; how can I best spend it? What shall I do?" He kneeled and ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... that she motions up a dignified old wreck dolled out in a white flannel suit and a red tie. If it hadn't been for that touch of red too, he sure would have looked ghastly; for there was about as much color in his face as there was in his white buckskin shoes. But he steps up spry and active and shoves out ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... carried this to where he lay. They got him onto it and bore it gently into the camping shack, out of the glaring sunlight. There, in Blythe's Bunk, the only home he knew, they laid him gently down and at Doc's request those who were not needed went out. The victim lay quite unconscious, his face ghastly pale and with a look of being polished caused perhaps by the water which ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... granting of their demands would have been completely subversive of the existing social order. The upper classes were united against them, Luther and his associates denounced them. The fiercest passions broke loose: there were ghastly massacres and ghastly reprisals, ending in the slaughter of scores of thousands of peasants, and the complete suppression of ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... had told their tale. Although but the same age as Malcolm Anderson, Colonel Leslie looked fully ten years older. His long confinement had taken every tinge of colour out of his face, and left it almost ghastly in its whiteness. He could with difficulty lift his hands to his head, and he walked as stiffly as if his legs had been jointless. His voice only had not lost the cheery ring his ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... so long away from the world that, for all I know, this ancient British type, this "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore," may have become extinct, like another, but less unprepossessing bird—the dodo; whereby our state is ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... incomplete agriculture, dearth of food was frequent, and even severe famine, in all its horrors of starvation and death, not uncommon. When George the First came to the throne the century was not old enough for the living generation of Scotchmen to forget the ghastly seven years that had brought the seventeenth century to its close—seven empty ears blasted with east-wind. So many died of hunger that, in the grim words of one who lived through that time, "the living were ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... we had better look to the future; the past has no charms for us," says Miss Priscilla, with a ghastly attempt at cheerfulness. "Let me see," referring through a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles to the letter in her hand: "That the dear children have landed we know, and—h'm—yes, this very—yes, plainly, very ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... of them, seemed to blend themselves in the chorus, to deepen immeasurably under this new intention. It is not always, or often, that men's abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits, affect conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe, infinite dust, in truth, starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes—that prospect from which Pascal's faithful soul recoiled so painfully—induced in Bruno only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship [241] and sympathy, since ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... the long winter evenings, the trio, tired with play, would lower the gas, and gathering round the large, blazing fire, tell ghost stories with such thrilling earnestness that often the ghastly phantoms seemed to merge almost into reality, and they found themselves starting at a falling cinder or the sound of a footstep in the passage outside. On those occasions the window-blind was usually ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... to the credit of Charles that after the fury of attack was over he insisted upon the wounded enemy and the prisoners being treated with all humanity. An incident is told of him which brings into relief the better qualities of his race. One of his officers, pointing to the ghastly field, all strewn with dead bodies, with severed limbs and mutilated trunks, said to the prince, "Sir, behold your enemies at your feet." The prince sighed. "They are my father's subjects," he said, sadly, as he ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... scorched out its vital force and riven the fibre of the wood. Here and there, too, the tooth of decay had gnawed fissures that the bark had not earlier known; and from one of these—she thought herself in a dream—a ghastly, white face looked out suddenly, and as ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... cheerful sensations there revived in some of them the sense of the ludicrous, and it was all that they could do to refrain from laughter as they looked at the forlorn females huddled together, wrapped in rugs and cloaks, drenched to the skin, almost blown from their seats, ghastly with watching and fear, solemn-visaged in the last degree, and yet singing "Pop goes the weasel," and similar ditties, with all the ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... shall bleed: The day will come, in which proud Troy shall yield, And spread its smoking ruins o'er the field. Yet Hecuba's, nor Priam's hoary age, Whose blood shall quench some Grecian's thirsty rage, Nor my brave brothers, that have bit the ground, Their souls dismiss'd through many a ghastly wound, Can in my bosom half that grief create, As the sad thought of your impending fate: When some proud Grecian dame shall tasks impose, Mimick your tears, and ridicule your woes; Beneath Hyperia's waters shall you sweat, And, fainting, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... ghastly a thing to watch inactive. Already every man's knife was in his hand, and three men were crouching for a spring, when the chief swept them ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... are poor and weak as compared with the sinking of the heart and the trembling of the knees which seize upon the unhappy lecturer as he advances towards his first audience, and as before his eyes rises a ghastly vision of a tongue-tied would-be lecturer, facing rows of listening faces, listening to—silence. But to my surprise all this miserable feeling vanished the moment I was on my feet and was looking at the faces before me. I felt no tremor of nervousness ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... a tug of war that was all the more ghastly for its soundlessness. The hunted jerked spasmodically to get away from the hunter. So wild were its efforts that several times it raised the monster clear of the bottom for a foot or so. But the grim ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... of persons, barely clothed with a few tattered rags, haggard with hunger, wasted with fever, and calling upon death to end their sufferings. It was a grievous, a horrible sight,—one that well-nigh broke the heart of our saint. The moanings of the dying were in her ears; the expression of their ghastly faces haunted her day and night. She would have gladly shed her blood for them, and fed them with her life. A sudden inspiration came over her one day: "Come to the corn-loft," she exclaimed, turning to Vannozza, and to Clara, a favourite and pious servant of theirs; "Come with me to the ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... admirals, with our pockets lined with gold. Perhaps he and some of his pals intend to rob us, later in the evening," proposed Dan, with a ghastly grin. ...
— Dave Darrin's Second Year at Annapolis - Or, Two Midshipmen as Naval Academy "Youngsters" • H. Irving Hancock
... really say that? God be thanked for that good news!" exclaimed the poor fellow with more energy than I could have expected from a man presenting such a ghastly appearance as he did. For his cheeks were sunken, and white as chalk, and his lips were quite blue. "The fact is, Grenvile," he continued, "that I don't want to die yet, if I can help it; not that I am not prepared to die, ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... time, and that not remote, when these fair meadows were a waste of death and desolation, scathed with fire, and strewn with the ghastly relics of an Iroquois victory. Now, all was changed. La Salle looked down from his rock on a concourse of wild human life. Lodges of bark and rushes, or cabins of logs, were clustered on the open plain, or along the edges of the bordering forests. Squaws labored, warriors lounged ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the promenade deck. He passed Senor Ortiz, ex-Minister of the Interior of the Argentine Republic. Ortiz bowed to him punctiliously, but Bell had a sudden impression that the Argentine's face was gray and ghastly. He checked himself and looked back. The little man was climbing the companion-ladder toward the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... new man that saw him. Another man lay, still clasping his musket, which he was evidently in the act of loading when a bullet pierced his heart, literally flooding his gun with his life's blood, a ghastly testimonial to his ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... iron before the appalled spectators; the more than mortal voices of Deities, Titans, and departed heroes were heard in awful conference; heaven bowed, and its divinities descended; earth yawned, and gave up the pale spectres of the dead and yet more undefined and ghastly forms of those infernal deities who struck horror into the gods themselves." His imagination dwells in the loftiest regions of the old mythology of Greece; his tone is always pure and moral, though stern and harsh; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Slave Trade tried to enlist this winning voice in the service of their cause. Cowper disliked the task, but he wrote two or three anti-Slave-Trade ballads. The Slave Trader in the Dumps, with its ghastly array of horrors dancing a jig to a ballad metre, justifies the shrinking of an artist from a subject hardly ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... uncurtained room Grew still and ghastly like a tomb, On the icy neck he fell And begged the death-sealed ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... nothing. He had nothing to say—he had nothing to do. His face in the few moments of this conversation had grown, ghastly white, his eyes were fixed on vacancy, and an expression of intense pain spread over his features. He walked along by Obed Chute's side with the uncertain step of one who ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... what made him leap at length with such an insane cry, over the ghastly obstacle? He will go mad. This not quite balanced brain might coldly enough commit even some kinds of murder, but fright can unhinge it. Is he not mad, to flee so wildly? He runs—he runs—he gropes, under his black thundercloud and load of fright and agony, ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... dreadful colour, the more ghastly under the dark dust-streaks upon her face. She seated herself on the side of ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... people drawn from widely separated parts of Saladin's dominions. Here were Nubians from the Nile, tall and powerful men, jet black in skin, with lines of red and white paint on their faces, giving a ghastly and wild appearance to them. On their shoulders were skins of lions and other wild animals. They carried short bows, and heavy clubs studded with iron. By them were the Bedouin cavalry, light, sinewy men, brown as berries, with white ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... near, whate'er they seize Becomes their prey; nor flocks nor herds are safe, Nor stalls protect the steer, nor strong barr'd doors Secure the favourite horse. Soon as the morn Reveals his wrongs, with ghastly visage wan The plunder'd owner stands, and from his lips A thousand thronging curses burst their way. He calls his stout allies, and in a line His faithful hound he leads; then, with a voice That utters loud his rage, attentive cheers. Soon the sagacious ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... far down until there was no bright spot except a narrowing oval near the southeastern horizon; and not a breath of wind. The storm was like a leaning wall, that bent far over us while its foot dragged along the ground, miles and miles behind its top. Everything had a tinge of strange, ghastly greenish blue like the face of a corpse, and it was growing suddenly dark as if the day had all at once shut down ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... backward, against the sun, as dreams will, and the moon rays weave a vision of dim day. Straightway tier upon tier, eighty thousand faces rise, up to the last high rank beneath the awning's shade. High in the front, under the silken canopy sits the Emperor of the world, sodden-faced, ghastly, swine-eyed, robed in purple; all alone, save for his dwarf, bull-nosed, slit-mouthed, hunch-backed, sly. Next, on the lowest bench, the Vestals, old and young, the elder looking on with hard faces and dry eyes, the youngest with wide and startled ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... these things with a certain degree of feeling, because not less than a week later this poor fellow was discovered by one of our company swinging from the crosstree of the tent, a ghastly corpse. There was something inexplicable in the deed. No one could account for it. He seemed not to be a man of deep feeling. And one of the last things he uttered in my hearing was a coarse jest which I did not like and to which I ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... the events in Bulgaria shed a ghastly light on the whole situation, and showed the consequences of giving the "moral support" of Britain to the Turks. The whole question ceased to rest on the high and dry levels of diplomacy, and became one of life or death for many thousands of men and women. The conscience of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... and the meal was in due course served and eaten. Afterwards Codd went on guard, being relieved by Hayle at midnight. Ever since they had made the ghastly discovery in the jungle, the latter had been more silent even than the gravity of the situation demanded. Now he sat, nursing his rifle, listening to the mysterious voices of the jungle, and thinking as if for dear life. Meanwhile his companions ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... knowledge had often been called into requisition for the benefit of many of the people as well as the animals of the neighborhood. Never had his skill been needed more than now, for poor Tiepoletta had not recovered consciousness, and her rigidity and the ghastly pallor which had overspread her features seemed to indicate that she had already been struck ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... rise, then hurl away thy yoke, Then dye with crimson that pale livery, Whose ghastly white has been the jailer's cloak For years flung o'er thy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... the unfaithful lover espouses Creusa. In the next Creusa is seen burning in the poisoned shirt, given her by Medea. In another Medea is seen in a car drawn by dragons, bearing her two children by Jason, whom she has stabbed in revenge for his desertion. Nothing can exceed the ghastly reality of death, as shown in the stiffened limbs and sharpened features of those dead children. The whole drawing and grouping is exceedingly spirited and lifelike, and has great power ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... aborigines and stimulated them to terrible and isolated reprisals. The scalped and skinned dead body of Jack Trainer, tied on his horse and held hideously upright by a cross of wood behind his saddle, had passed, one night, a slow and ghastly apparition, into camp; the corpse of Dick Ryner had been found anchored on the river-bed, disembowelled and filled with stone and gravel. The solitary and unprotected member of Redwood Camp who fell into ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... a Syrian desert landscape, pale and ghastly, under the light of a great white moon, with one lonely Figure standing like a sentinel against a towering fang of rock. Lurking forms of fierce beasts of prey were dimly to be distinguished amongst the shadows, and by the side of the patient, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... resignedly, "is going to be a ghastly trip. By Jove, here comes another! Now where have I ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... gray-bearded, helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde women in their arms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning over parapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves into the sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men and young girls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush, that were Wagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and hordes of gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships and ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... the sight of the child with its sunken cheeks and ghastly blue lips .... And she herself went out with the woman to buy the milk, and afterwards to the dive in Kendall Street which she called home—in one of those "rear" tenements separated from the front buildings by a narrow court reeking with refuse. The place ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... how many professed pilgrims hast thou befooled and turned back! How often does she attack and affright many real pilgrims! I am sure she has often made my poor heart ache with her ghastly looks and terrifying speeches. O may we ever say to her, in our Lord's words, 'Get thee behind me, Satan; thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... refused to believe. Her boys, Brock and Hugh! It was not credible, it was not reasonable, it was out of drawing that her good boys, her precious boys trained to be happy and help the world, to live useful, peaceful lives, should be snatched from home, here in America, and pitched into the ghastly struggle of Europe. Push back the ocean as she might, the ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... look? Tell me that? How? Has I got spots on my hands? Is it branded over my eyes? Everythin's kind o' ghastly to me this day. [Laughing a ghastly laugh.] Lord! I can't see the face o' you! Now I see one hand! Now I see two eyes! Just dots now! Martha, maybe I'm ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... he 'lost his head,' while we were bidding each other good-bye before his journey. He didn't mention the name of the Duchess, but said only that he had leave, and was going to Holland on business. But while he was away a dreadful thing happened—the most ghastly misfortune—and as we were engaged to be married, he felt obliged when he came back to ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... eyes from the white, impassioned face of Franois and looked upon the quivering, ghastly visage of the brother who stood beside him. The fire that glowed in the eyes of Franois was ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... box in a remote corner of the room, near other boxes awaiting transportation, the driver and his man returned to their wagon, while the two strangers approached the desk to enter their ghastly freight. They wore slouched hats and were very wet. They produced a death certificate of one John Slate, who had died at a farm house several miles away, of a non-contagious complaint, and was to be shipped to ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... with corpses. The foremost burier carried a lantern, but he held it so low that its light did not fall upon his burden. Leonard, however, did not require to see the body to know whose it was. The moon was at its full, and shed a ghastly light over the group, and a large bat wheeled in ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... months. This unfortunate woman had attempted suicide by self-decapitation from behind forward. She was found, knife in hand, with a huge wound in the back of the neck and her head bobbing about in a ghastly manner. The incision had severed the skin, subcutaneous tissues and muscles, the ligaments and bone, opening the spinal canal, but not cutting the cord. The instrument used to effect this major injury was a blunt potato-peeling knife. Despite this terrible wound the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... to look at the contents of the room, he saw Melrose in his skullcap, poking about among a medley of black objects on the floor and in a open cupboard, his withered cheeks ghastly in ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sets in awful light A blackened pine tree's ghastly cross, Then swiftly pays in silver white The faded ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... was leaning against one of the bookcases, with his hands clasped over his breast. His head was drawn back; his white lips moved, but no sound came from them. Over his upturned face there had passed a ghastly change, as indescribable in its awfulness as ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... and despairing victims until the whole army was almost totally destroyed. They cut off Hasdrubal's head, and Nero sat out the very night after the battle to return with it in triumph to his own encampment. When he arrived, he sent a troop of horse to throw the head over into Hannibal's camp, a ghastly and ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... moment. At the very first word of the Irishwoman's story, the savage had seated himself on the ground with his back turned to the others, and, unnoticed by them, had rapidly painted his face with the war-paint of his tribe. Words cannot describe the ghastly terrors, the fiendish ferocity these traditional lines and colors gave his countenance. This creature, that looked so like a fiend, came erect into the middle of the tent with a single bound, as if that moment vomited forth by hell, and yet with a grander carriage and ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... to enter into details of outrages. Many of them are untrue, and always are in a war. War is a grim, ghastly business at best or at worst, ["Hear, hear!"] and I am not going to say that all that has been said in the way of outrages must necessarily be true. I will go beyond that, and I will say that if you turn two millions of men—forced, conscript, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... get our wounded to the base hospital, Major?" asked a younger officer. He had only joined the unit thirty-six hours before and while he had faced the baptism of fire gallantly, the ghastly carnage about him shook his nerve. He was not fed up with horrors as ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... be tremendous upon nerves so highly strung and sensitive as those of Andre. But he need not have been alarmed on this point. As the young painter mastered the contents of the letter his features became ghastly pale, and a shudder convulsed every nerve and muscle of his frame. With a mechanical gesture he extended the paper to M. de Breulh, uttering the ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... at her I was conscious of a change in her. Her face, which had been pale before, was now ghastly. Her eyes were dull, and the lids drooped heavily over them. Above all, the look of serene confidence had gone from her features. Her mouth had weakened. Her forehead had puckered. She was frightened ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to be hoped that, now that their unhappy country is in the throes of the most ghastly terror of her history, the irreconcilable elements in the Irish nation will see an all-compelling reason for exercising the demon of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... laughed too; but Amy could not get over the impression of having been attacked by demons, and often afterward recurred with a shudder to the time when those awful black things flew at her and she hid behind mamma. The ghastly pictures of the Triumph of Death, which were presently exhibited to them on the walls of the Campo Santo, did not tend to reassure her, and it was with quite a pale, scared little face that she walked toward ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... mourning for the Barmecides,[FN277] whose echo has not yet died away, must have added poignancy to his tardy penitence. The crime still "sticks fiery off" from the rest of Harun's career: it stands out in ghastly prominence as one of the most terrible tragedies recorded by history, and its horrible details make men write passionately on the subject to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... rope that yoked them together was exchanged for a longer one; the party were secured, Marguerite second, and the Cellarman last; and they set out for the Refuges. The actual distance of those places was nothing: the whole five, and the next Hospice to boot, being within two miles; but the ghastly way was ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... Indians dally on the ghastly ground. Soon forsaking it, they continue on down the creek. Not in pursuit of the party which has so opportunely furnished them with spear-pennons and fringes for their leggings. The testimony of so many dead men, with the tracks of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... her eyeballs rattled in her head. The doll fell to the floor and lay there with closed eyes. Her face was pallid and ghastly. Her bonnet had fallen off, and her hair stuck out wildly in every direction. Her legs were doubled under her in the most helpless fashion. She was the forlornest figure of a doll imaginable. Presently Mary drew her hands away ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... it is ghastly. You have the significance now: we must scotch the snake. That girl is over at the Holland Agency, and we should see her at once, to learn what she knows. Cronin has arranged for my coming with you, so introduce me under ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... newness, and the few headstones and monuments shone upstartishly white in the sun. Barren of that curtain of verdure with which love strives to conceal the footprints of death, the little cemetery lay there against the green hillside like some fresh, gaping, ghastly wound in the face ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... upon us, we politely bade her to enter and asked her to be seated. She was attired in the dress in which she intended to make the journey on the following day, and its sombre black of deepest mourning, aided by the yellow light of our lamp, transformed the pallor of her haggard face into an almost ghastly white. We patiently waited for her to open the conversation, of course expecting that she had come to thank us once more for having presented her with the purse. It was some time before she could find her voice and then in the saddest tone that weaver ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... and the adults were hardly clothed with a rag of that bark stuff, produced by certain trees, and called "mbouzon" in the country. Thus the state of this troop of human beings, women covered with wounds from the "havildars'" whips, children ghastly and meager, with bleeding feet, whom their mothers tried to carry in addition to their burdens, young men closely riveted to the fork, more torturing than the convict's chain, is the most lamentable that ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... once more started down the stairs. How full of trembling I was! yet not afraid: there was a life, perhaps, to save. I opened the heavy oaken door. The wind put out my light. I did not need it longer. The shred of moon, hanging prophetic of doom, let out its ghastly whiteness to ghost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... horrid sound Has raised up his head: As awaked from the dead, And amazed he stares around. Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries, See the Furies arise! See the snakes that they rear How they hiss in their hair, And the sparkles that flash from their eyes! Behold a ghastly band Each a torch in his hand! Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain And unburied remain Inglorious on the plain: Give the vengeance due To the valiant crew! Behold how they toss their torches on high, How they point to the Persian abodes And glittering temples of their hostile ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... and the works of darkness. Though they lived in the country, they did not rejoice in God's heaven, or in the moon and stars which he had ordained. They fancied that the night was the time in which all ghastly and ugly phantoms began to move; that it was peopled with ghosts, skeletons, demons, witches, who held revels on the hill-tops, or stole into houses to suck the life out of sleeping men. The cry of the wild fowl, and the howling ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... well do I remember that night when he came to tell Mrs. Carlyle and me, pale as Hector's ghost, that my unfortunate first volume was burned. It was like a half sentence of death to both of us. We had to pretend to take it lightly, so dismal and ghastly was its horror!' ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... Rebecca was now wide awake, and had trumpeted a pretty shrill reveiller. And Gertrude had started up, her elbow on the pillow, and her large eyes open; and the dream, I suppose, was shivered and flown, and something rather ghastly ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... there were no Indians, and no agent to be tomahawked at all; but that the whole had been invented in a house in Crutched Friars. Well, I pitied poor Tidd, whose 20,000l. were thus gone in a year, and whom I met in the City that day with a most ghastly face. He had 1,000l. of debts, he said, and talked of shooting himself; but he was only arrested, and passed a long time in the Fleet. Mary's delightful news, however, soon put Tidd and the Muff and Tippet Company out of my ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... proceedings were to be taken in the matter. The god's face wore its usually placid look, unmoved by the shifting panorama of human life which ebbed and flowed in front of him from morning till night. The ghastly-looking policemen, with their grinning visages and ferocious scowls and contorted bodies, remained in the same unchanging postures ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... Michael away and enabled the sailor to intervene once again with the mop. And upon the scene came Dag Daughtry, to behold his captain, frayed and bleeding and breathing apoplectically, Michael raging in ghastly silence at the end of a mop, and a large Persian mother- cat writhing with a ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... was gazing at her. She caught at Vinicius's hand as a frightened child would, and disconnected, quick impressions pressed into her head: Was not that he, the terrible, the all-powerful? She had not seen him hitherto, and she thought that he looked differently. She had imagined some kind of ghastly face, with malignity petrified in its features; now she saw a great head, fixed on a thick neck, terrible, it is true, but almost ridiculous, for from a distance it resembled the head of a child. A tunic of amethyst color, forbidden to ordinary mortals, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Dynevor, near Carmarthen, noted for its ghastly noises of rattling iron chains, brazen caldrons, groans, strokes of hammers, and ringing of anvils. The cause is this: Merlin set his spirits to fabricate a brazen wall to encompass the city of Carmarthen, and as he had to call on the Lady of the Lake, bade them not to slacken their labor ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... found a pitiful wreck. Gordon was cold sober, and it was as if all his vital fluid had evaporated. His face was ghastly, his nerves utterly out of control, and his tongue stumbled as though it were hung by the middle with both ends at odds. Yet for all his shocking physical condition, something in the wastrel Englishman appealed to Barry as no part of the man had ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... them in the belfry came a most awful, piercing, and agonising scream of anguish. It rose in one shrill cry above every other sound, and echoed, long-drawn out and ghastly, among the dim arches of the ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... walked hastily forward and turned around, when, Oh, my God! what a sight was there! Holding still the dripping knife, with which he had cut his throat! and while his life-blood oozed from the gaping wound and flowed over his tattered garments to the deck, the same exultant smile beamed on his ghastly features! ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... and trembling, was seen hurrying from Mrs Jupp's house as fast as her agitated state would let her, and in another ten minutes two policemen were seen also coming out of Mrs Jupp's, between whom there shambled rather than walked our unhappy friend Ernest, with staring eyes, ghastly pale, and with despair branded upon every line of ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... having gone completely out of fashion in France. The papa of the farce (who was also the Jack Tar of the drama) reappears in the pantomime as Pierrot, the white-faced clown; and tremendously funny is he. There is a weird, elastic harlequin in a ghastly mask which he never lifts; and an amazing notary in an astounding nose, who proves to be Monsieur Goosequill. There is a humpback of hideous deformity and a Columbine of seraphic loveliness; and all Monsieur Goosequill's troubles ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... all that I said, that both should continue to exist. I cannot explain further, you must not ask it of me. You may not believe me when I tell you that I struggled hard to let it be myself. I had such a hideous doubt as to which had the best right to live. But I failed there—death is too ghastly. So I did what you see. In doing it I think I committed the unforgivable sin—not against you, but against art. It may be some satisfaction to you to know that I shall never wholly respect myself again in consequence." A word or two scratched ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... out of the way, praying for death to claim him. Praying? What if the prayers of the wife had in some way wished an illness upon the unsuspecting old man? Of course that was purely grotesque, yet as the ghastly notion occurred to her, Esther felt a sudden longing to confide in someone—Miss Clifford, the son, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick .. blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen. But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... terror suspended in his two brothers, seemed to be restored to Martin by the energy of his courage. He raised himself on the cart, bent his brows, and, clenching his fist, shook it at the spectre with a ghastly look of hate and defiance. The goblin vanished with his usual tremendous and explosive laugh, and left Waldeck exhausted with this ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... right to opine," opines the head whipper-in; so clapping spurs into his prad, he begins to pursue the delinquent round the common, with "Markis, Markis! what are you at, Markis? get into cover, Markis!" But "it's no go"; Marquis creeps through a hedge, and "grins horribly a ghastly smile" at his ruthless tormentor, who wends back, well pleased at having had an excuse for taking "a bit gallop"! Half an hour more slips away, and some of the least hasty of our cits begin to wax impatient, in spite of the oft-repeated admonition, "don't be in a hurry!" At length a yokel pops ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... in the castle-yard, in the open moonlight, which glimmered white and ghastly on the variety of strange and ruinous objects to which we have formerly alluded, and which gave the scene rather the appearance of some ancient cemetery, than of the interior of a fortification. The round and elevated tower—the ancient mount, with its quadrangular sides ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... together, I made my way to the tree, the gruesome thought entering my mind that Tristan's body had been transfixed by some downward-pointing snag as it was blown up against the limb, and that the strange stiffness of his limbs was due to some ghastly sudden rigor mortis brought on by electric shock. Dazed with horror and grief, I reached up to his clothing and pulled gently, braced for the shock of the falling body. It remained immovable against the bough. A harder tug brought no results either. Gathering up all my courage against ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... not. It is an impulse with all murderers to conceal the traces of their guilt. They dig holes in the earth and bury it, they carry it into the wilderness and hide it, they sink it in the depths of the sea. But the earth will not contain it, the wilderness betrays the ghastly secret, the waves ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... in a ghastly smile, as he set down his whisky and soda, and lit a cigar. We were seated under the awning, which had just been spread, and so had a good ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... heart, and utterly overcome by the sudden and awful tragedy to which he had been an enforced silent witness, David Helmsley had now but one idea, and that was at once to leave the scene of horror which, like a ghastly nightmare, scarred his vision and dizzied his brain. Stumbling feebly along, and seeming to those who by chance noticed him, no more than a poor old tramp terrified out of his wits by the grief and confusion which prevailed, he made his way gradually through the crowd ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... drank much, while the guards bade him take example from me, but he would not; and after a while sat silent in a corner and ghastly to look upon, for no one ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... warrior smiled a ghastly smile, as if the idea of being so excruciatingly treated were rather pleasant ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... Mrs. Cutts is a most kind, motherly woman," Harry said. "But it isn't the Back Kitchen, neither," he added with a ghastly sigh. ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... his words the tyrant ended had, The lesser devils arose with ghastly roar, And thronged forth about the world to gad, Each land they filled, river, stream and shore, The goblins, fairies, fiends and furies mad, Ranged in flowery dales, and mountains hoar, And under every ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... our liliputian drawing-room harbor so large an assemblage. They dripped on the carpet, they were conventional and courteous; we made conversation between us; but whenever the thunder rolled, Mrs. James became ghastly pale. Mr. James explained that this was his birthday, and that they were on a pleasure excursion. He conciliated me by anecdotes of a pet magpie or raven who stole spoons. At last, the thunder-storm and the G. P. ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... and invaded the hallowed precincts of Scriptural truth. Literature, with its captivating notes, had well-nigh destroyed what was left of the old Pietistic fervor. The songs of the church were no longer images of beauty, but ghastly, repulsive skeletons. The professor's chair was but little better than a heathen tripod. The pulpit became the rostrum where the shepherdless masses were entertained with vague essays on such general terms as righteousness, human dignity, light, progress, truth, and right. The peasantry ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... dare to follow, under the conditions of the weather, into a bay which French authorities describe as containing banks and shoals, and lined with reefs which the navigator rarely sees without fright and never passes without emotion. It was in the midst of these ghastly dangers that forty-four large ships were about to engage pell-mell; for the space was too contracted for fleet manoeuvres. Conflans flattered himself that he would get in first and be able to haul up close under the western shore of the ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... some object of interest. Presently they were joined by her father, who had just finished his breakfast and was on his way to the office. Now he stooped down and gazed at something half concealed in the snow, then suddenly started back, and as she caught a glimpse of his face, she saw that it was ghastly white. A terrible foreboding seized her. She threw a shawl about her shoulders and rushed down-stairs. In the hall she was met by her father, who was just entering, followed by four men, carrying something between them. She well knew what it was. She would fain have turned away, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... life they had led for so many days—patient beyond words. He had risen early that morning. The rose light over the eastern water was whitening, and all over the deck his comrades lay asleep, their faces gray in the coming dawn and their attitudes suggesting ghastly premonitions—premonitions that would come true fast enough for some of the poor fellows—perhaps for him. Stepping between and over the prostrate bodies, he made his way forward and leaned over the prow, with ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... your security more perfect; for, if I mistake not, when the admiral hears of the doings of the officials of the Inquisition, how many people they have burned to death lately at Lima, and what frightful cruelties they have perpetrated in that ghastly prison, he will burn the place to the ground and hang up the judges; in which case we may be sure that no further inquiry will ever be thought of, concerning the attack on the prison. What do you advise us to do, senor? For it is ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... a little ahead of Dick, peered between two lodges, and suddenly turned away with a ghastly face. ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... begins in a little manufacturing town a few miles from Liverpool, England, just three years ago today." Beneath the unwavering eyes of the man leaning on the table Whitley's face grew ghastly and he ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright |
