"Rack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... provost at their head, who cried, with a great oath, "Where is Vanbrock?" I replied, "At Sedan, monsieur, I believe." He swore again most confoundedly, and searched the mattresses of all the beds in the house, threatening to put my domestics to the rack if they did not make a disclosure; but there was only one that knew anything of the matter, and so they went away in a rage. You may easily imagine that when this was reported the Court would highly resent it. And so it happened, for ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... Barbadoes,' to which all Cromwell's prisoners were subject, a Royalist in the Tower mentions, in a pencilled letter, that he had been threatened with torture; and that the Protector himself used the menace of the rack rests on the evidence of another prisoner's brother.—'Clarendon Papers,' Bodleian Cal., iii. ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... room and everything is covered with this fine dust so thick that it is not possible to tell the color of a table top. Cloissonne vases, or rather images of the famous blue ware stand under the old lady's portrait, and everything is going to rack and ruin. Meantime we wandered around, planning how it could be made over into use when the revolution comes. Get rid of the idea that China has had a revolution and is a republic; that point is just where we have been deceived in the United States. China is at present the rotten crumbling ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... peice of Bacon not very fat, but sweet and safe from being rusty, a peice of fresh beefe, a couple of hoggs Eares, and foure feet if they can be had, and if not, some quantity of sheeps feet, (Calves feet are not proper) a joynt of Mutton, the Leg, Rack, or Loyne, a Hen, halfe a dozen pigeons, a bundle of Parsley, Leeks, and Mint, a clove of Garlick when you will, a small quantity of Pepper, Cloves, and Saffron, so mingled that not one of them over-rule, the Pepper and Cloves must be beaten as fine as possible ...
— The Compleat Cook • Anonymous, given as "W. M."
... dared not mention them to any human soul. Why should she disturb the gentle confidence of his sister and her daughter? She could not make them miserable merely to lift from her own mind a portion of its anxiety. She could only lie awake, night after night, and rack her brain with a thousand gloomy forebodings. She recalled certain phrases he had used in moments of pathetic confidence. She recalled the quick look of pain with which he sometimes paused in the middle of his speech, the almost involuntary raising the hand to the region of the heart, the passing ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... before by Parnell. The results of the agitation which had brought about the passing of the Act were seen when the Court decreed an average reduction of Irish rents by 20 per cent., knocking off no less than L1,500,000 at one stroke from the rack-rentals of the country. ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... waters of passions so keen and translunar as to have become chaste. It may be so—and, on the other hand, it may be that the old sly earth-gods will hold their indelible sway over us until the "baseless fabric" of this vision leaves "not a rack behind"! In any case, for our present purpose, the reading of Emily Bronte strengthens us in our recognition that the only wisdom of life consists in leaving all the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... this action is reversed to start the movement, the spring, in retracting from the wheel rim, starts the wheel swinging. Soon this slide on the case was dispensed with by fitting a curved sheet-metal rack into a groove turned in the edge of the balance cock. Engaging this rack was a pinion with a square hole through which the square stem could slide to set the hands back to zero as it had from the beginning, ...
— The Auburndale Watch Company - First American Attempt Toward the Dollar Watch • Edwin A. Battison
... vengeance. You shall die a slow, lingering death; each moment of your existence shall be fraught with a hell of torment; you will pray for death in vain; death shall not come to your relief for years. Each day I will rack my ingenuity to devise some new mode of torture. To increase the horrors of your situation, you shall have a companion in your captivity—a being unnatural and loathsome to look upon—a creature fierce as a hyena, malignant ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... broken in to the toil and roughness of exercise, so as to be trained up to the pain and suffering of dislocations, cholics, cauteries, and even imprisonment and the rack itself; for he may come by misfortune to be reduced to the worst of these, which (as this world goes) is sometimes inflicted on the good as well as the bad. As for proof, in our present civil war whoever draws his ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... lady!" he cried; "I pray you, do execution on me here and now. Carry me not to the extreme tortures. Death clears all. And I own that for my crimes I well deserve to die. But save me from the strappado, from the torment of the rack. I am an old man and could ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... between them: Merle still looked constantly at her husband's face, always hoping that he would get better, while he himself had no longer any hope. Even when the thump, thumping in his head was quiet for a time, there was generally some trouble somewhere to keep him on the rack, only he did not talk about it any more. He looked at his wife's face, and thought to himself: "She is changing more and more; and it is you that are to blame. You have poured out your own misery on her ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Ned rose and began pulling his belongings from the rack over his head, which action was followed by the three other boys in the party. Professor Zepplin had already risen and was walking ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... Branch of Rappahannock, about 50 Yards wide, and so rapid that the Ferry Boat is drawn over by a Chain, and therefore called the Rapidan. At night we drank prosperity to all the Colonel's Projects in a Bowl of Rack Punch, and ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the little white pony that belonged to all of the children together, and was saddled and bridled every fair day, and tied to the horse-rack, that the little girls might ride him whenever they chose; and 'twas no unusual sight to see two of them on him at once, cantering down the big road or ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... sir.—O heaven! that anything in the likeness of man should suffer these rack'd extremities, for the uttering of ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... neighbouring houses. They are changed every twenty-four hours. He had rather a hard time of it last night with a company from the Faubourg St. Antoine. As a rule, however, he says they are decent, orderly men. They complain very much that their business is going to rack and ruin; when they are away from their shops, they say, impecunious patriots come in to purchase goods of their wives, and promise to call another day to pay for them. On Saturday night the butler reports 300 National Guards were drawn ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... Say, does Heaven degrade The manly frame, for health, for action made? Break down the sinews, rack the brow with pains, Blanch the right cheek and drain the purple veins, To clothe the mind with more extended sway, Thus faintly ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... kinky, woolly head an' he mighty meek, so she got a little white lamb a-settin' on he grabe; an' de nex husban' he didn't have nothin' much fo' to disgueese him f'om de res' 'cep'in' he so slow an' she might nigh rack her brain off, twell she happen to think 'bout him bein' a Hardshell Baptis' an' so powerful slow, so she jest got a little tarrapim an' sot it on him. Hit sho' am a pretty sight jes' to go in dat buryin' groun' an' look at 'em all, side by side; an' ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... to no purpose, as the Inquisition could not be expected to split hairs in regard to an apostate Jew, when it sent the best of Gothic blood, raised in the Catholic faith, to the auto da fe or the scaffold,—the rack respecting neither faith nor profession that fell into its clutches. In milder persecutions, however, he escaped by outwardly conforming to the demands of his oppressors and history tells us of the circumcisions secretly performed on the dead ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... "improved" by the addition of a toasting fork, which could be adjusted and set at certain angles so that the toast could be left in front of the fire for a few moments until it was quite ready to be taken off and put on a plate standing conveniently on the trivet until the dish or rack of toast was complete. (Some scarce trivets are illustrated in "Chats on Old ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... magnificent, broad and deep, tapering swiftly towards the waist. Their arms and legs are beautifully fashioned for strong, swift deeds. Strip an ordinary white man and put him amongst those black warriors, and he would look like a human clothes rack. They walk with a quick, springy step, and gave me the impression that they could march at the double for a week without tiring. But they are at their best on horseback. To see them barebacked dash down the side of a ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... door behind them, and they went all together, keeping close one to another, up to the house, the door of which opened upon a big parlour or kitchen, sparely furnished, but very clean and comfortable. Some vessels of metal glittered on a rack. There were chairs, ranged round the open fireplace. There was no sound except that the wind buffeted in the chimney. It looked a quiet and homely place, and Father Thomas grew ashamed of his fears. "Now," said he in his firm voice, "though I am your ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... be economical, they should take some pains to ascertain what are the cheapest pieces of meat to buy; not merely those which are cheapest in price, but those which go farthest when cooked. That part of mutton called the rack, which consists of the neck, and a few of the rib bones below, is cheap food. It is not more than four or five cents a pound; and four pounds will make a dinner for six people. The neck, cut into pieces, and boiled slowly an hour and a quarter, ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... table, consisting of rose bowl in centre, toast rack, marmalade, entree dish, plate of bread, butter, tray of teacups, etc., sugar, pile of plates, and for each person a bread plate, a ...
— I'll Leave It To You - A Light Comedy In Three Acts • Noel Coward
... of brass, and dragon-gate of Hell, Grim Cerberus guards, and frights the phantoms back: Ixion, who by Juno's beauty fell, Gives his frail body to the whirling rack. ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... wrong? No; it should be bitter: bitterness is strength—it is a tonic. Sweet, mild force following acute suffering you find nowhere; to talk of it is delusion. There may be apathetic exhaustion after the rack. If energy remains, it will be rather a dangerous energy—deadly ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... gay and guileless laugh Of children with their nusses, The loud uneducated chaff Of clerks on omnibuses. Against all minor things that rack A nicely-balanced mind, I'll back The noisy chaff And ill-bred laugh Of ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... though they rack their hearts and- their backs," sighed poor Armine, rolling over. "Oh, mother, my back is so ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said Tweezy, quietly. "Now, suh, would you consider a fox-trot, an' single-foot, an' rack, an' pace, an' amble, distinctions not worth distinguishin'? I assuah you, gentlemen, there was a time befo' I was afflicted in my hip, if you'll pardon me, Miss Tuck, when I was quite celebrated in Paduky for all those gaits; an in my opinion the Deacon's ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... her mother still rested, Mary took courage to wander round the room, looking at the books, the photographs on the walls, the rack of pipes, the carpenter's bench, and the panels of half-finished carving. Timidly, yet eagerly, she breathed in the message it seemed to bring her from its owner—of strenuous and frugal life. Was that half-faded miniature ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... She turned from me and explored the rack of music rolls, became interested and took a piece, the first part of the Kreutzer Sonata, hesitated. "No," she ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... district, but he can carry it with him wherever he goes. If he stays, it will sap his strength and pull him to pieces; if he moves to a better climate, the malady moves with him, leaving him by degrees, and coming back at regular intervals to rack, shake, burn, and sweat its victim. Gradually it wears itself out, often wearing its patient out at the same time. M'Gregor had been through the experience, and there was a slight change in his voice as he ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... rough hand go out to comfort the little fledgling in the dark. I choked still further, and turned hurriedly out on to the low, wide old porch that ran all the way across the back of the house and which apparently was bath-room, refrigerator, seed-rack as to its beams, and the general depositing-place of the farm; but not before I had remarked, hanging by his door, a grass basket I had woven for Sam to bring locust pods to the hollyhock family. Then I fled, only stopping ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... capsicum on these places." He touched Milburgh's chest with his long white ringers. "Little by little, millimetre by millimetre my brush will move, and you will experience such pain as you have never experienced before. It is pain which will rack you from head to foot, and will remain with you all your life in memory. Sometimes," he said philosophically, "it drives me mad, but I do not think it will drive ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... rather remains of the old Galwegian forest, which lines for some space the banks of the Corriewater, the storm began to abate, the wind sighed milder and milder among the trees, and here and there a star, twinkling momentarily through the sudden rack of the clouds, showed the river raging from bank to brae. As he shook the moisture from his clothes, he was not without a wish that the day would dawn, and that he might be preserved on a road which his imagination beset with greater perils than the raging river; for his superstitious ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... that these two were the sum of the agreeable Rosita's admirers. The bronchos of a dozen others champed their bits at the long hitching rack of the Sundown Ranch. Many were the sheeps'-eyes that were cast in those savannas that did not belong to the flocks of Dan McMullen. But of all the cavaliers, Madison Lane and Johnny McRoy galloped far ahead, wherefore they ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... galley. They however that day seized a galliot laden with cotton, and made inquiry of the men concerning the fleet. They protested that they had not seen a ship since they left Gogo, and earnestly implored their mercy; but, instead of treating them with lenity, they put them to the rack, in order to extort farther confession. The day following, a fresh easterly wind blew hard, and rent the galliot's sails; upon this the pirates put her company into a boat, with nothing but a try-sail, no provisions, and only four gallons of water, and, ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... we sacrificed it to them, it might be a doubtful benefit. I often thank my stars I wasn't born in the age of martyrs. If J. had been, I'm sure the very sight of the rack or the faggot would have made ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... with peat-smoke, was tottering about the hut with a birch broom, muttering to herself as she endeavoured to make her hearth and floor a little clean for the reception of her expected guests. Waverley's step made her start, look up, and fall a-trembling, so much had her nerves been on the rack for her patron's safety. With difficulty Waverley made her comprehend that the Baron was now safe from personal danger; and when her mind had admitted that joyful news, it was equally hard to make her believe that he was not to enter again upon possession of his estate. 'It behoved to be,' ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... doing in the hotel at such a moment? What was her story of going to Hymettus but a lie as transparent as her own? The tortures of jealousy, which is as often the incentive as it is the result of passion, began to rack her. She had probably yet known no real passion for this man; but with the thought of his abandoning her, and the conception of his faithlessness, came the wish to hold and keep him that was dangerously near it. What if he were even then in that room, the room ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... Pain. The primal curse, the dominant tragedy of life. Who among you, dear friends, but has felt it? You men, slowly torn upon the rack of rheumatism; you women, with the hidden agony gnawing at your breast" (his roving regard was swift, like a hawk, to mark down the sudden, involuntary quiver of a faded slattern under one of the torches); "all you who have ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... soldier, under captain Perez, came to a centinel upon the guard, and in familiar talk did question him about this castle, of its strength, and how he thought it might be taken; this discourse the other told me early the next morning: I thereupon did issue private orders, to rack the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... a magazine rack that will find favor with many amateur wood-workers on account of its simplicity in design and its rich, massive appearance when properly finished. It is so constructed that each piece may be polished, ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part 3 • H. H. Windsor
... is of short focus, every object situated beyond a distance of three yards from the apparatus is in focus. In exceptional cases, where the operator might be nearer the object to be photographed, the focusing would be done by means of the rack of the objective. The latter can also slide up and down, so that the apparatus need not be inclined when buildings or high trees are being photographed. The door, E, performs the role of a shade. When the apparatus has been fixed upon its tripod and properly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... explained. For years, the factor at Fort Severn had kept in his hallway an enormous pipe-rack. Here, in appropriate rings were souvenir pipes from every white man that had ever visited the post. Most prized of all was one that had belonged to the great governor of the Company, Sir George Simpson, who yearly traveled thousands of miles in ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... capital of my two thousand a year, which I mayn't spend—till I am twenty-five. This has nothing to do with that. I'm quite free—and so are you. Do you think"—she drew herself up indignantly—"that you're going to make me happy—by turning me out, and all—all of you going to rack and ruin—when I've got that silly money lying in the bank? I won't have it! I don't want to go and live in the Cowley Road! I won't go and live in the Cowley Road! You promised father and mother to look after me, Uncle Ewen, and ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which furnished the pressure. By this means he ironed the yoke, wristbands, and neckband, setting the latter at right angles to the shirt, and put the glossy finish on the bosom. As fast as he finished them, he flung the shirts on a rack between him and Martin, who caught them up and "backed" them. This task consisted of ironing all the unstarched portions of ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... ships were found to have fine models—they rode the waves in a way that excited the admiration of all sailors. But the keelsons under the engines were only 40 inches deep, while the keels were 277 ft. long, and there was 'give' enough to rack the engines ...
— Manual of Ship Subsidies • Edwin M. Bacon
... abandoning your chances. Your love-affair will end—all of that kind do. And yours will end in a bitter, irretrievable quarrel after you have ruined yourself, and because you have ruined yourself. You are already on the rack—make no doubt about it. Oh, I have seen you twitch and jump with irritation—how many times on this yacht!—for trumpery, little, unimportant things she has said and done, which you would never ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... the fearful impact Jack sprawled on the steel floor of the torpedo room. Ted, standing close by his chum, clutched at one of the reserve torpedoes hanging in the rack in time to prevent ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... there to hide the falling wall-paper,—the place is going to rack and ruin," said Galloway, pointing to the top of the wardrobe, where the faded wall-paper, mildewed and wet with damp, was hanging in festoons. "Now, Queensmead, lead the way outside. I've seen all I want to see ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... dealt rapidly, unfalteringly, with the finish of one bred to the cards, handling chips and coppers with the peculiar mannerisms that spring from long practice. It was seen that she never looked at her check-rack, but, when a bet required paying, picked up a stack without turning her head; and they saw further that she never reached twice, nor took a large pile and sized it up against its mate, removing the extra disks, as is the custom. When she stretched forth her hand she grasped the right number ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... arrangement also keeps the quadrant always in good gear with its pinion, thereby allowing the teeth of both to be strengthened by shrouding, and rendering them exempt from the effects of sinking and slogger of the rudder stock as the pintles wear. The rack and pinions are of cast steel, as is also the tiller crosshead. The spring buffers, which, as has been said, form an essential part of the quadrant, are fitted with steel rollers at the point of contact with the crosshead, thereby reducing the friction to a minimum. The springs, by their compression, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... laboratory and Ruth went directly over to where the radio-projectile rested in a wall-rack. Dixon took the gleaming cylinder down to examine it. Tapering to a rounded point at the front end, it was nearly a yard long and about five inches ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... hear the low-pitched rumble of a scout-ship blasting from its launching rack. "All we want to do is go out and work Dad's claim," he said for ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... the produce of Mr. Smithson's particular clos, and by a couple of glasses of green Chartreuse, slept profoundly. She had not enjoyed herself so much for the last three months. She had been stretched on Society's rack, and she had been ground in Society's mill; and neither mind nor body had been her own to do what she liked withal. She had toiled early and late, and had spared herself in no wise. And now the trouble was over for a space. Here were rest ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... curious focusing of attention. Nor is it explained by words like "chivalry," "conscience," "social compassion." Magazines that will condone a thousand cruelties to women gladly publish series of articles on the girl who goes wrong; merchants who sweat and rack their women employees serve gallantly on these commissions. These men are not conscious hypocrites. Perhaps like the rest of us they are impelled by forces they are not eager to examine. I do not press the point. It belongs to ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... [Footnote: A "Walker" is a fuller of cloth. "She curst the weaver and the walker." Boy and Mantle, Percy Rel., iii., 5.] Rowing, and Burling and in Racking [Footnote: Stretching. "Two lutes rack's up / To the same pitch." The Slighted Maid, p. 53.] the Clothes aboue measure vpon the Teintors: all which faults may be learned of honest men, which faults are to be knowen to the merchant, to be shunned and not ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... for rain when it wus dry in crap time. De rain fell in torrents an' kept fallin' till it was 'bout a flood. De rain frogs 'gin to holler an' callin' mo' rain an' it rained an' rained. Den de raincrow got up in a high tree an' he holler an' axed de Lord for rain. It rained till ebery little rack of cloud dat come ober brought a big shower of large drops. De fiel's wus so wet an' miry you could not go in 'em an' water wus standin' in de fiel's middle of ebery row, while de ditches in de fiel's looked like little rivers, dey wus so full of water. It begun to ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... Clarissa's nurse would know where one could write to her mother; it was unlikely that even Ellie would go off without assuring some means of communication with her child. At any rate, there was nothing to be done that night: nothing but to work out the details of their flight on the morrow, and rack her brains to find a substitute for the hospitality they were rejecting. Susy did not disguise from herself how much she had counted on the Vanderlyn apartment for the summer: to be able to do so had singularly simplified the future. She knew Ellie's largeness of hand, and had been sure in ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... ordered to Sirmium and there detained. Constantius was not ashamed to send to the rack the old man who had been a confessor in his grandfather's days, more than fifty years before. He was brought at last to communicate with the Arianizers, but even in his last illness refused to condemn Athanasius. After this there was but one power in the West which could not be summarily ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... going to bed," declared the old lady. "But I allus told Peter this old place was bound to go to rack and ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... I led to the altar a buffalo cow, as they call the "muley" down South,—a large, spotted, creamy-skinned cow, with a fine udder, that I persuaded a Jew drover to part with for ninety dollars. "Pag like a dish rack (rag)," said he, pointing to her udder after she had been milked. "You vill come pack and gif me the udder ten tollar" (for he had demanded an even hundred), he continued, "after you have had her a gouple of days." True, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... the rack as Mr. Weevil turned to his books. Again his heart gave a great bound. One glance at it told him who it was from. It was the letter he had been so anxiously ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... his face solemn while he commented: "It ought to fit in that rack over there." He pointed to a group of half-filled racks. "We can slip a fake panel on it. Nobody will be able to tell it from any ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... dreaming of the business which was that night destined for him. Notwithstanding the darkness of the place, Julian succeeded marvellous quickly in preparing for his journey; and leaving his own horse to find its way to Dobbin's rack by instinct, he leaped upon his new acquisition, and spurred him sharply against the hill, which rises steeply from the village to the Castle. Dobbin, little accustomed to such exertions, snorted, panted, and trotted as briskly as he could, until at length he brought ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... science, without adverting to another cause of that irritability of genius which is so closely connected with their pursuits. If we look into the history of theories, we shall be surprised at the vast number which have "not left a rack behind." And do we suppose that the inventors themselves were not at times alarmed by secret doubts of their soundness and stability? They felt, too often for their repose, that the noble architecture which they ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... a table, spread with a cloth. They have a castor at dinner; they have some other little boys (selected from the ship's company) to wait upon them; they sometimes drink coffee out of china. But for all these, their modern refinements, in some instances the affairs of their club go sadly to rack and ruin. The china is broken; the japanned coffee-pot dented like a pewter mug in an ale-house; the pronged forks resemble tooth-picks (for which they are sometimes used); the table-knives are hacked into hand-saws; and the cloth goes to the sail-maker to be patched. Indeed, they are something ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... half a word when you require, The man of business must retire. The haughty minister of state, With trembling must thy leisure wait; And, while his fate is in thy hands, The business of the nation stands. Thou darest the greatest prince attack, Canst hourly set him on the rack; And, as an instance of thy power, Enclose him in a wooden tower, With pungent pains on every side: So Regulus[5] in torments died. From thee our youth all virtues learn, Dangers with prudence to discern; And well thy scholars are endued With ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... yet cannot fix upon the lack: Not this, nor that; yet somewhat, certainly. We see the things we do not yearn to see Around us: and what see we glancing back? Lost hopes that leave our hearts upon the rack, Hopes that were never ours yet seemed to be, For which we steered on life's salt stormy sea Braving the sunstroke and the frozen pack. If thus to look behind is all in vain, And all in vain to look to left or right, Why face we not our ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... made one dive for a rack of arms and snatched down his old sword and ran out, drawing it as he ran. I dashed out and up the stairs, snatched my camera-flashlight and a heavy revolver, gave one yell at Parsket's door: 'The Horse!' and was down and into ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... thinking of nothing but gorse and skylarks, when I came out on a vast circle of land, and over me lifted a vast, voiceless structure, tier above tier of seats, as huge as a Roman amphitheatre and as empty as a new letter-rack. A bird sailed in heaven over it. It was the Grand Stand at Epsom. And I felt that no one would ever be happy ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... of the flowers in the tall silver vases on the piano—her piano!—the spirit of desire which had so long possessed him, waking and sleeping, returned,—returned to torture him now with greater skill amidst these her possessions; her volume of Chopin on the rack, bound in red leather and stamped with her initials, which compelled his glance as he passed, and brought vivid to his memory the night he had stood in the snow and heard her playing. So, he told himself, it must always be, for him to stand in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... thought, and in the popular forms of expression which are so apt to be mistaken for thought, and to indicate the only safe mode of investigation and the only trustworthy tests of genuine knowledge; his favourite amusement to put time-honoured commonplaces on the rack, and demanding their raison d'etre, to pass on them summary sentence of extinction if they failed to account satisfactorily for their existence. Unfortunately, in his keen enjoyment of the fun of the thing, he not unfrequently overlooked the solid interests at stake. Like a huntsman who, for ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... half around, and he could see a faint impression of her view of office details. Then, she went to a book rack. For a few seconds, she glanced over the books, then selected ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... must obviously be emissaries of Satan, so it was God's work to root them out and destroy them. Thus the Gradys have reasoned for a thousand years; and thus in black dungeons underground they have turned the thumb-screws and pulled the levers of the rack. They do it still in many of the large cities of America, where superstition runs the police-force, in combination with liquor interests and ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... whether Alexander had had criminal conversation with them, they confessed it, but said they knew of no further mischief of his against his father; but when they were more severely tortured, and were in the utmost extremity, and the tormentors, out of compliance with Antipater, stretched the rack to the very utmost, they said that Alexander bare great ill-will and innate hatred to his father; and that he told them that Herod despaired to live much longer; and that, in order to cover his great ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... a rack of arms Harry chose a plain black hanger with an agate hilt. As he did it on he saw below it some heavy staves loaded with lead—just such as ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... value. The slums and the wretched dwellings now occupied by the working classes—the miserable, uncomfortable, jerry-built "villas" occupied by the lower middle classes and by "business" people, will be left empty and valueless upon the hands of their rack renting landlords, who will very soon voluntarily offer to hand them and the ground they stand upon to the state on the same terms as those accorded to the other property owners, namely—in return for a pension. Some of these people will be content to live in idleness on the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... They had been spoken by the Inquisitors who came to Italy with one of the Spanish princes. Instantly he recalled the scene where first he had listened to them—the dungeon draped in black—the white-hot irons which had seared his flesh; the rack which had maimed his limbs, the masked men who ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... they'd tear him to pieces on the spot, and kill or torture every member of his family. And so too, in England, most people believe, without a shadow of reason, that if men and women were allowed to manage their own personal relations, free from tribal interference, all life and order would go to rack and ruin; the world would become one vast, horrible orgy; and society would dissolve in some incredible fashion. To prevent this imaginary and impossible result, they insist upon regulating one another's ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... landed on the Chian shore, And him shall ever gratefully adore.' 'This forging slave,' says Pentheus, 'would prevail O'er our just fury by a far-fetched tale: Go, let him feel the whips, the swords, the fire, 140 And in the tortures of the rack expire.' The officious servants hurry him away, And the poor captive in a dungeon lay. But, whilst the whips and tortures are prepared. The gates fly open, of themselves unbarred; At liberty the unfettered ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... of my mercies in E-KUR, award him a severe malady, a grievous illness, a painful wound, which cannot be healed, of which the physician knows not the origin, which cannot be soothed by the bandage; and rack him with palsy, until she has mastered his life; may she weaken his strength. May the great gods of heaven and earth, the Anunnaki, in their assembly, who look after the halls and the courts of this E-bar-ra (temple of Shamash at Sippara, where the ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... think that the first was sent out by mistake and that the second was too vaguely addressed; but both letters went into the rack to await delivery, for our faith in the wisdom of our Postal Department was great; it makes no mistakes, and to it—in a land where everybody knows everybody else, and all his business, and where it has taken him—an address could never be too vague. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... wide couch heaped with bright cushions, drawn close to an open casement. There was a fire of logs, crackling cheerily in the wide fireplace: there were their own belongings—photographs, books, his own pipe-rack and tobacco-jar: there were flowers everywhere, smiling a greeting. Tea-cups and silver sparkled on a white-cloth; a copper kettle bubbled over a spirit-lamp. And there were his own people clinging round him, welcoming, ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... steam-engines." But his scientific hearers would at once see that there were general objections to it which could not be overcome. "These are, first, the weight of the engine and of the fuel; second, the large space it occupies; third, the tendency of its action to rack the vessel and render it leaky; fourth, the expense of maintenance; fifth, the irregularity of its motion and the motion of the water in the boiler and cistern, and of the fuel vessel in rough weather; sixth, the difficulty arising from the liability of the paddles, or oars, to break, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... matter out of hand. I must return home on Thursday—and this is Tuesday evening. It will be impossible for you to stay on here with those four children and no one responsible to look after them. You appear half dead with grief and depression, and you want a thorough change. The place is going to rack and ruin. Your rent-roll, how much ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... acid. When solution has been effected, dilution with a measured volume is generally necessary. The assayer sees to this and (whilst the funnels and filters are being prepared) makes any separation that is necessary. The filters are arranged in order on a rack (fig. 11), and need not be marked unless the precipitates or residues have subsequently to be dried. The filters are washed with hot water, and if the filtrates are wanted flasks are placed beneath, if not, the solution is drained off down the sink. Precipitation or reduction (or whatever ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... last. I went through passages. I found myself in a nondescript room where a courteous official seated at a desk held me on the rack for half an hour. I had to describe Carlotta: not in the imagery wherein only one could create an impression of her sweetness, but in the objective terms of the police report. What was she wearing? ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... is black, And the wail of the South wings forth; Will ye cringe to the hot tornado's rack, And the vampires of the North? Strike! ye can win a martyr's goal, Strike! with a ruthless hand— Strike! with the vengeance of the soul, For your bright, beleaguered land! To arms! to arms! for the South needs help, And a craven is he who ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... marvelous coincidence that it should be there on the rack. Like most coincidences, this was not hard to explain. It chanced to be there because Charity played it often. She was lonelier than Kedzie and almost as helpless to amuse herself. She read vastly, but the stories of other people's unhappy loves ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... up that she was waited for in the street below. So Nelly Lebrun went down in her riding costume, the corduroy swishing at each step, and tapping her shining boots with the riding crop. Her own horse she found at the hitching rack, and beside it Donnegan was on his chestnut horse. It was a tall horse, and he looked more diminutive than ever before, pitched so ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... misery did not end here. You were left me, but I seemed to care for you no longer. I sat down, a stunned and senseless thing, and let all belonging to me go to rack and ruin. The farm went, the furniture went, the homestead went—I was left a widowed, penniless, half-crazed wretch. Thus all was gone but the clothes upon our backs—you went, too. We were starving, but for the pitying charity ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... hard rule of a soulless gold-worshipper; the knowledge that years must pass thus; the sickening idea of her own poverty, and of living mainly on the grudged charity of neighbors—thoughts, too, of former happy days—these rack'd the widow's heart, and made her bed a sleepless ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... smothered under modern thought, liberty of action and bewildering variety of flesh-pots, it was still alive to the extent that it needed only his present state to resuscitate it in all its peculiar force. The Protestant Flagellant, who whipped his soul rather than his body, who made self-denial the rack and the boot, who believed that on Sunday it was sacrilegious to smile, blasphemous to laugh! Spurlock had gone back spiritually three hundred years. In the matter of his conscience he was primitive; and for an educated ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning star shines dead. As, on the jag of a mountain crag Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle, alit, one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings; And when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardors of rest and of love, And the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... were brilliantly banded in various colors and flowered out below their pediments into iron branches of oak leaves among which blossomed the bulbs of many electric lights. By each column stood a severely plain hat-rack. In the middle of the room were four billiard tables, around its sides numberless small marble-topped stands where beer was being served galore. Against the walls were fastened several of those magnificent mirrors which testify so loudly to the reasonable ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... this is revenge! It strikes home," murmured Egerton, and tears gushed fast from eyes that could have gazed unwinking on the rack. The clock ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... system, and none exceeding twenty per cent. It was then pressed through under the great emergency of the public necessities. But I may now recur to what I then said, namely, that its principle was false and dangerous, and that, when its time came, it would rack and convulse our system. I said we should not get rid of it without throes and spasms. Has not this been as predicted? We have felt the spasms and throes of this convulsion; but we have at last gone through them, and begin to breathe again. It is something that that act is at last ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... haunted by an ideal only, and never be familiarized with the plain, good face we knew. For what could the future make of all these caricatures and uncouth efforts at portraiture, rendered only more grotesque when stretched upon the rack of a thousand canvases? No less a benefactor to art than to humanity is he who shall ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... and some one to come back with the mule to carry forward the portion of meat that could not be taken at first. We intended to dry it at the willows, and then we could carry it along as daily food over the wide plain we had yet to cross. Having carried the meat forward, we made a rack of willows and dried it over the fire, making up a lot of moccasins for the barefooted ones while we waited. We were over most of the rocky road, we calculated that our shoemaking would last us through. This was a ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... where they set controls for launching," guessed Phillips, leaning back against a rack of emergency spacesuits. "That intercom screen on the bulkhead is probably plugged in to the control room. Looks as if the torpedoes themselves are stored under that hatch ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... is supplied by him, whose name is affixed to this paper, and who will stand by his employers with body and with soul. I laugh at the vigilance of the Venetian police; I laugh at the crafty and insolent Florentine, whose hand has dragged his brethren to the rack. Let those who need me, seek me; they will find me everywhere! Let those who seek me with the design of delivering me up to the law, despair and tremble; they will find me nowhere, but I shall find THEM, and that when they least expect me! Venetians, you understand ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... over much what followed; but one afternoon when I rides up to the ranch house to get some orders about a drove of beeves that was to be shipped, I hears something like a popgun go off. I waits at the hitching rack, not wishing to intrude on private affairs. In a little while Luke comes out and gives some orders to some of his Mexican hands, and they go and hitch up sundry and divers vehicles; and mighty soon out comes one of the sisters or so and some of the two or three ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... toward the centre-table, grasped his wrist, and forced him to make several dabs and passes at the fatal newspaper, which still lay there with a bland impassivity between drop-light and book-rack. "That's how we dash off our little ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... studying. "He tries to keep up a brave front, but that crack he got on the head some weeks ago was a worse one than most folks imagine. I'm thinking he ought to be home and under the doctor's care instead of trying to rack his brains making up lessons he ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... the Hidden God. His the steady inpouring of truth into every brain ready to receive it, so that hand stretched out to hand across the centuries and passed on the torch of knowledge, which thus was never extinguished. His the Form which stood beside the rack and in the flames of the burning pile, cheering His confessors and His martyrs, soothing the anguish of their pains, and filling their hearts with His peace. His the impulse which spoke in the thunder of Savonarola, which guided the calm wisdom of Erasmus, which inspired the deep ethics ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... infinitely less likely that she would marry Farrell—in any reasonable time. Nelly was not like other people. She was all feelings. Actually to see George die—and in the state that these doctors described—would rack and torture her. She would never be the same again. The first shock was bad enough; this might be far worse. Bridget's selfishness, in truth, counted on the same fact as Farrell's tenderness. 'After all, what people don't see, they can't feel'—to quite ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... morrow he went thither again, and the morn was wild and stormy with drift of rain, and low clouds hurrying over the earth, though for the sunrise they lifted a little in the east, and the sun came up over the passes, amidst the red and angry rack of clouds. This morn also gave him no tidings of the token, and he was wroth and perturbed in spirit: ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to recollect, there lived, not long ago, one of those gentlemen who usually keep a lance upon a rack, an old buckler, a lean horse, and a coursing grayhound. Soup, composed of somewhat more mutton than beef, the fragments served up cold on most nights, lentils on Fridays, collops and eggs on Saturdays, and a pigeon by way of addition on Sundays, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... past exasperations and paroxysms was, for the poor creatures so long tossed about, an unspeakable comfort. It was as though the punishment of the rack had ceased. They caught a glimpse about them and above them of something which seemed like a consent, that they should be saved. They regained confidence. All that had been fury was now tranquillity. It appeared ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... succeeded!" Then we turned, and both of us choked back a sob at what we saw. She had taken our discarded dressing-table drapery, cut out the best portions, ruffled it daintily, pressed it neatly, and put it on her own bureau. Our worn-out sash curtains, nicely laundered, veiled her book-rack. ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... angles to the verandah and the road. The floor was covered with oil-cloth; the walls were hung with curios, South Sea spears and masks, Japanese armour, boomerangs, nullahs, a multitude of quaint workings in wood and grass and beads. Against the wall facing the door was an umbrella stand and hat rack of polished wood, with a mirror in the centre. There were two pannelled doors to the left; a doorless stairway, leading downwards, and a large window to the right; at the end of the passage a glazed ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... with rather less of the manner of a suspected criminal examined in sight of the rack; 'I am sick of all the Abbeychurch pianos; I know them all perfectly, ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... oven in a closed pan with a small quantity of water constitutes braizing. This cooking process might be called a combination of stewing and baking, but when it is properly carried out, the meat is placed on a rack so as to be raised above the water, in which may be placed sliced vegetables. In this process the meat actually cooks in the flavored steam that surrounds it in the hot pan. The so-called double roasting pans are in fact braizing pans when they are properly used. ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... entered the parlour. It was a cold, clammy room, dark. He could hear footsteps passing outside on the asphalt pavement below the window, and the wind howling with familiar cadence. He began feeling for something in the darkness of the music-rack beside the piano. He touched and felt—he could not find what he wanted. Perplexed, he turned and looked out of the window. Through the iron railing of the front wall he could see the little motorcar sending ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... relate Oswald's unhappy fate, Left to these monsters, whose hate was ablaze? Both on revenge were bent; He for a menace sent, She for the merriment Caused by his lays. "Dungeon and torture-rack, These shall now pay thee back! Minstrel and poet rare, Rave in thy mad despair, And in that fetid ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... down with bloodhounds, and when she is taken I shall hew her limb from limb. I shall stretch her on the rack till her pale white body is twisted and curled like paper in ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... was heavy with a wet low vapor. The mail bags, as he strapped them to the rear rack, were slippery; the dawn was a slow monotonous widening of dull light. There were no passengers for Crabapple, and David, with his coat collar turned up about his throat, urged the horses to a faster gait ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the post-hour. Unfortunately, I knew it too well, and tried as vainly as assiduously to cheat myself of that knowledge; dreading the rack of expectation, and the sick collapse of disappointment which daily preceded and followed upon that well- ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... twinkled for a space among the tomb-stones, soon it was extinct, and two figures passed off in the shadow, who had been digging a grave even at that late hour. As the night advanced, a change began to take place. Clouds heaved up over the horizon; the wind was heard in murmurs; the rack hurried athwart the moon; and utter darkness fell upon river, mountain, and haugh. Then the gust swelled louder, and the storm struck fierce and sudden against the casement. But as the morrow dawned, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... hat and coat here," said his guardian, indicating the hat rack on which he was hanging his own overcoat. "Now follow me." He led the boy into the ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: "There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... brightened at this solution. "Yo'all kin take pappy's othah boat; it am downstream dere, behin' dem willows. Den yo'all goes down to de secon' big pile o' willows. Behin' dem is a li'l bitty bayo' goin' back. Yo'all goes up dat 'til yo'all comes to a fur rack. Den dat Jeems got de way ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... The highest rewards were promised her if she would disclose the names and plans of her associates. The inducements proving of no avail, torture was employed to wring from her the secret, in which so many of the best families of Colombia were interested, but even on the rack she persisted in making no disclosure. The accomplished young lady, hardly eighteen years of age, was condemned to be shot. She calmly and serenely heard her sentence, and prepared to meet her fate. She confessed to a Catholic priest, partook of the sacrament, and with ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... seldom used; on the bookshelves new, strange books were crowding out the old, on the little table drooped a few faded flowers in an awkward vase. On the mantlepiece, where she would never have more than one or two good ornaments, and the old gilt clock, were now stacks of papers, a rack bulging with packing materials—something like that—an ink-bottle, a candlestick, the candle trailed over with sealing-wax, and an untidy ball of string. And right in the centre of the room a great clumsy writing-table, an office table, piled with papers again, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... was Jathrop or mebbe the butcher, but I got to the window jus' in time to see a tail make the turn o' the gate, 'n' the seein' the tail showed right off 's it warn't Jathrop nor yet the butcher. Seems 't Jathrop, not seein' no ring to tie her to, tied her to a spoke in the hay-rack 'n' in her mooin' she broke it. Seems't then she squose out into the chicken-coop 'n' then busted right through the wire nettin' 'n' set off. She run like wild fire, they say. She headed right f'r town 'n' down the ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... the bright Queen who rules the tide Now forward thrown, now bridled back, Smile o'er each answering smile, then hide Her grandeur in the transient rack, And yield her power, and veil her pride, And move ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... his departure, my lamentations had met with the warmest sympathy as I stirred toffy over Jane's kitchen fire, whilst Martha lingered with the breakfast things, after a fashion very unusual with her, and gazed at the toast-rack and said, "the Colonel had eaten nothing of a breakfast to travel on." But next morning, I met her in another mood. It was a mood to which we were not strangers, though it did not often occur. In brief, Martha (like many ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the corridor, where by this time an office clerk and another man had joined the maid who was in charge of the coat rack. ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... soul fluttering madly to be free. This was the very ecstasy of love, to suffer the extreme torment for the beloved! Ah, he was smitten deep enough at last; if poetry were to be won through bloody sweat, the pains of the rack, the crawling anguish of the fire, was not poetry his own? Yes, indeed; what Dante had gained through exile and the death of Monna Beatrice was his for another price, the price of his own blood. He forgot the physical agony of his scorched mouth, forgot the insult, ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... himself, however, as an impersonation, was, in look, voice, manner, Mr. Skimpin, the junior barrister, under whose cheerful but ruthless interrogations that unfortunate gentleman was stretched upon the rack of examination. His (Mr. Skimpin's) cheery echoing—upon every occasion when it was at last extorted from his victim—of the latter's answer (followed instantly by his own taunts and insinuations), remains as vividly as anything at all about this Reading in our recollection. ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... moment of meeting very differently, but she might well have chosen worse. She unpinned her skirt and brushed the threads off, smoothed the pew cushions carefully, and took a last stitch in the ragged hassock. She then lifted the Bible and the hymn-book from the rack, and putting down a bit of flannel on the pulpit steps, took a flatiron from an oil-stove, and opening the ancient books, pressed out the well-thumbed leaves one by one with infinite care. After ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... kind-heartedness, partly since he could never resist a bargain and he got her for almost nothing, partly, perhaps because of his canny foresight, bought a wretched, puny, sickly, little runt of a four-year-old slave-girl, a mere rack of bones covered with yellow skin. She continued sickly for some years, then, when she was more than half grown, the fresh air of Trebula, its good water, the kindness with which she was treated, the ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... where Walter knew another deserted cabin to stand; for he knows every foot of this section of the river and once spent a summer, camped at the coal-mine, fishing. The spot was reached, but the cabin was gone. The fish rack still stood there, but the cabin was burned down. There was nothing for it but to return to the coal-mine cabin; so, for the first and only time in all my journeyings, it was necessary to abandon a day's march that had been entered upon and go back whence we had come. We ran before the gale at great ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... fourth member of the party. The mule bearing the trail pack was in ludicrous contrast to his own aristocratic companions. His long head, with one entirely limp and flopping ear, was grotesquely ugly, the carcass beneath the pack a bone rack, all sharp angles and dusty hide. Looks, however, as his master could have proven, ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... sign!), garaged the Grayles-Grice, and biked to the village. I'll now try to sleep for an hour or two—less because I'm tired than because I want to dream myself back in the path of the moon, where walks Romance to greet me. My bed here, by the by, usually reminds me of a rack out of commission. But to-day I don't care. I shall find it ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... only I knew exactly myself, your lordship—I am only a plain man, who wishes every one the best future. Here I do so out of regard for his Majesty, Sir Wolf Hartschwert, and the inexperienced youth of this marvellously beautiful creature. But if you were to force me by the rack to form a definite opinion of her, I could not do it. The most favourable would not be too good, the reverse scarcely too severe. To reconcile such contrasts is beyond my power. She is certainly something unusual, that will fit no mould with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... regulations. There was a diminutive stove in one corner, and a chest in another. In front of the box facing the clock were two telegraphic instruments, and a row of eight or ten long iron levers, which very much resembled a row of muskets in a rack. These levers were formidable instruments in aspect and in fact, for they not only cost Sam a pretty strong effort to move them, but they moved points and signals, on the correct and prompt movements of which depended the safety of the line, and the ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... the rack!" commanded Mrs. Peck. "There's a drop of soup to go in first. And, Columbine, my dear, I don't think it's right of you to go losing your temper that way. Rufus is Adam's son, remember, and you can't refuse to sit at table ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... but comprehendingly, for he hastily flung a napkin over the ice and gently set the decanter back in its rack. "But dynamite, it comes in sticks and not in bottles. And it would shake the roots of them old poplars ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... too, Don. But finding that missing gun will be as difficult as finding your father. I have searched the country over for it and made a wonderful collection of flint-lock guns, as you see by looking at yonder gun-rack; I have had dozens of arms collectors and detectives looking for guns of that description, but no Patrick Mullen rifle has turned up anywhere. There have, of course, been many false clues and many ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard |
