"Stench" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The stench of carbonized flesh scoured Jason's nostrils. Stupidly, he stared down at the headless, shoulderless, armless torso; black ... sooty ... against the snowy gleam of the floor; conscious of the sidelong, round-about ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... few miles. Then we are in absolute solitude. The plain lies bare and blanched around us. A thorn bush or two sticks up on it, or, now and then, the ghastly shape of a dead horse lying in puffed up relief with legs sticking out stiff and straight and an awful stench blowing from it. Kimberley's search-light at stated intervals still swings ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... turned round sharply, and saw "It" standing close beside her. She described it as being human in shape, and about four feet high; the eyes were like two black holes in the face, and the whole figure seemed as if it were made of grey cotton-wool, while it was accompanied by a most appalling stench, such as would come from a decaying human body. The lady got a shock from which she did not recover ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... wisdom, and he exists like a storeroom where a stingy housewife keeps all sorts of rubbish which is absolutely unnecessary to her, and worthless. If you touch such a man, if you open the door into him, the stench of decay will be breathed upon you, and a stream of some musty trash will be poured into the air you breathe. These unfortunate people call themselves men of firm character, men of principles and convictions. And no one cares to see that convictions are to them but the clothes ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... top of one of the mountains of eternal frost and snow, where they would be allowed to shiver for a time; thence they would be precipitated into a loathsome pool of boiling brimstone, to wallow there in conflagration, smoke and the suffocation of horrible stench; from the pool they would be driven to the marsh of Hell, that they might embrace and be embraced by the reptiles, many times worse than serpents and vipers; after allowing them half an hour's dalliance with these creatures the devils would seize a bundle ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... delaying to strike. What says Dante? "There was such a moan there as there would be if all the sick who, between July and September, are in the hospitals of Valdichiana, and of the Tuscan swamps, and of Sardinia, were in one pit together; and such a stench was issuing forth as is wont to issue from ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... simplicity, by the trouble in her face and eyes, and the wrong which is done to her in making her swear and in proclaiming her publicly as an adulteress. Giotto has also expressed with great realism a man afflicted with sores, as all the women who are about him, disgusted by the stench, turn away with various contortions in the most graceful manner imaginable. Then again the foreshortening in a picture containing a number of lame beggars is highly praiseworthy, and should be much prized by artists, since it is from these works that the origin of ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... driving their galleries. Edgar still acted as interpreter to Sir Sidney Smith, and was the bearer of his orders to the Turkish officers. He was very glad that it was but seldom that he was called upon to accompany his chief in his visits to the tower, for the stench here from the unburied bodies of the French and of the Turks overwhelmed by the explosion was overpowering. Numbers of the Turks stationed here were attacked by mortal illness, others became delirious, and it was necessary ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... and sickened by thousands a day, and not being aided or attended in any respect, almost without exception died. And many there were who ended their lives in the public streets by day or night, and many who, dying in their houses, were only discovered by the stench of their dead bodies; and of these and others that died everywhere the city was full. These were mainly disposed of in the same way by their neighbors, moved more by the fear that the corruption of the dead bodies should harm them than by any charity for the deceased. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... did the milking. But before he began he stroked Bossy's nose and bent close. "I've caught the stench of her breath!" he cried. "Sniff ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... they can hardly eat without taking down some of them; in the Night when they repose themselves upon the ground, they cover it three, or four Inches thick, and if a Wheel pass {138} over them, they emit a stench hardly to be endured: All which, and much more may be fully seen in the French Description of the Countries of Poland, made by Monsieur de Beauplan, and by Monsieur Thevenot, in his Relation of the Cosacks, contained in the First part of ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... on a noble plan To show us that a Judge can be a Man; Through moral mire exhaling mortal stench God-guided sweet and foot-clean to the Bench; In salutation here and sign I lift A hand as free as yours from lawless thrift, A heart—ah, would I truly could proclaim My bosom lighted with so pure a flame! Alas, not love of justice moves my pen To praise, or to ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... cold in the corridors of the theatre, and an attack of pleurisy laid her low and carried her off in six weeks. The poor woman left a little girl three years old, who was taken down with the measles; the disease assumed its most malignant form in the foul stench of the loft, where the child had breathed for more than a month air poisoned by the breath of her dying mother. The father had gone into the country to try and borrow money. He married again there. Nothing more ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... streets, their voices, speaking in a score of tongues, raising a din like that of Bedlam; the smells of unwashed bodies, human perspiration, strong tobacco, rum, hashish, whiskey, arrack, goat's cheese, garlic, cheap perfumery and sweat-soaked leather combining in a stench which ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... it was very cold there, in spite of the stoves. It had, I must say, a disagreeable odor pervading it, in which the dead people of long ago had doubtless some share,—a musty odor, by no means amounting to a stench, but unpleasant, and, I should think, unwholesome. Old wood-work, and old stones, and antiquity of all kinds, moral and physical, go to make up this smell. I observed it in the cathedral, and Chester generally has it, especially under the Rows. After all, the necessary damp and lack of sunshine, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... decidedly cold, conveniently near the barn, and kept covered with a foot of straw or old litter. As long as a cabbage is kept frozen there is no waste to it; but if it be allowed to freeze and thaw two or three times, it will soon rot with an awful stench. I suspect that it is this rotten portion of the cabbage that often gives the bad flavor to milk. On the other hand, if it is kept in too warm and dry a place, the outer leaves will dry, turning yellow, and the whole head lose in weight,—if it be not very hard, shrivelling, and, ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... planks, old and rotten, and I could not therefore suppose that any heavy weight had been placed above it. I should have observed that I had reason to congratulate myself the ship was new and well caulked, and that not a leak existed throughout her length, for had any bilge-water been in her the stench would have been insufferable, and would soon either have deprived me of life or produced a serious sickness. As it was, considering what ships' holds generally are, the air was comparatively pure, and I did not suffer much from the confinement. ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... By which sweet path thou mayst attain the goal That shall conduct thee to celestial rest! Break heart, drop blood, and mingle it with tears, Tears falling from repentant heaviness Of thy most vile[155] and loathsome filthiness, The stench whereof corrupts the inward soul With such flagitious crimes of heinous sin[156] As no commiseration may expel, But mercy, Faustus, of thy Saviour sweet, Whose blood alone ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... called Tullianum, after you have ascended a little way to the left, about twelve feet underground. It is built strongly with walls on every side, and arched above with a stone vaulting. But its aspect is foul and terrible from neglect, darkness, and stench." ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... all puckered up with the stench of burning varnish. The Senior Surgeon's mind was full of the horrid thought that he'd forgotten to renew his automobile fire-insurance,—and that he had a sprained back,—and that his rival colleague had told him ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... cold storage for a long time, evidently a very long time. They had been carried in the ice boxes without being drawn, and when exposed to the air the odor of decay was so strong that they were positively nauseating. I saw strong men turn exceedingly sick just from the stench, and I do not believe it is an exaggeration to say that there was more upset stomachs on that trip from the decaying rabbits that were given us to eat than from the ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... emphasized the last of these,[12] few would have concurred with Hill that the fetid air of London was less harmful than the clearer air at Highgate. All readers of the novel of the period will recall the hypochondriacal Matt Bramble's tirade against the stench of London air. Beliefs of the variety here mentioned cause me to question Hill's importance in the history of medicine; there can be no question about his contributions to the advancement of the science of botany through popularization of Linnaeus' system of bisexual ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... the fruit of these thy sins. For 3,000 years thou shalt wander over this earth, without a companion and without being able to talk with anyone. Alone and without anybody by thy side, thou shalt wander through diverse countries, O wretch, thou shalt have no place in the midst of men. The stench of pus and blood shall emanate from thee, and inaccessible forests and dreary moors shall be thy abode! Thou shalt wander over the Earth, O thou of sinful soul, with the weight ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... noceo, hurt) is a stronger word than noisome, as referring to that which is injurious or destructive. Noisome now always denotes that which is extremely disagreeable or disgusting, especially to the sense of smell; as, the noisome stench proclaimed the presence ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... the stagnant trench Where forty standing men Endure the sweat and grit and stench, Like ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... they were to be slept in, the dishes not washed until they must be used again, and soiled clothing was allowed to stand in soak a week at a time in hot weather, until a heavy scum gathered on the top and the air was poisoned by the stench. The remaining children were unkempt and untrained, and the woman quite indifferent about their condition. The imbecile had improved at Owing's Mills, but, owing to a half-expressed wish of the mother's to see the boy, Gamma brought him home and refused to take him ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... and perceived that the eyes belonged to an old woman, wrapped up in a greasy leather garment. Taking her by the arm, I dragged her out, for she could not, or would not, come by herself, and the stench was overpowering me. Such a sight as she was—a bag of bones, covered over with black, shrivelled parchment. The only white thing about her was her wool, and she seemed to be pretty well dead except for her eyes and her voice. She thought that I was a devil come to take ...
— Long Odds • H. Rider Haggard
... the sailor, with its coarseness and drudgery, its inadequate pay, its evil-smelling food, its maggoty bread, its beer drawn from casks that once had held oil or fish, its stinking salt-meat barrels, the hideous stench of the bilge-water—all this could in one sense be no worse than his sufferings in jail. In spite of self-control, jail had been to him the degradation of his hopes, the humiliation of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Tristan languished, for there trickled a poisonous blood from his wound. The doctors found that the Morholt had thrust into him a poisoned barb, and as their potions and their theriac could never heal him they left him in God's hands. So hateful a stench came from his wound that all his dearest friends fled him, all save King Mark, Gorvenal and Dinas of Lidan. They always could stay near his couch because their love overcame their abhorrence. At last Tristan had himself carried into a boat apart on the shore; and lying facing the ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... "mere and arrant pettifogger," "no antic hobnail at a morris but is more handsomely facetious;" "a boar in a vineyard," "a snout in this pickle," "the serving-man at Addlegate" (suggested by 'the maids at Aldgate'), "this odious fool," "the noisome stench of his rude slot," "the hide of a varlet," "such an unswilled hogshead," "such a cock-brained solicitor;" "not a golden, but a brazen ass;" "barbarian, the shame of all honest attorneys, why do they not hoist him over the bar and blanket him?"—such are a few of the varied elegancies. Two ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... exhaling odors as vitiated as the breath of a toad! The very saints could not be revivified from such a poison, much less our poor selves, sir, who strive a lifetime constructing character for those damned polluters to blight with their graveyard whisperings! I detest it, sir! The stench of it is repulsive to honest men and gentle women! But come," he added more genially, "before we spoil ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... nearer; at last it reached our ranks. I quickly hugged a knapsack to my stomach in order to protect myself as best I could. The shrieks of the wounded rang out on all sides. Tears came to my eyes when I heard the poor devils moaning with pain. The dust, the smoke, and the stench of the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... her put it in the candle, which she very innocently did, to her and the whole room's astonishment. But when the first went off she threw the rest upon the tea-table, where, one after the other, they all went off, with much noise and not a little stench, to the real joy of most of the women present, who don't dislike an opportunity of finding fault. Lady Lucy, indeed, was plentifully abused, and Mr Hobart had his share; and common fame says he has never had a card since. Few women will curtsy to him; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... no padding of feet, inside. He pulled the latchstring with his left hand and pushed the door open with his foot, the rifle ready. There was no need for that. What welcomed him, within, was a sickening stench ...
— The Keeper • Henry Beam Piper
... the interstices filled with moss and mud, a mode of building warmer than it sounds. In the interior there is always an enormous brick stove, five or six feet high, on which and on the floor the whole family sleep in their rags. The heat and the stench are frightful. No one undresses, washing is unknown, and sheepskin pelisses with the wool inside are not conducive to cleanliness. Wood, however, is becoming very scarce, the forests are used up in fuel for railway engines, for wooden constructions ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... or two months in that city, where I left a dozen louis, without either my health or understanding being the better for it, except from a short course of anatomy begun under M. Fitz-Morris, which I was soon obliged to abandon, from the horrid stench of the bodies he dissected, which I found it ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... of the great stench that they smelt, and went up to the fire, where the gentleman drew out of his bosom a handkerchief all dyed with the melted sugar, and on opening his robe, lined with fox-skin, found it to ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... close lane behind the Northgate-street; T'observe his vain attempts to keep the peace, Till tolls the bell, and strife and troubles cease, - Calls for our praise; his labour praise deserves, But not our pity; Reuben has no nerves: 'Mid noise and dirt, and stench, and play, and prate, He calmly cuts the pen or views the slate. But Leonard!—yes, for Leonard's fate I grieve, Who loaths the station which he dares not leave: He cannot dig, he will not beg his bread, All his dependence rests upon his head; And deeply skill'd in sciences and arts, On ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... of disposing of the skimmings was suggested by Mr. Parkinson. It is better than the old plan of throwing them away to decompose and create a stench about the factory. Probably a better method would be to pass these skimmings through some sort of filter, or, perhaps better still, to filter the juice and avoid all skimming. After this last skimming the juice is ready to be boiled down to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... settled itself about his feet, and a like matter afflicted him at the bottom of his belly. Nay, further, his privy-member was putrefied, and produced worms; and when he sat upright, he had a difficulty of breathing, which was very loathsome, on account of the stench of his breath, and the quickness of its returns; he had also convulsions in all parts of his body, which increased his strength to an insufferable degree. It was said by those who pretended to divine, and who were endued with wisdom to foretell such things, that God inflicted ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... provisional chief of the police "of public safety." Who kept the public safe from the police I am unable to say. Fighting was going on perpetually in the neighbourhood; the dead and dying lay scattered in all directions; the stench bred epidemics more murderous than all Napoleon's cannon. Friedrich must have found his hands full day and night. Richard was baptized on August 16; the following day Napoleon won a victory which cost him dear; the 18th, being Sunday, was observed as such by a soldiery in need of a rest; on the ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... they made the sign of the Cross and sailed away, he and his fellows brought down huge lumps of burning slag in tongs, and hurled them after the ship; and how they went back, and blew their forges up, till the whole island flared, and the sea boiled, and the howling and stench followed them, even when they were out of sight of that evil isle; and how St. Brendan bade them strengthen themselves in faith and spiritual arms, for they were now on the confines of hell, therefore they must watch, and play the man. All this must ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... Court the houses were smaller, and had their fronts whitewashed. Under the archway which led into the Court were fastened up several written notices of rooms to be let at this or that number. The paving was in evil repair, forming here and there considerable pools of water, the stench and the colour whereof led to the supposition that the inhabitants facilitated domestic operations by emptying casual vessels out of the windows. The dirty little casements on the ground floor exhibited without ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... more, when we reached our new ground, so it was not more than nine miles altogether, yet it was 10 o'clock at night before the rear-guard, bringing up the fag end of the baggage, came in. For nearly the whole of this day I was exposed to an infernally hot sun, and the stench arising from the dead cattle was really frightful. I was also literally twenty-six hours without getting a morsel to eat or a drop to drink, and but the day before on the sick-list. No wonder I was ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... the communion, they live honestly. This man gives himself up to exalt the Church of Christ: you to destroy it. The time approaches for opening the secret chamber: we will give but one turn of the key, and there will come out thence such an infection, such a stench of this city of Rome, that the odor shall spread through all Christendom, and all the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... four explodes nicely, but it is a bad thing when, as happened to me, the shells plopped around in a diameter of fifty meters. One hears the zip-zip of bullets, the boom of the great guns, the ste-tang of our French artillery, and in all this infernal experience of noise and stench, the screams at times of dying horses and men joined with the fury of gunfire and rising shrill above it, no man may boast of his courage. There were moments when I was a coward with ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... Largo do Paco, or palace square, my first favourable impressions of the city of Rio de Janeiro were somewhat lessened by the stench arising from offal on the beach, and the vicinity of the market, under the conjoined influence of a perfect calm and a temperature of 90 degrees in the shade. The palace, now used by the emperor only on court days, has two sides of the large irregular ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,— The night you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? Do you remember the rats; and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,— And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... courts, the executive officers, all the sources of authority and springs of control, were defiled and impested until right and justice fled affrighted from the land, and the name of the country became a stench in the nostrils ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... when I swore him in, what we want in Ascalon is a marshal that will use his gun oftener, and to better purpose, than the men that have gone before him. This town must be purified, the offal of humanity that makes a stench until it offends the heavens and spreads our obscene notoriety to the ends of the earth, must be swept out before we can induce sober and substantial men to bring their families ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... STench-louing Flies, their father heat, On mother, moysture doth beget; Who feeling force of Sunne too great, Their course vnto some water set, There meane of calmy ayre to proue, Twixt coole below and ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... a most original species of repose that they will taste there! The stench of the sulphur lake will breathe Sabian odours for them over a couch of mud! Their anointing oil will be the slime of attendant reptiles! Their liquid perfumes will be the stagnant oozings from their chamber ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... like fire etc. The Hindu idea is that kine are cleansing or sanctifying. The Rishis discovered that the magnetism of the cow is something that is possessed of extraordinary virtues. Give the same kind of food to a cow and a horse. The horse-dung emits an unhealthy stench, while the cowdung is an efficacious disinfectant. Western science has not yet turned its attention to the subject, but there can be little doubt that the urine and dung of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... more to live for. They gits into motor-cars an' scours the country, but they never sees it. They never 'ears the birds singin', an' they misses all the flowers. They never smells the vi'lets nor the mayblossom—they on'y gits their own petrol stench wi' the flavour o' the dust mixed in. Larst May I was a-walkin' in the lanes o' Devon, an' down the 'ill comes a motor-car tearin' an' scorchin' for all it was worth, an' bang went somethin' at the bottom o' the thing, an' it stops suddint. Out jumps a ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... no sooner put our heads within the door but we found ourselves assaulted with a smell, or rather stench, so intolerable as almost to drive us back: but the fury of the elements, and perhaps the less delicate organs of Clarke, who seemed determined to profit by the shelter we had obtained, induced us to brave an inconvenience which, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... our camp followers, and not a little are we grateful to these wonderful scavengers, the best of all possible allies in settling the great question of sanitation in camps. For all our roads were marked by the bodies of dead horses, mules and oxen, whose stench filled the evening air. Much labour in the distasteful jobs of burying these poor victims of war did the scavengers ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... well what he was doing, but powerless to help—powerless to prevent—he had gone.... Sometimes it did not seem real to him. It was a nightmare— a horrid, horrible, awful, grewsome, rotten dream, a dream that brought to his nostrils a stench—to his soul a coldness unutterable—a coldness beside which that of death might seem a grateful warmth.... He would wake sometimes from his dreams, a cold sweat enveloping him like a pall, a scream upon his lips.... And then, again—He did not understand. He could not understand. It was hopeless, ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... them. The water intersects the city everywhere, and would have furnished to the genius of Italy the capabilities of all that is most beautiful and magnificent in architecture. It might have been the rival of Venice, and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and stagnation. The Jungfer Stieg, (that is, Young Ladies' Walk), to which my letters directed me, made an exception. It was a walk or promenade planted with treble rows of elm trees, which, being yearly pruned and cropped, remain slim and ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and exhaustion, the dying fell shuddering on the dead; the hale on the dying; all tearing themselves like dogs with teeth and nails. The tower of Castrovillari became a foul hole of corruption, and the stench was spread abroad for ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... water," as the juice of the maguey is called during the twelve hours before fermentation sets in. From twelve to thirty-six hours after its drawing it is intoxicating; from then on, only fit to be thrown away. But the sour stench from each pulqueria and many a passing peon proved a forced longevity. Several lay drunk in the streets, but passers-by stepped over or around them with the air of those who do as they hope to be done by. Laughter was rare, the great majority being exceedingly somber in manner. ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... shouts of the soldiers cursing the name of Nero and calling down blessings on Galba. Passing some wayfarers on the road, he hears one of them whisper, "Hi Neronem persequuntur;" and another asks, "Ecquid in urbe novi de Nerone?" Further on his horse takes fright, terrified by the stench from a corpse that lay in the road-side: in the confusion the emperor's face is uncovered, and at that moment he is recognized and saluted by a Praetorian soldier who is riding towards the City. Reaching a by-path, they dismount and make their way hardly through reeds and thickets. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... must remember that in those days there weren't fifty automobiles in England. When my brother came up the London Road with a whiz and a bang, a long trail of blue stench coming out of the back of the machine, I really think that was the third or fourth time I had ever seen such a thing. Well, there he was, a great big chap with a hooked nose and flashing black eyes behind the goggles. Where ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... plain, or clambered up the rugged heights to pillow their dying heads at last on wreaths of snow. To add to the unheard-of miseries of these poor people, scurvy in its worst forms attacked them; and the air of many of their camping places was heavy with the stench arising from the dead bodies of men and animals that had perished by ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... palm-tree leaves, a proper instrument of penance, he tied it close about his naked body, where it remained unknown both to the community and his superior, till such time as it having eat into his flesh, what he had privately done was discovered by the stench proceeding from the wound. Three days successively his clothes, which clung to it, were to be softened with liquids, to disengage them; and the incisions of the physician, to cut the cord out of his body, were attended with such anguish and pain, that he lay for some ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... wiles But struggle with destruction, as a child With giants huge, or giants with a Jove. The statesman's arts to conjure up a peace, Or military phantoms void of force, But scare away the vultures for an hour; The scent cadaverous (for, oh! how rank The stench of profligates!) soon lures them back On the proud flutter of a Gallic wing Soon they return; soon make their full descent; Soon glut their rage, and riot in our ruin; Their idols grac'd and gorgeous with our spoils, Of universal empire sure presage! Till now repell'd by seas of British blood." ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... crumbling sand (Arabia Arenosa), not a vestige or hint of grass ever having grown there; booths and drinking-places go all round it, for a mile and a half, I am confident,—I might say two miles in circuit; the stench of liquors, bad tobacco, dirty people and provisions, conquers the air, and we are all stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park [2]. Order after order has been issued by Lord Sidmouth in the name of the Regent (acting in behalf of his royal father) for the ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... have ever seen; these fleas are as large as ordinary mosquitos, they breed in the mine and are carried up on the men's clothes. Often these pests were so bad that the men lay out in the yard at night instead of going to bed—anyway, in the hot weather the stench from ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... grated against my teeth as I opened my mouth to give it passage. At any rate the choking was gone, only now I felt as though I were quite empty and floating on air, as though I were not I, in short, but a mere shell of a thing, all of which doubtless was caused by the stench of those burning roots. Still I could look and take note, for I distinctly saw Zikali thrust his huge head, first into the smoke of what I will call my fire, next into that of Saduko's fire, and then lean back, blowing the stuff in clouds from his mouth and nostrils. Afterwards I ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... August,—all much more severe in Guadeloupe than in Martinique. In the village Au Prcheur, lying at the foot of the western slope of Pele, the people had been for some time complaining of an oppressive stench of sulphur,—or, as chemists declared it, sulphuretted hydrogen,—when, on the 4th of August, much trepidation was caused by a long and appalling noise from the mountain,—a noise compared by planters on the neighboring slopes to the hollow ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... behind the latter, from which daylight was forever excluded, were reserved for still worse things. No policeman would ever have succeeded in raiding these dens of iniquity; he would have found nothing but empty rooms or bunks filled with snoring Chinese; the abominable stench would soon have driven him out again, but if, by any chance, he had attempted to penetrate further and to explore the walls for the purpose of discovering hidden openings, the only result would have been a story in the next day's papers about a ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... removing the dead bodies by carts was now grown so very odious and dangerous, that it was complained of that the bearers did not take care to clear such houses where all the inhabitants were dead, but that some of the bodies lay unburied till the neighboring families were offended by the stench, and consequently infected. And this neglect of the officers was such, that the churchwardens and constables were summoned to look after it; and even the justices of the hamlets[166] were obliged to venture their lives among them to quicken and encourage them; for innumerable of the ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... a low, black, miserable place; Its roof was rotting; and above it hung A cloud of murky vapor, sending down Intolerable stench on all around. The place was silent, save the creaking noise, The steady motion of a dozen pumps, That labored all the day, nor ceased at night. Methought in it I heard a hundred groans; Dropping of widows' tears, and cries of orphans; ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... of the boat when I aimed straight at its left eye, and pulled the trigger of my pistol. For an instant the bright flash dazzled me so that I could see nothing, but I distinctly heard the "phitt" of the bullet, felt a hot puff of the sickening stench strike me full in the face, and became aware of a tremendous swirl and disturbance of the water as the huge creature plunged beneath ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... another in the hold like corpses, and clutched at one another like madmen. In despair some offered all their money, all that they had, to a priest as a votive offering to St. Nicholas, that the storm might abate. The state of the ship I should not dare to depict—the filth, the stench, the vermin. For nearly a thousand passengers there were three lavatories without bolts! Fitly was the boat named Lazarus—Lazarus all sores. What the poor simple peasant men and women suffered none ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... strained forward in eager expectation. A few blows sufficed to remove the head of the cask. Horror! a sickening stench arose, and there became visible the headless trunk of a human being. That portion of the body which was not immersed in the wine, was putrid. 'Look here!' cried I, in mad triumph, plunging my arm into the cask, and drawing forth the ghastly head of Lagrange. I held aloft the horrid ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... been selected in a great many different ways. (1) Some names are very old and their original meaning is obscure. Such names are iron, gold, and copper. (2) Many names indicate some striking physical property of the element. The name bromine, for example, is derived from a Greek word meaning a stench, referring to the extremely unpleasant odor of the substance. The name iodine comes from a word meaning violet, alluding to the beautiful color of iodine vapor. (3) Some names indicate prominent chemical properties of the elements. Thus, nitrogen means the producer ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... the exact measure of ground over which it rested. It hung low, and had the appearance of a light powdering of snow. In passing, it fell down on his small farm, and he smelt it very unpleasant, exactly like, he says, the bilge water of a ship—a sulphurous sort of stench. After the wind rose and cleared off those clouds or lumps of fog, there remained on the grass over which they had hung, as well as on the potato shaws, [stalks,] an appearance of grey dew or hoar frost. The next morning he noticed the leaves ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... strength of the coils as they curl and slip about her, drawing her whole life into one knotted and loathsome embrace. Then she knows not how, but while the roses fall in a red and white rain about her she escapes from the stench of the scaly hide, from the strength ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... evidence of mutiny and treachery on every side, with red flames lighting the horizon and the stench of burning villages on every hand, the strange Anglo-Saxon quality persisted that has done more even that the fighting-quality to teach the English tongue to half the world. The native servants who had ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... return apace into life's treasure house: these are things that long haunted my mind. I regretfully left the mole lying in the dust of the road. I had to go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters. It was not the place for philosophizing over a stench. What would people say who ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the Castle of Buen Retiro, formerly a royal palace, and now a prison. When my conductor had consigned me to the officer of the watch I was handed over to a corporal, who led me into a vast hall on the ground floor of the building. The stench was dreadful, and the prisoners were about thirty, ten of them being soldiers. There were ten or twelve large beds, some benches, no tables, and ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... they threw over, asked, as their victims fell, 'Why they did not come into Badajos?' In this dreadful situation, while the dead were lying in heaps, and others continually falling, the wounded crawling about to get some shelter from the merciless shower above, and withal a sickening stench from the burnt flesh of the slain, Captain Nicholas, of the engineers, was observed by Lieutenant Shaw, of the 43rd, making incredible efforts to force his way with a few men into the Santa Maria Bastion. ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... requests, and left them to be consumed by the famine. Now every one of these died with their eyes fixed upon the temple, and left the seditious alive behind them. Now the seditious at first gave orders that the dead should be buried out of the public treasury, as not enduring the stench of their dead bodies. But afterwards, when they could not do that, they had them cast down from the walls ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... life saw few set times and days for pleasure. The holy days of the English Church were as a stench to the Puritan nostrils, and their public celebration was at once rigidly forbidden by the laws of New England. New holidays were not quickly evolved, and the sober gatherings for matters of Church and State for a time took their place. The hatred of "wanton Bacchanallian Christmasses" ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... wrinkled in disgust as his nostrils were assailed by the awful stench of the hut. The nasty grasses upon which he lay exuded the effluvium of sweaty bodies, of decayed animal matter and of offal. But worse was yet to come. He had lain in the uncomfortable position in which they ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... horse, so that in the fall he made he to-frushed two of the great ribs in the overturn. And when they that were therein saw him fall, they opened the trap-door of a great pit that was in the midst of the hall. So soon as they had opened it, the foulest stench that any smelt ever issued thereout. They take their lord and cast him into this abysm and this filth. After that, they come to Perceval, and so yield the castle and put them at his mercy in everything. Thereupon, behold you, the Damsel of the Car that cometh. They deliver up to her ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... the herrings are left upon the shore useless for want of salt. Such immense quantities of this fish is left upon the shore to rot, I am surprised it does not bring some epidemic disorder to the inhabitants by the nauseous stench arising from ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... living mass of animal life. To an immense piece of unhewn timber was attached a yoke of oxen, and, as this heavy log was drawn through the ditch, it seemed absolutely to float on a crushed mass of vegetable corruption. The following day, under the heat of a tropical sun, the stench arising from this decaying mass was perceptible the country round, giving a strange and incomprehensible notion of the power and abundance of this destroyer of the ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... filthiness. During our stay the offensive smell from the accumulation of dirt on the yards and staircases of the palace was quite overwhelming: it is easier to imagine than to describe the abominable stench that pervaded the whole place. The few mosques are without importance—miserable whitewashed coral buildings. One, however, under construction promised to be a ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... a sort of mental nausea. Ben was not a philanthropist or a social reformer; the inspiring thought of the inexhaustible field for usefulness therein presented had never occurred to him. He wished chiefly to get away from the stench and ugliness; and, turning down a cross street, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... head of the flock, was to be ordained to the glory of God. Then he offered two he-goats for the people: one of which was offered in expiation of the sins of the multitude. For the he-goat is an evil-smelling animal; and from its skin clothes are made having a pungent odor; to signify the stench, uncleanness and the sting of sin. After this he-goat had been immolated, its blood was taken, together with the blood of the calf, into the Holy of Holies, and the entire sanctuary was sprinkled with it; to signify that the tabernacle ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... courage of despair and initiated counter-attack upon counter-attack, all of which we had to meet with great determination. The weather was extremely hot, which added much to the discomfort: and, as progress had been very slow for some time, it was impossible to clear up the battlefield, and the stench was almost insupportable. At length the village of Guinchy was captured, and, with our men installed on the further side of the slope, the fighting for position came to an end. We were now entering on the third stage of the great battle, which had commenced more than two months ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... bishop of the arrival of this treasure, and invited him to witness the opening of the casket, and to attend for the purpose of verifying its contents. Accordingly the bishop came, and on opening the casket, there proceeded from it such an abominable stench, that no man could endure it, infecting, as it did, the whole of the chapel. The bishop thereupon ordered all the vials to be taken out, and carefully examined one by one, hoping to ascertain the cause of this strange ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... Only take this Caution along with you; Do not forget to have in your Pack a couple of Hounds, called Hunters in the Highwayes, that will Scent upon hard Ground, where we cannot perceive Pricks or Impressions; and for your Huntsman's and your own Ease, let a couple of Old stench Hounds accompany you, by whose sure Scent, the too great Swiftness of the young and unexperienced Ones may be restrained and regulated; and if you please, take the following Observations with ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... and handsome, and the banks of the canals are planted with rows of trees, that make a very pleasing appearance; but the trees concur with the canals to make the situation unwholesome.[131] The stagnant canals in the dry season exhale an intolerable stench, and the trees impede the course of the air, by which, in some degree, the putrid effluvia would be dissipated. In the wet season the inconvenience is equal, for then these reservoirs of corrupted water overflow their banks in the lower part of the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... hairy tarantula scuttling through the tropical green rushes along the path. And the hunger and thirst and heat and dirt and rolling sweat of the last day's march and every detail of the day's fight; the stench of dead horse and dead man; the shriek of shell and rattle of musketry and yell of officer; the slow rush through the long grass, and the climb up the hill. And always, he was tramping, tramping, tramping ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... his face, and he cringed away, trying desperately to escape the stinging pain. Under the smarting blows, he remembered previous whippings, administered by a strong-armed kitchen master, and he seemed to smell the stench of the scullery once more. Suddenly, he sank to his ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... quick Lime into foxed Drinks while they are working in the Tun or Vat, that its Fire and Salts may break the Cohesions of the Beer or Ale, and burn away the stench, that the Corruption would always cause; but then such Drink should by a Peg at the bottom of the Vat be drawn off as fine as possible, and the Dregs ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... the back? Oh, halt in front! And duck when the shells come near! Carrying parties all night long, all day in a muddy trench, With your feet in the wet and your head in the rain and the sodden khaki's stench! Then over the top in the morning, and onward all you can— This is the work that wins the War, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... fly over the highest Walls; I must therefore inform him, that their strong Holds have all the open Places cover'd with Canvass stretch'd from Side to Side; upon which is strew'd an Herb so venemous, that, in six Hours after it has been expos'd to the Sun, it emits so pestiferous a Stench, that no Fowl can approach it by many Yards, but what will fall dead; and this Stench, by the Effluvia mounting, is no way offensive to those below. This is the Reason their Sieges are rather Blockades, and no fortify'd Town was ever taken but by starving. For tho' I have said, the Cacklogallinians ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... drawing nearer and with still more frenzy; "Glencoe has songs on it already. The stench from Invcrlochy's in the air; it's a mock in Benderloch and Ardgour, it's a nightmare in Glenurchy, and the women are keening on the slopes of Cladich. Cowards, cowards, little men, cowards! all the curses of Conan on you and the black rocks; die from home, and Hell itself ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... early this year," said he, "and put their foot into it up to the knee. Shipping to Red River was an experiment with them, and I hope they've got their belly full. We've got dead and dying cattle in every pasture from the falls to the river, while these in sight aren't able to keep out of the stench of those that croaked between here and the ford. Oh, this shipping is a fine thing—for the railroads. Here I've got to rot all summer with these cattle, just because two of my trains went into the ditch while no other foreman had over ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... trying-out is going on at night—the red glare of the fires, and the thick lurid smoke ascending in dense columns round the masts! Any one, not knowing what was going forward, would think, to a certainty, the ship was on fire; and then the stench of the boiling oil, hissing and bubbling in the pots—the suffocating feel of the smoke—the fierce-looking, greasy, unwashed men—I say, those who have been in a South Sea whaler will never ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... country, or die in the attempt. He seemed to feel that the whole responsibility of the struggle rested on him. Always ready to obey orders from superior officers cheerfully, and never wanting in energy to execute them. The deep snows of Quebec had not cooled his ardor. The fetid stench of an English prison ship could not abate his love of liberty and country. The blood and carnage of Saratoga and of Monmouth had given him confidence. The blood-stained soil of Valley Forge had inured him to hardships to which ...
— Reminiscences of the Military Life and Sufferings of Col. Timothy Bigelow, Commander of the Fifteenth Regiment of the Massachusetts Line in the Continental Army, during the War of the Revolution • Charles Hersey
... Ford, "looked one way and another with surprise, and were astonished at their own folly." The payment of interest on the state debt ceased after July, 1841, and "in a short time Illinois became a stench in the nostrils of the civilized world . . . . The impossibility of selling kept us from losing population; the fear of disgrace or high taxes prevented us from gaining materially."* The State Bank and the Shawneetown Bank failed ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... clapped her hand to her nose and held it tight shut. The veriest stench came from the little brown drop. Maya almost fainted. She flew away as fast as she could and seated herself on a raspberry, where she held on to her nose and shivered with disgust ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... whole position, for a man of M. Zaimis's character, was untenable: if sense of duty had prompted him to take up the burden, common-sense counselled him to lay it down. So he resigned; and the fat was once more in the fire—and the blaze and the stench were greater than ever; for his resignation synchronized with ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... through its night of agony, keeping alive faint hope that hell must have an end. Dawn broke sweet and calm. For it makes no matter if a nation writhes in agony, or man wreaks hate on man, the wind and the sky still whisper and smile; and the scent of wild flowers is not canceled by the stench of tired humanity. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... below, which, however, vary much in development, and the flesh tooth is most marked in those in which the tuberculate is least developed, and vice versa. The great and small intestines differ little in calibre, and many of them (i.e. the family) can diffuse at will a disgusting stench." This last peculiarity is a specialty of the American members of the family, notably the skunk, of the power of which almost incredible stories are told. I remember reading not long ago an account of a train passing over a skunk, and for a time ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... miles, and generally as much as sixty in a day. He slept in filthy inns where fleas and lice abounded and mosquitoes tormented him. Horses, cows, buffaloes and sheep would pass through his sleeping-room, and the stench of the stables nearly poisoned him. Yet he was so ill that often he could hardly keep his seat ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... of pilgrims, carrying triangular white and black flags, with the Persian coat of arms, the same we have seen over many doorways in Persia as warnings of the danger of trespassing upon the religious services held within. The cadaverous stench revealed the presence of half-dried human bones being carried by relatives and friends for interment in the sacred "City of the Silent." Thus dead bodies, in loosely nailed boxes, are always traveling from one end of Persia to the other. Among the pilgrims were blue and green turbaned ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... got his secretary, but the secretary of the Senate, who have taken upon themselves his sins, and who place him there under a large salary to annoy and obstruct the operations of the Executive. This the people well enough understand, and he is a stench in the nostrils of their ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... when from their terrible night of horror they were brought on deck once more, weak and worn and sick." Then, after all had come up and been splashed with salt water from the pumps, men went below to bring up the dead. There was never a morning search of this sort that was fruitless. The stench, the suffocation, the confinement, oftentimes the violence of a neighbor, brought to every dawn its tale, of corpses, and with scant gentleness all were brought up and thrown over the side to the waiting ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... for you in it. Look at me! I cannot assist the coachman in my house to decorate my forehead for me. Look at me! I pay my coachman. Look at me! Am I doing the coachman a favor when I can't stand the stable-stench? ...
— Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) - A Tragedy in Four Acts • Frank Wedekind
... service found only in the East. A good breakfast cheered a stomach outraged by the greasy mess perpetrated upon native boats in the name of Spanish cookery, and a cool shower bath eliminated the stench of stale copra which had clung to his nostrils if not to his clothing. An hour before noon he left the house and strolled about the scorching town, regardless of where he went so long as he found shaded ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... her and hearken. This is she. Stop the ways fast against the stench that nips Your nostril as it nears her. Lo, the lips That between prayer and prayer find time to be Poisonous, the hands holding a cup and key, Key of deep hell, cup whence blood reeks and drips; The ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and beckoned to Diana, patting the cushions beside him. Mastering the loathing that filled her she sat down with all the unconcern she could assume. The proximity of the man nauseated her. He reeked of sweat and grease and ill-kept horses, the pungent stench of the native. Her thoughts went back to the other Arab, of whose habits she had been forced into such an intimate knowledge. Remembering all that she had heard of the desert people she had been surprised ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... enclosure the rock had been hewn away in such a fashion as to create a vast amphitheatre; and that this was the place where sacrifice was offered by the priests was shown by the blood-stained altar in the centre of it, to which fragments of flesh also adhered, whence was wafted up to us a dreadful stench that instantly racked us with queasy qualms. Save directly in front of the entrance to the temple, where was a great stone balcony with a smaller balcony below it, all the sides of the amphitheatre were cut in steps, which made, also, benches where the multitude could sit at their ease ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... from a blackened chimney hung the more pungent sharpness of freshly burned gun-powder, and the man standing near the door gazed downward, with a dazed stare, at the floor by his feet, where lay the pistol which gave forth that acrid stench. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... away and lifts a man-hole plate in the platform. I seize the hand-lamp and get down on to the tank, and the Second follows. It is not pleasant, understand, down there, where bilge collects and rats run riot, and grease is rolled into filthy black balls, and the stench is intolerable. I push on towards ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... on board without being discovered by any Iroquois. They lodge me forthwith down in the hold; and in order to conceal me they put a great chest over the hatchway. I was two days and two nights in the belly of that vessel, with such discomfort that I thought I would suffocate and die with the stench. I remembered then poor Jonas, and I prayed our Lord, Ne fugerem a facie Domini, that I might not hide myself before his face, and that I might not withdraw far from his wishes; but on the contrary, infatuaret omnia consilia quae non essent ad suam ...
— Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 • Various
... cabin when he came out again, and telling us that he had no doubt she was a Portuguese or Brazilian, ordered the hatches, which were closed, to be lifted off. This took us some little time to do. Never shall I forget the horrible stench—the shrieks and cries and groans which ascended from the hold as the hatches were got off. We lowered our lanterns and looked down. There, arranged in rows along the deck, and chained two and two, squatting on their hams, were several hundreds of blacks—men, women, ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... with their retinue of ladies and squires, and hounds and hawks, are riding quietly through a wood. Suddenly their horses stop, draw back; the Emperor's bay stretches out his long neck sniffing the air; the kings strain forward to see, one holding his nose for the stench of death which meets him; and before them are three open coffins, in which lie, in three loathsome stages of corruption, from blue and bloated putrescence to well-nigh fleshless decay, three crowned corpses. This is the triumph of Death; the grim and horrible jest ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... a wind having a "raw stench;" but the smell of bait is suggested by the second line of the poem. A literal rendering is not possible in this case; the art of the composition being ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... until a certain day, when the carcase of an ox came drifting down the current and stuck upon the forepoint of that island. They tried in vain to lift it up or push it off; it was too heavy to be moved an inch by all their efforts. They named it in their speech the Heavy One. Its stench infected the whole island, and kept on increasing until the hapless ducks were forced ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... modesty away by the foulness of their speech and presence? When the aggregate filth of both sexes shall have met together at the polling stations, as it will be sure to do, we hardly think any chaste or modest home-loving woman will go near this stench ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... believe that No Man's Land was littered with the unburied dead, but I saw nothing of the sort at this place. There had been no German counter attack since our men came up here. But at one point as we went along the trench there was a dull stench. "Germans, I think," said my guide, though I did not see how he ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... and the Orient, posterior and posterior, sitting tight, holding fast the culture dumped by them on to primitive America, Atlantic to Pacific, were monumental colophons a disorderly country fellow, vulgar Long Islander. not overfond of the stench choking native respiration, poked down off the shelf with the aid of some mere blades of grass; and deliberately climbing up, brazenly usurping one end of the new America, now waves his spears aloft and shouts down valleys, across plains, over mountains, into heights: Come, what man ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... marches, sharp fighting, or, worse yet—carrying the wounded from the battlefield and burying the dead. They lived poorly, slept on the ground or in the mud at times, and became accustomed to filth and stench, indifferent to danger and hardened to death. When a comrade fell those who knew him best said: "Poor fellow, he's gone," and buried him without a prayer; but the dead who were personally unknown awakened no more feeling than ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... grim drawings of Daumier. All the rooms were painted alike, in salmon-colour with a high dado of maroon; and there was in them an odour of disinfectants, mingling as the afternoon wore on with the crude stench of humanity. The first room was the largest and in the middle of it were a table and an office chair for the physician; on each side of this were two smaller tables, a little lower: at one of these sat the house-physician and at the other the clerk who took the 'book' for the day. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... countries assembled to thank the man who had rid the world of its worst enemy. But amid the marriage festival and the general rejoicings it was forgotten that the monster's carcass had been left unburied, and as it was now decaying, it occasioned such a stench that no one could approach it. This gave rise to diseases of which many people died. Then the king's son-in-law determined to seek help from the sorcerer of the East. This did not seem difficult to him ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... the floor, he twisted sideways and managed to bring up one arm to protect his head. In an instant he was buried in a great, heavy, slippery mass of fish. His nostrils filled with the oily stench, and when he opened his mouth to breathe, he closed it again on a fish tail. He spat it out, and then, furious, he struggled against the slimy weight, got his hands and feet under him and heaved. Fish cascaded from his arched back and he ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... hovel out of hurdles thatched with reeds, in South Devon. He lived in it, solitary, speaking to no one. Occasionally he bought a sheep and killed it, and ate it as the appetite prompted, and before it was done the meat had become putrid. At length the police interfered, the stench became intolerable in the neighbourhood, as the hovel was by the roadside. The doctor was ordered to remove, and he went no one seems to ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... the anaconda kills its prey by its pestilent breath, is wholly fabulous. Waterton altogether denies the existence of any odour in the snake's breath. It is possible, however, that some species may produce a horrible stench, from a substance secreted in certain glands near the tail—a fact which has probably given rise ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... no more provision for me in the waters; let me leave this craft.' And she still answereth me, 'Allah is bountiful: good will presently betide thee.' Is this dead ass the good whereof she speaketh?" And he grieved with the sorest grief. Then he turned to another place, so he might remove from the stench of the dead donkey, and cast his net there and waited a full hour: then he drew it in and found it heavy. Thereupon quoth he, "Good; we are hauling up all the dead donkeys in the sea and ridding it of its rubbish.[FN241]" However he gave not over tugging at the net, till blood came from the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... heads and then hurled out onto the purple patches. Fire arose from the water and ran with frantic speed across the crests of the low waves, while the Salariki coughed and buried their noses in their perfume boxes, for the wind drove shoreward an overpowering stench. ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... unendurable to himself, and to those who were about him, because of the stench of his ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... strong columns from the bosom of the earth with a sound like a shout of joy. "There," he repeated, "there is the liquor which God the Eternal brews for all his children. Not in the simmering still over the smoky fires choked with poisonous gases, surrounded with stench of sickening odors and corruptions, doth your Father in heaven prepare the precious essence of life—pure cold water; but in the green glade and grassy dell, where the red-deer wanders and the child loves to play, there God brews it; ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... followed suit and did the like; then one after the other they re-entered the tomb of San Satiro, slipping in through a tiny crack in the lid, leaving their victim lying full length in a stream of a most intolerable stench. ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... gay and brilliant after abundant rains, and the spirit of youth dwelt in it, though the season was now autumn. All that was gracious triumphed. As the motorcars passed through Summer Street they raised only a little dust, and their stench was soon dispersed by the wind and replaced by the scent of the wet birches or of the pines. Mr. Beebe, at leisure for life's amenities, leant over his Rectory gate. Freddy leant by him, smoking ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... importance to them to secure their riches. They agreed therefore to cut Cassim's body into four quarters, to hang two on one side and two on the other, within the door of the cave, to terrify any person who should attempt the same thing, determining not to return to the cave till the stench of the body was completely exhaled. They had no sooner taken this resolution than they put it in execution, and when they had nothing more to detain them, left the place of their hoards well closed. They mounted their horses, went to beat ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... satisfied; in the severest winter the family sit in a circle, carrying on their several employments round a fire in the centre. The interior displays as much filthiness as if the inhabitants belonged to the dirtiest class of the brute creation. The smoke; the stench of bad fish, and blubber; the repulsive figures of the women, disgustingly occupied in seeking for vermin on the heads or skins of the men, and actually eating them when found; the great utensil for the service of the whole family, which is also the ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... ever be willing (Rufus!) her tender thigh under thyself to bestow, Not an thou tempt her full by bribes of the rarest garments, Or by the dear delights gems the pellucidest deal. Harms thee an ugly tale wherein of thee is recorded 5 Horrible stench of the goat under thine arm-pits be lodged. All are in dread thereof; nor wonder this, for 'tis evil Beastie, nor damsel fair ever thereto shall succumb. So do thou either kill that cruel pest o' their noses, Or at their reason of flight blatantly wondering ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... millions of miles, over many sulphurous rocks, and many a hideous cataract and fiery precipice, where all things bent downwards ever, with impending aspect; yet they all avoided us, except when once I poked my nose out of the veil, there struck me such a stifling and choking stench as would have ended me had he not saved me out of hand with the reviving water. When I had recovered, I could see that we were come to a halt, for in all that stupenduous chasm no sooner stay were possible, so sheer and slippery was it. There my Guide allowed me once more to rest; ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... any words can describe. The room in which they were confined was occupied by about a hundred native criminals; there was no ventilation beyond that afforded by the cracks in the walls, and the continual stench and heat were almost unbearable. As soon as she could get about, Mrs. Judson built herself a small bamboo hut by the gate of the prison, and lived there, to be as near as possible to her husband. After he had been a month in this black hole Mr. Judson was ...
— Excellent Women • Various |
