"Suffocating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by that terrible powerlessness which paralyzes us in our dreams; I try to cry out—but I cannot; I want to move—I cannot; I try, with the most violent efforts and out of breath, to turn over and throw off this being which is crushing and suffocating ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... when he reached it, and the wine shop was deserted. Outside, the California August lay withering and suffocating over all the land. The far hills were burnt to dry, hay-like grass and brittle clods. The eucalyptus trees in front of the wine shop (the first trees Felipe had seen all that day) were coated with dust. The plains of sagebrush and the alkali flats shimmered and ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... size of a nutmeg, rising and falling alternately, with the top not too thick nor too thin, and with the appearance of waves, mixed with the grain in the hogshead, rising and falling in succession, and when you put your head over the steam, and it flying into your nose, will have a suffocating effect, or when it will instantly extinguish a candle when held over it, you may feel assured, it ...
— The Practical Distiller • Samuel McHarry
... a plunge down into that swollen rushing torrent, and he would be past all rescue. An instant of suffocating pain, then singing in his ears, sparks in his eyes, unconsciousness—annihilation perhaps—who knew? Just then any other world, any other penalty, seemed preferable ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... A flood of suffocating emotion swept over her, full of ugly swimming and crawling reptiles, and invertebrate horrors, the inevitable scavengers of the ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! 'What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying.... ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... soldiers, who have gallantly rescued a couple of children that have been burning and suffocating under roof). Yes, take 'em off to the hospital! Poor little creatures—not much hope for them, I'm afraid! (To ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various
... those interchanges, and the looks accompanying them! Now, if the skeleton up-stairs had taken that opportunity, for instance, of calling out 'Here I am, suffocating in the closet!' ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... the winches hammered and pulleys screamed as the cases came up and the empty slings went down. The heat got suffocating and the slant of masts and deck made matters worse, because the men must hold the derricks back with guys while the heavy goods cleared the coamings of the hatch. Much judgment was needed to drop them safely in the boats. Men gasped and choked, quarreled ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... in crossing an open frozen marsh the snow drifted before the gale in clouds so dense as to be suffocating. The storm was attaining the proportions of a blizzard, and when Jamie again reached the shelter of the forest beyond the marsh he found it necessary to stop to ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... cold and more dense air rushing in, it seemed as if a sudden wind was blowing violently. The current drove the thick smoke, and showered the burning cinders, directly on the chesnut-tree. She felt the scorching heat, while the suffocating vapour almost deprived her of the power of respiration. She grew dizzy; yet still the only movement she made was, to turn her child a little in her arms, that he might be more effectually shielded from the smoke. At that moment, one of the warriors approached, in the wild movements of ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... speaks wisely. 'Tis not often that men who live in books, and spend their time in pouring over mouldy parchments, and in well-nigh suffocating themselves with stinking fumes have common sense in worldly matters. But when I have conversed with your father, I have always found that, although he takes not much interest in public affairs at present, he is marvellously well versed in our history, and can give illustrations ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... struggling, he continued in this state of awful alarm, vainly endeavouring to extricate himself from the toils of an imaginary monster, that was suffocating him, until he sank exhausted ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... il faut. You were expected, and you ought to have gone; it looked spiteful to stay away. I should absolutely like to see you subjected to 212 deg. Fahrenheit, in order to mark the result. Here I am almost suffocating with the heat, which would be respectable in Soudan, and you sit there bolt upright, looking as cool as a west wind in March. Beauty, you should get yourself patented as a social refrigerator, 'Warranted proof against ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... suffocating by the time I reached Wolf Larsen's bunk. I reached my hand and felt for his. He was lying motionless, but moved slightly at the touch of my hand. I felt over and under his blankets. There was no warmth, no sign of fire. Yet that smoke which blinded me and made me cough and gasp ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... shall never think in that way again, Mabel," gasped forth the Pathfinder, who appeared to utter his words like one just raised above the pressure of some suffocating substance. "No, no, I shall never think of you, or any one ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... chestnut burr from a souffle of maroons served on a silver dish. I could hear the moth-eaten string of steeds munching noisily over at one end of the huge darkness, and the odor that arose from their repast was of corn and not of suffocating gasoline. Tall weeds and long frames with teeth in them, which gave them the appearance of huge alligator mouths yawning from the dusk to snap me, pressed close on each side. Straps and ropes and harness were draped from the ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Beynac left some pleasant memories. The days were fiery, and, when the south wind blew, almost suffocating; but when the sun went down into the west there usually came a beneficent change. During the few minutes that the golden circle lay seemingly upon the edge of the world, a boat crossing the river appeared to glide over unfathomable depths ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... swept into the drawing-room they filled the place with a suffocating sweetness procured at the perfumer's. Their costumes, as to architecture, were the latest fashion intensified; they were rainbow-hued; they were hung with jewels—chiefly diamonds. It would have been plain to any eye that it had cost ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... republished and the inquisitors encouraged. Moreover, in accordance with Philip's suggestion, orders were now given that the heretics should be executed at midnight in their dungeons, by binding their heads between their knees, and then slowly suffocating them in tubs of water. Secret drowning was substituted for public burning, in order that the heretic's crown of vainglory, which was thought to console him in his agony, might never be placed upon ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... pull him up. He was almost once more on his feet, when another creeper caught his foot. Again he fell, and this time our enemies were too quick for him. Rushing on him by hundreds, they threw themselves on his body, almost suffocating him as they held him down by main force. I was treated much in the same way, when a huge negro caught me up by the back of the neck, and made as if he was about to cut off my head. He did not do so, but held me tightly by the collar while ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... weary her with talk, and a silence as sweet as communion lengthened between them as the stage lengthened. He was very intent upon her presence; the consciousness of her there beside him seemed, at times, almost suffocating. He could by no means forget that she had in a curious way been assigned to him—set aside to be his wife, the partner of all his days; and she tolerated him kindly, all unsuspicious of the significance of his advent ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... Thurston would not hear! He had won his right to rest by work well done, but she—it now seemed that a lifetime would be too short to mourn him. Helen shivered at the thought, then she felt as if she were suffocating. Turning the light low, she flung the long window open. Beyond the electric glare of the city, with its shapeless pile of roofs and towering poles, the mountains rose, serenely majestic, in robes of awful purity. They were beckoning her she felt. The man whom ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise: What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense: The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... skirts and saying "Thank you, Mr. Rutter—" and Ben with his face in so broad a grin that it got set that way—Aunt Dinah, the cook, having to ask him three times "Was he gwineter hab a fit" before he could answer by reason of the chuckle which was suffocating him. ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... company realised that something was happening to Bert; either he was suffocating or going mad. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... gently soothed it and carrying some damp clothing into the sitting-room, placed it before the open fire to dry. She returned to the child and I lay down by the fire. I must have slept for some time when I was awakened by a suffocating sensation. To my horror I saw that the clothes had caught fire and that the wood-work around the ...
— The Nomad of the Nine Lives • A. Frances Friebe
... two others. The action then became general. The overmatched Confederates kept up a losing battle for more than an hour, in full view of many thousands of ardent Southerners ashore. The scene, at its height, was appalling. The smoke, belching black from the funnels and white from the guns, made a suffocating pall overhead; while the dark, squat, hideous ironclad hulls seemed to have risen from a submarine inferno to stab each other with livid tongues of flame—so deadly close the two flotillas fought. When the awful hour was over the Confederates were not only defeated but destroyed; ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... eyes of the world, humbled to the dust as he had been humbled; nothing short of that could satisfy him now. But how, how was her ruin to be accomplished? he asked himself as he paced back and forth, almost suffocating with rage. Suddenly an idea flashed through his mind, causing ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... fare; they have their health miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close vapor of these malignant minerals. A hundred thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and managing the products of those mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how great would be our just indignation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... one o'clock on an intolerable day peculiar to the Dakota plain. A frightfully hot, withering, and powerful wind was abroad. The thermometer stood nearly a hundred in the shade, and the wind, so far from being a relief, was suffocating because of its heat and the dust it swept along ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... now what had been the name of the Englishman: Captain the Hon. Richard Mildare, late of the Grey Hussars—was dead. No hand made murderous by the lust of gold had helped him to his death. Sudden failure of the heart is common in aggravated cases of rheumatic fever, and with one suffocating struggle, one brief final pang, he had gone to join her he loved. But his dead face did not look at rest. There was some reflection in it of the terror that had come upon him in the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... limits of bodily strength could confine her zeal to do and suffer for others; a river of love had suddenly been checked in her heart, and it needed all these channels to drain off the waters that must otherwise have drowned her in the suffocating agonies of repression. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... received a suffocating blow full in the face, not from Mr. Bender's fist but from the solid bundle of books at the end of the strap. Ramsey saw eight or ten objectives instantly: there were Wesley Benders standing full length in the air on top of other Wesley ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... stood still in the doorway; so greatly was she imprest by the inflamed and at the same time deathly face, with its dim eyes fastened upon her. She felt simply dismayed, with a sort of cold and suffocating dismay: the thought that she would not have felt like that if she had really loved him flashed instantaneously ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... Mr. Brown's room, had found the atmosphere close and suffocating, and that gentleman, tossing restlessly on the bed from side to side, talking to himself in a wild delirium. She left the door ajar and began bathing his fevered head in cool water. This seemed to soothe him greatly and he sank back almost immediately into a deathlike slumber, ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... companion, as if to see what effect the talk had had upon him, and broke out into a suffocating chuckle. "Dot's vot it is all day long—don't you yonder I go crazy? First it is sideboards and den it is vooden saints. Here you, Bobby! Come inside vunce! I vant to ask ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Ah, my God!" As if suffocating, she pressed her hand upon her heart, and bowed her head till it rested on the table. And then he heard her murmur in a ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... fur, or cause the slightest smell. In fact, Stripes was altogether one of the cleanest and daintiest and most gentlemanly of all the wild creatures. But when he had to, he could contract those muscles around the oil sac with such violence that the deadly oil—blinding and suffocating—would be shot forth to a distance of several feet, right into the face of the enemy. And that, let me tell you, was ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... then held out his hand to Joe, and in this dumb and piteous manner begged him to lend him his knife. Joe drew it from his pocket, but could not brace his nerves sufficiently to venture within the suffocating man's reach. At length he bethought him of his pole, and opening the blade thrust it in the end of it and cautiously handed it to Sneak. Sneak immediately ran the sharp steel through the many folds of the snake, and it fell to the ground in a dozen ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... thought he could do so unseen. One day, however, when he had reached some distance, he dislodged a large stone which blocked up the opening toward his cell. His terror was frightful. Not only was the air suffocating, and the darkness dreadful, but he knew that if any of the guards were unexpectedly to come into his cell, the opening must be discovered, and all his toil again lost. For eight hours he stayed in the tunnel paralyzed by fear. Then he roused himself, and by dint of superhuman struggles ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... handsome eyes were on her mercilessly—she was suffocating besides with a wild desire to laugh, her breath coming short and quick. She gave one agonized look at Brother Skates, and then, lifted her eyes ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... dense clouds of steam and smoke issuing by this time from the opening, and as we looked the smoke suddenly became tinged with the lurid reflection of flames. I darted to the opening, and looking down as well as I could through the blinding suffocating clouds which rushed up in denser volumes every instant, saw that the bulkhead was burned through, and the flames already spreading ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... flames of a few poor slender tapers which flicker against the walls in stone arches, a dense crowd of human figures veiled in black, in a place overpowering and suffocating—underground, no doubt—which is filled with the perfume of the incense of Arabia; and a noise of almost wicked movement, which sirs us to alarm and even horror: bleatings of new-born babies, cries of distress of tiny mites whose voices are drowned, as if ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... anything before observed by anyone who saw it." It was a bowl-shaped object, about 8 inches in diameter, and one inch thick. Bright buff-colored, and having upon it a "fine nap." Upon removing this covering, a buff-colored, pulpy substance of the consistency of soft-soap, was found—"of an offensive, suffocating smell." ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... then with flying, reckless feet, jumping from boulder to boulder, slipping and sliding, but, as she said afterwards, going too fast to fall. The person in the water had put up a wet hand, crying hoarsely for help, and the leaping, suffocating bound which her heart gave told her that it was ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... another for a stretch of one thousand five hundred miles, wherever climatic and physical conditions were favorable to their irrigated tillage and highland herds of llamas. They found it easier to climb pass after pass and mount to ever higher altitudes, rather than descend to the suffocating coasts where neither man nor beast could long survive, though they pushed the political boundary finally to the seaboard. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... by exercise and impatience, throbbed fiercely in her temples and thumped heavily at her heart, producing a half-suffocating sensation; and, in her feverish anxiety, the doom of Damiens appeared tolerable in comparison with the torturing suspense of nine hours ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... second dog speedily comes to the rescue the first is inevitably drowned. If a companion arrives to free him, he is so disturbed by this unexpected bath that he regains the bank as quickly as possible, and has no further desire to attack this suffocating prey. A strong and courageous old male can thus hold his own against twenty or thirty dogs, drowning some and frightening others, and the hunter is obliged to intervene and put an end to this energetic defence by ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... to him had been at the station. He wanted to see his mother in his home. Walking fast exhausted him, and he had to rest. How dead his legs felt! In fact he felt queer all over. The old burn and gnaw in his breast had expanded to a heavy, full, suffocating sensation. Yet his blood seemed to race. Suddenly an overwhelming emotion of rapture flooded over him. Home at last! He did not think of any one. He was walking across the railroad yards where as a boy he had been wont to steal rides on freight trains. Soon he reached the bridge. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... no denying it. Not one of us has escaped the irritation of temper naturally resulting from ten days experience of the fog which has been clinging with suffocating affection to earth and sea, putting an end to outdoor sport and indoor comfort, taking the curl out of hair, the starch out of dresses, the sweetness out of dispositions, and hanging like a pall over all efforts ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... grown apace. The slight crackling sound which had originally accompanied its progress, was replaced by a sullen roar; volumes of ruddy smoke filled the air; a pungent, peculiar smell penetrated even to Roseen's room, almost suffocating her. Would no one hear, would no one heed? Taking the poker she knocked on the floor, hoping to produce some response from her grandfather, but finding that he did not answer she fell to hammering and battering the lock of her ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... minute. He then turned his eyes in the direction of the fort, shuddered, heaved a profound sigh, and looking up to heaven with the apparent fervour that became his situation, seemed to pray for a moment or two inwardly and devoutly. The thick and almost suffocating breathing of one immediately beyond the coffin, was now distinctly heard by all. Halloway started from his attitude of devotion, gazed earnestly on the form whence it proceeded, and then wildly extending his arms, suffered a smile of satisfaction to illumine his pale features. All eyes were now ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... the throats thickened, and lungs seemed to be eaten by the chlorine poison. Yet the men fought on until exhausted, and then fell to suffer through a death struggle which continued from twenty-four hours to three days of suffocating agony. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... ill for a very long time. At night, when I was almost suffocating, I had to have some one to sit up with me; then Alexix and Benny would take turns. At last I was convalescent, and then it was Lise who replaced Etiennette and walked with me down by the river. Of course during these walks she could not talk, ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... door came sounds of the whispering voices without, drowned by the shrieking bellow of the cattle. There was not a breath of air in the suffocating room. Jim ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... oblivion. Added to the uncertain and uncomfortable state of his mind, his body felt feverish and oppressed. This was chiefly owing to the close and confined air of the small apartment in which they slept. After enduring for some time the broiling and suffocating feeling attendant upon such an atmosphere, he rose to endeavour to open the window of the apartment, and thus to procure a change of air. Alas! the first trial reminded him that he was in jail, and that the building being contrived for security, not comfort, the means of procuring fresh ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... angle of a wall, And cursed, and reeled against, and flung aside By drunken brawlers as they shuffled past, A man was groping to what seemed a light. His eyelids burnt and quivered with the strain Of looking, and against his temples beat The all enshrouding, suffocating dark. He stumbled, lurched, and struck against a door That opened, and a howl of obscene mirth Grated his senses, wallowing on the floor Lay men, and dogs and women in the dirt. He sickened, loathing it, and as he gazed The candle ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... flames sweep up a mountain side. They run along the ground licking up the leaves and dead branches. They leap from tree to tree, and then with a roar the sheet of flame goes to the top of a tall pine. The air is like the breath from an oven and is filled with sparks and with suffocating smoke. The birds and animals flee away in ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... heresy, refused, in all the pride of martyrdom, to renounce her faith. She was condemned to the grave—not to the common occupancy of that cold refuge of the lifeless body, but to all the horrors of living contact and hopeless struggles with the suffocating clay. She suffered her punishment, in the midst of a crowd of curious fanatics; but such was the disgust inspired by the spectacle, that it was thought impolitic to hazard in the face of day another exhibition of the kind. Beatrice's judges, therefore, after a summary ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... fits or fretting; By day, 'twas gadding or coquetting. Fond to be seen, she kept a bevy Of powder'd coxcombs at her levy; The 'squire and captain took their stations, 55 And twenty other near relations; Jack suck'd his pipe, and often broke A sigh in suffocating smoke; While all their hours were pass'd between Insulting ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... very faults, doubts, swervings, doublings upon himself, have been typical of our age. We are like the voyagers of a ship, casting off for new seas, distant shores. We would still dwell in the old suffocating and dead haunts, remembering and magnifying their pleasant experiences only, and more than once impell'd to jump ashore before it is too late, and stay where our fathers stay'd, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... need be told that the pretty, bell-shaped pink and white flower on the vigorous vine clambering over stone walls and winding about the shrubbery of wayside thickets in a suffocating embrace is akin to the morning-glory of the garden trellis (C. Major). An exceedingly rapid climber, the twining stem often describes a complete circle in two hours, turning against the sun, or just contrary to the hands of a watch. Late in the season, when an abundance of ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... with a sickly, suffocating smell in her nostrils; and her eyes opened wide upon a face bent above her own. She had slept with a small lamp burning beside her, and by its dim light it seemed to her ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... noon, as they approached the equator, it was sometimes hot, but the breeze which continually swept the deck tempered it to the crew and passenger. Had they been caught in a calm the heat would have been suffocating; but Providence favored them, and they sped along like a seagull toward their destination. There seemed to be times when the green surface of the sea was at perfect rest; but the regular rising and sinking of the Coral ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... mother was held! She had not cut her hair enough then. But now she should have her deserts. Everything from as far back as he could remember should be recalled, for once in a way he would show her herself; now he had both the power and the right. His powers of discovery had been long hidden under the suffocating sawdust of the daily and nightly sawing; but now it was awake, and his ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... long dive the Ithaca righted herself laboriously, wallowing drunkenly, but apparently upon an even keel in less turbulent waters. One long minute dragged after another, yet no suffocating deluge poured in upon the girl, and presently she realized that the ship had, at least temporarily, weathered the awful buffeting of the savage elements. Now she felt but a gentle roll, though the wild turmoil of the storm still came ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her glass of champagne; she thought she could no longer support the situation. She almost felt she hated Henry and his devotion,—it was paralyzing her, suffocating her—crushing her life. Michael never spoke to her—beyond a casual word—and at length they all went back to the ball-room, where an extra was being played—Michael, for a moment, standing by her side. Then a sudden madness ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... suffocating gases and the smoke, and faint from pain and loss of blood, Houston had just staggered into the tunnel, when he heard the welcome sound of the voices of Lyle and of Morton Rutherford, and knew ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... Curucuti, and Salto, we arrive at a large inn (La Venta) built at six hundred toises above the level of the sea. The name Torre Quemada, or Burnt Tower, indicates the sensation that is felt in descending towards La Guayra. A suffocating heat is reflected from the walls of rock, and especially from the barren plains on which the traveller looks down. On this road, as on that from Vera Cruz to Mexico, and wherever on a rapid declivity the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... more natives die annually of consumption than in any town in England of the same amount of population. In Genoa, one of the most prevalent and fatal of the indigenous diseases is pulmonary consumption. In Florence, pneumonia is marked by a suffocating character, and rapid progress towards its last stage. In Naples, 1 death from consumption occurs in a mortality of 2-1/3; while in the hospitals of Paris, where phthisis is notoriously prevalent, the proportion is only 1 in 3-1/4. In short, in all the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... chest. The next moment something seemed to have fallen upon him with crushing weight. A red sea rose before his eyes. In it he was submerged; the roar of it filled his ears; it blinded him; and in the suffocating embrace of it he tried to cry out. He fought himself out of it, his eyes cleared, and he could see again. His rifle was no longer in his hands, and he was standing. Twenty feet away men were rushing upon him. His brain recovered itself with the swiftness of lightning. A bullet ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... of the West than comes to them from all other sources combined. They not only destroy the plants by feeding upon them, but they fill the soil with mounds, which greatly interfere with the harvesting of the crops. They are destroyed by giving them poisoned food, trapping, shooting, and suffocating through the use of bisulphide of carbon. Poison is frequently administered by soaking grain in strychnine or dropping it on pieces of potato and putting the same in or near the burrows. Bisulphide of carbon is put ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... him, and he yielded to it without a struggle. His attitude expressed his mood with relentless verity. Chin sunken upon his breast, eyes fairly distilling gloom, legs stretched out carelessly before him, he sat motionless, suffocating at the bottom of a gulf of discontent. His lips moved, sometimes noiselessly, ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... How can there be such a thing when there is a single sick baby dying for lack of nutrition—a single convalescent suffocating for want of country air—a single family without fire or blankets? Suggest to your wife that she give up a dinner gown and use the money to send a tubercular office boy to the Adirondacks—and listen to her ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... awakened by a scream. Even as she opened her eyes a dark cloud, a dull suffocating terrifying pain, descended upon her. When she again became conscious, she was lying upon a mass of canvas on the levee with three strange men bending over her. She sat up, instinctively caught together the front of the nightdress she had bought in Bethlehem the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... and plunged into the trackless veldt, it being estimated that a compass bearing due east would bring it by daybreak within easy reach of the parallelogram of hills in which Fauresmith and Jagersfontein lie. But the favour of Providence was withdrawn: the night, which had been born in suffocating heat, suddenly changed to piercing cold, and great zigzags of white lightning, clutching at the heavens like the claws of some gigantic dragon, heralded a tempest of unwonted fury. And presently it came preceded by a blinding sandstorm, which told ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... and thrilled to every heart; to his who knelt beside her, as if each tone revealed yet more the devoted love which led her there. Towards the conclusion of the service, and just as every one within the church knelt in general prayer, a faint, yet suffocating odor, borne on what appeared a light mist, was distinguished, and occasioned some slight surprise; by the group around the altar, however, it was unnoticed; and the men-at-arms, on looking towards the narrow windows and perceiving nothing but the intense darkness of the night, hushed the ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... compared with most of its predecessors, had still enough of weight and spite in it to sweep one of the poor fellows from his precarious foothold into the seething, hissing swirl to leeward. The man tossed his arms over his head, with a wild shriek for help, as the smother carried him along in its suffocating embrace, and Joe promptly made a spring for a spare life-buoy that we had provided for such an emergency; but before it could be thrown the unfortunate wretch was hurled over the brig's mainyard as it lifted out of the water, and the next instant he disappeared beneath the foot of the ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... kissing her, hungrily, passionately, yet tenderly withal. Myra's senses were reeling. He did seem to be drawing the very heart out of her with his lips, and drugging her senses. She felt as if she were suffocating, and again she began to struggle involuntarily after a few minutes as he drew her down with him ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... first, so disheartening, so hopeless seemed the task, that Mother wavered in her mission; a choking, suffocating sensation blocked all her channels of delivery. The very flowers on the window- sill, she noted, drooped in a languishing decline; they had a lifeless air as of flowers that struggle for existence in deep shadow ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... But I was so sure you would come sooner,—that you wouldn't be able to stay away! Oh, the afternoon has been endless; and the heat was suffocating. I couldn't dress, and I haven't unpacked ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... indeed to draw vitality from it, as flowers the most delicate from noxious air; but they collapsed at the searching breath of free inquiry, and could not abide persecution. The torch of Philosophy never kindled the suffocating fagot, under whose smoke Theology was mistaken for Religion. Theology had, until now, been speculative and quiescent: she abandoned to Philosophy these humbler qualities: instead of allaying and dissipating, as Philosophy had always done, she excited and she directed animosities. Oriental in her ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... work. At night the scene is particularly weird and impressive, for the shadows and general indistinctness make everything appear strange. The glowing furnaces, the showers of sparks, the roar of the blast furnaces, the suffocating fumes of sulphur, and the half-naked figures of the Mexican workmen, passing to and fro with cloths over their mouths, form all together ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... chance been witness of the tyrant's drunkenness, Ibrahim slaughtered the whole band. Again, he is said to have put an end to sixty youths, originally selected for his pleasures, burning them by gangs of five or six in the furnace, or suffocating them in the hot chambers of his baths. Eight of his brothers were murdered in his presence; and when one, who was so diseased that he could scarcely stir, implored to be allowed to end his days in peace, Ibrahim answered: 'I make no exceptions.' His own son Abul-Aghlab was beheaded by his ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... feels this. We Americans, accustomed as we are to the unlimited atmosphere of a boundless continent, always feel depressed in a country like England. There is in your country, Sir, a physical and also a moral constraint which, to a free, republican, continental American, is suffocating. And hence my dislike ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... has grown apace and is killing gods and fairies. Its fumes are suffocating the world, and its roots drain it of its beautiful strength." And I asked him why he sat on the hills I knew, ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... Numerous statues, vases, lamps, and other elegant works of art, have been recovered. Many skeletons have also been found, in the exact positions in which the living men were caught by the deadly shower of suffocating ashes. The excavators came upon the skeleton of a miser, who had been attempting to escape from his house, and whose bony fingers were still clutching the purse which contained the treasure he loved. There were also found in the barracks at Pompeii the skeletons of two soldiers chained to the stocks; ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... fits—of a suffocating nature," he said. "He suffers from a too sensitive conscience. The fits come upon him when he has made a mistake and gets ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... swallowing a fluid in which we are immersed, that it cannot be acquired before our nativity. But at this time, when the circulation of the blood is no longer continued through the placenta, that suffocating sensation, which we feel about the precordia, when we are in want of fresh air, disagreeably affects the infant: and all the muscles of the body are excited into action to relieve this oppression; those of the breast, ribs, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of profound silence, in which Roma felt herself to be suffocating, and could scarcely restrain the cry that was rising ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... credulity over other villages in Essex or in England. The instigator and chief agent in the Hedingham case was the wife of an innkeeper, who was convinced that she had been bewitched by an old wizard of reputation in the neighbourhood: and the mode of punishment was the popular one of drowning or suffocating in the nearest pond. Scraps of written papers found in the hovel of the murdered wizard revealed the numerous applications by lovers, wives, and other anxious inquirers. Amongst other recent revivals of the 'Black ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... he could hear his next-door neighbor, Strom the diver, moving about his room with tottering steps, and clattering with his cooking utensils close at hand. The smell of food, mingled with tobacco smoke and the odor of bedding, which crept through the thin board partition, and hovered, heavy and suffocating, above his head, became even more overpowering. His mouth watered. He shut his eyes and forced himself to think of other things, in order to deaden his hunger. Then a light, well-known step sounded on the stairs and some one knocked ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... became more intense in the hours when he allowed this emotion to assume control of his thoughts. Just to be alive, that was enough! Just to be free again from the sensation of stifling in trivial things, of suffocating in the monotony which rushed over one like a torrent of ashes. Just to escape with Patty into that wild kingdom of the mind where ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... and to keep every rule he might make. Then, too, he was a Christian, and understood all about what she meant when she had said God would help her; surely it must be very easy to be good and resist temptation in a place with such a master, and she felt like thanking God that, in spite of the suffocating dust, "the lines had fallen to her ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... not long until the flames, gathering life and strength, were beyond him to stay or extinguish them, had he been taken with sudden repentance. From step to step they leaped, the room meantime filling fast with suffocating gases. When he knew they were beyond the efforts of any and all whom they might attract, and must burst into conflagration the instant they reached the lightest of the gusts playing havoc outside, he went down on his hands and knees, for else it ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... of a solution prepared by dissolving 1 part of caustic soda in 21/2 parts of distilled water, and dexterously break in the liquid a tube containing 2.2 c.c. of bromine. The tubes will be found very convenient, obviating entirely the suffocating fumes diffused in the act of measuring bromine. Allow to stand in the solution of sodic hypobromite thus prepared a test tube containing exactly 5 c.c. of the urine under examination. Cork the bottle as shown in the illustration, see that the water is at zero, and that the liquid ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... to Paul,—"Let us go towards the quarter of the Golden Dust, and meet Virginia there. It is not more than three leagues from hence." We accordingly bent our course towards the northern part of the island. The heat was suffocating. The moon had risen, and was surrounded by three large black circles. A frightful darkness shrouded the sky; but the frequent flashes of lightning discovered to us long rows of thick and gloomy clouds, hanging very low, and heaped together over the centre of the ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... of August they came within sight of Madeira, and at night arrived off the port. They stopped for a day or two to take in provisions. Napoleon was indisposed. A sudden gale arose and the air was filled with small particles of sand and the suffocating exhalations from the deserts of Africa. On the evening of the 24th they got under weigh again, and progressed smoothly and rapidly. The Emperor added to his amusements a game at piquet. He was ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Madigan visited all the meteorological instruments and changed the daily charts; at times having to feel his way from one place to the other. Attending to the exposed instruments in a high wind with low temperature was bad enough, but with suffocating drift difficulties ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... fragment of an arch hangs over and is supported by a dismantled tree trunk. And through the torrid twilight of the approaching storm the cry of the hyena is heard. The claws of the hyena are heard upon the crumbling tombs and the suffocating girl strives with her last strength to free herself from the thrall of the great lianas. But there comes a hirsute smell; she turns with terrified eyes to plead, but meets only dull, liquorish eyes, and the breath of the obscene animal ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... that when the rain, having robbed the atmosphere of its last breath of wind, ceased and left the stateroom a steaming, suffocating furnace, he did not know when Skipper, panting for air, his loin cloth and undershirt soaked with sweat, arose, tucked blanket and pillow under his ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... blind panic. For, mingling unmistakably with the curiosity with which he was still studying her features, was a newborn expression of appropriation and passionate complacency. Her senses whirled in a bewilderment that had a suffocating sweetness about it. Though she now kept her eyes on the ground, she felt his constant sidewise glances, and, desperately seeking relief from the conscious silence that enveloped them like a vapor of intoxicating fumes, she forced herself to utter the merest triviality ...
— A Summer Evening's Dream - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... dense with history and suffocating with association, but I prefer to leave all that to the imagination where my own ignorance found it. A painter had told me once of his spending a summer in it, and he showed some beautiful pieces of color in proof, but ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... room came a deep, heavy, sobbing sigh, as if an echo of his. Tabitha had at last fallen asleep and in her slumber had tossed aside the suffocating pillow from her hot, throbbing head. He sat looking at the closed door for some minutes; then, hardly knowing why he did so, he ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... gradually sunk till sunrise, when it was 70 Deg. That is usually the period of greatest cold in each twenty-four hours in this region. The natives, during the period of greatest heat, keep in their huts, which are always pleasantly cool by day, but close and suffocating by night. Those who are able to afford it sit guzzling beer or boyaloa. The perspiration produced by copious draughts seems to give enjoyment, the evaporation causing a feeling of coolness. The attendants of the ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... the blasphemous agonies under which his frantic spirit was raging and writhing. The truth is, that the frightful certainty of death to himself and his family, in such an unprepared state, together with the rapid glance of his ill-spent life, joined to his exertion and the suffocating heat of the room, had, all combined, induced what may be well termed this insane ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... went rustling and clattering past my door; the house-door was pulled to with a bang. "That is Coppelius," I cried, terror-struck, and leapt out of bed. Then I heard a wild heartrending scream; I rushed into my father's room; the door stood open, and clouds of suffocating smoke came rolling towards me. The servant-maid shouted, "Oh! my master! my master!" On the floor in front of the smoking hearth lay my father, dead, his face burned black and fearfully distorted, my sisters weeping and moaning ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... honest, and thinke she is not: I thinke that thou art iust, and thinke thou art not: Ile haue some proofe. My name that was as fresh As Dians Visage, is now begrim'd and blacke As mine owne face. If there be Cords, or Kniues, Poyson, or Fire, or suffocating streames, Ile not indure it. Would ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... had been on Maggie's name—a name she never thought to hear again on earth, as she was pressed back, sick and suffocating. But suddenly a voice rang out above all confused voices and moaning hungry waves, and ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... mechanism. He tore down the bulkheads that rendered it difficult to get at the place where the fire was; he hurled bucket after bucket of water on the glowing mass, and rushed, amid clouds of hot steam and suffocating smoke, with piles of wet blankets to smother ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... fiercer pain swept into my consciousness—the pain of gasping breath forcing air through a tortured gullet into suffocating lungs. ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... into the street, breathing great breaths of air. He had been suffocating in that atmosphere, while the apprentice's chatter had driven him frantic. There had been times when it was all he could do to refrain from reaching over and mopping Jim's face in the mush- plate. The more he had chattered, the more remote had Ruth seemed to ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... about the deck for ampler circulation of air. Wind-sails, too, are constantly pouring a steady draft into the hold, except during a chase, when, of course, every comfort is temporarily sacrificed for safety. During calms or in light and baffling winds, when the suffocating air of the tropics makes ventilation impossible, the gratings are always removed, and portions of the slaves allowed to repose at night on deck, while the crew is ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... started and began to break out of the bedclothes, quieted her, pressed her gently, firmly down, folded her tight and made her submit to the perspiration against which, in convulsive starts, she fought and strove, crying that she was suffocating, she was too hot, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... or death shall take me." So saying he raised his great shield, and, unaccompanied, set his face to the dark entrance, where a stream, boiling with strange heat, flowed forth from the cave; so hot was the air that he stood, unable to advance far for the suffocating steam and smoke. Angered by his impotence, Beowulf raised his voice and shouted a furious defiance to the awesome guardian of the barrow. Thus aroused, the dragon sprang up, roaring hideously and flapping his glowing wings together; out from the recesses of the barrow came ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... that I saw a very strange thing, a hare in a rage. It seemed to go mad, of course I mean spiritually mad. Its eyes flashed fire; it opened its mouth and shut it after the fashion of a suffocating fish. At last it spoke in its own way—I cannot stop to explain in further detail the exact manner of speech or rather of its equivalent ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... springing to my feet, almost dumbfounded, my heart nigh suffocating me in its desire to leap forth. "Phyllis!—and here? What does ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... past experience, and calls to remembrance instances, that he has seen or heard of, in order to discover the effects of water on animal bodies? No surely; this is not the method, in which he proceeds in his reasoning. The idea of sinking is so closely connected with that of water, and the idea of suffocating with that of sinking, that the mind makes the transition without the assistance of the memory. The custom operates before we have time for reflection. The objects seem so inseparable, that we interpose not a moment's delay in passing from the one to the other. ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... garrison, and we knew absolutely nothing of what was taking place around us. Not one word did we dare even whisper to each other, our only means of communication being through our hands. The night was intensely dark and the air was close—almost suffocating. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... am suffocating with anxiety," she said. "I feel that this hour is to decide the lives of us all, and it seems to me as if Death were already stretching out his cold hand toward me. We are lost, and my son, my unhappy son, will never wear any other than ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... Tiflis and Baku: endless steppes and deserts, greyish-yellow and desolate, with occasionally a caravan of slowly moving camels. A violent storm arose as we drew near the sea. Dust rose up in clouds and penetrated through all the chinks of the compartment, the air became thick, heavy, and suffocating, and outside nothing could be seen but a universal grey veil of impenetrable mist. But the worst was that the storm struck the train on the side, and at last the engine was scarcely able to draw the carriages along. Twice we had to stop, and on an ascent the train even ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... low-bellying clouds lumbered up from the Gulf; crowded blackly against the sun; flickered, thundered, and burst in torrential rain—tepid, perpendicular—and vanished utterly away. Then, more furiously than before, the sun flamed down;—roofs and pavements steamed; the streets seemed to smoke; the air grew suffocating with vapor; and the luminous city filled with a faint, sickly odor,—a stale smell, as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred from wet mould,—as of grasses decomposing after a flood. Something saffron ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... rods and sextant that same afternoon; but when we attempted to land upon the islet we found that although the ashes were black on the surface they were still a dull glowing red in the heart of them, and so hot that they were not yet to be stood upon, leaving out of the question the veil of acrid, suffocating, blue smoke that still wreathed and ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... side, a few feet abaft the funnel and close to the water-line, passing through the engine-room and out through her bottom. There was no perceptible shock attending the blow, but the crash was terrific, while the smell of burning was almost suffocating—which is not to be wondered at, since the mass was blazing so fiercely that it set the ship on fire merely by passing through her. So intense was the heat of it that, as it passed through the ship's bottom into the water, we ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... The mob had collected combustibles for the purpose, but in breaking indiscriminately the bottles in the shop, they had inadvertently smashed some containing a quantity of very powerful acids. These, escaping and mixing with other drugs, caused such a suffocating vapour that the miscreants were driven from the shop half choked. Other tradesmen whose places were badly damaged were Mr. Arthur Dakin, grocer; Mr. Savage, cheesemonger; Mrs. Brinton, pork butcher; Mr. Allen, baker; Mr. Heath, cheesemonger; Mr. Scudamore, druggist; and ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... picture up to show the rest. "There now!" chimed in the wife, her pale face lit Like winter snow with sunrise over it,— "That's what I'm always asking him.—But he— Well, as he's answering you, he answers me,— With that same silent, suffocating smile He's ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... around, but by no means lighted the dormitory. The plumbing was open, and the odours coming therefrom and from the dirty, sweaty bodies of the lodgers and from the hot air of the stove—windows and doors being tightly closed—made the atmosphere stifling and suffocating. ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... stunned, then her senses came back to her and she struggled wildly, but, stifled in the thick folds of the Arab's robes, against which her face was crushed, and held in a grip that seemed to be slowly suffocating her, her struggles were futile. The hard, muscular arm round her hurt her acutely, her ribs seemed to be almost breaking under its weight and strength, it was nearly impossible to breathe with the close contact ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... of the lungs, even a severe bronchitis, is more or less serious for the patients and their hearts. The mucous membrane of their bronchial tubes and air vesicles is always hyperemic, and it takes little more congestion to all but close up some of the passages. and dyspnea or asthma, or suffocating, difficult cough is ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... still more numerous and tumultuous, and the exhibitions of violence more appalling. All the dens of infamy in the city vomited their denizens to meet and deride, and, if possible, to destroy the captured monarch. It was a day of intense and suffocating heat. Ten persons were crowded into the royal carriage. Not a breath of air fanned the fevered cheeks of the sufferers. The heat, reflected from the pavements and the bayonets, was almost insupportable. Clouds of dust enveloped them, and the sufferings of the ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... newly restored to liberty. He even spoke to his leader, contrary to his custom unless addressed:—"Methinks the air of yonder halls, valorous Captain, carries with it a perfume, which, though it may be well termed sweet, is so suffocating, as to be more suitable to sepulchrous chambers, than to the dwellings of men. Happy I am that I am free, as ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... destination, of which they can augur nothing but misery from all that they have yet seen? How shall I make known their situation, while labouring, under painful disease, or while struggling in the suffocating holds of their prisons, like animals enclosed in an exhausted receiver? How shall I describe their feelings as exposed to all the personal indignities, which lawless appetite or brutal passion may suggest? How shall ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... Fortescue,' 'Lady Flood,' and the two Misses Amphlett. Consequently this account is written after 1785, when Mr. Fortescue succeeded to his title. Lord Lyttelton, not long returned from Ireland, had been suffering from 'suffocating fits' in the last month. And THIS, not the purpose of suicide, was probably his reason for executing his will. 'While in his house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square, he DREAMT three days before his death he saw a bird fluttering, and afterwards a woman appeared in white apparel, and ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... rose and the battle was resumed. Now, despite John Steele's vigilance, the two came together. Tom Rogers' arm wound round him with suffocating power; strove, strained, to hurl him to earth. But the other's perfect training, his orderly living, saved him at that crucial moment; his strength of endurance lasted; with a great effort he managed to tear himself loose and at the same time with a powerful upper stroke ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... lower slopes spotted with farms. The houses showed some slight improvement as we advanced. The people were all at work in the fields, cutting the year's satisfactory harvest. A scorching sun blazed in a cloudless sky; the earth was baked and dry, and suffocating clouds of dust rose from under our horses' hoofs. Most of the women in the fields, on account of the heat, had pulled off their body-sacks, and were working in shifts made on the same principle, which reached to the knees. Other garments they had none. A few, recognising us as strangers, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... recover—the doctor said the chances of life and death were in his opinion equally balanced—and then he always loved the sea so dearly! There was something exhilarating to him in the motion of a vessel, and he spoke with animation of getting free from the almost suffocating atmosphere incident to the hot season, and drinking in the fresh sea breezes He talked but little more, however, than was necessary to indicate his wants, his bodily sufferings being too great to allow of conversation; but several times ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... distance again and in the west were turning purple with mauve tops. But the rest of the sky was coloured a threatening greenish bronze, with monstrous-shaped clouds sprawled across it; and the air, though sunless, was still sand-laden and suffocating, with the promise ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... is from the housetops of the city on a dusty evening in this July, following a day of suffocating heat. The sunburnt roofs, warm ochreous walls, and blue shadows of the capital, wear their usual aspect except for a ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Presently horsemen came galloping by on their way to warn ranchers of the fire, and every little while a man would come out and report the progress made in checking it. It was an oppressive, hidden danger, for nothing could be seen from the valley of the actual flames through the thick suffocating curtain of smoke that hung over all. The only avenue of escape was by way of the road to Gilroy, and the fire threatened momentarily to cut this off. Not wishing to abandon the place to its fate, Mrs. Stevenson thought out a plan for ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... The red and yellow roses pricked his eyelids, They scorched him back to consciousness. He tried to shift his position; He could not move. Something weighed him down, He could not breathe. He was gasping, Pinned down and suffocating. He opened his eyes. The curtains of the window were flung back, The fire and the candle were out, And the room was filled with green moonlight. And pressed against the window-pane Was a wide, round face, Winking—winking— ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell |
