"Ferocious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Vicenza, and wearing the medals with which the municipality of Rome had decorated them. They stood together and formed a line from the gate up to the staircase of the palace. Sullen visages were to be seen and ferocious imprecations heard among them. During the time when the Deputies were slowly assembling, and business could not commence because there was not yet a quorum present, a cry for help suddenly proceeded from the extremity of the public gallery, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... drowsy tinkle of a pastoral bell behind him, and on turning round, he saw a peasant dressed in shaggy skins, driving a few goats from the ruins. The appearance and physiognomy of this peasant struck him as something more wild and ferocious than any thing about the Indians; and, perhaps, the observation was correctly philosophical. In the Indian, Nature is seen in that primitive vigour and simplicity, in which the actions are regulated by those feelings that are the elements ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... completely changed, as though by magic. His flame died down to still, white fire; his jaws ceased to clash; his ferocious snarl died away into deadly silence; he crouched like a lynx at bay. At that moment Jan's number was very nearly up, for Grip had coldly determined to kill. He had practically ceased fighting. He was merely sparring defensively now, with bloody murder in his blue eyes, watching grimly for his opening—the ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... be obliged to own, hereafter, that there is some generosity in an Englishman. I cannot deny their treatment, and yet I had rather it had been more ferocious." ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the fixed purpose of maintaining the neutrality of the United States, however general the war might be in Europe; and his zeal for the revolution did not assume so ferocious a character as to silence the dictates of humanity, or ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... puzzled way. Was it an earnest of the boy's return, or was it a bribe to let him go? The former hypothesis seemed untenable, for if he got nabbed his penniless condition would be such an aggravation of his offence as to call down upon him a more ferocious punishment than he need have risked. And why in the name of sanity did he want to go home? To kiss his sainted mother in her sleep? To pack his blankety portmanteau? Barney Bill's fancy took a satirical turn. On the latter hypothesis, the boy was in deadly fear, and preferred the certainty ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... to save the knight; for the Stargardians were slaying right and left, and Otto's followers were utterly discomfited. So the knight tried to draw his dagger, and having got hold of it, plunged it with great force into the heart of the ferocious animal, who fell back dead, and Otto sprang to his feet. Just then, however, a tanner recognised him, and seizing hold of him by the arms, carried him off to ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... of his countrymen, and in spite of the opposition of the whole of the nobles of his country banded the people in resistance against England, and for a time wrested all Scotland from the hands of Edward. His bitter enemies the English were unable to adduce any proofs that the epithets of ferocious and bloodthirsty, with which they were so fond of endowing him, had even a shadow of foundation, and we may rather believe the Scotch accounts that his gentleness and nobility of soul were equal to ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... sympathizing friend. You can make of him what you like. But the Italian, and still more the Spaniard, is as gay as a child, and as incapable of intentional disrespect. The Castilian grandee does not regard his dignity as in danger from a moment's chat with a waiter. He has no conception of that ferocious decorum we Anglo-Saxons require from our manservants and our maidservants. The Spanish servant seems to regard it as part of his duty to keep your spirits gently excited while you dine by the gossip of the day. He joins also in your discussions, whether they touch ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... thankfulness: "In all the vicissitudes of a long life of public service, no circumstance has ever produced on my mind such impressions of gratitude and joy as the event of yesterday. To have been one of the humble instruments in the hands of Divine Providence for bringing to reason a ferocious Government, and destroying for ever the horrid system of Christian slavery, can never cease to be a source of delight and heartfelt comfort to every individual happy enough to be employed ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... displayed an uncommonly exact resemblance of a perambulating pear. He had a rich expanse of fat cheek and a small, but dimpled, chin. He was saved by his fierce moustache, which, upturned in the imperial fashion, gave him the ferocious air required by his military profession and his sentiments of a superman of the ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... most modern of her wits thus perished together. Concerning Knox, the opinions of his contemporaries differed. By his own account the leaders of his party deemed him "too extreme," and David Hume finds his ferocious delight in chronicling the murders of his foes "rather amusing," though sad! Quarrels of religion apart, Knox was a very good-hearted man; but where religion was concerned, his temper was remote from the Christian. He was a perfect ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... that she ought to repress her spirit of extravagance, and Camilla at once foresaw that he would avail himself of this plea against her should he find it possible at any time to avail himself of any plea. She became ferocious, and, turning upon him, told him to mind his own business. Was it not all for him that she was doing it? "She was not," she said, "disposed to submit to any control in such matters from him till he had assumed his legal right to ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... laboring man gave them the shelter of his humble cabin, for they were strangers and in distress. Soon it was known abroad that this poor man had offered them the hospitalities of his home, and a rude and ferocious rabble soon gathered around his dwelling, demanding his guests. With loud clamor and horrid threatening they broke down his doors, and rushed upon the strangers. They were an old man and his wife, their daughter and her husband with four children; and they were ...
— The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 18 • American Anti-Slavery Society
... which, on being examined by a microscope, proved to consist entirely of the horny cases and legs of minute water insects. Continental writers declare that it will attack any small animal that comes in its way, giving it quite a ferocious character, and it is said to destroy fish spawn. I can hardly believe in its destroying large fish by eating out their brain and eyes. Brehm, who gives it credit for this, must have been mistaken. I have also read of its attacking a rat in a trap which was dead, and was discovered devouring ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... at Valserine; I saw it in 1825, in a pleasant excursion to Switzerland, which is one of the sweet, happy recollections of my early life. I remember with what noise, with what ferocious bellowing, the Rhone precipitated itself into the gulf while the frail bridge upon which I was standing was shaking beneath my feet. Ah well! since that time, the Rhone brings to my mind the idea of a tiger—the Rhine, that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... on its back and died, for wild and ferocious beasts may be killed in Mo as well as in other parts of the world. Having vanquished his enemy, Prince Jollikin climbed down from the tree and went to tell the people that the Gigaboo ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... midst of the high tide of their prosperity, suddenly there arose a great alarm at the invasion of a ferocious band of warriors from the North of the Great Lakes; and as these bands advanced, an indiscriminate slaughter was made of men, women, and children. Destruction fell ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the day to Angus. Sir Patrick Hamilton, and the master of Montgomery, were slain. Arran, and Sir James Hamilton, escaped with difficulty; and with no less difficulty was the military prelate of Glasgow rescued from the ferocious borderers, by the generous interposition of Gawain Douglas. The skirmish was long remembered in Edinburgh, by the name of "Cleanse the Causeway."—Pinkerton's History, Vol. II. p. 181.—Pitscottie Edit. 1728. p. 120.—Life ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... with the Patriots. The latter were not faultless, but they often exhibited a generosity and a self-denial that promised much for the future of their country, which promise would have been realized but for the ferocious tone of the warfare of the old governing race. The Spaniards were ultimately beaten, but they left behind them an evil that marred the victory of the Patriots, and which has done much to prevent it from proving useful to those who obtained ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... Archipelago, and whose jocose humour it was to imprison his women slaves in loose garments of leather, very tightly secured, however, at the wrists, neck, and ankles. In the same garments, before fastening round the limbs of the victim, one or more Infuriated cats were introduced; the which ferocious animals, playfully disporting themselves in their attempt to find a point of egress, would so up and tear, and mangle, and lacerate, with their Terrible claws, the flesh of the sufferers, that not all the Brine-washing or pepper-pod-rubbing ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... heroes and champions, and their brave soldiers, their chiefs of valour and renown and deeds of arms; yet not one of them was able to give relief, alleviation, or deliverance from that oppression and tyranny, from the numbers and multitudes, and the cruelty and the wrath of the brutal, ferocious, furious, untamed, implacable hordes by whom that oppression was inflicted, because of the excellence of their polished, ample, treble, heavy, trusty, glittering corslets; and their hard, strong, valiant swords; and their well-riveted ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... you revealed the object of your voyage—which would be exceedingly foolish of you—you could not induce them to make a voyage in such a small vessel as yours to islands inhabited mostly by ferocious savages. But this much I can and will do for you. I will direct Captain Hunter of the Sirius, the only King's ship I have here, to set his carpenters to work on your vessel as soon as ever you careen her; ...
— John Corwell, Sailor And Miner; and, Poisonous Fish - 1901 • Louis Becke
... smile, and more open aspect in the forepart of the week, while his Sunday shave retained its influence, so far as its limited area went, for he kept a long beard always. By Wednesday he certainly began to look grim, and on Saturday ferocious, pending the advent of the Bridlington barber, who shaved all the Quay every Sunday. But his mind was none the worse, and his daughters liked him better when he rasped their young cheeks with his beard, and paid ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... danger and alarm. Slowly, therefore, and painfully the hours wore away. She had no alleviation to her distress. The words of comfort which the hag vainly attempted to administer, would have failed to sooth, even from the lips of sympathising friends, much more when surrounded by the avowed and ferocious enemies of ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... But we who live amongst our friends need neither fear nor punish. Surely if we, in dread of an occasional rare homicide, an occasional rough blow, were solemnly and legally to commit homicide and violence, we could only be a society of ferocious cowards. ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... vermicelli. They have a decided animal flavor, as may be observed in the soups containing them. Maccaroni, being tubular, is the favorite habitat of a very dangerous insect, which is rendered peculiarly ferocious by being boiled. The government of the island, therefore, never allows a stick of it to be exported without being accompanied by a piston with which its cavity may at any time be thoroughly swept out. These ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... were unpatriotic worshipers of a crucified Jew, who multiplied like vermin, and only wanted to turn the good old order of things upside down. But this time they should see—the hypocrites, who pretended to so much humanity, and then set ferocious dogs on peaceful folk!—they should learn that they could not fall on a Macedonian citizen without paying ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to Hermes and Hecate, the protectors of travellers, they left the city at the Dipylon Gate, and entered the road leading to Eleusis. The country presented a cheerless aspect; for fields and vineyards once fruitful were desolated by ferocious war. But religious veneration had protected the altars, and their chaste simplicity breathed the spirit of peace; while the beautiful little rustic temples of Demeter, in commemoration of her wanderings in search of the lost Persephone, spoke an ideal language, soothing to the heart amid ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... seen a year marked, on the whole, by substantial progress toward victory, even though the year ended with a setback for our arms, when the Germans launched a ferocious counter-attack into Luxembourg and Belgium with the obvious objective of cutting our ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... These four waited in silence. Their assistants followed them. Then came the stablemen, the huntsmen, the litter-bearers, and the running footmen with muscles like iron, two gardeners hirsute as Priapus, six ferocious looking negroes, three Greek slaves—one a grammarian, another a poet, and the third a singer. They all stood, ranged in order, on the public square, and were presently joined by the negresses—curious, suspicious, rolling ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... all the drudgery of house and field work, while their lazy husbands drink and gamble; as long as they are liable (and their children too) to be sold or put on the hazard of a cast of the dice; as long as they are themselves ferocious enough to go out to battle with their husbands; I presume you will think the "Germanic culture" very far short of the "culture" likely to be produced by the New Testament! Well says Gibbon, "Heroines of such a cast may claim admiration; but they were most assuredly neither ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... movement of small flocks of plain-coloured birds (ant-thrushes) in the jungle. If this be disregarded until he advances a few steps farther, he is sure to fall into trouble, and find himself suddenly attacked by numbers of the ferocious little creatures. They swarm up his legs with incredible rapidity, each one driving his pincer-like jaws into his skin, and with the purchase thus obtained, doubling in its tail, and stinging with all its might. There is no course left but to ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... from a distance. Without a word of hesitation Julia turned into the path with him, yet with almost a shudder at the darkness. They had not taken a dozen steps when an appalling, shrieking yell, a brute yell, of ferocious animal rage—the rage for blood and lust to mangle and tear—burst from the thicket on their right. A wild plunge through tangled brush and limbs, another more appalling shriek, and a dark, shadowy ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... them think us anything rather than we should get into their power. Once in their hands we should never get out again so helpless as we are. Indeed they look so ferocious that two of them would be quite enough to kill ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... the ferocious attacks made upon him by Hunt and Hazlitt. Holding, as he did, that inviolable secrecy was one of the prime functions of an editor—though the practice has since become very different—he never attempted ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... water fowl, sported upon the bosom of the river or the lake, whose waters no paddle wheel or even keel disturbed. Wild turkeys, quails, and pigeons at times, swept the air like clouds. And then there was the intense excitement of occasionally bringing down a deer, and even of shooting a ferocious grizzly bear or wolf or catamount. The romance of the sea creates a Robinson Crusoe. The still greater romance of the forest creates a Kit Carson. It often makes even an old man's blood thrill in his veins, to contemplate the wild and wondrous adventures, which this majestic continent opened to the ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... became about evenly divided between white and colored, fixing their status by the marriages they made. One of the daughters, for instance, married a white man and reared in a neighboring county a family of white children, who, in all probability, were as active as any one else in the recent ferocious red-shirt campaign to disfranchise ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... gli stessi atroci delitti che vi si commettono ne sono una prova." Without subscribing to the latter part of his proposition, a dangerous doctrine, the truth of which may be disputed on better grounds, namely, that the Italians are in no respect more ferocious than their neighbours, that man must be wilfully blind, or ignorantly heedless, who is not struck with the extraordinary capacity of this people, or, if such a word be admissible, their capabilities,[369] the facility ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... in a recent despatch tells us how a British subaltern saw, from a wood, an unsuspecting German soldier patrolling the road. Not caring to shoot his man in cold blood, he gave him a ferocious kick from behind, at which the startled German ran away with a yell. This subaltern certainly ought to have figured in "Boots' Roll of Honour" which ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... and peerless bare-back equestrienne, the most daring lady rider in the universe," for the one; and for the other, "Chevalier Adrian di Roma, king of the animal world, with his great aggregation of savage and ferocious wild beasts, including the famous man-eating African lion, Nero, the largest and most ferocious animal of its species in captivity." And under this latter announcement there was a picture of a young and handsome man, literally smothered with medals, lying at full length, with his arms crossed ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... minutely are the circumstances recounted) he passed his great antagonist, seated near a well-known spring, stern and silent as usual. No word passed between the determined representatives of war and peace; but it was doubtless not without a sensation of triumphant pleasure that the ferocious war-chief saw his only rival and opponent in council going into what seemed to be voluntary exile. Hiawatha plunged into the forest; he climbed mountains; he crossed a lake; he floated down the Mohawk river in a canoe. Many incidents of his journey ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... Hermann Busch, who brought with him the manuscript of his 'Triumph'; and perhaps it was not difficult to predict that the cause of the old books would be safe in the hands of Pope Leo X. They found themselves in company with that ferocious satirist, Ulric von Hutten, memorable for his threat to the citizens of Mainz, when they proposed to destroy his library, and he answered, 'If you burn my books, I will burn your town.' The Grand Inquisitor was utterly overwhelmed by ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... throne the editor was established for the day. Bound volumes of the "Congressional Record" in their original wrappers were piled in a corner. A consular report, folded in half, was thrust under the editor's right thigh, easly accessible in ferocious moments when he indulged himself in the felicity of slaughtering the roaches with which the place swarmed. He gave Dan a limp fat hand, and cleared a chair of exchanges with one foot, which he thereupon laboriously ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... chances of interruption. Meta was lingering to track the royal highway of some giant ants to their fir- leaf hillock, when they were hailed from behind, and her squire felt ferocious at the sight of Norman and Harry closing the perspective ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... quickly returned to the sick-chamber. The patient was becoming delirious. The name of Esperance was continually recurrent in his confused talk. Once the young girl trembled; the Count's expression had become so ferocious that she was terrified. Genevieve and the old Mademoiselle had just come in. She clung to them, clenching her hands and hiding her face. She pointed to the Count, who, with his brows contracted and his lips sternly set, was talking volubly. All three trembled. He ground out the name ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... doom would be sealed. The sound of that voice, the veiled glitter of that gambler's eye, the slightest movement of the soldier, who treated her with a brutality that was still polite, made her shudder. As to the power of attorney demanded by the ferocious colonel, who in the eyes of all Issoudun was a hero, he had it as soon as he wanted it; for Flore fell under the man's dominion as France had ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... one other person who could have been implicated, and I hesitate to name him in this place. Yet one remembers what terrific acts of misapplied courage and ferocious brutality the fanatics of history have been capable of performing when their creed and their authority ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... prevailed upon his friends to supply him with money and troops, and send him upon an expedition to recover his throne in Epirus. When he landed, many of the people of the country were willing to accept him as their king, because of their dislike to the ferocious and arbitrary rule of Neoptolemus; but he, fearing that if he drove out his rival he would apply to some of the kings,[38] made terms and friendship with him, and agreed to share the kingdom. As time went on, however, many encouraged him to attack Neoptolemus, and fomented suspicion between ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... place, ready for fresh massacre, a sacred plant which God had planted, and which no rage of man could trample out—let us believe, I say, that that sight taught at last to the buccaneers of the old world that there was a purer manliness, a loftier heroism, than the ferocious self-assertion of the Berserker, even the heroism of humility, gentleness, self-restraint, self-sacrifice; that there was a strength which was made perfect in weakness; a glory, not of the sword but of the cross. We will believe that that was the lesson which the Norsemen ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... have knocked that blasted quarantine's head off," ejaculated Mr. Jack MacKenzie, with ferocious emphasis. I had been relating my experience with the campers; and was recounting how the man put his head out of the tent and warned me of smallpox. But my uncle was a gentleman of the old school and had a ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... no house finds a home in family and friends, whence it results that the Gipsy, despite his ferocious quarrels in the clan, and his sharp practice even with near relations, is—all things considered—perhaps the most devoted to kith and kin of any one in the world. His very name—rom, a husband—indicates it. His children, as almost every writer ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... this time and all the house was in alarm. But Drake went out with long strides and a ferocious face, and no ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... without intermission, this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow, that, when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... as she took no pains to hide the content which filled her heart, he would scarcely bear to meet her sweet grey eyes for the thought that soon the love he read in them would change to aversion and cold contempt, and each dainty caress was charged for him with a ferocious irony. He knew at last his miserable selfishness in having linked her lot with his, and there were times when in his torture he longed for courage to tell her all, and put an end with his own hand to a happiness which was to him the bitterest of delusions. But he dared ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... maimed. It appeared the foremost driver lashed on the horses, while the drivers in the second and the third carts were asleep and did not see us. The collision was followed by the blankest amazement on both sides, then a storm of ferocious abuse. The traces were torn, the shafts were broken, the yokes were lying about on the road.... Ah, how the drivers swore! At night, in that swearing turbulent crew, I felt in utter solitude such as I have never felt before ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... beside Hugh, the other three occupying the tonneau of the car. There was abundance of room for all, and some to spare. Owen held his new shotgun in his hands and he kept a close watch upon the road ahead, just as though that idea connected with a ferocious wildcat might have taken hold on his mind, and he believed there was a possibility of such a ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... his face. No such words had ever before been addressed to him, and he knew not how to reply to them. The Princess Helena followed up the effect—she was not sure that it was an advantage—by an appeal to the simple, childish nature which she believed to exist under his ferocious exterior. For a minute it seemed as if she were about to re-establish her ascendancy: then the stubborn ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... the mind are equally certain. The Tartars, who live principally on animal food, are cruel and ferocious in their disposition, gloomy and sullen minded, delighting in exterminating wars and plunder; while the Bramins and Hindoos, who live entirely on vegetable aliment, possess a mildness and gentleness of character and disposition directly the reverse of the Tartar; and I have no doubt, had India possessed ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... its own horror. No one can thus hear it shouted, in the stillness of the night, unmoved. It affected even the ferocious assailant of the lonely old man, and arrested ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... nearly everybody had put some of his soul and some of his sweat into that slow and painful structure so instantly annulled. The mockery of the wasted toil embittered every one. The wrath of the workers was both loud and ferocious. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... Just at the time of our arrival at the Kenia there was an epoch of temporary calm, because the Wangwana were too much occupied with their own internal quarrels to pay much attention to their neighbours. After the death of the last kabaka his numerous sons terribly devastated the country by their ferocious struggles for the rule, until in the previous year one of the rivals who was named Suna (after an ancestor renowned both for his cruelty and for his conquests) had got rid of most of his brothers by treachery. The power was thenceforward ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... that, within their own consciousness and memories, they have the witness and knowledge of a life even before that of this humanity. But, for my own part, I should never know, by anything in my own memory, that I had been a baby,—that I was or did anything before that first school where the ferocious little girl was handcuffed in unbleached-cotton ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... angelic child were treated as dissimulation. The fresh, pure blossoms of affection which bloomed instinctively in that young soul were pitilessly crushed. Pierrette suffered many a cruel blow on the tender flesh of her heart. If she tried to soften those ferocious natures by innocent, coaxing wiles they accused her of doing it with an object. "Tell me at once what you want?" Rogron would say, brutally; "you are ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... cold-hearted; black-hearted, hard-hearted, flint- hearted, marble-hearted, stony-hearted; hard of heart, unnatural; ruthless &c. (unmerciful) 914a; relentless &c. (revengeful) 919. cruel; brutal, brutish; savage, savage as a bear, savage as a tiger; ferine[obs3], ferocious; inhuman; barbarous, barbaric, semibarbaric, fell, untamed, tameless, truculent, incendiary; bloodthirsty &c. (murderous) 361; atrocious; bloodyminded[obs3]. fiendish, fiendlike[obs3]; demoniacal; diabolic, diabolical; devilish, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... What a blessed thing it is for women,—and for men too certainly,—that there should be a positive happiness to the female sex in the possession, and in exhibiting the possession, of bright clothing! It is almost as good for the softening of manners, and the not permitting of them to be ferocious, as is the faithful study of the polite arts. At Loring the manners of the mill hands, as they were called, were upon the whole good,—which I believe was in a great degree to be attributed ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... how the poor Quakers fared in the hands of inferior and rougher functionaries. Fines and imprisonment for vagrancy, contempt of court, or non-payment of tithes, were the ordinary discipline for all; but there were cases here and there of whipping by the hangman, and other more ferocious cruelties. For among the Quakers themselves there were varieties of milder and wilder, less provoking and more provoking. The Quakerism of men like Fox and Dewsbury was, at worst, but an obdurate and irritating eccentricity, in comparison, for example, with the Quakerism run mad ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Steadman was on the other side, and—was that Mr. Halsey? O never! The Mr. Halsey I knew was shockingly careless of his dress, never had his hair smooth; let his beard grow as it would, and wore a most ferocious slouched hat. This one had taken more than one look at the glass, a thing I should have imagined the other incapable of doing. He had bestowed the greatest care and attention on his dress, had brought his beard within reasonable limits, had combed his hair with the greatest ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... all these colonies. Since that time two or three generations of men had passed away, but they had increased and multiplied with unexampled rapidity; and the land itself had been the recent theatre of a ferocious and bloody seven-years' war between the two most powerful and most civilized nations of Europe contending for the ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... court-martial in the Senate, on the Friday. He followed all the proceedings in a dazed condition. Everything was carried on in German, but the parts that most concerned him were grotesquely translated by a ferocious-looking interpreter, who likewise turned Bertie's stupid, involved, self-condemnatory answers into German—no doubt very incorrectly. Bertie however protested, over and over again, that Miss Warren knew nothing of his projects, and that his only object in posing as an American ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... came upon the footprints of men in the mud of the western bank—a Robinson Crusoe experience which carries an electric shiver with it yet, when one stumbles on it in print. They had been warned that the river Indians were as ferocious and pitiless as the river demon, and destroyed all comers without waiting for provocation; but no matter, Joliet and Marquette struck into the country to hunt up the proprietors of the tracks. They found them, by and by, and were hospitably received and well ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might have stepped out of the pages of "Jesse James." He wore a sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian's. Surely this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his high-heeled ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... destruction of the garrison. As if in pursuit of the ball, the players turned and came rushing, a maddened and tumultuous throng, towards the gate. In a moment they had reached it. The amazed English had no time to think or act. The shrill cries of the ball-players were changed to the ferocious war-whoop. The warriors snatched from the squaws the hatchets which the latter, with this design, had concealed beneath their blankets. Some of the Indians assailed the spectators without, while others rushed into the fort, and ...
— Indian Games • Andrew McFarland Davis
... this strange cry broke Young Grumpy's nerve. He scuttled for his hole his jet-black heels kicking up the straws behind him. As soon as he began to run, of course, the gander saw him and swept after him with a ferocious hissing. But Young Grumpy had got the start. He dived into his hole just as the gander brought ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... flowers in summer, and swept with fierce storms in the winter-time, is written the life story of Louis Riel. Chance was not blind when she gave as a field to this man's ambition the plains whereon vengeful Chippewas and ferocious Sioux had waged their battles for so many centuries; a country dyed so often with blood that at last Red River came to be its name. But while our task is to present the career of this apostle of insurrection and unrest; stirred as ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... the Princess Rosalba, was not found in the royal palace, of which King Padella took possession, and, it was said, had strayed into the forest (being abandoned by all her attendants) where she had been eaten up by those ferocious lions, the last pair of which were captured some time since, and brought to the Tower, ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was nearly forty years old, a warrior from boyhood, uncouth, barbaric, ferocious. One could think of no current danger that he had not encountered, no horror that he had not witnessed. His gaunt face was dull red, as if baked by the heat of blazing towns. His coarse black hair had been thinned by the friction of his helmet. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... protection. The "varments" came in relays. A small gray variety took hold of us while it was warm, and when it became too cold for them, the big, black, "sticky" fellows appeared mysteriously, and hung around in the air uttering deep, bass notes like lazy flies. The little gray fellows were singularly ferocious and ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... Plato? No, not he. But in warfare and massacre, in rapine and rape, in black revenge and in deadly malice, in slavery and polygamy, and the debasement of women, and in the pomps, vanities and greeds of royalty, of clericalism, and of usury and barter—we may easily discern the influence of his ferocious and abominable personality." ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... could be translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those black angularities which his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his wallowing in ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... particularly to you, on its arrival, ten days ago. What you tell me of Perry petrifies me; it is a rank imposition. In or about February or March, 1816, I was given to understand that Mr. Croker was not only a coadjutor in the attacks of the Courier in 1814, but the author of some lines tolerably ferocious, then recently published in a morning paper. Upon this I wrote a reprisal. The whole of the lines I have forgotten, and even the purport of them I scarcely remember; for on your assuring me that he was ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... gave us perhaps the hardest fight of our campaigning. This we ran across in the fields not far from home. There was an unusually large number of them, and as is usually the case with these insects, they proved very ferocious. Nothing loth, however, we attacked with cheers, only to be driven back time and again and finally we were compelled to make a very undignified retreat, at full speed in the direction of home. Not to be beaten, however, we secured reinforcements and more ammunition, in the shape of old rags, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... the refinement of taste, and the extent of commerce. But the barbarism of the eleventh century diminished the income and aggravated the expense of the Marquis of Este. In a long series of war and anarchy, man and the works of man had been swept away, and the introduction of each ferocious and idle stranger had been overbalanced by the loss of five or six perhaps of the peaceful industrious natives. The mischievous growth of vegetation, the frequent inundations of the rivers were no longer checked by the vigilance of labour; the face ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... cried, and looking round, he saw me. Assuming an air of not knowing me, and with a ferocious, angry frown, he hastily turned away. I felt so utterly ashamed that I didn't know where to look. It was as if I had been detected in a disgraceful act. I dropped my eyes, and quickly hurried home. All the way I had the drums beating ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... that I was foolish to throw away the benefits sure to come through the "old man's" liking for me. "He'll take care of you," he assured me. "He's got you booked for a quick rise." My poverty was so pressing that I had not the courage to refuse,—the year and a half of ferocious struggle and the longing to marry Betty Crosby had combined to break my spirit. I believe it is Johnson who says the worst feature of genteel poverty is its power to make one ridiculous. I don't think so. No; its worst feature is its ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... love—she was a girdle, so fine, so soft, and so charming, she threw herself into a tub of water for my sake! There was also a widow, who became glowing hot, but I left her standing till she got black again; there was also the first opera dancer, she gave me that cut which I now go with, she was so ferocious! my own hair-comb was in love with me, she lost all her teeth from the heart-ache; yes, I have lived to see much of that sort of thing; but I am extremely sorry for the garter—I mean the girdle—that went into the water-tub. ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... him—he was so pleased with the financial results of the voyage that he determined on a second; and his wife insisted on accompanying him, though he pleaded with her to remain, and told her of the dangers and terrors of a long voyage in unknown seas, the islands of which were peopled by ferocious and treacherous cannibals. But she was not to be deterred from sharing her husband's perils, and with an aching heart took farewell of her infant son, whom she left in care of her mother, and on 2nd September, 1829, the Antarctic sailed ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... behind the times! You may be an unsurpassable expert on dress and manners, on perfumery and jewels, but you could know more law. All those ferocious old statutes have been abolished by the enactments of Antoninus and Aurelius. A slave, during good behavior, is almost as safe ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... horrible grimace the young man yanks fiercely at his cravat. It does not budge, or at least only very slightly. With still further display of energetic effort, accompanied by a ferocious expression of pained and enraged exasperation, he yanks again. No, the cravat is stuck fast behind within the collar. With a gesture of hopeless despair and a face of pitiful woe the young man abandons his struggle with the ordinary kind of cravat which loops around ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... left into the dryest places. It reasons—it decides—rarely it pardons. It is more dangerous than an incoming sea; the sea gives warning—the fire gives none. Your death is only one of many—a burned detail. The forest fire has a leap which is subtle—ferocious. Things it misses it goes back for until they crumble and are devoured at its edge. It cuts with the sweep of a red-hot scythe. All this occurs above the surface. What happens beneath is worse. It gnaws with the tenacity of a cancer deep into the ground, lingering hidden until suspicion ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... sir—as much as my life is worth. The most ferocious poacher in the country. Has nearly beaten in the skull of the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... to dwell on the recollection like a whited sepulchre, a gilded lazar-house of helpless and incurable wretchedness. A Roman beggar, glaring at you from the arches of a ruined temple, like one of Salvator Rosa's Radicals, with a look at once abject and ferocious, may be, perhaps, a characteristic accompaniment to the scene; but the active, erect walk, the frank countenance, and cheerful salutation of a peasant of the Val d'Arno, leave a more pleasing recollection on the mind, as connected with the ideas ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... something touched my neck. It was not the scorching flames I dreaded. I opened my eyes. A hideous face, copper-colored, distorted by a loving grin, was close to mine; a pair of arms were about my neck—a pair of woman's arms! They were those of a ferocious and ugly squaw, old enough to be my mother. The warrior with the fire-brand was replacing it, with a disappointed expression, under the stewed ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... varied like other animals: some were gentle and timid, some were ferocious as wolves. The strong tyrannised over the weak, made slaves of their prisoners, occasionally ate them, and those they did not eat they sacrificed at what they called their customs—offered them up and cut their throats at the altars of their idols. These customs were the most sacred traditions ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... night after night, the one or other part of the camp is entertained by the edifying spectacle of natives being thrashed, tents being burnt, and white people surrounded by ferocious crowds who can scarcely be kept back from carrying out their desire for vengeance by a small truncheon and ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... composed. His music is the modern man in his lately gotten sense of the tininess of the human elements in the race, the enormity of the animal past. For Ernest Bloch, the primeval forest with its thick spawning life, its ferocious beasts, its brutish phallic-worshiping humanity, is still here. Before him there still lie the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of development necessary to make a sapient creature of man. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... fame or success made him very tender to all suffering, especially the suffering of the weak and the helpless. Yet, like many a sensitive man, he concealed this kindness of heart under an affectation of cynicism, which led many unsympathetic critics to style him hard and ferocious in his satire. ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... in setting forth their enemies by crocodile and other ferocious reptiles were not describing any imaginary monsters of the primaeval chaos, but real oppressors. The Egyptian, with his "house of bondage," the Assyrian, "which smote with a rod," the Chaldean who made havoc of Israel altogether, were not dreams. And in beseeching God to deliver ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... the moment of struggle to be a standing advertisement of the utter failure and falsity of the system I had preached, backing my statements with the wager of her life? Moreover, to do so would be to doom myself to defeat at the poll, since under our byelaws, which were almost ferocious in their severity, I could no longer appear in public to prosecute my canvass, and, if my personal influence was withdrawn, then most certainly ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... from the waist up, their exposed bodies quite light in color, and unpainted as is the usual Indian custom for war. Their leader was a tall fellow, having a head of matted coarse hair, which stood almost erect, thus yielding him a peculiarly ferocious aspect. The entire band moved forward, as if in response to prearranged signals, which must have been conveyed by motion, as I could distinguish not the slightest sound of speech. However, it was a relief to note they bore no weapons in their hands ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... Tennessee, Kentucky, and eastern Pennsylvania; then again the plains of Ohio, and now the small remnant of them that remains, are established west of Missouri and Arkansas. They have been involved in numerous bloody wars with other tribes; and for near half a century, resisted with a bold, ferocious spirit, and an indomitable hatred, the progress of the white settlements in Pennsylvania, western Virginia, and especially Kentucky. The Shawanoes have declined more rapidly in numbers[A] than any other tribe of Indians known to the whites. This has been, and we suppose justly, attributed ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... of man's cunning against that of a beast; and after being away some hours, he came up with the not very pleasant information that a huge lion, one of the ferocious maneless kind, was tracking the waggon, and would no doubt hang upon their trail until it had pounced upon one of the ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... the text, but spoil the story; but she has, though probably she does not yet know it, ceased to love,[56] and not without some reason. To say no more about Arthur's technical "blamelessness," he has, by the coming of Lancelot, ceased to be altogether heroic. Though never a mere petulant and ferocious dotard as the Chansons too often represent Charlemagne, he is very far from being a wise ruler or even baron. He makes rash promises and vows, accepts charges on very slight evidence, and seems to have his knights ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the fashion to regard the British as a degenerate race. Still it is good to know that one of our rat clubs has killed no fewer than three hundred of these ferocious beasts. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... hear what it was, why he never thought of it before, and it is somewhat surprising, but by no means without precedent. Artemus Ward has told us somewhere of a ferocious bandit who was confined for sixteen years in solitary captivity, before the notion of escape ever occurred to him. When it did, he opened the ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... the earlier part of her troubles, when she had only a husband to think of and to care for. But now she had a son; and the maternal instinct seemed to operate in her case, as it has done in so many others, to make her fearless, desperate, and, in the end, almost ferocious, in protecting her offspring from harm, and in maintaining his rights. She immediately engaged with the utmost zeal and ardor in raising a new army. She did not trust the command of it to any general, but directed all the operations of it herself. There is not space to ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... four extended On the grass the vessel's keel; High above it, gilt and splendid, Rose the figure-head ferocious With its ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... view gives us a somewhat different picture of the process of evolution from the old idea of a ferocious struggle between the individuals of a species with the survival of the fittest and the annihilation of the less fit. Evolution assumes a more peaceful aspect. New and advantageous characters survive by incorporating themselves into the race, improving it and opening to it new opportunities. ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... added, as though it had been a huge and ferocious animal, "is very yellow and has eaten up London. It will take us a very long time to ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... times the monomaniac's designs would never have reached fruition. Now the vast public discontents converted the cringing ex-tenant or shrieking beggar into a gaunt, long-haired, ferocious agitator—one of the outstanding crazy ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... advised his father to hold out to the last. In a military point of view, he considered his captors as contemptible, being without a head; though many of the men:—the savages in particular—appeared to be ferocious and reckless. The whole party was guarded in discourse, and little was said in English, though he was convinced that many more whites were present than he had at first believed. Mr. Woods he had not seen, nor did he know anything of ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... different origin is the pretty Lough Derryclare, in Connemara, south of the Joyce Country. The ferocious O'Flahertys frequented this region in past ages, and, with the exception of Oliver Cromwell, no historical name is better known in the west of Ireland than O'Flaherty. One of this doughty race was, it seems, a model ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... remained that of the old Roman Empire. Both of these systems of law, however, fell into disuse, and were replaced by rude bodies of "customs," which gradually grew up. The habits of the time were exceedingly rude and ferocious. The Franks had been the fiercest and most untamable of all the Teutonic nations, and only submitted themselves to the influence of Christianity and civilization from the respect which the Roman Empire inspired. Charles the Great had tried to bring in Roman cultivation, ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that Boccaccio was the inventor of the bean cure. Cat's claws are notoriously apt to scratch. Should a savage cat tear out a piece of flesh from the hand, she is said to "dawk" it out. "Dawk" expresses a ferocious dab and tear combined. A sharp iron nail unseen might "dawk" the skin off an unwary hand. In ancient days when women quarrelled and fought, they are said to have "dawked" fragments from each other's faces with their finger-nails. Such incidents are now obsolete. It has often been ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... regulations that carry so many men as culprits to the Federal prisons. The offenders, known as "Moonshiners," are those who make and sell whisky without paying the United States for a license in the trade. These transgressors of the law have for years been hunted like Italian bandits or ferocious wild beasts, and not unfrequently blood has been shed in defence of the hidden distilleries and quite as often in attacking them and ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... gnarled trees, matted vines, interlacing rank grasses, and clusters of towering plants, so dank with the odor of wet and decay that the air even up where the flyers were seemed charged with it, lurked many a monster reptile and ferocious beast. Often the four boys saw the majestic form of a lion or the lumbering shape of an elephant as these animals were quenching their thirst at some open spot along a stream. And once they caught a brief glimpse of ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... assassinations which have left an indelible stain on that event. He was intimately connected with the deputies, styled Girondists or Brisotins, who perished on the scaffold, after their party was overcome, on the 31st of May, 1793, by that of the ferocious mountaineers. The latter warmly reproached TALMA with having, in the year 1792, after the retreat of the Prussians, given a fete or grand supper to the famous DUMOURIEZ, with whom they were beginning to fall out, and whom they accused of treason for not ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... the ghastly part of it!" cried Hadria; "from ferocious enemies a girl might defend herself, but what is she to do against the united efforts of ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... out the consequences, the consequences to the public purse, when I recommend 'em to read Coryphaeus? No, Mrs. Ambrose, you will form no just opinion of the stupidity of mankind until you have sat upon a Borough Council!" The little man fixed her with a glance of ferocious energy. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... clutched the food tightly in both his hands for an instant. A look of ferocious desire wrung his face, and he raised it to his lips. Then a divine smile dawned in his eyes, and he proffered it to the other. The man took it eagerly, and slipped into the darkness, that he might eat it unseen. As ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... rapidly effacing this romantic fresco, that filled the sides of the archway like the frontispiece of a book, causing it to scale off; but Gabriel could still see the horrible face of the judge standing at the foot of the cross, and the ferocious gesture of the man, who with his knife in his mouth, was bending forward to tear out the heart of the little martyr; theatrical figures, but they had often disturbed ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... agonized unto death amid wrongs to which no man would give ear! That appeal of innocence in anguish to the hard, mute heavens! Were there only one such instance in all the chronicles of time, it should doom the past to abhorred oblivion. Yet injustice, the basest, the most ferocious, is inextricable from warp and woof in the tissue of things gone by. And if anyone soothes himself with the reflection that such outrages can happen no more, that mankind has passed beyond such hideous possibility, he is better acquainted with books ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... they seek him not—and cannot expect to find women and children in an invading army. But they are men, and have equal rights with all other men to defend themselves and their property when invaded, more especially when they find in the enemy's camp a ferocious and mortal foe, using the same warfare which the American ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... a shock of black hair and ferocious eyes, came up. The rest shoved in after him to ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... of Alca began to take courage. The labourers of Dombes and the neatherds of Belmont swore that they themselves would be of more avail than a girl against the ferocious beast, and they exclaimed as they stroked the muscles on their arms, "Let the dragon come!" Many men and women had seen him. They did not agree about his form and his figure, but all now united in saying that he ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... Abraham Lincoln.[8] Of the other sons of Mordecai (great-uncles of the President), Thomas also went to Kentucky, Isaac went to Tennessee, while Jacob and John stayed in Virginia, and begat progeny who became in later times ferocious rebels, and of whom one wrote a very comical blustering letter to his relative the President;[9] and probably another, bearing oddly enough the name of Abraham, was a noted fighter.[10] It is curious to observe of what migratory stock we have here the sketch. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... near the engines," was all Frank had time to shout before the avalanche of hairy, ill-smelling brutes was upon them. Some of them had armed themselves with rocks which they hurled with ferocious force. Others used nothing but their bare hands. Some of them, wounded as they were, fought with added fierceness. Desperately the boys fought them off and when the magazines of the rifles and revolvers were emptied they fell back on their ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... veneration. He is often to blame; he is often ridiculous; but he is always a good man; and the feeling which he inspires is regret that a person so estimable should be so unamiable. Wycherley borrowed Alceste, and turned him—we quote the words of so lenient a critic as Mr. Leigh Hunt—into "a ferocious sensualist, who believed himself as great a rascal as he thought everybody else." The surliness of Moliere's hero is copied and caricatured. But the most nauseous libertinism and the most dastardly fraud are substituted ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... now developed a ferocious temper. Her three suitors all bore the marks of her teeth. Yet they never replied in kind, never defended themselves against her. They turned their shoulders to her most savage slashes, and with wagging ...
— White Fang • Jack London |
