"Fetid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chill in the room was not a delusion of my chilled body. I was warm, yet the air around me remained moist and cold, unlike a summer night. It seemed air strangely thickened and soiled, as pure water may be muddied by the passage of some unclean body. In this atmosphere persisted a fetid smell of mold and decay, warring with the homely scent of coffee and the fragrance of ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... the long hot days went on: they were days of drought to the land, but they were days of paradise to me. The fever-mists were heavy and the peasants sickened. Tiber was low, and had fetid odors as its yellow shallows dried up in the sun, clouds of gnats hovered over the Lagherello and its beds of rushes, and the sullen wind blew always from the south-east, bringing the desert sand with it. But to me this sickly summer was so fair that I continued to live in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... public resort except the bathing-sheds, people must spend nearly all their time in bathing, sleeping, smoking, and eating. The great spring is beyond the village, in a square tank in a mound. It bubbles up with much strength, giving off fetid fumes. There are broad boards laid at intervals across it, and people crippled with rheumatism go and lie for hours upon them for the advantage of the sulphurous steam. The temperature of the spring is 130 degrees F.; but after the water has travelled to the village, along ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... fetid alleys where the sun never shone, my guide led the way, bringing me at last to the familiar Rue de Roi. My distrust had vanished by now, and I followed him unhesitatingly. Crossing the road and walking rapidly through a private passage, we reached the back of the inn. The ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... a dark alley, whose fetid odors were quite sufficient to deter the dainty from penetrating beyond—they went, and into a miserable room where was scarcely space for them to stand, so huddled was it with broken furniture and ragged children. A fire was burning in a shattered grate, and ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... prisoner through long lines of close, musty, fetid passages, and up high flights of cold, damp stone stairs, to the very top of the building, where the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... prospect is before you! the commencement of the civilization of Africa, the extension of our knowledge of all the kingdoms of nature, the production of great material benefits to the Old World, the gradual healing of that foul and fetid ulcer, the slave-trade, the one grand disgrace and weakness of Christendom, and that has defiled the hands of all those who have had any dealings with it; and last, but not least—nay, the greatest of all, and the true end of all—the lifting up of the poor African from the earth, the turning ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... paralysis. When the infinite reality becomes questionable, then all things become material and vile. The world becomes a world of sight and sound, of taste and touch. The soul is poured through the senses and dissipated; the current of life stagnates, and grows fetid in sloughs and marshes. Minds for whom God is the Unknowable have no faith in knowledge at all, except as the equivalent of weight and measure, of taste and ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... realized the atmosphere was fetid and stifling. A great pressure bore on his lungs, making breathing labored and difficult. And then they were in a lift that dropped into the depths of its shaft with dizzying speed. Antazzo's grin; Tom's eyes, dull and lifeless, floating ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... immediately into a deep sleep. He awoke in a high fever and delirious. Some days later he came to himself, rose and went out. It was eight o'clock, and the sun had disappeared. The heat was as intolerable as before, but he inhaled the dusty, fetid, infected town air with greediness. And now his head began to spin round, and a wild expression of energy crept into his inflamed eyes and pale, meager, wan face. He did not know, did not even think, what he was going to do; he only knew that all was to be finished ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... that fetid huddling, that shameless communal sprawl. And yet, was this so much better? The nearness to the surface was meaningless; it only tantalized. And the ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... in the coldest weather the presence of a dozen men in a small chamber, air-tight except for a small opening in the roof, very soon raises the temperature to an uncomfortable degree, and the air becomes so fetid that a white man, not accustomed to it, is nauseated in half an hour or less. Such are the conditions in the modern kivas of Tusayan. In the smaller structures of De Chelly they must have been worse. The fire is, therefore, made ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... its seat in the brain, repose utterly forsook the patient's couch. The progress of the fever within was marked by yellowish spots, which spread over the surface of the body. If then, a happy crisis came not, all hope was gone. Soon the breath infected the air with a fetid odor, the lips were glazed, despair painted itself in the eyes, and sobs, with long intervals of silence, formed the only language. From each side of the mouth, spread foam tinged with black and burnt blood. Blue streaks mingled with the yellow all over the frame. All remedies were useless. This ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... her life she had heard the ugly din of the world's wickedness pass harmlessly over her head, like a storm dashing at the doors of some secluded dwelling that shielded its inhabitants from the tempest. But now she had come personally face to face with the demon of impurity; she had felt the fetid touch almost upon herself; and it hurt, it sickened her. Therefore it was that the other Vestals marvelled, asking what change had come over their companion, to quench the mild sunshine of her life; ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... would have followed the thrust. He knew that then the victim would have been taken back, helpless and motionless as the spider was, to be laid side by side with other helpless but still conscious victims in the fetid depths of the wasp's nest. And he knew that finally an egg would have been laid on the victim's chest; an egg that would eventually hatch and deliver a bit of life that would calmly and leisurely devour the ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... astonishment; for he found that the dwelling was thirty miles in circuit, and composed of one entire carbuncle, lucid and vermilion. What became of the boasted wonders of the world before this? The world itself, in the comparison, appeared but a lump of brute and fetid matter.[6] ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... afford it due nourishment; it will be inadequate in quantity and quality. Its countenance, therefore, will become pale; its look sickly and aged; the flesh soft and flabby; the limbs emaciated; the belly, in some cases, large, in others, shrunk; and the evacuations fetid and unnatural; and in a very few weeks, the blooming healthy child will be changed into the pale, sickly, peevish, wasted creature, ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... revealed. Frame hutches, split log cabins rubbed shoulders with buildings of steel frame and stone fronts. Thousand dollar apartments gazed disdainfully down upon hovels scarcely fit to shelter swine. Their noses were proudly lifted high above the fetid atmosphere which rose from the offal-laden causeway below. They had no heed for that breeding ground of the germs of every disease ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... ninety- seven blows, when his strength failed; and Brend, his flesh black and beaten to jelly, and his bruised skin hanging in bags full of clotted blood, was thrust into his cell. There, upon the floor of that dark and fetid den, the victim fainted. But help was at hand; an outcry was raised, the people could bear no more, the doors were opened, and he was rescued. [Footnote: New England Judged, ed. ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... The fetid odour of the creatures—which was quite as strong as that of the carrion itself—was too much for the olfactory nerves of our heroes; and they were all three glad enough to let the king-vultures off without a ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... were hanging. The women who sat in their doorways were pale and their matted fair hair hung loose over their shoulders. The children were almost naked and the few clothes that they did wear were but rags. In the alley were some pigs wallowing in the stagnant water from which a fetid odor arose. Our guide stopped. Evidently he had lost his way. But at this moment a policeman appeared. The clerk spoke to him and the officer told him he would show him the way.... We followed the policeman down more narrow streets. At last we stopped at a yard in ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... fifteen minutes, sometimes for longer, talking over netsukes and Hong Kong with Ah Shee. The atmosphere of the place was overpowering; such a stifling reek of a mysterious effluvium, the combination of joss sticks, stale fish, rancid oil, and a sickly taint like the fetid breath of some mortal sickness; it made Sophy feel faint and, after a short interval, she invariably made her way into the street, where the air—though by no means fresh—was an improvement on that within ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... blamed the Pope for doing to himself. Luther found it difficult to meet this line of argument. Much against his will he was obliged to support his opinions by appealing to the tradition of the Church and the writings of the Fathers, which latter he had denounced as "fetid pools whence Christians have been drinking unwholesome draughts instead of slaking their thirst from the pure fountain of Holy Scripture."[5] "This article (The Eucharist)," he wrote, "is neither unscriptural nor a dogma of human invention. It is based ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... theme I have been wont to brag on; I've told how you, my now innocuous moke, Would chew the tail-board off a G.S. wagon By way of mere plaisanterie (or joke); Dubbed you most diabolical of ragers, A rampant hooligan, a fetid tough, A thing without respect for sergeant-majors— That is to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... the large mortality arising from poor living and its concomitant diseases, and the exhaustion produced by repeated torture, epidemics frequently break out in the hot weather in those dark and fetid dens, and oftentimes nearly clear out the prison. On such occasions as many as four hundred have succumbed in a month. The number of criminals who are executed from this prison, either as sentenced to death, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... came, and with it the gurgling of the old woman. It was impossible and incredible, that mingling in the fetid air of those two sounds, as if the babble of clear spring water had suddenly broken into and merged with the turgid roll of a city sewer. Mick sat up. "But ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... at some fetid alkali holes that had scarce given enough to slake their thirst. The effect of the water had weakened them, and the steers that had been without water for thirty-six hours were being pushed on a course slightly northwest as rapidly as the enfeebled condition of the saddle-horses would ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... ones. One house must turn its back to the other, leaving the lower streets between them. Provisions, such as wood, wine and such things are carried in by the doors n, and privies, stables and other fetid matter must be emptied away underground. From one ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... and finned and fanged, had basked upon it—grotesque, tentative vehicles of the Flame of Life! And then these flashed out, and the wild sea fell, and the land arose—hideous and naked, a steaming ooze fetid with gasping life. And all the while this scarred Sentinel stared unmoved. And then a riot of giant vegetation all about it—divinely extravagant, many-colored as fire. And this too flashed out—like the impossible dream of a god too young. And the Great Change came, and ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Patching did not participate in this contest for seats, but walked through the fetid and stifling cabins to the forward deck, where fresh, bracing air, glorious sunlight, and a cheery view of the river were to be had. But these charms of nature were apparently thrown away on the trio. They all leaned over the railing, and, looked steadily into the water. Times ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... factory. The statement to-day is hardly credible, but such is the fact. In those cruel times, when no Lord Ashley had as yet arisen to open the door of the workman's prison-house and set the children free, this poor child had been shut up from six in the morning till six at night in the fetid atmosphere of a cotton-mill. God knows what the economic value of such a weakling's labour may have been! One would think that a South Carolina planter would have been wiser than to work his "stock" at such an age. Be this as it may, my friend had passed through this terrible apprenticeship ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... the monotonous dark green of the level, interminable mangrove forest, with its fantastic, interlacing roots, whose function it appears to be to extend seaward, year by year, its dismal kingdom of black fetid mud, and to veil from the rude eye of the intruder the tropical charms of the country at its back. After some miles of this cheerless scenery, and at a point where the fresh water begins to mingle with the salt, the handsome and useful nipa ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... victims of scurvy, which, in the succeeding few weeks, carried off so many. All of us who had read sea-stories had read much of this disease and its horrors, but we had little conception of the dreadful reality. It usually manifested itself first in the mouth. The breath became unbearably fetid; the gums swelled until they protruded, livid and disgusting, beyond the lips. The teeth became so loose that they frequently fell out, and the sufferer would pick them up and set them back in their sockets. In attempting to bite the hard corn bread furnished by ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... about our clothes, and expressed the greatest astonishment at everything he noticed about us. He ridiculed our repugnance to partake of a piece of the raw gut of a turtle which he offered to us, and to expose our folly, ate a piece, which he appeared to think a dainty, although it was quite fetid from putrefaction. Our attempts to collect a vocabulary of their language were quite unsuccessful. An axe, some chisels, and other tools were given to them, but they expressed no pleasure in receiving the presents, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... days. He pictured her huddled there in the swamp in the cheerless leaky cabin with worse than no companions. Ah! the swamp, the cruel swamp! It was a fearful place in the rain. Its oozing mud and fetid vapors, its clinging slimy draperies,—how they twined about the bones of its victims and chilled their hearts. Yet here his Zora,—his poor ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the streets was dreadful. The bones of dead horses and other animals were bleaching in the streets and buzzards almost as tame as sparrows hopped aside as passers-by disturbed them. There was a fetid smell everywhere and evidences of a pitiless siege and starvation on ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... pickpockets,' shouted a Metropolitan. Every body then tried to button his coat over his breast, and every body gave it up as a bad job. In at last, but with the heat of that exertion—the smell of the hot gas—the fetid breath of two thousand souls, not particular, many, as to the quality of their gin—what a sweltering bath follows! The usher sees a ticket clutched before him, and a breathless individual saying ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... water-fronts are the slum wastes where the sewers of politics and business and social life pour forth their fetid filth. Here the journals of yellow shade grub and fatten. In this ooze and slime puddle the hordes of sewer rats, scavengers of the world's garbage, from whose collected stores the editor selects his daily ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... almost every one: one day in my house he called Grote's 'History' "a fetid quagmire, with nothing spiritual about it." I always thought, until his 'Reminiscences' appeared, that his sneers were partly jokes, but this now seems rather doubtful. His expression was that of a depressed, almost despondent yet benevolent man; and it is notorious how heartily ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... time in his life, an influence serene, natural, healthy, and sweet breathed over him from the mind of a woman,—an influence so heavenly and peaceful that he did not challenge or suspect it, but rather opened his worn heart insensibly to it, as one in a fetid chamber naturally breathes freer when the fresh ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... irresolute, glaring at them; then something struck and shattered a pane of the window beside him, and the fetid smell of a bad egg filled the room. At the sound Mr. Thomasson uttered a cry and shrank farther into the darkness, while Lord Almeric rose hastily and looked about for a refuge. But Mr. ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... for a drink of clean water, and saying that the desire to drink clean water out of a glass represented everything he had to say for the moment about the desert; all the same, he continued to tell of fetid, stale, putrid wells, and of the haunting terror with which the Saharian starts in the morning lest he should find no water at the nearest watering-place, only a green scum fouled by the staling of horses and mules I Owen was as plain-spoken as Shakespeare, so Harding said ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... be the crazy creature who torments me so much! Were it not for him, I could talk to you of more agreeable things: he is not greatly changed; and yet he has taken a great deal o f %t. But he has nearly killed me with the fetid smell of his breath; for now his is still worse than your cousin's: you guess that this is a fresh reason for my not approaching him; on the contrary, I go away as far as I can, and sit on a chair at ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... could almost see the skipper of this mystery ship leaping frantically from his bed at some sudden call or commotion. A chair was smashed and broken, and the man who examined it curiously wiped from his hands a disgusting slime that was smeared stickily on the splintered fragments. There was a fetid stench within his nostrils, and he passed up further examination ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... Kane time to understand what had happened to him, and now it was too late. Space had taken care of its own. The air in The Luck was growing foul and the food was gone. Death hung in the fetid atmosphere of the tiny ...
— Turnover Point • Alfred Coppel
... streets swept clean and sprinkled with perfumes, Adorned with flags, and filled with shouting crowds, Drew near the sacred shrine, a greater came, Through unswept ways, where dwelt the toiling poor, Huddled in wretched huts, breathing foul air, Living in fetid filth and poverty— No childhood's joys, youth prematurely old, Manhood a painful struggle but to live, And age a weary shifting of the scene; While all the people drew aside to gaze Upon his gentle but majestic face, Beaming with ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... the coarsest species or refuse of the Barbados aloes, and from its rank fetid smell is only useful for veterinary medicine. It is also ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... boat—making, by this operation, a very curious trail, and a very disagreeable smell in stirring up the mud, as we sank above the knee at every step. The water here was still fresh, with only an insipid and disagreeable taste, probably derived from the bed of fetid mud. After proceeding in this way about a mile, we came to a small black ridge on the bottom, beyond which the water became suddenly salt, beginning gradually to deepen, and the bottom was sandy and firm. It was a remarkable ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... It is not unfrequently the case, however, that some of them cannot get home. They have to stay behind until they have, in a measure, slept off the fumes of strong drink: and then, with bloodshot eyes, fetid breath, and staggering gait, they reach their homes. Such young men have received a new impetus in the way that leads to destruction, and such are the common fruits of a ...
— Charles Duran - Or, The Career of a Bad Boy • The Author of The Waldos
... village, with its squalid and fetid huts, we caught the sound of bells, innumerable bells, tinkling at regular intervals. Many people trooped out from their houses to look at us, all flat-faced, all with oblique eyes, all stolidly, sullenly, stupidly passive. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... bitter intestinal process, the crowd of lawyers, doctors, notaries, councillors, business men, bankers, big merchants, speculators, and magistrates. Here are to be found even more causes of moral and physical destruction than elsewhere. These people—almost all of them—live in unhealthy offices, in fetid ante-chambers, in little barred dens, and spend their days bowed down beneath the weight of affairs; they rise at dawn to be in time, not to be left behind, to gain all or not to lose, to overreach a man or ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... during which the excitability increases before it disappears. As fatigue increases, the perception of the intercurrent excitation is retarded; an odor is perceived as exciting before it is perceived as a differentiated sensation; the most fetid odors arouse feelings of well-being before being perceived as odors, and their painful quality only appears afterward, or is not noticed at all." And after recording a series of results with the ergograph obtained under the stimulus of unpleasant odors he remarks: "We ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... cesspools, indeed, are by no means in such evil odour as they used to be. A fetid Thames and a low death-rate occur from time to time together in London. For, if the special matter or germs of epidemic disorder be not present, a corrupt atmosphere, however obnoxious otherwise, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... run. At this hour of night, hardly a pedestrian was in evidence. It was an arched vaulted corridor, almost a tunnel, dimly blue-lit with short lengths of fluorescent tubes at intervals on the ceiling. For all the vaunted mechanisms of our time, the air here was heavy and fetid. Moisture dripped from the concrete roof. It lay on the metal pavement of the ground; the smell of ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... eye like a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of wholehearted crime that can only be described as sparkling. His unalloyed maleficence is adorned with a thousand graces of manner. Into the dark and fetid marsh that is an evil heart, where low forms of sentiency are hardly distinguishable from the all-pervading mud, Stevenson never peered, unless it were in the study of Huish in ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... night was abominable, some unpleasant kind of meat cooked with cabbage, and though they tried to eat it, many of them could not keep it down. The ship rolled and the men grew sick. The atmosphere became fetid. Each moment seemed more impossible than the last. There was no room to move, neither could one get out and away. After supper the men lay down in the only place there was to lie, two men on the tables, two men on the benches each side, two men on the floor between, ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... horror, lurking in the shadows of the fire-lit room, had suddenly stirred and were creeping stealthily towards her—impalpable but deadly, nauseous as the poisonous miasma rising from some dark and fetid pool. She shrank back, instinctively putting out her hand as though to ward ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... underworld of the great city? What of the babes who cry in fetid cellars for the light and are denied it? What of the Subway track-walker, purblind from gloom; the coal-stoker, whose fiery tomb is the boiler-room of a skyscraper; sweatshop workers, a flight below the sidewalk level, whose faces are the ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... ears. These altogether formed something like a half-decayed turnip stuck upon a mop-stick. Let the reader only imagine to himself a figure of this sort, constantly opening the slit that I have above described, and vomiting forth at once, from a fetid carcase, the most disgusting sound and stench, and then he will have some faint idea of the scene exhibited by this animal of a Customhouse officer. After being admonished twice to be peaceable, and not attending to it, he and his ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... was Africa; the Egyptian ports with their traditional corruption that at sunset was beginning to tremble and steam like a fetid morass; Alexandria in whose low coffee houses were imitation Oriental dancers with no more clothes than a pocket handkerchief, every woman of a different nation and shrieking in chorus all the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... but the sun was still above the edge of the horizon, and its beams had that soft, whitish, unnatural light of the northern summer night. A faint breeze came down from the waters of the gulf, lifting away the fetid odors of the huge camp, and bringing relief to the thousands of wet and dirty men who were half prostrated by heat and unwonted exercise. Ivan, who had lain gazing moodily through the lifted flap of the tent, had fallen into a light doze before de Windt, more than ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... such, that by their means they decided disputes, as they imagined that perjurers would meet their death in these waters, while the guiltless would be able to come forth from them unharmed. They were fetid, sulphureous pools of water, probably affected by the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... remains. Those of other families are not however rare. Fish, for instance, are found in great abundance, near Glarus in Switzerland, in clay slate; in Germany, at Papenheim, in a slaty marle, in the cupriferous slate of Eisleben, in the fetid limestone of Oehningen. They are also found in Egypt, and we have specimens of the same sort from Lyria, in a limestone apparently belonging to the oolitic or Jura formation. China and the coast of Coromandel have also fossils of this sort, but by far the greatest quantity ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... reeling footsteps must have been palsied by the horrors of their situation. The air was cold and misty. The paving-stones, loosened from their beds, lay in wild disorder amid the tall, rank grass, which sprang up around the feet and ankles. Fallen houses choked up the streets. The most fetid and poisonous smells everywhere prevailed;—and by the aid of that ghastly light which, even at midnight, never fails to emanate from a vapory and pestilential at atmosphere, might be discerned lying in the by-paths and alleys, or rotting in the windowless ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... from its nest in the far East, there flutters westward a foul thing. Hovering over Limehouse suburb, seeing it crowded and unclean, liking its fetid smell, it settles ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... moschatus) in the breeding-season, many deer, antelopes, sheep, and goats possess odoriferous glands in various situations, more especially on their faces. The so-called tear-sacks, or suborbital pits, come under this head. These glands secrete a semi-fluid fetid matter which is sometimes so copious as to stain the whole face, as I have myself seen in an antelope. They are "usually larger in the male than in the female, and their development is checked by castration." (11. Owen, 'Anatomy of Vertebrates,' vol. iii. p. 632. See also Dr. Murie's observations ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... out that I'm a man!" At the soldier's orders, his companion bound Quartilla and myself together, mouth to mouth, breast to breast, and thigh to thigh; and not without a great deal of laughter. Then the catamite, also at the soldier's order, began to beslaver me all over with the fetid kisses of his stinking mouth, a treatment I could neither fly from, nor in any other way avoid. Finally, he ravished me, and worked his entire pleasure upon me. In the meantime, the satyrion which I had drunk only a little while before spurred every nerve ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... the moonlight, like some mighty beacon of evil rising up above that sleeping sea, it seemed to say to us, "Go, turn back; remember those who count upon you." And we pulled from it reluctantly out into the broad sea, and breathed a full breath as we left its vapours and its fetid shores. ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... superficial quackery, and that isn't all. This fetid naturalism eulogizes the atrocities of modern life and flatters our positively American ways. It ecstasizes over brute force and apotheosizes the cash register. With amazing humility it defers to the nauseating taste of the mob. It repudiates style, it rejects every ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... nowhere visible; but I was not much astonished at that, because, from the glimpse that I was able to catch of the river, I had very little doubt that its characteristics were precisely those of all the other rivers in that region, namely, a somewhat sluggish current of water thick with foul and fetid mud, swampy margins overgrown with mangroves, and numerous shallow, winding creeks, mangrove-bordered, discharging into it on either side; and it was highly probable that, failing to find a firm bank upon which to land along ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... kind, which he had the opportunity of observing only once, are sometimes united in masses, and completely close the auditive canal. The surface is granulated and black, and there escapes from it an unctuous fetid discharge. On both sides the animal is exceedingly susceptible of pain, and the excrescences bleed if the slightest pressure is brought to ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... an egg-shaped veil (volva), having a gelatinous inner layer. Some are bright-colored, others are pure white, and the stems of one species look as if covered with lace work. The most familiar one, Phallus impudicus, "the fetid wood witch," we have placed in the list of fungi at the end of this ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... with the master, provided that there is not a speck on the outside insensible horn; and perhaps that is oiled and blacked (!) when the horse is brought out, while inside, the soft frog is left night and day soaked and saturated with the most frightful horrors. Hence the most fetid thrushes, and hence the contracted heel; for the contracted heel is the consequence, not the cause ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... whose hate was ablaze? Both on revenge were bent; He for a menace sent, She for the merriment Caused by his lays. "Dungeon and torture-rack, These shall now pay thee back! Minstrel and poet rare, Rave in thy mad despair, And in that fetid lair Finish thy days!" ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... disseminated throughout the stratified rocks. Certain limestones are visibly greasy with it, and others give off its characteristic fetid odor when struck with a hammer. Many shales are bituminous, and some are so highly charged that small flakes may be lighted like tapers, and several gallons of oil to the ton may be ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... attributed much of this to the clear mountain atmosphere which surrounded Raymond Simms, the ignorant barbarian driven out of his native hills by a feud. Raymond was of the open spaces, and refused to hear fetid things that seemed out of place in them. There was a dignity which impressed Newton, in the blank gaze with which Raymond greeted Newton's sallies that were wont to set the village pool room in a roar; but how could you have a fuss with a feller who knew all about trapping, who had seen a man ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... seconds the prairie was black with filthy birds, which clambered over the dead antelopes, and beat their wings against each other, while they tore out the eyes of the quarry with their fetid beaks. ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... in one of those red star-spangled passions of rebellion against his fetid days, he blindly cut Hanscha with the edge of a book which struck against her brow as he hurled it. She had been drunk and had asked of him, at sixteen, because of the handsomeness that women would easily love in him, to cadet the neighborhood of Grand Street, using ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... Coccosteus, a heavy fish, indifferently furnished with fins, may have burrowed, like the recent Silurus glanis or Pimelodus gulio, in a thick mud,—of the existence of which in vast quantity, during the times of the Old Red Sandstone, the dark Caithness flagstones, the fetid breccia of Strathpeffer, and the gray stratified clays of Cromarty, Moray, and Banff, unequivocally testify; and that it may have thus not only succeeded in capturing many of its light-winged contemporaries, which it would have vainly pursued in open sea, but may have been enabled also to ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... a head that resembled a huge football made of soiled linen. In place of the mouth there was a small, dirty hole through which the fetid breath came and went. Above the hole was a big red patch. I unwound the bandages one by one. Gradually the face was revealed. Between the mouth with black, swollen lips and the bruised eyes, closed by grey greenish lids, there was, where the nose should have been, ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... of his helmet, and lifted it. The air that struck his face was cool and clean. He breathed deeply, gratefully. And at first he did not notice the strange odor upon it: a curious, unpleasant scent, earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar. ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... understand what two great men were watching them, how they would stare! But they don't care a sprat for us, not they! They are not part of the world the three or four thousand civilised savages for whom we sweat our brains, and whose fetid breath perfumed with ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... slow to avail themselves of the privilege either, but hastened to scramble through the gap, carrying the lanterns with them. William managed to get up enough steam to crawl outside, where he could breath air that was not fetid, and ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... Where the cholera, the cyclone, and the crow Come and go; Where the merchant deals in indigo and tea, Hides and ghi; Where the Babu drops inflammatory hints In his prints; Stands a City—Charnock chose it—packed away Near a Bay— By the Sewage rendered fetid, by the sewer Made impure, By the Sunderbunds unwholesome, by the swamp Moist and damp; And the City and the Viceroy, ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... fetid atmosphere of bar-rooms and to the soft living of the great city, found his nerve beginning to crack under the strain. Cold drops stood out on his forehead and his hands shook from excitement and anxiety. What kind of a man was his enemy to lie there in the black silence and not once give a ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... far greater skill and shrewdness; their rent and food are more expensive; and their hours of work, while they have work, more than half as long again. Conceive sixteen or eighteen hours of skilled labour in a stifling and fetid chamber, earning not much more than 6s. 6d. or 7s. a week! And, as has been already mentioned in one case, the man who will earn even that, must work all Sunday. He is even liable to be thrown out of his work for refusing to work on Sunday. Why not? Is there anything about one idle day in seven ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... from the comparatively clean air of the street into the fetid chill of his room he asked himself why he—son of Northern tamaracks and quiet books—went on with this horrible imitation of living; and each time answered himself that, whether there was any real reason or not, he was going to make good ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Europe to America. Our senses had been changed from what they had been the night and day before, while listening to the hoarse sounds of the mariners, when the abyss of the sea was at our feet, and when we drank fetid water, and inhaled the stench of pitch. In the Prior's cell of the Convent of Vera Cruz, we listened to a melodious voice accompanied with an harmonious instrument, we saw treasures and riches, we ate exquisite confectioneries, we breathed amber ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... I replied; "so let us make haste. I will go first, and you bring up the rear, with Woola between. Come," and with the words I dashed forward, across the fetid ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... forty-mile square that makes the Dismal Swamp. Thither, aforetime, even as to-day, men fled into the labyrinthine recesses to escape the justice—or the injustice—of their fellows. Runaway slaves sought asylum within its impenetrable and uncharted mazes of thicket and quaking earth, of fetid pool and slithering quicksands. Such fugitives came no more after the emancipation. Instead of slaves, there were black men who had outraged the law, who fled into the steaming, noxious waste in order to evade the penalty for crime. For ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... has not shown his head. Not only has the desire for smoking been effectually squelched, but a perfect hatred of smoking has been developed on account of the offensiveness of the odor of tobacco. I frequently cross the street, or change my seat in a car to escape the puff of smoke, or the fetid breath of a smoker. 'Thanks be unto God who ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... is said to be so fetid that a dog will not touch it. A dog is always suspicious of an animal that shows no fear and makes no attempt to get out of his way. This fetidness of the opossum is not apparent ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... sniffing with disgust. "Eyes like a boiled haddock. And that thing has the cheek to call itself a Messiah. Thank God I'm a Jew; it's not business of mine. But if I were a Christian, I'd bash his blooming head in. Damned if I wouldn't. The frowsy, fetid, flow-blown fraud. Or what's the matter with the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... this strain until I began to think that I had longed for this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we went back to the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly belly in the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green liquid oozed from his ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... to surrender, and Konrad was carried, a half-senseless captive to Bothwell's castle of Hermitage. Even then the earl spared his life. He lay in a hideous den, in pitch darkness and dead silence broken only by the splash of drops of fetid water that fell from the slimy arch ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... signs of vegetation, save here and there a clump of sage brush, or the wild pita plant, whose stalk towered into the air like a sign-post to guide the wanderer over these sandy wastes. The cactus and fetid creosote plant lined our path, the latter giving forth a most disagreeable odor as it was crushed beneath the horses' hoofs. Towards night we approached the base of a mountain, and entering a grove of willows and cottonwoods, halted, and dismounting, made ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... on in the interest of city-building ever since Cain's day. Narrow and crooked streets, want of proper sewerage and ventilation, the absence of forethought in providing open spaces for the recreation of the people, the allowance of intramural burials, and of fetid nuisances, such as slaughter-houses and manufactories of offensive stuffs, have converted cities into pestilential inclosures, and kept Jefferson's saying—"Great cities are great sores"—true in its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... evening. Either through insufficient advertising, or the crass stupidity of the enfranchised of Eden Centre, who thought less of their political enlightenment than the noisy saving of their souls, Shelby's meeting proved a pitiful fiasco. Hardly a score had gathered in the low-ceiled schoolhouse, fetid with reeking kerosene lamps and wilting humanity; and of this beggarly handful two-thirds were women. Shelby assumed a cheerful front, declaring that a small audience so assembled was deserving of his best, but hewing to this line was another matter. Womankind ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... gone. He arose, with broken ribs, and—scarcely feeling the pain—awaited the second charge. Again was the crushed and useless arm gripped in the yellow vise, and again was he pressed backward; but this time he used the knife with method. The great snout was pressing his breast; the hot, fetid breath was in his nostrils; and at his shoulder the hungry eyes were glaring into his own. He struck for the left eye of the brute and struck true. The five-inch blade went in to the handle, piercing the brain, and the animal, with a convulsive spring which carried him half-way ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... returning from district school. Miss Mattie had taught at Clark's Crossing for seventeen years, had grown meek and meager and hopeless. Heavens! thought Una, would she have to be shut into the fetid barn of a small school ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... jewels is but a paltry guerdon for such service, and yet even that is not forthcoming. But it is not too late to alter what has been done. If I say the word, the prisoners linger in the damp and fetid dungeons of the republic, until they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... commercialized amusements only as the higher opportunities are denied them. They would always rather play than be played to; they would rather, where early labor has not sapped vitality, play outdoors than sit in a fetid atmosphere watching tawdry spectacles. But play, the idealization of life's experiences, they will find somewhere. To this need the home must minister by the provision of space, time, opportunity, and the means of play. If through either sloth, selfishness, preoccupation, ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... sharp sometimes that he felt as if he must fall down. He was going to drop into a doorway and rest, but when he came to it he found on an upper step a man folded forward like a limp bundle, snoring in a fetid, sodden sleep, and, shocked into new strength, he hurried on. At last the wagon came to a place that he saw was a market. There were no buyers yet, but men were flitting round under the long arcades ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... it had become an excruciating pain to breathe, and my breast felt as though laced about with iron bands. In the interior many had by this time dropped down, not so much suffocated as poisoned by the fetid gas they were compelled to inhale. And now at length I detected a new, indescribably nauseous odour, added to the acrid smell of the place. At first I tried to conceal even from my own mind what this was. But not for long. In a very few minutes ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... hope. It was in vain that I endeavoured to cheer both officers and men with tales and assurances of the promised land before them, should they only reach the Nile. They had worked like slaves in these fetid marshes until their spirits were entirely broken,—the Egyptians had ceased to care whether they ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... we advance in life, the more we advance in art, the more convinced we become that nothing is abrupt and isolated; that nature and society progress by evolution and not by chance, and that the event, flower joyous or sad, perfumed or fetid, beneficent or fatal, which unfolds itself to-day before our eyes, was sown in the past, and had its roots sometimes in days anterior to ours, even as it will bear its fruits ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... train was off again. The man pushing against Mr. Neal was heavy-jowled as a prize-fighter, but if ever he had followed the ring his fighting days were over now. Good feeding had done for him; he breathed heavily in the fetid atmosphere of the car. He was almost squeezing the breath out of the little man with a heavy red mustache who stood just behind him. The red mustache made the little man's face seem out of proportion; there was not enough of chin ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was afraid of the damp boards for my patient, but I covered her up as carefully as possible, and pinned some old window-curtains across the bed. Neglect and want of cleanliness had made the air of the sick-room so fetid and poisonous that one could hardly breath ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... that ever we sipped Was brewed from toad and the eye of crow, Slain in a mead when the moon had slipped From heav'n to the fetid fogs below. ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... young upstarts of his own tribe, was fully as tall as his antagonist. The sight of its wide red jaws, from which the froth flew as it does from the lips of a mad dog, the gleaming yellow teeth, the capacious throat which seemed fairly to steam with the fetid breath expelled from the beast's lungs, almost overcame young Harding. For the moment he was enthralled by the terrifying appearance of the wolf, and his arms lacked the strength necessary to ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... fourth morning a confused wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... different. The heart of her womanhood shrank within her trembling and afraid—cried out within her in protest at the outrage. In the fetid atmosphere of the crowded car; in the rough touch of the crushing bodies of sweating humanity; in the coarse, low, jest; she felt again the demon that she had heard in the laughter of the crowd. She saw again the horror ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... — that, after some years, the old holes are forsaken and new ones bored; perhaps because the old habitations grow foul and fetid from long use, or because they may so abound with fleas as to become untenable. This species of swallow moreover is strangely annoyed with fleas: and we have seen fleas, bed-fleas (pulex irritans), swarming at the mouths of these holes, like bees upon ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... place. Always, this mysterious, invisible, yet horribly potent, power of sin was like a miasma throughout the prison. Always, it was striving to reach her soul, to make her of its own. She fought the insidious, fetid force as best she might. She was not evil by nature. She had been well grounded in principles of righteousness. Nevertheless, though she maintained the integrity of her character, that character suffered from the taint. There developed over the girl's original sensibility ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... We were all, men and boys and sometimes girls, reduced to the common level of blackened humans, with about two garments each. The coal dust covered my skin like a tight-fitting garment, and coal was part of every mouthful of food I ate in that fetid atmosphere. I had a powerful body that defied the dangers of the pit; but the labour was exhausting, and my face was blistered every day with the hot oil dripping from the ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... can support themselves long on its surface without assistance from some friendly log. It contains the coarsest and most uneatable of fish, such as the cat-fish and such genus, and, as you descend, its banks are occupied with the fetid alligator, while the panther basks at its edge in the cane-brakes, almost impervious to man. Pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracks, covered with trees of little value except for firewood, it sweeps down whole forests in its course, which disappear ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... heart of swamps, surrounded by chilling or fetid airs, a flower blossoms, tender and fragrant as any rose of sunny Tours: such a flower Margot had been. Thirty years; yet her face had lost to him not a single detail; for there are some faces which print themselves so indelibly upon the mind that they become not elusive like the ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... sides Bulge with the slime of life. Thus they abide, Thus fouled and desecrate, The summons of the Trumpet, and the while These Twain, their murderers, Unravined, imperturbable, unsubdued, Hang at the heels of their children—She aloft As in the shining streets, He as in ambush at some fetid stair. ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... to reply— And then there comes before his muddled brain A vision of green vastitudes beneath an April sky, And clover pastures drenched with silver rain. He knows that it can never be, that he is down and out; Life leers at him with foul and fetid breath; And then amid the revelry, the song and cheer and shout, He suddenly grows grim and cold ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... variety of the common Smallage (Small ache) or wild Celery (Apium graveolens), which grows abundantly in moist English ditches, or in water. This is an umbelliferous herb, unwholesome as a food, and having a coarse root, with [95] a fetid smell. But, like many others of the same natural order, when transplanted into the garden, and bleached, it becomes aromatic and healthful, making an excellent condimentary vegetable. But more than this, the cultivated Celery may well take rank as a curative ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... down the alley to the narrow opening that to the uninitiated was not an opening between the buildings at all, and slipped in the old way. He had thought it all out in the night. He was sure he knew just how far beyond Sal's house it was; on into the fetid air of the close dark place, the air that struck him in the face like a hot, wet ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... hardens into round tears, forming the "tear ammoniacum" of commerce. "Lump ammoniacum," the other form in which the substance is met with, consists of aggregations of tears, frequently incorporating fragments of the plant itself, as well as other foreign bodies. Ammoniacum has a faintly fetid, unpleasant odour, which becomes more distinct on heating; externally it possesses a reddish-yellow appearance, and when the tears or lumps are freshly fractured they exhibit a waxy lustre. It is chiefly collected in central ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... more or less separation of the hoof; but they often originate in uneven pressure upon the sole, and rise upward from a crack between the claws, and are principally or wholly confined to one side or claw of the foot. A fetid purulent discharge proceeds from the ulcers, and a sinus may sometimes be discovered by means of a probe to descend from the coronet beneath the hoof. The affected animal is excessively lame, and may possibly suffer such a degree of pain as to ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... by a strange sympathy was affected like the spirit; for when the foul and fetid smoke that arose from tithes witheld, had nearly suffocated Thurcillus, and made him cough twice, those who were near his body said that it coughed twice ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... the victim of intemperance is as stupid as an ass, as ferocious as a tiger, as savage as a bear, as poisonous as the asp, as filthy as the swine, as fetid as a goat, and as malignant as a fiend. No matter what may be the original materials of the man; his figure may possess every grace of the sculptor; his mind may be imbued with every art and science; he may be fit to command at the head of armies, to sway a Roman senate, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... shoulder along the ways, shuttered, dark, grim, with an effect of conspirators, their heads together in lawless conference. The streets were intolerably narrow, the paving a farce; pools of stagnant water stood in the depressions, piles of refuse banked the walls. The fetid air hung motionless but sibilant with stealthy footsteps and whisperings.... Preferable to this seemed even the infinitely more dangerous and odorous Coolootollah purlieus into which they presently passed—nesting place though it were for the ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... polecat, skunk; assafoetida^; fungus, garlic; stinkpot; fitchet^, fitchew^, fourmart^, peccary. acridity &c 401.1. V. have a bad smell &c n.; smell; stink, stink in the nostrils, stink like a polecat; smell strong &c adj., smell offensively. Adj. fetid; strong-smelling; high, bad, strong, fulsome, offensive, noisome, rank, rancid, reasty^, tainted, musty, fusty, frouzy^; olid^, olidous^; nidorous^; smelling, stinking; putrid ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a misery to the shrinking, aching, choking Finn, who stood shuddering in his fetid den, his sensitive nose wrinkling with horror and disgust. His need of water was the thing which hurt him the most cruelly; but the nature of his prison was a good deal of a torture, too. Remember that his life so far had been as cleanly and ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... upward from salt marsh and meadow, on either side the rutted road, into the limpid purity of the spring sky. A light wind flapped the travel-stained, high-collared blue cloth cloak which he wore; and brought him both the haunting fetid-sweet reek of the mud flats—the tide being low—and the invigorating tang of the forest and moorland, uprolling there ahead, in purple and umber to the pale northern horizon. Against that sombre background, fair and stately ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet |
