"Fiendish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stood with ready guns, waiting for a chance to shoot. A shot passing through one of the savages, told the rest they were discovered; and now a regular firing began. The Indians simultaneously uttered a fiendish shout, such as no person can imagine who has not heard the Indian war-scream; and then brandishing their tomahawks rushed upon the house and began hewing at the door. In a moment we were all down stairs, and our fire became so fatal that they were forced to retire ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... of authority to the verge of irony, dire denunciations follow. When the author looks back upon his labours, he discerns "a scene of almost unrelieved blackness." He avers that "the deliberate burning alive of a human being simply for difference of belief, is an atrocity," and speaks of a "fiendish legislation," "an infernal curiosity," a "seemingly causeless ferocity which appears to persecute for the mere pleasure of persecuting." The Inquisition is "energetic only in evil"; it is "a standing mockery of justice, perhaps the most iniquitous that the arbitrary ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Once or twice Miss Baxter came upon her with apparent traces of weeping on her face. The Prince was not an old man, as she had imagined, but young and of a manly, stalwart appearance. He evidently possessed a fiendish temper, and moped about the castle with a constant frown upon ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... edge of the cliff and looked down I could see nothing, but below me I heard the waves break upon the rocks, and they seemed to laugh with fiendish glee, and mock me in my ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... the murderers spread through the valley of the St. Peter's, proclaiming war against the whites. They made no distinction of age or sex. The atrocities they committed are among the most fiendish ever recorded. ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... Sir Edward Grey and Prince Lichnowsky is recorded in the famous No. 123. With the rather childish subsequent attempt to minimize No. 123 on the ground that the Prince was merely an amiable nincompoop who did not really represent his fiendish sovereign, neither I nor any other serious person need be concerned. What is beyond all controversy is that after that conversation Prince Lichnowsky could do nothing but tell the Kaiser that the Entente, having at ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... hide, came in for blows from the servant, without showing that he felt them. The furniture was knocked about, the ground shook, the plates rang on the dresser, and still he did not give in, but he grew more and more false and fawning. The rogue knew that, irascible and fiendish as the little woman was, she was open to flattery like all human beings, and that it was for the interest of his stomach to keep her in a good humour. Finally, roaring like a bull, he caught her by the waist and held ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... howled dismally and drove the rain with repeated assaults against the rattling windows. How nice it would be—the thought flashed through his mind—if all winds, like the west wind, went down with the sun! They made such fiendish noises at night, like the crying of angry voices. In the daytime they had such a different sound. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... branches of study were abandoned. And when the storm calmed down, they found themselves deprived of the accumulations of centuries, forced, like Noah after the deluge, but without his means, to start again from the very beginning. Indeed, as Levinsohn remarks, the wonder is that, despite the fiendish persecution they endured, these unfortunates should have preserved a spark of love of knowledge. Yet a little later it was to burst into flame again and bring light and warmth to hearts crushed ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... and threes, are easily distinguished, and are permitted to carry larger walking-sticks than the Romans, whom the French commandant has forbidden to come abroad with any but the merest twig. Some of these spies wear spurs, the better to deceive and to succeed in their fiendish work. No disguise, however, can conceal the sbirro. His look, so unmistakeably villanous, proclaims the spy. These fellows will not be defeated in their purposes. They carry, it is said, articles of conviction, that is, political papers, on ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... are shocked at the utter absence of the sentiment relating to the sanctity of human life. But our horror at this fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that the victims are not strangers but members of the same family. I must defer to the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom of slaughtering sick relatives and aged parents; here I will confine myself to a few words regarding ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Egypt, Assyria, and Greece. It was unknown to Socrates, to Epicurus, to Aristides, to Marcus Aurelius, to King Asoka, and to Buddha. It has opposed science and liberty almost from the first. It has committed the most awful crimes and atrocities. It has upheld the grossest errors and the most fiendish theories as the special revelations of God. It has been defeated in argument and confounded by facts over and over again, and has been steadily driven back and back, abandoning one essential position after another, until there is hardly anything left of its original pretensions. ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... way to the settlement. It left the camp on the sixteenth of December, with scant rations for six days, hoping in that time to force its way to Bear Valley and there find game. But the storms which had been so pitiless at the mountain camps followed the unprotected refugees with seemingly fiendish fury. After the first day from camp, its members could no longer keep together on their marches. The stronger broke the trail, and the rest followed to night-camp as best ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... spectators of the duel. Bows were bent, and javelins pointed by the braver part of the soldiery, against an animal of an appearance so ambiguous, and whom his uncommon size and grizzly look caused most who beheld him to suppose either the devil himself, or the apparition of some fiendish deity of ancient days, whom the heathens worshipped. Sylvan had so far improved such opportunities as had been afforded him, as to become sufficiently aware that the attitudes assumed by so many military men, inferred immediate ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... justified in the attempt to liberate his people, however drastic the means. His act, which would have been heralded as the noblest heroism if perpetrated by a white man, was called religious fanaticism and fiendish brutality. ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... with himself to subdue the impulse to put an end, now and here, to the fiendish tricks which guile was playing on the purest innocence; but the street was deserted, and if he had to struggle with the bent old man, whose powerful and supple limbs he had already seen, and if the villain should plant a knife in his ribs—for as a wrestler he felt himself his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fiendish earnestness Bismarck plotted to break the bones of two democratic editors whose writings threw the Prussian mastiff into periodical black rages. Bismarck justified his cruelty by insisting that "bounds must be set for these infamous ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... liquid, soulful orbs that marked his mother. To the Doctor the resemblance was rather weird. But he could see no other point in the child's body or mind or soul whereon Margaret Mueller had left a token. The Doctor liked to discuss Kenyon with his wife from the standpoint of ancestry. He took a sort of fiendish delight—if one may imagine a fiend with a seraphic face and dancing blue eyes and a mouth that loved to pucker in a pensive whistle—in Mrs. Nesbit's never failing ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... to get out of it. This was evident by the demonstrations he began to make. They could hear him rushing about—passing from door to window—striking both with his huge paws, and causing them to shake upon their hinges—all the while uttering the most fiendish roars. ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... and unimpeded. We saw them enter the woods and return with clubs freshly cut from the trees, an ominous indication of the fate in store for us. To the number of several hundred the savages had gathered upon the plain, and were arranging the preliminaries for their fiendish sport. We watched their preparations with a peculiar interest; at length all seemed in readiness—two rows of Indians stretched along the plain for a distance of about three hundred yards—all were armed with clubs, and stood facing each other; an interval of three or four paces ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... most fiendish noise broke out below. The negroes had charged, and the Lugarenos, struck with terror at the unforeseen catastrophe, were rushing helter-skelter through the gate. The screaming of the maids was frightful. They ran up and down ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... I shook him till his teeth rattled audibly, like dice in a box; I kicked him, pushed him, and, as the gratification grew with what it fed on, at one dread reckoning I paid off the horror I experienced from his account of the girl I had worshipped, and his insolent mention of my father. I took a fiendish delight in prolonging his agonies. Another minute's indulgence in the punishment would have raised the tiger that lies sleeping, but always awakable, in every man's heart, and I might have killed him outright; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... forty-five years before his rule began. For in the year 1282 'that discreet man, Mr Walter de Lechelade,' the Precentor of Ottery, was waylaid coming from Exeter Cathedral in his canonical robes, and murdered by 'certain sons of perdition full of fiendish ferocity.' 'Mr Walter de Lechelade' was probably extremely unpopular locally, because he had obtained the lease for life of the Manor and Church of Ottery from the authorities at Rouen, and was allowed to make all the profit ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... up in corners, they breathed heavily. Their lips twitched, and at every sickening heave of the overturned ship they opened them wide as if to shout. The cook, embracing a wooden stanchion, unconsciously repeated a prayer. In every short interval of the fiendish noises around he could be heard there, without cap or slippers, imploring in that storm the Master of our lives not to lead him into temptation. Soon he also became silent. In all that crowd of cold and hungry men, waiting wearily ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... the place of sepulture being carefully concealed, I had to rest satisfied with conjecture. Frequently the Bakwains buried their dead in the huts where they died, for fear lest the witches (Baloi) should disinter their friends, and use some part of the body in their fiendish arts. Scarcely is the breath out of the body when the unfortunate patient is hurried away to be buried. An ant-eater's hole is often selected, in order to save the trouble of digging a grave. On two occasions while I was there this hasty burial was followed by the return home of the men, who had ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... had never revealed the fact. Stephen had wanted one, had said he intended to get one with the first money he earned after he came out of college, but she had hoped in her heart they would go out of fashion by that time and there would be something less fiendish-looking to take their place. They always looked to her as if they were headed straight for destruction, and the person on them seemed as if he were going to the devil and didn't care. She secretly hated the idea of Stephen ever sitting upon one of them, flying through space. But now he was gone ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... in 1663," said Benjamin as he closed the account; "and, though we have no record of another so fiendish affair, it is a fact that within a few years some printers and editors in England have had their ears cropped, others have been flogged publicly, and others still put into the stocks and pillory. We have ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... might lead night wanderers into mischance, and laugh mischievously at the bodily harm that he had caused them; but Puck has now disappeared, and in his stead is found a malignant spirit, who seeks to laugh his fiendish laughter over the soul he has deceived into destruction. Questions arise thick and fast that are easier put than answered. Can it be that evil influences have the upper hand in this world? that, be a man never so honest, ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... of him, the way his hands hung, irritated her beyond bearing. She turned on him blindly and destructively, he became a mad creature, black and electric with fury. The dark storms rose in him, his eyes glowed black and evil, he was fiendish in ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... all the plans of man, over every man, and over every association of men, even the largest, the widest, the mightiest. And now the Infidel, having taken away our hope of help from heaven, comes with the serpent's hiss, and fiendish sneer, to taunt the perishing world with this miserable truism—that the tendency of everything on earth is to perdition, and that it needs no inspiration to tell it. Truly it does not. Were that all the prophets of God ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... manipulated our three rakish adventurers from Battak. When an unusually severe lurch nearly precipitated us into the deep storm-water channel on the left or the carefully-irrigated paddy fields on the right, Jehu turned round and grinned a grin of fiendish appreciation, whilst we thanked with fervour the merciful Providence who preserved us from destruction, and wondered how long one could hold out with a broken limb, without surgical help, should the worst happen. It is the unexpected that happens. We got to Sindanglaya without ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... color. Birds. especially of the parrot tribe, mocked this fantastic variety of nature with tints as brilliant as those of the vegetable world. Monkeys chattered in crowds above their heads, and made grimaces like the fiendish spirits of these solitudes; while hideous reptiles, engendered in the slimy depths of the pools, gathered round the footsteps of the wanderers. Here was seen the gigantic boa, coiling his unwieldy folds about the trees, so as hardly to be distinguished from their trunks, till he was ready to dart ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... home—dreading the consequences of the butchery, and gladly abandoning, in his terror, all solicitude about the fate of the Ourang-Outang. The words heard by the party upon the staircase were the Frenchman's exclamations of horror and affright, commingled with the fiendish jabberings ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the blood flowing from his wounds he made a hideous picture as he rushed forward. They had forgotten to reckon with the wonderful tenacity of life that makes a grizzly bear the hardest thing in the world to kill. Six bullets were embedded in his carcass and his life was ebbing. But his fiendish ferocity was unimpaired, and he had gathered himself together for one ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... awake, and every man gripped his rifle in readiness. No one dared to leave the rampart. Safety lay in being all together. The pounding of hoofs grew louder and louder, the picketed horses whinnied, then there was a wild gallop past the little camp, accompanied by fiendish yells. Not a man dared to investigate, for fear of ambush. All that they could do was to patiently await the coming ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... Klanner's death must not appear in any way to be consequent to the murder at the bank—therefore it was to bear every evidence of having been purely inadvertent, and, in a way, an accident. Yes, it was crafty enough, hideous enough to be fully worthy even of the fiendish brain that had planned it! Kid Greer, having probably struck up an acquaintance with Klanner during the past few days, had inveigled Klanner to-night into Baldy Jack's, ostensibly, no doubt, for an innocent and casual ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... waving of the whirring, snowy wings, Cooled the hot air, diffusing mystic calm. Again I shuddered as I marked the glare Which shot from the fell Raven's fiendish eye, The while he measured where his pall-like swoop Might seize the Dove as Death had seized Lenore: 'Lenore!' he shrieked, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with the sun shining brighter than ever, ain't that so, Tony? Of course it is. Well," went on Phil, sagely, "I guess I can size the McGee up, all right. He's just got a fiendish temper. He does things on the spur of the moment, that he's sorry for afterwards. All right. I can understand such a man; and Tony, take it for me, I'd rather deal with such a fiery disposition than the cold, calculating one of the man who never gets mad. I'm going to win over the McGee, ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... in, and the fight became general. A Carthaginian would grasp a Roman by the hair and hustle him around over the desk in a manner that was simply frightful, and a Roman would give a fiendish whoop and knock a Carthaginian over the head with Greenleaf's Arithmetic. Hannibal got the head of Scipio Africanus under his arm, and Scipio, in his efforts to break away, stumbled, and the two generals fell and had a rough-and-tumble fight under the ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... for them; They call it Soear Bethlehem. You'll see where in old Roman days, Before Revivals changed our ways, The Virgin 'scaped the Devil's grab, Printing her foot on a stone slab With five clear toe-marks; and you'll find The fiendish thumbprint close behind. You'll see where Math, Mathonwy's son, Spoke with the wizard Gwydion And bad him from South Wales set out To steal that creature with the snout, That new-discovered grunting beast Divinely flavoured for the feast. No traveller yet has hit upon A wilder land ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... fairly satisfied now that Chauvelin had accepted his suggestion of summarily sending to the guillotine one member of every family resident in Boulogne, if Marguerite succeeded in effecting an escape, and, of a truth, Chauvelin had hailed the fiendish suggestion with delight. The old abbe with his nephew and niece were undoubtedly not sufficient deterrents against the daring schemes of the Scarlet Pimpernel, who, as a matter of fact, could spirit them out of Boulogne just as easily as he would ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... pretty tired when we got back at 8 o'clock, as it was a good five-mile walk, part of the way on fiendish cobble-stones, and we are on our feet all day at the Dressing Station. But I am very fit, and all the better for the excellent fresh food we have here. No more tins of anything, ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... said, "and honour your scruples. One of my objects, in sending Pierre down into the town again, is to learn what has taken place at the Louvre. It may be that this fiendish massacre has extended there, and that even the King of Navarre, and the Huguenot gentlemen with him, have shared the fate of the others. Should it not be so, it would be best in every way that what you ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... the Virginia law of 1691 which declared that any white woman marrying a negro or mulatto, bond or free, should suffer perpetual banishment. But at no time in the South was adultery of any sort punished with such almost fiendish cruelty as in New England, except in one known instance when a Virginia woman was punished by being dragged through the water ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... me through his keen, half-shut eyes, "you vill not say zat ven you regard ze 'ole. And you others, I spik to you: sometimes von loses a somzing vich is qvite near all ze time. It is ver' droll, eh? my vord, ha, ha, ha!" And he ambled off, with an aggressively fiendish ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... With kindred bonds to Nature. All is past, And he—who won from me such love for him, And he—my valiant uncle and my friend, Comes not to lift the cloud that drapes my soul, And shield me from the fiendish Prophet's power. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... glared for a moment with fiendish curiosity upon the young girl who stood before her like one of God's angels. She measured her from head to foot, noted every fold of her white robe, every flexure of her graceful form, and drank in the whole beauty and innocence of her aspect with a feeling ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... look upon. Doors, chairs, windows, and table's were broken, and even the strong brass rod that ornamented the bar had been partially wrenched from its fastenings by strong hands, under an impulse of murder, that only lacked a weapon to execute its fiendish purpose. Stains of blood, in drops, marks, and even dried-up pools, were to be seen all over the bar-room and passage floors, and in many ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... chieftain was also to be appointed Governor of Fort William.[249] But the emissaries of William the Third could not have chosen a worse period than that in which to treat with the brave and wary Cameron. The massacre of Glencoe was fresh in the remembrance of the people, and the stratagem, the fiendish snares which had been prepared to betray the unsuspecting Macdonalds to their destruction, were also recalled with the deep curses of a wronged and slaughtered people. The game of cards, the night before the massacre, between the villain Campbell, and the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... crows came down heavily from every tree. The noise they make whilst jumping about everywhere is indescribable. There seemed to be something positively human in the positions of the slyly bent heads of the drunken birds, and a fiendish light shone in their eyes while they were examining us ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... Daniel and the den affair, And other stories rich and rare, Were writ to make old doctrine wear Something of a romantic air: That the Nain widow's only heir, And Lazarus with cadaverous glare (As done in oils by Piombo's care) Did not return from Sheol's lair: That Jael set a fiendish snare, That Pontius Pilate acted square, That never a sword cut Malchus' ear And (but for shame I must forbear) That — — did not reappear! . . . - Since thus they hint, nor turn a hair, All churchgoing will I forswear, And sit ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... out as one devoted to the manufacturing interest. Fire and smoke, and red-hot cinders follow in his wake. He has no attachment to the soil, but travels on a road of iron, furnace wrought. His warning is not conveyed in the fine old Saxon dialect of our glorious forefathers, but in a fiendish yell. He never cries "ya-hip", with agricultural lungs; but jerks forth a manufactured ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... He tapped on his teeth, and remarked that the weather bad no business to be so warm in winter. "But it was fiendish ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... were clearing away now. He was in London, at the Savoy Restaurant, and within a few yards of him sat the man with whose name all Europe once had rung—the man hailed by some as martyr, and loathed by others as the most fiendish Judas who ever drew breath. Bernadine was not concerned with the moral side of this strange encounter. How best to use his knowledge of this man's identity was the question which beat upon his brain. What use could be made of him, what profit for his country and himself? And then a fear—a sudden, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... screamed, holding out her wizened hands like the talons of an unclean bird. "You see what I am. I am the fiendish old woman. I wear snuff-coloured silks. My curse descends on people. Sir Walter was partial to me. Shall I be ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... mildly speculative and popular style. The volume was rather dull, and very unimportant; but it happened to appear at this particular moment, and Voltaire pounced upon it with the swift swoop of a hawk on a mouse. The famous Diatribe du Docteur Akakia is still fresh with a fiendish gaiety after a hundred and fifty years; but to realise to the full the skill and malice which went to the making of it, one must at least have glanced at the flat insipid production which called it forth, and noted with ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... lungs to scare them away; but as if they were as well aware that I could not escape them as I was myself, they merely left off their violent efforts to reach my projecting legs, and forming a semicircle round me, watched with upturned eyes, that seemed to possess a fiendish expression that fascinated and bewildered me, the snapping of the frail hold that ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... grew there; and when, in the light of the next flash, the scene returned, he could see the red lips of the phantom hounds, the bright eyes of the phantom snakes; the tongues wagged in mockery; the hands brandished great stones to hurl at him; the mountain-top was instinct with fiendish life,—a very Blocksberg of all hideous shapes ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... specially for its execution. The four Spaniards—or Californians, as he believes them to be—must have had knowledge of the treasure being shipped, and, in their plan to appropriate it, have engaged the others to assist them. Striker's talk has told this; while revealing also the still more fiendish designs of abduction ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... too, I am afraid it is a true bill that Torture was in the bad old days indiscriminately used towards both gentle and simple in some gloomy underground places in this said Tower. I have heard of a Sworn Tormentor and his assistants, whose fiendish task it was to torture poor creatures' souls out of their miserable bodies, and of a Chirurgeon who had to watch lest the agonies used upon 'em should be too much for human endurance, and so, putting 'em out of their misery, rob the headsman of his due, the scaffold ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... on the level ground in the vicinity snowed up in a heap of paper fragments, print, and manuscript which would appear to be the accumulated compliments that have been sent flying at her in the course of the day. The whole party, Small included, are blackened with dust and dirt and present a fiendish appearance not relieved by the general aspect of the room. There is more litter and lumber in it than of old, and it is dirtier if possible; likewise, it is ghostly with traces of its dead inhabitant and even with his chalked writing ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... into the hut. The escape of Thorne destroyed all the satisfaction which his success would have given him. He had good reason to know the fiendish malignity of the man and, in spite of the warnings he had given Kate Ellison, and his strict orders to the police on guard, he felt a thrill of anxiety, now that he was aware her enemy was ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... horse, spread all dishevelled upon the ground; and gaunt and naked children grasping knives and daggers in their tiny hands. Of the patriotic troop not one appeared to have fallen; and when, after their enemies had retreated with howlings of fiendish despair, they told their numbers, only one man was missing, who was never seen again, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... Paul who had persecuted the Princess for years and whom alone of all beings on earth she feared. He had been expected before, but had arrived now in the nick of time while the brig was casting anchor. Saskia had said that he had a devil's brain, and Dickson, as he stared at him, saw a fiendish cleverness in his straight brows and a remorseless cruelty in his stiff jaw and his ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... they were glad when they reached the rockier bank of the stream which came down, broad and shallow in some places, narrow and tumbling in others. Here sometimes they waded in the water to escape the tangled thickets of alder interspersed with the prickly "devil's club," peculiar to all Alaska—a fiendish sort of plant covered with small spines, which grows in all fantastic shapes, but which manages to slap one somewhere, no matter where one steps upon it, and whose little prickly points detach themselves and remain in the flesh. Our young explorers, ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... mysterious stranger smiled—and it was a peculiarly sweet half-grave sort of attractive smile, as far removed from the fiendish grin of the stage bandit ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... said the officer, almost startled at the fiendish expression of the Quadroon's countenance as she ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... malignantly dogs the steps of Miriam, all readers think that Donatello committed no sin at all; and the reason is, that Hawthorne has deprived the persecutor of Miriam of all human attributes, made him an allegorical representation of one of the most fiendish forms of unmixed evil, so that we welcome his destruction with something of the same feeling with which, in following the allegory of Spenser or Bunyan, we rejoice in the hero's victory over the Blatant Beast or Giant Despair. Conceding, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... the dangers to be met with in superstitious countries, these mydratic alkaloids are among the worst. They offer a chance for crimes of the most fiendish nature—worse than with the gun or the stiletto. They are worse because there is so little fear of detection. That crime is the production ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... path watched his death-struggle. It was ghastly—horrible. The expression of their faces was fiendish. They watched with positive joy. There was no pity in the ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... few minutes after there was nothing but confusion in the room. Elsworthy had been standing behind backs, with a half-fiendish look of rage and disappointment on his commonplace features. "Let them help her as likes; I washes my hands of her," he cried bitterly, when he saw her fall; and then rushed into the midst of the room, thrusting the others ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... wretched Frenchwoman, whom you may remember here, Mademoiselle Lenoir," Maria remarked parenthetically, "turned out, oh, frightfully! She taught the girls the worst accent, it appears. Her father was not a colonel; he was—oh! never mind! It is a mercy I got rid of that fiendish woman, and before my precious ones knew what she was!" And then followed details of the perfections of the two girls, with occasional side-shots at Lady Anne's family, just as in the old time. "Why don't you bring ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... why, you slim demon!" shouted the chief inspector, roused to anger by the consciousness that he had been duped. "What fiendish trick have you played on those wretches penned up inside there? But I'll ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... there came within his field of vision a countenance, (it was that of a decrepid old man of some sixty-five or seventy years of age) which at once arrested and absorbed all his attention. It bore an expression which might truly be called fiendish, for it gave the idea of mental power, of cruelty, of malice, of intense—of supreme despair. It passed on. There came a craving desire to see the face of that man again—to keep him in view—to know more of him. Snatching ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... rifles created a deafening noise; the hoarse, grating sounds from the French mitrailleuses, in particular, made a horrible accompaniment to the dying groans of the wounded. But the French mitrailleuses had found their match in the Krupp cannon. These fire no balls, but some fiendish contrivances, longitudinal, cylindrical projectiles, which explode as they alight, and scatter their ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... power of these slops to make men drunk, could they experience or see what took place at Raleigh on that day. They would be willing to testify in any court that beer will not only intoxicate, but, taken in sufficient quantities, it will make men beastly drunk and fill them with a spirit of fiendish cruelty. There were on that day as many as four fights, with enough miscellaneous howling, cursing and billingsgate to fill out the natural make-up of a hundred more. I was drunk—so drunk that I did not know ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... the dirty lamp, intimated to the general public that this was the "Ace of Spades." And in the money-till of the Ace of Spades, doubtless was the price of many a poor man's toil, the bread and meat of his hungry children squandered and sacrificed with a fiendish recklessness. Within the dingy walls of the Ace of Spades was bartered the domestic happiness of many a home that had been cheerless enough, God knows, ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... courtyard of his magnificent palace, near the Tiber, a chapel dedicated to St. Thomas, he remarked to the architect, when instructing him to design a family vault, "That is where I hope to bury them all." The architect often subsequently admitted that he was so terrified by the fiendish laugh which accompanied these words, that had not Francesco Cenci's work been extremely profitable, he would have refused to go ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... than love-lay of the maidens, than war-song of the braves, than even the wild, triumphant chorus of the scalp-dance; a sound that suddenly rose for a moment above the clamor of the squaws, and then was answered and overwhelmed and drowned in mad, exultant, even fiendish, yells of delight—it was the scream of a ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... by a rope from the end of the pole pushed out from the rock above, swung lazily around and around just beyond my reach. I made a frantic effort to grasp it, and barely saved myself from falling headlong. The fiendish laughter of the men above was answered by a chorus of shouts from below. I looked down. From the decks of the proas and from about the fire on shore, where another feast was beginning, the Moro men were ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... have come to tell you that you may go to my father and ask his permission for you to marry me. You may also say to him, from me, that I hope he will give his consent, because—it will be a fiendish falsehood; but never mind that; you can tell it—because the ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... moments of deliberation, brings him down with his rifle; and the cougar, falling among the eager crowd below, is torn to pieces in a moment. But this does not get rid of the peccaries, who set up their fiendish screams anew as they discover two other victims in the tree. The father fires again and again, dropping his peccary each time, till five lie dead upon the ground; but the rage of the rest only becomes more and more furious—and the marksman is at his last bullet. Here we shall leave him; and ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... the mothers do it! It seems to me that there's nothing too fiendish or diabolical for these people to do. Why, in some of the islands they have an institution called the Areoi, and the persons connected with that body are ready for any wickedness that mortal man can ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... had prepared the woman who rejected its Hebraic dogma, to find out for herself the underlying truths. She accepted them in their full significance. It has been laid as a blame to her that she nowhere shows any proper abhorrence of the fiendish and vindictive Heathcliff. She who reveals him remembers the dubious parentage of that forsaken seaport baby, "Lascar or Gipsy;" she remembers the Ishmaelitish childhood, too much loved and hated, of the little interloper whose hand was against every man's hand. Remembering this, ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... my face must have lost some of its alleged sympathy as he set forth this fiendish plot. Even Percy the bluebottle seemed shocked. He had settled on the sugar-bowl, but at these words he rose in a marked manner ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... out, it seemed incomprehensible that it should just be like this: the bottles emptied, refilled, rewrapped, and replaced. A sort of plot, a sinister attempt to deceive, a thing resembling sly vengeance, but for what? Or else a fiendish joke. But Mr. Burns was in possession of a theory. It was simple, and he uttered it solemnly in a ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... boat and persuade the enemy's admiral (as they could surely easily do) that while most human acts were of doubtful responsibility and not really wicked, yet the invasion, and, above all, the impoverishment of the Nepioi was so foul a wrong as would certainly call down upon its fiendish perpetrator the fires ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... Cook began to take a renewed interest in his platoon, and, having discovered the recalcitrant one of No. 11 actually coming on parade with only the front of the tip of his bayonet-scabbard polished, he took a fiendish delight in seeing the criminal writhing under the brutal and savage sentence of three ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... small, paved courtyard. It was a perfect summer's night, and the deep blue vault above was jeweled with myriads of starry points. How impossible it seemed to reconcile that vast, eternal calm with the hideous passions and fiendish agencies which that night had loosed a soul upon ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... walking or riding with Margaret, was enough to send her writhing upon her bed in the darkness of a wakeful night. She would clench her pretty hands until the nails dug into the flesh and brought the blood. She would bite the pillow or the blankets with an almost fiendish clenching of her teeth upon them and mutter, as she did so: "I hate her! I hate her! I could ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... on his black horse, wrapped in his black cloak, and long ago bareheaded (his hat had fallen off), Gaston was like some fiendish cavalier bound ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... tramp arrived at his bourne that night more weary than I, for I had been walking most of the day in the burning sun. But although I lay down like a jaded horse, I was too feverish to sleep. To make matters worse, there was a cock in the yard just underneath my window, and the fiendish creature considered it his duty to crow every two or three minutes after the stroke of midnight. How well did I then enter into the feelings of a man I knew who, under similar provocation, got up from his bed, and, taking a carving-knife from the kitchen, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Accursed be ye both! Oh Sire! 'tis wrong upon the dying lion To loose thy dog! (Turns to Triboulet) And thou, whoe'er thou art, That with a fiendish sneer and viper's tongue Makest my tears a pastime and a sport, My curse upon thee!—Sire, thy brow doth bear The gems of France!—on mine, old age doth sit; Thine decked with jewels, mine with these gray hairs; We both are Kings, yet bear a different crown; And should some impious ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... resistance, George allowed the little black wretch to secure his feet, and as it was complete, stooped to sit down. With a fiendish look on his face, the Egyptian raised his foot and gave him a vicious kick in the chest. Losing his balance, Helmar fell heavily to the floor, striking his head with great force against the side of ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... unconsciousness of language used by his party little suited to his own sacred calling, or to the noble simplicities of Christianity. Certainly it is unhappy for the Seceders, that the only disavowal of the most fiendish sentiments heard in our days, has come from an individual not authorized or at all commissioned by his party—from an individual not showing any readiness to face the whole charges, disingenuously dissembling the worst of them, and finally offering ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... defeated by Uncas in a battle on the Great Plain in the present township of Norwich. Encumbered with a coat of mail which his friend Gorton had given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured. By ordinary Indian usage he would have been put to death with fiendish torments, as soon as due preparations could be made and a fit company assembled to gloat over his agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas, threatening dire vengeance if harm were done to his ally. This message puzzled the Mohegan chief. The appearance of a schism in the English ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... suddenly as it had come to them out of the half darkness, the fiendish noise ceased, dying away in what seemed to be sobbing, insane laughter. With a swallow or two, to wet his parched lips and fear-dried throat, Dick asked in ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... Feeble health. Busy scene at market. Unable to procure canoes. Disaster to Arab canoes. Rapids in Lualaba. Project for visiting Lake Lincoln and the Lomame. Offers large reward for canoes and men. The slave's mistress. Alarm of natives at market. Fiendish slaughter of women by Arabs. Heartrending scene. Death on land and in the river. Tagamoio's assassinations. Continued slaughter across the river. Livingstone ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... sake, kill me! kill me! Shoot me if—you want to, but let me down from here!" The only effect of this upon Barrett was to light up his brutal face with a leer of fiendish satisfaction. He said to the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the crowning piece of evidence, Knox, evidence of such fiendish cleverness on the part of those who had plotted Menendez's death that I began to wonder whether after all it would be possible to defeat them. I realized that Camber's life hung upon a hair. For the production ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... had diminished sufficiently to permit him to open his eyes he scanned his surroundings more carefully; but his vision was unreliable. His head, too, continued to feel as if his skull were being forcibly spread apart by some fiendish instrument concealed within it. His mouth was parched, his stomach violently rebellious. In spite of these distractions he began to note certain unfamiliar features about this place. The wall-paper, for ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... replied he, with a fiendish smile, 'she will have no need of one, for she is about to be led to the Conciergerie, and then ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... written in the most plausible manner; the hand-writing and name of the Chairman of my Committee was forged, and every thing was admirably calculated to give the impression, that it was genuine truth. But, fortunately, this fiendish scheme failed of its purpose; for, as my family had left Rowfant before the letter arrived, the letter was never opened till we returned together after the election ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature, i.e., the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from man,—was gone, vanished, extinct; and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect is marvellously accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... could he not win he should not lose. DARES, you see, was "Champion" of his land, And these were "Trojans all" you'll understand. ("Champion be blowed!" SAYERIUS said. "Wus luck, They wasn't Trojans. This is British pluck!") Then from the Corner fiendish howls arise, And oaths and execrations rend the skies. ENTELLUS stoutly to the fight returned. Kicked, punched and mauled, his eyes with fury burned, Disdain and conscious courage fired his breast, And with redoubled force his foe he pressed, Laid on with either hand like anything, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... his third wife's movements could by any possibility refer to anybody but himself. Robina, according to Mr. Cartaret, was perpetually thinking of him and of how she could annoy him. She had shown a fiendish cleverness in placing Gwenda with Lady Frances. She couldn't have done anything that could have annoyed him more. More than anything that Robina had yet done, it put him in the wrong. It put him in the wrong not only with Lady Frances and the best people, but it ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... shrouds—now leaping to one part of the vessel, and now to another,—their enjoyment seemed raised to its heighest pitch. At length the hatches opened to the devouring element, the tortured victim of their fiendish cruelty fell exhausted into the flames, and the horrid and revolting scene closed amidst the shouts of the miscreants who ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... on old Mr. Penrose's face was so fiendish as Mrs. C. D. Budlong toppled backward and stood on his bunion that Wallie forgot the graceful speech of welcome he had framed. Mr. Penrose had travelled all the way in one felt slipper and now, as the lady ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... "Yes, and you are a liar, a coward, a villain! You are engaged in a fiendish plot; you are deceiving an innocent lady. Ah, I spurn you, ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... monument—subscriptions to be sent to the American Board. He denounced the national policies in Africa, China, and the Philippines, and showed by the reports and by the private letters of soldiers home, how cruel and barbarous and fiendish had been the warfare made by those whose avowed purpose was to carry the blessed light of civilization and Gospel "to the benighted native"—how in very truth these priceless blessings had been handed on the point of a bayonet to the "Person Sitting ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Simultaneously with the fiendish atrocities committed on the Saline and Solomon rivers and the attack on Comstock and Grover, the pillaging and murdering began on the Smoky Hill stage-route, along the upper Arkansas River and on the headwaters of the Cimarron. That along the ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... the accent on the first syllable," Burton was always careful to say when speaking of this fiendish monster, "and do not confound him with (Haroun al) Rashi'd, accent on the second syllable—'the orthodox,' the 'treader in the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... forced itself upon me that the golf ball had a sort of impish intelligence that could only be met by a superior cunning. I suspected that it deliberately hid itself, and that so long as it was aware that you were hunting for it, it took a fiendish delight in dodging you. If, said I, one could only let the thing suppose it was not being looked for it would be taken off its guard. I put the idea into operation, and I rejoice to say it works ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... special mission to accomplish—namely, the discovery and deliverance, if possible, of between thirty and forty of my own countrymen, languishing in a bitter captivity, and in daily, if not hourly, peril of death by torture as cruel and protracted as the fiendish malignity of ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... imagination, where alone the saddest notes of woe, even the appalling shriek of despair, are softened, as it were, by the tempering dews of this visionary region, ere they fall upon the heart. Else how could we stand the smothered moan of Desdemona, or the fiendish adjuration of Lady Macbeth,—more frightful even than the after-deed of her husband,—or look upon the agony of the wretched Judas, in the terrible picture of Rembrandt, when he returns the purchase of blood to the impenetrable Sanhedrim? Ay, how could ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... to remain in their seats with the appearance at least of discipline. It is stated by good authority that the rolling of croquet balls across the floor during recitation was objected to, under the fiendish excuse of its interfering with their studies. The breaking of windows by base balls, and the beating of small scholars with bats, were declared against. At last, bloated and arrogant with success, the under-teachers threw aside all disguise and revealed themselves in their true colors. A cigar ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... terrors of lockjaw as she had been in the careless fun of 1859, lying in bed in consequence of a miserable cab-accident that had bruised her foot. Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... no name for him unless it be Fatality, an emblem of the evil influence that rules your fortunes; a demon to whom you subjected yourself by some error at the outset of life, and were bound his slave forever, by once obeying him. See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... unhappy riots of the First of February, and advices from foreign police left no doubt whatever that he had contemplated a preposterous raid of the combined revolutionary clubs of Europe against Italy, timed with almost fiendish imagination to break out on the festival ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... premonitory manifestation of murderous intent on the part of a potential criminal. Indeed, with most cunning wisdom, a wild-animal murderer will often conceal his purpose until outside interference is an impossibility, and the victim is entirely helpless. These manifestations of fiendish cunning and premeditation are very exasperating to those responsible for the care ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... though endowed with a fiendish intelligence, the blazing fabric took a sheer to port, and headed for the skiff. A hoarse cry broke from the old negro, whose face was ashen gray with fright. It was echoed by Binney Gibbs. The others kept silence, but ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... his commands to the firing squad with fiendish deliberation and delay. He seemed to enjoy dragging out the agony that the condemned man suffered. But it was this very cruelty that caused Maenck's undoing and saved the life of Leopold of Lutha. Just before ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the old beadsman Edie Ochiltree, and that preternatural figure of old Edith Elspeith, a living shadow, in whom the lamp of life had been long extinguished, had it not been fed by remorse and "thick-coming" recollections; and that striking picture of the effects of feudal tyranny and fiendish pride, the unhappy Earl of Glenallan; and the Black Dwarf, and his friend Habbie of the Heughfoot (the cheerful hunter), and his cousin Grace Armstrong, fresh and laughing like the morning; and the Children of the Mist, and the baying of the bloodhound that tracks their steps at a distance (the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... eye, rested half upright propped against the lower step. He was a sandy-bearded fellow, no better dressed than the one without, but with a belt about him, containing pistol and knife. His yellow teeth protruding gave his ghastly features a fiendish look. Beyond him a pair of legs stuck out from behind the staircase, clad in long cavalry boots, and above these, barely showing, the green cloth of the Queen's Rangers. Then Grant had not gone when this attack was made, or else he ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... against her purpose so strongly that Edith was borne down and reluctantly gave way. Zell wrote immediately a touching, pathetic letter that would have moved a man of one knightly instinct to come to her rescue. Van Dam read it with a look of fiendish exultation, and ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... it seems that such awful crimes can be committed in our quiet neighborhood? who could have been so guilty; and what motive could have prompted such a fiendish act?" ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... brittle and break off in the flesh. Superstition and carelessness are the main factors that make the wound dangerous; the people believe too much in an ever-present evil spirit which abides in all the vicious and fiendish animals of the forest and swamp. Once wounded by any of these malignant creatures, they believe there is no hope of recovery and they hardly try to survive. Besides, lack of proper care and treatment of a wound generally results ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... one. He was a medical practitioner at Rugeley in Staffordshire, and having become infatuated with betting had no scruples about removing those to whom he had contracted debts of honour. It was not till the early months of 1856 that light was shed upon some of his fiendish designs and after a long trial he was sentenced to ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... the side of the bed, knitting his brows and staring straight before him, with an expression in his clear grey eyes whose significance he would have denied hotly, had any man charged him with it. He was thinking of Antony Ferrara's record; the victims of this fiendish youth (for Antony Ferrara was barely of age) seemed to stand before him with ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... talk, I rather turn away from you with disgust, and am even inclined to believe that you possess some execrable power for attracting me to you." "O God! God! God!" whined the old dame, a prey to unspeakable pain, "what fiendish spirit of darkness has put such fearful thoughts into your head? O Tonino, my darling Tonino, the woman who took such tender loving care of you when a child, and who saved your life from the most threatening danger on ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... hands were raised above his head, and a heavy blackthorn stick lay across them. His dark, handsome, aquiline features were convulsed into a spasm of vindictive hatred, which had set his dead face in a terribly fiendish expression. He had evidently been in his bed when the alarm had broken out, for he wore a foppish embroidered night-shirt, and his bare feet projected from his trousers. His head was horribly injured, and the whole room bore witness to the savage ferocity of the blow which had struck him ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle |
