"Headless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... three ways. The legend said that he was a man seven feet high; the skeleton measured six feet from the shoulder-bones to the heel Again, another legend said that his heart was enshrined in a church forty miles away; the skeleton corresponded with this, for it was headless. Moreover, it was said that his mother and a friend were buried on either side of him; we also found skeletons of a male and female in these positions. Being satisfied on this point, we set the masons to work to rebuild the altar tomb in its original shape and size, using ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... along the trail did they find their father; he had not been injured in the path, nor could they find where he had fallen over a cliff. So they passed on to the garden; there they found their father's headless body. They searched for blood in the bushes and grass, but they found nothing — no blood, no ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... of Persia land played one against other, and Gharib said, "O King of the age, I have a mind to tilt with the horsemen of Ajam-land, but on one condition." Asked the King, "What is that?"; and answered Gharib, "It is that I shall don a light tunic and take a headless lance, with a pennon dipped in saffron, whilst the Persian champions sally forth and tilt against me with sharp spears. If any conquer me, I will render myself to him: but, if I conquer him I will mark him on the breast and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... The headless bodies of the dead were left where they had fallen. The long Russian winter was just beginning, and for five months they lay unburied, a frightful spectacle for the eyes of the citizens ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... he stood bewildered,—imagining a crime. But in another moment he perceived that there was no blood, and that the headless necks did not look as if they had been cut. Then he thought to himself:—"Either this is an illusion made by goblins, or I have been lured into the dwelling of a Rokuro-Kubi... (4) In the book Soshinki (5) it ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... hold of an ancient legend, whether of headless horseman or housekeeper, pixie or wizard. Even in that "happy hunting ground" of the Modern Spirit, the United States of America, the old legends linger still, if but faintly. The soil of a new country does not grow sentiment ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... and startling. Susan almost forgot her home-sickness for a while, and found a companion of her own age far more interesting than imaginary conversations with dolls. After they were both tired of jumping, in which exercise Sophia Jane's spare form was by far the most successful, the headless body of the murdered doll was dragged out from behind a box ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... robbery of the treasure-house of Rhampsinitus king of Egypt, where the clever thief, having made the soldiers dead drunk, shaves off the right side of their beards and then decamps with his brother's headless body. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... of, but that conscience makes me firm, The boon companion, who her strong breast-plate Buckles on him, that feels no guilt within And bids him on and fear not. Without doubt I saw, and yet it seems to pass before me, A headless trunk, that even as the rest Of the sad flock pac'd onward. By the hair It bore the sever'd member, lantern-wise Pendent in hand, which look'd ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... e., native Chinese) emperor, who (upon finding himself in a dreadfully small minority) retired into his garden with his daughter, and there hanged both himself and the lady. On no account would he have decapitated either; since in that case the corpses, being headless, would in Chinese estimation ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... a terrible scene unfolded itself to our eyes. There had evidently been not more than half a dozen of the monsters in the beginning. Two of these were stretched headless upon the ground. Three others had suffered horrible injuries where the invisible vibratory beams from the disintegrators had grazed them, and they could not long survive. One ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... believe it was to his conference with this African sage, and the precious revelations of the good dame of the spinning-wheel, that we are indebted for the surprising though true history of Ichabod Crane and the headless horseman, which has since astounded and ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... despised. He was transferred to London, lodged in the Tower, and executed in a bungling manner by "Jack Ketch"—the name given for several centuries to the public executioner. He was buried under St. Peter's Chapel, in the Tower, where reposed the headless bodies of so many noted saints and political martyrs—the great Somerset, and the still greater Northumberland, the two Earls of Essex, and the fourth Duke of Norfolk, and other great men who figured in the reigns of ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... near the Aldersgate, stood the headless statue of Fortitude, which monks and pilgrims deemed some unknown saint in the old time, and halted to honour. And in the midst of Bishopsgate-street, sate on his desecrated throne a mangled Jupiter, his eagle at his feet. Many a half-converted ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... monsters. There they sat, for an instant, sleepily rubbing their eyes with their brazen fingers, while all the snakes on their heads reared themselves on end with surprise, and with venomous malice against they knew not what. But when the Gorgons saw the scaly carcass of Medusa, headless, and her golden wings all ruffled, and half spread out on the sand, it was really awful to hear what yells and screeches they set up. And then the snakes! They sent forth a hundred-fold hiss, with one consent, and Medusa's snakes answered them ...
— The Gorgon's Head - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lost several of my best fowls, not by the hawk but a horrid beast of the same nature as our polecat, called here a scunck; it is far more destructive in its nature than either fox or the hawk, for he comes like a thief in the night and invades the perch, leaving headless mementos of his barbarity and ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... father, my brother, my uncle—all my family, nearly, and broke my mother's heart. They had done nothing but keep silence. Their sentiments were only guessed. Their headless corpses were thrown indiscriminately into the ditch of the Mousseaux Cemetery, ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... upon atheistic humanitarianism, in its origin utterly destitute of theology, has developed into a colossal system of demonology, dogmatics, eschatology, myths and legends, with a pantheon more populous than that of old Rome. Many of the images by the wayside are headless, cloven by frost, overturned by earthquakes, and so pitted by time as to resemble petrified smallpox patients rather than divinities. Nature neither respects dogma nor worships the gods made by men, and the moss and the lichens have muffled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... have caused. A lady all in white, and without her head, was what she deposed and adhered to, supported by a consciousness of the secret sympathy of her mistress under the withering scorn with which Miss Pole regarded her. And not only she, but many others, had seen this headless lady, who sat by the roadside wringing her hands as in deep grief. Mrs Forrester looked at us from time to time with an air of conscious triumph; but then she had not to pass through Darkness Lane before she could bury herself ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the third day. The Normans were drinking in the hall of Bourne, casting lots among themselves who should espouse the fair Alftruda, who sat weeping within over the headless corpse; when in the afternoon a servant came in, and told them how a barge full of monks had come to the shore, and that they seemed to be monks from Crowland. Ivo Taillebois bade drive them back again into the barge with whips. But ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... of the dead are buried, but his skull is hung up in the taboo house in order, we are told, that his ghost may remain in the neighbourhood of the village and see how his memory is honoured. After the burial of the headless skeleton feasting and dancing go on, often for more than a month, and the expenses are defrayed out of the riches left by the deceased.[636] Even in the case of eminent persons who have been buried whole and entire in the usual way, a special mark of respect is sometimes paid to ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... I spent an hour very pleasantly in the National Academy, in the same building as the National Gallery. Many of the paintings here are of a fine order. Oliver Cromwell looking upon the headless corpse of King Charles I., appeared to draw the greatest number of spectators. A scene from "As You Like it," was one of the best executed pieces we saw. This was "Rosalind, Celia, and Orlando." The artist did himself and the subject great credit. Kemble, in Hamlet, with that ever memorable skull ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... about courtesy on the part of the customer and the public—that great headless mass of unrelated particles. Business is service, we say, and the master is the public, the hardest one in the world to serve. Each one of us speaks with more or less pitying contempt of the public, forgetting that we ourselves are the public ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... this the place? I promise ye, it is a goodly scaffold: In sooth, I am come about a headless errand, For I have not much to say, now I am here. Well, let's ascend, a God's name: In troth, methinks, your stair is somewhat weak; I prithee, honest friend, lend me thy hand To help me up; as for my coming down, Let me alone, I'll look ...
— Sir Thomas More • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... reign of inordinate, unprincipled clans. At this period, 1888, those quill-drivers whose consciences are in their pockets hold high carnival. When news- dealers shout for class legislation, and decapitated reputa- tions, headless trunks, and quivering hearts are held up [25] before the rabble in exchange for money, place, and power, the vox populi is suffocated, individual rights are trodden under foot, and the car of the modern In- quisition rolls along the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... world are you up to, Hilda?" exclaimed Mrs. Bale, as she entered the nursery where her six-year-old daughter was stuffing broken toys, headless dolls, ragged clothes and general debris ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... from the ground and put them back in their accustomed place upon the altar. Then, stooping, she forced herself to wrap up closely in the altar-cloth that which must be her burden till she found James Mottram's headless body where Charles had left it, and placing that same precious burden within the ample folds of her cloak, she held it with her left hand and arm closely pressed ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Vaillant! His headless body was then being taken to Clamart, and the crowds for whom he had wept, worked, and died were now going quietly away, indifferent and bored. Poor Vaillant! His ideas were exaggerated ones, ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... of it when it came.... Nor did he know it when the walls of Cyclopean masonry bulged and opened about him like the petals of a flowering lily. He was beyond all that. His gross body, headless, rent and torn as though the devils it had housed had wreaked their fury on their dwelling, lay sandwiched between the wreckage of the great chimney and the millstone that had paved its hearth, now a yawning cavity, some six feet deep. Leaning ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... them be called Cyno[ce]phali, for they have heads as hounds, and seem by the working, beasts rather than men, and some be called Cyclops, and have that name, for one of them hath but one eye, and that in the middle of the forehead, and some be all headless and noseless, and their eyen be in the shoulders, and some have plain faces without nostrils, and the nether lips of them stretch so, that they hele therewith their faces when they be in the heat of the sun: and some of them have closed mouths, in their breasts only one hole, and breathe and ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and shapeless. And at every step he feared that he had already died, that his soul had been wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... the Athenian fowl,[419] Which Chalcis gods, and mortals call an owl, Now see an Attys, now a Cecrops[420] clear, Nay, Mahomet! the pigeon at thine ear; Be rich in ancient brass, though not in gold, And keep his Lares, though his house be sold; To headless Phoebe his fair bride postpone, Honour a Syrian prince above his own; Lord of an Otho, if I vouch it true; Bless'd in one Niger, till ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... everything in the room reminded her of the man. He had furnished it from his junk-pile. The drawer was missing from the centre table, the door of the kitchen stove was wired at the hinges; even the black marble clock, with its headless gilt figure, and the brown tin boxes marked "Coffee," "Bread," and "Sugar"—all were junk. And these were the things that Grit, not without a show of pride, had brought home ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... his rigmarole, in which he had jumbled together pell-mell nautical phrases and facts out of one of his favorite books. "Well, they went to the bottom, and a nice mermaid welcomed them, but was much grieved on finding the box of headless knights, and kindly pickled them in brine, hoping to discover the mystery about them, for being a woman, she was curious. By-and-by a diver came down, and the mermaid said, 'I'll give you a box of pearls if you can take it up,' for she wanted to restore ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Harriet and two other women, and six men counting the guide and Weaver. The ship was a red-lit cavern. The "crewman" turned out to be a hairy horror, a three-foot headless lump shaped like an eggplant, supported by four splayed legs and with an indefinite number of tentacles ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... off to play chaupur with King Sarkap. And as he journeyed there came a fierce storm of thunder and lightning, so that he sought shelter, and found none save an old graveyard, where a headless corpse lay upon the ground. So lonesome was it that even the corpse seemed company, and Rasalu, ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... I detested it more than ever. A physical feeling of turgescence and congestion in that region, such as swimmers often feel, probably increased the impression. I thought with envy of the Aztec children, of the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, of Saint Somebody with his head tucked under his arm. Plotinus was less ashamed of his whole body than I of this inconsiderate and stupid appendage. To be sure, I might swim for a certain distance under water. But that accomplishment ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... can account for Sir John, and I can hold him on the Sacandaga; I can account for Haldimand only through the cowardice or treachery of Vermont; but I can hold him, too, if he ever dares to leave the lakes. For Sir Henry Clinton I do not care a damn; like a headless chicken he tumbles about New York, seeing, hearing nothing, and no mouth left to squawk with. His head is off; one of his legs still kicks at Connecticut, t'other paddles aimlessly in the Atlantic Ocean. But he's done for, Carus. Let ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... a headless doll struck against the side of my neck. It had been thrown by one child at another; missing her aim, she gave me the benefit of her evil intention. At this, cook lost all patience, and seizing the offending little one, boxed her soundly, before I ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... assassin was caught, being pressed to death at York Castle for his crimes. Not only have the stains of this bloody tragedy ever since been indelible, but the spirit of Walter Calverley could not rest, having often been seen galloping about the district at night on a headless horse.[28] And, speaking of ghosts which appear in this eccentric fashion, we may note that Eastbury House, near Blandford—now pulled down—had in a certain marble-floored room, ineffaceable stains of blood, attributable, it is said, to the suicide of William Doggett, the steward of ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... we created—the ghost of the murdered child that crept up behind you and laid cold fingers on yours. I confess that, to this day, I cannot help fancying its little, furtive footsteps behind me when I come here after nightfall. I'm not afraid of the White Lady or the headless man or the skeletons, but I wish I had never imagined that baby's ghost into existence. How angry Marilla and Mrs. Barry were over that affair," ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... have beheld strange worlds and strange people in my life, and it is true that I have. I have seen the headless people of that red world Iralo, the ant people, the dragon-fly people, the terrible carnivorous trees of L-472, and the pointed heads of a people who live upon a world which may not be named. But I have still to see a more terrible creature than that which ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... "For his own part," he said, "and in the land where he was bred, men would as soon take for their mark King Arthur's round-table, which held sixty knights around it. A child of seven years old," he said, "might hit yonder target with a headless shaft; but," added he, walking deliberately to the other end of the lists, and sticking the willow wand upright in the ground, "he that hits that rod at five-score yards, I call him an archer fit to bear both bow and quiver before a king, an it were ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... exterminated by the papal jealousy. Truly we may say with Michelet that the sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain, because the time was not yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoophytic members of half-moulded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles, preceded the birth of full-formed man. The nations were not ready. Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... co-operation of part with part. The street cars and railways had ceased; the telephone service was out of gear and only worked intermittently. The Germans had struck at the head, and the head was conquered and stunned—only to release the body from its rule. New York had become a headless monster, no longer capable of collective submission. Everywhere it lifted itself rebelliously; everywhere authorities and officials left to their own imitative were joining in the arming and flag-hoisting and ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... Hundred Fountains, but many of them were stopped up by time and had ceased to spout, while others did very little. Many of the shields were broken and moss had obliterated the coats of arms; many of the griffins were headless and the figures on the sarcophagi appeared through a veil of moss like fragments of silver work through an old and ragged velvet cover. On the water in the basins—more green and limpid than emerald—maiden-hair ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... rested a marble altar decorated with figures in relief. Beside the basin are rooms for religious purposes. These rooms are adorned with the gods of healing, AEsculapius with an acolyte holding a cock, the Dioscuri and their horses, the head of Serapis, and a headless statue of Apollo. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... consequence of their position in the ranks, and were now usually in possession of a simple but perfectly immovable faith that somebody understood the jumble. Even if they had been convinced that the army was a headless monster, they would merely have nodded with the veteran's singular cynicism. It was none of their business as soldiers. Their duty was to grab sleep and food when occasion permitted, and cheerfully fight wherever their feet were planted until more orders came. This was a ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... his head. His left hand was on the earth, fallen forward, his right hand uplifted, invoking Divine aid. Young Verendrye lay face down, his back hacked to pieces, a spear sunk in his waist, the headless body mockingly decorated with porcupine quills. So died one of the bravest of the young nobility in ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... strained forward in eager expectation. A few blows sufficed to remove the head of the cask. Horror! a sickening stench arose, and there became visible the headless trunk of a human being. That portion of the body which was not immersed in the wine, was putrid. 'Look here!' cried I, in mad triumph, plunging my arm into the cask, and drawing forth the ghastly head of Lagrange. I held aloft the horrid trophy of my vengeance; there were the dull, ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... confronted each other for about the space of a second, the headless apparition rising and rising till it seemed to touch the roof of the cave, when it extended its wide arms and made a clutch at the other, and ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... over 500,000 pins a day on the web, rejecting every bent or headless pin, and did the work with greater accuracy than it was possible to do it by hand. There was not the suggestion of an eye, or a finger in the entire machine, to show ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... all haste to sail away, bearing the wretched Cornelia with them, utterly distracted with grief and despair, while Philip and his fellow-servant remained upon the beach, standing bewildered and stupefied over the headless body of their beloved master. Crowds of spectators came in succession to look upon the hideous spectacle a moment in silence, and then to turn, shocked and repelled, away. At length, when the first impulse of excitement had in some measure ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... shot him dead at the Nine Stonerig, Beside the headless Cross; And they left him lying in his blood, Upon ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... civil commotion,—thou, that, besides the wreck of thy soldiery perishing on either side, didst bewail, amongst thy spectacles of domestic woe, the luminaries of thy senate extinguished, the heads of thy consuls fixed upon a halberd, weeping for ages over thy self- slaughtered Catos, thy headless Ciceros (truncosque Cicerones), and unburied Pompeys;—to whom the party madness of thy own children had wrought in every age heavier woe than the Carthaginian thundering at thy gates, or the Gaul ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... quickly to his companion, who seemed to be reading his thoughts, for he nodded, and together they touched the flanks of their horses and cantered and then galloped off the field of blood, eager to leave the quivering bodies and headless corpses far behind. ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... Smith slowly; "I suppose you are right. There are historic instances, of course: Glamys Castle and Spedlins Tower in Scotland, Peel Castle, Isle of Man, with its Maudhe Dhug, the gray lady of Rainham Hall, the headless horses of Caistor, the Wesley ghost of Epworth Rectory, and others. But I have never come in personal contact with such a case, and if I did I should feel very humiliated to have to confess that there was any agency which could produce a physical result—death—but ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... breathe. My scalp bristled;" and you, if you are like me, hide a yawn and say, "No, really?" There is a breezy carelessness, too, about his methods which kills a story. He distinctly states, for instance, that the story of the "Headless Cat of No. ——, Lower Seedley Street, Manchester," was told to him by a Mr. ROBERT DANE. In the first half of the narrative this gentleman's brother-in-law addresses him as Jack, and later on his wife says to him, "Oh, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... upon Constantine? It lasted over twelve days of fearful weather, during which no discomfort was spared us. Torrents of rain, rivers in flood, snowfalls, men dying of cold, stragglers whose shouts for help only brought us to them to find them lying headless on the ground, and last of all, a terrible outbreak of cholera, which one of the regiments in the column brought with it from France. And we had the mental agony to boot of being kept ever so long at the foot of a mountain, the Raz el ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... riding a headless horse, and wearing a chain armor, with a triangular shield flung behind his back, and ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... Crecy (Belgian recipe) " Fish " Flemish " Green Pea " Hasty " Immediate, or Ten Minutes " Leek " Mushroom Cream " Onion " Ostend " Potage Leman " Sorrel " The Soldiers' Vegetable " Starvation " Tomato " Tomato Puree " Vegetable " Waterzoei Sparrows, Headless Speculoos Sprats, To Keep Spinach a la Braconniere Stew, A Quickly Made Strawberry Fancy Strawberry Tartlets Sweet Drinks and Cordials Orgeat Sweet ...
— The Belgian Cookbook • various various
... should have to suppose than an animal whilst lying down determined to rise up in some particular direction; and that after its head had been cut off, an impulse continued to travel very slowly along the nerves to the proper muscles; so that after several hours the headless animal rose ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... Garh in the Emperor's litter. The latter meanwhile was seized by a savage Uzbek, named Balabash, who had been stationed within, and who sawed off the defenceless monarch's head with a knife. Then stripping off the rich robe he cast the headless trunk out of the window, where it lay for some hours upon the sands until the Kashmirian ordered its removal. The date of this tragic event is between the 10th and 30th of November, 1759 (the latter being ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... "you remember in Germany how disappointed we were at not finding a ghost in that old castle, which was said to be haunted by a headless apparition? Well, I have heard of a house in London which, I have reason to hope, is decidedly haunted. I mean to sleep there to-night. From what I hear, there is no doubt that something will allow itself to be seen or to be heard,—something, perhaps, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... eyes, and hangs upon the gateway of the lips; she speaks as well in the intricate, yet harmonious lines of the body, and the ever-varying play of the limbs. Look at the torso of Ilioneus, the son of Niobe, and see what an agony of terror and supplication cries out from that headless and limbless trunk! Decapitate Laocooen, and his knotted muscles will still express the same dreadful suffering and resistance. None knew this better than the ancient sculptors; and hence it was that ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... were shrewd fellows. This portico rested on fifty-eight columns, surrounding a court-yard. In the court-yard, a large movable stone, in good preservation, with the ring that served to lift it, covered a cistern. At the extremity of the portico, in a hemicycle, stood a headless statue—perhaps the Piety or Concord to which the entire edifice was dedicated. Behind the hemicycle a sort of square niche buried itself in the wall between two doors, one of which, painted on the wall for the sake of symmetry, ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... the officer's head clean off without Filer finding it out on account of the darkness of the night, and the clamour of cannon and musketry mingled with the cries of the wounded. Much it was to Filer's astonishment, then, when the surgeon asked him what he had brought in a headless trunk for; he declared that the lieutenant had a head on when he took him up, for he had himself asked him to take him from the breach, and that he did not know when the head was severed, which must have been done ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... 'Let me see—Joe,—it's two pillows that you always have, isn't it? And a double-fold of blanket at the foot?' You mean that you and Joe have been washed and scrubbed together so familiarly all your young childhood that you could identify Joe's headless body twenty years hence by the kerosene-lamp scar across his back? You mean that you and Joe have played house together so familiarly all your young tin-dish days that even your rag dolls called ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... dwellings than the peasants' houses which are now the only habitations on the Lido; and I suspect that a genteel villa must formerly have stood near the farm-gate, which we found surmounted by broken statues of Venus and Diana. The poor goddesses were both headless, and some cruel fortune had struck off their hands, and they looked strangely forlorn in the swaggering attitudes of the absurd period of art to which they belonged: they extended their mutilated arms toward the sea for pity, but it regarded them not; and ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... act to flee the war: The tendons twain behind the knee it snapped, And palsied all his speed. A Danaan marked, And leapt on that maimed man with sweep of sword Shearing his neck through. On the breast of earth The headless body fell: the head far flung Went rolling with lips parted as to shriek; And swiftly fleeted ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... followed a sharp, cracking noise, like the explosion of a percussion-cap, and the head of the rattlesnake spun twenty feet or more out over the swamp. It struck the branch of a tree, and, dropping to the water, sunk out of sight. The headless body of the reptile now writhed and doubled over itself, and smote the tree in the most horrible agony. Oonomoo walked quietly forward, and with his feet shoved it from the log. Still twisting and interlocking, it sunk down, down, down into the clear spring-like waters until it could ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... rapidly that the words fairly tumbled over one another, "'in the land where he was bred, men would as soon take for their mark King Arthur's round table, which held sixty knights around it. A child of seven might hit yonder target with a headless shaft.' Oh, this ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... she dug up those useful vegetables every day to see how they were sprouting, it was not surprising that they refused to make much growth. Lately she had converted the whole into a dolls' cemetery, and, with Cyril's aid, keenly enjoyed conducting the funerals of various headless favourites, waxing so enthusiastic over the obsequies that she even buried several quite respectable wax babies, though, regretting their loss afterwards, she was eventually forced to dig them up again. She put tombstones ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... formality, and in quiet grief, so many of the renowned and the humble followed his remains from the village-church to the rural graveyard, wore so pensive a fitness to the eye as the simple bridge over Sleepy-Hollow Creek, near to which Ichabod Crane encountered the headless horseman,—not only as typical of his genius, which thus gave a local charm to the scene, but because the country-people, in their heartfelt wish to do him honor, had hung wreaths of laurel upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... spot where Triphyna lay dead. After they had all knelt in prayer, St Gildas said to the corpse: "Arise, take thy head and thy child, and follow us." The dead body obeyed, the bewildered troop followed; but, gallop as fast as they could, the headless body was always in front, carrying the babe in her left hand, and her pale head in the right. In this manner they reached the castle ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... up and swung the tree over roots first, while he held and steadied it by its topmost branches. At this moment the Prince, unseen by the others, drew his sword, and, with one stroke, hewed off the giant's head. It fell within the city walls, and, in another second, the headless body ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... she would never go to heaven. I pretended to be deep in my book and not listening; April and May were sitting on the grass sewing ("needling" they call it) fearful-looking woolwork things for Seraphine's birthday, and June was leaning idly against a pine trunk, swinging a headless doll round and round by its one remaining leg, her heels well dug into the ground, her sun-bonnet off, and all the yellow tangles of her hair falling across her sunburnt, grimy ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... overtook them and without diminishing my speed I rammed the prow of my little flier between the shoulders of the nearest. The impact sufficient to have torn through inches of solid steel, hurled the fellow's headless body into the air over the head of his thoat, where it fell sprawling upon the moss. The mounts of the other two warriors turned squealing in terror, and bolted ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... throwing up earthworks or digging trenches. As well as they could surmise, the garrison, like the besieging army, was seeking shelter and rest, and from this fact the keen mind of Colonel Arthur Winchester divined that the defense was confused and headless. ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... good paintings in rags and in gardens statues covered with the moss of centuries smashed. In many places, still on the pedestal, you would see a headless Venus, or a flying Mercury chopped off ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... great aisle of giant columns into the courtyard at the end, there, between the pillars, stand massive images of granite, most of them headless, but one perfect except for the ends of the fingers ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... beautiful little creatures, and her heart warmed to them for Nan's sake. She could not stoop to conciliate the older girls, but she could make an effort with the babies. She knelt on the floor and took up a headless doll. ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boom that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Kuklux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... than the "Mafficking" [Transcriber's note: Mafeking?] in England of the Boer war days. The two Witnesses had been a source of torment and fear upon all peoples (save those who clove to God) and now that their headless bodies lay stark and dead on the marble pave of "The Broadway," the people "rejoiced upon them, made merry, and sent gifts one to ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... mass of the cerebrum, leaving the inner aspect and base of the skull exposed. The cerebrum was partly removed; the external auditory meatus was preserved. Immediately after the decapitation the rooster was left to its supposed death struggles, but it ran headless to the barn, where it was secured and subsequently fed by pushing corn down its esophagus, and allowing water to trickle into this tube from the spout of an oil-can. The phenomena exhibited by the rooster were quite interesting. It made all the motions of pecking, strutted about, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... England?" exclaimed the count. "Ah, no, Olympia; trust me, le Dieu-donne looks higher than the poverty-stricken daughter of a headless king and a crownless queen. There is nought to fear from her. But, come, there is our cue," and, with a gay song upon their gossipy lips, Mars and Venus danced in upon the stage, while a terrible Fury circled around them in a mad whirl. And amid the applause of the spectators ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... well-adorned head of the Danava who was drinking the Amrita without permission. And the huge head of the Danava, cut off by the discus and resembling a mountain peak, then rose up to the sky and began to utter dreadful cries. And the Danava's headless trunk, falling upon the ground and rolling thereon, made the Earth tremble with her mountains, forests and islands. And from that time there is a long-standing quarrel between Rahu's head and Surya and Soma. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the body of the blasted tree, and coming round it, his eyes caught the red light of free Levi's fire, and he heard the sound of a hammer falling upon heated iron. The little path was somewhere in the darkness, and as he vainly sought for it, he stumbled over a row of stripped and headless cornstalks which ran up to the cabin door. Once upon the smooth stone before the threshold, he gave a boyish whistle and lifted his hand to knock. "It is I, Uncle Levi—there are ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... standing, visible on the dark background of the thick wood. Looking down upon this mass of ruins from a broken pedestal, half-covered with ivy, a mutilated, but colossal statue of stone still keeps its place. This statue is strange and awful. It represents a headless human figure. Clad in the antique toga, it holds in its hand a dish and on that dish is a head. This head is its own. It is the statue of St. John the Baptist and Martyr, put to death by ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... curious and interfering, and then the ghosts would go somewhere where it was quieter. But we just let them come and go and don't make any fuss, and in consequence Fairfield is the ghostiest place in all England. Why, I've seen a headless man sitting on the edge of the well in broad daylight, and the children playing about his feet as if he were their father. Take my word for it, spirits know when they are well off as much as ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... companion that was mysterious and appalling. It was soon fearfully accounted for. On mounting a rising ground which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller against the sky, gigantic in height and muffled in a cloak, he was horror-struck to discover the stranger was headless!—but his horror was still more increased in observing that the head which should have rested on the shoulders was carried before the body on the pommel ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... rather suddenly layed back the cover and saw within six inches of my son's face a large old diamond back rattler. It was close and short work to dispatch him but I succeeded, the report of my gun brought all hands to their feet they examined the headless reptile, and were soon again lost in slumber. after while we arrived safely at Fort Collins bought a supply of food and other necessaries and took the trail for the head waters of La-Cash-a-po-da. We reached Pan-handle creek about twenty-five miles ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... themselves as they were dumped down under a jet of water, and the salmon burst out in a stream of quicksilver. A Chinaman jerked up a twenty-pounder, beheaded and detailed it with two swift strokes of a knife, flicked out its internal arrangements with a third, and case it into a blood-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped from under his hands as though they were facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them from the vat and thrust them under a thing like a chaff-cutter, which, descending, hewed them into unseemly red gobbets ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... of this folly," said Forgoll; "pay you me what is mine." A man came in from the ramparts;—"What news with you?" asks Mongan.—"There is a warrior like the men of old time approaching from the south, and a headless spear-shaft in his hand."—"I told you he would be coming," said Mongan. Before the words were out from between his teeth, the warrior had leaped the three ramparts into the middle of the dun, and in a moment was there between Mongan and the file ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... this point is simply a headless neck attached to a tow body, supported by natural legs fixed to a perch. I assume that your fragments are sufficiently relaxed, and the feathers cleaned and nearly dried. All the fat must, of course, have ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... body, and all the arm that had encircled her neck. A moment after the eating began, Mr. Rust observed a complete union of the sexual organs, and the eating and copulation went on together. On being forcibly separated the female exhibited signs of fear at her headless mate, and it was with difficulty that they were brought together again. On being suddenly tossed upon the back of the female the male seized her with a grasp from which she could not extricate herself, and immediately the sexual union was renewed, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... was carved and cunning, As the Celtic craftsman makes, Graven all over with twisting shapes Like many headless snakes. ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... peaceable incidents there were occasional threats of Indian treachery, like the theft of tools from two woodsmen and the later bold challenge in the form of a headless arrow wrapped in a snake's skin; the latter was returned promptly and decisively with the skin filled with bullets, and the danger was over for a time. The stockade was strengthened and, soon after, a palisade was built about the ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble
... of course, a beautiful sight, with a precious old headless rabbit pressed tight to his cheek; Annaple's face grew tender as she looked at the motherless creature; and she admired him to any extent except saying that he excelled her own. Being more than a year the elder, there could ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... came heavily to earth, but it was upon hands and knees, and, still retaining his sword, he scrambled to his feet again at the same time as the Gaul, who raised his headless spear on high to bring it down upon ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... which no modern imitation can effect. There are innumerable niches, too, up the whole height of the towers, above and around the entrance, and all over the walls: most of them empty, but a few containing the lamentable remnants of headless saints and angels. It is singular what a native animosity lives in the human heart against carved images, insomuch that, whether they represent Christian saint or Pagan deity, all unsophisticated men seize the first safe opportunity to knock off their heads! In spite of all dilapidations, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... was otherwise of no especial value as a work of art, the Viceroy of Naples very generously presented this object to the place of its discovery, whose citizens, doubtless thinking the appearance of the headless statue uncanny, popped a stray antique occiput (of which a goodly number, more or less mutilated, are constantly brought to light by the peasants) upon Lollianus' vacant shoulders. Anything more comical and at the same time more repellent than this hybrid statue it ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... hand alone will I commit her. Adm. I touch her not; but she hath leave to enter. Herc. I shall entrust her only to thy hand. Adm. Thou dost constrain me, king, against my will. Herc. Venture to stretch thy hand, and touch the stranger's. {1190} Adm. I touch her, as I would the headless Gorgon. Herc. Hast thou her hand? Adm. I have. Herc. (lifting the veil) Then hold her safe. Hereafter thou wilt say the son of Jove Hath been a generous guest; view now her face, See if she bears resemblance to thy wife, And thus made happy bid farewell to grief. ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... given a good blow as a remembrance, flew upon him from behind. The cornet swung his arm with all his might, and brought his sword down upon Borodaty's bent neck. Greed led to no good: the head rolled off, and the body fell headless, sprinkling the earth with blood far and wide; whilst the Cossack soul ascended, indignant and surprised at having so soon quitted so stout a frame. The cornet had not succeeded in seizing the hetman's head by its scalp-lock, and fastening it to his saddle, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... have been thrown into dungeon for life, or shot. In France, the idol of the revolutionist of all countries, they would heave been carried before a mob tribunal, their names simply asked, their sentences pronounced, and their bodies headless within the first half hour. In England, they had the benefit of the law in all its sincerity, the assistance of the most distinguished counsel, the judgment of the most impartial tribunal, and the incalculable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... however, another object for which Smith said the Lord had sent him to Susquehanna; and that was—a wife. Until he obtained one there was no use in trying to get certain buried treasures at Palymra. A headless Spaniard guarded it with great vigilance, but would, it appeared, be driven away if Smith should shake millinery and dry-goods bills at him. Joseph stopped at the house of Isaac Hale, already noticed as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... spirits of the unburied awake fear. During the late war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes headless, were brought back by native pastors and interred; but this (I know not why) was insufficient, and the spirit still lingered on the theatre of death. When peace returned a singular scene was enacted in many places, and chiefly round the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... front of the theater, on the left as one comes out, is quite a space, which seems to have been excavated recently, and farther to the left excavations were being made when I was there. An ancient lamp, a fluted column, and a headless statue were among the articles taken out. The workmen were resting when I viewed this part of the ruins, and an old colored man gave me a drink of water. Beginning a little to the right of the theater, and extending for perhaps fifteen hundred or two thousand feet, is ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... death met him there in the guise of a woman, Joan Countess of Hereford, mother-in-law of Henry, and sister of Archbishop Arundel. She had never forgiven Exeter for sitting in judgment on her brother the Earl of Arundel, and she rested not now till she saw him stretched before her, a headless corpse. ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... describe the scene as I found it. About twenty boats were jammed together, forming one confused mass; some bottom up; the bows or sterns of others only visible; mixed up, pell-mell, with huge rafts; and among which were nearly all our advanced little division. Headless trunks, as well as heads without bodies, were lying about in all directions; parties were engaged hand to hand, spearing and krissing each other; others were striving to swim for their lives; entangled in the common ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... Brunai. The rebels, emboldened by the impunity they had so far enjoyed, were soon found to be hovering round the outskirts of the capital, and every now and then an outlying house would be attacked during the night and the headless corpses of its occupants be found on the morrow. There being no forts and no organized force to resist attack, the houses, moreover, being nearly all constructed of highly inflammable palm leaf thatch and matting, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... seized the bleeding head, and plunging into the lake, swam safely over to the main shore. He had scarcely reached it, when, looking back, he saw amid the darkness the torches of persons come out in search of the new-married couple. He listened till they had found the headless body, and he heard their piercing shrieks of sorrow, as he took his way to the lodge of ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... head of the lady falling upon him. He was amazed to see Amgiad standing by him with a bloody sabre, and the body of the lady lying headless on the ground. The prince told him what had passed, and said, "I had no other way to prevent this furious woman from killing you, but to take away her life." "My lord," replied Bahader, full of gratitude, "persons of your rank and generosity are ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... by the shore Held rule, and named the waves his steeds: 'Twas he that struck the stroke accursed - Headless this ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... conspirators, on the day fixed for the election (20 Oct.) denounced the conspiracy in the full senate and in presence of its principal leaders. Catilina did not condescend to deny it; he answered haughtily that, if the election for consul should fall on him, the great headless party would certainly no longer want a leader against the small party led by wretched heads. But as palpable evidences of the plot were not before them, nothing farther was to be got from the timid senate, except ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... stage? Almost always with contempt, at the best as a humble adviser. He is the comic character or the villain; generally, as a further insult, the secondary villain. The attorney is sometimes the hero of a farce, as in The Headless Man—never in comedy, or to be more correct, hardly ever, for Mr Granville Barker in The Voysey Inheritance gave a very fine and sympathetic study of a young solicitor. The dramatist may say in defence that he is truthful, that he merely reflects the vulgar prejudice against the profession, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... suddenly threw down his samples, bought a colour-box, and became the master whom we have all admired. Marlotte, for a central figure, boasted Olivier de Penne. Only Barbizon, since the death of Millet, was a headless commonwealth. Even its secondary lights, and those who in my day made the stranger welcome, have since deserted it. The good Lachevre has departed, carrying his household gods; and long before that Gaston Lafenestre ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... out-of-the-way place 'Hard to Come By,' which explains itself. Most romantic of all, the valley where King Charles's army lost a battle long ago is still known as 'Fine and Brave.' There, the country people say, headless ghosts of defeated Cavaliers may still be seen on moonlight nights riding up and down, carrying their own plumed-hatted heads under their arms. All over the county these story places are to be found. ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... irreconcilable. He quotes both passages: in one Julianus is represented as a miser, in the other as a voluptuary. In the one he refuses to eat till the body of Pertinax has been buried; in the other he gluts himself with every luxury almost in the sight of his headless remains.—M.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... that. He never once said, How would I like that said about me? or, How would I like that done to me? or, How would that look and taste and feel to me if I were in So- and-so's place? It needs genius to change places with other men; it needs a grace beyond all genius; and this poor headless and heartless creature does not know what genius is. It needs imagination, the noblest gift of the mind, and it needs love, the noblest grace of the heart, to consider the case of other people, and to see, as Butler says, that we differ as much from other people as they ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... taste for the supernatural, there was ample opportunity for its gratification in this haven of tradition. He may have seen the headless man who was accustomed to walk down Green Street to Market Space, with what intention was never divulged. Every old house had its ghost, handed down through the generations, as necessary a piece of furniture as the tester-bed or the ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... things connected with this discovery. The boots were what are called "rights and lefts," and in a good state of preservation. The crosier was perfect, and a part of the body was hard, and of a copper-coloured hue, whilst the other part was decomposed. The body was headless, and a piece of lead was found lying in place of the skull, with this inscription ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... saint was quoting from the heathen pages of Herodotus, the Father of Lies. Nothing of the kind. He is too conscientious to speak from hearsay of such marvellous matters; he says that he personally went among these headless monocular folk; he says that he spoke to them and lived with them; that he made a study of their morals and social institutions, which, in this particular sermon, he holds up as an example ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... weather. The caterpillars march at an even pace, each touching the stern of the one in front of him. The unbroken chain eliminates the leader with his changes of direction; and all follow mechanically, as faithful to their circle as are the hands of a watch. The headless file has no liberty left, no will; it has become mere clockwork. And this continues for hours and hours. My success goes far beyond my wildest suspicions. I stand amazed at it, or rather I ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... One party of them fixed it, like that of the vilest traitor, on an immense pole, and bore it in triumph all over Paris; while another division of the outrageous cannibals were occupied in tearing her clothes piecemeal from her mangled corpse. The beauty of that form, though headless, mutilated and reeking with the hot blood of their foul crime—how shall I describe it?—excited that atrocious excess of lust, which impelled these hordes of assassins to satiate their demoniac passions upon the remains of this ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... railroad to trial on such a charge in any county of the State. The company had really nothing to fear in the way of criminal prosecution. But the matter had touched the temper and roused the suspicions of the great, headless body called the public. The railroad felt that it must not be silent under even a muttered and vague charge of such nature. It must strike first, and in a spectacular manner. It must divert the public mind by a ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... relic of the luckless Masaniello, the fisherman of Naples. After he had been raised by mob favour to a height of power more despotic than monarch ever wielded, he was shot by the same populace in the streets, as if he had been a mad dog. His headless trunk was dragged through the mire for several hours, and cast at night-fall into the city ditch. On the morrow the tide of popular feeling turned once more in his favour. His corpse was sought, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... "Oh, 'Headless Horsemen' and 'Midnight Mysteries,' fascinating maidens carried off by desperate ruffians. I am thankful to say that I have no personal acquaintance with that sort of thing; but, girls, let me ask you ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... of the livid color of death; gaping red wounds on the body and round the brows: the whole piece enough to turn one sick, and fit only to brutalize the beholder of it. The Virgin is commonly represented with a dozen swords stuck in her heart; bleeding throats of headless John Baptists are perpetually thrust before your eyes. At the Cathedral gate was a papier-mache church-ornament shop—most of the carvings and reliefs of the same dismal character: one, for instance, ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... out of the earth, wherein it had been deposited, the skull of his father, and took it along with him in his flight, in order that it might not be dishonoured in his absence, for he loved his father with extraordinary tenderness, and cherished his memory as dearly as his own life. The headless body of the venerable chief, like those of his ancestors, had been sent to Benin, in order that its bones might adorn the sacred temple at that place, agreeably to an ancient and respected custom, which ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... patted the quivering trunk outstretched to smell the dead snake and then went forward and grasped the hamadryad's tail with both hands, striving to hold it still. But it dragged him from side to side and the writhing coils of the headless body nearly enfolded him, so he let go and stepped back. As well as he could judge the king-cobra was more than ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... of man or friendship, or even the stronger love of woman, could make my dungeon free, or my chains vanish into "thin air?" Still there had been a interposition, and to that interposition, whether for future good or ill, it certainly was due that I was not already mounting the scaffold, or flung, headless trunk, into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... had scaled the walls and forced the gates. The prisoners taken were treated with humanity. But, unfortunately, this current of Christian sentiment was immediately arrested by the conduct of the Turks in the Acropolis, in killing nine hostages, and throwing over the walls some naked and headless bodies. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... guard the babe that had disappeared. Many whose virginal modesty had been violated by the sea, showed naked limbs swollen and greenish, with deep bites from flesh-eating fishes. The tide had even tossed ashore the headless body of a child a few ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Century by the actual commission of a similar deed, struck horror to the hearts of the people, and they were worked up to a pitch that had never been witnessed in this country before. Telephones and telegraph were called into service, and the finding of the headless body of a young and doubtless beautiful woman in a sequestered spot near Fort Thomas, was flashed around the world. So shocked was the country over this ghastly find that the metropolitan papers from one end of this country to the other informed their representatives in the ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown |
