"Pestilential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eve the night-bird fly, And vulture dimly flitting by, To revel o'er each morsel stolen From the cold corse, all black and swoln That on the shattered ramparts lay, Of him who perished yesterday,— Of him whose pestilential steam Rose reeking on the morning beam,— Whose fearful fragments, nearly gone, Were blackening from the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... familiarity With open forms of ill, not to be shunned Where youths of all kinds meet, endangered there A mind more willing to be pure than most— Oft when the broad rich humour of a jest, Did, with its breezy force, make radiant way For pestilential vapours following— Arose within his sudden silent mind, The maiden face that smiled and blushed on him; That lady face, insphered beyond his earth, Yet visible to him as any star That shines unwavering. I cannot tell In words the tenderness ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... despondency into which they had fallen; their lively imaginations making it assume the form of a flaming cross leading them on to victory. Famine was not the least of the evils they endured. Unwholesome food, and the impure air from the neighbouring marshes, engendered pestilential diseases, which carried them off more rapidly than the arrows of the enemy. A thousand of them died in a day, and it became at last a matter of extreme difficulty to afford them burial. To add to their misery, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... may be discussed and his social condition ignored. To seek out an individual here and there and endeavor to redeem or recover him while the environment remains unchanged, is a waste of force: as foolish as it would be to spend millions on remedies for people sick with malaria in a pestilential and malarial district, and ignore the condition of the district. True wisdom would demand first of all that the district be purged, the environment made healthy, the ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... One who dwelt in the country at the time writes: [See Sir Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages, page 14.] "The fatal infection spread around with a baneful rapidity which no flight could escape, and with a fatal effect that nothing could resist. It destroyed with its pestilential breath whole families and tribes; and the horrid scene presented, to those who had the melancholy opportunity of beholding it, a combination of the dead, the dying, and such as, to avoid the fate of their friends around them, prepared to disappoint the plague of its ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... his fellow-men. And the distance between them, that had seemed to be lessening as they talked, spread illimitably vast; a dark, sunless plain, bounded by a livid horizon, reflected in the slimy pools of foul swamps and pestilential marshes, where poisonous reptiles bred in slimy, writhing knots, and the Eaters of Human Flesh lurked under the tangled shade of the jungles. Less vile of life, even in his degradation, than many men, he felt himself beside this ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... his eldest son, the editor, Mr. Powers was enabled to secure a farm not far from Cincinnati, and removing his family to it, began the task of clearing and cultivating it. Unfortunately for the new-comers, the farm was located on the edge of a pestilential marsh, the poisonous exhalations of which soon brought the whole family down with the ague. Mr. Powers the elder died from this disease, and Hiram was ill and disabled from it for a whole year. The family was broken up and scattered, and ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... particular localities, all of which are well known and avoided[1], from being liable after the rains to malaria, or infested at particular seasons with agues and fever, a lengthened residence in the island may be contemplated, without the slightest apprehension of prejudicial results. These pestilential localities are chiefly at the foot of mountains, and, strange to say, in the vicinity of some active rivers, whilst the vast level plains, whose stagnant waters are made available for the cultivation of rice, are seldom ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the maddening spirit O'Brien dispensed. He knew that his own baggage had at last arrived from Heaven only knew where, and he wished it hadn't, for it left him feeling even more burdened than ever with the responsibilities of the pestilential valley. He knew that he was beginning to hate the police, and Fyles, almost as much as Charlie did. He knew that if prevailing conditions weren't careful he would lose his temper with them, and make things hot for somebody or something. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... I oughter git wiser. But ef I was to live till the great round-up I don't guess I'd ever learn the limits of a woman's self-sacrifice fer them she takes the notion to mother. An' it don't matter if it's her own folk, or her beau, or her man, or some pestilential kid she's rescued from drownin' in a churn of cream she's jest fixed ready fer butter makin'. Wot Jeff don't owe you fer haulin' him right back into the midst of life, why I guess you couldn't find with one of them things crazy highbrows ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... harsh again as he added: "If I temporarily forget the rules of honorable warfare, it's because my memory has been corrupted by the vileness of those Outcasts who, in their ego-mania, blaspheme the Almighty God by claiming kinship with Him. I wish you and I could go over there and clean up that pestilential Prussian herd! By gad, sir, they've the hoof and mouth disease, each confounded one of them! Whenever I think of them I get rush of ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... tainted by the discouragement of all good men, which penetrated every shire and every parish, than by the distant reports of the loose behaviour of Charles II. Servility, meanness, venality, time-serving, and a disbelief in virtue diffused themselves over the nation like a pestilential miasma, the depressing influence of which was heavy, even upon those souls which individually resisted the poison. The heroic age of England had passed away, not by gradual decay, by imperceptible degeneration, but in a year, in a single day, like the winter's snow ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... infested with reptiles and poisonous insects. The point from which these three streams diverge is known as the "Head of the Passes," and it was here that the blockading squadron of four vessels was stationed. The ships swung idly at their moorings for weeks. The pestilential vapors from the surrounding marshes were rapidly putting all the crews in the sick bay, while the clouds of gnats and mosquitoes that hung about made Jack's life a wretched one. They did not even have the pleasurable excitement of occasionally chasing a blockade-runner, for ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... in a most miserable state. All the streets, courts, and houses were covered with dead bodies, among whom some miserable wretches were crawling about in the different stages of the most offensive diseases, occasioned by famine, the most unnatural food, and the pestilential smell of the corrupting carcases. Even the trees were stripped of their bark, and the ground had been everywhere dug up in search of any kind of roots it might be able to afford. Not a drop of water could be any where procured; and though it was the constant practice of all these nations ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... publicly attributed to him, though, in the estimation of every officer of the army and squadron, richly deserving it. It will be in the recollection of the reader, that instead of marching on Lima, he wasted nearly two months at Haura, and that from the pestilential character of the climate, a fearful amount of sickness amongst the troops was the consequence. I will here give a letter to me from his Aide-de-camp Paroissien, who was subsequently employed by San Martin to promulgate his infamous accusations against me, when he had no ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... and uncanny. I had recently read the "Iliad," and the long lines of huge fires reminded me of that scene in the first book, where the Greeks burn on the sea shore the bodies of those smitten by Apollo's pestilential-arrows ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... S.W. by rail from Algiers is Bufarik (the "hanging well''); pop. 5980. A thoroughly French town, it dates from 1835, when General Drouet d'Erlon established there an entrenched camp on a hillock in the midst of a pestilential swamp. Soon afterwards Marshal Clausel began to build a regular city, which was at first called Medina Clausel in his honour. The draining of the site and neighbourhood was a costly undertaking, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm during all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late "rich man" had to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of fact we were in sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our destination. The excellent Father Superior mentioned to me with an air of immense commiseration: "The poor man has left a young daughter." Who was to look after her I don't know, but I saw the devoted ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... which they dare not own; and certainly dare not act, without my leave. These fellows are all villainy! A league with demons would be less abominable!—I must close the account, and shake off such pestilential scoundrels!— ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... into the coach, and take care your muddy clothes do not soil the lady's gown, as your presence could hardly fail to be pestilential to her, did she but know you as you really are. Good-night, fair mistress; some day I hope to see you ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... bely the boastful professions of his whole life, to desert the royal cause, to join with the Wildmans and Fergusons, nay, to propose that the King should be sent a prisoner to a foreign land and immured in a fortress begirt by pestilential marshes. The lure which had produced this strange transformation was the Viceroyalty of Ireland. Soon, however, it appeared that the proselyte had little chance of obtaining the splendid prize on which his heart was set. He found that others were consulted on Irish affairs. His advice was never ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his life at the call of duty; but, on his suddenly succumbing to the effects of a murderous slug shot through the lungs, fired from the old flint musket of one of the King of Abarri's adherents, in the pestilential African stream up which he had gone to demolish a native stronghold that had defied the fetish of the British flag, this allowance for my support ceased, and I was thenceforth left a poor pensioner on my uncle's bounty. I will do my ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... reactionary—and therefore wrong—to insist upon strikes or other forms of class warfare in moments of great calamity, as, for example, during disasters like the Johnstown flood and the Messina earthquake, or amid the ravages of a pestilential plague. Marx, to whom we owe the formulation of the theory of class struggle which has guided the Socialist movement, would never have questioned this important truth; he would never have supported class separatism under conditions ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... would be a series of terrible hardships for Nell and full of new dangers, but he realized that they could not remain all their lives on Mount Linde and it was necessary to start soon on the journey. The time, after the rainy season, when water covers the pestilential swamps, and is to be found everywhere, was the most suitable for the purpose. The heat could not yet be felt on the high table-land; the nights were so cool still that it was necessary to be well covered. But in the jungle below it was considerably hotter, and he knew well that intense heat ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... grudgingly with a prince who had done more for England than had ever been done for her by any of his predecessors in so short a time, with a prince who was now about to expose himself to hostile weapons and pestilential air in order to preserve the English colony in Ireland, with a prince who was prayed for in every corner of the world where a congregation of Protestants could meet for the worship of God? [597] But on this subject Lowther harangued in vain. Whigs and Tories were equally fixed in ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in his tent at the Crimea. Florence Nightingale was one of those philanthropic and humane ladies who left their homes and the comforts of life, and resorted to the Crimea, where, on the field of battle and in the pestilential hospital, she comforted and nursed the sick and wounded soldiers. The tent can be made of white cloth, fastened to a frame of light strips of wood eight feet square, with a small flag fastened in front. A couch should be formed at one side of the tent, on which reclines the wounded ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... Berlin or Dresden. These and similar large towns, with their public, do not exist for me at all. As an audience I can only imagine an assembly of friends who have come together for the purpose of knowing my works somewhere or other, best of all in some beautiful solitude, far from the smoke and pestilential business odour of our town civilization. Such a solitude I might find in Weimar, but certainly not in a larger city. If I now turn to my great work, it is done for the purpose of seeking salvation from ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... sometimes pestilential. If any doubt this truth let him remember the nightmares wherein his nudity made torment. And, while remembering the anguish such lack of clothing has occasioned in dreams, let him think with pity on the suffering ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... antagonistic to it: "to them that love God all things work together for good." What is called "nature" is not something fixed, but plastic; something which can be conformed to the will of the God and Father of Jesus. A pestilential Panama, for instance, is not natural, but subnatural, and must be brought up to its divine nature, when it will serve the children of God. The Rule of God in nature, like the Kingdom in Jesus' parables, must both ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... of the criminal was merely the beginning of a weird life of horror. It was customary at that period to immure prisoners in solitary confinement. There, in their small and reeking cells, filled with damps and pestilential odors, they were confined day after day, year after year, condemned to perpetual inactivity and silence. If they presumed to speak, they were brutally lashed with the whip. They were not allowed to write letters, nor to communicate with ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... this pestilential interior, and took a seat on a bench on the veranda. After a moment's interval, the yellow landlord came to the door with a look of inquiry, which Guest answered by a demand for lodging and supper. When the landlord had vanished again in the cigarette fog, ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... fifteen million pounds, have given no thought to drainage. But the good Arabs, patiently and without murmuring, gather up their long robes, and with legs bare to the knee make their way through this already pestilential water, which must be hatching for them ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... yet directed by judgment and regulated by prudence, and of elegance such as the most accomplished knight of that most perfect age of chivalry might be expected to display. This nobleman died of a pestilential disorder at the castle, in the year 1361, greatly lamented by the inhabitants of Leicester. The order of his funeral appointed by himself, and curiously recorded by our local historians, is a pleasing proof of his good sense and piety; the body being taken in a hearse from St. Mary's near ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts
... which cut through the middle of a block. This was something which Orme had not expected. He ran forward and peered down the dark, unpleasant passage. There was his man, barely visible, picking a careful way through the ash-heaps and avoiding the pestilential garbage-cans. ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... the plague rage in Avignon for six or eight weeks, and the pestilential breath of the sick, who expectorated blood, caused a terrible contagion far and near; for even the vicinity of those who had fallen ill of plague was certain death; so that parents abandoned their infected children, and all the ties of kindred ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... would fantastic champions of hygiene who should attempt to render a marsh inhabitable by killing the mosquitoes one by one with shots from a revolver, instead of adopting as their method and their goal the draining of the pestilential marsh. ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... may be propagated; also that heat in the air, or heat of weather, as we ordinarily call it, makes bodies relax and faint, exhausts the spirits, opens the pores, and makes us more apt to receive infection or any evil influence, be it from noxious, pestilential vapors, or any other thing in the air; but that the heat of fire, and especially of coal fires, kept in our houses or near us, had quite a different operation, the heat being not of the same kind, but quick and fierce, tending not to nourish, but to consume ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... sometimes by the dark pestilential river that marks the boundary between the two countries, often and often have I wondered to myself whether I was wandering and suffering there to spread slavery over an unwilling people. I am not sorry ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... I trow he will listen to some crazy counsel from Rome, belike, or some barefooted hermit—very holy, no doubt, but who does not know a Greek from a Saracen, or a horse's head from his tail—and will go to some pestilential hole like that foul Egyptian swamp, where we stayed till our skin was the colour of an old boot, in hopes of converting the Sultan of Babylon, or the Old Man of the Mountain, or what not, and there he will stay till the flower of his ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... risk and the ultimate cost of his life; Florence Nightingale and the noble sisterhood inaugurated by her, who have won all the untarnished and undisputed laurels of recent wars on both sides of the Atlantic; and the Christian missionaries to savage tribes and in pestilential climates, who have often gone to their work with as clear a consciousness of deadly peril as if they had been on their way to ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... protects the weak from the strong, I commit the care of your innocence and virtues, if they have not already received their full reward, and if your youth and delicacy have not long since fallen victims to the violence of the African trader, the pestilential stench of a Guinea ship, the seasoning in the European colonies, or the lash and lust of a brutal ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... earth are filled with pestilential dust which once was the bones, the flesh, the bodies of great ones who sate upon thrones, deciding causes, ruling assemblies, governing armies, conquering provinces, possessing treasures, tearing down temples, flattering themselves with pride, majesty, fortune, praise and dominion. ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... theory of Plato, as far as I have been able to give it a lucid explanation in the time at my disposal. I put my trust in him when he says that the cause of epilepsy is the overflowing of this pestilential humour into the head. My inquiry therefore was, I think, reasonable when I asked the woman whether her head felt heavy, her neck numb, her temples throbbing, her ears full of noises. The fact that she acknowledged these noises to be more frequent in her right ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... all, of himself, of his body and soul. A storm of contempt broke loose in him: it had long been brewing: sooner or later there had to come the reaction against the base thoughts, the degrading compromises, the stale and pestilential atmosphere in which he had been living for months: but the need of loving, of deceiving himself about the woman he loved, had postponed the crisis as long as possible. Suddenly it burst upon him: and it ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... urged in favour of robbery, murder, and every species of wickedness, which, if we did not practise, others would commit. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that they were to take it up. What good would it do them? What advantages, for instance, would they derive from this pestilential commerce to their marine? Should not we, on the other hand, be benefited by this change? Would they not be obliged to come to us, in consequence of the cheapness of our manufactures, for what they wanted for the African market? But he would not calumniate ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... Through this simple act, the entire social community will experience a diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. At the present hour, the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Epicurus denying the immortality of the soul, and in brief so terrified him that the good simple soul, by means of certain intermediaries, let grease his palm with a good dose of St. John Goldenmouth's ointment[56] (the which is a sovereign remedy for the pestilential covetise of the clergy and especially of the Minor Brethren, who dare not touch money), so he should deal ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... exultation as their descendants. Some of them would have denied that these great centers of industrial democracy either in the Old World or in the New always stand for progress. Jefferson said, "I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man. I consider the class of artificers," he went on, "as the panders of vice, and the instrument by which the liberties of a country are generally overthrown." In England they reckon 70 per ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... regions; for week after week this weather never varies, the rains come on at once, and then cease till the following season. The tempests which raise the fogs from the ocean have no influence here, and they are strangers likewise to that hot moisture which produces the pestilential fevers in England and America. There are sometimes indeed heavy thunder storms, when the clouds burst, and pour down torrents of rain: but the storm ceases in a few minutes, and the heavens, under the influence of a powerful sun, resume their beauty ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... relief of it. The cold reward. Allan Mowbray was avenged. Jessie and her mother were freed from the threat which had so long over-shadowed their lives. The bitter air of the northland had been cleansed of a pestilential breath. So he turned his back on Leaping Horse with the knowledge that the murderer would pay his penalty before God ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... on lime-squash, and a limitless admiration for her missionary husband,—a large, ungainly man, with the manners of a shy schoolboy, and the wrapt gaze of a seer; a man who, in an age of fanaticism, would have walked smiling to the rack. As it was, he walked with no less equanimity through the pestilential mazes of the city and bazaar. For although in this age of tolerance run to seed, a man is not called upon to die for his beliefs, he is occasionally called upon to live for them; which is not necessarily ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... me up, and show me how the gods keep house. I counter-offered to keep him with me, by force of dynamite, carry him back to civilization, and go shares on his voice, as per circular. And this is where the big But comes in. My offer was pestilential; ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... officer, "do you think, on this pestilential unlucky planet, we can afford any more bad luck? Metals fatigue, Karol burned so badly the medic thinks he may never use his hand again, and now you and Ringg getting yourselves laid up and out of action? The medic will help me with Ringg; that Mentorian ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... fast as through the papers. So here's how we'll fix them. Recommend the City Council to pass an ordinance making it a misdemeanor punishable by fine, imprisonment, and revocation of license to practice, for a physician to make a diagnosis of any case as a pestilential disease. The Council will do it on ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... anywhere, in any stone, stick, bush, person, hill, or river. A god made on the animistic model can be assigned to any department of human activity, down to sports, or lusts, or the province of Cloacina. Thus religion becomes a mere haunted and pestilential jungle of beliefs. But the theistic conception, when not yet envisaged as spiritual, cannot be subdivided and eparpille. Thus, from every point of view, and on every side, Animism is full of the seeds of religious degeneration, ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... indecisive battle had been fought between a detachment of General Lincoln's army and the British, under General Prevost, in June, 1779. At the time of Dr. McLean's arrival at James Island, many soldiers were sick with the pestilential "camp fever" of that sultry climate, or were suffering from the wounds of battle at the army hospital. Some of these sufferers were from Lincoln and Mecklenburg counties, with whom he was personally acquainted. Under judicious medical ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... long since, the question is substantial, not formal. If the Teutsch Ritterdom was actually at this time DEAD, actually stumbling about as a mere galvanized Lie beginning to be putrid,—then, sure enough, it behooved that somebody should bury it, to avoid pestilential effects in the neighborhood. Somebody or other;—first flaying the skin off, as was natural, and taking that for his trouble. All turns, in substance, on this latter question! If, again, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... crime by reason of their vileness, they were guilty of many barbarous usages. "These wretches," says Dr. Hodges, "out of greediness to plunder the dead, would strangle their patients, and charge it to the distemper in their throats. Others would secretly convey the pestilential taint from sores of the infected to those who were well; and nothing indeed deterred these abandoned miscreants from prosecuting their avaricious purposes by all methods their wickedness could invent; who, although they were without witnesses to accuse them, yet it is not doubted but divine ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... the force now at their disposal. Even had they been victorious, he argued, they had intended to leave their present camp, which was unhealthy at all times, and was now in the hot season becoming pestilential. The time was the beginning of autumn, and many of the Athenians were sick, while all were disheartened. Nikias, however, opposed the idea of retreat, not because he did not fear the Syracusans, but because he feared the Athenians more, and the treatment which as an unsuccessful ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... of "lighting up her heart" at the shrine of affection, by being closed in a sack and thrown into the lake. But, I felt persuaded, there was something English, in the tones of your voice. Did you forsake Old Albion for the sultry, pestilential deserts of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... Mexican war. One of his most practical temperance addresses was that, while engaged off the coast of Africa in suppressing the slave trade, he persuaded the men under him on the Perry, of which he was the commander, to give up the use of liquor. Although exposed to one of the most pestilential climates in the world, he did not lose ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... falls in England in the whole year—come down in a short rainy season of four months. The water filters through the sand-hills, and forms great stagnant lagoons; a rank tropical vegetation springs up, and the air is soon filled with pestilential vapours. Add to this that the water is unwholesome; the city too is placed in a sand-bath which keeps up a regular temperature, by accumulating heat by day and giving it out into the air by night, so that night gives no relief from the stifling closeness of the day. ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... paralleled by another of their assertions, namely, that by their magic might they can reduce the world to a desert, the purest waters to streams of livid poison, and the clearest lakes to stagnant waters, the pestilential vapours of which shall slay all living creatures, except the blood-thirsty beast of the forest, and the ravenous bird of the rock. But that in the midst of this desolation the palace of the Chief Genii shall rise sparkling in the wilderness, and the horrible howl of their ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... second-rate ship like the Ariadne carried eighteen midshipmen; and as six lieutenants were appointed from them, only twelve remained. From these twelve, in the dingy after-cockpit, where the superficial area was not more than twelve square feet; where the air was foul, and the bilges reeked with a pestilential stench; where the purser's store-room near gave out the smell of rancid butter and poisonous cheese; where the musty taint of old ropes came to them, there was a spirit ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... directly connected with the well-being of the people. His philological work had its origin in this motive, and in his miscellaneous writings he displayed his practical philosophy and philanthropy. He wrote frequently upon banks and banking; his "Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases" is pronounced by an authority to have great historical value; he was one of the founders of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences; and in the numerous list of his writings one comes upon such oddly assorted subjects as an account of ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... austere; Barlow felt that he dwelt on a plane where the trivialities of life were but pestilential insects, to be endured stoically in a physical way, with the mind freed from their irritation grasping grander things; life was a wheel that revolved with ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... ship that carried the new-caught, cannibal blacks from remote islands to labour on the new plantations where white men turned dank and pestilential swamp and jungle into rich and stately cocoanut groves. The Arangi's two masts were of Oregon cedar, so scraped and hot-paraffined that they shone like tan opals in the glare of sun. Her excessive sail ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,—who on week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... the pestilential jungles of India, or beneath the scorching sun on Africa's burning sands, or amid the rigors of an Arctic winter, in the midst of danger, disease, and every trial or hardship that can crush the human heart; and through all presenting a character equal to the sternest trial, and an address ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... a formed disease. Yet, finding that my preventing physic did not work so kindly and take so good an effect as I earnestly desired, but rather that this my so tenderly beloved patient grew worse and worse, as not only being in process of time fallen into a fever and that pestilential, but also as having received divers dangerous wounds, which, rankling and festering inwardly, brought it into a spiritual atrophy and deep consumption, and the parts ill-affected (for want of Christian care and ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... anaesthetics, which partially or wholly removed suffering supposed to have been sent by Providence. The history of the use of chloroform furnishes striking illustrations of this. Many of my readers may remember the French monks who devoted themselves to cultivating one of the most pestilential spots in the Roman Campagna, which was associated with an ecclesiastical legend, and who quite unnecessarily insisted on remaining there during the season when such a residence meant little less than a slow suicide. They had, as they were accustomed to say, their purgatory upon ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... after by the same number who joined me.[143] Poor M. Brayer and M. Gourlade had been during almost the whole campaign in the most pitiable condition, especially the former, who I thought a thousand times must have died. As for me, the powders d'Aillot preserved me from the pestilential air, and cured me from the effects of a fall in my bajarow,[144] caused by the clumsiness of my boatmen. I narrowly escaped breaking ...
— Three Frenchmen in Bengal - The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 • S.C. Hill
... wandering, that which followed on the old Sparwehr. We were in quest of new lands of silk and spices. In truth, we found fevers, violent deaths, pestilential paradises where death and beauty kept charnel-house together. That old Johannes Maartens, with no hint of romance in that stolid face and grizzly square head of his, sought the islands of Solomon, the mines of Golconda—ay, he sought old ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... uncommon lot for the bold privateersman, who, when once consigned to it, found that the reward of a sea-rover was not always wealth and pleasure. A Massachusetts privateersman left on record a contemporary account of the sufferings of himself and his comrades in this pestilential hulk, which may well be condensed here to show some of the perils that the adventurers dared when ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... Mandar's mountain for their pole, And churned with all their heart and soul. As thus, a thousand seasons through, This way and that the snake they drew, Biting the rocks, each tortured head, A very deadly venom shed. Thence, bursting like a mighty flame, A pestilential poison came, Consuming, as it onward ran, The home of God, and fiend, and man. Then all the suppliant Gods in fear To Sankar,(203) mighty lord, drew near. To Rudra, King of Herds, dismayed, "Save us, O save us, Lord!" ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... said the Captain of the Watch: "Be careful what you say! If you saw the rat, why did you then not aid this unhappy citizen who was bitten by it—first, to avoid that rodent, and subsequently to slay it, thereby relieving the public of a pestilential danger?" ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The pestilential "pianiste," The screechy singer too, The writer of the stupid book And of the dull review, The actor who is greatest when He takes his exit cue;— Chacun son metier: Les vaches ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... me in the direction you had taken, the sentry bade me mount a horse at the door, and we rode rapidly down to the edge of the valley, to Kohlvihr's headquarters—a pestilential place sunken in the ground and covered with sods. There they broke it to me ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... cask of heavy upland rice, from the river Denbigh, in Africa, about lat. 9 deg. 30' North, which I sent to Charleston, in hopes it might supersede the culture of the wet rice, which renders South Carolina and Georgia so pestilential through the summer. It was divided, and a part sent to Georgia. I know not whether it has been attended to in South Carolina; but it has spread in the upper parts of Georgia, so as to have become almost general, and is highly prized. Perhaps it may answer in Tennessee ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... her face in her hands again, and, rocking herself to and fro in an agony of despair, gave herself vip to a paroxysm of utter misery. This was too, too terrible. To think of eighteen hours in that gloom and suspense; and then to die at last, gasping hard for breath, in the poisonous air of that pestilential tunnel. ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... a childish curiosity may be her pleasure, any incident to divert thoughts that make her sensible of her own bereavement. She stops to listen to the denunciations of the crazed prophet, and herself partakes, though callously, of his insanity—half believes, but scarcely feels. The sky is lurid, pestilential; it touches with plague what it illuminates. Such is the picture in its design. The colouring is quite in accordance with the purpose, and completes the sentiment; there is much of a green tone, yet under great variety. There is very great knowledge shown in it of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... your mighty intellect has not yet comprehended the philosophy of religion. Oratorically you soar like the condor when its shadow falls upon the highest peaks of the Andes, but logically you grope among the pestilential shadows of an intellectual Dismal Swamp, ever mistaking shadow for substance. You are frittering away your mighty intellectual strength with the idiosyncrasies of creeds and the clumsy detail of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... it adds to the comfort of all, it enlarges thought and strengthens sympathy. Our greater knowledge has enabled us to lengthen human life; to extinguish some of the most virulent diseases; to perform surgical operations without pain; to increase the fertility of the soil; to make pestilential regions habitable; to illumine our cities and homes at night with the brilliancy of day; to give to laborers better clothing and dwellings than princes in other ages have had. It has opened to our vision the limitless sidereal ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... come here. It would be just like her to follow up her new admirer. Mrs. Willoughby is so hot in her advocacy of what she terms the 'New South,' that she must speak of everything which seems to favor her pestilential ideas. By birth she belongs to the Old South and the only true South, and she tries to keep in with it, but she is getting the cold ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... are vague; they have barely heard of Cosenza or of Cotrone, and of Paola not at all; it would as soon occur to them to set out for Morocco as for Calabria. How shall I get along with people whose language is a barbarous dialect? Am I aware that the country is in great part pestilential?—la febbre! Has no one informed me that in autumn snows descend, and bury everything for months? It is useless to explain that I only intend to visit places easily accessible, that I shall travel mostly by railway, and that if disagreeable ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... down by me on the settee, and without farther ceremony or preamble, flings his arms about my neck, and drawing me pretty forcibly towards him, obliged me to receive, in spite of my struggles to disengage from him, his pestilential kisses, which quite overcame me. Finding me then next to senseless, and unresisting, he tears off my neck handkerchief, and laid all open there, to his eyes and hands: still I endured all without flinching, till emboldened by my sufferance and silence, for I had ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... swift in her creating, than time in his destruction; and so she has ordained that many animals shall be food for others. Nay, this not satisfying her desire, to the same end she frequently sends forth certain poisonous and pestilential vapours upon the vast increase and congregation of animals; and most of all upon men, who increase vastly because other animals do not feed upon them; and, the causes being removed, the effects would not follow. This earth ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... burning climate the putrefaction of dead bodies was a cause of pestilential diseases, the Egyptians, in many of their towns, had adopted the practice of burying their dead beyond the limits of the inhabited country, in the desert of the West. To go there, it was necessary to pass ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... summer pestilential fevers and agues crept out of the marshes and wasted us. In the winter the east winds wrung our bones and our hearts. And summer and winter alike, the Government contractors, or those employed by them, waxed fat on their ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... unconscious mesmeriser. The other day our poor Maohn was terrified by a communication from Ali Bey (Moudir of Keneh) to the effect that he had heard from Alexandria that someone had reported that the dead cattle had lain about the streets of Luxor and that the place was pestilential. The British mind at once suggested a counter-statement, to be signed by the most respectable inhabitants. So the Cadi drew it up, and came and read it to me, and took my deposition and witnessed my signature, and the Maohn went his way rejoicing, in that 'the ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... horrors. She made a holocaust of the literature she had once thought entertaining. Russians suspected of liberal tendencies were watched, and upon the slightest pretext sent to Siberia, and she urged the King of Sweden to head a crusade against this pestilential democracy, which she would help him to sweep out of Europe. It was Catherine, in consultation with the Emperor of Austria, who first talked of dismembering Turkey and creating out of its own territory a group of neutral states lying between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. And Voltaire's ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... made the prey of the spoiler; the most venerable ministers of the sacraments, men most eminent for their Catholic character, are harassed by unheard of annoyances. The religious orders are suppressed, impious books of every kind and pestilential publications are disseminated, wicked and pernicious societies are everywhere and under every form multiplied. The education of youth is, in almost all countries, withdrawn from the clergy, and, what is far worse, intrusted ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... its coiling hold upon the bough—and shaken, lacerated, and affrighted, the hideous reptile unwound itself from the ferocious animal, and fell powerless on the grass, where the vermin of the forest attacked it with their greedy maws ere its pestilential breath ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... and that they could not have exaggerated the statements is proved by the risks they voluntarily encountered to gain their freedom. The bullets of the marines on duty, the fear of the voracious shark in waters where they abounded, the dangers of a pestilential climate, or the certainty, if retaken, of being subjected to a more revolting and excruciating punishment than was every devised by the Spanish Inquisition FLOGGING THROUGH THE FLEET could not deter British seamen from attempting to flee from their ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... prosperity and for these gifts he was truly thankful, and though he feared he might prove tedious, still he would hope that Felix in his great clemency might allow him to say a few further words about a pestilential fellow, an agent of sedition among the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect known as the Nazarenes: one who came to Jerusalem but to profane the Temple, and wishing, he said, to judge him for his blasphemy ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... and he said it so determinedly. He described hell to them as a pestilential hole, where all the filthiness of the world flowed together. There was no air except the hot, sulphurous flames; there was no bottom; they sank and sank into everlasting silence! It was terrible, only to hear about it; ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... moreover, we had a child, we should clamor still more loudly, and should even set to work to clear away the nuisance with our own hands, in our solicitude for his health. But if the bodies of mother and child lay dead, they would no longer be conscious of the pestilential air. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... convince the most incredulous that a radical change must be made. Dr. Ackerly, writing in 1822, thus describes the condition of the burial-ground connected with Trinity Church, New York, forty years before: "During the Revolutionary War this ground emitted pestilential vapors, the recollection of which is not obliterated from the memory of a number of living witnesses." In the same year, the Commercial Advertiser published an article in reference to the present evils of earth-burial at the same place, in which it was said: "It will be remembered that the graveyard, ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... particularly devoted to the worship of the Sun; and they were generally situated near hot springs, or else upon foul and fetid lakes, and pools of bitumen. It is, also, not uncommon to find near them mines of salt and nitre; and caverns sending forth pestilential exhalations. The Elysian plain, near the Catacombs in Egypt, stood upon the foul Charonian canal; which was so noisome, that every fetid ditch and cavern was from it called Charonian. Asia Proper comprehended little more than Phrygia, and a part of Lydia; and was bounded ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... choked thoroughfares leading out of London gave the lie to these suppositions, and for many weeks the bridge was a sight in itself, crowded with carriages and waggons all filled with the richer folks and their goods, hastening to the pleasant regions of Surrey to forget their fears and escape the pestilential atmosphere of the city. ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... When a pestilential disease breaks out in the city, the plainness and urgency of the case compel all to see in the sickness of one the danger of all. Wants and discomforts, which charity had been too cold to attend to, now considered as ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... muddy, polluted, pestilential river, instead of allowing it to resolve itself into a million irrigating-ditches, has been the fight of the centuries. The trouble is that irrigation is not an end—it is just a beginning. Irrigation means constant and increasing effort, and priests ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... established by the wisdom of man? And what is that infidelity which founded empires by its prudence, defended them by its valor, and strengthened them by its justice—which built powerful cities, formed capacious ports, drained pestilential marshes, covered the ocean with ships, the earth with inhabitants; and, like the creative spirit, spread life and motion throughout the world? If such be infidelity, what then is the true faith? Doth sanctity consist ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... a small compass, as would scarcely be thought sufficient to accommodate twenty, if considered as free men. This confinement soon produces an effect, that may be easily imagined. It generates a pestilential air, which, co-operating with, bad provisions, occasions such a sickness and mortality among them, that not less than twenty thousand[056] are generally taken off in ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... cursed cough Which not unmerited on me my maw, A-seeking sumptuous banquetings, bestowed. For I requesting to be Sestius' guest 10 Read against claimant Antius a speech, Full-filled with poisonous pestilential trash. Hence a grave frigid rheum and frequent cough Shook me till fled I to thy bosom, where Repose and nettle-broth healed all my ills. 15 Wherefore recruited now best thanks I give To thee for nowise punishing ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... under the veneer of civilization. She sees clearly what she has to destroy. So do we. No American and Englishman can meet but that they grip hands and thank God together that they are comrades in this Holy War. They are out, like Knights of Fable, to rid the earth of a pestilential monster; and they will not rest until their foot is on his slain ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... sound of birds and scent of thyme and twinkling of dewdrops on the grass around. Meanwhile ague, fever, and death have been stalking all night long about the plain, within a few yards of their couch, and not one pestilential breath has reached the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... mighty promontory of Cap St. Jacques and headed for the open sea. The palm-fringed shore line of Cochin-China dropped away; the blue mountains of Annam turned pale and ghostly in the evening mists. A sun-scorched, pestilential land.... I was glad to leave it. But already I am longing to return. I want once more to sit at a cafe table beneath the awnings of the Rue Catinat, before me a tall glass with ice tinkling in it. I want to hear the pousse-pousse coolies padding softly by in the gathering twilight. ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... other hand, "the allies pledged themselves, should the negotiations not result in a final understanding, to vacate the territory occupied by them, and to return on the road to Vera Cruz to a point beyond the Chiquihuite, near Paso Ancho,"* i.e., in the pestilential coast region. ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... it must be confessed that when an error, however flagrant and pestilential, has ceased to shock and scandalize the general body of the commonwealth; when the people listen to the doctrine without indignation, and their worst sentence upon it pronounces it merely "queer," ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... town arose all around Ptolemais. In spite of this the winter brought innumerable hardships. In that small space more than a hundred thousand men were crowded together, with insufficient shelter, and uncertain supplies of wretched food; pestilential diseases soon broke out, which swept away thousands, and were intensified by the exhalations from the heaps of dead. Saladin retreated from their deadly vicinity to more airy quarters on the adjacent hills; his troops also suffered from the severe weather, but were far better supplied ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... and his voice shed with astounding completeness all its syllabled nicety. "You try to make yourself useful as well as pestilential. Get him a bit of adhesive for that cut. It looks as bad as though a ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... dragoon, through battle's flood, Dashed the hot war-horse on. These spots of excavation tell The ravage of the bursting shell - And feel'st thou not the tainted steam, That reeks against the sultry beam, From yonder trenched mound? The pestilential fumes declare That Carnage has replenished there ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... rooms, where the criminals were closely confined, for twenty-four hours, which, with the action of the damp, heated atmosphere of that climate, was of itself enough to breed contagion. We spoke of the want of ventilation and the noxious fumes that seemed almost pestilential, but they seemed to have become habituated to it, and told us that the rooms on the south side were lighter and more comfortable. Many of them spoke cheerfully, and endeavored to restrain their feelings, but the furrows upon their haggard ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... inconceivable with what increased zeal new candidates for African discovery come forward the moment that the death of any fresh victim to this pestilential country is announced. To the list of those who have already fallen, may be added young Park, the son of the late enterprising Mungo Park, and a midshipman of his majesty's ship Sybille. He went out in this ship with a full determination ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... suggest itself. Should some sceptical individual still entertain doubts whether in a world without Clothes, the smallest Politeness, Polity, or even Police, could exist, let him turn to the original Volume, and view there the boundless Serbonian Bog of Sansculottism, stretching sour and pestilential: over which we have lightly flown; where not only whole armies but whole nations might sink! If indeed the following argument, in its brief riveting emphasis, be not of itself incontrovertible ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Mere de Saint-Monique, who died in July, 1756, the victim of her devotion in ministering to the decimated crew of the ship "Leopard," sunk in the port by order of Government to arrest the spread of the pestilential disease which had raged on the passage. Mr. Faucher closes his able report with a suggestion that a monument ought to be raised, to commemorate the labours and devotion of the Jesuits, on the denuded area on which stood their ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... a pestilential vapour can hover over society, when its chief director is only instructed in the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies? Will men never be wise? will they never cease to expect corn from ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Latium was not healthy even in ancient times. The malaria of the Campagna renders Rome itself unhealthy in the summer and autumn; and the Pontine Marshes, which extend along the coast in the south of Latium for a distance of thirty miles, are still more pestilential. ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... those woes, with which the Divil troubles us. It is said of the Israelites, in 1 Cor. 10. 10. THEY WERE DESTROYED OF THE DESTROYER. That is, they had the Plague among them. 'Tis the Destroyer, or the Divil, that scatters Plagues about the World: Pestilential and Contagious Diseases, 'tis the Divel, who do's oftentimes Invade us with them. 'Tis no uneasy thing, for the Divel, to impregnate the Air about us, with such Malignant Salts, as meeting with the Salt of our Microcosm, shall immediately cast us into that Fermentation and Putrefaction, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... you short before coming to the red, for my unaided memory here suffices me: the red blood of my wounds flowing and clotting on the frozen mud of Argonne that terrible morning in December, 1914; the red mud of pestilential slaughter-houses; the shattered heads of dead comrades; mangled stumps irrigated with peroxide solution so that the living corruption was half hidden by bloodstained foam; red visions glimpsed everywhere in these ghastly and tragical days, you chase one another ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... "I was early astir, for time is very precious just at present, which is why I drop unannounced upon you from the skies, O'Moy." He took the glass that Mullins proffered on a salver, sipped from it, and set it down. "There is so much vexation, so much hindrance from these pestilential intriguers here in Lisbon, that I have thought it as well to come in person and speak plainly to the gentlemen of the Council of Regency." He was peeling off his stout riding-gloves as he spoke. "If this campaign is to go forward at all, ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... situation in the hospital. Despite the storm there had been but one death, and there was only one fresh case, while half a dozen boys crawled weakly away to the barracks. He wondered if it was the wind that was blowing the disease away and cleansing the pestilential land. ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... has never been heard of since. One report is, that he has been condemned to some mysterious penal seclusion by his ecclesiastical superiors—another, that he has volunteered, as a sort of Forlorn Hope, to accept a colonial curacy among rough people, and in a pestilential climate. I asked his brother, the sculptor, about him a little while ago, but he only shook ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... her; on the contrary, every eye glanced at her, as a being marked with enmity towards God. Blanched faces and knit brows, the signs of fear and hatred, were turned upon her; her breath was considered pestilential, and her touch paralysis. There she stood, proscribed, avoided, and hunted like a tigress, all fearing to encounter, yet wishing to exterminate her! Who could she be?—or what had she done, that the finger of the Almighty marked her out for such a ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... grasp the hand of a brother or friend lest the grip of the pestilence should clutch him. Such was the dismay that now followed in the track of the disease or ran before it throughout the town. Graves were hastily dug and the pestilential relics as hastily covered, because the dead were enemies of the living and strove to draw them headlong, as it were, into their own dismal pit. The public councils were suspended, as if mortal wisdom might relinquish its devices now that an unearthly usurper had found his way into the ruler's ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spider-webs, and the floor paved with mortar. On the eastern wall hangs a large sheet of paper with the inscription, 'Hence blows the breath of life', which not many visitors will believe, because, instead of a quickening breath, pestilential odors enter by the window and offend the nostrils of those whose olfactory nerve has not lost all sensitiveness.... On the opposite wall, to the west, appear the words, 'A memorial unto the destruction of the Temple'. ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... profound."—Bacon. Dign. and Adv. of Learn. book ii. What Lord Bacon desired for the mere gratification of scientific curiosity, the welfare of mankind now imperiously demands. Shallow systems of metaphysics have given birth to a brood of abominable and pestilential paradoxes, which nothing but a more profound philosophy can destroy. However we may, perhaps, lament the necessity of discussions which may shake the habitual reverence of some men for those rules which it is the chief interest ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between 10 and 4 without ease or interposition. Taedet me harum quotidianarum formarum, these pestilential clerk faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk! they are the same, save that at the latter you are outside the machine. The foul enchanter—letters four do form his name—Busirane is his name in hell—that has curtailed you ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... ornament from the rest, treated him with ceremony and marked deference. The children were brought to see and even to touch him. So great was their amazement that any one should have escaped from these pestilential vapours, that they attributed it to divine interposition, and looked upon him with some of the awe of superstition. He was asked to stay with them altogether, and to take command ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... own faults if they had been tickled off, and tossed about from post to pillar, since themselves had began the beating. So they lived I cannot exactly tell you how many days after this. But from that time to this it was held for a certain truth that Basche's money was more pestilential, mortal, and pernicious to the catchpoles and bums than were formerly the aurum Tholosanum and the Sejan horse to those that possessed them. Ever since this he lived quietly, and Basche's wedding grew ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... on their own business. The market-place was bordered to the east and west by an extensive swamp, covered with weeds and water and frequented by wild ducks, cranes, and vultures. The house which had been provided for him was close to a morass, the pestilential exhalations of which were increased by the sewers of the houses all opening ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... myself once more exposed to the pestilential air of an African river. I in vain tried to sleep. All night long I heard the sound of the carpenters at work fitting the slave decks, and fixing the bars across them, to which the captive negroes were ...
— The African Trader - The Adventures of Harry Bayford • W. H. G. Kingston
... heaps—administrating whisky to the workmen. I found him there one day, most Napoleonic, on a little Elba of dirt, in an atmosphere that defies print. He also, I remember, chose what he considered cheerful contrasts of colours for the painting of the woodwork. This exasperated my aunt extremely—she called him a "Pestilential old Splosher" with an unusual note of earnestness—and he also enraged her into novelties of abuse by giving each bedroom the name of some favourite hero—Cliff, Napoleon, Caesar, and so forth—and having it painted on the door in gilt letters on a black label. "Martin ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... it is due to an unnatural black bile, or to acute fevers, in which the humors are consumed. This variety bears the name of pustula. A fourth form is called lenticula. This latter form occurs sometimes with fever, like synocha, sometimes without fever, and it arises from pestilential air or corrupt food, or from sitting near a patient suffering from the disease, the ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... mo'o; a word that to the Hawaiian meant a nondescript reptile, which his imagination vaguely pictured, sometimes as a dragonlike monster belching fire like a chimera of mythology, or swimming the ocean like a sea-serpent, or multiplied into a manifold pestilential swarm infesting the wilderness, conceived of as gifted with superhuman powers and always as the malignant foe of mankind, Now the only Hawaiian representatives of the reptilian class were two species of harmless lizards, so that it is not conceivable that the Hawaiian notion of a mo'o was ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... by so pestilential a manufactory, by the construction of so infamous a brothel, by digging a night-cellar for such thieves, murderers, and house-breakers as never infested the world, I am so far from aggravating, that I have fallen infinitely ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... are reacted on again by them. The diminution of rainfall by the destruction of forests, its increase by replanting them, and the effect of both on the healthiness or unhealthiness of a place—as in the case of the Mauritius, where a once healthy island has become pestilential, seemingly from the clearing away of the vegetation on the banks of streams—all this, though to study it deeply requires a fair knowledge of meteorology, and even of a science or two more, is surely well worth the attention of any educated man who is put ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... epoch, how the construction was one error from the first, and every correction of an error bred a new defect, I should make you laugh, I should make you weep. We let them fall to ruin as quickly as they would, and their sites are still so pestilential, after the lapse of centuries, that travelers are publicly guarded against them. Ravening beasts and poisonous reptiles lurk in those abodes of the riches and the poverty that are no longer known to our life. A part of one of the ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... Richard—the King had made him a knight only last year—and how this place where they now were was his father's country house. "It lies," said the nurse, "among the pleasant fields and orchards of Deptford." And how he, Dickie, had been very sick of the pestilential fever, but was now, thanks to the blessing and to the ministrations of good Dr. Carey, on the ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... that could be seen was a fringe of thick, low trees, the edge of the forest that ran back from the river. Conspicuous among them was the ill-omened "fever tree," with its gaunt, bare, ungainly arms and yellow bark—the tree whose presence indicates a pestilential air. Here was no luxuriant variety of form, no wealth of colour, no festooned creepers nor brilliant flowers, but a dull and sad monotony, as we doubled point after point and saw reach after reach of the featureless ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... Macculloch; but, as observed by a contemporary, Why should he have observed any delicacy on this subject?—why not have, long since, denounced the whole of the ponds in St. James's, the Green, and Hyde Parks, Kensington Gardens, and the Regent's Park, as pestilential nuisances to all around them? Besides, he states that malaria is only generated in hot weather; so that the palace, being intended as a winter residence, the health of our gracious sovereign will, we hope, not be endangered by his residence. That there is much ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 278, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... it their broken and dying animals. The stench overpowered him, making him deathly sick, and as in a nightmare he scrambled out. Halfway up, he recollected Bondell's gripsack. It had fallen into the hole with him; the pack-strap had evidently broken, and he had forgotten it. Back he went into the pestilential charnel-pit, where he crawled around on hands and knees and groped for half an hour. Altogether he encountered and counted seventeen dead horses (and one horse still alive that he shot with his revolver) before he found Bondell's grip. ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... for them, and detain them in places that will allow permanent detention and segregation. And the results will be surprising, for prisons will be less numerous, workhouses, casual wards and asylums less necessary, lazar houses with their pestilential breath will pass away, and England will be ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... not content to remain idle, and in her native county of Norfolk began to interest herself in factory girls and other children of the poor. She was always cheerful, and few people knew how much she was suffering from the effects of years of hard work and privation in a pestilential country. She died on June 6, 1870, aged forty-three; and when the sad news reached Ibadan there was great sorrow in the town, and the Christian Church which she had helped to plant there forwarded to her husband a letter of consolation and thankfulness for the ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... for any man, let him be never so fearful or phlegmatic, to be an unconcerned spectator in this busy scene. The demon of play hovers in the air, like a pestilential vapour, tainting the minds of all present with infallible infection, which communicates from one person to another, like the circulation of a general panic. Peregrine was seized with this epidemic distemper to a violent degree; and, after having lost a ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... and distillers say, "It enhances the value of property and products of all kinds." The fools answer, with idiotic promptness and docility, "Yes, we must continue this ulcerous cancer upon the body politic—this unclean, pestilential, gangrenous sore, reeking with disease, vice, poverty, madness, to increase the price of grain." Yes, gentlemen, grain is more profitable deposited in the stomach of your son or your neighbor's son, in the form of whisky, mixed with sundry deadly drugs to give it "tone," than in pork, ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... his exquisite, delicate, tantalising, fastidious wife, his body ached for her, his soul fainted for even a touch of her little hand, so that once again he raised his right hand as though to sweep away some pestilential insect from his path, just one little careless gesture ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... very anxious to know how it was that their numbers did not increase, as they were exempt from all pestilential diseases, and live in such abundance, that a beggar by trade has never been known among them, and are ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker |
