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More "Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not utterly black, as he had expected. Light from the electric lamps without flickered through the stained-glass windows. Ghastly rays of yellow played over the painted faces on the walls and lit up the gilded features of the mummy by Mrs. Athelstone's desk. There were crimson spots, like blotches of blood, on the veil of Isis. And all about were moving ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... of Hadrian. He, in his earlier days, whilst yet only dreaming of the purple, had not found the Oracle superannuated or palsied. On the contrary, he found it but too clear- sighted; and it was no contempt in him, but too ghastly a fear and jealousy, which labored to seal up the grander ministrations of the Oracle for the future. What the Pythia had foreshown to himself, she might foreshow to others; and, when tempted by the same princely bribes, she might authorize and kindle the same aspiring views ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... there, half-way to the burn! It's like an English cottage! Those we saw as we came along were either like a piece of the earth, or so white as to look ghastly! This one looks neat and comfortable, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... Gray, as he stood on the balcony the following morning, and looked out over the white and ghastly picture of desolation, "I thought Labrador the most inappropriately named country upon the earth, but think of calling this picture of all ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... down and writhed under the wheels. She uttered a tragic cry, but little Silver cared for that. Rendered merciless with fear he sent the car right over her body, and then drove desperately down the hill to gain the hard road. Miss Greeby, with a broken back, lay on the ground and saw as in a ghastly dream her machine flash roaring along the highway driven by a man who could not manage it. Even in her pain a smile ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... she panted. "He will die if I touch him. Take away his hands." It was done, with set teeth, and the face of the football hero was bathed in sweat. He breathed through tense nostrils, and a sickly whiteness spread backward from his lips. Suddenly he loosed his burden. It fell, doubling in a ghastly heap, and he ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... own matter to allow him to care about outward things, and his words now showed what had occupied his thoughts. It was just after the mysterious knocking that he began the theme. "Since I have been away today, Eustacia, I have considered that something must be done to heal up this ghastly breach between my dear mother and ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... for, to her, Damocles confessed the ghastly, terrible, damning truth that he was a Coward. He said that he had hidden the fearful fact for all these years within his guilty bosom and that now it had emerged and convicted him. He lived in subconscious terror of the Snake, and in its presence—nay ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... change is absolutely necessary, try to imitate nature's own methods by using the glorious trees around you, instead of iron and tin shaped by man's hand; pause before you have murdered your natural loveliness by ghastly modernity, or you ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... was on his face, Soon hatred settled in its place: It rose not with the reddening flush Of transient anger's hasty blush, But pale as marble o'er the tomb, Whose ghastly whiteness ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... Arabs, and so shallow were these that from each of them there oozed a dark, dreadful stain. To add to the horrors of the scene, portions of mangled and putrefying corpses protruded from many of them—ghastly skulls, from the sockets of which the eyes had been picked by vultures and other obscene birds. Limbs of brave men upon which the hyena had already begun his dreadful work, and half-skeleton hands, with fingers spread and bent as if still ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... an Instance as eminent in History as the other; this was in Char. VI. of France, sirnamed, The Beloved; who riding over the Forest near Mans, a ghastly frightful Fellow (that is to say, the Devil so clothed in human Vizor) came up to his Horse, and taking hold of his Bridle, stop'd him, with the Addition of these Words, Stop King, whither go you? You are betray'd! and immediately disappear'd. ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... was extinct. He was drawn gently from the stream and laid on the shingle just as the foot men arrived with torches. It was a sad spectacle, this fine old man we all loved and respected so much, only a few hours before full of life and health, now a ghastly corpse, his hair and long white beard lying dank over his cold white face and glaring eyes. The scene was rendered all the more weird and awful by the surroundings, the still dark night, the rushing water, and overhanging cliffs under the red glare of the torches. His body was laid ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... the incident that in its ghastly, horrible absurdity made the rest of the people shout with laughter the next day. It was not funny then. For suddenly the eiderdown comfort began to slip. I heard no footstep, not the slightest sound approaching me, but ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... valley opens, that the villages get scantier, and that at last a great giant iceberg walls up the way in front, and we feast our eyes on the long-desired sight till after that the setting sun has tinged it purple (a sure sign of a fine day), its ghastly pallor shows us that the night is upon us. It is cold, and we are not sorry at half-past nine to find ourselves at Bourg d'Oisans, where there is a very fair inn kept by one Martin; we get a comfortable supper of eggs and go to ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... bird-beaked merchants of ready-made and second-hand clothing. The contents of the dingy shops seem to have revolted, and rushed pell-mell out of doors, and taken possession of the sidewalk. One could fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this point, and that those ghastly rows of complete suits strung up on either side of the doorways were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders. But as you approach these limp figures, each dangling and gyrating on its cord in a most suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the lapel ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... real crown of thorns was upon his head, which was bowed downward, as if in the death agony; and drops of blood were falling down his cheeks, and from his hands and feet and side. The face was haggard and ghastly beyond all expression; and wore a look of unutterable bodily anguish. The rude sculptor had given it this, but his art could go no farther. The sublimity of death in a dying Saviour, the expiring God-likeness of ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the nursery when the children were in bed, to talk to Jane Nettles, and look out of the window. Those gossips in the nursery were a great source of disturbance to Beth when she ought to have been composing herself to sleep. She recollected nothing of the conversations more corrupting than that ghastly account of how the girl was exhumed, so it is likely that the servants exercised some discretion when they dropped their voices to a whisper, as they often did; but these whispered colloquies made her restless and cross, and brought down upon her a smart ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a horrible stare, as if fixed by the magic power of some ghastly sight, while large drops of perspiration oozed from every pore, and stood in cold beads upon his brow! In fixed horror he thus remained for some moments, then fell back and covered his eyes with his hands, as if to shut out ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... was sufficiently ghastly, standing in the dark with her apron thrown over her head, and speaking behind it in a low, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... laid out, its wounded forehead covered with a bandage, and Eliza's rosary and crucifix on its breast; but it did not, as Marian had hoped, suggest peace or sleep. It was not Susanna, but a vacant thing that had always underlain her, and which, apart from her, was ghastly. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... led the pursuit in turn. The Spaniards fought with desperate courage, still suffering ghastly losses. But, do what they could to bear up against the English and the wind, they were forced to leeward of Dunkirk, and so out of touch with Parma. This was the result of the Battle of Gravelines, fought on Monday the 29th of July, 1588, just ten days ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... of Autolycus cured Ulysses, who had been injured while hunting the wild boar, by stanching the blood flowing from a wound in his leg, by means of a verbal charm. "With nicest care the skilful artists bound the brave, divine Ulysses' ghastly wound; and th' incantations stanch'd the gushing blood."[108:1] We have also the testimony of the Grecian lexicographer, Suidas, that various maladies were cured by the repetition of certain words, in the time of Minos, King ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... must look through her papers, get her clothes together, sort out the clutter of phials, bandages and innumerable things that sickness collects—jostle death about, in short. It was a ghastly thing to enter that attic, where the crumbs of bread from her last meal were still lying in the folds of the bedclothes. I threw the coverlid up over the bolster, like a sheet over the ghost of ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... clammy Louisbourg. When April brought the Gibraltar regiments from Virginia, Pepperrell sent in to Shirley his general report on the three thousand men with whom he had begun the autumn. Barely one thousand were fit for duty. Eleven hundred lay sick and suffering in the ghastly hospital. Eight hundred and ninety lay buried out on the dreary tongue of land between the lime-pit ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... bravely made its way with its crew, whose faces were so hollow and ghastly that they looked like a crew of spectres, sailing beneath the scorching sun that beat down from the pale blue of the cloudless sky upon a sea hardly less blue in its greater depths. Only the hope that they would soon reach Timor seemed to rouse them ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Old Bailey. The chief trade done by the coffee house was in the early morning. After market hours there were few customers save when there was to be an execution at Tyburn the next morning, and those eager to secure a good sight of the ghastly procession and perhaps take part in it, assembled opposite the prison door over night. Mrs. Fenton in the evenings thought no more of business, but betook herself to the theatre or one of the pleasure gardens in the outskirts ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... you know the sort of chap the average Kayite is. They'd keep me busy even if I were allowed a free hand. But I'm not. Whenever I try and keep order and stop things a bit, out springs the man Kay from nowhere, and takes the job out of my hands, makes a ghastly mess of everything, and retires purring. Once in every three times, or thereabouts, he slangs me in front of the kids for not keeping order. I'm glad this is the end of the term. I couldn't stand it much longer. Hullo, here come the chaps from ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... wherein sounded the clash of Bellona's armor, and the harsh stir of palm-boughs rustled by a hot wind of the desert, and vibrant with the dying clangor of gongs, and shouts of worshipping crowds reverberating through horrid temples of grinning and ghastly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... wait for an answer, but went on: "Mr. Warlock's all right, of course. I think he's such a fine-looking man, don't you? Of course he's old now, but his beard's rather attractive I think. He's a duck, but isn't that harmonium ghastly? I can't think why they don't buy an organ, they're most awfully rich I know, and do simply ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... her finery leering and mincing at Death, and playing off her youthful tricks upon him as if he had been the Major; but an alteration in her mind that ensued on the paralytic stroke was fraught with as much matter for reflection, and was quite as ghastly. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... in their grotesque attitudes and movements— reminded him of the painted clown whom he had seen last summer in the circus, and he laughed as he watched them. But on and ever on they crept, these maimed and bleeding men, as heedless as he of the dramatic contrast between his laughter and their own ghastly gravity. To him it was a merry spectacle. He had seen his father's negroes creep upon their hands and knees for his amusement—had ridden them so, "making believe" they were his horses. He now approached one of these crawling figures from behind and with an ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... That quivering response to the subtle nuances of thought! A profound change had come upon him, yet essentially he, the man, was unchanged. Except for those scars, the convoluted ridges of tissue, the livid patches and the ghastly hollows where once his cheeks and lips and forehead had been smooth and regular, he was as ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... detective caused a great sensation in the town next day, and it was not until many months after that we learned of the fate of the unfortunate man, not death, but mutilation worse than death—a ghastly wound below the heart ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... spouse he stood, There in the horrid shade he saw A giant passing nature's law: Vast as some mountain-peak in size, With mighty voice and sunken eyes, Huge, hideous, tall, with monstrous face, Most ghastly of his giant race. A tiger's hide the Rakshas wore Still reeking with the fat and gore: Huge-faced, like Him who rules the dead, All living things he struck with dread. Three lions, tigers four, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... afterwards, that his only object was, to detain me until the dreadful scene, about to take place in the prison, was over. For when I left him to go to my room, one of the servants came running, and with a ghastly countenance informed me, that all the white prisoners were carried away. I would not believe the report, but instantly went back to the governor, who said he had just heard of it, but did not wish to tell me. I hastily ran into the street, hoping to get a glimpse of them before ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... must feed our sea for a thousand years, For that is our doom and pride, As it was when they sailed with the Golden Hind Or the wreck that struck last tide— Or the wreck that lies on the spouting reef Where the ghastly blue-lights flare. If blood be the price of admiralty, If blood be the price of admiralty, If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... the headlong cavalier, O'er rough and smooth, in wild career, Seems racing with the wind; His sad companion,—ghastly pale, And darksome as a widow's veil, CARE—keeps ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... on the spot and ready to undertake any case on simple application. No! David went to the battle and stayed to fight, and won! Wise beyond his years, he had no use for Saul's armour. It cramped his freedom of action. He tried it on and took it off, quick sharp. And, besides, it made such a ghastly rattle, even when he walked, that he could not hear the still small voice of God, and would never have heard Him saying afterwards, "This is the way to the brook, David! and there are the five smooth stones! Trust only in ...
— The Chocolate Soldier - Heroism—The Lost Chord of Christianity • C. T. Studd
... remembered, too well, when those finely moulded features—now, so worn by sorrow, so marked by sickness, so ghastly in the hue of death—were rounded with young-woman health and tinted with rare loveliness. He recalled that day when he saw her a bride. He remembered the sweet, proud dignity of her young wifehood. He saw her, again, when her face shone ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... The Dryasdust Philosophisms and enlightened Scepticisms of the Eighteenth Century, historical and other, will have to survive for a while with the Physiologists, as a memorable Nightmare-Dream. All this haggard epoch, with its ghastly Doctrines, and death's-head Philosophies 'teaching by example' or otherwise, will one day have become, what to our Moslem friends their godless ages are, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... The full horror of what had happened to Dr. Marks was just having its effect. He found himself shivering as though with a severe chill. Marks was the victim of something ghastly. He seemed to be trying to make sense, as though there was still a glimmer of intelligence behind the blank stare. But his words were ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... put a teaspoonful of sugar on top and a few maraschino cherries. When ready to serve turn over each a scant teaspoonful of brandy and light just as the table is reached. The brandy will burn with a ghastly flame and melt the sugar and marshmallows. Whipped cream served in a bowl is ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various
... threw the light of the lantern upon his face, he had nearly let it fall from fright at what it revealed. Poor Matamore was dead, stiff and stark, with wide-open, sunken eyes staring out vaguely into the darkness, and his ghastly face wearing that pinched, indescribable expression which the mortal puts on when the spirit that dwelt within has fled. The three who had found him thus were inexpressibly shocked, and stood for a moment speechless and motionless, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... destruction come upon them unawares; let them go down a dark and slippery way to death; make them to be as blind and deaf adders that see not the foot of the destroyer! Yea, shake thy hand upon these Malignants and make them a spoil to their servants!" He turned his ghastly face and burning eyes upon Landless. "Curse them with me!" ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... what supply was there. A little water was visible, which I quickly baled into the canvas bags we had brought for the purpose. The bottom of the hole was filled in with dead sticks, leaves, the rotting bodies of birds and lizards, bones of rats and dingoes. Into this ghastly mass of filth I sunk up to my middle, and never shall I forget the awful odour that arose as my feet stirred up the mess. Nevertheless water was there, and thankful I was to find it, even to drink it as it was. After half an hour's work in this stinking pit, sick from ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... northeast of Schofield, and as he bent to his work he did not see a strange, level mass of gray that advanced slowly toward him. From a distance to the lay observer this mass would have looked like an ordinary cloud-bank, but the experienced eyes of a fisherman would have discerned its ghastly gray hue and ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... without seeing Chonita again. Valencia was in wildest delirium for a week; at the end of the second every hair on her head, her brows, and her eyelashes had fallen. She looked like a white mummy, a ghastly pitiful caricature of the beautiful woman whose arrows quivered in so many hearts. They rolled her in a blanket and took her home; and then I sought Chonita, who had barely left her room and never gone to Valencia's. I told her ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... It is an impulse with all murderers to conceal the traces of their guilt. They dig holes in the earth and bury it, they carry it into the wilderness and hide it, they sink it in the depths of the sea. But the earth will not contain it, the wilderness betrays the ghastly secret, the waves ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... not the murderer!' At the break of day he hastened, in strange agitation, to the cave; but it was empty, the stranger was gone. At night, as he strove in vain to sleep, the vision appeared once more, ghastly pale, but less stern of aspect than before. 'Farewell, Inverawe!' it said; 'farewell, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... all, in paper, protected by a tight case of the same, from which, with the help of a ribbon, you drew out the precious little green volume, with its gilt edges and lovely engravings—one of which in particular I remember—a castle in the distance, a wood, a ghastly man at the head of a rearing horse, and a white, mist-like, fleeting ghost, the cause of the consternation. These books had a large share in the witchery ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... died away in low gaspings and moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch, and permitted the door to be opened. Twenty-three ghastly figures staggered out of the charnel-house, one hundred and twenty-three bodies were hastily thrown into a pit and covered up, and the Black Hole of Calcutta has gone into history as a synonym for all that is dreadful and all that ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... how many professed pilgrims hast thou befooled and turned back! How often does she attack and affright many real pilgrims! I am sure she has often made my poor heart ache with her ghastly looks and terrifying speeches. O may we ever say to her, in our Lord's words, 'Get thee behind me, Satan; thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... small comfort as was possible on the cramped seats. Hope glanced toward the heretofore noisy group at the rear—the girl nearest her rested with unconscious head pillowed upon the shoulder of her man friend, and both were sleeping. How haggard and ghastly the woman's powdered face looked, with the light just above it, and all semblance of joy gone. It was as though a mask had been taken off. Out in the darkness the engine whistled sharply and then came to a bumping stop at some desert station. Through the black window ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... wide, the church is bare, Oh, horror, ghastly, sore! A gulf of death, with hideous stare, Yawns in the ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... from the western end of Alexandria. The place was still marked with all the horrors of last week's battle. Then, as usual, disease and famine followed upon war. Not a house was without a funeral. Death was everywhere to be seen in its most ghastly form. Bodies were left un-buried in the streets to be eaten by the dogs. Men ran away from their sickening friends in fear. As the sun set they felt in doubt whether they should be alive to see it rise in the morning. Cowards hid their alarms in noisy ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... sombrero, which had been pulled far forward, and this revealed her face fully, and her hair came tumbling down. The rider gazed, stupefied. Then a faint tinge of red colored his ghastly cheeks. ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... at him. Only those who have known Paris and loved her beauty can understand the thrill that came to us on that morning in September when we had expected to hear the roar of great guns around her, and to see the beginning of a ghastly destruction. Paris was still safe! By some kind of miracle the enemy had not yet touched her beauty nor tramped into her streets. How sharp and clear were all the buildings under that cloudless sky! Spears of light flashed from the brazen-winged horses above Alexander's ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... wailing chant—a hopeless prayer for mercy and deliverance. A guttering candle shed a ghastly light over ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... proclivities, of his pride, of his scientific vanity, of his human affections, of his lusts, of his innocent enjoyments. He tore himself clear of everything; so as to envisage the universe in its unmitigated horror, so as to look the emptiness of space straight between its ghastly lidless eyes. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... could "get properly going" with the brumbies, two travellers rode into the homestead, supporting between them a third rider, a man picked up off the track delirious with fever, and foodless; and at the sight of his ghastly face our hearts stood still with fear. But the man was one of the Scots another Mac of the race that loves a good fight, and his plucky heart stood by him so well that within twenty-four hours he was Iying contentedly in the shade of the Quarters, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... voice was heard singing that holy hymn, the flower-garlands about the boat broke into ghastly flames, and wreathed it with a dreadful burning; and the radiant figures were changed into dark shapes crowned with fire; and the song of longing and love became a wailing and gnashing of teeth. The island vanished away in rolling smoke; ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... trying criminals were as cruel as their punishments. On the Continent the presumption was held to be against the accused, and the rack and its ghastly retinue of instruments of pain were freely used to procure confession. Calvin's hard saying that when men felt the pain they spoke the truth merely {482} expressed the current delusion, for legislators ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... lies in the hands of the man who'd sell His hold on his life for an ice-bound hell. What care we for the fevered brain That's filled with ravings and thoughts insane, So long as we hold In our hands the gold?— The glistening, glittering, ghastly gold That comes at the end of the hunger and cold; That comes at the end of the awful thirst; That comes through the pain and torture accurst Of limbs that are racked and minds o'erthrown, The gold lies there and ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... turn. Turn straight to me. I want to persuade you to trust me," Goodwood repeated. And then he paused with his shining eyes. "Why should you go back—why should you go through that ghastly form?" ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... writing from Paris to Williamson (?) (June 19/29 1669), gave a terrible account of Marsilly's death. (For the letter, see Note V.) With a broken piece of glass (as we learn from another source), Marsilly, in prison, wounded himself in a ghastly manner, probably hoping to die by loss of blood. They seared him with a red-hot iron, and hurried on his execution. He was broken on the wheel, and was two hours in dying (June 22). Contrary to usage, a Protestant preacher was brought ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... most unpleasant physiognomy he had ever observed, but, at any rate, he glanced down the area and was a good deal astonished to see a man lying on the stones, his limbs all huddled together, and his face turned up. Our gentleman thought his face looked peculiarly ghastly, and so set off at a run in search of the nearest policeman. The constable was at first inclined to treat the matter lightly, suspecting common drunkenness; however, he came, and after looking at the man's face, changed his tone, quickly enough. The early bird, who had picked up this ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... bridegroom, and many and many more of them, with gaping wounds and deathly faces—all but the young King of the Isle of Wight and his shroud, his shroud, Cousin Lily, it was up to his breast; and the ladies' faces that were so blithe, they were all weeping, ghastly, and writhen; and they were whirling round a great sea of blood right in the middle of the hall, and I could—I could bear it ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that this ghastly phase of the business was true, but, inasmuch as there was no certainty of it, he was too considerate to bring additional grief to the heart of ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... soon be a scarcity of native labour. These were the circumstances in which the idea of importing black African labour to the New World was first conceived—a plan which was destined to have results so tremendous that we have probably not yet seen their full and ghastly development. There were a great number of African negro slaves at that time in Spain; a whole generation of them had been born in slavery in Spain itself; and this generation was bodily imported to Espanola to relieve and assist the ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... overhanging window in the choir. The Lady Chapel was a fringe-maker's shop. The smithy in the north transept had descended from father to son. The south transept, walled up to make a respectable dwelling, showed through its open door the ghastly marble tomb of a crusader which the thrifty London housewife had turned into a parlor table. His crossed feet and hands and upward staring countenance protruded ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... and panting, he desisted. I then tried the door myself, equally in vain. As I ceased from the effort, again that creep of horror came over me; but this time it was more cold and stubborn. I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... she passed on, setting the clock upon the stump and immediately drawing back to a suitable distance at the right, where she stood, wrapped in her long dark cloak. Her face shone ghastly white, even in its environment of snow-covered boughs, and noting this, Violet wished the minutes fewer between the present moment and the hour of five, at which time he was to ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... have been his countenance as he sat writing such words of himself under the ghastly light of his own small, solitary lamp? Had he written his letter at his office, in the day-time, with men coming in and out of his room, he could hardly have written of himself so plainly. He would have bethought ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... strained over the bones; the lips are shortened, the gums shrink from the teeth and lead to caries, and the nostrils are compressed. The strained skin and the emotionless features (relieved only by telangiectatic striae) give the countenance a ghastly, corpse-like aspect. The etiology and pathology of this disease are quite obscure. Happily the prognosis is good, as there is a tendency to spontaneous recovery, although the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... children and the adults were hardly clothed with a rag of that bark stuff, produced by certain trees, and called "mbouzon" in the country. Thus the state of this troop of human beings, women covered with wounds from the "havildars'" whips, children ghastly and meager, with bleeding feet, whom their mothers tried to carry in addition to their burdens, young men closely riveted to the fork, more torturing than the convict's chain, is the most lamentable ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... always wore on their regal brows, the effect was dazzling as it was refined. It was this peculiarity and their strong family resemblance which led their brother-in-law, the good-humored St. Addlegourd, to say that, "'Pon my soul, you know, the whole precious mob looked like a ghastly pack of court cards, you know." St. Addlegourd was a radical. Having a rent-roll of 15,000,000 pounds, and belonging to one of the oldest families in Britain, he could afford ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... brought to the fishermen served to bring men, women and children to the spot where John Trafton lay, ghastly with blood. ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... between the two men from Scotland Yard. Kerry stood awhile, chewing and staring at the ghastly ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... powder hour after hour and day after day and week after week at a foe who never sees you and whom you never see; to go at this dreary, heavy trade of war with the sober, uninspired earnestness of convicts building a prison wall about themselves—the ghastly unreality of the ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... provoked to fiendish outbursts of wrath. No wonder men of downright sense, like Dr Johnson, admit that under such circumstances children will not learn anything unless they are so cruelly beaten that they make desperate efforts to memorize words and phrases to escape flagellation. It is a ghastly business, quite beyond words, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... by his friends, and subjected, night after night, to the same ghastly annoyance, the young man found his health beginning to suffer, and decided ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... dark, and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There was not a line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines. Each stood apart in its own lot. Each opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it were a billiard- ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wake, then rise, then hurl away thy yoke, Then dye with crimson that pale livery, Whose ghastly white has been the jailer's cloak For years flung o'er thy shame ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... went. My life is all reminiscence and anticipation—if you can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak of ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... up to this he had not clearly seen the villainy of Rochester. The woman showed it. Rochester had picked up a stranger, because of the mutual likeness, and sent him home to play his part, hoping, no doubt, to have a ghastly hit at his family. What about his wife? He had either never thought of her, or he had ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... dark sky. The clouds Had heap'd themselves over the bare west in crowds Of misshapen, incongruous potents. A green Streak of dreary, cold, luminous ether, between The base of their black barricades, and the ridge Of the grim world, gleam'd ghastly, as under some bridge, Cyclop-sized, in a city of ruins o'erthrown By sieges forgotten, some river, unknown And unnamed, widens on into desolate lands. While he gazed, that cloud-city invisible hands Dismantled and rent; and ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... of that unseen eye, glaring in upon the felons, drives some of them half mad. The thought that poor Hagar found to be her only comfort in the wilderness—and so christened the well after it—'Thou God seest me,' must be the source of our purest joy; or it must be a ghastly dread. When He comes at last, some men will lift up their faces to the sunshine and have their faces irradiated by the light; and some will call on the rocks and the hills to cover them from His face, and prefer rather to be crushed than to be blasted by the brightness of His countenance. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... blot of ink he sits across the way, Upon the smiling terrace of the Cafe de la Paix; That little wizened Spanish man, his face is ghastly white, His eyes are staring, staring like a tiger's in the night. I know within his evil heart the fires of hate are fanned, I know his automatic's ready waiting to his hand. I know a tragedy is near. I dread, I ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... be shovelled on board from a collier by manual labour, whereas, in an oil-driven destroyer, one simply went alongside a jetty or an "oiler," connected up a hose, and went to bed while a pump did all the work. But Langdon never could endure "the ghastly stink" of crude petroleum, while coal, though dirty, was clean dirt. The Rapier might have old-fashioned engines, but with them one ran no chance of developing that affliction of turbine craft: water in the casing, the consequent stripping ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... were then lying in a shed near the spot. Hastening thither, they found five lying side by side. Among them were those of poor Ben Trench and the captain of the ship—the one strong, stalwart and still ruddy in the face, the other attenuated and ghastly, as might have been expected of one who had, as it were, died ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... exordium with extreme care, and I have sought diligently in the works of all the great modern orators, and of some of the ancient as well, for similar passages of higher merit. My quest has been in vain. Mr. Webster's description of the White murder, and of the ghastly haunting sense of guilt which pursued the assassin, has never been surpassed in dramatic force by any speaker, whether in debate or before a jury. Perhaps the most celebrated descriptive passage in the literature of modern eloquence is the picture drawn ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... sword, when "there flew a white cock toward the king, and cried: 'Pharaoh, if thou spill the blood of this child, thy daughters shall be more leprous than before.' Pharaoh cast a glance upon the princesses; and, as if from dread and fright, their faces were already suffused with a ghastly yellow, he desisted again from his bloody ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... resumed his rapid walk down the graveled footpath. Reaching the entrance to the grounds he paused, leaning for a moment against a stone pillar of the gateway; his hands were clenched until the nails left deep indentations in the flesh; his face was ghastly and covered with great drops of perspiration, and, whether the look that shone from his glittering dark eyes betokened rage, or despair, or both, an ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... There was a ghastly stricken silence round her. The order she had brought had just been glanced at, but no other thought was with the most callous there than the heroism of her act, than ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... he said, peering at her uncertainly. "You're here—in the flesh? You've been having just a ghastly sort of game with me all these years, have you? Hang it, I didn't deserve quite that! And so the little newspaper chap spoke the truth, ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... succession of passions flying over his face,—rage, disdain, suspicion,—the Landgrave looked round upon The Masque as he uttered these words, and, with pallid, ghastly consternation, beheld him raise to his lips a hunting-horn which depended from his neck. He blew a blast, which was immediately answered from within. Silence as of the grave ensued. All eyes were turned in the direction ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... house all grey, and doors and windows white, I went down to the summer-house and did that the same. But it turned out horrible to look at; the yellow underneath showed through and made it a ghastly colour. The flagstaff I took down and painted a clean white. Then I put in a spell of field-work with Nils and was haymaking for some days. ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... could not believe the dreadful news, and took it for one of those ghastly rumours which circulate with such rapidity during periods of civil strife; but we were not left long in uncertainty, for the details of the catastrophe arrived all ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... conquered, it was by sheer force. George glanced at the skeleton, and he was afraid. Something was very wrong with architecture. He agreed with Mr. Enwright's tiresomely reiterated axiom that it was the Cinderella of professions and the chosen field of ghastly injustice. He had embraced architecture; he had determined to follow exactly in the footsteps of Mr. Enwright; he had sworn to succeed. But could he succeed? Suppose he failed! Yes, his faith faltered. He was intensely, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... as fast as her agitated state would let her, and in another ten minutes two policemen were seen also coming out of Mrs Jupp's, between whom there shambled rather than walked our unhappy friend Ernest, with staring eyes, ghastly pale, and with despair branded upon ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... Darvil on the grass—still living, but a horrible and ghastly spectacle. One ball had pierced his breast, another had shot away his jaw. His eyes rolled fearfully, and he tore up the grass ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Suppose she had been a good daughter, to begin with; suppose she had even been an obedient daughter, and had kept her own counsel, as mamma had commanded and implored. Ah, how different would have been this ghastly summer!... ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... for which they pay me and laugh at me while I lecture. "Linley, the mad microscopist," is the name I go by. I suppose that I talk incoherently while I lecture. Who could talk sense when his brain is haunted by such ghastly memories, while ever and anon among the shapes of death I behold the radiant form of my ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... grow mutinous day by day; My men grow ghastly wan and weak." The stout mate thought of home; a spray Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek. "What shall I say, brave Admiral, say, If we sight naught but seas at dawn?" "Why you shall say at break of day, 'Sail on! sail on! sail on! ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... of Lords. There was a debate of some public interest, and a considerable crowd was collected round the Peers' entrance. The moment Lord Cadurcis was recognised, the multitude began hooting. He was agitated, and grinned a ghastly smile at the rabble. But he dismounted, without further annoyance, and took his seat. Not a single peer of his own party spoke to him. The leader of the Opposition, indeed, bowed to him, and, in the course of the evening, he received, from ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... boots of the Labour Members creak And a terrible ghastly pallor is On the Wee Free face as it tries to speak; But ah! what a change to each sunken cheek If you put a bit more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... great shouting, and in the semi-darkness a noisy battle raged. After some minutes the Lirongs drew off and rushed back to their boats as wildly as they had come; and, strange to say, no blood was flowing, no heads were rolling on the ground, no ghastly wounds were gaping, in fact no one seemed any the worse. For it seems that this attack was merely a well understood formality, a put-up job, so to say. When two tribes, between whom there is a blood-feud not formally settled, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... her, and the same feeling of bewilderment. The suddenness and the nature of the disclosures were dream-like and unreal, and the image of Dorcas remained impressed upon her sight; not like Dorcas, though the same, but something ghastly, wan, glittering, and terrible, like a ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... me altogether. The Rat fed me on cabbage soup and glasses of tea and caviare and biscuits. During those three days he never left me, and indeed tended me like a woman. He would sit by my bed and with his rough hand stroke my hair, while he poured into my ears ghastly stories of the many crimes that he had committed. I noticed that he was cleaner and more civilised. His beard was clipped and he smelt of cabbage and straw—a rather healthy smell. One morning he suddenly took the pail, filled it with water and washed himself ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... for there's nothing more ghastly in the world than poverty in London. It's scared me. By Jove, it put the fear into me! And one oughtn't to be ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... ghost!" cackled the old man. "Ha! Ha! you must have your joke! But don't let me have such a ghastly one again. I don't like"—in a lower tone—"jests about the spirits ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... here. There were evidences of him—evidences of a child rather than a man. Boyish forethought stared her in the face and staggered her by its ghastly incongruities with the things this premeditating youth had done. Here were provisions, not such as a man would have selected to stand a siege, but the taste of a schoolboy. She looked at the supplies spread here—tins ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... boat lay the body of a man. In the man's side was a great gaping wound, and his clothing and the boat were spattered and smeared with blood. The man was dead. In the fixed, cold stare of his wide-open eyes was a look of hopeless appeal, and the ghastly terror of one who ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... as ghastly in sunlight as they had done in the pale light of the moon. I could see too that this path was ancient, and nowhere could I find traces of its being used. As I had seen the night before, it led straight across the desert, ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... the earnest intention of carrying them into effect, seldom fail to restore a measure of peace to the troubled mind. It is only when a regular and ghastly see-saw of wrong-doing and repentance has been established, and when the mind can no longer deceive even itself as to the possibility of permanent uprightness of life, that good resolves cease to tranquillise. Such a see-saw must gradually lose its regularity; ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... eleventh day, "the biscuit is all gone." His face was ghastly. His eyes were hollow. His lips ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... tell you," was the meditative reply. "It's your extraordinary insouciance. It seems to me, as a budding diplomat, that you are running the most ghastly risks on earth." ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... having gone completely out of fashion in France. The papa of the farce (who was also the Jack Tar of the drama) reappears in the pantomime as Pierrot, the white-faced clown; and tremendously funny is he. There is a weird, elastic harlequin in a ghastly mask which he never lifts; and an amazing notary in an astounding nose, who proves to be Monsieur Goosequill. There is a humpback of hideous deformity and a Columbine of seraphic loveliness; and all Monsieur Goosequill's troubles come out of the fact that he endeavors to marry the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... a third degree fatality about the usually debonair Penny that exacted obedience. George unwillingly looked him in the eye, and had a ghastly feeling of having his suddenly realized ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... to you the heinousness of this crime: you have but to consult your own breasts. Who ever saw the ghastly corpse of the victim weltering in its blood, and did not feel his own blood run cold through his veins? Has the murderer fled? With what eagerness do we pursue! with what zeal apprehend! with what joy do we bring him to justice! Even the dreadful sentence of death ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... waste of life. The decks were loaded with corpses, Christian and Moslem lying promiscuously together in the embrace of death. Instances are given where every man on board was slain or wounded. It was a ghastly spectacle, where blood flowed in rivulets down the sides of the vessels, staining the waters of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... themselves." A board, it is insisted, rose out of the floor of its own accord and flung itself violently at a servant. Strange lights, "like corpse candles," floated about. The Squire's personal attendant John, "a stout fellow and of sober conversation," was one night confronted by a ghastly apparition in the form of "a great body with two red and glaring eyes." Frequently, too, when John was in bed he was treated as were the children, his coverings removed, his body struck, etc. But it was ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... and he struggled for self-command. He raised the pen, and succeeded in getting its point on the proper place. Then his dim eye lighted, and shot a reproachful glance at Tom; he smiled in a ghastly manner, looked towards the paper, passed a hand across his brow, closed his eyes, and fell back on the pillow, utterly unconscious of all that belonged to life, its interests, its duties, or its feelings. In ten ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... enfeebled because unheeded, will then be restored to its early sensitiveness and power, as if the labourer's horny palm were to be endowed again with the softness of the infant's little hand. If you will take and think about that, brother, there is enough—without any more talk, without any more ghastly, sensual external figures—there is enough to make the boldest tremble; a memory embracing all the past, a memory rapidly grasping and constantly bringing its burden, a judgment which admits of no mistakes, and a conscience which has done ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... head had been shaved in order to disgrace him, and he had been so dreadfully whipped that he could hardly walk. So horrible was the impression produced upon my mind by his heart-broken countenance and crippled person that I fainted away. The sad and ghastly countenance of one of their female mulatto slaves who used to sit on a low stool at her sewing in the piazza, is now fresh before me. She often told me, secretly, how cruelly she was whipped when they sent her to the work house. I had known so much of the terrible scourgings ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... was sitting with his back against a gnarled stump, which gave him some support. He had his hand to his chest, and as he breathed a ghastly whistling sound came from the wound, and spirts of blood rushed from his mouth. His glazed eyes were fixed upon the man who had shot him, and a curious smile played about ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this latter calamity, we hauled the boat farther up and held the cable in our hands. Occasional flashes of lightning shone with a ghastly glare through the watery curtains around us, and lent additional horror to the scene. Yet we longed for those dismal flashes, for they were less appalling than the thick blackness that succeeded them. Crashing peals of thunder seemed to tear the skies in twain, and ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... practical training in it, which alone could teach its right principles, makes, and in the nature of things is bound to make, great mistakes—mistakes easily avoidable. No such thing can possibly be right. Raphael himself designed for tapestry, and the cartoons are priceless, but the tapestry a ghastly failure. It could not have been otherwise under the conditions. Executant separated from designer by all the leagues that ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... have repeated forgotten gossip and revealed the places where crimes had been committed or treasure buried. More often, perhaps, ghosts have walked the night without any ostensible or useful purpose, apparently in obedience to some ghastly compulsion that crept over them in death, as if a hesitating sickle had left them still hanging to life by ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... cottage was sunsteeped and still; Vines honeysuckled the window; softly he peeped o'er the sill. The lilies dropped from his fingers; devils were choking his breath; Rigid with horror, he stiffened; ghastly his face was as death. Like a nun whose faith in the Virgin is met with a prurient jibe, He shrank—'twas the wife of his bosom in the arms of Philo, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... midst of a society more intellectually cultivated than certainly was that which produced Regulus or the Horatii. And the most learned eras in modern Italy were precisely those which brought the vices into the most ghastly refinement." ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... weakness to a companion thus: "Tim, I haven't cried this twenty year; but they were all good boys, and my countrymen." The next day when the roll was called, and they answered not, we thought of their ghastly faces as we laid them in the trench, and hearts beat quick. When we sat down to eat and missed a messmate, the query went round, "Will it be my turn next?" A comrade's faults were now forgotten, his good qualities magnified, and all said, "Peace to ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... prevent her fellow-sinner from associating with us on more than terms of equality. Should Grandma Clay become aware of what I knew, she certainly would bundle the girl out neck and crop, as she would be justified in doing. But the girl was in a ghastly predicament, and more sinned against than sinning, when one heard her grief and remembered the age of her betrayer, which should have made him the protector instead of ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... not a form of all that lie Thus ghastly, wild and bare, Tost, bleeding, in the stormy sky, Black in the burning air, But to his knee some infant clung, But on his ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... creatures in his pockets, and transferring them to his mother for immediate care. I have heard him speak admiringly of the skilful tenderness with which she took into her lap a lacerated cat, washed and sewed up its ghastly wound, and nursed it back to health. The great intimacy with the life and habits of animals which reveals itself in his works is readily ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... indeed lays it down, that "the meditation of death cools the heart not a little." But her more experienced companions know better. The worse side of this Renaissance peculiarity is told in the last tale, a rather ghastly story of monkish corruption; its lighter side appears in the story, already referred to, of the "Grand Prince" and his pious devotions on the way to not particularly pious occupation. But touches of the more poetical and romantic effects of it are all over the book. It ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Cabrieres being fortified was prepared to stand a siege; but on a promise of their lives and property the inhabitants opened the gates. Without a moment's hesitation the Baron gave orders to put them all to death. The soldiers refused to break plighted faith; but the mob had no scruples and the ghastly work began. 'A multitude of women and children had fled to the church: the furious horde rushed headlong among them and committed all the crimes of which hell could dream. Other women had hidden themselves in a barn. The Baron caused them to be shut up ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... snatching a lamp from a distant table, brought it near, and the increased light showed Elsie's little face, ghastly as that of a corpse, while a stream of blood was flowing from a wound in the temple, made by striking against some sharp corner of the ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... Syrian desert landscape, pale and ghastly, under the light of a great white moon, with one lonely Figure standing like a sentinel against a towering fang of rock. Lurking forms of fierce beasts of prey were dimly to be distinguished amongst ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... hours of the night the scenes of the last few hours, of the last few days, came back to him and burnt into his soul. The gulf yawned before him now plain enough, open at his feet—black, ghastly. He shuddered at it, wondering if he should even yet fall in, felt wildly about for strength to stand firm, to retrace his steps; but found it not. He found not yet the strength he was in search of, but in the grey morning he wrote a ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... nervous excitement had driven him close to the line where reason and his own will wavered in their decisions, and his irregular, tottering steps became the type of the whole man. His eyes were wild and bloodshot. A ghastly pallor gave his haggard face the look of death. A damp dullness pervaded the heavy air of the room, which in his unrest he had greatly disordered. The fire had died out, and he had not even tried to kindle it again. His broodings had been so deep and painful during the earlier part of the night ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... barn with its bill stuck fast in a crack of one of the large timbers, dead, of course, with wings extended, and as dry as a chip. The bird seems to have died, as it had lived, on the wing, and its last act was indeed a ghastly parody of its living career. Fancy this nimble, flashing sprite, whose life was passed probing the honeyed depths of flowers, at last thrusting its bill into a crack in a dry timber in a hay-loft, and, with spread wings, ending ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... rejoiced over the bare fact, briefly cabled without ghastly details, that the Philippine generalissimo had fallen prisoner, because it portended the peace which all desired. In deference to public opinion, the President promoted Colonel Funston of the volunteers to the rank of ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... find much mention of him in their Literary Histories and Catalogues. A man of ample learning, and also of strong cheerful human sense and human honesty; whom it is thrice-pleasant, to meet with in those ghastly solitudes, populous chiefly with doleful creatures.] which take ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... to violate all. Whoever trampled on that, showed that no relation had any sacredness in his eyes—that he was unfit to move among human relations who had violated one so sacred and tender.—Therefore, the Mosaic law uplifted his bleeding corpse, and brandished the ghastly terror around the parental relation to guard it ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... second lesson was being read the sun had shifted from Miss Mapp's face, and enabled her to see how ghastly dear Evie looked when focussed under the blue robe of Jonah, who was climbing out of the whale. She had had her disappointments to contend with, for the Contessa had never really grasped at all who she was. Sometimes she mistook her for Irene, sometimes she did not seem ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... developing in hideous outlines the phosphorescent colors of the skeletons and long, fuzzy, exaggerated lines of the accompanying worms. The effect was thrilling. Every sound save the soft swish of the ghastly robes and the delicate footfall of ghostly feet ceased. Not a whisper from a sap-headed youth or a yap from an aged degenerate or a giggle from a silly woman broke ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... it if, at such an hour as this, we are prone to magnify trifles, or that the most insignificant thing becomes an omen full of ghastly meaning and possibilities? The creak of a door in the silence, a rustle in the dark, become to us of infinitely greater moment than the crash ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... you mean by browbeating my nurse and forcing yourself in here!" exclaimed Doctor Ward hotly. "Good God! What have you done to Goddard!" He had caught sight of the latter's ghastly face. "Nurse, look to your patient! Now, sir, out with you." He pushed Baker in the direction of the door. "And you go, too, Symonds," as the man rose and stood uncertain whether or not to assist Colonel Baker in his efforts to remain ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... absurd manner with its nib stuck in the cane bottom of an overturned chair. He took it out and laid it on the table. He saw his hat in a corner, stooped for it, missed it several times, and then got hold of it, and put it on. There was a little glass over the mantelpiece. A ghastly face with a torn collar was watching him furtively through it. He turned fiercely on the spy and found the face was his own. He turned up his coat and buttoned it. Then he went to the ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... "justifiable homicide"), not entirely divested of that malice prepense which constitutes the crime of murder! Happy the victims in whom life is not completely extinguished, who recover their feet, bind up their wounds, and undeterred by a ghastly experience, hazard in more encounters a fresh assassination of the heart. Such fortitude would have afforded a remedy to Dick Stanmore. "Wanted—a lady!" should have been the motto emblazoned on his banner if ever he ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... Moonlight Pleasure Club" came straggling in by twos and threes. Some of the weary dancers had dropped to sleep, still wearing their ball-gowns and slippers and bangles and picture-hats, their faces showing ghastly white and drawn in the mote-ridden sunbeams that fell through the dirty windows. Others were busy doffing Cinderella garments, which rites were performed with astounding frankness in the open spaces ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... Marianne, I weep and mourn to-day, From your house to our cottage-home the fever made its way; My father lies with ghastly face, and many a raving cry— Oh, would that Durand too might come, before ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... becomes what Charles Lamb calls "a mockery of a river—a liquid artifice—a wretched conduit." But take away the water from the most beautiful river-banks, and what is left? An ugly road with none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... we landed. I could only creep along the path, holding on by the fence; for my feet were like leaden weights. My form bowed itself like an old man's. The fields, the trees, were not green, but ghastly. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... the door did not even shake to his stoutest kick. Breathless and panting, he desisted. I then tried the door myself, equally in vain. As I ceased from the effort, again that creep of horror came over me; but this time it was more cold and stubborn. I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We precipitated ourselves into the landing place. We both ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... them: that was the trouble. The railway carriage alone would cost him more than he could get for them. They were too cheap. So nobody could have them. It's the muddle of the thing that makes me mad—the ghastly muddle-headed way the chief business of the world is managed. There's enough food could be grown in this country to feed all the people and then of the fragments each man might gather his ten basketsful. There's no miracle needed. I went ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... Schofield, and as he bent to his work he did not see a strange, level mass of gray that advanced slowly toward him. From a distance to the lay observer this mass would have looked like an ordinary cloud-bank, but the experienced eyes of a fisherman would have discerned its ghastly gray hue and its ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... to get back home to the old planet and the companionship of fellow creatures. He soon got over that feeling, but he says his first flight alone was a nightmare to him because of that dreadful sensation of ghastly loneliness." ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... not only dazed, but a pallor stole over his skin, the more ghastly in contrast with his black ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... ought to do? The thought hurt him, then lost edge, as if it had come in contact with a breastplate. Out of oneself! Impossible! Out into soundless, scentless, touchless, sightless space! The very idea was ghastly, futile! And touching there the bedrock of reality, the bottom of his Forsyte spirit, Soames rested for a moment. When one ceased, all ceased; it might go on, but there'd be nothing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... distant dot of intensely bright light, shed its wan glow over the ghastly scene. Dodeth wished the Moon were out; its much brighter light would ...
— The Asses of Balaam • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Germana. Germinate gxermi. Gerund gerundio. Gesture gesto. Get (receive) ricevi. Get (procure) havigi. Get (with infinitive) igi, igxi. Get dirty malpurigxi. Get ready pretigi, pretigxi. Ghastly palega. Gherkin kukumeto. Ghost fantomo. Giant grandegulo. Gibbet pendigilo. Gibbous gxiba. Gibe moki. Giddiness kapturno. Giddy, to make kapturnigi. Gift donaco. Gift, to make a donaci. Gifted talenta. Gild orumi. Gill (fish) branko. Gilliflower ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... days the approach to London on all sides seems to have lain through serried files of gibbets, growing closer and more thronged as the distance from the city diminished, till they and their occupants arranged themselves in rows of ghastly and grinning sentinels along both sides ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... Chigi palace the commotion assumed the aspect of a riot. The carriage had to stop. Elena leaned forward to look out, and her face emerging from the shadows and lighted up by the glare of the gas and the reflection of the sunset seemed of a ghastly whiteness, an almost icy pallor, reminding Andrea of some head he had seen before, he could not say where or ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... shut out the sight that pressed upon them. "I cannot get it out of my mind. I suppose my nerves and everything are wrong; all night long it seemed to be before me,—the blood on his forehead, the ghastly white face, the labouring breath. Oh, not like your father, who was good and old and peaceful, who was just taken away gently, led away,—but so young and so unprepared! Oh, so unprepared! What could God do with him, cut off ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... turns in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive, and I may add, reasonable incredulity. I have lately seen one of Correggio's finest pictures, in which the three Furies are represented, not as ghastly deformed hags, with talons and torches, and snaky hair, but as young women, with fine luxuriant forms and regular features, and a single serpent wreathing the tresses like a bandeau—but such countenances!—such a hideous expression of ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... given rein, will not only grow monstrous and despotic, but artificial appetites will be created which, like a ghastly Frankenstein, develop a kind of independent life and force, and then turn on their creator to torment him without pity, and will mock his efforts to free himself from this slavery. The victim of strong drink is one of the most pitiable creatures on earth, he ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... certainly force a crisis. The sooner the crisis came the better, and amongst those for whom that was better Philip de Commines was not the least. With all his heart he loathed the part he was compelled to play, even while determined to play it to its ghastly end. But to some men, Commines amongst them, the irrevocable brings a drugging of the sensibilities. When that which must be done could not be undone he would ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... visit the earth as a black dog, on another day as a raven, on still another day he would be heard in the distance roaring like a bull. He appeared sometimes as a white man in black clothes, and sometimes he became a black man in black clothes, when it was remarked that his voice was ghastly, that he wore no shoes, and that one of his feet was cloven. His stratagems were endless. For, in the opinion of divines, his cunning increased with his age; and having been studying for more than ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... rector looked in, with a face so ghastly and drawn that she almost cried out in terror. His hair was white, and ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... that contraption, will you? If ever it started going off not one of us would live to tell the ghastly tale," called Will, as if really and truly alarmed, which, of course, he ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... improve natural knowledge might have loomed larger than the Plague and have outshone the glare of the Fire; as a something fraught with a wealth of beneficence to mankind, in comparison with which the damage done by those ghastly evils ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... after the terrible storm of 1905, when the great steamer Bay Queen went down with all on board, the exact spot of her sinking unknown even to this day. Then the whole ocean side of the Cape, from Race Point to Orham, was strewn with ghastly relics. But the Bay Queen met her fate in the winter season, amid a gale such as even the oldest residents could not remember. Now it was early summer; the night before had been a flat calm. There had been no wreck, ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the dead, And amazed he stares around. Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries, See the Furies arise! See the snakes that they rear How they hiss in their hair, And the sparkles that flash from their eyes! Behold a ghastly band Each a torch in his hand! Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain And unburied remain Inglorious on the plain: Give the vengeance due To the valiant crew! Behold how they toss their torches on high, How ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... ship's crew; others in sky-blue, in gold and pink and combinations of brilliance that blended their loose garments to kaleidoscopic hues. But the figures were similar in one unvarying respect: they were repulsive and ghastly, and their faces showed bright blotches of blood vessels and blue markings of veins ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... for the Day, you lied for the Day, And woke the Day's red spleen, Monster, who asked God's aid Divine, Then strewed His seas with the ghastly mine; Not all the waters of all the Rhine Can ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the morning has climbed up the high eastern hill And the sunlight is dancing on ripple of rill, The coroner summons a jury and feigns An inquest of law o'er the ghastly remains. The verdict is heard with whoop and hurrah: "These moonshiners died at the hands of the law; Let all men beware," the coroner cried, "The murder ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... she paused, knowing she had made the most ghastly mistake, and not knowing how to remedy it. Daisy ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... overthrown; they were surrounded by shrieking black children, with pointed wings on their shoulders and horns on their foreheads, bound to stakes to represent the hosts of hell—a performance which they tried to make at once ghastly and droll. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... reserve of her injured husband, together with his ghastly paleness disturbed her, and her inquietude grew to painful anxiety as he maintained silence. At length he said "I have learned to love you truly and passionately, my wife, and now you show me how you ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... amity. May from my bones a new Achilles rise, That shall infest the Trojan colonies With fire, and sword, and famine, when at length Time to our great attempts contributes strength; Our seas, our shores, our armies theirs oppose, And may our children be for ever foes!' 210 A ghastly paleness death's approach portends, Then trembling she the fatal pile ascends; Viewing the Trojan relics, she unsheath'd Aeneas' sword, not for that use bequeath'd: Then on the guilty bed she gently lays Herself, and softly thus lamenting prays; 'Dear relics! whilst ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... dare the dense murder that spewed from those ghastly machines. (Only those who have danced to its music can know what the mitrailleuse means.) But the bridge on the Aisne was a menace; our safety demanded its fall: "Engineers,—volunteers!" In a body, the Royals ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... cane bottom of an overturned chair. He took it out and laid it on the table. He saw his hat in a corner, stooped for it, missed it several times, and then got hold of it, and put it on. There was a little glass over the mantelpiece. A ghastly face with a torn collar was watching him furtively through it. He turned fiercely on the spy and found the face was his own. He turned up his coat and buttoned it. Then he went to the half-open door and ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... Count Adrian's face was ghastly. Lord Cedric raised his sword and made a lunge at him. La Fosse was too quick for Cedric. He sprang between and parried the pass with astounding dexterity. The monk intended it for a finale stroke; but not so Cedric. He began a ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... "Ghastly! I can't stand it! But, all the same, it's a fearful corvee to keep it up when you're persecuted ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... stared. Surely the heavy breath had come more quickly a moment ago. It seemed an age between each rise and fall of the coverlet. There was a ghastly whistling sound ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... was by no means familiar to Cuthbert, it took only one glance to show him that this man was dying or dead. His face was ghastly and drawn, and his limbs were already growing rigid and motionless. The heavy charge of the pistol had done its work surely and fully: the bullet had passed through the spine, and had entered the ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... has lands and gold, mother, The Queen has lands and gold, While you are forced to your empty breast A skeleton babe to hold,— A babe that is dying of want, mother, As I am dying now, With a ghastly look in its sunken eye, And famine upon ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... cast into the sea. In a few days the putrified body rose to the surface head upwards, as though the murdered man had come again to haunt his executioners and give them a further opportunity of gazing at the ghastly features of their victim.[11] The sight of his old friend emerging again terrified Ferdinand, and he became afflicted with a feeling of abiding horror which he sought to appease by having the body interred in a Christian burial-ground. But the spirit of his executed ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... die in eager strife Upon a well-fought field; Nor from the red wound poured their life Where cowering foemen yield. Death's ghastly shade was slowly cast Upon each manly brow, But calm and fearless to the ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... sound that escaped the doctor's lips. It was a prolonged sound, and uttered in a tone of exquisite distress. The white and ghastly face ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... travels. The old villain then catches what he can. Myself, I hardly believe he continues his brigandage. He appears wholly worn out. I gave his little son 20 paras to buy camel's flesh. The old freebooter grinned a ghastly smile. Walking in Ben Weleed quarters, I heard a great to-do, and went to see what it was, when I saw the old chief, Haj Ben Mousa Ettanee, standing over his young truant son, whilst with a thick stick the servant of the schoolmaster was belabouring the feet of the child. Never was a more ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... in the place of contending theorists. Robespierre and Brissot were politicians who did not shrink from crime, but it was in the service of some form of the democratic system. Even Marat, the most ghastly of them all, who demanded not only slaughter but torture, and whose ferocity was revolting and grotesque, even Marat was obedient to a logic of his own. He adopted simply the state of nature and the primitive contract, in which thousands of his ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... sword, and spurs, were laid on the coffin, and from her shaded window Albinia watched it borne between the files of soldiers with arms reversed; and the procession of officers whose bright array contrasted with the colonel's war-worn dress, ghastly cheek, and empty sleeve, tokens of the reality of war amid its pageantry, as all moved slowly away to the deep tones of the solemn Dead March, music well befitting the calm grandeur of the face she had seen, and leaving her heart throbbing with the deep exulting awe and pathos ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... beams of the morning sun—and the slowly moving "relief detail" from the camp—came a weird half-resurrection of that ghastly field. Then it was that the long rays of sunlight, streaming away a mile beyond the battle line, pointed out the first harvest of the dead where the reserves had been posted. There they lay in heaps and piles, killed by solid shot or bursting shells that had ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... face of the cattleman Dave read the ghastly fear of his own soul. Doble was capable of terrible evil. His hatred, jealousy, and passion would work together to poison his mind. The corners of his brain had always been full of lust and obscenity. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... a wailing chant—a hopeless prayer for mercy and deliverance. A guttering candle shed a ghastly light ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... red and blue and yellow Blotting the fair skies! And the air, with noisome stenches, As from things that rot, Chokes the breather—exhalation From the infernal pot. And amid the thick-curled vapors Ghastly shapes I see Of dire diseases, Epimetheus, Launched on earth by thee. A horrid crew! Some lean and dwindled, Some with boils and blains Blistered, some with tumors swollen, And water in the veins; Some with ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... risen from a sick-bed, led the conspirators who seized Davie Rizzio, dragged him from his mistress's knees, to which he clung, and slew him pitilessly on the boards which, according to old tradition, still bear the stain of his blood. After that ghastly token, authentic or non- authentic, which would thrill the hearts of the young princesses as it has stirred many a youthful imagination, Darnley's armour and Mary's work-table, with its embroidery worked by her own hand, must ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... slow, uncertain steps, his hands clinging to the balustrade, his head so heavy that he scarce could bear its weight. The servants stood below in sorrowful amazement. They had never seen their master so agitated in his life before; they could scarcely believe that this ghastly being was the dignified and stately man who had left them but an hour before. Suddenly they started, for surely they heard a loud laugh from the study, but what a laugh!—so wild, so unearthly, that it sounded like the dreadful mirth of a madman!—Then ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... rate, he glanced down the area, and was a good deal astonished to see a man lying on the stones, his limbs all huddled together, and his face turned up. Our gentleman thought his face looked peculiarly ghastly, and so set off at a run in search of the nearest policeman. The constable was at first inclined to treat the matter lightly, suspecting common drunkenness; however, he came, and after looking at the man's face, changed his tone, quickly enough. The ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... a spectacle did they present! The cavalry, most of them dismounted, were mingled with the infantry, who dragged their feeble limbs along with difficulty; their shattered mail and tattered garments dripping with the salt ooze, showing through their rents many a bruise and ghastly wound; their bright arms soiled, their proud crests and banners gone, the baggage, artillery, all, in short, that constitutes the pride and panoply of glorious war, forever lost. Cortes, as he looked wistfully on ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... That I know. I will never forget that. He weighed only 195 pounds, but I am sure he had another couple of hundred tucked away somewhere. When I had finished counting a great variety and number of stars, it occurred to me that I had been in a ghastly railroad wreck, and that the engine and cars following had picked out my right knee as a nice soft place to pile up on. There was a feeling of great relief when I looked around and saw that the engineer of that train, Mr. E. H. Coy, had stopped ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... moor striped with sullen water courses, shagged with sedge, and yellow iris, and in the drier part with bilberries. For by this time it was four o'clock, and the summer sun, rising wanly, showed us all the ghastly scene. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... yet as ghastly dreadfull, as it seemes, Bold men, presuming life for gaine to sell, Dare tempt that gulf, and in those wandring stremes Seek waies unknowne, waies leading down to hell. For, as we stood there waiting on the strond, Behold! an huge great ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... and charming by his warmth and boldness of color. His attempts to express the gay and mirthful, as for instance in the masquerade music of "Traviata" and the dance music of "Rigoletto," are dreary, ghastly, and saddening; while his ideas of tenderness are apt to take the form of mere sentimentality. Yet generalities fail in describing him, for occasionally he attains effects strong in their pathos, and artistically admirable; as, for example, the slow air for the heroine, and the dreamy song for ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... what people in books call 'stunned'. The illumination during the past few minutes had been so dazzling that my brain could not master it. I remember very clearly that I did not think about the ghastly failure of our scheme, or the German plans which had been insolently unfolded to me as to one dead to the world. I saw a single picture—an inn in a snowy valley (I saw it as a small place like Peter's cottage), a solitary girl, that smiling devil who ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... enough to cut off heads and arms at one blow. When this valorous exploit was done, he comes to me laughing, as a token of triumph, delivered me my sword again, with abundance of suprising gestures, laying it, along with the bleeding and ghastly head of the Indian, at ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... seen her purloin it. Then she would be a friend to him; did he forget her power? He questioned her on the uses she would make of a blood-stained linen rag. She told him she had her purposes, and he remembered her witch practices, the stories of the ghastly ingredients of her magic potions. He alluded to witchcraft, and she defied him again, then he called the guard; but when the soldiers' tread echoed in the corridor, she drew the cloth from a hidden panel in her bureau and flung it at him, with bitter words cursing him. And he departed ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Before him, crippled and ghastly in the last agony of life, lay the author of this diabolical outrage upon every ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... Mr. Merrick recoiled. The face was seared with livid scars, the nose crushed to one side, the mouth crooked and set in a sneering grin. One eye was nearly closed and the other round and wide open. A more forbidding and ghastly countenance Mr. Merrick had never beheld and in his surprise ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... something, and he stopped, shuddering. It was the body of one of the slavers and presently he passed another. The sea was giving up its dead. He reached the schooner, glad to leave these ghastly objects behind him, and, with some difficulty, climbed aboard. The vessel had shipped much water, but she was not as great a wreck as he had expected, and he instantly descended to the cook's galley, where he had given ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... said the V. A. D. "Whenever I see it, I somehow feel my heart grow warm to the American people for the splendid way in which they have helped poor France, for, you know, in the first months of the war, the French hospitals were perfectly ghastly." ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... horror? Shall he not cry out, beg for his life, or fly to save it? Shall I not see the assassin dealing the deadly blow, and the defenseless wretch falling dead at his feet? Shall I not picture vividly in my mind the blood gushing from his wounds, his ghastly face, his groans, and ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... the restaurant. The full horror of what had happened to Dr. Marks was just having its effect. He found himself shivering as though with a severe chill. Marks was the victim of something ghastly. He seemed to be trying to make sense, as though there was still a glimmer of intelligence behind the blank stare. But his words ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... away to look for the entrance to the lagoon. I was then aloft again, for the sake of the more extended view obtainable from the height of the topgallant yard; and as we swept past the reef, and I looked down upon it, I thought I had never seen a more ghastly place for a solitary human being to be cast away upon. It was composed, apparently, of nothing but coral, upon which the everlasting surf was gradually casting up a deposit of sand, which, when dry, the wind ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... notice, because it seems likely to have extensive effects in corrupting others: —we mean his taste for horrible and revolting subjects. We thought we had supped full of this commodity; but it seems as if the most ghastly and disgusting portion of the meal was reserved for the present day, and its most hideous concoction for the writer before us,—who is never so much in his favourite element as when he can "on horror's head horrors accumulate." He ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... burning curiosity and a deep sense of duty that urged me on, than anything I could properly call affection—still less, revenge or malice. I didn't remember my father as alive at all: the one thing I could recollect about him was the ghastly look of that dead body, stretched at full length on the library floor, with its white beard all dabbled in the red blood that clotted it. It was abstract zeal for the discovery of the truth that alone pushed me on. This search became ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... divested of that malice prepense which constitutes the crime of murder! Happy the victims in whom life is not completely extinguished, who recover their feet, bind up their wounds, and undeterred by a ghastly experience, hazard in more encounters a fresh assassination of the heart. Such fortitude would have afforded a remedy to Dick Stanmore. "Wanted—a lady!" should have been the motto emblazoned on his banner if ever he turned ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... 'Isn't it ghastly? I've bought twenty; they're in our camp; but won't you have something to eat first? We've more than ten people can do here; and I've got a horse for you. Oh, I'm so glad you've come! You're a ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... "I suppose we can find out soon, for tomorrow we have our next general meeting. You will excuse me," he said, with a rather ghastly smile, "for being well acquainted with my ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... monsters of the deep; palpitating masses of pulp! One lay rocking, already as large as a football with streamers of ooze hanging from it, and squirting a black inky fluid. Others were rods of red jelly-pulp, already as large as lead pencils, quivering, twitching. Disease germs, these ghastly things, enlarging from the invisibility ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... at the breast by a medallion of gold and topaz. He was a typical Egyptian, but thinner of lip and severer of countenance than the laity. The wooden dolls tumbled about by the children of the realm were not more hairless than he. His high, narrow head was ghastly in ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... dying out fast on the peaks around, and they ceased to flash and glow, to become pale and grey, and then ghastly, cold and strange, as the little party sat enjoying the simple meal and the calm and rest of the peaceful scene. Everything around was so still that there was hardly a murmur in the pines; only the hushed roar of the restless river, but subdued now, for its waters ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... the light. The two went after him into a silent house, where everybody slept. The light that had burned for him all night was sick like a guilty thing in the eye of day, and all that had been prepared for his repose was ghastly to him in the hour of awaking, as if prepared not for sleep but for death. His heart was sick like the watch-light, and life flickered within him with disgust and disappointment. For why had he been born, if this were all?—for all was vanity. The ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... use of fire-arms. I noticed that these people have slightly fairer complexions than the natives of Hudson's Bay, and the women are somewhat more elaborately tattooed, despite which they are quite comely. The children are all remarkably pretty, but the men have a ghastly look from wearing wooden goggles to guard against snow blindness, which makes the skin around the eyes, where protected by the goggles, several shades lighter than the rest of ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... nobody more quickly than Jane Hubbard—now observed that the white face of the man on the stool had grown whiter still. His eyes gazed out glassily from under his damp brow. He looked like a man who was seeing some ghastly sight. The audience sympathised with him. They felt like ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... is so ghastly and abnormal that I must own it puts me quite off my balance; but the thought did occur to me that possibly the—well, the person who set the trap might have come to see the ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... and sudden that it scarcely seemed real to John, but there were the dead bodies lying ghastly in the road, and there stood Julie, as pale as death, but not trembling. The leader of the Uhlans pushed his helmet back a little from his forehead, and looked down at John, who had been disarmed but who stood erect ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ghastly livid hue on the strongly-marked features of the sleeper, rendered sharp and haggard by disease and his penurious habits; she could just distinguish through the gloom the spectre-like form of the invalid, and the long bony attenuated hands which grasped, from time to time, the curtains and bedclothes, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... except when occasionally he coughed, and the others seemed content to let him enjoy himself in his own way. His eyes had a singular brightness, and when he laughed his white teeth and rather drawn mouth gave him almost a ghastly appearance. He seemed as much of an odd number as Tom himself, but not in the same way, for Tom was matter-of-fact and stolid, and this little gnome of a scout seemed all ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... chieftain, leading beside it their pinioned captive. As they approached to the little rude hamlet where they dwelt, a motley crowd of old men, women, and children, came forth to welcome their return; but when they beheld the ghastly body of their late chief, and the drooping looks of the warriors, their joyful cries were exchanged for wails of lamentation, and they tore their hair, and expressed the most violent emotions of grief. They wept over the bleeding corpse of the victim, while they derided and buffeted ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... National Museum at Naples, but those which remain impart a more living sense of the past than such wisely ordered accumulations; for it is the Pompeian paradox that in the image of death it can best recall life. It is a grave which has been laid bare, and it were best to leave its ghastly memories unhindered by other companionship. One feels that one ought to be there alone in order to see it aright. ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... requisition for the benefit of many of the people as well as the animals of the neighborhood. Never had his skill been needed more than now, for poor Tiepoletta had not recovered consciousness, and her rigidity and the ghastly pallor which had overspread her features seemed to indicate that she had ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... sending British ships to lay Constantinople under their guns, was a splendid conception worthy the military imagination of the daring ages when the British Empire was built and the days of the Spanish Main, but the only criterion in the ghastly business ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... water was visible, which I quickly baled into the canvas bags we had brought for the purpose. The bottom of the hole was filled in with dead sticks, leaves, the rotting bodies of birds and lizards, bones of rats and dingoes. Into this ghastly mass of filth I sunk up to my middle, and never shall I forget the awful odour that arose as my feet stirred up the mess. Nevertheless water was there, and thankful I was to find it, even to drink it as it was. After half an hour's work in this stinking pit, sick from the combination of smells—distinguishable ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... later Mrs. Lloyd was startled by a hasty rap at the door, and on opening it beheld her husband supported between two men, his face ghastly pale, and stained with blood from a wound on his forehead. She was a brave woman, and although her heart almost stood still with agonised apprehension, she did not lose control of herself for an instant. Directing Mr. Lloyd to be carried into the parlour and laid gently upon the sofa, ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... irresponsible, but up to this he had not clearly seen the villainy of Rochester. The woman showed it. Rochester had picked up a stranger, because of the mutual likeness, and sent him home to play his part, hoping, no doubt, to have a ghastly hit at his family. What about his wife? He had either never thought of her, or ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Hog-Lane, St. Giles. He has shown us Bridewell, Bedlam, and the Fleet Prison. Through a window in one print we see the houses on old London Bridge; in another it is Temple Bar, surmounted by the blackened and ghastly relics of Jacobite traitors. He takes us to a cock-fight in Bird Cage Walk, to a dissection in Surgeons' Hall. He gives us reception-rooms in Arlington Street, counting-houses in St. Mary Axe, sky-parlours in Porridge Island, and night-cellars ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... ride, then," he offered. "We can cache more stuff and I'll ride Sally." He grunted and twisted as the pain cut him. He looked ghastly. ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... moved to pronounce his name, but some swift intuitive warning restrained the utterance. Suddenly a new horror, a ghastly possibility, thrust itself for the first time before her, and she felt as though some hand of ice ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... chafing not a little, an incident happened in Boston which warned him to let patience have its perfect work. It was on the night of September 17th that the dispositions of the city toward him found grim expression in a gallows erected in front of his house at 23 Brighton street. This ghastly reminder that the fellow-citizens of the editor of the Liberator continued to take a lively interest in him, "was made in real workmanship style, of maple joist five inches through, eight or nine feet high, for the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... the whales, And feel the churned sea round me boil beneath their scourging tails! Then deep in tangle-woods to fight the fierce sea-unicorn, And send him foiled and bellowing back, for all his ivory horn; To leave the subtle sworder-fish of bony blade forlorn; And for the ghastly-grinning shark, to laugh his jaws to scorn: To leap down on the kraken's back, where 'mid Norwegian isles He lies, a lubber anchorage for sudden shallowed miles— Till, snorting like an under-sea volcano, off he rolls; Meanwhile ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... remind me, there are no kings in Radstowe. There's not even,' she added with a mocking smile which made her face gay in a ghastly way, 'not even a foreign Count who would turn out an impostor. Rose would do very well there, too. An imitation foreign Count with a black moustache and no money! She would be magnificent and tragic. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... on the turf, Paul gazed anxiously into his face. The eyes were closed; the lips ghastly blue; the heart ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... feet; but the business was over in two twos. The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly fashion, the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... But if you do, you'll find me out! I'll tell you! I won't be able to conceal it! You'll know the truth about me! You've said all this was mysterious—for your own sake, let it stay so! You needn't think all truths are beautiful, and the truth about me is the most ghastly in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... bare during full daylight, mingled their summits with the jasper tints of the sky; at their base ran a sea of amethyst. Not less lovely was the sunset, but after a quarter of an hour its beauty faded, and the wilderness of white crags and pinnacles was naked and ghastly under the moon. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... "grant, then, that there is such Scriptural warrant; I would nevertheless know that the existence of purgatory was wholly incompatible with the reign of an infinite God of love. And, knowing that, I have ceased to extort gifts of money from the ignorance of the living and the ghastly terrors of the dying—" ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... had been sitting by the patient, but now that he could do no more for him he had moved to the fire; and they had taken the ghastly, half-emptied medicine bottles from the table by the bedside, and had spread it with a fair linen cloth, and had set out the silver vessels of the Supper of the Lord. The old man had been "wandering" somewhat during ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... home, Child of its narrow house!—how late the bloom, The facile smile, the soft eye's crystal light, Each grace of Youth's gay morn, that charms our sight, Play'd o'er that Form!—now sunk in Death's cold gloom, Insensate! ghastly!—for the yawning tomb, Alas! fit Inmate.—Thus we mourn the blight Of Virgin-Beauty, and endowments rare In their glad hours of promise.—O! when Age Drops, like the o'er-blown, faded rose, tho' dear Its long known worth, no ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... deepest shade; that on her right, though much lower, took the whole blaze of the midnight moon. Great festoons of live and purple sea-weed hung from it, shading dark cracks and crevices, fit haunts for all the goblins of the sea. On her left hand, the peaks of the rock frowned down ghastly black; on her right hand, far aloft, the downs slept ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... went up from the ranks of the Hillmen, and some of them would have rushed to accept the ghastly challenge. But the Chief held them back sternly. Then he himself, half a head taller than all but one or two of his followers, with magnificent chest and shoulders, and a dark, lionlike mane thick-streaked with grey, strode out three or four paces to the front and stood leaning on his ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... attention as the hours went by. He saw the gathering of armaments—the horizon tinged by the gathering war-vessels of the air—the advance, the sudden storm of battle, the gigantic destruction from these vast engines of power of which he had learned nothing but their ghastly potentialities. Or he saw the advance of this desperate garrison, dispersing this way and that for their war upon the world—silent vessels, moving in the clouds, to Rome, to London, to Paris and Versailles, each capable of obliterating a city. Or he saw, again, the submission of the world to the ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... believe. Her boys, Brock and Hugh! It was not credible, it was not reasonable, it was out of drawing that her good boys, her precious boys trained to be happy and help the world, to live useful, peaceful lives, should be snatched from home, here in America, and pitched into the ghastly struggle of Europe. Push back the ocean as she might, the ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... agreed with his friend. "I like an expedition, Charlie, if there is fighting to be done; but I don't want to have anything more to do with surprises. However, the cavalry had a good deal more to do with it than we had; but, as you say, it was a ghastly business. The only comfort is they began it, and have been robbing the peasants and destroying ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... taking a gold coin from her little bag, but at that very moment a heavy blow, as if dealt by a fist, resounded on the door. And Norine turned ghastly pale, for she had recognized Alexandre's brutal knock. What could she do? If she did not open the door, the bandit would go on knocking, and raise a scandal. She was obliged to open it, but things did not take the violent tragical turn which she had feared. Surprised at seeing a lady there, Alexandre ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... have written them! There is neither the same boldness of design, nor mastery of execution in Johnson. In the one, the spark of genius seems to have met with its congenial matter: the shaft is sped; the forked lightning dresses up the face of nature in ghastly smiles, and the loud thunder rolls far away from the ruin that is made. Dr. Johnson's style, on the contrary, resembles rather the rumbling of mimic thunder at one of our theatres; and the light he throws ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... is dark with woe, Tears have left ghastly traces there, Those ceaseless tears! I wish their flow Could quench thy ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... pedlars, with hawk eyes flashing from countenances whose every other feature wore only an expression of abject humility; sturdy professional street beggars scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp, whom despair alone had driven forth into the night for charity; feeble and ghastly invalids, upon whom death had placed a sure hand, and who sidled and tottered through the mob, looking every one beseechingly in the face, as if in search of some chance consolation, some lost hope; modest young ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... shark at the bottom of the sea to the eagle against the floor of the sky. As the perfumed fop, in an interval of reflection, gazes at the spectacle through his dainty eyeglass, the prospect swims in blood and glares with the ghastly phosphorus of corruption, and he shudders with sickness. In the philosophical naturalist's view, the dying panorama is wholly different. Carnivorous violence prevents more pain than it inflicts; the wedded laws of life ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to him that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked ruins. As for the roof he vaunted, he might have found that shutting out the sky in a new way—to wit, forever, from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead was fired, out of the barrels of a hundred ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... reached the middle of the frozen stream, which was covered with ghastly forms, when Captain Rose suddenly clasped his hand to his side and uttered ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... as his predecessor did. Now when the stomachs of those that are thus turned out of doors, grow keen, they rob no less keenly; and what else can they do? for when, by wandering about, they have worn out both their health and their clothes, and are tattered, and look ghastly, men of quality will not entertain them, and poor men dare not do it; knowing that one who has been bred up in idleness and pleasure, and who was used to walk about with his sword and buckler, despising all the neighbourhood with an insolent scorn, as far ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... one it would be impossible to forget. He must bear with him this memory, as a man who has committed a murder must bear with him the memory of his victim's ghastly face. ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... sound of sleigh-bells on the quiet English Quay made itself heard through the double windows. There was a clang of many tones, and the horses pulled up with a jerk. The color left Catrina's face quite suddenly, as if wiped away, leaving her ghastly. She was going to see ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... enter, and then looked at Meunier with an expression of angry inquiry; but he lifted up his hand as it to impose silence, while he fixed his glance on the dying woman and felt her pulse. The face was pinched and ghastly, a cold perspiration was on the forehead, and the eyelids were lowered so as to conceal the large dark eyes. After a minute or two, Meunier walked round to the other side of the bed where Bertha stood, and with his usual air of gentle politeness towards her begged her to leave the ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... port side. There were accidents. Three or four were knocked out. Petersen, the Swede, had his leg crushed. I don't know what was wrong at the time. He was working next me, and a roll of the ship brought an ugly crate over him. He couldn't get up. He looked ghastly. So I took him on my back and clawed my way up the iron ladder and reached the deck somehow, and staggered along, barging into everything—it was blowing half a gale—and once I fell and he screamed like a pig, poor devil. But I picked him up and got him into the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... and his condemnation. Over the very bridge where the heads of his adherents, exposed to view, held out a fearful picture of the fate which had threatened himself, he now made his triumphal entry; and to remove these ghastly objects was his first care. The exiles again took possession of their properties, without thinking of recompensing for the purchase money the present possessors, who had mostly taken to flight. Even though they had received a price for their estates, they seized ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... up I saw that Browne was at the helm, while Max was sleeping at my side. On perceiving that I was awake, Browne, from whom the exclamation had proceeded, pointed to something in the water, just astern. Following the direction of his finger with my eye, I saw, just beneath the surface, a large ghastly-looking white shark, gliding stealthily along, and apparently following the boat. Browne said that he had first noticed it about half an hour before, since which time it had steadily followed us, occasionally making a leisurely circuit round the boat, and then ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... in the lake, way out, beyond the piled ice along the shore. It would be ghastly cold to drop ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... were all drawn up on parade; before them were placed, in a ghastly heap, the bodies of their late commanders, to which Jung pointed, as he assured the army that it would find in him all that it had ever found in them, and he consoled many of the officers in a great measure for ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... cannot be that their past was unknown, but only that it was ignored. Long, I tell you, long and often, have I pondered on that history, and sought to trace with what ghastly secret has been pregnant the destiny, gloomful as Erebus and the murk of black-peplosed Nux, which for centuries has hung its pall over the men of this ill-fated house. Now at last I know. Dark, dark, and red with gore and horror is that history; ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... this time were very dark, and at several points we could see burning farm homesteads and villages, which to the thoughtful mind denoted the awful destruction and suffering envolved by the ghastly outrage upon humanity, being ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... seemed ghastly; and his refusal upon any persuasion to see a doctor quite heathenish, and a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his remark; it seemed unnecessary, and each was busy with his own thoughts. What did the next few days hold in store for the world, for England, for him? The ghastly, haunting fear that possibly they held nothing for England gnawed at men's hearts. It would be incredible, inconceivable; but impossible things had happened before. Many must have felt that fear, but to none can it have been quite so personal, ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... her to hide the ghastly faintness that was coming over him. "I—I oughtn't to have tried to keep you, when I did," ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... that after all I managed to stave off the smash with sufficient approach to verisimilitude, and the ghastly business went on. You must understand that the scheme of the test he was applying to me was, I gathered, a homeward passage—the sort of passage I would not wish to my bitterest enemy. That imaginary ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... the executioner, whose arm became almost powerless; the affrighted man struck the blow on the part directed, but though, it is hoped, it destroyed all sensation, the head was not severed, but fell back on the shoulders, exhibiting a ghastly sight. Two more strokes of the axe were requisite to complete the work. Then, the head having been received in a piece of scarlet cloth, the lifeless remains of the true, and noble hearted soldier were deposited in a coffin, and delivered ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... prairie was lit up like a theatre during the grand scene in a spectacle. We could see the guerrilleros standing by their horses, in cordon across the plain; we could distinguish their arms and equipments—even the buttons upon their jackets! With their faces rendered ghastly under the glare, and their bodies magnified to gigantic proportions, they presented to our eyes a wild and ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... observed the sergeant, as Stingaree, ghastly enough beneath his blood and dust, rolled over on his back once more, and lay effectively with closed eyes. Even the ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... dogs; until, through an opening in the thicket, he could see, at a distance of about forty paces, an enormous hyena, in the most wonderful state of excitement; dancing round a lamb just killed, and uttering, from time to time, the ghastly hysterical laughter which had pealed ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... was brought home to be laid among the echoes of that solitary place, or how she died, is all mystery. Some of her old friends, principally to be found among the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats, did once occasionally say, as they toyed in a ghastly manner with large fans—like charmers reduced to flirting with grim death, after losing all their other beaux—did once occasionally say, when the world assembled together, that they wondered the ashes of the Dedlocks, entombed ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... on the bare ground. They had been refused lodging in the workhouse, and were going to pass the night in that situation. As he came up to them, coarse jests, and snatches of low drinking-songs, ghastly as the laughter of lost spirits in the pit, mingled with the feeble wailings of some child of shame. The vicar recollected how he had seen the same sight at the door of Kensington Workhouse, walking home one night in company with Luke Smith; and how, too, he had commented ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... boast was that, if she wished to, she could take half the roofs off the Avenue. You did not know how real that terrible threat was, for you never saw the cloaked men issuing from its doors bearing their ghastly burdens. You have heard of the Burdell murder but you never knew the real solution. You have read of the Nathan murder at the corner of the Avenue and Twenty-third Street. But you did not hear, as I heard, that piercing wail, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... parents. On Hamish the Reverend Mr. Tyrie had bestowed instructions when he was occasionally thrown in his way; and if the seed fell among the brambles and thorns of a wild and uncultivated disposition, it had not yet been entirely checked or destroyed. There was something so ghastly in the present expression of the youth's features that the good man was tempted to go down to the hovel, and inquire whether any distress had befallen the inhabitants, in which his presence might be consoling ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... look strangely?" There was a feeble effort to awaken a smile, which only gave her face a ghastly expression. ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... straight towards that oaken beam, A trampled pathway ran; A ghastly shape was swinging there— ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... second the hunchback seemed to hesitate. He stood in awesome fear of Gian Maria, of whose cruelties some ghastly tales were told. But in greater fear he stood of the eternal damnation he might earn did he break the oath he had plighted not to ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... the ghastly remains fearful each instant that I should find the dainty skull that would shatter my happiness for life; but though I searched diligently, picking up every one of the twenty-odd skulls, I found none that was the skull of a creature but slightly removed from the ape. Hope, then, ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... striving to make her voice sound matter-of-fact, her eyes glued to the road ahead of them as it twisted and turned through the woods. "I don't see why lights should make a perfectly harmless wood look ghastly. And, anyway, I couldn't turn them out now. I don't believe I could find my way. You don't want me to ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge - or, The Hermit of Moonlight Falls • Laura Lee Hope
... tracking an ordinary sleep-walker. The lawns were broader than I imagined, and it seemed an age before I reached the edge of the Grove. The world was so still that I appeared to be making a most ghastly amount of noise. I remember that once I heard a rustling in the air, and looked up to see the green doves circling about ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... which are built and thatched in a circular form, and in which their young men and bachelors sleep; here likewise are deposited the heads, of which they have more than enow, as above one hundred ghastly remnants of mortality ornamented the abode in which we slept. I could not on this occasion find out that they professed to take the heads of friends or strangers, though the latter may fall victims if on enemies' ground. They ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... Marquis gazed a moment, And nothing did he say, But the cheek of Argyle grew ghastly pale, And he turn'd his eyes away. The painted harlot at his side, She shook through every limb, For a roar like thunder swept the street, And hands were clench'd at him, And a Saxon soldier cried aloud, "Back, coward, from thy place! For seven long years thou hast not dared ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... shield and a great shouting, and in the semi-darkness a noisy battle raged. After some minutes the Lirongs drew off and rushed back to their boats as wildly as they had come; and, strange to say, no blood was flowing, no heads were rolling on the ground, no ghastly wounds were gaping, in fact no one seemed any the worse. For it seems that this attack was merely a well understood formality, a put-up job, so to say. When two tribes, between whom there is a blood-feud not formally settled, meet together to make peace, it is the custom ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... and guilt bringeth weakness, and faintness in this life; how much more, when both with all their power and force, like a giant, fasten on them; as God saith, "Can thine heart endure, or can thine hands be strong, in the days that I shall deal with thee?" (Eze 22:14). Now will the ghastly jaws of despair gape upon thee, and now will condemnings of conscience, like thunder-claps, continually batter against thy weary spirit. It is the godly that have boldness in the day of judgment (1 John 4:17); but the wicked will ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... left behind, was as the man in his own story, "Silence," who sat upon a rock—the gray and ghastly rock of "Desolation." "With his brow lofty with thought and his eyes wild with care and the fables of sorrow and weariness and disgust with mankind written in furrows upon his cheek," he sat upon the lonely grey rock and leaned his head upon his hand and ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... father, her only friend—the one for whom she would lay down her life, and to soothe whose delirium she had consented to this abhorrent sacrifice of herself. The marriage thus planned was to take place thus; it was to be a hideous, a ghastly mockery—a frightful violence to the solemnity of sorrow. She was not to be married—she was to be sold. The circumstances of that old betrothal had never been explained to her; but she knew that money was in some way connected with it, and that she was virtually ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... long years should have brought more wisdom, he went poaching for supper upon Welsh rabbits. That night all the ghastly time came back, and stood minute by minute before him. Every swing of his body, and sway of his head, and swell of his heart, was repeated, the buffet of the billows when the planks were gone, the numb grasp of the slippery oar, the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... end, to sew the piece on the other, for the sons and nephews of Berka now share the presents amongst them. His Giantship was very condescending to me, though savage enough with the merchant. He laughed and joked, and "grinned a ghastly smile," and asked me, why I did not go into the public square and see all the people, thinking my not going out more showed a want of confidence in the Touaricks. Want of confidence in a Touarick is the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the path. Men were staggering along alone, or supported by comrades, or crawling on hands and knees, or carried on stretchers. Corpses lay here and there. Many of the wounds were of a horrible nature. The splinters and fragments of the shell had torn and mutilated in the most ghastly manner. I passed about two hundred while I was climbing up. There was, moreover, a small but steady leakage of unwounded men of all corps. Some of these cursed and swore. Others were utterly exhausted and fell on the hillside in stupor. Others again seemed drunk, though they had had no liquor. ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... business-like Miss Frayne start and shiver as a little scream escaped her. I didn't wonder. Even I, knowing that it was an illusion and a snare, felt my flesh creeping as I looked at the ghastly thing in ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... bearers of the litter halted for a moment. Many turned away their faces in horror. I saw the schoolmistress of the red feather supporting my mistress of the upper first, who was almost in a swoon. At the same moment I felt a touch on the elbow; it was the little mason, who was ghastly white and trembling from head to foot. He was certainly thinking of his father. I was thinking of him, too. I, at least, am at peace in my mind while I am in school: I know that my father is at home, seated at his table, far removed from all danger; ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... night had been near three part wasted, Full half the meeting more like spectres seem'd Than of this world. The clamour then grew great; Whilst ev'ry torturing passion of the foul Glar'd in the ghastly visages of several. Some grinn'd in rage, some tore their hair, whilst others, Upon their knees, with hands and eyes uplifted, In curses dar'd assail all-ruling Providence Under the varied names of Fate and Fortune. ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... said compassionately, seeing the ghastly pallor of his face, "but I pity you. The street is furious that these wretches should have carried off that sweet young creature, who was so good to everyone; but what could we do? We hissed the men, and we ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... declared Nan. "Why, the Chattertons are fourteen miles from Abbencombe Station and it would be simply ghastly if they sent all that way to meet me—and there was no me! Besides, there's a rehearsal fixed for ten o'clock ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... about Swakopmund. As a town it is the most extraordinary place I have seen. I use the superlative deliberately. But I do not wish to live there. It is purely artificial, and artificial to a ghastly degree too. There is not a spot of vegetation. There is not a genuine tree to be seen. The water has a detestable, unsatisfying blurred taste, to which the adjective "brackish" is applied. It is probable that a town occupied by enemy troops does not ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... returned Dodger, as a ghastly expression came over his face, and he tumbled back into his ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for liberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at this late hour of the day because there ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... his cloak about his humped shoulders, and in the flickering dim light from overhead his face stood out in all its ghastly pallor, accentuated by the dead black hair and mustache. But his eyes were burning strangely, and when they saw it the men drew back, and more than one sought the outer chill in ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... picture of which, and that of purgatory, were on the wall opposite that of heaven, the human faces were the most horrible that can be imagined. Persons of different descriptions were represented, with the most distorted features, ghastly complexions, and every variety of dreadful expression; some with wild beasts gnawing at their heads, others furiously biting the iron bars which kept them in, with looks which could not fail ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... cousin who is a silly old fool. And if that should be so, I swear there's no known or unknown form of torture I wouldn't undergo to get the old fool to introduce me to the man who composed the sonata; starting with the torture of the old fool's company, which would be ghastly." ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... that she wanted to deposit in the bank for John. For Fanny was saving now as only Fanny knew how when she set her mind to it. And she had set not only her mind but her very soul on making good. Every cruel taunt had left a ghastly wound and only work of the hardest ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... water. And there, beside a ruined shrine, two dead cactus bushes, with their stiff distorted limbs, made Roy think suddenly of two dead Germans he had come upon once—killed so swiftly that they still retained, in death, the ghastly semblance of life. Why the devil couldn't a man be rid of them? Dead Germans were ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... my court, and tried her, and condemned her, and, as nearly as might be, put her to death. I, with my ten hundred thousand sins—all of them as black as Erebus—found her not pure enough for me! It ought to make one die of laughter. Diane," he went on, in another tone—a tone of ghastly jocularity—"didn't it amuse you, knowing yourself to be what you are—knowing what you had done for Mrs. Eveleth—knowing the things Bienville has just said of you—didn't it amuse you to see me sitting in judgment ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... There was not a moment to be lost! She went straight to it, and knocked rather loud. No answer came. She knocked again. Still there was no answer. She knocked a third time, and after a little fumbling with the lock, the door opened a chink, and a ghastly face, bedewed with drops of terror, peeped through. She was standing a little back, and the eyes did not at once find the object they sought; then suddenly they lighted on her, and the laird shook ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... had all been ring-barked a couple of seasons or more before this time, with the result that they were now the very haggard skeletons of mighty trees, naked for the most part, their white bones open to all the winds of heaven, but here and there sporting a ghastly kind of drapery, remnants of their grave-clothes as it might be, in the shape of long hanging streamers of dead bark, which moaned and rustled eerily in the night breezes. High above the tattered grave-clothes of their lifeless trunks, the knotted, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... use of his limbs," was carried to a boat, and hoisted in a chair over the ship's side. This latter journey, far more fatiguing to the sufferer than the twelve miles ride which he had previously undergone, was not rendered more easy to bear by the jests of the watermen and sailors, to whom his ghastly, death-stricken countenance seemed matter for merriment; and he was greatly rejoiced to find himself safely seated in the cabin. The voyage, however, already more than once deferred, was not yet to begin. Wednesday, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... The ghastly eyes were fixed on Des Esseintes, penetrating him, freezing his very marrow; wilder than ever, the bulldog woman threw herself at him and commenced to howl like a dog at the killing, her head hanging ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the casual observer that no further proceedings were to be taken in the matter. The god's face wore its usually placid look, unmoved by the shifting panorama of human life which ebbed and flowed in front of him from morning till night. The ghastly-looking policemen, with their grinning visages and ferocious scowls and contorted bodies, remained in the same unchanging postures ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... its former hue, So natural, warm, and florid, The Furnace burns of a brimstone blue, And instead of the couleur de rose it threw, With a cooler reflection,—justly due— Exhibits each of the Pagan crew, Livid, ghastly, and horrid! But vainly they close their guilty eyes Against prophetic fears; Or with hard and horny palms devise To dam their enormous ears— There are sounds in the air, Not here or there, Irresistible voices everywhere, No bulwarks can ever rebut, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... of animalism, under increasing control as it rises, still with the ferocity, rapacity and selfish passions of the gloomy mass at the bottom and forever in revolt. Is this not proved by history, written and unwritten? Is it not proved by the ghastly secrets of individual introspection that men never reveal or admit to others; secrets guarded by a system of conventions so impenetrable and vast that to attempt to personalize it in the sneaking figure of Hypocrisy would be as absurd as to try to enlarge the significance of an ivory chessman by ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... seen, by their deformed, bowed legs, bent backs and shrivelled little, old faces—such faces as we find in cripples aged by pain. Our hearts have been almost stilled as we have listened to the terrible stories of the hundreds of little girls in the ghastly fleshmarkets of India and China who, by the knife and the insertion into their tender bodies of wedges of expanding wood, are thus made ready, through months of torture, for the use of some inhuman Hindu ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... How can it be doubted that in this speech the Ghost accuses his wife and brother of adultery? Their marriage was not adultery. See how the ghastly revelation grows on Hamlet—his father in hell—murdered by his ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... Frank Rolls blowing his infernal whistle opposite my summer cottage at some ghastly hour in the morning. Even without getting out of bed, I could see from the window that it was no day for fishing. No, not raining exactly. I don't mean that, but one of those peculiar days—I don't mean wind—there was no wind, but a ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... that the faces of the speakers were revealed to me with extraordinary vividness, and their horrified expressions were even more startling than was the silent, ghastly figure of the Unknown. The scene comes back to me, here, in my little room in Norwood, with its every detail as clearly marked as on the night it was first enacted. The long range of cone-shaped mountains, darkly silhouetted against the silvery sky, and seemingly hushed in gaping expectancy; ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... entertainment having gone completely out of fashion in France. The papa of the farce (who was also the Jack Tar of the drama) reappears in the pantomime as Pierrot, the white-faced clown; and tremendously funny is he. There is a weird, elastic harlequin in a ghastly mask which he never lifts; and an amazing notary in an astounding nose, who proves to be Monsieur Goosequill. There is a humpback of hideous deformity and a Columbine of seraphic loveliness; and all Monsieur Goosequill's troubles come out of the fact ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... little slanted tables, each under an electric globe with a green shade. Here a curly-headed scoundrel with a corncob pipe was hurling paper balls the size of apples at the head of an industrious man who, under these difficulties, was trying to draw a picture of an awful wreck with ghastly-faced sailors frozen in the rigging. Near this pair a lady was challenging a German artist who resembled Napoleon III. with having been publicly drunk at a music hall on the previous night. Next to the great ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The blue course of a stream is there. On its banks stood Cairbar of Atha. His spear supports the king; the red eyes of his fear are sad. Cormac rises on his soul with all his ghastly wounds.' Precious memorandums from the pocket-book ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... him a tale with ghastly distinctness. It was that, unless they performed their feat of getting up the slope with the precision of machines, they were over the edge and ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the western quarter at a depth to the back; in this hell they appear at a distance like serpents of various kinds; and the most deceitful like vipers: but in the hell into which I was permitted to look, they appeared to me as if they were ghastly pale, with faces of chalk: and as they are mere concupiscences, they do not like to speak: and if they do speak, they only mutter and stammer various things, which are understood by none but their companions who are near them; but presently, as they sit or stand, they make themselves ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... it to take the jewels away again, mother would only think we hadn't looked out properly and let the burglars sneak in and nick them - or else the police will think WE'VE got them - or else that she's been fooling them. Oh, it's a pretty decent average ghastly mess this time, ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... who were dearest to them were descending into everlasting fire, must have often experienced pangs compared with which the torments of the martyr were insignificant. The confident assertions of the Methodist preacher and the ghastly images he continually evoked poisoned their imaginations, haunted them in every hour of weakness or depression, discolored all their judgments of the world, and added a tenfold horror to the darkness of the grave. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... officer gazed as though stricken with sudden horror, his blue eyes staring, his gaunt, pinched features ghastly white, and then Sergeant Haney and another trooper sprang from their horses and ran to his side. Weak, worn, starved, he had quailed at the dreadful sight, and was toppling head-foremost to ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... her, took it and more. "We're to sit together at the Ambassador's then—or at least you two are—with this new complication thrust up before you, all unexplained; and to look at each other with faces that pretend, for the ghastly hour, not to ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... gold, mother, The Queen has lands and gold, While you are forced to your empty breast A skeleton babe to hold,— A babe that is dying of want, mother, As I am dying now, With a ghastly look in its sunken eye, And famine upon ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... of the two candles went low, and then shone with a ghastly green effulgence. I looked up, quickly, and as I did so I saw the lights sink into a dull, ruddy tint; so that the room glowed with a strange, heavy, crimson twilight that gave the shadows behind the chairs and tables a double depth of blackness; and wherever the light struck, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... the destroyed area I met not one living person. The noise made by my feet kicking the broken glass was the only sound. The silence, the gaping holes in the sidewalk, the ghastly tributes to the power of the shells, and the complete desolation, made more desolate by the bright sunshine, gave you a curious feeling that the end of the world had come and ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... religion to him, and whose appearance only a few hours ago had been the most inspiring thing which had entered into his life? He looked across the lawn into the pine grove with steadfast eyes and knitted brows, and Da Souza watched him, ghastly and nervous. At least he ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... more like a wild beast than a man. "You're not fit to live! You're beasts of prey! No decent girl is safe from you!" His voice rose loud and thin and harsh. He was fast losing hold of himself. His ghastly face, bloody and horribly disfigured, made an appalling setting for his blazing eyes. Nearer and nearer the crowd he walked, gnashing and grinding his teeth till the foam fell from his lips. The wild fury of his Highland ancestors was turning him into a wild beast ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... should a sicht sae ghastly-like, Wi' rags, and banes, and skin, Hae nae impression on yon folks, But tell ye 'll stand ahin'; O what a contrast will ye shaw, To the glowrin' Lunnun folk, When in St James' ye tak' your stand, Wi' a hinging, toom meal pock. And sing, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... and though the savages made vigorous search for him, he remained undiscovered. You can imagine the horrible sight the fort presented when the sun went down, the soldiers in their red uniforms lying there scalped and mangled, a ghastly heap under the summer sky. And to just think it was only a short time ago, a little more than a ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... royal funerals on record, including a superb effigy of his Highness, robed in purple, ermined, sceptred, and diademed, to represent the life; and not till the 23rd of November was there an end to these ghastly splendours by a great procession from Somerset House to Westminster Abbey to deposit the effigy in the chapel of Henry VII., where the body itself had already been privately interred.—A week after this disappearance of ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... finish—nay, may sometimes be called rough as to workmanship. But, unhappily there are few of the lesser arts that have fallen so low as the plasterer's. The cast work one sees perpetually in pretentious rooms is a mere ghastly caricature of ornament, which no one is expected to look at if he can help it. It is simply meant to say, 'This house is built for a rich man.' The very material of it is all wrong, as, indeed, mostly happens ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... heavens. Thunder rolls, and the electric current cuts the air, illuminating the wild scene with a picturesque touch that is almost ghastly in its yellow white. ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... British ships to lay Constantinople under their guns, was a splendid conception worthy the military imagination of the daring ages when the British Empire was built and the days of the Spanish Main, but the only criterion in the ghastly business of war ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... wood which will bear edge enough to cut off heads and arms at one blow. When this valorous exploit was done, he comes to me laughing, as a token of triumph, delivered me my sword again, with abundance of suprising gestures, laying it, along with the bleeding and ghastly head of ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... hosts, Of ghosts, And that without reflectors; And creepy things With wings, And gaunt and grisly spectres! He can fill you crowds Of shrouds, And horrify you vastly; He can rack your brains With chains, And gibberings grim and ghastly. Then, if you plan it, he Changes organity With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity - Driving your foes to the verge of insanity. Barring tautology, In demonology, 'Lectro biology, Mystic nosology, Spirit philology, High class astrology, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... tenderly handled, and the soldiers who bore them upon their shoulders carried sad faces, too; for happily as yet the death of friends in the South was not made, by familiarity, a thing of course. And lastly—lifted so gently, and suffering so patiently—came the ghastly burdens of the stretchers. Strong men, maimed and torn, their muscular hands straining the handles of the litter with the bitter effort to repress complaint, the horrid crimson ooze marking the rough cloths thrown over them; delicate, fair-browed boys, who had gone forth a few days back so full ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... cap the climax, the German airplanes returned over the spot of their ghastly triumph and fired on the rescuers with machine guns. God will never forgive the Huns for that act alone. Nor will our comrades ever ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... of the traffickers, they were hurried away, from country to country, until the highest bidders obtained the virtue, honour, and the life of the victims of these inhuman traffickers. In my various journeyings these ghastly facts were over and over again brought to my knowledge. Their truth I was unfortunately frequently able to verify, so that from personal observation and knowledge I knew this state of things to exist, yea, to be ever on the increase. I knew that just as ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... kills as the un-stayed pest. It lies in the hands of the man who'd sell His hold on his life for an ice-bound hell. What care we for the fevered brain That's filled with ravings and thoughts insane, So long as we hold In our hands the gold?— The glistening, glittering, ghastly gold That comes at the end of the hunger and cold; That comes at the end of the awful thirst; That comes through the pain and torture accurst Of limbs that are racked and minds o'erthrown, The gold lies there and is all ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... seem," she said to Hannah, and then, as Richard's name dropped from Ethelyn's lips, she looked curiously at the flushed face so ghastly white, save where spots of crimson colored the cheeks, and at the mass of hair which Ethie had pushed up and off from the forehead it seemed to oppress ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... half frightened and much surprised, but the boy showed no symptoms of astonishment. His face relaxed into a ghastly leer, which showed the whole range of his ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... independence, girls of that class are used to the feeling of being specially protected, as, in fact, they are. This feeling accounts for nine tenths of their audacious gestures. Her face had gone completely colourless. Ghastly. Fancy having it brought home to her so brutally that she was the sort of person who must run away from the police! I believe she was pale with indignation, mostly, though there was, of course, also the concern for ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... The two ghastly women, squeezing each other tightly, followed the maneuvers of the boat. The music of La Grenonillere continued to sound in the distance, and appeared with its cadences to accompany the movements of the somber fisherman; ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... guilty conscience made Charles tremble lest at any moment she would lose footing and be precipitated down the dark and gaping chasms formed by glaciers and rocks. After hours of toil, and with imminent peril, they found the body of Cassier. A dark pallor had clouded his features, a ghastly stare, closed teeth, and clenched hand bespoke the last sentiment of human passion. Alvira trembled and stood powerless for a few moments. Still, necessity nerved her to action. She removed the money and valuables from the body of her father, and, in the midst of wailings that ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... up, and, for the first time, Lalage saw how he had changed. He was livid and ghastly, and, when he tried to speak, he caught his breath and coughed heavily. Lalage waited with pitiful anxiety ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... at once to the Morgue and found that the "unknown man" was indeed Mr. Jocelyn, and yet he had so changed, and a bullet-hole in his temple had given him such a ghastly appearance, that it was difficult to realize that he was the handsome, courtly gentleman who had first brought his beautiful daughter to ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... have ventured to shoot her without her permission, you know!" In a moment he repented of the ghastly pleasantry into which exasperation had led him. "Forgive me, Cheniston—the thing's got on my nerves ... I hardly ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... wondering why it had taken to rolling and earthquaking in that preposterous manner; or were thinking on the bald-headed mother he had left behind him in the African wilderness. When the loud laugh of the men saluted his ears, Jacko looked up as quickly and steadily as he could, and grinned a ghastly smile—or something like it—as if to say, "What are you ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... mutter that 'they didn't know as 'twas altogether such a bad thing as they was hung for sheep-stealing.' There were parsons then, as now, in every rural parish preaching and teaching something they called the Gospel. Why did they not rise as one man and denounce this ghastly iniquity, and demand its abolition? They did nothing of the sort; they enjoyed their pipes and grog ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... yet," he said with a ghastly affected airiness, and I sat there with the blood freezing in my veins, fearing he was going mad. All at once he ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... to the subtle nuances of thought! A profound change had come upon him, yet essentially he, the man, was unchanged. Except for those scars, the convoluted ridges of tissue, the livid patches and the ghastly hollows where once his cheeks and lips and forehead had been smooth and regular, he was as he had ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... proceeded from a spectre or the branch of a tree. Farther off was heard the vehement croaking of some crow whose nest had been flooded, and whose first sleep was disturbed. Close to her there was ghastly laughter. "Hee, hee! hoo, hoo!" and again Lenore started. Was it a malicious forest kobold, or only a night-owl? Nature spoke around her in a hundred melancholy tones. Lenore sometimes enjoyed, and sometimes trembled at the wild charm of this ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... weapon, and beat the rusty blade away, hacking through a few bramble strands, and there, deep down in a tunnel of strands and boughs, was the ghastly blood-besmeared countenance of a man, with hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, and a look of weakness that strongly resembled that which, to his sorrow, he had so often seen upon ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... middle classes professional men and men of moderate means, bore the chief burden of the war. They submitted to terrible taxation, to many privations, besides the universal gift of their young blood. We won the war and what was the result? The wealth of the country, through ghastly legislation, drifted into the hands of the profiteering classes, the wholesale shopkeepers, the ship owners, the factory owners, the mine owners. The professional man with two thousand a year was able to save a quarter of that before the war. After ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... she said. Her smile was ghastly. She turned to Jane on the open threshold. "He hasn't got the children with him, has he? I don't ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... Gropphusen, however, was smiling once more; though in sooth on her pallid countenance the smile had something of a ghastly look. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... used to twist the lad's arms and administer a certain number of hard blows upon them. This he did every day so long as the whim lasted. As for the smoking, poor Brokenribs had to smoke a certain number of pipes every day. A single pipe made him look ghastly, and the whole series made him dreadfully ill. I remember his white face at such times; but he attained his reward in becoming an ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... he picked up his rifle and ran for the forest. He knew that chance, or perhaps the will of the greater powers, had saved him again, but, as he ran, he shuddered many times, not from the cold, but at the ghastly fate that had overtaken the warriors. The impression faded by and by. When one is in a bitter struggle for life he does not have time to think long of the fate of others, and the savage wilderness through which he fled was ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sense she ever possessed: she did not faint, but she stiffened herself in the posture in which she sat, and with her hands turned down over the elbows of the huge chair, on which her arms were extended, she leaned back in all the frightful rigidity of a corpse, with a ghastly face, and ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... said Priscilla. "What on earth is the point of dropping off like that in the middle of the day? Ghastly laziness I ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... woman breathed an invocation to the Deity and sank back against the wall, her face ghastly ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... time for strengthening the defenses about Richmond, and for concentrating their forces there. Now they were ready to fall back without testing our magnificent works and huge guns, and lead us into the swamps of Chickahominy; where they hoped that the fever would complete the ghastly ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... story, that day when he 'lost his head,' while we were bidding each other good-bye before his journey. He didn't mention the name of the Duchess, but said only that he had leave, and was going to Holland on business. But while he was away a dreadful thing happened—the most ghastly misfortune—and as we were engaged to be married, he felt obliged when he came back to let me know ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... my heart is all trembling for thy sons, lest my father forthwith destroy them together with the strangers. Slumbering just now in a short-lived sleep such a ghastly dream did I see—may some god forbid its fulfilment and never mayst thou win for thyself bitter care on ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... remained for a considerable period, his clothes and hair (for his hat had fallen to the ground) being saturated with rain; while his face purple with blood, his eyes swollen and protruding from their orbits with a most ghastly look of agony and fear, showed how often the uneasiness of his horse, round whose body his legs were wrapped with the convulsive energy of despair, had brought him to ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... consigned to the oblivion of the grave, and for the five hundred of our fellow-subjects now suffering on Molokai." A noble instance of devotion has just been given by Father Damiens, a Belgian priest, who has gone to spend his life amidst the hideous scenes, and the sickness and death of the ghastly valley of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... hour's repose, while I took his place by Harry's bedside. It was between two and three o clock in the morning, and the first rays of early dawn, stealing in through the partially closed shutters, and mingling with the faint glimmer of the night-lamp, threw a pale and ghastly light over the surrounding objects, when I fancied that I heard my name pronounced in a low, scarcely audible voice. I glanced at Ellis, but his hard and regular breathing proved him to be sound asleep. I next turned towards the ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... like a sea-urchin; his face was quite disfigured with black marks of violence; behind his bleeding left ear still stuck the cigarette. His swollen upper lip was drawn sideways and gave him the expression of a ghastly smile. His eyes looked out helpless, dispirited, from his ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... acts is often noble. The long speech of York, in Act I, coming, as it does, after a clash of minds turbid with passion, is most noble. It gives a terror to what follows. The calm mind makes no mistake. The judgment of a man without heart seems as infallible as fate, as beautiful, and as ghastly. All happens as he foresees. All the cruelty and bloodiness of the latter half of the play come from that man's beautifully clear, cool brain. He stands detached. One little glimmer of heart in him would alter ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... lighted cabin, Levy with his arms bound behind him, had watched the game of dice as calmly as though his life did not lie in the hands of the two who played for such a ghastly stake. Out on the deck, the mutineers drank and jested and sang uproariously in their new freedom. He wondered if that were to be the end: a short plank, a blow to thrust him into the dark waves of the ocean which he had loved so well. Uriah closed his eyes, swaying ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... her, for it seemed to her that if life were really what she had believed it to be last night, these men and women could not walk so buoyantly, could not smile so gaily, could not spend so much thought and time on the way they looked and the things they wore. "No, it must have been a mistake, a ghastly mistake," she insisted almost passionately. "Some day we shall laugh over it together as we laughed over my jealousy of Abby. He never loved Abby, not for a minute, and yet I imagined that he did and suffered agony because of it." ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... and hypochondriac of the eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club, between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... literrally dyed with the same hue as the ground. He started up in terror; a long vivid flash lingering more than a minute in the air, disclosed the object against which he had fallen; and paralyzed with horror, pale, ghastly, as if suddenly turned to stone, he remained. He uttered no word nor cry; but flash after flash played around him, and still beheld him gazing in stupefied and motionless horror on the ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... rushes to him and places his arm round him. With his foot he drags a chair nearer, into which Sir Hastings falls with a heavy groan. It is only a momentary attack, however; in a little while the leaden hue clears away, and, though still ghastly, his face looks ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... of the poor are alike as graves that appear not;—only their murmur, that sayeth "it is not enough," sounds deeper beneath us every hour; nay, the whole earth, and not only the cities of it, sends forth that ghastly cry; and her fruitful plains have become slime-pits, and her fair estuaries, gulfs of death; for us, the Mountain of the Lord has become only Golgotha, and the sound of the new song before the Throne is drowned in the rolling death-rattle of the nations, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in every direction;—what could it mean? I awoke the chief, and the mystery was solved. He appeared to be just recovering from the effects of the night's debauch,—the Iroquois were in the camp. Mine host "grinned horribly a ghastly smile" as he placed himself, rather unsteadily, in a sitting posture in his bed, and in a hoarse tremulous voice bade me welcome, at the same time rousing his better-half, who appeared to be in the same happy state ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... dare to tell you the rest of this story as the old Pottawatomie told it to me, for it is near bedtime and these are the very trees between which the ghostly, ghastly figures flitted in the darkness. It is all past and gone now and you need have no fear. You boys on the outer edge who are crowding up to the light of the camp-fire are just as safe as the fellows in the middle. The thing to interest you is what the Indians did ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... oak wainscot. A large and cheerful fire and a number of gas-jets illuminated the company. The Prince and his follower made the number up to eighteen. Most of the party were smoking, and drinking champagne; a feverish hilarity reigned, with sudden and rather ghastly pauses. ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I snapped at her. And her ghastly attempt at a grin, with her swollen nose and red eyes, made me hysterical. I laughed and cried together, and pretty soon, like the two old fools we were, we were sitting together ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... generous gondolier, and we go to the Hall—a dismal, bleak place, ghastly with the memories of last year's opulence and plenty, and here Giuseppe's fare is swelled by the stranger's mite. But here Giuseppe tells me of the "Relief Boat" which leaves for the flooded district in the interior, and here, profiting by the lesson he has taught me, I make the resolve ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... of impending disaster, once more invaded him. Suddenly it revealed itself in definite terms. A ghastly notion ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... fanaticism. And the new Pope Gregory sang Te Deum in solemn state; and the morose monarch of Spain laughed aloud in unwonted glee; but Charles of France, men said, was haunted to the hour of his death by red visions of that ghastly carnival of blood. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... echoed, and stopped the bearers who laid their ghastly burden down, having little relish in the task. Yes, it was in ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... dump and noisome, but not by any means so bad as might have been expected, considering the number of months which had elapsed since last the vault was opened to receive one of its ghastly and ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... as they had charged together, and her mare, enraged and intoxicated with noise and terror, had torn away at full speed that had outstripped even the swiftest of her Spahis. A little farther on a dog's moan caught her ear; she turned and looked across. Upright, among a ghastly pile of men and chargers, sat the small, snowy poodle of the Chasseurs, beating the air with its little paws, as it had been taught to do when it needed anything, and howling ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... reply. As Cuthbert spoke the ruddy color on his cheeks had been replaced by a ghastly pallor. An expression of bewilderment had come across his face, the perspiration stood out in big ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... were determined to hang him; he was running for his life. He took me to a hill from which I could see the Garrison, and the American flag flying over it. I looked, and saw we were standing in blood up to our knees, while here and there ghastly white bones shone above the red surface. Just then, below me I saw crowds of people running. "What is it?" I asked. "It means that in another instant they will commence to shell the town. Save yourself." "But Will—I ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... perspective of so many generations. And in that strange century the sorrow and the pain of a world in travail are as evident as its joy. The feverish excitement with which it grasped at life and pleasure is counterbalanced, and explained by the ever-present horror of death in its most ghastly forms. ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... saw the bushes on the opposite shore move, and a face, painted and ghastly, was thrust out. Others followed, a half-dozen altogether, and Henry saw them surveying the river and examining his own shore. The muzzle of his rifle moved forward a few inches more, but he knew that it would ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... looked Olivier in the face,— Ghastly paleness was there to trace; Forth from his wound did the bright blood flow, And rain in showers to the earth below. "O God!" said Roland, "is this the end Of all thy prowess, my gentle friend? ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... the Royal Servian Government made itself guilty, has lasted up to the moment in which the events of June 28th demonstrated to the entire world the ghastly consequences of such sufferance. ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... is once more the Rudin type—utterly irresolute, with a mind teeming with ideas and surging with ambition. He wants to be a Russian Napoleon, with a completely subservient conscience, but instead of murdering on a large scale, like his ideal, he butchers two inoffensive old women. Although the ghastly details of this double murder are given with definite realism, Dostoevski's interest is wholly in the criminal psychology of the affair, in the analysis of Raskolnikov's mind before, during, and chiefly after the murder; for it is the mind, and not the bodily ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... such as to strongly favour the second. Whilst the hunters had been sedulously pursuing their task the sky had gradually lost its pristine purity of blue and had become a pale colourless grey, in which the sun seemed to hang like a ghastly white radiant ball, shorn of his beams. The distant landscape first became unnaturally clear and distinct in all its details and then became veiled in a sort of murky haze. Presently a sharply defined ridge of cloud made its appearance above the south- ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... alone with the apparently dying man, she felt that a silent, yet mighty struggle was going on between the forces of life and death. She feared death would obtain the victory. By a terrible fascination, her eyes became fixed on the ghastly face over which she fancied she could perceive, more and more distinctly, shadows cast by the hand of the destroyer. Every moment she thought of recalling her mother, but feared that the slightest jarring movement of the atmosphere might stop at once that feeble respiration. So she remained, watching ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... education, and in almost every respect. She is surrounded by the most numerous and delicate attentions. Yet she is not satisfied.... The Anglo-Saxon 'new woman' is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and destined to be the most ghastly failure of the century." Apart from the deprecation—perhaps well placed—which is contained in this presentment, it adds nothing but obscurity to the woman question. The grievance of the new woman is made up of those things which this typical characterization ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... demanded currency, but the cashier had become alarmed by the investigations made by the General and had temporized—said he must consult the president, and asked the major to call two hours later, whereat Burleigh had taken alarm. He was looking ghastly, said the cashier. It was apparent to every one that mentally, bodily, or both, the lately debonair and successful man of the ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... "I must say, you know—what? Oh, of course, it was a ghastly affair all along. But you know all that, as well as I do. Why, her temper! Oh, awful! I've seen her myself dead-white in one of her rages—she had hold of a wine-glass so hard that it snapped, and cut her hand. She looked at the blood—she didn't know ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... turns out that the curate is well connected. (Mitchener staggers at the shock. Speechless he contemplates Balsquith with a wild and ghastly stare; then reels into his chair and buries his face in his hands over the blotter. Balsquith continues remorselessly, stooping over him to rub it in.) He has three aunts in the peerage; and Lady Richmond's one of them; (Mitchener utters a heartrending groan) ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... been expected. From time to time, it is true, Northmour or I would rise from table and make a round of the defences; and, on each of these occasions, Mr. Huddlestone was recalled to a sense of his tragic predicament, glanced up with ghastly eyes, and bore for an instant on his countenance the stamp of terror. But he hastened to empty his glass, wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and joined ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... saluting. Then, his face still a ghastly hue, he turned and marched from the room, not venturing, under the eyes of the O.C., to look at ...
— Dave Darrin's First Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
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