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More "Ordeal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... meaning for us when rightly understood. He had all that birth, breeding, education, and tradition could give. The resources of our American life and civilization could produce nothing better. How would he and such men as he stand the great ordeal when it came? If wealth, education, and breeding were to result in a class who could only carp and criticize, accumulate money, give way to self-indulgence, and cherish low foreign ideals, then would it have appeared that there was a radical unsoundness in our ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... their divisions and their absorption in petty schemes of personal aggrandisement left Europe at the mercy of uncivilised invaders. In the ninth and tenth centuries, medieval society experienced the same ordeal to which the Roman Empire had been subjected in the fifth. From the North and from the East a new generation of barbarians, perceiving the patent signs of weakness, began to break through the frontiers in search of ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... probably pass through the same ordeal as liberty in every other form. It can only dictate laws, after having first taken thorough possession of men's minds. If, then, it be true that a reform, to be firmly established, must be generally understood, it follows that nothing can so much retard ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... himself for an ordeal, was keyed to a high note, and the quiet, smiling girl near him made ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... He wished to fight, he was fully determined to fight, and yet, in spite of all his mental effort, in spite of the exertion of all his will power, he felt that he could not even preserve the strength necessary to carry him through the ordeal. He tried to conjure up a picture of the duel, his own attitude, and ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... every faculty. His mind sank to stupor. Time no longer possessed dimensions, but blew into a vast Present which was never going to cease. If he kept at it a half-hour after this condition manifested itself he emerged from the ordeal as tired and sleepy as though he had undergone hard physical labour. It was more than mere boredom; it was ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... which the world had been pleased to acknowledge in the creations of Old Mortality, the Bride of Lammermoor, and others of these narratives. But I, nevertheless, threw the manuscripts into my drawer, resolving not to think of committing them to the Ballantynian ordeal, until I could either obtain the assistance of some capable person to supply deficiencies, and correct errors, so as they might face the public with credit, or perhaps numerous and more serious avocations might permit me to dedicate my own time and ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... already made the acquaintance of the elect twenty who were to be her house companions, but that was a comparatively slight affair compared with the ordeal of her introduction to the school as a whole. In spite of her outward appearance of sangfroid, she felt her heart thumping a little as she marched into the large lecture hall for "call over". It needs a certain courage to face seventy-two ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... object of such an attempt; the second that more care had not been taken by those responsible for his safety in travelling; and the third was admiration for the perfect coolness and obvious bravery which he showed during and after the ordeal. Everywhere tributes of sympathy were tendered in language of unstinted appreciation of the Heir Apparent's public services and character. Speaking at Acton, on the same evening, Lord George Hamilton, M.P., said: "What could have induced any ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... good you are," Evadne cried, feeling fully for the first time how much she had in heart been dreading the ordeal of having perhaps to ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the self-confident, it was a welcome and uplifting exercise. To the timid and self-distrustful it was a terrible ordeal. To the intellectual it was a perpetual challenge to skepticism. Even Bunyan puts as his first and worst temptation, "to question the being of God and the truth of his gospel." To the prosaic and practical minds ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... off towards the village, Dick in the highest of glee, and chattering and questioning about everything he saw, Will getting more and more quiet and lower of spirit as he thought of the ordeal that he ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... spent to help his cause, he declared in all humility that he felt he was too great a sinner for God to work a miracle in his behalf; but he proposed another challenge: he would try with Savonarola the ordeal of fire. He knew, he said, that he must perish, but at least he should perish avenging the cause of religion, since he was certain to involve in his destruction the tempter who plunged so many souls beside ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Volunteer Force, he was fully prepared to meet Dan Gallaher on the field of battle—Dan leading the National Volunteers. He looked forward with something like pleasure to the final settlement of the Home Rule question by the ordeal of battle. In the meanwhile he and Dan Gallaher by no means hated each other, and were occasionally in full sympathy when the police or some ridiculous Government department made trouble ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... scenes of disaster, saw the frightful ruin, heard the stories of Christians and missionaries, faced the little companies of survivors and learned more of the awful ordeal through which they had passed, I marvelled, not that some yielded, but that so many stood steadfast. Edicts were issued commanding them to recant on pain of dire punishment, but promising protection to those who obeyed. The following proclamation posted on the wall of the yamen at Ching-chou-fu ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... terrible about age, it would seem, not only to its possessor, but even to those who must encounter it second hand, and Steve was not without his qualms. Although in his wooing he had not for one moment lost his gentle self-possession, he had entirely forgotten about the ordeal of an interview with Nannie's guardians until she reminded him by saying ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... what he had said, or to lie under any illusion as to the girl's knowledge of her peril. Claude's eyes met hers: and for a moment the anguished human soul peered through the mask of constancy, for a moment the woman in her, shrinking from the ordeal and the fire, from shame and death, thrust aside the veil, and held out quivering, piteous hands to him. But it was for a moment only. Before he could speak she was brave as before, quiet as he had ever seen her, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... abiding obsession—if we may call his besetment thus—changed in practically all essential regards the manners and the practices of his daily life. After the shooting he never returned to his mill. He could not bring himself to endure the ordeal of revisiting the scene of the killing. So the mill stood empty and silent, just as he left it that night when he rode to town with the sheriff, until after his brother's death; and then with all possible dispatch he sold it, its fixtures, contents ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... would fight in mortal combat. If one knight accused the other of crime or dishonour, the latter might challenge him to fight with swords or lances; and, according to the superstition of the times, the victor was considered to be the one who spoke the truth. But this ordeal combat was far removed from the ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... chivalry, the child is instructed in the rite and familiarized with the idea as an honourable expiation of crime or blotting out of disgrace. If the hour comes, he is prepared for it, and gravely faces an ordeal which early training has robbed of half its horrors. In what other country in the world does a man learn that the last tribute of affection which he may have to pay to his best friend may be to act ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... terms very quietly; seeing very few people, making very few friends, reading after his own fashion with an obstinate indifference to all systems of study, and shutting his eyes persistently to the near approach of the final ordeal. Things were in this condition when he received a sudden telegram calling him home. "Come at once, or you will be too late," was the message. The Rector, to whom he rushed at once, looked at it coldly. He was not fond of giving ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... first, I had felt it would be all but impossible for me to attend Mrs. Porter's dinner, my talk with Blakely had so raised my spirits that now I was able to face the ordeal with something very like serenity. What did it matter? What did anything matter, so long as Blakely loved me? Then, too, I knew I was looking my very best; my white lace gown was a dream; Valentine had never ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... to his seat over the clock, whilst noble lords jostled each other in the effort to obtain seats in the limited space allotted to them. It happened that the debutant was destined to undergo a serious and unexpected ordeal. His time should have come not later than five o'clock, questions being then over, and the House permitted to settle down to the business of the day. But there intervened a riotous scene, arising on a question of a breach ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the peaceful seclusion of the railway carriage the duke's excitement had returned; and now that the real ordeal was at hand, he had grown uncommonly nervous. It may be that he was unused to deceit. He had set Emily Gibbs beside the chauffeur that he might have Pollyooly to himself; and all the way he poured jumbled ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... Having gone through this ordeal, I reached the inn at Plymouth, where I found my captain, and presented my father's letter. He surveyed me from top to toe, and desired the pleasure of my company to dinner at six o'clock. "In the mean time," he said, "as it is now only eleven, you may go aboard, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... began to clamor its call to service, and nearly the whole population of Harding took its way to the performance. I had taken the precaution to set my watch fifteen minutes fast. Tom was nervously preparing himself for the ordeal. He fidgeted himself into his best suit an hour before the time, carried his hat about the room in the most aimless and demented way and consulted his watch a hundred times. I was to accompany him to church, and I spent the time fussing about the room, doing the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... me!" he gasped, very much as if he were undergoing that watery ordeal. "Egad, sir! Lord love your ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... 1858, transferred to the frigate Sabine for passage home to his examination for the grade of passed midshipman. Passing that ordeal satisfactorily, aided by handsome commendatory letters from his commanding officers, he spent three happy months at home, and then received orders for duty on board the steamer Sumter, as acting master, the ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... pleasure had vanished by the time night came, and I seemed only just to have closed my eyes when Bill came, and, with a rough shake or two, informed me that the time had come. Any hope that I might have had of escaping the ordeal was at once dispelled by his expectant demeanour, and the helpful way in which he assisted me with my clothes, and, yawning terribly, I ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... the antagonism between modern science and the Pentateuch be affected. The statements I have made are public property. If you think they are in any way erroneous I must ask you to take upon yourself the same amount of responsibility as I have done, and submit your objections to the same ordeal. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... obliged to return after dinner to the classroom, and she was not free until three o'clock, when she handed in her last paper, and was told by Miss Rowe that she might go and join the other girls in the grounds. Very much relieved that her ordeal was over at last, she put on her hat and strolled across the quadrangle under an archway into the garden beyond. She felt tired out and languid. It was a warm September day, and the unwonted exertion of answering so many questions ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... has now), the profound gratitude of fifty of his comrades. Ever doing his duty bravely and unflinchingly, he had, now, ransomed from the enemy, men who would have consented to undergo any ordeal for that boon. The citizens of Charleston hastened to offer us the traditional hospitality of their city. General Jones had informed them of the names of our party, and they had settled among themselves where each man was to be taken care ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... and she winced and closed her eyes with a slight shudder; but though she shrank from the ordeal, she resolved to make it. Lady Wolfer had been kind to her, had won her love, and, more than all else, had confided in her, and she—Nell—would ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... {19} she found her condition much altered; for it was resolved, and her destiny had decreed it, for to set her apprentice in the school of affliction, and to draw her through that ordeal-fire of trial, the better to mould and fashion her to rule and sovereignty: which finished, Fortune calling to mind that the time of her servitude was expired, gave up her indentures, and therewith delivered ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... by the possibilities, by the sharp actualities indeed, that she accepted. She took our friend out, she showed her at home, never attempted to hide or to betray her, played her no trick whatever so long as the ordeal lasted. She drank deep, on her side too, of the cup—the cup that for her own lips could only be bitterness. There was, I think, scarce a special success of her companion's at which she wasn't personally present. Mrs. Munden's theory of the ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... fist had struck him; otherwise he was no more discomposed than usual, and, being put on to construe soon after entering the school, acquitted himself very well and with the most perfect sang froid. Fortunately Saurin was not subjected to the same ordeal or he would have been considerably flustered, if not totally unable to fix his mind on the subject; and he might have excited suspicion as to something unusual going on, which again might have caused inquiry, and so spoiled sport. But he was not called ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... unaware that he was observing me; nor was I surprised when, at the end of the exhausting ordeal, he broke through the crowd—with oh, such dear impetuosity!—and asked my uncle to present him, while I, trembling at his approach, looked in the other direction, for I felt the crimson in my cheeks—I who had been out three seasons! Then I turned and raised my eyes ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... results we may hope that this revolution will give birth to a better system of International Law. Would there were reason to hope that it might lead to the erection of some high tribunal of justice among nations to supersede forever the dreadful and uncertain ordeal of war! Has the Government of England, in any case where your right was clear, really done you a wrong? If it has, I trust that the English nation, temperately and respectfully approached, as a proud nation requires to be, will surely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... calmness and intrepidity. For several days they were obliged to witness the tortures inflicted on their fellow-disciples, that they might, if possible, be intimidated by the appalling spectacle. After passing through this ordeal, the torture was applied to themselves. Ponticus soon sunk under his sufferings; but Blandina still survived. When she had sustained the agony of the heated iron chair, she was put into a net and thrown to a wild bull that she might be ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... in medicine; and every headsman is a doctor. No Arab has ever tried to convert them, but occasionally a slave taken to the coast has been circumcised in order to be clean; some of them pray, and say they know not the ordeal or muavi. The Nassick boys failed me when I tried to communicate some knowledge through them. They say they do not understand the Makonde language, though some told me that they came from Ndonde's, which is the head-quarters ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... interview one of the young ladies through a grating, while several persons, who refused to understand that they were not wanted, stood listening. Burton at once perceived that it would be an exhausting ordeal to make love in such circumstances, but he resolved to try, and ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... to face the usual ordeal of having to "write" as best I could a motto for use as a wall picture. Our lettering, when done with a brush, falls pitifully behind Chinese characters in decorative value, and our mottoes will not readily translate into Japanese. I was often grateful ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... finally "bogged" in a quagmire of absurdities. Not long ago, shortly after the publication of his book, the lawyer had occasion to cross-examine a modest-looking young woman as to the speed of an electric car. The witness seemed conscious that she was about to undergo a severe ordeal, and Mr. Wellman, feeling himself complete master of the situation, began in his ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... branches of commerce, so far as I could judge, were in a state of decay, owing partly to these exactions, and partly to the recovery of debts being now very much neglected in the courts of justice, which seems to be one of the causes of the increase of trials by ordeal. A poor creditor, in general, has no resource against a powerful debtor, except sitting Dherna on him; and unless the creditor be a Brahman, he may sit long enough ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... Half an hour later, back in the sickbay, the Black Doctor was awake, breathing slowly and easily without need of supplemental oxygen. Only the fine sweat standing out on his forehead gave indication of the ordeal he had been through. ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... limp, unconscious form into the parlor, and after some efforts managed to bring her out of the faint, and when she had fully recovered so as to withstand the ordeal, she slowly repeated to me the story of her summer's experience, how Foreman McDonald, unable to be without his Helen, had wasted to a shadow of his former self; and in August had died of a broken heart, and how only the thoughts that upon her own frail self had ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... by reprisals, but they rarely pursued a foe. Offences among themselves were treated according to their supposed enormity: the culprit had to stand while a certain number of spears were thrown at him. By this ordeal he was cleared, and the keenness of his eye and the agility of his motions, usually enabled him to escape a fatal wound. Faults, of slighter consequence, were punished without damage: the transgressor ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... you in the strongest manner, not only that I was inexpressibly delighted myself by the readiness with which Charley went through this ordeal with a stranger, but that I also saw you would have been well pleased and much gratified if you could have seen Mr. Cookesley afterwards. He had evidently not expected such a result, and took it as not at ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... Tarzan and Taug forced their adversaries. Teeka followed slowly. She scarce knew what to do. She was lame and sore and exhausted from the frightful ordeal through which she had passed, and she had the confidence of her sex in the prowess of her mate and the other bull of her tribe—they would not need the help of a she in their battle with these ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... as water, What have they given your children in return? A heritage of servitude and woes, A blindfold bondage, where your hire is blows. 70 What! do not yet the red-hot ploughshares burn,[239] O'er which you stumble in a false ordeal, And deem this proof of loyalty the real; Kissing the hand that guides you to your scars, And glorying as you tread the glowing bars? All that your Sires have left you, all that Time Bequeaths ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Gondals and Solala Vernon, the material for quite other books was in poor Anne's mind. She was then teaching in the family at Thorpe Green, where Branwell joined her as tutor in 1843, and where, owing to events that are still a mystery, she seems to have passed through an ordeal that left her shattered in health and nerve, with nothing gained but those melancholy and repulsive memories that she was afterwards to embody in 'Wildfell Hall.' She seems, indeed, to have been ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... silk, a mark for Lady Rythdale's eyes and tongue. She sat drooping a little with indignation and shame, when Mr. Carlisle came up. He had seen from a distance the tint of his lady's cheeks, and judged that she was going through some sort of an ordeal. But though he came to protect, he stood still to enjoy. The picture was so very pretty. The mother and son ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... entered, the women simultaneously rose, and coming modestly forward to Mr Wilson, who was the senior of the party, saluted him, one after another! I had been told that this was a custom of the ladies on Christmas Day, and was consequently not quite unprepared to go through the ordeal. But when I looked at the superhuman ugliness of some of the old ones—when I gazed at the immense, and in some cases toothless, chasms that were pressed to my senior's lips, and that gradually, like a hideous nightmare, ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... which she had captured the parti of the county; some, mostly women, were already jealous of her. A few of the older people here and there, both men and women—but after all they shook hands like the rest!—knew perfectly well that the girl must be going through an ordeal, were touched by the signs of thought and storm in the face, and looked back ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lived in a state of feverish expectancy and subdued excitement. She had fancied from her father's tone in speaking that there had been some talk of a betrothal between him and his neighbour, and that Reuben might take her consent for granted. The idea made her restless and unhappy. She wished the ordeal of refusing him over. She believed she was right in taking this step; but it was a hard one, and she was sometimes afraid of her own courage. The more she thought of the matter the more she convinced herself that Reuben's love was one of compassion ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... before Chicago. His perspective might thus be corrected in a natural manner, and the process would in various ways be salutary. It is a nice question how many of the opinions formed on the first visit—and especially the most convinced and positive opinions—would survive the ordeal of the second. ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... His eyes were more meditative, and his expression was more sad. He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very slime-pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... with Mrs. Willard's assistance she always looked the beautiful country cousin. Other girls remarked upon the monotony of her dress, but then the gentlemen did not care that one woolen gown did duty on many occasions. Some women can stand the ordeal of a uniform for church and theater, party ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... deacons in the responses, though only with the notes not with the words. When at last it came to taking leave of the dead, I bowed low, but did not give the last kiss. Mr. Ratsch, on the contrary, went through this terrible ordeal with the utmost composure, and with a deferential inclination of his person invited the officer of the Stanislas ribbon to the coffin, as though offering him entertainment, and picking his children up under the arms swung them up in turn and ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the strongest power must necessarily prevail. It was a conflict of rights before a watching God of battles, in which the greatest right could be trusted to emerge victorious. War between States was analogous to the ordeal of battle between individuals: it was a legal way of testing rights. Now ordeal by battle was a mode of procedure in courts of law, and a mode of procedure whose conduct and control belonged to the clergy. If, therefore, war between States is analogous to ordeal, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... newspaper without reading in it a fancied libel on himself. First he bought laudanum, and had gone out into the fields with the intention of swallowing it, when the love of life suggested another way of escaping the dreadful ordeal. He might sell all he had, fly to France, change his religion, and bury himself in a monastery. He went home to pack up; but while he was looking over his portmanteau, his mood changed, and he again ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... a clan council, consisting of chiefs (tecuhtli) elected by the clan, and inducted into office after a cruel religious ordeal, in which the candidate was bruised, tortured, and half starved. An executive department was more clearly differentiated from the council than among the Indians of the lower status. The clan (calpulli) had an official ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... arrival at Possum Gully father was much away on business, and so on my mother fell the ordeal of receiving the ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... irony at the daily rehearsal! With how sad a smile must he have received the compliments of Mr. Dimonds on his fine performance, knowing how different it would all be 'on the night! 'Nothing could have steeled him to the ordeal but his great love. He must have wavered, had not the exaltation of his love protected him. But the jeers of the mob were music in his hearing, his wounds love-symbols. Then came the girl's cruel ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... for the church of Smyrna are predicted; but he "which was dead, and is alive forevermore," having passed through the ordeal of suffering and death himself, stands in a position to speak words of comfort and consolation, assuring them in the strongest terms that, although wicked men and the devil may cast them into prison and persecute them unto the death, yet "he that overcometh ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... supposed to represent the hand acting on behalf of the subcaste, which is considered the body. The panchayat, however, was not the original judge. It was at first the god before whom the parties pleaded their cause, and the god who gave judgment by the method of trial by ordeal. This was probably the general character of primitive justice, and in some of the lower castes the ordeal is still resorted to for decisions. The tribe or subcaste attended as jurors or assessors, and carried out ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... spot by description; and then he was allowed to pass out, his spirits flagging with the ordeal, and with the knowledge that his connection with the manufacture of brush whiskey was suspected by the coroner's jury, suggesting an adequate motive on his part for waylaying a stranger supposed to be of the revenue force. He felt the dash of the rain in his face as he stood aside to make way ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... stranger's, image is throned in her soul. She who had moved in the world so variously, who had received so much homage and been accustomed from her childhood to all that is considered accomplished and fascinating in man, and had passed through the ordeal with a calm clear spirit; behold, she is no longer the mistress of her thoughts or feelings; she had fallen before a glance, and yielded in an instant to ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... still associated in their breasts with affectionate memories; the first act of this kind would have been one appealing to every generous motive of those people, again to reconsider the question of how we could live together, and through that bloody ordeal to have brought us into the position in which our fathers left us. There need have been no collision, as there could have been no question of property which that State was not ready to meet. If it was a question of dollars and cents, they came here to adjust it. If it was ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... careful of the water; for he knew not how long he must stay there; and he taught Bub to eat very slowly, as he had heard his father say that the hunters did so on the plains to prevent thirst. It was a terrible ordeal for a boy of his tender years to witness the horrid sights transpiring around him; and then, when the neighboring cabins were fired, he was filled with fear, lest the cinders would set the ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... keep watch upon her, so that she could not take a single step, even from one apartment of her palace to another, without being observed. Never was young and beautiful widow exposed to so terrible an ordeal. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... the principal of Teague's School of Engineering suddenly emerges from his private office, hangs up a card labelled "No Smoking during Lectures" and proceeds to feed us with the irreducible minimum of information necessary for our ordeal. By long practice, astute contriving, and careful cross-examination of successful pupils he has arrived at such a pass that he seems to know more about the examiner's mind than that gentleman himself. He repeats slowly and deliberately the ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... supposed that the snow-walls melted under this ordeal; nothing of the sort. Their tendency to do so was checked effectually, not only by a sharp frost, but by the solid backing of snow behind them; and the little that did give way in close proximity to the fire ran unobtrusively ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... allowed to enter the "boat of the Sun," and was led by good spirits to Aahlu (Elysium), to the "pools of peace" and the dwelling-place of Osiris. If, on the contrary, the good deeds were insufficient, if the ordeal was not passed, then the unhappy soul was sentenced, according to its deserts, to begin a round of transmigrations into the bodies of more or less unclean animals, the number, nature, and duration of the transmigrations depending on the degree of the deceased's ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... as she drew her smoking skirt away from the fire. But she still stood close to the cheerful blaze, one foot on the fender, the green cloth skirt drawn up, leaving the more delicate fabric of her silk petticoat to meet the fiery ordeal. 'If it annoys you to hear me say that's my view of charity, why, don't make me talk about it;' but the face she turned for an instant over her shoulder was far gentler than her words. 'And don't in future'—she was again looking down into the fire, and she spoke ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... of her director, for whom, however, she felt more aversion than confidence. Nothing consoled her. She had to be compelled to receive Holy Communion, of which she believed herself unworthy, and from which she abstained for a considerable time. Only those who have passed through a similar ordeal can judge of her state of mind at that time, or form any idea of what she suffered. But in order to be more explanatory, it will again be necessary to refer to ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... studied as a soldier, a statesman, an organizer, a politician. In all he was undeniably great. But men will always like to know something about him as a man. Can he stand that ordeal? These volumes will answer that question. They are written by one who joined the First Consul at the Hospice on Mt. St. Bernard, on his way to Marengo, in June, 1800, and who was with him as his chief personal attendant, day and night, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... The Master Builder. Ibsen had come to Berlin in February 1891 for the first performance of Hedda Gabler. Such experiences were always a trial to him, and he felt greatly relieved when they were over. Packing, too, he detested; and Elias having helped him through this terrible ordeal, the two sat down to lunch together, while awaiting the train. An expansive mood descended upon Ibsen, and chuckling over his champagne glass, he said: "Do you know, my next play is already hovering before me—of course in vague outline. ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... Anglo-Saxons. I know not how they do it, but I know not a young fellow appeared at the governor's house in the evening who had apparently taken more than was good for him; and yet had our Philadelphia lads been through the ordeal of proffered glasses all day long, I warrant there would not have been a corporal's guard able to line up in good order at the governor's ball. But all these young St. Louis Frenchmen were out in fine feather, ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... at last Helen and he did meet, the day before Thanksgiving, their meeting was not at all the dreadful ordeal he had feared. Her greeting was as frank and cordial as it had always been, and there was no reproach in her tone or manner. She did not even ask him why he had stopped writing. It was he, himself, who referred ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... to me is this silence that you have imposed on me!' I cried; 'but I would rather have had some sharper ordeal still.' And she smiled upon the intoxication in my eyes; she did not reject my admiration in any ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... were, therefore, instructive rather than interesting, as he used infinite care in preparing them; but appearing before his classes was so dreaded by him that he is said to have been in the habit of taking a half-drachm of laudanum before each lecture to nerve him for the ordeal. One is led to wonder by what name he shall designate that quality of mind that renders a bold and fearless surgeon like Hunter, who is undaunted in the face of hazardous and dangerous operations, a stumbling, halting, and "frightened" speaker before a little band of, at most, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... and syllabax. This searching ordeal. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents. Wait. I mean, wartsblood ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... she had not been shattered like an egg shell; but when, later on, we came to dismember her, we were still more amazed to find how little damage, comparatively speaking, she had sustained while passing through that fearful ordeal on the reef, and what extraordinary exertions were needed to wrench her several parts asunder. But a detailed description of the varied schemes to which we were obliged to resort in order to effect our purpose would be of no interest to the general reader; I will therefore content myself ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... which makes even the neighboring treetops invisible, while the mothers have their infants laid away under the bushes with only a shawl between them and the cold ground. In their ball plays also each young man, before going into the game, is subjected to an ordeal of dancing, bleeding, and cold plunge baths, without food or sleep, which must unquestionably waste his ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... repression of crime we find the origin of trial by jury, so often attributed to earlier times. Twelve lawful men of each hundred, with four from each township, were sworn to present those who were known or reputed as criminals within their district for trial by ordeal. The jurors were thus not merely witnesses, but sworn to act as judges also in determining the value of the charge, and it is this double character of Henry's jurors that has descended to our "grand jury," who still remain charged with the duty of presenting criminals for trial after examination ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... touch was "simply contamination." These were the opposed principles in which Maisie was to be educated—she was to fit them together as she might. Nothing could have been more touching at first than her failure to suspect the ordeal that awaited her little unspotted soul. There were persons horrified to think what those in charge of it would combine to try to make of it: no one could conceive in advance that they would be able ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... wife, whose flower-like face peeped out from a nest of white fur. Covertly he squeezed her hand, and was rewarded with a swift, half coquettish glance, in which he read trust and contentment. The dreadful ordeal through which she had passed had accomplished that which no physician in Europe could have hoped for, since no physician would have dared to adopt such drastic measures. Actuated by deliberate cruelty, and with the design of bringing ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... command in the United States army has, of late years, become, in many instances, very unfortunate. Perhaps it is this that has taught our legislators a lesson. But there is a truth which lies above this difficulty. The severe ordeal necessary to be gone through with at West Point, in order to make military men of the proper standard, has very naturally raised a jealousy between these two classes of men. This is very healthy for the country, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... successfully, and Varley had issued from the operating-room with the look of a man who had gone through an ordeal which had taxed his nerve to the utmost, to find Valerie Meydon waiting, with a piteous, dazed look in her eyes. But this look passed when she heard him say, "All right!" The words brought a sense of relief, for if he had failed it would have seemed almost ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in the least. Yet the result is, he is already an influence. People who have braved the ordeal, and emerged successfully, go about ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... of that presence, Mary remained motionless for a long minute, then sighed from her tortured heart. She turned and went slowly to her chair at the desk, and seated herself languidly, weakened by the ordeal ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... about afterwards with my wife we heard not many comments, a word here and there about Henderson's wonderful success, a remark about Margaret's beauty, some sympathy for her in such a wearisome ordeal—the world is full of kindness—the house duly admired, and the ordinary compliments paid; the people assembled were, as usual, absorbed in their own affairs. From all we could gather, all those present were used to living in a palace, and took all the splendor quite as a matter of course. Was there ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... looks of those baby eyes, now bright with fever, now dull as dead violets, the little inarticulate murmurings, the appeals that could not be comprehended, added such a misery as was almost too much for flesh and blood to bear. This terrible ordeal was what Lucy had to go through. The child, though he had, as the maids said, no constitution, and though he had been enfeebled by illness for half his little lifetime, fought on hour after hour and day after day. Sometimes there was a look in his little face as of a conscious intelligence ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... the measure of the past session, denominated the Church of Scotland Benefices Act, will soon be tested, and is now undergoing the ordeal of proof, in consequence of objections lodged by the parishioners of Banff, with the presbytery of Fordyce, against the presentation, induction, and translation of the Rev. George Henderson, now incumbent of the church and parish of Cullen, to the ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... independent reflection was beginning to do that for which he himself had come. In other words, there was a proposal going on there in the glass, and Jingleberry enjoyed the novel sensation of seeing how he himself would look when passing through a similar ordeal. Altogether, however, it was not as pleasing as most novelties are, for there were distinct signs in the face of the mirrored Marian that the mirrored Jingleberry's words were distasteful to her, and that the proposition he ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... I must ask you not to speak to me of it again until after to-morrow night. I need all my strength for that ordeal. After that, we must turn our attention to this new problem, and work it out ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... some dignitary of high rank connected with the imperial family. With this impression they had received us when we arrived, and had, poor fellows, done their very best to show us proper honour and respect. It had been a severe ordeal to us, but it had proved in the most unmistakable manner the loyalty of the Kamchadal inhabitants of Milkova to the reigning ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Elaine, pale and shaken from the ordeal she had voluntarily gone through, burst in upon us from upstairs. Without a word she advanced to Craig and took ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... long passed the ordeal, and even steam, and smoke, and washing basins, and all the various discordant and revolting noises from those who suffer, have no effect upon my nervous system—still was I doomed to torment, and was very sick indeed. For some time I had been ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... this illustrious statesman early passed its ordeal. Scarcely had he attained the age at which reflection commences, than Europe with astonishment beheld him filling the first place in the councils of his country, and manage the vast mass of its concerns with all the vigour and steadiness of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... democracy like ours should have its sons and daughters skillful, you see that it is this line more than any other. "The people in their wisdom"—this is the kind of wisdom most needed by the people. Democracy is on its trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. Abounding about us are pessimistic prophets. Fickleness and violence used to be, but are no longer, the vices which they charge to democracy. What its critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... HODGSON,—I write to you a few lines on business. Murray has thought proper at his own risk, and peril, and profit (if there be any) to publish 'The Giaour'; and it may possibly come under your ordeal in the 'Monthly' [1] I merely wish to state that in the published copies there are additions to the amount of ten pages, text and margin (chiefly the last), which render it a little less unfinished (but more unintelligible) than before. If, therefore, you review it, let ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... large, but when pulpit and press ridiculed and reproved do we marvel that one by one the women withdrew their names and "joined the persecutors?" Much I fear that our own organization would shrivel to pitiful proportions if today submitted to the ordeal from which they recoiled. Indeed even Mrs. Stanton confessed that if she had had the slightest premonition of all that would follow this convention, she feared her courage would not have been equal to it. Fortunate ignorance, if she did not underrate her bravery, for she ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... father, who gave her the first intimation of what was forthcoming. Afterward, in recollecting the conversation, it seemed to Virginia that the young man had been directed to break the news to her, that her father might be spared the ordeal. It was evident then that he expected opposition, but the girl was too loyal to let von Horn know if she felt other than in harmony with the proposal, and too proud to evince by surprise the fact that she was not wholly conversant ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... intemperate oracles, political and clerical, Deny there's force or purpose in the People's mighty "Aye!" They stultify their principles, for by ordeal numerical Their Creed declares all policy ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... insists on emphasizing the comic rather than the tragic aspect of things, though he can also be powerful in tragedy; and his enthusiasms for the beauty of the world and for the romance of youthful love are delightful. He may perhaps best be approached through 'Evan Harrington' (1861) and 'The Ordeal of Richard Feverel' (1859). 'The Egoist' (1879) and 'Diana of the Crossways' (1885) are among his other strongest books. In his earlier years he wrote a considerable body of verse, which shows much the same qualities as his prose. Some of it is rugged in form, but ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... people, excited such a ferment throughout the nation, as ought to have deterred the ministry from the prosecution of such an unpopular measure; which, however, they had courage enough to maintain against all opposition. The bill passed the ordeal of both houses, and his majesty vouchsafed the royal sanction to this law in favour of the Hebrew nation. The truth is, it might have increased the wealth, and extended the commerce of Great Britain, had it been agreeable ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... indeed, bitter, but its results are precious. The mind, feelings, and temper are subjected to a discipline equally painful and priceless. I have known many who were unhappy as governesses, but scarcely one who, having undergone the ordeal, was not ultimately strengthened and improved—made more enduring for her own afflictions, more considerate for the afflictions of others. The great curse of a single female life is its dependency; daughters, as well as sons, should aim at making their way through life. Teachers may be ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... wears is striped. There is nothing in this world so humiliates a person as being compelled to wear these stripes. No language can describe the feelings of horror that took hold upon me the first time I saw myself arrayed in these emblems of disgrace. I passed through all the fiery ordeal of trial, sentence, reception cell, undaunted, but when I made my first toilet in the penitentiary, I must admit, I was "knocked out." Then I felt keenly the sting of disgrace. The prisoner is next ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... base. Werewolves of War, the batch of planes he belonged to had been christened, and it was a richly deserved title. In front of the front they fought, detailed to desperate, harrying missions, losing an average of ten men a day. The ordeal of gas and fire and acid bullets added five years to a man's brow overnight—if he served with the ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... their rank and dates of commission as possible; but I was to do nothing until I heard further from him on the subject, as he explained that he would have to consult the Secretary of War before making final orders. General Buell and his officers had been subjected to a long ordeal by a court of inquiry, touching their conduct of the campaign in Tennessee and Kentucky, that resulted in the battle of Perryville, or Chaplin's Hills, October 8,1862, and they had been substantially acquitted; and, as it ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... from the great mahogany table. Its glistening surface was only broken by a decanter, two choice wine-glasses, and a tall silver candlestick. There were lamps in other parts of the room, but Challoner liked candles. Lighting a cigar, Blake looked about while he braced himself for the ordeal that must ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... of relief to have this particular ordeal safely over, she walked out of the shop door—and straight into the arms of Captain Holliday! She pulled herself up abruptly, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... is absolutely necessary, I think she would better be excused," Hinman answered. "She is still very nervous. The ordeal might cause a ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... and the priests of Jupiter were forbidden to eat it, touch it, or even pronounce its name. The believer in the doctrine of transmigration of souls carefully avoided this article of food, in the fear of submitting beloved friends to the ordeal of mastication. ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... the action to no purpose, and the play goes on as if it had not been. Schiller was evidently concerned to produce a pendant to the great scene in 'Nathan the Wise'. Saladin wants truth, Philip wants a man. Both the prophets prepare themselves for their ordeal in a brief soliloquy. Both monarchs get their wish, and a friendly relation ensues. Both scenes are purple patches of didacticism,—the author preaching a sermon to his contemporaries. Unfortunately ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... united strength of ten men to raise. They were forbidden to seek shelter during the most tremendous storms, nor were they allowed to dress their wounds before the conclusion of a combat. What would some of our "Guards" say to such an ordeal? ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... assault, was so great, that they rushed over the swamp with an eagerness that could not be restrained, struggling as in a race to see who could first reach the log that led into the fiery mouth of the fort. A Salem villager, John Raymond, was the winner. He passed through, survived the ordeal, and came unharmed out of the terrible fight. He was twenty-seven years of age. He signed his name to a petition to the General Court, in 1685, as having gone in the expedition from Salem Village, and as then living there. Some years afterwards, he removed ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... terrific method, but was in no condition of strength to bear the operation. It was decided to postpone it till the 22d of June. Twelve doctors were invited to be present. Meanwhile a diet nurse sent from New York, remained with her, to prepare her system for the ordeal. ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... mourning for Calasiris, they are lodged in the palace of the satrapess, where the constancy of the hero is exposed to a variety of perilous temptations, but comes forth, of course, unscathed from the ordeal. The love of ladies thus rejected has been prone, in all ages and countries, particularly in Egypt since the days of Yusuf and Zuleikha,[64] to turn into hatred; and Arsace is no exception to this long-established usage. Theagenes is accordingly thrown into a dungeon, and regularly bastinadoed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... visit some pleasant friends and recuperate her strength, when we find her back in Osmotherly again nursing her aunt. It was the end of December and she was the only servant in the house. Before this ordeal was over, she was taken ill herself, and had to be put to bed and nursed. In crossing a room, a cramp took her; she fell on the floor, lay all night in the cold, calling in vain for assistance. She did not finally escape from these terrible scenes until the end of January, five months ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... was a hard line drawn between "gentlemen" and common men. And there were all sorts of things that, however bad he might be, a "gentleman" did not do; or if he did commit these actions, his punishment was swift. He was obliged to face the ordeal of a duel, or he received the cut ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... Winter, spring, summer and autumn in turn visited the earth, and with each I thought, aye, longed to depart; but the great Refiner had his own purpose to accomplish,—there was a little fine gold but the dross rendered it useless. The ordeal through which I am passing is indeed a terrible one, but I know where peace and consolation are to be found, and there are times when I can say in sincerity, 'Thy will ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... completed; were all seasons that pointed out times of waiting upon the ordinances of that Covenant which was ratified by the oath—represented by the number of perfection that should be waited on in ages most remote. Typical purifications; the ordeal for freeing from the imputation of murder, conducted by slaying the heifer, and washing the hands over it, while there was made a protestation of innocence, that embodied an oath:[413] the means of removing ceremonial defilement of various kinds: and the bitter water which, according ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... up that which I thought warmed and helped me, and I can declare, after considering the whole period in which I have subjected myself to this ordeal, I never did more work; I never did more varied work; I never did work with so much facility; I never did work with such a complete sense of freedom from anxiety and worry, as I have done during the period ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... you who stand gazing down in sorrowful reproach upon what you regard as my unpardonable impiety, little dream of the fiery ordeal that consumed my childlike, beautiful faith, as flames crisp and blacken chaff. I am alone, and must ever be, while in the flesh; and I hoard my pain, sparing the world my moans and tears, my wry faces and desperate struggles. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... committees for raising recruits and providing for the familles of soldiers. A large part of his time during the war was devoted to this work, and will ever be remembered with gratitude by scores of families for timely assistance rendered during that trying ordeal. In the Fourth ward, where he lives, there never was a man drafted ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... expression which they called in the Parliament House "Hermiston's hanging face" - they struck mere dismay into the wife. She sat before him speechless and fluttering; at each dish, as at a fresh ordeal, her eye hovered toward my lord's countenance and fell again; if he but ate in silence, unspeakable relief was her portion; if there were complaint, the world was darkened. She would seek out the cook, who ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of an engraver on steel. But it is also true that during the last years of his life he lived under the pressure of photographers and newspaper syndicates, who came to him with great sums of money in their hands. He was exploited by the press of the United States, and this is the severest ordeal which a writer of English can pass through. There was one year in which he earned four thousand pounds. His immeasurable generosity kept him forever under the harrow in money matters, and added another burden to the weight carried by this dying and indomitable ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... and hardest-fought battles was that of Lundy's Lane, which we meet this day, on this historic ground, to celebrate—both the loyalty and courage of the Canadian people were put to the severest test, and both came out of the fiery ordeal as refined gold. Nothing could be more disgraceful and unprincipled than the Madison (I will not say American) declaration of war against Great Britain, which was at that moment employing her utmost strength and resources in defence of European nations and the liberties of mankind. ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... the gods were once graciously good to me. One wondrous evening before hope died utterly I survived the ordeal of walking ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... conceive precisely how great an ordeal it was for Finn and Kathleen to face, when they were led down the length of this great building to their own particular bench among the other Irish Wolfhounds, of whom there were some thirty or forty ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... the best preparative for the ordeal of the ride to town, Laramie hesitated about waking Hawk—yet the hours were precious, for the trip would be long and slow. Fortunately he had not long to wait before ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... and misfortune; contrasts throwing lurid light upon hearts, like the blaze of a conflagration illumining and revealing the gloom of midnight. Here chance may bring together those who but a few hours before were strangers to each other. The ordeal of a moment, a single word, may separate hearts long united; sudden confidences are often forced by necessity, and invincible suspicions frequently held in secret. As a witty woman once remarked: "They often play a comedy, to avoid a tragedy!" That which has never been uttered, is yet ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... thoughts were running forward, his blood was pounding in his arteries, in vengeful eagerness to take up the trail of the men who had subjected him to this inhuman ordeal. He could not hope to repay them cruelty for cruelty, for he was not a man who did much crippling when it came to handling a gun, but if he had to follow them to the Nueces, even to the Rio Grande, for his toll, then he ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... encourage her, Fred," pleaded my darling. "I have counted so much on her. If Josie had taken it into her head to be queer, I shouldn't have said a word, for I think myself that is often for a plain girl's happiness not to have to undergo the ordeal of being neglected; but in the case of a beauty like Winona it would be such a waste! There is not a girl of her age who compares with her ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... William B. Reed is feelingly alive upon the subject of his grandfather's memory, and has devoted the labors of nearly his whole life to establish the popular delusion that his grandfather's patriotism underwent the severest test and ordeal ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... and extending his own hand in farewell, with polite excuses as to his haste—relieved that his last ordeal had been spared him. He turned, as he felt rather than heard the approach of another, whose coming caused his heart almost to stop beating—the woman dreaded and demanded by every ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... open window. Immediately the blood rushed to his face, and suffused it almost with a purple red: he checked his horse suddenly, and, for a moment, looked full up at the window, where he met the cold gaze of de Lescure fixed full upon him. The pause was but for a moment; he could not bear the ordeal of that look, but fixing his eyes to the ground, he struck his spurs into his horse, and hurried out of the sight of those on whom he did not dare ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... the pen is mightier than the gun and whose half a century's bag contains only a few rabbits, a hedgehog and a moorhen, it is no inconsiderable ordeal to be handed a repeating rifle and some dozens of cartridges and be told that that is your elephant—the big one there, with the red ochre on its forehead. To be on an elephant in the jungle without ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... aunt's temper, her peevish ways, the awful consequences of offending her, and so forth, were like so many needles stuck into the girl's heart, until she was ready to cry out to be released from this fearful ordeal. Moreover, as the day came near what he could not see in her she saw in him. Was she likely to be reassured when she perceived that her husband, in spite of all his fun, was really anxious, and when she knew that some blunder on her part might ruin him? In fact, if he had suspected for a moment ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... unanimous consent of one and all of them; his novels, however, appeal only to a select few, but by them they are regarded with unbounded admiration, some giving preference to this and others to that of the series; "The Ordeal of Richard Feveril," published in 1859, is by many considered his best, though it is over "The Egoist" that Louis Stevenson breaks out into raptures; Meredith has most sympathetic insights into nature and life, has a marvellous power in analysing and construing character, and shows ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of French youth has been illustrated in some letters given to the public by the novelist, Henry Bordeaux, called "Two Heroes." They relate the personal experiences of two youths, one twenty, the other twenty-one, whose baptism of fire came in the battle of the Marne. They grew old fast under the ordeal of battle and of responsibility for the lives of their men; their letters home show a loftiness of spirit, a sense of self-forgetfulness, of devotion to the cause, that is sublime, poignant—and typical. In every rank of society the same immense devotion, the same utter renouncement of selfish ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... assume a share of the burden, Granny had actually had to fall back on the coarsest and humblest menial work—scrubbing and washing by the day in strange houses. Yet she and her daughter appeared throughout that ordeal to have remained on terms of pleasant intimacy with friends of the class to which they regarded themselves as ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... were brought up and "presented" in due form. It was an ordeal. How Dan got through with it he didn't know. He had never before been "presented" to any one but Polly. But dad managed it somehow, and on the porch friendly shadows were gathering that concealed any social discrepancies. Then Polly flitted off to don her party dress, and Dan found himself stranded ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... his life if he would submit to be stripped, have one end of a rope fastened round his neck, and the other round that of a wild young colt, and would race the colt as long as it could run. He agreed to the ordeal; the brutal Generals and no less brutal soldiers collected round the young man to prepare him for the race, close to the Bussex Rhine in Weston. Away they started at a furious rate till the horse fell exhausted by the side of his ill-fated companion, at Brinsfield ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... Hanaud gravely. "This has been a trying ordeal for you. I understand that. But we are coming to the end. I want you to read this description of Mlle. Celie through again to make sure that nothing is omitted." He gave the paper into the maid's hands. "It will be advertised, so it is important that it should be complete. See that ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... old by various methods, such as washing with coffee, with tobacco, and by being carried in the pocket, near the person, by being smoked or partially burned, and in various other ways. I have in my possession a paper which has passed the ordeal of many examinations by experts and others, which purports to be two hundred years old, and to have been saved from the Boston fire. The handwriting is a perfect fac-simile of that of Thomas Addington, the town clerk of Boston, ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... terrible, almost as terrible as some of the wounds I have seen—and they have been very awful. However, as quite a number of the men had only recently come out, it was natural enough that we should be upset by this ordeal. Time and repeated experiences of this kind toughen if they do not harden a man—but for many this was the ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... time Oowikapun hesitated to undertake this terrible ordeal, called by the Western Indians the hock-e-a-yum, a ceremony so severe and dreadful that many an Indian has never recovered from its agonies. Great indeed must be the wretched disquietude that will cause human beings, who are made to shrink from pain, endure what thousands voluntarily ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... more experienced than himself. He had taken a decided and a prominent part in a scene of strife, and danger, and difficulty, and he had (to make use of that most significant though schoolboy phrase) "placed himself." His character had gone through the ordeal: without any previous preparation, the iron had been hardened into steel; and if any part had remained up to that moment soft or weak, the softness was done away, ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... or as safe as anything can be, to say about any picture. It graphically indicates in the speaker delicate sensitivity and emotional responsiveness to Art. And, most beneficently, it subtly evades anything like the trying ordeal of an analysis of a work of art. It ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... a gentleman visitor insisted on singing 'By the sad sea waves,' which he did vilely, and he wound up his performance by a most unexpected and misplaced embellishment, or 'turn.' Dickens found the whole ordeal very trying, but managed to preserve a decorous silence till this sound fell on his ear, when his neighbour said to him, 'Whatever did he mean by that extraneous effort of melody?' 'Oh,' said Dickens, 'that's quite ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... thought to stand approximately on the site of the earlier Saxon church restored by Ethelwold in 980, in which Queen Emma underwent the "fiery ordeal" by walking blindfold and barefooted over nine red-hot plough-shares, thus proving her innocence of the charges brought against her, and furnishing her accusers with an example of what female chastity is able to accomplish. The main portion of the structure as ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... The social ordeal was not so formidable. The private-car party was made up of the president and his sister-in-law, the president's family physician, Doctor Van Bruce, the doctor's wife, his sister, a maiden lady of no uncertain age, and Alicia. These, with Penfield and Ford, made the eight at table in ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... cause. Uncle Christian had only desired to prove him. He knew men well, and he knew that youths of various birth take a blow in the face in various ways; now, the Emir's son had demeaned him as one of his rank, and had stood the ordeal! So my aunt Jacoba told him, for she had at once seen through Uncle Christian's purpose, and presently Jost Tetzel himself, though ill-pleased and sullen, confessed his error. Then, when they had promised the youth that he ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... been decreed, Shall perish and vanish each weak god of men, And the world shall be purged with a ravening fire. Happy the man in that terrible day, Who bewails with contrition the sins of his life,[221-2] And meets without flinching the fiery ordeal." ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... that morning, but had carried in his subconsciousness all day this visit to the footman's child. In one manner or another that inconvenient locality had been compassed in his circuit for the past three weeks. From it he passed to his daily ordeal, another rich patient, a nervous wreck, whose primary ailment—the lack of anything to do—had passed into the advanced stages of an inability to do anything, with its sad Nemesis of melancholia—the registered protest of the dying ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... upon the track of the "Autocrat." They had to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected, which is a formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest. Paradise Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are enough to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his arrow of the danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... In the passage alluded to he is called so by implication, being compared to the 'false-minded' thief who, knowing himself to be guilty, undergoes the ordeal of the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... The Sacrifices made by Converts. Difficulty in Forming a Right Estimate of a Community. The General Character of our Native Christians. The Ordeal of 1857. The Christian Constancy of our People. Their Loyalty. Their Bearing in Joy and Sorrow. "Everywhere spoken against." Most Europeans have no Sympathy with us. Unfair to judge by Individuals. The Support of Native Christians. Different Occupations. Native ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... not so very remarkable that I should do my best to safeguard the ship and such of her passengers and crew as survive last night's ordeal." ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... her story, she would contradict herself, break down, attempt to shed false tears, act as only a woman who has committed a first great crime could act. And this child stands here, submitted to this fearful ordeal, defended by none, but defending herself with the whole innocence of her nature, the glory of truth in her eyes, the self-conscious courage of a stainless life in her heart. Is this assumed? Is this put on? You have seen murderers—it is your office to see them— did you ever see one like her? ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... this knit their loves: she knew, and he felt, that he was going in the road of nobleness and honour; and the fiery ordeal which he had to struggle through, raised that hearty earthly lover more nearly to a level with his heavenly-minded mistress. Through misfortune and mistrust, and evil rumours all around, in spite of opposition from false friends, and the scorn of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Rokeby's creaseless back, at his fingers wandering over the keys, and for the first time she noticed how sensitive, how caressing the fingers were. Yet that two people in her intimate circle could contemplate that through which she herself had passed painfully, as through ordeal ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... ordeal we put up at an excellent khan, the best we had seen in Servia, being a mixture of the German Wirthshaus, and the Italian osteria, kept by a Dalmatian, who had lived twelve years at Scutari in Albania. His upper room was very neatly ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... the music resumed, and a number of variegated advertisements were weakly thrown on the screen. She set herself doggedly to walk back down the slope of the aisle, not daring to look ahead for Louis. She felt that every eye was fixed on her with base curiosity.... When, after the endless ordeal of the aisle, she reached her place, Louis was not there. And though she was glad, she took offence at his delay. Gathering up the reticule with a nervous sweep of the hand, she departed from the theatre, her ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... or lies the road of all through this dark valley of the shadow of dead love? Is it Love's ordeal? testing the feeble-hearted from the strong in faith, who shall find each other yet again, the ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... circulation a play entitled 'Love's Martyrdom,' and for which I desired to obtain the independent judgment of some of our most eminent literary men, before seeking the ordeal of the stage, I sent a copy to Mr. Dickens, and the letter ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... this manner, by those who find fault because their intellect is not sufficient to enable them to appreciate! Authors, take my resolution; which is, never to show your face until your work has passed through the ordeal of the Reviews—keep your room for the month after your literary labour. Reviews are like Jesuit father confessors—guiding the opinions of the multitude, who blindly follow the suggestions of those to whom they may have entrusted their literary consciences. If your work ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Miss Francis ended her long sojourn at Mount Whitney and returned to England. The ordeal of living surrounded by the Grass, which had destroyed her assistants, seemed to have made no other change in her than the fading of her hair, which was now completely white, and a loss of weight, giving her a deceptive ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... his whole mind to the refereeing, and soon warmed to business. He found that there was heaps more fun in it than he had bargained for, and as he was a sharp, quick, and clever youth he came out of the ordeal with flying colours. He made mistakes, naturally, but momentous issues depended on none of them, and he felt he had not done so badly when Higgins, at half-time, spoke to him as one in authority to another. But Palmer, the captain ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... for a witch. Witches usually received severer justice, but stocks were often used for keeping prisoners safe until they were tried and condemned, and possibly Shakespeare alludes in this passage only to the preliminaries of a harsher ordeal. Drunkards were the common defaulters who appeared in the stocks, and by an Act of 2 James I they were required to endure six hours' incarceration with a fine of five shillings. Vagrants always received harsh treatment unless they had a licence, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... that dark large eye lurked the profound and fiery enthusiasm of his ill-starred passion. In the thin but exquisite lip I read the courage of the paladin, who would have 'fought his way,' though single-handed, against all the magnates of his county, and by ordeal of battle have purged the honour of the Ruthyns. There in that delicate half-sarcastic tracery of the nostril I detected the intellectual defiance which had politically isolated Silas Ruthyn and opposed him to the landed oligarchy of his county, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... tenderly as they might have treated a little child. They felt that he had been through some ordeal from which they themselves would have shrunk with a terror they would have been ashamed to admit; and that despite the youth's fragile frame and ethereal face that looked little like that of a mailed warrior, a ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Hakon's rival, Jarl Skuli, thought Earl John so promising a traitor as to send him letters forged with the Norse king's seal.[6] In 1218 John was present at Bergen to witness the ordeal successfully undergone by King Hakon's mother in order to prove that king, then a boy, to be her son by the late King Hakon Sverri's son, and so rightly entitled to ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... remain there to recruit before advancing toward Jerusalem. The tragical fate of Peter Barthelmy must be mentioned. Many of the crusaders had begun to question the genuineness of the relic he had found. He was prevailed upon to submit to the ordeal of fire, and perished in the flames. From that moment the story ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... last this ordeal was over, and Ramage opened the door. She emerged with a white face and wide-open eyes upon a little, red-lit landing. She went past three keenly observant and ostentatiously preoccupied waiters down the thick-carpeted staircase and out of the Hotel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory of relationships, ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... After the health of many others had been drunk, Audubon's was proposed by Skene, a Scottish historian. "Whilst he was engaged in a handsome panegyric, the perspiration poured from me. I thought I should faint." But he survived the ordeal and responded in a few appropriate words. He was much dined and wined, and obliged to keep late hours—often getting no more than four hours sleep, and working hard painting and writing all the next day. He ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... little more than seven years, he had risen from an ensign to be a lieut.-colonel. Owing to gross mismanagement and peculation on the part of his predecessor, who was in consequence recommended privately to sell out, if he did not wish to stand the ordeal of a court martial, the regiment was sadly disorganized; but the commander in chief, the late Duke of York, was heard to declare that Lieut.-Colonel Brock, from one of the worst, had made the 49th one of the best regiments ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... Sunday, July 18th.—I have just returned from church. Such an ordeal I never went through. If a benevolent lady, sitting behind me, had not taken compassion on me, and handed me a fan, I think I should have fainted.... Everyone says that the heat here surpasses that felt anywhere else. They also affirm that ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... very life is made of them. On he goes to the end, heaping crime on crime, and lie on lie, and at last, when it seems that justice, which has been so long vainly halting after him, has him really in her iron grasp, there is a solemn appeal to heaven, a challenge, a battle ordeal, in which, by means we may not venture even to whisper, the villain prospers, and comes out glorious, victorious, amidst the applause of a gazing world; and, to crown it all, the poet tells us that under the disguise of the animal name and form the world of man ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... that he is dismissed. Sometimes their discourse is carried on through the medium of a sort of Jew's-harp, one handing it to the other, asking questions and returning answers. The lover remains until daybreak. After the consent of the girl and her parents has been obtained, one more ordeal remains; the bridal couple have to run the gauntlet of the mischievous village boys, who stand ready with sooted hands to begrime their faces and bodies; and generally they succeed so well that bride and groom present the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... whilst Gina grasped the arm of the chair against which she was standing. She was endeavoring to steel her heart to bravery; but in those days, and in that country, such a scene was a terrible ordeal. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Majesty's Foot," and he remembered attempting to recite "Clair de Lune" at luncheon; then he slept in a big, soft chair until almost five o'clock when another crowd found and woke him; there followed an alcoholic dressing of several temperaments for the ordeal of dinner. They selected theatre tickets at Tyson's for a play that had a four-drink programme—a play with two monotonous voices, with turbid, gloomy scenes, and lighting effects that were hard to follow when his eyes behaved so amazingly. He imagined afterward ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... were all called 'Burney's bull-dogs') constructed a very simple instrument of torture. One big boy spun the whirligig, while another held the small boy's palm till the sharp slate-edge gashed it. The wound was severe. For many years a long white cicatrice recorded the fact in my right hand. The ordeal was, I fancy, unique - a prerogative of the naval 'bull-dogs.' The other torture was, in those days, not unknown to public schools. It was to hold a boy's back and breech as near to a hot fire as his clothes would bear without ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... full of the embarrassments of the marriage proposal. To all who are not borne along by an impetuous impulse it is a trying ordeal. Barwood was too self-conscious ever to be transported ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... saying that in this world gentle methods have effected more than harsh, and added this beautiful thought: "In the ordeal by laundry the soft-fronted often ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... Crystal Lake trail crossed and climbed higher, and with a last scream at the station lights it slewed past the curve, clicked over a switch or two and stood panting there in the storm, waiting to see whether it might go on and get the ordeal over with at once, or whether it must wait until ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... Macedon into a madman, and perverted the gracious-minded Julius Caesar into usurpation and tyranny, has also been found by Christian heroes the most perilous ordeal of their virtue; but, inasmuch as they are Christian heroes, and not pagan men, worshippers of false gods, whose fabled examples inculcated all these deeds of self-absorbing vain-glory, our heroes of a "better revelation" ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... Germany and the Thirty-nine Articles in England, the Count could honestly become a Bishop without being guilty of founding a new sect. The Count returned to Germany. He was examined in the faith, by the King's command, by two Berlin Divines. He came through the ordeal with flying colours, and finally, on May 20th, he was ordained a Bishop of the Brethren's Church by Bishop Daniel Ernest Jablonsky, Court Preacher at Berlin, and Bishop David ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... girl of seventeen, in whose warm nature passion and imagination so largely predominated over intellect, was but too liable to have her reason shaken from its seat by the ordeal through which she was ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... calculated the strength he should need for this ordeal. There was a coldness in the very tone and manner of the man who had come for him that went like an ice-bolt to his heart, and with a deep groan he sank back ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... village was the sacrifice to be made. The friends and relatives of the Sioux who had been killed in the assault upon the Pawnees were drawn up around the unfortunate captives, who were about to be fastened to stakes and stand the terrible ordeal of death by fire, when suddenly, like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky, the terrible war-whoop of the Pawnees sounded in the ears of the now thoroughly frightened Sioux, who saw, to their dismay, a band of the dreaded ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... to put it into execution. At first he found the ceremonial exacting. To part from all his clothes and to parade through the mosque in attire of which the principal items were a towel and the key of his valuables (adorning his wrist) was ever so slightly an ordeal to one of his temperament and upbringing. To sit unsheltered in blinding steam was not amusing, though it was exciting. But the steam-chapel (as it might be called) of the mosque was a delight compared to the ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... reputed witches once dwelt, but whether from greater fear or greater enlightenment here than elsewhere, they were never called to endure the ordeal either by fire or by water. They hunted in couples apparently, for the story goes that two men at Clathick, rising early on a May morning, saw them coming up the burn-side, putting a tether across the stream, and saying, "Come all to me." This incantation succeeded in providing the witches' ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... show of fairness was had, and, considering the ferocity with which the old man was attacked when down in the Engine House, the only wonder is that he was granted a trial at all. Through all the trying hours of that ordeal how like a hero did he deport himself! Grand in his assaults on the citadel of slavery, he became grander still as he calmly met his enemies, and told them of his purposes. Never boastful, he assumes nothing, but at the end, when asked ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... that country. Throughout his subsequent career, Lafayette sustained the reputation he had won in early manhood. He was one of the few prominent figures of the French Revolution who emerged from that ordeal with untainted reputation. From then until his closing days he was the foremost champion of liberal thought and political ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... as time goes, but on this night of stress and ordeal, nine-fifteen was a terrible hour. The instant Miss Blackburne was out of the house, the two girls turned to each other, ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... fashionable code of honour, when a man has seduced or carried off his friend's wife, the next thing he has to do is to fight the man whom he has injured and betrayed. By thus appealing to the ordeal of the duel, he may not only clear himself from guilt; but, if it be done with proper spirit, he may acquire celebrity and glory in the annals of gallantry, and in the eyes of the fair and innocent. In our hero's place, most men of fashion would have triumphed in the notoriety of his offence, and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... interval of more than ten years, with a trembling hand, with a confused and horrible recollection of certain occurrences and situations, in the ordeal through which I was unconsciously passing; though with a vivid and very sharp remembrance of the main ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... separate maintenance of his wife and daughter. In order to effect this it became, of course, necessary to recall his daughter, Rhoda, and fix her residence once more at Gray Forest. No more dreadful penalty could have been inflicted upon the poor girl—no more agonizing ordeal than that she was thus doomed to undergo. She had idolized her mother, and now adored her memory. She knew that Mademoiselle de Barras had betrayed and indirectly murdered the parent she had so devotedly loved; she knew that that woman had been the curse, ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... refinement are accessible, they are not below it. Let them be sure that they do not take dulness for integrity, and that the virtue, proof to intellectual triumphs, and disdaining "the last infirmity of noble minds," would not sink if exposed to the ordeal of a service of plate, or admission in some frivolous coterie. For ourselves we will only say, "Amicus ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... impertinence of the scrutiny far more on Philip's account than his own. Ashe's pale face had on it the faintest possible flush, and his always grave manner had become really solemn; but otherwise he made no sign. Wynne had a certain sense of humor which helped him through the ordeal, and there was a faint gleam of a smile in his eye as he confronted the brilliant woman before him; but he was ill-pleased that his friend ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... an institution of grave importance to the community, as the practice of obligatory inoculation prevailed, and all the young people of the colony had to go up in classes to the hospital and pass the ordeal. Her mother's death left her the matron of the hospital and caretaker of her sister and brothers, and the stories of her life at that time, which she told me now and then, showed that, with the position, she ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... there was no further hesitation. One and all subjected themselves to the ordeal suggested; even Mr. Spielhagen. But this effort was as futile as the rest. The lost ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... foundation stone of moral eminence, passed through a crucial ordeal, and it is to be greatly wondered at that the Negro woman emerged with even the crudest ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Gora. It can therefore be said that the Serbs know how to treat an Englishman well when he passes through their country. Salutations therefore, and thanks! They fought like lions, and they suffered as none others suffered in Europe's terrible ordeal. A Serbian spark at Sarajevo fired the arsenal of European militarism, and a common ungenerous thought sometimes blames the spark instead of blaming the recklessness of those who allowed Europe to be enkindled. And there used to be some who could not forget Serbia's dynastic ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... immense crowd had gathered. The church and churchyard were filled to overflowing. It was the largest collection of queer looking people, horses, and "fixes" I have ever seen. The services were brief, but most impressive, and it must have been a trying ordeal for the aged clergyman, an old friend of the deceased. Several times his voice faltered, and he seemed about to break down. The coffin was borne to the grave by six stalwart negroes, laborers on the estate. A lad followed, leading poor Thurlow's favorite horse. Then the widow and her son, ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... possible. None of that exposure to the gaze and exultation of a victorious foe, such as we had seen pictured in our school-books, or as practised by conquering nations in all times. We had felt it as not improbable that, after an ordeal of mortifying exposure for the gratification of the military, we would be paraded through Northern cities for the benefit of jeering crowds. So, when we learned that we should be paroled, and go to our homes unmolested, the ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... SHADWELL, in the January Nineteenth Century, in his article on "Ordeal by Fire," after denouncing idlers and loafers and shirkers, falls foul "above all" of the young girls called flappers, "with high heels, skirts up to their knees and blouses open to the diaphragm, painted, powdered, self-conscious, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... "Severus" and "Hesychius" representing one and the same individual. Only by a Critic seeking to mislead his reader will any one of these five Fathers be in future cited as witnessing against the genuineness of S. Mark xvi. 9-20. Eusebius is the solitary witness who survives the ordeal ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... compelled me to be with her at the open door to meet "our darling boy," but that I could not bear. It would be as trying for him as for me, and I had to spare him the ordeal at any price. ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... miles around, which had served to deck every bride in the district ever since any one could remember, was left seated on the geta, or raised sleeping platform, in the dimly lighted inner apartments, there to await the ordeal known to Malay cruelty as sanding. The ceremony that bears this name, is the one at which the bride and bridegroom are brought together for the first time. They are officially supposed never to have seen one another ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... the duties of identification and burial of the dead Terry led the girl into one of the huts and quietly comforted her. She told him of the ordeal of her forced journey through the greater part of a day and a night, of the captors who leered at her but remained aloof because of fear of Malabanan, of being waked from sleep at Malabanan's arrival just before Matak appeared. Malabanan ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... killed him," said Venning, pulling himself together with a great effort; for he had been through a very severe ordeal. ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... what had been anticipated; and now the two prisoners stood, trembling with exhaustion from their superhuman efforts, cruelly bruised, bleeding, and altogether too dazed and helpless to make that sudden, wild dash for freedom which each had planned in his heart when entering upon the terrible ordeal through which they had just passed. What was to be the next move in this grim game of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... his Satanic majesty. The last case of burning in Scotland was in Sutherland, A.D. 1722: the judge was Captain David Ross, of Little Dean. At Glarus, in Ireland, a servant girl was burnt so late as 1786. The last authenticated instance of the swimming ordeal occurred in 1785, and is quoted by Mr. Sternberg from a Northampton Mercury of that year:—"A poor woman named Sarah Bradshaw, of Mears Ashby, who was accused of being a witch, in order to prove her innocence, submitted to the ignominy of being dipped, when she immediately ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... the ordeal came to an end. The sentry glanced at the east, and appeared to note with satisfaction that his period of duty was coming to an end — as indeed it was, once and for all — for he rubbed his hands and began to walk again briskly ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... of the afternoon passed away all too soon for those who were to sail on the tide, and those who were to return to Bonnydale. The commander took leave of his parents, his sister, and Bertha in his cabin, where Paul passed through the same ordeal with Miss Florry. The navy-yard tender was alongside; and the ladies were assisted on board of her by the officers, while the seamen under the direction of Mr. Makepeace ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... us, in one of his short poems, "learn to labor and to wait." I have labored through about twenty-five courses at this table, and then I have waited until this hour, in the hope that I might be spared the inevitable ordeal. But when the last plate had been removed, and your president, who is a stern man of duty, rapped upon the table, I saw there was no escape, and the time had come when he was going to present to you one of the most popular of all dishes at a New England banquet, tongue garnished with brains. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... feet, denounced her as a thief. She denied it; but the medicine-man answered, "The spirit has declared her guilty; the spirit never lies."' The woman, however, was acquitted, after a proxy trial by ordeal: a cock, used as her proxy, threw ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... looked tired but irrepressibly happy. Now that it was all over, and success assured, she realised how intensely she had dreaded the ordeal ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... defence, and support; whose capacities and instincts can best regulate the physical energies to self-advantage according to circumstances—in such immense waste of primary and youthful life those only come forward to maturity from THE STRICT ORDEAL BY WHICH NATURE TESTS THEIR ADAPTATION TO HER STANDARD OF PERFECTION and fitness to continue their kind by reproduction." {86a} A little lower down Mr. Matthew speaks of animals under domestication ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... vulgar, naturally prejudiced against the Jewish people, excited such a ferment throughout the nation, as ought to have deterred the ministry from the prosecution of such an unpopular measure; which, however, they had courage enough to maintain against all opposition. The bill passed the ordeal of both houses, and his majesty vouchsafed the royal sanction to this law in favour of the Hebrew nation. The truth is, it might have increased the wealth, and extended the commerce of Great Britain, had it been agreeable to the people; and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... last gave Barbara courage to speak. It seemed to nerve her for the ordeal, and, at the same time, to point a ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... nations which knew nothing of one another, or which saw one another only in the form of contemptuous caricatures, have learned during the last four years, in the mud of the trenches, and at grips with death, that they are the same suffering flesh. All are enduring the same ordeal, and in it they become brothers. This sentiment continues to grow. For when we attempt to foresee the changes which, after the war, will occur in the relationships between the nations, we do not sufficiently realise the extent to which the war will lead to other upheavals, which ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... themselves, you and I, you know, alone. The fact is that they are all eager to tell you what they feel about your exploit of this morning, and they will not be happy until they have done so. Do you feel equal to the ordeal; or shall I go back and say that they must excuse you for a little while longer? I think you can stand it, you know. What ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... many a fray That happened in the early day, When shiners with an iron hand Reigned here the terror of the land! Few were the victims of the strife— If any—and the loss of life, Was fanciful much more than real In that blood-letting old ordeal. Among the medico's of old, Doctor Stratford I behold, Who foolishly I thought deemed best To emigrate towards the West, And leave behind a work which few Could with a single lancet do When venesection—old idea, Combined ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... employed. Mr. Wilberforce and Mr. William Smith undertook this laborious department; and as they performed it with great ability, so they did it with great liberality towards those, who were obliged to come under their notice in the course of this fiery ordeal. ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... gone: white-flower buds gleamed like pearls on the lichen-covered, twisted limbs of the old "dragon-plum" by Ume's chamber ledge, when Tatsu and his adopted father entered once more together the little Kano home. If the young husband had realized, all along, what this coming ordeal might mean, he had given no sign of it. Kano and the physicians feared for him. The last test, it was to be, of sanity and of endurance. The actual hour of departure from the hospital fell late in January. More than once before a day had been ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... tedious to dwell so much on this subject, but it appears to be a risk which is not generally much thought of, though it is of the most vital importance to the safety of London. It is very desirable that the metropolis should take warning by the experience of Liverpool, without going through the fiery ordeal which ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... were producing the most fearful and painful results. A large part of the laboring population was starving. Never before had there been greater distress. On the 2d of March, 1846, the ministerial plan had to go through the ordeal of a free-trade attack. Mr. Villiers proposed an amendment that would result in the immediate and total repeal of the corn laws. Nevertheless, the original bill passed the Commons by a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... Aug. 24 in an automobile. He was accompanied by a photographer and a Belgian newspaper correspondent, and his intention had been to make sketches on the battlefield. His arrest at Laneffe thwarted this plan. He underwent a terrifying ordeal at the hands of his demented captor, although he was not ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... we be fired upon. Volley after volley of arrows struck about us. The distance was so great by this time that most of the arrows fell short, while those that reached us were sufficiently spent to allow us to ward them off with our paddles. However, it was a most exciting ordeal. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... on to them, and although they bore it most unflinchingly, old experience told me that their nervous fighting energy was being used up all the time. If only these men could have been brought within charging distance, fresh and unbroken by any ordeal! But here was just one of the drawbacks of the battlefield and ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... must be rent for me? Do I not know the Grand Mystery is likely to burst prematurely on me? Great Spirit, in whose goodness I confide, whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and morning from early infancy, help the weak creation of Thy hands! Sustain me through the ordeal I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! Give me patience! Give me—oh, give ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... they rushed over the swamp with an eagerness that could not be restrained, struggling as in a race to see who could first reach the log that led into the fiery mouth of the fort. A Salem villager, John Raymond, was the winner. He passed through, survived the ordeal, and came unharmed out of the terrible fight. He was twenty-seven years of age. He signed his name to a petition to the General Court, in 1685, as having gone in the expedition from Salem Village, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... slender figure in the dust of the circus alone was a creature without artifice. And, as she looked up, she recognized the man in the box, the man who had once been a barbarian, too, and she turned her eyes to the iron gates of the cages whence came the roar of the beasts, and waited the ordeal. And the face was ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... well as great. He took delight in elections, served on committees, opposed tooth and nail all projects of university reform, and talked jovially over his glass of port of the ruin to be committed by the Whigs. The ordeal through which he had gone, in resisting the blandishments of the lady of Rome, had certainly done much towards the strengthening of his character. Although in small and outward matters he was self-confident enough, nevertheless in things affecting the inner man he aimed at a humility of spirit ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... The entrance ordeal is not quite over, but for a little while you rest on the wooden bench in your E compartment, waiting until the group is assembled, all save those sent away for detention. Suddenly you are told to come on, and in single file E group marches along ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... conclude that it is purified of its unavowable imperfections or defects, of its alloy of wretched and petty passions, its grossness, its chimerical notions, that it has become strong and healthy and vigorous. It is the ordeal of it, for to show itself natural, to be always true, without shrinking, it must have all the lovable qualities, and have them without seeking, as a second nature. What we call 'natural,' is indeed really acquired; it is the gift of a physical and moral evolution which it is precisely the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... to maintain silence, lest they betray their position. During the night the German aviators were more active than during the day and many times their bombs found a mark among the British soldiers crouching on the ground. It was a terrible ordeal through which these brave fellows had to pass, the forced inaction was maddening, and they were all the more eager to fight when at last the welcome signal came in the early dawn to go forward ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... matter," returned Lyndsay. "I have pondered over it long and anxiously, and I feel that my decision is right. The grief poor Flora feels at parting with her friends, is the greatest drawback. I thought that she possessed more strength of endurance. As for me, I have passed through the ordeal before, when I left Scotland for the Cape of Good Hope; and I now look upon myself as a citizen of the world. I know that Flora will submit cheerfully to the change, when once we lose sight of ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... started, looked at the girl, longed to question her, and had not the courage. She followed mechanically, and in silence. Could she, must she face it? Yes—for her son's sake. She prayed inwardly that she might meet the ordeal before her with Christian ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "Ah, it's an ordeal one has with girls," said Juffrouw Pieterse. "Take another piece, don't wait to be insisted upon; it's a cake ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... got out of the building that I began to walk on air. And the human animal being averse from change and timid before the unknown, I said to myself that I really would not mind being examined by the same man on a future occasion. But when the time of ordeal came round again the doorkeeper let me into another room, with the now familiar paraphernalia of models of ships and tackle, a board for signals on the wall, a big, long table covered with official forms and having an unrigged mast fixed to ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... back to the Indian lad with a rush the memory of the recent ordeal he had been through. He gave one glance at the unconscious form on the other couch and his hand darted to the hunting-knife at his hip as he staggered, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... himself by accusing another man of the theft. This other man was a Mr. John Temple, who had once had an opportunity of examining the papers of the late Mr. Whately. Temple immediately challenged his accuser; a duel was fought, and as far as ordeal of battle went, Temple made good his innocence, for he wounded William Whately. At {156} this moment Franklin came forward. He admitted that the letters had come into his hands, and that he had despatched them to America. He declined to say how they did come into his hands, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and, faint from suffering, he lay languidly back among the pillows, Dr. Swift's stern face relaxed, and it was then Theo realized for the first time that his father, too, had been bracing himself to meet the ordeal and had also ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... feet. Decision and deliberation marked his movements. He did not glance at the man and woman. His eyes were fixed up the trail. He had made up his mind. They knew it. And they knew, so far as they were concerned, that the ordeal had just begun. ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... like? He did not know that every word he said in joke about his aunt's temper, her peevish ways, the awful consequences of offending her, and so forth, were like so many needles stuck into the girl's heart, until she was ready to cry out to be released from this fearful ordeal. Moreover, as the day came near what he could not see in her she saw in him. Was she likely to be reassured when she perceived that her husband, in spite of all his fun, was really anxious, and when she knew ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... a deep impression on me. Here was a man who had undergone a strange ordeal. Here was a man whose sufferings were unique. His was no threadbare experience. Eighty minutes had seemed like two days to him! If he had really been immured two days in the tomb, the story, from my point of view, would have lost its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... subtile analysts, the jealous clairvoyance of dissentient theorists, the oblique glances of suspicious sister-sciences, the random flashes that skepticism throws from her faithless mirror to dazzle all eyes that seek for truth; through such a varied and protracted ordeal must every record that embodies long and profound observation, large and lofty thought, reach the golden Imprimatur which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Spirit. In summer he shivers with cold, in winter he suffers from heat; he cries when he laughs and he laughs when he cries, &c. He is the reverse of nature in all things. Heyka is universally feared and reverenced by the Dakotas, but so severe is the ordeal that the Heyka Wacpee (the dance to Heyka) is now rarely celebrated. It is said that the "Medicine-men" use a secret preparation which enables them to handle fire and dip their hands in boiling water without injury, and thereby gain great eclat ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... subtle instinct, for no man who had experienced it ever spoke willingly about it afterwards. Only the man would be changed; some began to be more reckless, as if a dumb blasphemy rankled hidden in their breasts. Others, coming with greater strength perhaps to the ordeal, became quieter, looking squarely at any danger as they face it, but continuing ahead as though quietly confident that nothing happened save ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... husband's offence and to make me his scapegoat, doomed to a life of hypocrisy and therefore immorality and shame. I would die rather than endure it. Yes, I would die that very day rather than return to my husband's house and go through the same ordeal again. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... than unflagging good-humor during a disagreeable journey with cross children. At last the ordeal came to an end, and in the late afternoon shadows they alighted at the wide piazza of the Under-Cliff House, and were shown to airy rooms, which proved that the guests were not kept in pigeon-holes for the sole benefit of the proprietor. Our heroine employed the ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... that had dropped from his lips, about the ordeal through which the Indians pass before they are allowed to join war-parties, had awakened Austin's curiosity. Nor was it long before, seated with his brothers in the cottage, he was listening to the whole account. "Please ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... corpse is in the town, and he may not mourn for the dead. If he dies while in office, he must be buried at dead of night; few may hear of his burial, and none may mourn for him when his death is made public. Should he have fallen a victim to the poison ordeal by drinking a decoction of sassywood, as it is called, he must be buried under ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... telling of the ordeal, his big eyes rolling and his deep rich voice trembling with the memories stamped forever in his brain; and picture too the men who, at one time or another, listened to him, fascinated, their mouths agape and a tickling down the length of their spines. It was probably ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... had started for Rome, and soon the boy was rioting in the inexpressible glories of his first impressions of the great city. Even the ordeal of going to a strange school had its compensations in the two slaves who went behind him to carry his books. The centurions' sons at home had carried their own, and Horace felt a harmless, boyish pleasure (without in the least understanding the years of economy on his father's ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... considered how much worse it would be if the divorced man married her own sister. That course seemed to her impossible. She imagined the horrible details, the surmises, the newspaper articles, and she said to herself that even if she herself were willing to face the ordeal it would be still more of an ordeal for Wollaston and Evelyn. She said to herself that it was impossible; then she also said to herself, with no bitterness, but with an acquiescence in the logic of it, that ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... many of my friends may find themselves some day, at some hour of their lives, face to face with such an ordeal? Who knows how many an act of patriotism will make their names illustrious, how dear to the people some of these names may become? What if some day I were to see the youth who sat next to me in the class-room or at table, or slept beside me in the dormitory, riding through ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... of his strength and natural speech," and thrust upon him a paper for his signature, "wherein the Cardinal had writ what he pleased for his own particular weill," evidently with some directions about the regency, that ordeal which Scotland, unhappily, had now again to go through. When James had put his dying hand to this authority, wrested from him in his last weakness, a faint light of peace seems to have ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... had been anticipated; and now the two prisoners stood, trembling with exhaustion from their superhuman efforts, cruelly bruised, bleeding, and altogether too dazed and helpless to make that sudden, wild dash for freedom which each had planned in his heart when entering upon the terrible ordeal through which they had just passed. What was to be the next move in this grim game of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... sincerely, and he knew the results to be good. On his own bridge he had faced the blind fog with the lives of passengers hanging upon his judgment; he had met the elements at their work, and out of the ordeal he had come with greater self-reliance, broader, kindlier, better. For the first time in his life he was looking beyond his dreams, although the work in hand was all-absorbing; there would be more for him to do. He felt it, he knew it, for such ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... goblet contained a vile poison, one drop of which on her tongue would cause death; so she hesitated, trembling and shrinking from the ordeal. ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... should have been able to sleep soundly after her emotional ordeal, until she remembered that when at last Don Carlos had desisted in his attempt to make her surrender herself voluntarily and had left her, Madre Dolores had reappeared and insisted upon her drinking something out of a glass. The "something" was a sweet and pungent ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... invited him to visit that town. He accepted the invitation and was hospitably entertained. A number of young men of the town proposed a public supper in his honour, and gave him notice that he would have to reply to the toast of his own health. Clare shrank from this terrible ordeal and quitted Boston with scant ceremony. This he regretted on discovering that his warm-hearted friends and admirers had, unknown to him, put ten pounds into his travelling bag. His visit to Boston was followed by an attack of fever ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... but that my conduct was to be viewed by the light of the pure flame of research. In my secret soul I resolved that I would go at once, that very morning, to New York and plead with Caffray for some slight easing of my ordeal. The 'Spectre of the Threshold' appeared to wear a silk hat, and I was afraid I never, ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... months after the outbreak of hostilities, while the two last to take the field did not leave till early in 1916. The policy may in the long run have proved the right one; but at the time it did seem a pity not to have accelerated the preparation of these existing troops for the ordeal of the field. None of us in Whitehall, however, wished the New Armies to be set up under the auspices of the Territorial Associations; that was a different ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... reason for further concealment. But one last word, Watson. Say nothing of the hound to Sir Henry. Let him think that Selden's death was as Stapleton would have us believe. He will have a better nerve for the ordeal which he will have to undergo to-morrow, when he is engaged, if I remember your report aright, to ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... Rae briskly, "a moment only, one moment, I assure you. Well do I know the rage which boils behind that genial smile of yours. Don't deny it, Sir. Have I not suffered all the pangs, with just a week before the final ordeal? This is ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... his first start in the speaking line (Feb. 1830) in a strong oration much admired by his friends, in favour,—of all the questionable things in the world,—of the Treason and Sedition Acts of 1795. He writes home that he did not find the ordeal so formidable as it used to be before the smaller audiences at Eton, for at Oxford they sometimes mustered as many as a hundred or a hundred and fifty. He spoke for a strongly-worded motion on a happier theme, in favour of the policy and memory of Canning. In the summer of 1831, he mentions ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and David Bell sat down, wiping the great drops of perspiration from his brow. To a man of his training, and cast of thought, no ordeal could be more terrible than that through which he had just passed. But underneath the turmoil of his emotion he felt a great calm and peace, threaded with the exultation of ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a horrible ordeal for her, after the hope that had excited her, and this time it was real tears that flowed down her cheeks. The sound of the sobs roused Philippe from his dream. He listened to it sadly and then began to pace the room. Moved though ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... as if she had been through some terrible ordeal, for her face was pale; the emotion of meeting Clif almost overcame her, and she burst into ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... have helped to give foreigners the impression that every American is an oratorical revolver, ready with a few remarks whenever any chairman may choose to pull the trigger. And yet there are Americans not a few to whom the making of an after-dinner speech is a most painful ordeal. When the public dinner was given to Charles Dickens in New York, on his first visit to America, Washington Irving was obviously the predestined presiding officer. Curtis tells us that Irving went about muttering: "I shall certainly break down; I know I shall break down." When the ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... we had a judge among us. I know it is equally easy and invidious to ridicule the peculiarities of appearance and manner in people of a different nation from ourselves; we may, too, at the same moment, be undergoing the same ordeal in their estimation; and, moreover, I am by no means disposed to consider whatever is new to me as therefore objectionable; but, nevertheless, it was impossible not to feel repugnance to many of the novelties that now ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... had been postponing the promised visit, and thereby postponing the taking of the final step in the campaign of intimidation. The unexplained telephone call decided him, however. He would go and see Elinor and have the ordeal over with. ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... You'll deny yourself nothing, and go through no ordeal that is disagreeable to you. I don't suppose your things are a bit better arranged in London than they were in the spring." She looked at him as though waiting for an answer, but he was silent. "It's too late for anything of that kind now, but still you may do very much. Make up your mind to this, ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... Father Hecker once said to the writer: "While I was kneeling among the novices, outside Pere Othmann's room, waiting to go to confession, I often begged of God that it might be His will that I should die before my turn came, so dreadful an ordeal had confession become on account of the severity of the novice-master." Yet, as recorded in the memoranda, the victim was eager for the sacrifice when the knife was not actually lifted over him. "I begged ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... river, she carries her baby with her, and invariably gives it a bath in the cold water. This she applies with her hand or a coconut shell, and frequently she ends the process by dipping the small body into the water. Apparently, the children do not enjoy the ordeal any more than European youngsters; but this early dislike for the water is soon overcome, and they go to the streams to paddle and play, and quickly become excellent swimmers. They learn that certain sluggish fish hide beneath large rocks; and oftentimes a whole troop of naked ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... for morning prayers. Whether or not both queens whiled away a rainy day by going over the whole manor-house, down to the kitchen, we cannot say; but it is not likely that her Majesty's predecessor underwent the ordeal to her gravity of passing through a gentleman's bedroom and finding his best wig and whiskers displayed upon a block on a chest of drawers. And we are not aware that Queen Elizabeth witnessed such an interesting family rite ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... side passage to see something else, leaving your wife or your sister behind in one of the main galleries. You are gone only a minute or two, but returning you find her furiously, helplessly angry and embarrassed; and on inquiry you learn she has been enduring the ordeal of being ogled by a small, wormy-looking creature who has gone without shaving for two or three years in a desperate endeavor to resemble a ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... saw himself standing on his head; and at the window stood three clerks and a head clerk, and every one of them was writing down every single word that was uttered, so that it might be printed in the newspapers, and sold for a penny at the street corners. It was a terrible ordeal, and they had, moreover, made such a fire in the stove, that the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... minutes to release him from his position of terrible agony. I should have expected him to faint, but he did not. His face went dead white, and he began to sweat freely, but otherwise endured his ordeal with praiseworthy fortitude. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... by the caste of color, and humanity alone shall be the criterion of all human rights. The Republican party has been the party of ideas, of progress. Under its leadership, the nation came safely through the fiery ordeal of the rebellion; under it slavery was destroyed; under it manhood suffrage was established. The women of the country have long looked to it in hope, and not in vain; for to-day we are launched by it into the political arena, and the Republican party must hereafter fight our battles for ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... key was regarded as evidence that some unseen dread power was present, and so overpowering occasionally was the impression produced that the young woman who was chief actor in the scene fainted. The parties holding the key and Bible were generally old women, whose faith in the ordeal was perfect, and who, removed by their age from the intenser sympathies of youth, could therefore hold their hands with steadier nerve. It is only when firm hands hold it that the turning takes place, for this phenomenon depends upon the regular and steady pulsations in the fingers, and when held ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... peaceful seclusion of the railway carriage the duke's excitement had returned; and now that the real ordeal was at hand, he had grown uncommonly nervous. It may be that he was unused to deceit. He had set Emily Gibbs beside the chauffeur that he might have Pollyooly to himself; and all the way he poured jumbled instructions into ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... paused, and Alice realized that this was not the time to interrupt. Eleanor seemed to be bracing herself as for an ordeal, yet when she spoke the words came ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... of seeing Mother lift the great masses of golden butter from the churn with her ladle and pile them up in the big butter bowl, with the drops of buttermilk standing upon them as if they were sweating from the ordeal they had been put through. Then the working and the washing of it to free it from the milk and the final packing into tub or firkin, its fresh odour in the air—what a picture it was! How much of the virtue of the farm went each year into those firkins! Literally ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... the spot by description; and then he was allowed to pass out, his spirits flagging with the ordeal, and with the knowledge that his connection with the manufacture of brush whiskey was suspected by the coroner's jury, suggesting an adequate motive on his part for waylaying a stranger supposed to be of the revenue force. He felt ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... definite. The draft, you know, begins on Saturday of this week. I shall not have any rest of mind till this ordeal is over. Outwardly all is comparatively quiet. So is a powder magazine till a spark ignites it. This unpopular measure of the draft is to be enforced while all our militia regiments are away. I know enough about what is said and thought ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... reader, unaccustomed to minute researches, might be surprised, had he laid before him the history of some of the most familiar domestic articles which, in their origin, incurred the ridicule of the wits, and had to pass through no short ordeal of time in the strenuous opposition of the zealots against domestic novelties. The subject requires no grave investigation; we will, therefore, only notice a few of universal use. They will sufficiently ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... involved—the preparation of these people for their new life. We regard the renewal of this observance as specially fitting now, because the colored people of the South are passing through a terrible ordeal, and need all the encouragement and help that is possible, to save them from utter discouragement. It is said that the work of this Association is among the agencies most helpful in their elevation. Last year a Concert Exercise was ...
— The American Missionary—Volume 49, No. 02, February, 1895 • Various
... who do not follow them. We have three pressing wants: 1. A sustained paper that will not bow the knee to the image of this modern Baal. Such a paper we have, but it should not be concealed, that it must pass through a fiery ordeal, and can only be sustained by the timely efforts of its friends. 2. We need a convention made up of men who regard slavery as a moral evil, and are disposed to make their own consciences the rule of their action. 3. We need a missionary fund, which ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... of lunch, the approaching ordeal at Balham began to loom large on his horizon. In a vain effort to put off the evil hour, he decided that he would first go round to his rooms in Half Moon Street. He had kept them on during the war, only opening them up during his periods of leave. The ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... How came you to forget what I have told you over and over again about a proper reserve?" The energetic whisper reached the gentleman's ear, and he expected to be annihilated with a look when his offence was revealed; but he was spared that ordeal, for the ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... must pardon me, Mr. Searles, if for a moment I seemed unmanned. It is a terrible ordeal to be thus suddenly separated from ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... the loving-kindness of the Lord' (motherly Mistress Blaykling was wont to testify in after years) 'that brought the ordeal only upon us, grown men and women, and not upon any tender babes.' The Meeting began, much like any other Meeting in that peaceful country, where Friends ever loved to gather under the shadow of the hills and the yet mightier overshadowing of the Spirit ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... through the clothes, and deep into the flesh. Simon winced with intense torture, yet he did not give the designated sign in token of submission until the skin was entirely burnt from his face, by the fiery ordeal. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... mother's pregnancy enraged the eldest girl. Mrs. Brangwen was so complacent, so utterly fulfilled in her breeding. She would not have the existence at all of anything but the immediate, physical, common things. Ursula inflamed in soul, was suffering all the anguish of youth's reaching for some unknown ordeal, that it can't grasp, can't even distinguish or conceive. Maddened, she was fighting all the darkness she was up against. And part of this darkness was her mother. To limit, as her mother did, everything ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... is the world subject to an ordeal of judgment:—At Passover, which is decisive of the fruits of the field; at Pentecost, which is decisive of the fruits of the garden; at the feast of Tabernacles, which is decisive in respect of rain; on New Year's Day, when all who come into the world pass before the Lord like sheep, as ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... with the bow, and other weapons suited to a warrior's use; and, as manhood approaches, they gradually assume the dignified gravity of the elders. In some tribes the young men must pass through a dreadful ordeal when they arrive at the age of manhood, which is supposed to prepare them for the endurance of all future sufferings, and enables the chiefs to judge of their courage, and to select the bravest among them ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... it, not glad, gloriously glad, to be there—slaving to make a sermon because "in three days Sunday will be here;" taking with them at service time this so-called sermon, strong with the smell of books and of midnight oil; speaking it in pain of utterance, and delighted when the ordeal is over, with a delight most certainly shared by many who neither came to scoff nor remained to pray. Heaven help the man whom fate in the shape of foolish friends, or parents, or mistaken church-officials has sentenced to hard labour in the pulpit; who is ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... gave way at the second stroke of the mallet, and, at the third, uttering a shriek of agony, he revealed, in short gasps, the names of all the comrades he could recall. Let us not judge him harshly until we have undergone the same ordeal with credit! A look of intense pity overspread the face of Andrew Black while this was going on. His broad chest heaved, and drops of perspiration stood on his brow. He had evidently forgotten himself in his ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... of hope, soothing himself with unsubstantial plans of future greatness, and endeavouring to cover what was past with the veil of oblivion. After some hesitation, he resolved to make Crabtree acquainted with his misfortune, that once for all he might pass the ordeal of his satire, without subjecting himself to a long series of sarcastic hints and doubtful allusions, which he could not endure. He accordingly took the first opportunity of telling him that he was absolutely ruined by the perfidy of his patron, and desired that he would not aggravate his affliction ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... driver goads them, though to slaughter. Ye men, who pour your blood for kings as water, What have they given your children in return? A heritage of servitude and woes, A blindfold bondage, where your hire is blows. What! do not yet the red-hot plowshares burn, O'er which you stumble in a false ordeal, And deem this proof of loyalty the real; Kissing the hand that guides you to your scars, And glorying as you tread the glowing bars? All that your sires have left you, all that Time Bequeaths of free, and History of sublime, Spring from a different theme! Ye see and read, Admire ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... secret self I pondered whether or not the visitors dreaded the expected ordeal as ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... to college I am convinced that he gained material aid from me in that I loaned him my college scrap-books, which contained, among other things, a large number of examination papers which I marvel greatly to-day that I was ever able successfully to pass, and which gave to him some hint as to the ordeal he was about to go through. In his younger professional days, also, I have been Barkis's friend, and have called him up, to minister to a pain I never had, at four o'clock in the morning, simply because I had reason to believe that he needed four or five ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... July 18th.—I have just returned from church. Such an ordeal I never went through. If a benevolent lady, sitting behind me, had not taken compassion on me, and handed me a fan, I think I should have fainted.... Everyone says that the heat here surpasses that felt anywhere else. They also affirm that ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... siege of '71, when the last German was gone, and our houses had breasted the ordeal of the Commune, I was sent to the South. The Superior thought my cheeks were ominously hollow, and suspected threats of consumption in my cough. So I was to go to the Mediterranean, and try its milder air. I liked the change. Paris, with its gloss of noisy gayety and its substance ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... in science, in literature, and in administrative position, that I at once resolved to respond to it by braving not only the disquieting oscillations of the Atlantic, but the far more disquieting ordeal of appearing in person before the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... got to the Bill, he had exhausted a good deal of his stock of voice, and yet he seemed to be less dependent than usual on the mysterious compound which Mrs. Gladstone mixes with her own wifely hand for those solemn occasions. It appeared that both she and her husband had somewhat dreaded the ordeal. The bottle which Mr. Gladstone usually brings with him is about the size of those small, stunted little jars in which, in the days of our youth, the young buck kept his bear's grease, or other ornament of the toilet. But on Monday Mr. Gladstone ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... been thrilled and delighted to know that Olga so much wanted to come in after dinner and see the tableaux, so he found it quite easy to induce Lucia to nerve herself up to an ordeal so passionately desired. Indeed he himself was hardly less excited at the thought of being ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... process was concluded, and the first blush of novelty began to wear off, the children were turned out in front of the women's tent, where, seated together on a bit of wood, they underwent the inspection of the whole tribe, old and young, male and female. This was a much more trying ordeal, but in about an hour an order was issued which resulted in the dispersion of every one save a few boys, who were either privileged individuals or rebellious subjects, for they not only came back to gaze at the children, but ventured at ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.' Mr. Bourne visited us in our affliction. My soul truly rejoiced in the Lord, while His servant spake of the things of God, and prayed with us. I am much comforted by my husband's state of mind. Although this is a painful ordeal, through which I am passing, God is with me, and His grace supports me.—My husband is no better. When Mr. Eastwood inquired the state of his mind, ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... Nirvana of a long afternoon siesta. There was a little departing detachment on this golden afternoon at Madras—two frightened women, now gladly seeking the shelter of their cabins, as the fleet steamer Coomassie Castle turned her prow toward Palk Strait. The terrible ordeal of "passing the surf" had appalled them, and the exhausted Nadine Johnstone at last fell asleep with her arms clasped around her sad-hearted governess. A hundred times had they read over together the old nabob's telegram: "Going home from Calcutta to ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... had served to deck every bride in the district ever since any one could remember, was left seated on the geta, or raised sleeping platform, in the dimly lighted inner apartments, there to await the ordeal known to Malay cruelty as sanding. The ceremony that bears this name, is the one at which the bride and bridegroom are brought together for the first time. They are officially supposed never to ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... work with his visiting and organizing. The open air suited him, his health improved amazingly, and the Mosgiel Manse simply rocked under the storms of his boisterous gaiety. Sometimes the shadow of the coming ordeal spread itself heavily over his spirit, and he came to the study with unwonted gravity to ask how this or that point in his maiden effort had better be approached. To prevent his anxiety under this head from ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... forward, bowing to friends in the familiar, first-night gathering; but he preferred to stand at her side, hidden by a curtain, while she called back the names of the new arrivals. This was a greater ordeal than the evening when his first play was produced, for he was known now, and the critics would judge him by the success and standard of the earlier play; instead of a handful of old colleagues, he was now on nodding ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... almost silent. This was due to some extent, no doubt, to the reaction from his severe ordeal of the day before, but it may have been caused somewhat by the feeling that he had gone too far in taking them fully into his confidence. His secret was no longer his, and while he was strongly drawn toward these wholesome young fellows who were of his own age, ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... from up and down the ranks of literature and science, till Lady Driffield raised her eyebrows, invited a certain number of her own set to keep her in countenance, and made up her mind to endure. At the end of the ordeal Lord Driffield generally made the rueful reflection that it had not gone off well. But he felt the better and digested the better for the self-assertion of it, and it was ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... underestimate the difficulties of the ordeal was evident by the extent of his orders, and Captain Nibletts noted with satisfaction as the evening wore on that the old man's spirits were improving considerably. Twice he sent out instructions to the bar to have the men's mugs ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... and hanging her head as if the ordeal was too much for her, was the plainest-looking maiden he had ever seen in his life. She was thin and ill-thriven-looking, very different from the buxom lassies he was accustomed to see: her eyes were colourless; her nose was long and pointed, and the size of her mouth would alone have ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... north, and it was absolutely sure that it was beyond the reach of Southern raiders. Colonel Newcomb wished to send a message to the Secretary of War and the President, telling of the night's events and his triumphant passage through the ordeal. These circumstances might make them wish to change his orders, and at any rate the commander of the regiment wished to be sure ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and new members passed through a ceremony called 'initiation,' which was not confined to the lower classes, from which most of them were recruited. Almost every Philadelphia boy, as late as twenty years ago, went through some sort of ordeal when he first entered into active boyhood. Being triced up by legs and arms, and swung violently against a gate, was usually part of this ceremony, and it no doubt still exists, although I have no particular information, which ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... with Valmai had, of course, been a trying ordeal. With the fervour of a first and passionate love, he recalled every word she had spoken, every passing shade of thought reflected on her face, and while these reveries occupied his mind, there was a ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... decorative trees growing bravely in little pots, red people offering incense which is piled up on mounds like mountains, Ptah-Seket, Osiris receiving a royal gift of wine, the queen in the company of various divinities, and the terrible ordeal of the cows. The cows are being weighed in scales. There are three of them. One is a philosopher, and reposes with an air that says, "Even this last indignity of being weighed against my will cannot perturb my soaring spirit." But the other two sitting up, look as ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... spell; they had been working in an incessant flood of water; their sleeves had been doubled up, and every man had ugly salt-water boils on his arms. The little cabin-boy had stuck gallantly to work with the rest, but both his feet were frost-bitten, and he could not stand alone. A more deplorable ordeal was never undergone by men, and nothing but indomitable hardihood could have kept them up. On the 17th of the month they had got so far north that there was scarcely any daylight in each twenty-four hours. ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... horror at the thought of such an ordeal. To drive away from the palace, where she had been more than queen, under the scornful eyes and bitter gibes of so many personal enemies! After all the humiliations of the day, that would be the crowning cup of sorrow. ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... But Mona escaped that ordeal. Her grandmother did not mention the subject, for one reason; she felt too unwell; an outburst of anger always made her ill; and for another, she was already ashamed of herself and of what she had said. Altogether, ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... his one available arm across her shoulders, he essayed to walk, but it was so ghastly an ordeal that he could accomplish only a few steps ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... who so proudly issued from the Boston barracks at sunrise for the suppression of pretentious rebellion. Knapsacks were thrown aside. British veterans stripped for fight. Not a single regiment of those engaged had passed such a fearful ordeal in its whole history as a single hour had witnessed. The power of discipline, the energy of experienced commanders, and the pressure of honored antecedents, combined to make the movement as trying ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... this, that which is most under present debate, is that which refers to something vulgarly called Spectre Evidence, and a certain sort of Ordeal or trial by the sight and touch. The principal Plea to justifie the convictive Evidence in these, is fetcht from the Consideration of the Wisdom and Righteousness of God in Governing the World, which they ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... but everything that passed before his eyes was, as it were, in a kaleidoscope, vivid and glowing, but yet intangible. His brain told him that here before him was a woman into whose life he had brought its first ordeal and humiliation. But his heart only felt a reflective sort of pity: it was not a personal or immediate realisation, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... thus, recovering my strength in the sun, I was able to give Hartog some account of my adventure. At first, when I spoke of rubies, he evidently regarded what I said as a flight of fancy inseparable from the dreadful ordeal through which I had passed. But when I insisted that I had told him nothing but truth, he brought me the clothes I had worn on my descent into the valley, the pockets of which we found to be full of the rubies I had collected. But, after consultation, we determined to say nothing about ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... dear brother Claude and his contemporaries, Rotherwood is the only one left-were at Oxford, they got raised into a higher atmosphere, and came home with beautiful plans and hopes for the Church, and drew us up with them; but now the University seems just an ordeal for faith to ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Seraphina's cry—this "At last," showing the stress and pain of the ordeal—that shook my faith in my conduct. It had brought upon our heads a retribution of mental and bodily anguish, like a criminal weakness. I was young, and my belief in the justice of life had received a shock. If it were ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... in a judgment in his favour which was greeted as another triumph for him, and not unnaturally though, as recent developments have shown, quite prematurely,[5] won him much sympathy, even amongst those who were politically opposed to him. But throughout this ordeal Tilak never relaxed his political activity either in the Press or in the manifold ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... and woman suffrage workers, and held meetings to plead for free schools for Negroes and for the ballot for Negroes and women. She found people relieved to have the war over and busy with their own affairs, but with prejudices smoldering. Public speaking was still an ordeal for her and she confessed to her diary, "Made a labored talk.... Had a struggle to get through with speech," and again, "Had a hard time. Thoughts nor words would come—Staggered through."[174] However, she was a determined woman. The message must be carried to the people and she would ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... much as you promise me, so much the better for you. In that case we will come back and make a new arrangement at Stuttgart." The experiment is a terribly expensive one; but you know that my devotion never has shrunk from an ordeal. There is another point, moreover, which, from a mother to a mother, it would be affectation not to touch upon. I remember the just satisfaction with which you announced to me the betrothal of your ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... any taint. I have suffered a great wrong"—her contralto voice was quite unmoved as she made the assertion—"a very grievous injustice has been done to me; but now that the physical unpleasantness of the ordeal is over I don't feel as though I—my ego, my soul, if you ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... time the unhappy Jew was undergoing his terrible ordeal in the gloomy dungeon, his daughter Rebecca, in her lonely turret, had been exposed to ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... that winter when he was the chief lion of Edinburgh society many records remain to show, both in his own letters and in the reports of those who met him. On the whole, his native good sense carried him well through the ordeal. If he showed for the most part due respect to others, he was still more bent on maintaining his respect for himself; indeed, this latter feeling was pushed even to an exaggerated independence. As Mr. Lockhart has expressed ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... still to pass the ordeal of the cabinet. The President was not disposed to rely upon his own judgment either one way or the other. He asked, therefore, for the written opinions of the secretaries of the treasury and of state, Hamilton and Jefferson, and the attorney-general, Randolph. The same request was made to ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... there is no noun to describe a person who goes to court for a single time) was compelled to walk up a long room, and to back, bowing, out of the queen's presence. For ladies who had trails to manage the ordeal must have been a trying one. Now it has been made quite easy. There is but one point in which a presentation to the queen differs from that already described at the prince of Wales's levee. You may turn your back ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... same it was an ordeal. I believe I have wept since: for Benjy scratched my door often yesterday evening, and looked most wistful when I came out. Merely paltry self-love, dearest:—I am so little ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... more captivating in literature, than the narrative of some heroic deed of woman. Very few such are recorded; how many might be, if the actors themselves had not shunned notoriety, and "uncommended died," rather than encounter the ordeal of public praise? Of such the ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... too, on board—a very delicate looking young woman, who was returning from a tour in the States to her native village. She seemed very much to dread the ordeal she had yet to pass through—in sitting dressed up for a whole week to receive visitors. Nor did I in the least wonder at her repugnance to go through this trying piece of ceremonial, which ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... freedom of women was scarcely launched when the long-threatened Civil War broke forth and precipitated the struggle for the liberty of another class whose slavery seemed far more terrible than the servitude of white women. The five years' ordeal which followed developed women as all the previous centuries had not been able to do, and when peace reigned once more, when an entire race had been born into freedom and the republic had been consecrated anew, the whole status of the American woman had been changed and the lines which circumscribed ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... feel as if he had been there for an eternity. He could dimly remember a previous existence in which he had not been sitting in his present position, but it seemed so long ago that it was shadowy and unreal to him. The ordeal of spending the evening in this retreat had not appeared formidable when he had contemplated it that afternoon in the lane: but, now that he was actually undergoing it, it was extraordinary how ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... English school, did I say?—very few pictures at all, of any school, are safe from condemnation: almost all the Dutch must suffer judgment, and a very large proportion of modern sculpture, poetry, and music, will not pass. Even "Christabel" and the "Eve of St. Agnes" could not stand the ordeal. ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... the game," he reflected, as he addressed and stamped the envelope. "It may be superfluous, in case he sees or writes to her to-day. But he won't do that—he will put off the ordeal as long as possible. My beautiful Madge, for your sake I am steeping myself in infamy! It is not the first time a man has sold himself to the devil for a woman. Yet why should I feel any scruples? It would have been far worse to let them go on ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... pigeons, grind corn, press grapes, etc. For a long period, the man of letters was never combined with the statesman, as in England. In France, speculation in government ran wild, because the thinkers, suddenly raised to influence in affairs, had enjoyed no ordeal of public duty. Hence certain imaginary fruits of liberty were sought, and its absolute worth misunderstood. And now that experience, dearly bought, has modified visionary and moulded practical theories, how much of the normal interest of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to show the high sense he entertained of the honour of the visit by making almost any sacrifice (this was said with great conceit), proposed to put a negro up with an apple on his head, in imitation of the ordeal imposed on William Tell, the Swiss patriot, declaring that he who divided the apple, or perforated it with a rifle-ball, should own the slave. This proposal, the gentleman very facetiously observed, the party jumped at, expecting some good sport; but added, "The fellow spoilt it, for ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... myself, "I had never yet quitted a place without gaining a friend; adversity is a good school; the poor are born to labour, and the dependent to endure." I resolved to be patient, to command my feelings, and to take what came; the ordeal, I reflected, would not last many weeks, and I trusted it would do me good. I recollected the fable of the willow and the oak; I bent quietly, and now I trust the storm is blowing over. Mrs. Sidgwick is generally considered an agreeable woman; so ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... but the throat was dry. One felt like scratching the ground, but the finger nails had long become soft. One felt like biting one's own flesh, but one had no power over himself so long as a man was sitting on his neck and pinning it tight to the ground. It was hard enough to stand the ordeal itself, as hard as hell. But it was still harder to bear in mind that such a punishment was coming. It felt as if one was being flogged every moment. So, in the stress of the moment, I found my speech. "Sir," said I, saluting, "I would rather stand twenty-five lashes at once than have ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... shaved, and he was given a coarse robe and then left alone. Toward the end of the day he was given a piece of black bread and a bowl of water. This he was told was to fortify him for the ordeal ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... Unionist papers refrained from any attempt to identify Nationalist Ireland generally with the rising: they did full justice to the valour and the sufferings of Irish troops—who, indeed, at that very moment were passing through a cruel ordeal. In that Easter week the Sixteenth Division was subjected to two attacks with poison gas of a concentration and violence till then unknown, and under weather conditions which prolonged the ordeal beyond endurance. The 48th and 49th Brigades had very ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... think because I did not consult you, I did not think of you. You were in my mind as much as any other person at that trying ordeal, unless ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... met on the street, and walked home alone, rather than let any one say that she kept her husband tied to her apron-strings. His club, after the first sense of its splendor and usefulness wore away, was an ordeal; she had failed to conceal that she thought the initiation and annual fees extravagant. She knew no other bliss like having Bartley sit down in their own room with her; it did not matter whether they talked; if he were busy, she would as lief sit and sew, or sit and silently look ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... course," he continued. "These people are as silly as geese. The mute despair of the old woman will certainly teach them nothing. They will never have the least suspicion of the thing, for they are too far away from the truth. Once the ordeal is over, we shall be at ease as to the consequences of our imprudence. All will ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... the woman was a suspected witch, and that they were putting her to the test. I believe she was forced to go on her knees, and use the name of God, and say the Lord's Prayer. However, the poor frightened thing got successfully through the ordeal, and I saw her ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... next morning had come—clear and fair and with the sun shining wonderfully bright—a great concourse of people began to betake themselves to that place where the lists had been set up in preparation for that ordeal of battle. That place was on a level meadow of grass very fair bedight with flowers and not far from the walls of the town nor from the high road that led to the gate ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... king, but priest and prophet; indeed, his elevation to the throne was due, as his friends asserted, to supernatural agency. After the death of his father, his two brothers and he claimed the throne. Their pretentions were to be settled by an ordeal. They possessed a small magic drum, and, it being placed on the ground, he who could lift it was to take the crown. His brothers were unable to stir it, though exerting all their strength, but Rumanika raised it with his little finger. This test, however, ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... them from the alert eyes of the enemy below, was responsible for the separation of the raiders, so that each was forced to act independently and to trust to the compass to bring him out of the ordeal successfully. Lieutenant Sippe sighted Lake Constance, and taking advantage of the mist lying low upon the water, descended to such an extent that he found himself only a few feet above the roofs of the houses. Swinging round to the Lake he descended still ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... delight over the boy's appearance that morning which awoke an almost hysterical impulse in her brother. For he knew, as completely as though he had heard it from the boy's own lips, that nothing in the world but the knowledge that "Miss Sarah" wished it would have carried Steve through the ordeal of his first appearance. They had a word ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... incredulous, deemed it idle to make any effort to save their lives. But it was true; it was deadly true. And then, gentlemen, the doomed three appeared in a new character. Then they rose into the dignity and heroism of martyrs. The manner in which they bore themselves through the dreadful ordeal ennobled them for ever It was then we all learned to love and revere them as patriots and Christians. Oh, gentlemen, it is only at this point I feel my difficulty in addressing you whose religious faith is not that which is mine. For it is ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... a baddish shrapnel fire on to them, and although they bore it most unflinchingly, old experience told me that their nervous fighting energy was being used up all the time. If only these men could have been brought within charging distance, fresh and unbroken by any ordeal! But here was just one of the drawbacks of the battlefield and ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... and meditating, not without uneasiness, upon the ordeal that lay before me after sunset, for I felt sure that it would be an ordeal, Hans appeared and said that the Amahagger impi or army was gathered on that spot where I had been elected to the proud position of their General. He added that he believed—how ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... been told so well and so often that I spare you its details. Set this good hint of Cotton Mather against that letter of his to John Richards, recommending the search after witch-marks, and the application of the water-ordeal, which means throw your grandmother into the water, if she has a mole on her arm;—if she swims, she is a witch and must be hanged; if she sinks, the Lord have mercy on ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... not costumes and scenery, would the king be escorted by the lifeguards, arrayed in shining helmets and breastplates, which we know are perfectly useless in these days when a bullet will go through fifty of them with ease? The first thing a man thinks of when he has to face any ordeal, be it a coronation or an execution, is, how am I going to look? how am I to behave? what manner shall I assume? shall I appear calm and dignified, or happy and pleased? shall I wear a portentous frown or a beaming smile? how shall I walk? shall ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... Cousin Martha from Glenoro, in a panic of nervousness, was laboring hard to get to the end of it, but long after the bridal party was in position the faint, jerky sounds still wavered on, now vanishing altogether in a dumb show, now, just as the people were hopefully thinking the ordeal over, becoming huskily audible. There seemed enough of the thing, Mrs. Long said afterward, to give Arabella time to walk over to the next concession ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... great," said William; "and I do not wonder that so many perish in the ordeal. Yet I know that people need not fall, if they will open their eyes, and act out their country nature. Evil affords a high and noble discipline when we meet it like men, and overcome its onsets. When men and women from the country ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
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