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More "Stifling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appointment. He was canvassing the State, with a view to a final rally of its resources, preparatory to his last great effort—to scotch the serpent of the North, which finally, however, wound its insidious folds around the heart of brotherly affection, stifling it, as the snakes of fable were sent to ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... failed to wake her, he might grabble at the counterpane with palsy-twitching fingers. As for the twins, he was quite determined to teach them a lesson. The first thing to be done was, of course, to sit upon their chests, so as to produce the stifling sensation of nightmare. Then, as their beds were quite close to each other, to stand between them in the form of a green, icy-cold corpse, till they became paralyzed with fear, and finally, to ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... Carrigaboola, and bring her up there. I assure you I am up to it," she added, meeting an amused look. "I know a good deal more about sheep farming than either of you gentlemen. I can ride anything but a buckjumper, and boss the shepherds, and I do love the life, no stifling in fields and copses! I only wish you would come too, Bear; it would do you ever so much good to get a little red paint on those ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... soon leads to the neglect of a man's duties. The heart of this young libertine was already far on this road. Yet his was not a bad nature, though incredulity and misery were gradually stifling his natural disposition and dragging him down to ruin; they were leading him into the conduct of a rascal and the ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... hold of myself, but with an effort that was a fearful strain. I must try so, that it almost kills me, if I wish to accomplish even a little of what I ought. The heat here is almost insupportable, it is stifling, and I spent an hour or so ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... deformity, man is answerable to man. You dwellers in the pleasant places of the world are pitiless in your judgment of the sullen, suspicious, narrow life you find edging forests, clinging to mountain flanks, or stupidly stifling in the heart of some vast plain. I cannot understand the mental cruelty which condemns with contempt human creatures who have had no chance—not one single chance. Are they ignorant? Then bear with them for shame! Are they envious, grasping, narrow? ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... not rise from every human heart an outcry of blasphemy against a God who, by means of memory, transformed life into an endless torment, destroying all activity or initiative in the anxiety of expectancy, in a word, stifling the present beneath the heavy ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... her and led her from the stifling tent. People made way for them. Only their hostess and Archie ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... a strong hand, and, seizing his insulter by the collar, gave him a quick twist that laid him on his back. Mortimer held him there, squirming for a full minute, while men gathered so close that the air became stifling. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, neighbors, friends, and enemies of the boys and girls whose fate was in the hands of the big man seated in the revolving chair up in front. But Bennie's mother was not of this crowd; this pitiful, ludicrous crowd filling the great room with the stifling, rancid odor of the poor. Nor was Bennie. He sat, clear-eyed and unsmiling, in the depths of a great chair on the court side of the railing and gravely received the attentions of the lawyers, and reporters and court room attaches ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... black smoke from the tunnel rolled in a thick cloud about them, stifling them. The girl, dazed with the roar and blinded by the smoke, could only cling to her protector. For an instant they felt as if they were about to be drawn into the awful power of the rushing monster. Then ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... felt the change. The exile of Ovid was a blow to the muses. We have seen how it injured his own genius, a decline over which he mourns, knowing the cause but impotent to overcome it. [2] We have seen also how it was followed up by other harsh measures, stifling the free voice of poets and historians. And when we reflect how the despotism was entwining itself round the entire life of the nation, gathering by each new enactment food for future aggression, and only veiled as yet by the mildness or caution of a prince whose ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Stas, for it was as wide as a large room and could have given shelter not merely to four persons, but to ten men. The lower opening formed a doorway and the upper a window, thanks to which in the huge trunk it was neither dark nor stifling. Stas thought of dividing the whole, by means of the tent canvas, into two rooms, of which one was to be assigned to Nell and Mea and the other to himself, Kali, and Saba. The tree was not decayed to the top of the trunk; the rain, therefore, ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... this promenade down the fashionable boulevard where he had so often walked with Miss Hitchcock on bright Sundays, bowing at every step to the gayly dressed groups of acquaintances. He was taking the stroll for the last time, something told him, on this hot, stifling July afternoon, between the rows of deserted houses. In twenty-four hours he should be a part of them in all practical ways—a part of the struggling mob, that lived from day to day, not knowing when ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... mother, quite undone, Cried, while thus pleading with her son, Who, leaning on his blacksmith's forge The stifling sobs quelled in his gorge. "'Tis very true," he said, "that we are poor, But had I that forgot?... I go to work, my mother, now, ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... one, were lost in admiration; and, what is very uncommon, jealousy gave no alloy to it; the fear of the present danger, and the love of their country, stifling, without doubt, all other sentiments. The gloomy consternation, which had before seized the whole army, was succeeded by joy and alacrity. The soldiers were urgent to be led against the enemy, in the firm assurance (as they said) of being victorious ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... equinoctial line. But although there was not a breath of wind, the powerful equatorial current was quietly driving the ships, much faster than the Admiral could have suspected, to the northwest and toward land. By the end of that stifling week they were in latitude 7 deg. N., and caught the trade-wind on the starboard quarter. Thence after a brisk run of ten days, in sorry plight, with ugly leaks and scarcely a cask of fresh water left, they arrived within sight of land. Three mountain peaks loomed up in the offing before them, ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... whose abominable inventions contrasted so strangely with the mildness of their demeanour where their religion was not concerned. It was pitiful to see the young birds, many of them not yet able to fly, flutter into the flames and the stifling smoke, and then fall, scorched, and twittering miserably. The young lambs and other domesticated animals were forced in without much resistance, but the great difficulty was to urge the wolves, antelopes, and other ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... at all, but rather a dull, coppery red. Its spectrum indicates that it is smothered with absorbing vapors, a sun near extinction which, at intervals, experiences an accession of energy and bursts through its stifling envelope with explosive radiance, only to faint and sink once more. It is well to use our largest ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... that atmosphere would have left all on board the submarine gasping and stifling sixty feet below the fresh air that meant life. There was but one thing to do — come to the surface and run for it in the face ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... she said, "and yet, somehow or other the whole atmosphere seemed stifling. Naudheim is great," she went on. "Oh, he is a great man, of course. He said wonderful things in a convincing way. He made ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... contributed to make primary education what it ought to be—not a mere glut of random scraps of knowledge, not a mere conglomerate of facts, dates, and figures, undigested and unassimilated, of no practical use to the pupil in his later life, and stifling any constructive powers of thought with which he might have been born, but a system of self-development and self-expression, with the future of the pupil as a citizen in view, rather than his mere monetary value in the shape of school fees. This in itself is a remarkable ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... sensation, that of a descent into a coal-pit. There is the rushing noise of the cage, the whirring of wheels, the constant dripping and plashing sound of falling water, the thudding of the pump, the stifling feeling of dank heat, the stuffy mist, and joined to all the knowledge that if that slender thread of wire-rope should happen to break, the cage would fall perhaps hundreds of feet, and its occupants be killed. Then, he who descends knows that he is going ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn
... in hand, he pushed through the unlatched door into Collins's room. There was an acrid odor of dynamite fumes in the air, and when he pressed on to the third room of the suite the gases were stifling. His first act was to feel for the switch and cut in the electric lights. The third room, which had doors of communication with his own office and Collins's, was a wreck. Desks were broken open, and the safe-door had been blown ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... Goethe said of him, "He lives entirely in the ideal, but can never consciously grasp it." Unconsciously, too, Alexander the Great had fought for the extension of Greek culture; Caesar, to destroy the stifling institutions of a worn-out system; Charles the Great, to realize the "city of God" on earth; Napoleon, for nationality, individual liberty, popular sovereignty. What was personal and petty in the work of these Titans, being ephemeral, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... she could not do, for her hands and feet were strapped, and on the pillow, near her head, was a big bath-towel saturated with water which had been employed in stifling her healthy screams which marked ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... to be a warm one—indeed stifling hot, the men stay outside, smoking their pipes in the porch, or reclining upon the little grass plot in front of the dwelling, while within, by the bedside of the bereaved widow, are ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... still held it, grasping it more tightly when he felt the fumes of his father's reeking eloquence mount to his brain. The women were all sobbing aloud. A young girl was writhing on the floor, her groans stifled by her mother's hand. The air of the room was stifling with hysteria. The old sister of the dying man called out, "Oh, quick, Master Everett. He is going. Exhort him now to give us some token that at the last ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... affected her that way too, at first, and it got so that a procession of white-faced, wailing babies began to appear to her in the dead of night and cry for her to help them; to give them a chance to breathe in the stifling midnight, a chance to claim their birthright of clean water and air and sun. And she added, 'When you get to seeing things at night ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... flights ascended within the walls. The old man stumbled into the pitch-black, stifling passage and sat down on the lowest step to rest. On the landing above he must encounter the auld wifie of a landlady, rousing her, it might be, and none too good-tempered, from sleep. Unaware that he added to his master's difficulties, Bobby leaped upon him and licked the beloved ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... alternately turning their backs and fronts to the fire, while standing in one place, and often shifting places from one side of the fire to the other; in now taking refuge within their camp when the constantly veering gusts bore the smoke and flame outward, and then fleeing out of it when the stifling column was driven inward; but finding no peace nor rest anywhere, among those shifts and commotions of the battling elements,—they wore away the long and comfortless hours of that dreary night, till the return of morning light, which, after many a vain prayer for its speedier ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... but one o' my sons is out a coon-huntin' and he mought come in, not knowin' you're thar. But you jes' holler an' he'll move on." She meant precisely what she said and saw no humor at all in such a possibility—but when the door closed, I could hear those girls stifling shrieks ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... the glaring gas- light reflected upon them. On the opposite side, on rows of slab benches, sit a group of motley beings,—the young girl and the old man, the negro and the frail white,—half sleeping, half conscious; all imbibing the stifling draught. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... in utter silence that was broken only by the soft dipping of the oars. The night was somewhat cooler now, for the bursting of the great meteor seemed to have cleared the air. Or perhaps the gentle breeze that had sprung up, blowing from the open sea, tempered its stifling heat. ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... uncommitted sin that gains upon him at each stride, Antony fled from the place, and sought the moors. The moon was near its setting, and soon the dawn would throw open the eastern doors of the sky. He walked on and on, waiting, praying for, stifling for the light; and, at last, with a freshening of the air, and faint sounds of returning consciousness ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... ourselves in a vain endeavor. It isn't worth it. As soon as a great work of art is brought into the theater it loses its great poetic quality. It becomes a hollow sham. The breath of the public sullies it. The public consists of people living in stifling towns and they have lost all knowledge of the open air, and Nature, and healthy poetry: they must have their poetry theatrical, glittering, painted, reeking.—Ah! And besides ... besides, even suppose one did succeed ... no, that would not fill one's ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... the hotel—through the back door, where the smoke was not so stifling—because I thought that sahib would perhaps have taken refuge there. I did not find sahib, but I found these clothes, and thought it better to put them on than to ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... Instead we have bounded forward with seven-league boots. Have the fears and predictions of the local opponents of woman suffrage been verified? Have women degenerated into low politicians, neglecting their homes and stifling the noblest emotions of womanhood? On the contrary women are respected quite as much as they were before Statehood; loved as rapturously as ever, and are led to the altar with the same beatific strains of music and the same unspeakable joy ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... sunshine to sweeten and dry and vivify; and I would warn all good souls who begin life by setting out two little evergreen-trees within a foot of each of their front-windows, that these trees will grow and increase till their front-rooms will be brooded over by a sombre, stifling shadow fit only for ravens ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... dull, and he tried to write some letters. Worse and worse. The place was stifling, and the pen almost melted ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... the weather, Andrew?" said Captain Page as I went into his cabin. We had the skylight off, to let in as much air as possible, but yet it felt hot and stifling. He was very pale. His lips were of a bluish tinge, and his eyes were sunken and dim. On a locker close by him sat a young boy with a book before him, from which he was in vain endeavouring to read. I saw that Natty ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... a month later. August, hot and sunny, is reigning with quite a mad merriment, making the most of the days that be, knowing full well that the end of the summer is nigh. The air is stifling; up from the warm earth comes the almost overpowering perfume of the late flowers. Perpetua moving amongst the carnations and hollyhocks in her soft white cambric frock, gathers a few of the former in a languid manner to place in the ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... reached, and in fact even before that, the heat again became oppressive, the dust stifling, and the thirst at times almost maddening. In some places we could see the water of the Snake winding through the lava gorges; but we could not reach it, as the river ran in the inaccessible depths of the canyon. Sickness again ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... icy, snowy, Sundays in mid-winter when one hugs the cheerless radiator and, shivering in chilly discomfort, wishes that Sundays were months instead of days apart. There are stifling, sticky, sweltering. Sundays in midsummer when one prays, if he can pray at all, for the night to come. And there are blustering, rainy, sleety, dismal, Sundays in the fall when the dead hours go in funeral procession by and the world seems a gloomy tomb. But ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... muttered. "The night is stifling, and the lights make it worse. I will go nearer ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... Welsley," said Mrs. Clarke. "It's beautiful but, to me, stifling. It has an atmosphere which would soon dry up my mind. All the petals would curl up and go brown at the edges. I'm glad you're not going to live there. But after South ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... His image! For perhaps three heart-beats I saw them there, framed in the luminous mist, and then it rolled over them, swiftly, silently, and wiped them out, and I stumbled from the rock-seat and ran back across the beach, a great lump stiffening my throat and a hard, frightened jealousy nearly stifling me, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... the clouds. I changed my course, and struck out for the chain. The light of the torches did not reach me. Both the boat from the right bank and the watch from the Tour de Nesle continued to move towards the same point. I approached the chain, took a long breath, dived, felt the stifling embrace of the waters for a season, rose to the surface, breathed the air of heaven again, and cast a look behind. The chain stretched between me and the distant boat and torches. ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... "this place is stifling. If the Dons mean to make an end of us, they may as well do it ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... room crowded around him, and greeted most of the score of swarthy men and women by name. Tony masterfully stripped him of his overcoat and cap and placed them in the kitchen from which emanated odors of strange things cooking. The room was stifling with heat and with smells—beer, garlic, tobacco, ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... the multitudinous blasphemy of his day; you have made him free of its newspapers, its reviews, its magazines, its novels, its controversial pamphlets, of its Parliamentary debates, its law proceedings, its platform speeches, its songs, its drama, its theatre, of its enveloping, stifling atmosphere of death. You have succeeded but in this,—in making ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... forward in preparation for the advance. They recognized me because I did not put on my mask, and as they passed they shook hands with me and I wished them "good luck in the name of the Lord." Such cheery souls they were, going forth in their stifling helmets to the unknown ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... quiver. "I want to be happy; I want to be loved; I don't want to live a life of just dreary commonplaceness, alone, uncared for, with no outlook, with no prospect of joys. I want the most there is in happiness—every girl wants that; and this monotonous existence has been robbing me, stifling me, until sometimes I've been wild enough to leap off a high ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... against her—her reserve, her fine perception, her excellent fastidiousness of taste, even that little air of coldness that became her so well. To come into her presence was like entering a fragrant English garden, after stifling for an hour in a conservatory where the air was heavy ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... percentage of the value of the fuel employed is utilized. It is dirty, because of the dust and soot which result therefrom. It is unhealthy, because of the cold draughts which in its simplest form are produced, and the stifling atmosphere which pervades the house when the products of imperfect combustion insist, as they often do, in not ascending the flues constructed for the express purpose of carrying them off; and even when they take the desired course, they blacken and poison the external ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... and flushed, was raised from her slate. The lamp was flaring, and the room was stifling and smelt of kerosene. But she looked up at her aunt with some confidence. She half-expected to be commended. She was certainly working hard and surely ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... wing, which had swept the whole political atmosphere, now caged within the stifling limits of theological casuistry and personal ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sat down, and began to talk to Diana. In a few minutes he said, "Count, it is dreadfully warm in your rooms. I see the countess is stifling. I will give her my arm for a turn in ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... stifling work, but at last I reached a point where the fire lit up the corridor sufficiently for me to see that no soldier of Helium lay between me and the conflagration—what was in it or upon the far side I could not know, nor could any man have passed ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... house. When we reached the entrance we were met by the owner, and a warrant was shown to him. A heated argument followed, at the end of which the infuriated man waved us in with a magnificent and most dramatic gesture. There were some twenty rooms in the house, and the stifling heat of a July noon made the task none too enjoyable. The police inspector was extremely thorough in his work, and an hour had passed before three rooms had been searched. He looked into the cupboards, went down on his knees to peer into ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... caught herself up with a start. It was as though some one else had been speaking—a stranger who had borrowed her own voice: she felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental ventriloquism. Concluding suddenly that the room was stifling and Una's tea too sweet, she set down her cup, and looked about for Westall: to meet his eyes had long been her refuge from every uncertainty. She met them now, but only, as she felt, in transit; they included her parenthetically ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... stretched himself, looked out of the window, then decided to go on deck to get the breeze, for the heat was stifling in his stateroom. ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... general decadence in Polish literature. The perversion of taste which, at the beginning of that age, reigned in Italy, and thence spread over Europe, reached Poland; and for nearly a hundred and fifty years the country, under the influence of the Jesuits, was the victim of a stifling intolerance, and of a general mental paralysis. But in the reign of Stanislaus Augustus (1762-1795), Poland began to revive, and the national literature received a new impulse. Though the French language and manners prevailed, and the bombastic school of Marini ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... for miles, it seemed, was that one under the trees in the little coppice, where the caravan stood; but even there the heat was stifling, and the smell of hot blistering varnish mingled with the faint ...
— Dick and Brownie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... intense oppression—perhaps due to the stifling air and the lower elevation (1,950 ft.) at which Goyaz city lay—we entered the capital of Goyaz. At the sound of our mules upon the pavement, timid men, timid women and children cautiously peeped from each window through the half-closed Venetian blinds. We only had to turn round to peep at ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... history—a combination of freight, passenger, and "cattle." It had averaged eight miles an hour on its climb toward Yellowhead Pass and the end of steel. The "cattle" had already surged from their stifling and foul-smelling cars in a noisy inundation of curiously mixed humanity. They were of a dozen different nationalities, and as the girl looked at them it was not with revulsion or scorn but with a sudden quickening ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... tread, till we reached a convenient place, where we threw off our clothes, and plunged in. The warm wave was delightful to the skin, but extremely offensive to the smell, and when we came out, our mouths and throats were filled with the stifling gas. ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... his scars, for on the rack and in the Spanish boot, on nails, and the pointed bench, in the iron necklace and with the stifling helmet on his head, he had resolutely refused to betray through whom and whither the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... deck that the force of the wind could be fully appreciated, especially after leaving the stifling fo'castle. It seemed to stand up against you like a wall, making it almost impossible to move on the heaving decks or to breathe as the fierce gusts came dashing by. The schooner was hove to under jib, foresail, and mainsail. We proceeded ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... they leave me on if they go before bed time. Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner, but if you come, never go. The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often, but every time it comes by surprise that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening Company I should always like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth) and voices all the golden morning, and five evenings in a week would be as much as I ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... very carefully with a serious brow. He finished it and then knew that he had not read a word of it. He went, slowly, to the window and opened it because the room was of a stifling heat. Then he took the letter again and read it. As he finished it again he was conscious that the door-bell was ringing. He wondered ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... up the middle aisle Jack followed his leader, with a sense of awe almost stifling him; then, too, he felt drowned in the thunderous flood of music from the organ. He saw the man stop, open a pew-door, step back, smile and bow, and then wait until the boy from Crofield had passed in ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... him first. She beckoned Mazzetti who stood in attendance beside Mrs. Hubbell's chair. She snatched up the wrap that lay at hand and rose. "It's stifling in here. I'm going out on the Promenade for a breath of air. Come on." She plucked at Mazzetti's sleeve and actually propelled him through the crowd and out of the room. She saw ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... of the tabernacle flew open, and the Saints pushed out of that stifling atmosphere of denunciation, a cry came to the lips of the ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual midday, without the repose of night or the new birth ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... Stifling a sigh, Mr. Forrester rose, going to his safe. A few turns of the combination lock and he pulled the ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... both elbows on the rail, and looked out at the misty banks, puffing at his cigar. Then he dropped it hissing into the water, and, stifling a yawn, looked up and down the length of the deserted deck. It ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... trembled through the cracks above died away, and the darkness became gross. The air in the hold was stifling; our souls panted for the wind and the stars outside. At the worst, when the fetid blackness lay upon our chests like a nightmare, the hatch was suddenly lifted, a rush of pure air came to us, and with it the sound of men's voices speaking on the deck above. Said one, "True the doctor ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... child," says a famous English writer, speaking of the chimney-sweepers of London, "what a mysterious pleasure it was to witness their operation!—to see a chit no bigger than one's self enter into that dark hole—to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on through so many stifling caverns—to shudder with the idea, that 'now surely he must be lost forever!'—to revive at hearing his feeble shout of discovered daylight,—and then (oh, fulness of delight!) running out of doors, to come just in time to see him ...
— The Nursery, March 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... the surly admission. "But it's stifling here. If I have to live long in this hole I'll dry up from want of air. It's near the shop or I wouldn't stay out the week." Twice this day he had seen Brotherson's tall figure stop before the window of this shop ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... way, as he always had it. What pleased her most in the house was the conservatory, opening out from the drawing-room—a spacious place with a fountain and cool vines and flowering plants, not a tropical hothouse in a stifling atmosphere, in which nothing could live except orchids and flowers born near the equator, but a garden with a temperature adapted to human lungs, where one could sit and enjoy the sunshine, and the odor of flowers, and the clear and not too incessant notes of Mexican birds. But when it was all ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... ago, in Yorkshire, on one of those sultry and stifling days of August which in winter, or even in such a March as we have been suffering, one can view as something more desirable than rubies, but which in actual fact are depressing, enervating, and the mother of moodiness and fatigue. We had left Chop ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... which a land forces new habits on its dwellers. The quick increase of suns at the end of spring sometimes overtakes birds in their nesting and effects a reversal of the ordinary manner of incubation. It becomes necessary to keep eggs cool rather than warm. One hot, stifling spring in the Little Antelope I had occasion to pass and repass frequently the nest of a pair of meadowlarks, located unhappily in the shelter of a very slender weed. I never caught them sitting except near night, but at midday they stood, or drooped above ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... it good? I'm stifling for a blow. My lungs are sore for want of exercise. I was longing, longing to get out. Robert, do you realise it? We have won the prize! Can you believe it? It is almost too good to be true. It's the best present of all. Now you can buy your microscope, and ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... four men, evidently hurt, reclined upon the deck, with their backs propped up against sea-chests. As for O'Gorman, he stood close by the swaying lamp, holding a dirty, bloodstained rag to his gashed cheek as his eyes rolled gloomily and sullenly about the dark and stifling hole. ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... from the atmosphere of self-seeking faction, feverish intrigue, and murderous stratagem in which unhappy France was stifling into the colder and calmer regions ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to a little village called Ebersdorf, on the bank of the river, and near the field of battle. At the house of a brewer they found a room over a stable where the heat was stifling, and was rendered still more unendurable from the odor of the corpses by which ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... heat and stifling air, worked steadily alone in the dusty office, the cold, homely face bent over the books, never changing but once. It was a trifle then; yet, when she looked back afterwards, the trifle was all that gave the day a name. The room shook, as I said, with the thunderous, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... However she resumed her story. "The confirmation over, our life became as gloomily monotonous as before; we read the same pious books and did the same work at the same hours as formerly. It seemed to me that I was stifling in this atmosphere. I gasped for breath, and thought that anything would be preferable to this semblance of existence, which was not real life. I was thinking of applying for the 'good situation,' which had so often been mentioned to me, when one morning I was summoned ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... which they could discharge their shots and throw their fire-balls. For nearly three days a terrific contest ensued. The savages finally undermined the palisades to the house of Christie, which was at once set on fire, nearly stifling the garrison with the smoke and heat, for Christie's quarters were close to the block-house. Longer resistance was vain, "the soldiers, pale and haggard, like men who had passed through a fiery furnace, now issued from their scorched and bullet-pierced stronghold." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... last words that hot shame, tenfold more stifling than when it had before humiliated Madeline, rushed over her, sending the scarlet in a wave to her temples. It seemed that his words made her realize she was actually face to face with him, that somehow a shame she would rather have ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... the chamber, Mr. Vincent had felt that its hot and stifling atmosphere must augment the fever of his patient; and before he attempted to disturb him from the temporary rest of insensibility, he opened the window-shutters and also the room-door wide enough to admit the air from the adjoining apartment. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... When the unbaptized were gone the tiny church, that had seemed so thronged and stifling, grew to be roomy ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... write the words I said, 130 My words were slow, my tears were few; But through the dark my silence spoke Like thunder. When this morning broke, My face was pinched, my hair was grey, And frozen blood was on the sill Where stifling in my struggle ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... fast-sailing line-of-packet ship, 'THE SCREW,' was solely indebted to his own resources, and shipped his good humour, like his provisions, without any contribution or assistance from the owners. A dark, low, stifling cabin, surrounded by berths all filled to overflowing with men, women, and children, in various stages of sickness and misery, is not the liveliest place of assembly at any time; but when it is so crowded (as the steerage cabin of the Screw was, every passage out), that mattresses and ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... will come with thee out of this stifling cabin," said Eleanor. "O would that we had been in time for thee to have counselled ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I do not say among all, but among a very large number of animals, this foresight for offspring in a well-marked form. It is easy to understand that the species that first acquired and fixed an instinct propitious to the increase of the race has rapidly prospered, stifling beneath its extension those that are less favoured from this point of view, which is of capital importance in a struggle for a place beneath the sun. At the present day if the struggle of animal life offers few facts of lack of foresight for the rearing of young, it is because ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... the lady, he drew the chest out of the pit, which he filled up with earth, laid her again in the chest, and shut it in such a manner, that it did not look as if the padlock had been forced off; but for fear of stifling her, he did not put it quite close, leaving room for the admittance of air. Going out of the burial-place, he drew the door after him; and the city gate being then open, soon found what he sought. He returned with speed to the burial place, and helped the muleteer to lay the chest across ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... trap-door, which communicated with the storeroom. He had been doing this while I was waiting in the swamp. The storeroom opened upon a piazza. To this hole I was conveyed as soon as I entered the house. The air was stifling; the darkness total. A bed had been spread on the floor. I could sleep quite comfortably on one side; but the slope was so sudden that I could not turn on my other without hitting the roof. The rats and mice ran over my bed; but I was weary, and I slept such sleep as ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... combustibles to be had. Of this they were already aware. He had tied these handkerchiefs together in such a way that they would burn, and after setting fire to them, had burled the blazing mass into the house. There it emitted its stifling fumes till they confused, suffocated, frightened, and confounded the lurking wild boar. Then, in the midst of this, the heroic youth, armed with his gun, rushed forward and poured the deadly contents of his piece into the body of the beast. Had it been any ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... necessary preparations. An hour and a half later he was speeding along through the clear cold moonlight to Dover, realising for the first time, as he leant back alone in his compartment, the full meaning of the news which had hurried him off. All his tender affection for his sister, and all his stifling sense of something unlucky and untoward in his own life, which had been so strong in him during the past two months, combined to rouse in him the blackest fears, the most hopeless despondency. Marie dead,—what would the world ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was canvassing the State, with a view to a final rally of its resources, preparatory to his last great effort—to scotch the serpent of the North, which finally, however, wound its insidious folds around the heart of brotherly affection, stifling it, as the snakes of fable were sent to do ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... then. The crowd had gone. The great room contained not more than half a dozen people. Confetti littered the floor. Here and there a napkin, crushed and bedraggled into an unrecognizable ball, lay under a table. From an overturned bottle the dregs were dripping drearily. The air was stale, stifling, poisonous. ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... The tepee odor became stifling, so in order to get as far from the Indians as possible, I went across the room and sat upon a small trunk by the window. I had not been there five minutes, however, before that wily chief, who had apparently not noticed my existence, got ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... reason for her desolateness? Because she does not know what the real reason is—conscience makes blunderers of us all. "How was it that in the weeks since their marriage Dorothea had not distinctly observed, but felt, with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead no whither? I suppose it was because in courtship everything is ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... dreams that were sweeter than words can tell! The chill embrace of the waters cold, Clasping my form in their viewless hold, Laving my brow in their terrible play, Tangling my locks with their glittering spray, Freezing my warm blood, stifling my breath, With awful kisses that bring but death,— To such endearments I now must go Where my Spirit ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... followed by a band of mousmes, hiding their laughing faces beneath a kind of veil, and carrying in vases of the sacred shape the artificial lotus with silver petals indispensable at a funeral; then come fine ladies, on foot, smirking and stifling a wish to laugh, beneath parasols on which are painted, in the gayest ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... way, down the hill into the city. He was glad to go back; the trustful, waiting quiet oppressed, taunted him. It sent him back more mad against Destiny, his heart more bitter in its great pity. Let him go back into the great city, with its stifling gambling-hells, its negro-pens, its foul cellars. It is his place and work. If he stumble blindly against unconquerable ills, and die, others have so stumbled and so died. Do you think ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... sweets. I think, nay, I am sure, that they were careful of their talk before me, but it was a strange life for a child. Very often I could not see their faces for the cloud of tobacco smoke, and sometimes the atmosphere was so stifling that I preferred to sit outside on the ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... those who are acquainted with the story of Australian inland exploration. The country was covered with thick scrub, through which they endeavoured to make their way. The afternoon sun poured down a pitiless flood of heat, the white, glaring sand burnt their feet, the air in the Bush was stifling. It was as though they were walking through furnaces; and there were no spreading trees to relieve the ordeal by a touch of shade. They at length regained the shore, and trudged along the soft, hot sand; when Peron, exhausted after a walk of three hours, was compelled to throw aside ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... announced some new cause for anxiety. In a few minutes the worst was known. The underground approach had been advanced as far as Christie's quarters, which were immediately set on fire. Only a narrow space separated this building from the blockhouse, and with the fierce blaze of its pine logs the stifling heat in the latter became almost unsupportable. It seemed to the men that the time to yield had come; but their commander was not yet ready to acknowledge the situation as hopeless. Even when the scorched and smoking walls of their prison house burst into flame, he only bade them work the harder, ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... brought about the untimely stifling—I might better say strangulation—of my artistic impulses. The doctors were led—unwisely, I believe—to decide that absolute seclusion was the only thing that would calm my over-active brain. In consequence, all writing and drawing materials and all books were taken ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... defined outlines of the mountain chains, seemed to Mansana ruthlessly to expose his misery; he shivered in the chilly morning air, and returned to the atmosphere of the smoky engine, just then preparing to steam out again, to the rattling and racket of the noisy train, and to his own stifling thoughts. ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... opening of arms and a head on Clytie's shoulder, wet eyes close in a corner that had once been the good woman's neck—and stifling sobs that seemed one moment to contract her body rigidly from head to foot—the next to leave it limp and falling. From the nursing shoulder she was helped to the bed, though she could not yet relax her arms from that desperate grip of Clytie's neck. Long she held her so, even ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... fill overlooking the Flats. It was a heavy train, and a train that was helping to make history—a combination of freight, passenger, and "cattle." It had averaged eight miles an hour on its climb toward Yellowhead Pass and the end of steel. The "cattle" had already surged from their stifling and foul-smelling cars in a noisy inundation of curiously mixed humanity. They were of a dozen different nationalities, and as the girl looked at them it was not with revulsion or scorn but with a sudden quickening of heartbeat and a little laugh that had in it something both of wonder and ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... the window after his visitor had gone, and leaned out for some few minutes, letting the fresh air into the close, stifling room. Then he went upstairs, bathed and changed his clothes, made some pretense at breakfast, went through his letters with methodical exactness. At eleven o'clock he ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... descending. Two of them were already in the chimney, and were threatening horrible vengeance if the least resistance was offered. Upon the coals on the hearth the housewife instantly emptied her basket of feathers; and a great volume of pungent, stifling smoke poured up the chimney. The threats of the men, who by means of ropes were cautiously descending, were transformed into choking, half-suffocated sounds, and it was soon evident that the intruders were scrambling out as fast ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... had held off unconscionably long; the air within the lodge was stifling, and without the garden waited, breathless. Everything seemed pervaded by a poignant distress; the hush of feverish, intolerable expectation. The still earth, the heavy flowers, even the growing darkness, breathed the exhaustion of protracted waiting. Caroline felt that she ought to go; ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... throng the hither flood And lean intent above the beach. Their beating hearts inhibit speech With stifling tides ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... to have gone out at last like a flickering light away up beyond the clouds, and in the stifling gloom of the courtyard the three figures stood colourless and shadowy, as if surrounded by a black and superheated mist. Aissa looked at Willems, who remained still, as though he had been changed into stone in the very act of tearing his hair. Then she turned ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... She felt herself stifling in the wagon and flung aside the covering. Thrusting her bare feet into moccasins and slipping on a sweater, she stepped into the white world that had the still ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... epoch of human life seemed to have run its course and come to a stop. The impulses which had started it were exhausted. In the political field, feudalism, originally beneficent, had become tyrannous and stifling; and monarchy, at first an austere necessity, had grown to be, beyond measure, arrogant, selfish, and luxurious. In science, the old methods had proved themselves puerile and inefficient, and the leading scientists were magicians ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... climax. In his agitation the dentist had been pulling hard on his pipe, and as Marcus for the last time thrust his face close to his own, McTeague, in opening his lips to reply, blew a stifling, acrid cloud directly in Marcus Schouler's eyes. Marcus knocked the pipe from his fingers with a sudden flash of his hand; it spun across the room and broke into a dozen fragments in ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... statute common-law distinctions, has emasculated it. This is obviously untrue. By its judgment every contract and combination in restraint of interstate trade made with the purpose or necessary effect of controlling prices by stifling competition, or of establishing in whole or in part a monopoly of such trade, is condemned by the statute. The most extreme critics can not instance a case that ought to be condemned under the statute which is not brought within ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... their purity. Though stout awnings defied the direct fury of the sun they could not shut out its glare and furnace heat. And the human barometer showed the stress of life. Stump was a caldron in himself, Tagg a bewhiskered malediction in damp linen. The temper of the crew, stifling in crowded quarters, suggested—that they were suffering from a plague of bolls. As a mere pastime, there was an occasional fight in the forecastle. Unhappily for the disputants, Stump had a ready ear for these frays, and he would ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... to see a trooper fall forward over his horse's shoulder shot through the throat. Several more were hit, and our fellows began to waver a little—not much. Just then Royston's voice broke in: it was so clear and strong that it set my nerves right directly, and the dizzy, stifling feeling went away, as it might have done before a draught of fresh pure air. 'Close up there, the rear rank. Keep cool, men! Steady with your bridle-hands, and strike fairly with ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... there, framed in the luminous mist, and then it rolled over them, swiftly, silently, and wiped them out, and I stumbled from the rock-seat and ran back across the beach, a great lump stiffening my throat and a hard, frightened jealousy nearly stifling me, to ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... pestilential vapours. Add to this that the water is unwholesome; the city too is placed in a sand-bath which keeps up a regular temperature, by accumulating heat by day and giving it out into the air by night, so that night gives no relief from the stifling closeness of the day. No wonder that Mr. Bullock, the Mexican traveller, as he sat in his room here in the hot season, heard the church-bells tolling for the dead from morning to night without intermission; for weeks ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... John, stifling the note in his hand and stalking tragically around the room. "Can it be possible that I have nursed a frozen viper? An ingrate? A wolf in sheep's clothing? An orang-outang in ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... right to vote and hold office. Have the wheels of progress stopped? Instead we have bounded forward with seven-league boots. Have the fears and predictions of the local opponents of woman suffrage been verified? Have women degenerated into low politicians, neglecting their homes and stifling the noblest emotions of womanhood? On the contrary women are respected quite as much as they were before Statehood; loved as rapturously as ever, and are led to the altar with the same beatific strains of music and the same unspeakable joy that invested ceremonials ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... as she crossed the hall, jacket dangling over her arm, and pushed open the door of a darkened room. The air within was stifling, she opened a window and thrust back the blinds, and at the same moment the ringing crack of a rifled cannon shattered the silence of dawn. Very, very far away ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... of Jack and Bart and grew very bitter, for somehow the fire seemed the result of their carelessness. Would they be trapped by it? They had two good strong legs. They would save themselves, he hoped. So must he! Gritting his teeth and stifling a groan, he tried to gallop, using the cane and injured foot in unison. It was painful, but he must make time—he ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... much time quoting precedents to a court; it produces weariness rather than conviction on the part of the judge, who himself is a daily maker of decisions and knows their value. He knows the stifling mass of precedents, and sighs under them. It is rare that more than two cases should be cited in oral argument on any given point. Those cases ought to be the most controlling you can find—not necessarily the latest. They should be cases decided upon reason rather than upon authority. Your ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... pyramids of skulls festooned with human hair, a cave inhabited by reptiles with human faces, and an apartment whose walls were hung with carpets of a thousand kinds and a thousand hues, which moved slowly to and fro as if stirred by human creatures stifling beneath their weight. But Beckford passes swiftly from one mood to another, and was only momentarily fascinated by terror. So infinite is the variety of Vathek in scenery and in temper that it seems like its wealthy, eccentric, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... just going to get up when I heard your foot on the stairs. I feel stronger this morning, and I want to get out-of-doors. The house is stifling me. I have been listening so hard for the sound of her foot or her voice that when I try to listen I can't hear for the thumping of my heart in my ears. I want to be with her. I too am only a trouble to people. She and I will not be a trouble ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... me sick; always did. Wish I hadn't come," sighed Billy, feeling, all too late, that lemonade and "lozengers" were not the fittest food for man, or a stifling tent the best place to be in on a hot July day, especially ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... Porthos fell. His hand of iron grasped, quick as lightning, firm as a pair of blacksmith's pincers, the soldier's throat. He raised him, almost stifling him as he drew him through the aperture, at the risk of flaying him in the passage. He then laid him down on the floor, where D'Artagnan, after giving him just time enough to draw his breath, gagged him with his long scarf; and the moment he had done so began to undress him with the ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... at the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long, narrow galleries, or rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a large part of their lives, like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters of some old building. How close the air was in the stifling passage through which he was crawling! The scene changed, and he was climbing a slippery sheet of ice with desperate effort, his foot on the floor of a shallow niche, his hold an icicle ready to ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... daily in the green forest, hearing the wind singing in the branches and seeing the sunlight filter through the lattice-work of green leaves, there came unto her thoughts that had lain asleep in the stifling air of the cottage and the weariness of guiding the plough. And by and by she took a needle from her girdle and pricked the thoughts on the leaves of the trees and sent them into the air to float hither and thither. And it came to pass that people began to pick them ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... speech of Mr. Lincoln was the profoundest that he made in his whole life. He felt burning upon his soul the truths which he uttered, and all present felt that he was true to his own soul. His feelings once or twice came near stifling utterance. He quivered with emotion. He attacked the Nebraska Bill with such warmth and energy that all felt that a man of strength was its enemy, and that he intended to blast it, if he could, by strong and manly efforts. He was most successful, and the house ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... a giant insect, the shrill whine came through the air, rising to an overwhelming scream. There was a deafening crash—a great hole was torn in the wall just by the window with the jagged pane, and the room filled with stifling black fumes. A sudden agonising stab, and the man, looking up, saw Molly in front of him. She was standing ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... You can see fairly well up to one half of the tower, then pitch blackness surrounds you, and you begin to feel cautiously with hands and feet for that reason; also because just about here your head begins to whirl owing to the stifling atmosphere, and ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... to ride down to the coast, I went by coach. This held six inside and two by the driver. Three of the inside passengers sat with backs to the horses, the others facing them. My coach was full, and stifling hot and stuffy it was before we had done with it. Of the five others two were fat priests, and for twenty hours my place was between them. But in one way I had my revenge: I carried my loaded rifle between my knees, and a pistol in my belt. The dismay, the terror, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... idled; out upon the slow-gliding river it beat relentlessly, creating a pale, thin vapour that clung close to the shimmering surface and dazzled the eye with an ever-shifting glaze. The air was lifeless, sultry, stifling; not a leaf, not a twig in the tall, drooping willows moved unless stirred by the passage of ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... novel. Richardson, though he had found the universal as far as certain aspects of it in humanity are concerned, had confined it within a very narrow space, or particular envelope, in tone and temper: the fact that he has been called "stifling," though the epithet may not be entirely just, is almost sufficient evidence of this. Fielding had taken the novel into a far larger air and, as has been said already, there was hardly anything to which his method might not lead, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... and looked at her. Her breathing was so laboured I thought she was in a fit; and first I tried to put leeches on her temples, but they would not bite, and we resolved to carry her into the fresh breeze in the verandah, for the air of the room seemed laden with something close and stifling. When I threw back the covering of the bed, I perceived that the veins of both arms had been cut, and a few drops of blood stained her night-dress; also there was a small empty bottle in the bed with "Laudanum" on its label. The terrible truth was evident—she had taken poison and ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... or cursing all who resisted its advance. It exterminated scepticism by stifling knowledge, and putting a merciless veto on free thought and free speech, and by rewarding philosophers and discoverers with the faggot and the chain. It held its power for centuries by force of hell-fire, and ignorance, ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... operating system interface) has actually been codified in a ratified standards document. The existence of these standards documents (and the technically inappropriate but politically mandated compromises which they inevitably contain, and the stifling language in which they are invariably written, and the unbelievably tedious bureaucratic process by which they are produced) can be unnerving to hackers, who are used to a certain amount of ambiguity in the specifications of the systems they use. (Hackers ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... thunderstorm on a stifling day is proverbial, as is the relief of finding one's handkerchief just before one sneezes; but what are these compared with the flooding joy that comes with release from an embarrassing situation with a young lady? The effect upon Tom was to make him excited; more so, perhaps, than he had ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... awakened, however, by a shrill squeak, as of some animal in the agonies of death; and then there was a second squeak, that seemed to be suddenly interrupted by the stifling ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... one-thousandth part as bad as the detestable mosquitoes on the shores of the Barbuda lagoon, they agreed. So some occupied the bunks—regular ovens—others the lockers, and Tom took possession of the cabin-table, the least stifling spot, but tenable only—and that by no human being but a midshipman—in moderate weather. Old Higson took the first watch. Timmins, the master's-assistant was far too eloquent just then to be trusted, and Norris was to have ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... two later these lean, half-dead wretches were kicked out of their dark and stifling dungeon to be sold to some planters. A woman among them asked for a few words with Morgan. Haggard, tear-stained, ragged, neglected as she was, the captain did not at first recognize her as the one whom he had insulted by his show of love. ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... sitting in the Summer Garden on a seat under a tree, and his mind dwelt on the matter. It was about seven o'clock, and the place was empty. The stifling atmosphere foretold a storm, and the prince felt a certain charm in the contemplative mood which possessed him. He found pleasure, too, in gazing at the exterior objects around him. All the time he was trying to forget some thing, to escape from some idea that haunted him; ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... easily accomplished, when, as in Example 24, No. 2, it is only one 16th-note short of a full measure. And although this 16th, being the cadence-chord, is actually equivalent to the whole measure, it is sometimes less confusing to the hearer to silence it. This is called stifling the cadence (or Elision); and its presence depends simply upon sufficient proof that what was supposed to be the cadence-measure (and to a certain extent is such) is at the same time really the first measure of the next sentence. The following contains an illustration ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... thirty-first performance, a good run at that date; and according to an advertisement in the Craftsman the satire was still being played on the 7th of May. In little more than four weeks, and after the alleged perpetration of a treasonable and profane farce called The Golden Rump, a Bill for stifling the liberty of the stage under a censorship was introduced, had passed through both Houses, and received the royal assent. Well might Lord Chesterfield exclaim in the brilliant speech which, in Smollet's words, "will ever endear his ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... to free himself but the breath was fairly choked out of him. Joe Hawkridge was desperately thrashing about in the swamp, gasping and snorting, his cries also smothered. In a twinkling they were captives, their arms tightly bound behind them, the stifling grip of their necks unrelaxed. Weakened almost to suffocation, the two lads could make no lively resistance. Jack uttered one feeble shout for help but subsided when those strong fingers tightened the ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... twitched, there was not the faintest movement in his whole body, and his brows were still contracted in the same forbidding frown. If Varvara Petrovna had remained another three minutes she could not have endured the stifling sensation that this motionless lethargy roused in her, and would have waked him. But he suddenly opened his eyes, and sat for ten minutes as immovable as before, staring persistently and curiously, as though at some object in ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... dry; for every inch of available space below is occupied. Captain Runciman is writing, with tears in his eyes, the account of the loss of his fine ship. He tells me that he tried in vain to save sixty pounds' worth of his own private charts from his cabin, but it was impossible, on account of the stifling atmosphere, which nearly overpowered him. Fortunately, all his things are insured. He drowned his favourite dog, a splendid Newfoundland, just before leaving the ship; for, although a capital watch-dog, and very faithful, he was rather large and fierce; and when ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... refreshing to escape from the atmosphere of self-seeking faction, feverish intrigue, and murderous stratagem in which unhappy France was stifling into the colder and calmer regions ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sin in desperation because in the modern world she could not get a living wage in return for honest work. Sometimes she made a wild, reckless dash towards excitement because she could no longer endure the stifling, drab, and hideous monotony coupled with privation which we allow to become ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... not gone far before the heat and the stifling air drove him hack, and rushing back to his friends ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke
... that by this time I was gone; but how could I go? I felt like a rat in a trap: and if I had been a nervous woman I should have imagined myself stifling in the small, hot room with its closed doors and windows. As it was, I was uncomfortable enough. My forehead grew damp, as in the first moments of a Turkish bath, and absent mindedly I felt in pocket after pocket for my handkerchief. It was not ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... "Oh, it's all right," he said, stifling a yawn, and propping his newspaper against his coffee pot, ate his breakfast leisurely, so leisurely that the other habitues of the hotel had finished their breakfast and departed before he pushed back his chair. ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... heat," Tignonville muttered. "The night is stifling, and the lights make it worse. I will go ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... had been intensely hot, and our travellers sat in the shade of the cart overpowered and gasping. During the afternoon a faint breeze blew, but this had now died away, and the stifling air felt as thick as though they were breathing cream. Even the two Boers seemed to feel the heat, for they lay outstretched on the grass a few paces to the left, to all appearance fast asleep. As for the horses, they were thoroughly ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... "fish-cellar," as it was called, we found it crammed with people, the women and children occupying the ground, and sitting there on straw, which had been provided for the occasion, the men and boys were sitting on the cross-beams of the roof. The heat in the place was stifling beyond all description, for besides being densely crowded below and above, the wooden shutters were shut, on account of the wind and rain, the people's wet clothes were steaming, and there was a strong smell of stale fish. At first we felt as if it would be impossible to bear ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... the last of June, what he would infallibly be hanged for if he committed on the first of July; by which the greatest criminals may escape, provided they continue long enough in power to antiquate their crimes, and by stifling them a while, can deceive the legislature into an amnesty, of which the enactors do not at that time foresee the consequence. A cautious merchant will be apt to suspect, when he finds a man who has the repute of a cunning dealer, and with whom he ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... was closed, she rolled upon the floor in agony, stifling her moans lest they should be heard outside, beating her breast and biting her arms like a ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... around me men were swaying, striking, shooting, panting, locked in a deadly embrace. A sweating, red-faced soldier closed with me; chin to chin, breast to breast we wrestled; and I shall never forget the stifling struggle—every detail remains, his sunburned face, wet with sweat and powder-smeared; his irregular teeth showing when I got him by the throat, and the awful change that came over his visage when Jack Mount shoved the muzzle of his ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... owing to the effect of the elixir, or whether the appearance of Aramis had restored his strength, he made a movement, and his eyes glaring, his mouth half open, and his hair damp with sweat, sat up upon the bed. Aramis felt that the air of the room was stifling; the windows were closed; the fire was burning upon the hearth; a pair of candles of yellow wax were guttering down in the copper candlesticks, and still further increased, by their thick smoke, the temperature of the room. Aramis opened the ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... on the other's breastbone, almost stifling him. "Wot?" he said, scoffingly. The pleasing mixture of gin and fog in his throat rendered him more hideously hoarse than usual. "Not make up a prayer! And you a regular dab at all that game! Why, I've seen the women snivellin' ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... Jeremy's conversion to the big idea took place on the way across the desert to Jerusalem—a journey that took us a week on camel-back—a rowdy, hot journey with the stifling simoom blowing grit into our followers' throats, who sang and argued alternately nevertheless. For, besides our old Ali Baba and his sixteen sons and grandsons, there were Jeremy's ten pickups from Arabia's byways, ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... almost tender, until she said, "Isn't this gassy, and stifling? I confess I do like a carriage, and Richmond on a Sunday. And then, with two daughters, you know! But what I complain of is her folly in being in love, or something like it, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that great streams of sweat were coursing down his face. A quick glance told him that every member of the crew was the same way; and then, suddenly, he was conscious of a wave of intense heat—heat which quickly became terrific. The control room was stifling! ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... chamber in the College of Alcala, in the year 1562, where lies, probably in a huge four-post bed, shrouded in stifling hangings, the heir-apparent of the greatest empire in the then world, Don Carlos, only son of Philip II. and heir-apparent of Spain, the Netherlands, and all the Indies. A short sickly boy of sixteen, with a bull head, ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... my feelings, and I feel choking. When I first came to England, before the horror of Russia wore off, I used to go about breathing in deep breaths of air, exulting in the sense of freedom. Now I am stifling again. Do you not understand? Have you never guessed it? And yet I have often said things to you that should have opened your eyes. I must escape from the house of bondage—must be master of myself, of my word and thought. Oh, the world is so wide, so wide—and we are so narrow! ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... It was hot and stifling work, but at last I reached a point where the fire lit up the corridor sufficiently for me to see that no soldier of Helium lay between me and the conflagration—what was in it or upon the far side I could not know, nor could ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with rank weeds and vines, marked the spot where she had spent so many happy hours. The glowing yellow chestnut leaves dropped down at her feet, and the oaks tossed their gnarled arms as if welcoming the wanderer whose head they had shaded in infancy, and, stifling a moan, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Until he reaches Satan's home. Unholy visions curse and swear, Gyte vypers lull each demon's sigh, Giant Dragons whom no Remorse storms, Shake fists at opals in a dome. And Cesspools vext with odours strong From stifling shard and putrid dung, 'Mid caverns large and Cauldrons deep, Vile squats in teeming pewter burn; And shrieking vypers wield a prong Above a monster, quarter'd hung. The Tasmanian Devils keep The sod turn'd in a gyre's urn That no lost soul can undulate: Hence ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... foil to the order above it. Without spirit to resent, he, with his fellows, had endured the greatest evils of slavery. With the curse of free labour on the land, there had been no incentive for toil, no hire for the labourer. Like an incubus the system had lain over them, stifling all energy, checking all progress, retarding all prosperity save the prosperity of the great land-owners. Then the soil had changed hands, and where the plough had broken the earth, the seeds of a democracy had germinated and put forth from the very blood of the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... scrape, welcome indeed if he would settle down quietly into the conventional mold of Oak Hill or Red Springs. But he was no schoolboy, and at that moment the parlor of Oak Hill, for all its luxury and warmth, was a box sealing him in stifling confinement which he could no longer endure. Drew held tight control over that resurgence of his old impatience, knowing that his first instinct had been right: the old life fitted him now no better than his coat. ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... fellow," said the Viscount, stifling a yawn beneath the bedclothes, "you rise with the lark,—or should it be linnet? Anyhow, you do, you know. ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... Kunagunda's fair opened with a stifling crowd. Protestants, Catholics, and Germans who never had seen the interior of an American church jostled the buyers at the booths, and the faithful dutifully ate turkey and cold rolls for the fifth time at the supper-tables. The outsiders did not linger at ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... into a grove, and towards its gloom Mellen mechanically directed his steps under the cold, gray sky. A chill wind was blowing up from the water, but he did not observe it; in the fever which consumed him the air seemed absolutely stifling, and he hurried on, increasing ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... anchoring; Dom Joao the younger had accompanied us in his launch. The little river steamer was of very open build, as is necessary in such a hot climate; and to keep things dry necessitated also keeping the atmosphere stifling. The German taxidermist who was with Colonel Rondon's party, Reinisch, a very good fellow from Vienna, sat on a stool, alternately drenched with rain and sweltering with heat, and muttered to ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... he realized the atmosphere was fetid and stifling. A great pressure bore on his lungs, making breathing labored and difficult. And then they were in a lift that dropped into the depths of its shaft with dizzying speed. Antazzo's grin; Tom's eyes, dull and lifeless, floating there in the haze before his own—it was ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... shrill yells of the savages, the hoarse shouts of the settlers, the boom of the cannon overhead, the cracking of rifles and the whistling of bullets; in all that din of appalling noise, and amid the stifling smoke, the smell of burned powder, the sickening sight of the desperately wounded and the already dead, the Colonel's brave wife had never faltered. She was here and there; binding the wounds, helping Lydia and Betty mould bullets, encouraging the men, and ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... not all leisure, though, thus hanging about the Equator under the scorching sun, now at noon precisely perpendicular over our heads, the heat at night too being almost as stifling and the stars as bright as moons; for Captain Gillespie took advantage of our inaction to "set up" the rigging, which had slackened considerably since we entered the tropics, the heat making the ropes stretch ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... on the bag, which was very like sitting on the floor; but it was stifling down there among people's feet; besides, mine soon got "pins and needles"; so presently I popped up like a Jack out of his Box, and almost knocked off a man's nose with the crown of ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... where he could grasp the edge, but his strength had given out when one more effort would have freed him. He felt himself sinking back. Over him was the sky, reddened now by the fire that raged below. Through the hole the pent-up smoke in the building found vent and rushed in a black and stifling cloud. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... good deal of it. I heard a click — had no idea what it was — and then the same movement back again to the lamp. Of course, he now fell over the stool he had upset before. Meanwhile there was a hissing sound, and a stifling smell of paraffin. I was thinking of making my escape through the door, when suddenly, just as I suppose it happened on the first day of Creation, in an instant there was light. But it was a light ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... Sister, who worked thus during daylight that she might pursue her mission of mercy and succour at night. Thus passed some days, and then Jessica's blood grew restless; the narrow room seemed to her stifling and unendurable, and she pined for the open air, as a caged blackbird longs for ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... shiver. Perhaps through perfumes also memory knocks the loudest on our heart-doors; until it has come to pass that unto scented handkerchief or withering leaf has been given full power to fire the eye or blanch the cheek; while from secret drawers one starts appalled at flower breaths, stifling, shut up long ago. The sprays themselves might drop unheeded down—dead with the young hopes that laid them there—but the old-time emotion wraps one yet in that undying—ah, how ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... same intelligence, adding the description of his disguise: on which the worthy magistrate put on his mask and bauta, and went out himself; when his eyes confirming the report of his informants, and the reflection on his duty stifling all remorse, he sent publicly for Foscarini in the morning, whom the populace attended all ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... portrait has been left to us; and I think you will agree with me that he must have been sometimes RATHER TIRED of his velvet, and his diamonds, and his ermine, and his grandeur. I shouldn't like to sit in that stifling robe with such a thing as that on ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... another note of idealism in the life of to-day which Mr. Street ignores. This is the tendency toward the apotheosis of the individual in antithesis to society. This is a sign of health, in so far as it is a revolt against the stifling pressure of outworn conventionality, and it has found worthy expression in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and the poetry of Browning and ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... as soon be anywhere above the three fellows at the bottom of the Glass," replied Haynes, stifling ...
— Dick Prescott's Third Year at West Point - Standing Firm for Flag and Honor • H. Irving Hancock
... if she prove stupid or refractory. Meanwhile, the corporal, with a party, will bring the old man and the girl there to some apartment—the parlour, I think, called Victor Lee's, will do as well as another.—We will then be out of this stifling smell of gunpowder." ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... soon I must have fainted from sheer excitement and terror, for I remember nothing more till I felt myself deposited on a hard floor, propped against the wall, and the stifling piece of sacking taken off my ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... found out the subjects that were interesting to him, and reviving his faith in his own intelligence, led his mind through sunny, breezy ranges of thought that made the time he spent with her like an escape from the narrow walls and stifling air and ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... of standing," cried Dorian Gray, suddenly. "I must go out and sit in the garden. The air is stifling here." ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... breathing the fresh air of the street for a few moments, we quickly arrive at the entrance of one of the many small factories with which the town abounds. In spite of open doors and windows its atmosphere feels hot and stifling, for it is impregnated with tiny particles of flour dust, which too often, alas! are apt to affect permanently the lungs of the workmen. The dough of maccaroni is obtained by mixing pure wheaten flour with semolina in certain ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... confirmation of the circumstance that he had hardly a farthing in his pocket at the time. Little by little Mitya began to grow surly. Then, after describing his journey to see Lyagavy, the night spent in the stifling hut, and so on, he came to his return to the town. Here he began, without being particularly urged, to give a minute account of the agonies of jealousy he endured ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... had begun to seize him at the thought of blood. The stifling hold seemed again filled with struggling figures he had known; the air thick with cries and blasphemies that he had forgotten. He rose to his feet, and running quickly to the hatchway, leaped to the deck above. All was quiet. The door leading to the empty loft yielded ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... bleed; I feel the chill of night or of the tomb Creeping upon me slowly, stealthily. But lo, I struggle to shake off the evil That creeps on me so cold; with longing heart, I drag my bleeding knees beyond thy walls, Out of thy columns—forests stifling me— Into the sunlight and the ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... open market, stuck with signs and filled with merchandise and barter. Everybody stays out of doors as much as possible. In summer-time the children sleep on the steps, and on covered chicken coops along the sidewalk; for, inside, the rooms are too often small and stifling, some on inner courts close-hung with washing, some of them practically closets, without any opening whatever to the ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... told times without number in story and history. It was what the despised colonials feared and any bushranger could have predicted. July 9, in stifling heat, the marchers had come to a loop in the Monongahela River. Braddock thought to avoid the loop by fording twice. He was now within eight miles of Fort Duquesne—the modern Pittsburg. Though Indian raiders had scalped some wanderers from the trail and insolent messages ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... enacted behind that silent barrier of light? I shuddered as my imagination conjured up hideous pictures of that unseen death that now must be stalking about those city streets, entering those homes, polluting the air with its stifling, noisome breath, and that even at this distance seemed clutching at my ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... to perpetuate all that is worst and feeblest in the master's, leader's, or founder's work; or else, as in some cases, to upset it altogether; as a sort of hydrant for extinguishing the fire of genius, and for stifling the flame of high aspirations, the kindling of which has been the chief, perhaps the only, merit of the protagonist of the movement. I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever proposed to myself is to say, This and ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... evidently not recovered from their surprise in the south, for no counterattacks were attempted, nor had any reserve divisions been brought to their support. Throughout the long, stifling July day squadrons of Allied aeroplanes were industriously bombing depots and lines of communication back of the German front. The much-lauded Fokkers were flitting here and there, doing little damage. Two were sent to earth by Allied airmen before the day was ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... necessity for telling Anne," he said, at last, pulling rather roughly at his little moustache. They were seated at one of the broad windows in Simmy's living-room, drinking in the cool air that came up from the west in advance of an impending thunderstorm. The day had been hot and stifling. "No sense in letting her know, old man. Secret between you and me, if ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... noxious air of the sleeping-car as it toiled like a snail over the infinity of prairie. From behind the green-striped curtains of the berths, now the sound of restless turning and now a long-drawn sigh signified the uneasy slumber due to stifling ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... "A stifling hot day!" General Hobson lifted his hat and mopped his forehead indignantly. "What on earth this place can be like in June I can't conceive! The tenth of April, and I'll be bound the thermometer's somewhere near eighty in the shade. You never find the ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fuss.... And my father is not young, Kathleen. So I thought I'd like to run down and take him out to dinner once or twice—to a roof-garden or something, you know. It's rather pathetic that men of his age, grown gray in service, should feel obliged to remain in the stifling city this summer." ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... over the railing to look down. Now it was the gaslight on the first floor which seemed a distant star at the bottom of a narrow well six stories deep. All the odors and all the murmurings of the immense variety of life within the tenement came up to her in one stifling breath that flushed her face as she hazarded a worried glance down into the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... Shakib was then suspended and stoned. But their humour, like the odor and smoke of gunjah, (hasheesh) was become stifling. So, we lay our chobok down; and, thanking them for the entertainment, we struggle through the rolling reek and ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... characters are numerous and vividly painted, and the keen sense of ridicule pervading the book makes it a broad jest from beginning to end. Historically, his delineations are valuable; for he describes a period in the annals of the British marine which has happily passed away,—a hard life in little stifling holds or forecastles, with hard fare,—a base life, for the sailor, oppressed on shipboard, was the prey of vile women and land-sharks when on shore. What pictures of prostitution and indecency! what obscenity of language! what drunken infernal orgies! We may shun the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... he went off. When Janzen had led him away, it seemed as if the night which had brought him had carried him back into its impenetrable depths. And then only did Pierre rise from his chair. He was stifling, and threw the large window of the room wide open. It was a very mild but moonless night, whose silence was only disturbed by the subsiding clamour of Paris, which stretched away, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Even at the end of May and the beginning of June the heat was so great that it made people ill and tired and cross. Poppy's mother, who was never able to leave her bed, felt it very much. The court was close and stifling, and the old window in the small bedroom would only open a little way at the bottom, so that very little air could get into the room, and the poor woman lay hour after hour panting for breath, and ...
— Poppy's Presents • Mrs O. F. Walton
... six of the marines, including the sentinel, lying dead on the ragged pavement, and four others wounded, but stifling their groans, by the order of their commander, that they might not inform the enemy of his weakness. With the remainder of his command Manual had entrenched himself behind the fragment of a wall that intersected the vault, and, regardless of the ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... predecessors. Then the cure steeped the thumb of St. Sergius in beef broth. Same result. Then Joan ran weeping to Margaret to borrow some linen to make his shroud. "Let me see him," said Margaret. She came in and felt his pulse. "Ah!" said she, "I doubt they have not gone to the root. Open the window! Art stifling him; ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... One hot, stifling night, a brilliant ball was held, arranged at the Princess's instigation, in the cause of charity. All the smart world attended, and dancing was almost at an end when Bindo met me alone out upon ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... Into that stifling atmosphere—for the Administration of the Bains de Mer of Monaco seem as afraid of fresh air as of purity propaganda—the glorious afternoon sunlight struggled through the curtained windows, while ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... floating past, the chirr of the cicadas, that little brown lizard among the pebbles, almost within reach, seeming to listen to the beating of summer's heart so motionless it lay; unconscious, as though in verity he were again deep in some stifling trench, with German shells whining over him, and the smell of muck and blood making foetid the air. He was in the mood which curses God and dies; for he was devout—a Catholic, and still went to Mass. And God had betrayed the earth, and Jean Liotard. All the enormities ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... Assyrian-like church of Santa Rosa, in the old, half ruined monastery and garden, was the hospital of the besieged. A stifling, fetid odor, far worse than of drugs merely, sickened the two girls as a foul breath when they passed with their guide between thick walls into the large, overcrowded rooms. Military medical service was not yet become an institution ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... volumes for each library with a prohibition against introducing another volume into it without the Grand-Master's permission, hours, duration, application and sessions of classes, of studies, of recreations and of promenades causing the premeditated stifling of native curiosity, of spontaneous inquiry, of inventive and personal originality, both with the masters and still more, with the scholars. This to such an extent that one day, under the second Empire, a minister, drawing out his watch, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... as if he felt deliverance near after the weary day, that seemed to have been a lifetime already, though the sunbeams were only beginning to fall high and yellow on the ceiling, through the heated stifling atmosphere, heavy with anxiety and suspense. Doctor May was thinking of the meeting after the acquittal, of the telegram to Stoneborough, of the sister's revival, and ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... seriousness of the moment Wetherby roared with laughter inside the stifling, smelly cowl that made them both seem like familiars of the ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... through it, and as Bim emerged, his hair was scorched in yellow patches. He dragged out a dead puppy, laid it at his master's feet, and before he could be restrained had once more dashed back into the stifling smoke. Again he appeared, this time weak and staggering, every trace of his white coat gone. He was singed and blackened beyond recognition; but he was a four-footed hero, who had nobly performed a self-imposed duty. As he feebly dragged another little dead puppy to his master's feet, ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... Be he who is the stifling cause which smothers The best and sweetest feeling of our hearts; At ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... uncomfortable again in the region of the heart, but he was deliberately stifling pity, as five years ago, in a Peruvian fonda, he had subdued his filial tenderness and grief. He was not callous: if he had had the earlier cable he would have sailed for home without delay. But since Andrew Hyde was dead and would never know ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... parental dependence. A so-called independence which leads only to earning the merest subsistence is not so enticing, not so ideal that one can expect woman to sacrifice everything for it. Our highly praised independence is, after all, but a slow process of dulling and stifling woman's nature, her love instinct and her ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... better, and after the first week, the doctors decided that death was imminent. They were near the Line now, in the stifling heat of storms. The troop-ship kept on her course, shaking her beds, the wounded and the dying; quicker and quicker she sped over the tossing sea, troubled still as during the ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... cholera which was said to be raging in the city. I was staying in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette for the sake of being near Belloni. Through this street funeral processions, announced by the muffled drum boats of the National Guard, passed practically every hour. Though the heat was stifling, I was strictly forbidden to touch water, and was advised to exercise the greatest precaution with regard to diet in every respect. Besides this weight of uneasiness on my spirits, the whole outward aspect ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... have always kept themselves and their society strictly in the background, have nevertheless done what they could from time to time to assist the progress of truth in the world, and some half-century ago, in despair at the rampant materialism which seemed to be stifling all spirituality in Europe and America, they determined to make an attempt to combat it by somewhat novel methods—in point of fact to offer opportunities by which any reasonable man could acquire absolute proof ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... able to appreciate the entire change in the nature of her sentiments which that indifference showed. Love, though rooted in the past, depends upon the surrounding atmosphere for the breath of continued life, and he had surrounded her with the stifling vapors of disgust until her love had succumbed and withered. She found that his exhibitions of conceit and insipidity did not affect her in the same way as before. Her sensations were no longer sharp and poignant, ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... strong and ugly daughters, who carried bottles and glasses round the tables, together with salted herrings, and different kinds of bread. Nobody could have guessed, seeing the faded woman, shabbily dressed, moving in that stifling atmosphere of alcohol and human breath, that she was the wife of one of the wealthiest ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... them hopeless idiots. The Lady Superior has kept her lips resolutely closed up to the present time, but admitted, when first questioned, that the three sufferers had lived in their hideous prison for nine years, in an atmosphere of stifling heat throughout the summer and half frozen with cold throughout the winter; "but," she added, "they were idiots when they came." The conductor of the inquiry replied that, if such were the case, it was illegal to have admitted them to the Convent at all, and that even supposing ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... on another attempt to clear up the mystery that was fast stifling out my youth, love and hope. I professed to have an extraordinary desire to see the city from the house-top. I had never been any higher up than the third story of any house I had been in, and could not, I ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... hesitation, knowing whither it led. It was damp and stifling. Her candle burned dimmer and dimmer in the impure air of the long shut-up passage. There were, however, no other obstacles in her way. The passage was unincumbered; but the low arch, scarcely over her own height, seemed to press down ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... It is a stifling night; I sit With windows open wide; And the fragrance of the rose is blown And also the musk outside, There's plenty of room for the moths out there In the cool and pleasant gloom; And yet these mad insectual beasts Will swarm ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... should end itself, saying a prayer or two for the welfare of every one concerned, but making not the slightest attempt to restrain the panic nor to restore order. But the Queen and her ladies were in danger of being crushed to death in the very midst of the seething, bruising, stifling mass of humanity. ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... whose seclusion had made the dream of the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass possible, the boarding-house with its hideous clatter, its gossip and its commonplaceness was the merest make-shift of a home. It was stifling. How was a dreamer to breathe in a boarding-house? He was even homesick for the purr and the comfortable airs of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... Cuscuta, "which knows nothing of labour," the wicked Orobanche, plump, powerful and brazen, the skin covered with ugly scales, "with sombre flowers that wear the livery of death, which leaps at the throat of the clover, stifling it, devouring it, ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... for he had read my thoughts exactly; and without another word, I sprang to the side, climbed above the main-chains, and made my way upwards. But I had not gone far before, as I rose higher and more over the burning hold, I became aware of a hot, stifling fume, and the irritating smoke which rose ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... a more nervous and quivering temperament, was compelled to play a part, and she played it to perfection, thanks to the clever hypocrisy she had acquired in her bringing up. For nearly fifteen years, she had been lying, stifling her fever, exerting an implacable will to appear gloomy and half asleep. It cost her nothing to keep this mask on her face, which gave her an appearance of ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... a strongly marked and serious countenance, dressed in sober-coloured habiliments, had lifted up the stifling folds of the tent and was bending over me. "Can you speak, my lad?" said he in English, "what is the matter with you? If you could but tell me, I could perhaps help you—" "What is it that you say? I can't hear ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the Pacific. Giant stock operations resulted from a seeming accidental fire. A mine filled with water by mysterious breakage of huge pumps. Hoisting machinery suddenly unmanageable; dashing to their doom unsuspecting wretches. Imprisoned miners, walled up in rich drifts, have died under stifling smoke, so that their secrets would ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... death-bed, but while strong in life, and fair in reputation. And ever, after such an outpouring, oh, what a relief have I witnessed in those sinful brethren! even as in one who at last draws free air, after a long stifling with his own polluted breath. How can it be otherwise? Why should a wretched man—guilty, we will say, of murder—prefer to keep the dead corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at once, and let the universe take care ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
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