"Acrid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... terrific effort. His little heart pounding with exhaustion and alarm, he hid under a whin bush to get his breath and strength. The sheltered dell was windless, but here a stiff breeze blew. Suddenly shifting a point, the wind brought to the little dog's nose a whiff of the acrid coal smoke of Edinburgh three ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... upon Paris that day; a rain so fine and cold that it penetrated the soles of men's shoes and their hearts alike, a dispiriting drizzle through which the pale, acrid smoke of innumerable wood fires faltered upward from the clustering chimney-pots, only to be rent into fragments and beaten down upon the glistening tiles of the mansard roofs. The wide asphalts reflected the horses and carriages and trains and pedestrians ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... parts is excessively acrid. I remember a man being persuaded to take the leaves reduced to powder, as a remedy for Syphilis, and he died in consequence in great agony in ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... would have coughed his teeth out, his glass eye out, his wig off, his very head off; but he stopped this convulsion by stumping across the room and seizing a little bottle of bright pink medicine, which, being opened, spread a singular acrid aromatic odor through the apartment; and I thought I saw—but of this I cannot take an affirmation—a light green and violet flame flickering round the neck of the vial as he opened it. By the way, from the peculiar stumping noise which he made in crossing the bare-boarded ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... it went wide of the window. It was followed by a rain of small beams, but I was warned and dropped my head beneath the sill. The rays flashed dangerously upward through the oval opening, hissed against our vaulted roof. The air snapped and tingled with a shower of blue-red sparks, and the acrid odor of the released ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... begrimed with the soot of ages, the wall was plastered with filth, the roof was made up of spear-heads, the flooring was covered with snakes and bespattered with all manner of uncleanliness. Such an unwonted sight struck terror into the strangers, and, over all, the acrid and incessant stench assailed their afflicted nostrils. Also bloodless phantasmal monsters huddled on the iron seats, and the places for sitting were railed off by leaden trellises; and hideous doorkeepers stood at watch on the thresholds. Some of these, armed with clubs lashed together, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... was certainly strong—acrid, but by no means disgusting. He broke off a piece, and the fresh surface was a creamy white, that changed like magic in the space of ten seconds to a yellowish-green colour. It was even an inviting-looking ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... saponins are markedly irritant to the mucous membranes. They have an acrid taste and provoke a flow of saliva, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. If injected directly into the circulation they produce hemolysis, diuresis and direct actions on the central nervous system which may be rapidly fatal. Absorption after oral administration is so poor that ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... had said it out. But there was something else surely goading the girl than mere intolerance of the family tradition. The hesitancy, the moral doubt of her conversation with Langham, seemed to have vanished wholly in a kind of acrid self-assertion. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... expression. A moment more—another kiss, and she might have been compromised, she might have responded to the thrilling love which was calling to her heart, but the goddess of her destiny willed otherwise. The front door opened; an angular form appeared; an acrid voice fairly curdled love-thoughts as it assailed the impetuous lover. Within a minute he was slinking away and the rescued maiden was safe in the indignant, resenting arms of her mother—safe, but for years to be tempted and troubled by remorse and wishes, to be haunted by unaccepted ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... the headquarters of continental radicalism in the nineteenth. Robert never felt his wits so much stretched and sharpened as when after the lecture Lestrange was putting questions and objections with an acrid subtlety and persistence worthy of a descendant of that burgher class which first built up the Calvinistic system and then produced the destroyer of it in Rousseau. Robert bore his heckling, however, with great ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the genus quack, and, above all, that of acrid-quack. 'These,' says Carlyle, 'though never so clear-starched, bland-smiling, and beneficent, he absolutely would have no trade with. Their very sugar-cake was unavailing. He said with emphasis, as clearly as barking could say it, "Acrid-quack, avaunt!"' But once when 'a tall, irregular, busy-looking man came halting by,' that wise, nervous little dog ran towards him, and began 'fawning, frisking, licking at the feet' of Sir Walter Scott. No reader of reviews could have done better, says Carlyle; and, indeed, that canine ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... or castoreum, as it is commercially known, was obtained principally from the beaver himself. The basis of it was an acrid secretion with a musky odor of great power, found in two glands just under the root of the beaver's tail. Each gland was from one and one half to two inches in length. The boys cut out these glands and squeezed the contents into an empty tin can. This at first ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... agile youths, old men shaking the multitudinous wrinkles of their rosy, and white-haired skins, or dragging their legs thinner and drier than the juniper staff that served them as a third leg, hurried on, panting and emitting an acrid odour and hoarse gasps. Yet she went on peacefully and seemed ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... what an atmosphere inside the highest shelter, where sleepers had been packed like sardines and the newly kindled fire filled the fetid air with acrid smoke! What there was to be seen we saw—the crater, neither wide nor deep; the Shinto temple, where a priest was intoning prayers; and the Post Office, where an enterprising Government sells picture-postcards for triumphant pilgrims to ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... crash as he pitched up his gun. Something struck the heather with a thud not far away, and swinging the muzzle a little, he pulled again. He was not surprised to hear a second thud, and laying down his gun he turned to his youthful companion, while a thin cloud of acrid vapor hung about him. ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... the doorway looking in. Through a grimed and cobwebbed window at the farther end of the room the light filtered down among the still figures; there was the smell of dead fur and feathers, and of some acrid preservative. One box had been broken in moving it from the house, and a beaver had slipped from his carefully bitten branch, and lay on the dusty boards, a burst of cotton pushing through the splitting belly-seam. Lloyd Pryor thrust it into its case with his ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me, Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw. Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy, The sobs and slobber of a last years woe. And still the sick ship rolls. 'Tis hard, I tell ye, To choose 'twixt love and nausea, heart ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... page, a dedication, a blank page, a dedication, and so on. I saw no reason to change the title. It only remained to select the things, and the book was done. I set to work at once, and in a very little while my bibelot was selected. There were dedications fulsome and fluid, dedications acrid and uncharitable, dedications in verse and dedications in the dead languages: all sorts and conditions of dedications, even the simple "To J.H. Gabbles"—so suggestive of the modest white stones of the village churchyard. Altogether I picked out one hundred and three dedications. At last only ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... the eye, which was grey and full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt says: 'I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural. They were like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes.' Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and Haydon that he had none of form. The best likeness of him, in De Quincey's judgement, is the portrait of Milton prefixed to Richardson's notes ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... is not a poetic word—mere mention of it would distress Mr. Yeats; but it is potent as "Sesame" to unlock the treasures of memory. And before the laggard Spring comes round again many of us will sigh for a whiff of yellow, acrid smoke, curling from a smoldering fire in the heart of ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... natural thing in the world that he should be helping this girl, and he went forward with the greatest assurance to lift the black pot off the fire for her. The keen, acrid swirls of wood-smoke blew into his eyes, and the rank steam of yellow home-made soap, manufactured with bracken ash for lye, rose to his nostrils. Now, Ralph Peden was well made and strong. Spare in body but accurately compacted, if he had ever ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... centuries there has appeared a peculiar kind of Irishman. He is so unlike the English image of Ireland that the English have actually fallen back on the pretence that he was not Irish at all. The type is commonly Protestant; and sometimes seems to be almost anti-national in its acrid instinct for judging itself. Its nationalism only appears when it flings itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner or the invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift. Thackeray simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... She got out of bed with difficulty, then for a whole hour sat on the edge of it motionless, unsure that she was not in hell. At last she wept—acrid tears, for very misery. She rose, took off her satin and lace, put on a cotton gown, and was once more a decent-looking poor body—except as to her glowing face and burning eyes, which to bathe she had ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... for another's wife of troubadour, trouvere, and minnesinger, seem to have been squeezed together, so that all their sweet and acrid perfume is, so to speak, sublimated, in the recently discovered early Provencal narrative poem called "Flamenca." Like the "Tristram" of Gottfried von Strassburg, like all these light mediaeval love lyrics, of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... the head waters of Red River during the summer of 1852, we suffered most severely from thirst, having nothing but the acrid and bitter waters from the river, which, issuing from a gypsum formation, was highly charged with salts, and, when taken into the stomach, did not quench thirst in the slightest degree, but, on the contrary, ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... leaves and little green flowers, followed by a quaint pink and red- striped pear, from which hangs, at the larger and lower end, a kidney-shaped bean, which bold folk eat when roasted: but woe to those who try it when raw, for the acrid oil blisters the lips; and even while the beans are roasting, the fumes of the oil will blister the cook's face if she holds it ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... leprosy—the legs, arms, thighs, and, in fact, the whole body, being covered with scales, and the necessary movements of the patient would cause the diseased parts to crack, and discharge blood, or a thin, acrid, and burning ichor; yet, under all these circumstances, I have been particularly successful in the treatment of these cases; a great variety of them having yielded to the mode which I have suggested to the sufferers, after many other means had ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... which is composed of a metal, or positive radical, and OH. It generally turns red litmus blue, and often has an acrid taste. ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... Whenever the muscles of the abdomen are in a state of constriction, as described by him, the usual cause is spasm of some part of the intestinal canal, produced by colic, either of an accidental nature, arising from some acrid ingesta, which irritate the bowels without producing diarrhoea, attended with griping pains and distention, and spasmodic contraction of the abdominal muscles, with costiveness; or of a bilious form, closely allied to ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... shapeless shack. The hoofs of El Sangre bit into the dust, choking and red in daylight, and acrid of scent by the night. All was very quiet except for a stir of voices in the distance here and there, always kept hushed as though the speaker felt and acknowledged the influence of the profound night in the mountains. Someone ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... that the valley was a desert, despite the presence of Barney, and that was the face of the country itself. One-half of that whole Nevada area was a great white blister, forty miles long and fifteen wide, acrid with alkali, flat, barren, and harsh as a sheet of zinc. The valley's remaining territory was covered with gray, dry scrub, four inches high, through which the dusty Overland stage-route was ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... dimness of vision, ending in blindness if the food is not varied; the poisonous principle cannot be anything like soaked out in the surcharged water, and the meal when it is made up and cooked has just the same sour, acrid taste you would expect it to have ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... of pretty fruits might be compiled, and yet not more than half a dozen are edible, and only half that number nice. The majority are bitter and acrid, some merely insipid, and of the various nuts not one ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling shallowness can make him. But he told stories admirably, and was allowed sometimes to interrupt Carlyle a little, of which one was glad, for, that night, he was in his more acrid mood; and, though much more brilliant than on the former evening, grew wearisome to me, who disclaimed and rejected almost ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... prevent the action of acrid and stimulating matters upon the mucous membranes of the ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... wood and other combustibles were, under the action of heat, capable of disengaging a gas fit for lighting and heating. He had seen that the gas which is disengaged from wood is accompanied with blackish vapors of an acrid and empyreumatic odor. In order that it might serve for the production of light, it was necessary to free it from these ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... takes the unexpectedly genial form of plotting for their happiness, the disposition of our favorite writers becomes a matter of great importance to us. A surly, sour-tempered person, taking advantage of our confidence, can turn us against our best friends. If he has an acrid wit he may make us ashamed of our highest enthusiasms. He may so picture human life as to make the message "Peace on earth, good will to ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... prominently in the midst, as if announcing all these apparitions to be the offspring of her necromantic art. But Silas Foster, who leaned against a tree near by, in his customary blue frock and smoking a short pipe, did more to disenchant the scene, with his look of shrewd, acrid, Yankee observation, than twenty witches and necromancers could have done in the way of rendering ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... back, and crouched down where poor little Muckluck had knelt, so sure of a welcome. Muckluck, cogitated the Boy, will believe more firmly than ever that, if a man doesn't beat a girl, he doesn't mean business. What was it he had wound round one hand? What was it dangling in the acrid smoke? That, then—her trinket, the crowning ornament of her Holy Cross holiday attire, that was what she was offering the old ogre of the Yukon—for his unworthy sake. He stirred up the dying fire to see it better. A woman's face—some Catholic ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... last, and thrust the envelope into the flame. It burned slowly, at first a thin blue flame tipped with yellow, then, eating its way with a small fine crackling, a widening, destroying blaze that left behind it black ash and destruction. The acrid odor of burning filled the room. Not until it was consumed, and the black ash fell into the saucer of the candlestick, ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... some people," says Whipple, "amounts to genius." "How in our troubled lives," asks J. Freeman Clarke, "could we do without these fair, sunny natures, into which on their creation-day God allowed nothing sour, acrid, or bitter to enter, but made them a perpetual solace and comfort by their cheerfulness?" There are those whose very presence carries sunshine with them wherever they go; a sunshine which means pity for the poor, sympathy for the suffering, help ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... figure in a shawl came toward him through the haggard, his wife's mother. There was the sweetish, acrid odor of whisky. ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... denied its kill. Occasionally a venturesome gust with the spirit of a minor demon would find its way down the chimney to the drawing-room fire and send sparks in volleys against the screen, with thin puffs of wood smoke that lingered in the air like acrid ghosts. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... business. To do all this in a full Council of 137 members, most of them quite unversed in public life, many of them opinionated, all articulate, and not a few vociferous, was a work of the utmost difficulty, and Lord Rosebery engineered it to perfection. He was suave and courteous; smoothed acrid dissensions with judicious humour; used sarcasm sparingly, but with effect; and maintained a certain dignity of bearing which profoundly impressed the representatives of the Great Middle Class. "By Jove, how these chaps ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... combined. Few people think a piece of plain boiled or broiled muscle (lean flesh) with nothing on it but a little salt, is fit to be eaten. Everything, it is thought, must be rendered more stimulating, or acrid; or must be swimming in gravy, or melted ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... reminded me at every stage of the march against Kaskaskia, the woods, the chocolate streams, the coffee-colored swamps flecked with dead leaves,—and at length the prairies, the grass not waist-high now, but young and tender, giving forth the acrid smell of spring. Nick was delighted. He made me recount every detail of my trials as a drummer boy, or kept me in continuous spells of laughter over his own escapades. In short, I began to realize that we were as near to each other as though we had ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... thirty-two per cent of saline matter, which is considerably more than the amount of such matter in the water of the Dead Sea. The surrounding plain is barren, in places marshy, and often covered with an incrustation of salt. The whole scene is one of desolation. The acrid waters support no animal organization; birds shun them; the plain grows nothing but a few stunted and sapless shrubs. The only signs of life which greet the traveller are the carts of the natives, which pass him laden with the salt that is obtained ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... charged with caloric by means of innumerable earthen tubes lining the sides of the laconicum, and covered with a peculiar plaster. But in both cases the nature of the resultant heat is identical. It radiates to one from all sides. There is no acrid biting of the face such as one feels in the worst type of hot-air baths; no unpleasant fulness or aching of the head; and no panting or palpitating. Such is the "bath" of pure radiant heat, a thing totally distinct ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... assault the strong Weraroa pa—the key to the west coast. He hinted depressingly that 2,000 more troops might be required from England. In vain Sir George Grey urged him to greater activity. The only result was a long and acrid correspondence between them. From this—to one who reads it now—the General seems to emerge in a damaged condition. The best that can be said for him is that he and many of his officers were sick of the war, which they regarded as an ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... the musicians, each with a bottle of wine at his feet, from which they refreshed themselves during the intervals. An impalpable dust, raised by the feet of the dancers, filled the air charged with acrid odors. The women in light dresses and bareheaded, and the men arrayed in their Sunday clothes, gave themselves up with frantic ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... The acrid blasphemy of the doctrine naturally leads the writer to indulgence in epithets of bad taste which prevent our regarding his work as the mere challenge of a paradoxical theorist. We have really to do with a theophobist, whom faith in goodness rouses to ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bring back the scene in which I smelt it first. There is an odour less easy to define, but just as easy to recognise, in the air of the morning street; in the reek of horse and harness going up Snow Hill; in a mingling of wet rot and dry rot in the station; in the acrid, faintly-tinctured coffee smell at Oxford; in the scent of a London fog, or the fragrance of a London egg—any one of which will infallibly take me back to the scene and the time at which ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... the observation of Dr. Sydenham, who records it. For many years after the time of Dr. Cullen, who frequently promulgated opinions founded on those of some fancy author rather than on his own observation, it was very much the fashion to speak of redundancy of bile, or of acrid bile, as the cause of the whole train of symptoms in this disease; but, since the attention of medical men has been more particularly drawn to the subject, practitioners may be found in every town in ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... deceiver," said the shrill Elder again, and with a ring of acrid triumph; "thee has hid these things from our eyes many years, but in one day thee has uncovered ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that my health began to fail me. I became weak and pale with severe bearing down pains, fearful headaches and frequent dizzy spells. The doctors prescribed for me and yet I did not improve. I would at times bloat after eating and have frequent vomiting. I had acrid discharge and pains down through my limbs so I could hardly walk. It was as bad a case of female trouble as I have ever known. Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound cured me within four months and since that ...
— Treatise on the Diseases of Women • Lydia E. Pinkham
... however, of the aperture just in time to spring across it, he did so; and glancing back for an instant on reaching the other side, he saw a broad expanse of glowing white-hot bales of wool, and, dimly through the acrid smoke and steam, the forms of the men who were plying the ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... and, having an instinctive sense of her dependent position, she was very humble and subservient and, as Tommy the Mate used to say, "as smooth as an old threepenny bit" to the ruling powers, which always meant my Aunt, but spiteful, insolent, and acrid to anybody who was outside my Aunt's favour, which ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... understands. Religion! Ah! Yes, religion; the world will be a blackened cinder or cometary gas before the love of God is stamped from its heart. But religion and art must go hand in hand. Divorced, art has fallen into the Slough of Despond; else has been transformed into an acrid poison wherewith men's souls are destroyed as if by a virulent absinthe. United with religion, art is purified. All art sprang from religion. All great art, from a Greek statue to a Gothic cathedral, from a Bach fugue to Michael Angelo, was religious. Therefore, if we are to reach ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... third day after its abandonment (unless the constituion has become so impaired by long habituation that there will probably be no vital reaction) opium begins to show its dissolutions from the tissue by a profuse and increasingly acrid bilious diarrhea, which must not be checked if diagnosis has revealed sufficient constitutional vigor to justify any attempt at abandonment of the drug. Hemorrhoids may result; they must be topically treated; mild astringents may be used ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... have the advantage of more scientific instruction, and to this end was placed under the care of Kunisch, an excellent violin teacher, and under Hartung for harmony and counterpoint. The latter was a sort of Dr. Dryasdust, learned, barren, acrid, but an efficient instructor. When young Spohr showed him one of his compositions, he growled out, "There's time enough for that; you must learn something first." It may be said of Spohr, however, that his studies ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... She wanted to reach Oldclough before one whit of her anger cooled down; though, somehow, she felt quite sure, that, even when her anger died out, her courage would not take flight with it. Mr. Dugald Binnie had not proved to be a very fascinating person. He was an acrid, dictatorial old man: he contradicted Lady Theobald flatly every five minutes, and bullied his man-servant. But it was not against him that Lucia's indignation was aroused. She felt that Lady Theobald was quite capable of suggesting to him that Francis Barold ...
— A Fair Barbarian • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... change in me, for it raised its head. Through my eyelashes I saw above me the two great flaming eyes of a gigantic wolf. Its sharp white teeth gleamed in the gaping red mouth, and I could feel its hot breath fierce and acrid upon me. ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... another coating of earth was put upon it, with perhaps an overcoat of coarse, dry stable manure, and the precious pile was left in silence and darkness till spring. How the earth tempers and flavors the apples! It draws out all the acrid, unripe qualities, and infuses into them a subtile, refreshing ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... opened fire again, sending violent shock charges into the beast's hide. Caught in the withering cross fire, it turned blindly on the boys and charged at them. The two cadets fired coolly, rapidly, unable to miss the great bulk. The air became acrid with the sharp odor of ionized air. Maddened now beyond the limits of its endurance, hit at least twenty times and wild with pain, the great king of the Venusian jungle bore down on the ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... shop, and a frowsty-looking man, yellow-pale, was quickly and nervously hauling in the national flag. There were shouts of derision and mockery—a great overtone of acrid derision—the flag and its owner ignominiously disappeared. And the procession moved on. Almost every shop had a flag flying. And every one of these flags now disappeared, quickly or slowly, sooner or later, in ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... wild here, that pretty low tree, Cashew, with rounded yellow-veined leaves and little green flowers, followed by a quaint pink and red-striped pear, from which hangs, at the larger and lower end, a kidney-shaped bean, which bold folk eat when roasted; but woe to those who try it when raw; for the acrid oil blisters the lips, and even while the beans are roasting the fumes of the oil will blister the cook's face if she holds ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... down a certain fashionable street when a loud explosion occurred in a near-by shop and a cloud of acrid grey smoke came rolling out. Being by nature as inquisitive as a chipmunk I was on the point of shoving my head round the door-jamb to see what was up when caution prompted me to turn round. Yes, there ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... across a dingy street, a small grocery store, and purchased there coffee, bacon and a pound of dates. Then he returned across the Nursery to the hollow and huts. More men had arrived through the day, other fires were burning, and an acrid odor of scorched fat and boiling coffee rose in the delicate evening. A small group was passing about a flasklike bottle; a figure lay in a stupor on the clay; a mutter of voices, at once cautious and assertive, joined argument ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... joy, but lost to pain, Which never shall he feel again; Earth's acrid fruits he shall not taste, And wrong it were to chide the haste With which he left this barren field, That with its flowers so few, so ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was not cheerful; she was rather of an acrid disposition. People said that there was only one subject on which the shopkeeper and his wife agreed, that was as to the superiority of their daughter in beauty, talent, and amiability, over all other young women far or near. In their broad Scotch fashion they ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... sextant that same afternoon; but when we attempted to land upon the islet we found that although the ashes were black on the surface they were still a dull glowing red in the heart of them, and so hot that they were not yet to be stood upon, leaving out of the question the veil of acrid, suffocating, blue smoke that still wreathed ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... her voice, which aimed at charming piquancy and realised only an airy affectation, attracted his attention, and revamped her upon his mind as one of the party of star-gazers. Her personality was acrid and insistent, and he imagined that the friendship between the two women was of her own making and maintenance. The nature of her greeting left him no choice but a flat and awkward confession of absent-mindedness. This trifling irritation, however, was of small moment ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... what is at all worthy of respect. Here, as in his later books, right is right, and wrong wrong, and he is never tempted to jingle his jester's bell out of season, and make right look ridiculous. And if the humour of "Pickwick" be wholesome, it is also most genial and kindly. We have here no acrid cynic sneeringly pointing out the plague spots of humanity, and showing pleasantly how even the good are tainted with evil. Rather does Dickens delight in finding some touch of goodness, some lingering memory of better things, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... came a deafening roar and a tremendous concussion, as the two 70-pounders hurled forth their shells at the Huascar, and a dense cloud of white smoke drifted down upon the conning-tower, filling it with acrid fumes and momentarily blotting out ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... boots, and no vest. There was nothing remotely suggestive of unusual ability or force of character, and I thought as I studied him that the sting of George D. Prentice's bon mot about him was in its acrid truth. Said ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... of big guns shook the frail shack that had been turned into a hospital. Now and then, as the wind blew in fitful gusts, there was borne on it the acrid smell of powder. And again, in some dark corner of that building of suffering, there could be seen through the cracks, left by hasty builders, the flash of fire that preceded the booming ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... impregnated with the strong odor of the stuff and the boys' eyes smarted. Old Sikaso kept up his dance, bending lower and lower till it seemed that he must be actually inhaling the pungent, acrid smoke. ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the stream. Before long I discovered some water-cress—a lucky discovery for travellers who are confined constantly to animal food. Lucien examined the small white flowers, which have obtained for all its family the name of Cruciferae; these vegetables contain an acrid and volatile oil, which gives them strong anti-scorbutic qualities. The cabbage (Brassica oleracea), turnip (B. napus), radish (Raphanus sativus), and mustard (Sinapis alba), are of the crucifera order. To this list we must also add the horse-radish, the colza, the seed of which produces ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... sheet of flame leapt up from her interior; and, seeming to break in two, the dismembered hull rapidly disappeared, the bow and stern portions rearing themselves out of water for a few seconds ere they plunged to the bottom, leaving nothing to show where the boat had been, save a great cloud of acrid smoke and steam, a few fragments of wreckage, and some half a dozen ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... autodidact, the lessons in composition from Alexander von Zemlinsky not affecting his future path-breaking propensities. His mission is to free harmony from all rules. A man doesn't hit on such combinations, especially in his acrid instrumentation, without heroic labour. His knowledge must be enormous, for his scores are as logical as a highly wrought mosaic; that is, logical, if you grant him his premises. He is perverse and he wills his ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Englishman's right of grumbling to a large extent; with a sort of bitter and acrid humility, he would accuse himself of having missed his vocation and his rightful heritage, of being neither "fish, flesh, nor good red herring;" nevertheless his post for the last two years had pleased him well: he was connected with a certain large literary society which gave ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... well to set your guests eating and drinking betimes on these occasions. The fasting man takes an acrid view of your arrangements compared with that taken by the man who has well fed; and the deferred opening of the supper-room has sealed the fate of many a dance which but for that had been voted pleasant enough. Lionel Beauchamp and his confreres determined ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... chaparral to the south! To the east something stirred into bounding life and action; a coyote called twice—and then they came, on foot and silently as fleeting shadows, leaning forward to bring into play every ounce of energy in the slim, red legs. Smoke filled the room with its acrid sting. The crashing of the Winchester, worked with wonderful speed and deadly accuracy by the best rifle shot in the Southwest, brought the prostrate man to his feet in an instinctive response to the call ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... self-reliant, not the helpless. He felt that the solicitor of charity was always a lazy or drunken person, trying to live by plundering the sober and industrious." This malign distrust of fellow beings, this acrid cynicism of motives, this extraordinary imputation of evil designs on the part of the penniless, was characteristic of the capitalist class as a whole. Itself practicing the lowest and most ignoble methods, governed by the basest ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... suddenly buried his face in his hands. For in his mind he was seeing a rigid, searing body, and in his nostrils, acrid, distinct, was the smell of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... the first approach of the keen weather of Autumn, needed incessant attention. All day slaves went back and forth, carrying wood and buckets of mineral coal from the great mines near Uriconium, through the narrow alleys to the roaring furnaces, where the air, smoke-laden and acrid, was hot to suffocation. Here, panting, dripping with sweat, they fed the flaming mouths; then back again into the outer air, which by contrast struck knife-like to the very vitals. The colder the weather and the greater the necessity for fires, the more was ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... Till the acrid hour aches out and ceases, And the sheathed eyeball sleepier swims, The deep flank smoothes its dimpling creases. And passion loosens all ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and economical properties which they possess, and which are indeed frequently peculiar to the order. Such is the case with the natural order Euphorbiaceae, or spurge family, to which the tallow-tree of China belongs. The order includes 2500 species, all of which are more or less acrid and poisonous, these properties being especially developed in the milky juices which abound in the plants, and which are contained, not in its ordinary tissues, but in certain special vessels. Many important substances are derived from this order, notwithstanding its acrid and poisonous ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... green and maroon or whitish-striped spathe that curves in a broad-pointed flap above it. Leaves: 3-foliate, usually overtopping the spathe, their slender petioles 9 to 30 in. high, or as tall as the scape that rises from an acrid corm. Fruit: Smooth, shining red berries ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... slowly across a square of grey cloud. Right up to the topmost benches the folk were banked—broadcloth in front, corduroys and fustian behind; faces turned everywhere upon him. The grey reek of the pipes filled the building, and the air was pungent with the acrid smell of cheap, strong tobacco. Everywhere among the human faces were to be seen the heads of the dogs. They growled and yapped from the back benches. In that dense mass of humanity, one could hardly pick out individuals, but Montgomery's eyes caught the brazen gleam of the helmets held ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the Old Parties.—To this long program of measures the reformers added harsh and acrid criticism of the old parties and sometimes, it must be said, of established institutions of government. "We denounce," exclaimed the Labor party in 1888, "the Democratic and Republican parties as hopelessly and shamelessly ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... work done by other women with any of the good will which men display in the same occupations. If this is true, the reason should not be looked for in any intersexual complications, such as fear or an acrid rivalry, but only in the perpetually recurring physical disturbances to which, as a sex, they are subjected; and as the ability and willingness of a man to use his fists in response to an affront ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... believed it, but this was different; this was the hot wind of the desert, at the approach of which the others dropped dead, like mere sweet airs of the garden. It wrapped her about; it lifted her off her feet, while the very taste of it, as of something potent, acrid and strange, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... eyes, and break Through the cloudy chrysalis, See the wonder as it is. Down a narrow alley, blind, Touch and vision, heart and mind; Turned sharply inward, still we plod, Till the calmly smiling god Leaves us, and our spirits grow More thin, more acrid, as we go. Creeping by the sullen wall, We forego the power to see, The threads that bind us to the All, God or the Immensity; Whereof on the eternal road Man is but ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... upon. It may seem strange, that Holloway's Pills should be recommended for Dysentery and Flux, many persons supposing that they would increase the relaxation. This is a great mistake, for these Pills will correct the liver and stomach, and thus remove all the acrid humors from the system. This medicine will give tone and vigor to the whole organic system, however deranged, while health and strength follow, as a matter of course. Nothing will stop the relaxation of the bowels so ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Wolf had not imagined that she could be so thoughtful, so forgetful of self, and so affectionate in her sympathy. He hung upon her lips in silent admiration, yet it was impossible for him to determine whether this sisterly affection from Barbara was pouring balm or acrid lye ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... better than any other book that the author had ever written—and the reviews unanimously described it, either with praise or with blame, as an extraordinary collection of heresies, most of them almost too acrid to be bruited about. In other words, this mass of platitudes took Americans by surprise, and somehow shocked them. What was commonplace to even the peasants of the European Continent was so unfamiliar ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... stirred memories of the acrid smoke of hill camp-fires, of nights under a tarp with the rain beating down on him, and still others of a road herd bawling for water, of winter camps when the ropes were frozen stiff and the snow slid from trees ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... all its type, had no furnace, and moisture and cold seemed to penetrate it, and linger therein. Wind howled past the dark windows, rain dripped from the cornice above the front door, the acrid odor of drying woolens and wet rubber coats permeated the halls. Mrs. Lancaster said she never had known of so much sickness everywhere, and sighed over the long list of unknown dead in ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... of which we have a Saturday night scene, worthy of the author of L'Assommoir and Le Ventre de Paris in his most perceptive mood. In this inferno, amongst the pungent odours, musty smells and 'acrid exhalations from the shops where fried fish and potatoes hissed in boiling grease,' blossomed a pure white lily, as radiant amid mean surroundings as Gemma in the poor Frankfort confectioner's shop of Turgenev's Eaux Printanieres. The ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... background, her part in his life had been settled there among many future possibilities, and all the foreground was crowded with the impatient symbols of the intervening time. Moreover, he well knew that the savor would be gone from his happiness with the woman were the taste of another failure acrid in his mouth. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... A mist of acrid smoke bathed, drowned them, and they seemed to sink into a somnolent and sad inebriety, in that taciturn and morose intoxication peculiar to men who ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... any teeth whatsoever; but the obnoxious repute still attaches to the milky exudation sometimes perceptible from glands situated on either side behind the head; nevertheless experiments have shown, that though acrid, the secretions of the toad are incapable of exciting more than a slight erythema on the most delicate skins. The smell is, however, fetid and offensive, and hence toads are less exposed to the attacks of carnivorous animals ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... fountains of earth rise, leaping, Spouting like shocks of meeting waves, Death's fountains are playing, Shells like shrieking birds rush over; Crash and din rises higher. A stream of lead raves Over us from the left ... (we safe under cover!) Crash! Reverberation! Crash! Acrid smoke billowing. Flash upon flash. Black smoke drifting. The German line Vanishes in confusion, smoke. Cries, and cry Of our men, 'Gah, yer swine! Ye're for it', die ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... in this manoeuvre at first, but the secret of it was not kept for long. An acrid smell stole out into the air, which thickened every minute in intensity. Kettle seemed dimly to recognize it, but could not put a name to it definitely. Besides, he was working with all his might at scraping away the earth from the foot of the wall, and had little leisure ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... Khiva, deg. and ferment the milk of mares. deg. deg.120 Next, the more temperate Toorkmuns deg. of the south, deg.121 The Tukas, deg. and the lances of Salore, deg.122 And those from Attruck deg. and the Caspian sands; deg.123 Light men and on light steeds, who only drink The acrid milk of camels, and their wells. 125 And then a swarm of wandering horse, who came From far, and a more doubtful service own'd; The Tartars of Ferghana, deg. from the banks deg.128 Of the Jaxartes, deg. men with scanty beards ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... dropped by Dr. West, touching the past, had not been without its fruits in Sibylla's mind. It lay and smouldered there. Had Lionel been attached to Lucy?—had there been love-scenes, love-making between them? Sibylla asked herself the questions ten times in a day. Now and then she let drop a sharp, acrid bit of venom to him—his "old love, Lucy." Lionel would receive ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... and of his desire to learn other than ordinary school work. As a young man he had suffered the insolence of these wretched people about him; their cackling laughter at his poverty jarred and grated in his ears; he saw the acrid grin of some miserable idiot woman, some creature beneath the swine in intelligence and manners, merciless, as he went by with his eyes on the dust, in his ragged clothes. He and his father seemed to pass ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... canny Scotchman with a new child a year. Yes, my certie," offered Nanny, with an acrid grimness. Mrs. Muir's hands clasped strongly as they lay on the ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... young Americans, with legs crossed and without their shoes, sat on the mats of the tea-house of the Hundred and One Steps. On their sun-tanned faces was the glare of Yokohama Bay, in their eyes the light of youth, of intelligent interest, of adventure. In the hand of each was a tiny cup of acrid tea. Three of them were under thirty, and each wore the suit of silk pongee that in eighteen hours C. Tom, or Little Ah Sing, the Chinese King, fits to any figure, and which in the Far East is the badge of the tourist tribe. Of the three, one was Rodman Forrester. His father, besides being pointed ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... in this fashion for about 150 yards, when I heard a shell come shrieking in my direction. With a plunk it fell, and exploded about forty feet away, choking me with sand and half blinding me for about five minutes. The acrid fumes, too, which came from it, seemed to tighten my throat, making respiration very difficult for some ten minutes afterwards. Cautiously looking round, I tried to locate the other scouts, but nowhere could they be seen. I crawled for another thirty yards or so, but still no sign ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... among the tables. Shouting, swinging noises and a bray of music spurted unintelligibly against the ears of the newcomers. A chlorinated mist, acrid to the eye, and burning to the nose, crawled about the room. Dorn, followed by Lockwood, groped his way through the confusion toward a small vacant table against a wall. From ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of sanctimony became an easy substitute for the sense of sanctification, and the tithe of mint and cummin was allowed to overbalance the weightier ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Perhaps this thought flickered across Miss Alicia's mind among a number of other things. She had heard "dear papa" on Lady Mallowe, and, howsoever lacking in graces, the vicar of Rowcroft had not lacked an acrid shrewdness. Miss Alicia's sensitively self- accusing soul shrank before a hasty realization of the fact that if he had been present when the cards were brought up, he would, on glancing over them through his spectacles, have jerked out immediately: "What does the woman ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... two boys looked into each other's eyes, squinting painfully in the acrid smoke. The flames crackled and roared in their ears. The strained, terror-stricken look passed from Grafton's face. His eyes lighted and he even ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... thorns. It was on all fours, like a hound on a scent, that I was compelled to travel; my solar topee getting the worse for wear every minute; my skin getting more and more wounded; my clothes at each step becoming more and more tattered. Besides these discomforts, there was a pungent, acrid plant which, apart from its strong odorous emissions, struck me smartly on the face, leaving a burning effect similar to cayenne; and the atmosphere, pent in by the density of the jungle, was hot and stifling, and the perspiration transuded through every pore, making my flannel tatters feel ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... cry. Heavy explosions are shaking the earth—underground, in the dug-outs. We are all at once divided by huge clouds of smoke so thick that we are masked and can see nothing more. We struggle like drowning men through the acrid darkness of a fallen fragment of night. One stumbles against barriers of cowering clustered beings who bleed and howl in the bottom. Hardly can one make out the trench walls, straight up just here and made of white sandbags, which are everywhere torn ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse |
