"Dank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her five children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... of people collected around me from all parts. They requested me to speak; but as I did not understand their language I could not answer them. They repeated often the word Dank, Dank, and supposing them to be Germans, I addressed them in this language, then in Danish, and finally in Latin; but they signified to me, by shaking their heads, that these languages were unknown to them. I tried at last to declare myself in the subterranean ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... terror now possessed me. I crouched in the dank corner clutching my sword, listening, vainly listening, for some sound out of which to conjure up an assassin. A rat ran across my foot. Screaming out I bounded erect and beat about me with blind desperation. One hand touched the other and ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... time sped by, but the sun had sunk below the horizon, and he had quite lost the Mont in the fog. The brown sand and the gray dank mist were all that he could see, yet still he plodded on westward, toward the sea, calling into the growing darkness. At last he caught the sound of a child's sobs and crying, which ceased for a moment when he turned in that direction and shouted, "Phine!" ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... fell into the hands of a Basque woman, who persuaded me to live with her, which I have done for several years; she is a great hax, {8} and says that if I desert her she will breathe a spell which shall cling to me for ever. Dem Got sey dank,—she is now in the hospital, and daily expected to die. This is my history, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... DOCTOR WANGEL'S garden. It is boggy and overshadowed by large old trees. To the right is seen the margin of a dank pond. A low, open fence separates the garden from the footpath, and the fjord in the background. Beyond is the range of mountains, with its peaks. It is afternoon, almost evening. BOLETTE sits on a stone seat, and on the seat lie some books and a work-basket. HILDE ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... His heart cried aloud in forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him. His eyes stung. And he fought against that inarticulate misery, against the melancholy that settled upon him like a dank mist. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... yard, dark, dank, and drear, They found him, on the floor - It leads from Richmond Buildings—near The Royalty stage-door. With brandy cold and brandy hot They plied him, starved and wet, And made him sergeant on the spot - The ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... at the edges of the wood, gazing at all the pomp and procession of the foxgloves towering amidst the bracken and shining red in the broad sunshine, and beyond them into deep thickets of close undergrowth where springs boil up from the rock and nourish the water-weeds, dank and evil. But in all my wanderings I avoided one part of the wood; it was not till yesterday that I climbed to the summit of the hill, and stood upon the ancient Roman road that threads the highest ridge of the wood. Here they had walked, Helen and Rachel, along this quiet causeway, upon the pavement ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... weeds, And the willow branches hoar and dank, And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds, And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank, And the silvery marish flowers that throng The desolate creeks and pools among, Were ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... there no more, And thick dank moss creeps over thy gray stone Thy path is lost that skirted the low shore, With willow-grass and speedwell overgrown; Thine eye has closed for ever, and thine ear Drinks in no more the music ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... eet!" he murmured, looking up at her with limpid eyes. "You haf seen how I suffered, unt you haf taken pity. Gott sie dank! Gott ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... without warning or signal, it slipped off, as though casually, towards an undetermined goal. Often it ran level with the roofs of vague, far-stretching acres of houses— houses vile and frowsy, and smoking like pyres in the dank air. And always it travelled on a platform of brick arches. Now and then the walled road received a tributary that rounded subtly into it, and this tributary could be seen curving away, on innumerable brick arches, through the chimneypots, and losing itself in a dim horizon ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... dire misfortune," I said, when we had both walked round inspecting the black dank walls of our prison. "I wonder what fate ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Her thin face blazed a scarlet wedge between the sleek curtains of her dank hair; perspiration stood on her triangle of forehead. "It is the hottest day I ever knew!" she said, defiantly, and there was open rebellion ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... along the curbstones before their baskets. Their dank hair hung trailed over their brows. They were not beautiful to see as they crouched in the mire. But their souls were seen by God; and if their souls were in a state of grace they were radiant to see: and God ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... words of our Dutch translator with whom I'm sure you'll heartily agree: Toch ben ik er mijn landgenooten dank baar voor, die mijn arbeid steeds zoo welwillend outvangen en wier genegenheid ik voortdurend ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... in that dank pass to the region of shades, and no quarter was shown to any man; only cries of "The String! The String!" from members of the gang in order to distinguish the robbers from the robbed, in the darkness. There were curses, the kicking and squealing of ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... threatened to whirl the frail tent and its occupant into space, and hurl them into one of the many unfathomable abysses that yawned around the party, while, to add to the general discomfort, the wind brought with it a dank, chilling fog, thick as a blanket, that penetrated everywhere and left on everything great beads of icy moisture like copious dew. But Escombe was too unutterably weary to let any of these things trouble him. Sleep was what every fibre of his body ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... for the Indian to come, he noted that the edges of the hole, and all the bushes that over-hung its mouth were crusted thickly with white frost. Carefully he laid flat on his belly and edged himself along until he could thrust his face into the abyss. The air felt very warm—a dank, damp warmth, such as exudes from the depths of a swamp in summer. He peered downward but his eyes could not penetrate the Stygian blackness out of which rose the monotonous ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... shaping, building, the kindergarten child sees life on many sides. Perhaps, finally, other cities following the lead of Cincinnati will introduce the kindergarten spirit and kindergarten activities into the lower grades where they will clarify an atmosphere, fetid and dank with concepts which to the ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... strange artist, Utrillo, personal enough, just as Modigliani was handsome enough, to satisfy the exigences of the most romantic melodrama, with a touch of madness and an odd nostalgic passion—expressing itself in an inimitable white—for the dank and dirty whitewash and cheap cast-iron of the Parisian suburbs. Towards the end, when he was already very ill, he began to concoct a formula for dealing with these melancholy scenes which might have been his undoing. His career was ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... with a nod and a grin. His hat had gone, and the dank wisps of his hair were being fluttered about like black rags; his narrow slits of eyes were heavily bloodshot; his face was grimy and pale, his hands grimy and red; his clothing was a wreck. He looked very unpleasant, but he was undoubtedly very broad awake. ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... through many vicissitudes, and was in no condition for a long cruise in the Pacific. So mouldering was her fabric, that the reckless sailors, when seated in the forecastle, dug their knives into the dank boards between them and eternity as easily as into the moist sides of some old pollard oak. She was much dilapidated and rapidly becoming more so; for Black Baltimore, the ship's cook, when in want of firewood, did not scruple to hack splinters from the bits and beams. Lugubrious indeed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... fort. In its musty vaulted dungeons were still the massive, rust-corroded irons for feet, waist and neck of prisoners of the old brutal days; blind owls stared upon us; once the boy brought down with his honda, or slung-shot, one of the bats that circled uncannily above our heads. In dank corners were mounds of worthless powder; the bakery that once fed the miserable dungeon dwellers had crumbled in upon itself. Outside great trees straddled and split the massive stone walls that once commanded the entrance to the Chagres, jungle waved in undisputed ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... trembling avidity, winning and losing, apparently unmindful of either. But this was merely the gilded outwardness—within, rankled fierce passions, like the lightning in the summer-evening cloud. The night glided on; its dank air grew fresher; the fire burned low on the hearth-stone; the raging storm was hushed to stillness, and three was sounding from the antique clock that adorned the mantle-piece. Save two men the room was deserted. One by one the rest had stolen away, until these two were its only occupants. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... vague and highly colored notions of a smugglers' cave, his narrow lungs filled with air, Bubbles dove, swam between two slimy barnacled piles, and came up presently in a dark, dank, stale, gurgling region, wonderfully cool after the blazing sunlight which he ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... young ones as they wrestled with the nightly problem of their own dank, straight particular bit of woman's glory, would doubtless, if questioned, have upheld the Hindu custom of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... them across the basement to a door leading into a dank, unfinished portion of the cellar, directly east of Lydia's bedroom and beneath Nita's. The wire whose course they were following led under the top frame of the door, and, with a flashlight in his hand, Dundee showed how it continued along a rafter until it reached ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... vain that we seek to avoid our fate! Rest here!" and seizing my wrist, she dragged me down on the fallen trunk of a tree that lay half hidden by the tall grass at the side of the path. Immediately behind us was a gloomy wood, choked with rank autumnal growths. A more dank, unwholesome situation for a seat on a wet day it would be impossible to conceive. But I preferred running the risk of rheumatic fever to contradicting Miss Latouche in her present mood. Only I hoped the explanation ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... with this ambiguous invitation, the visitor and commander disappeared down the small cuddy in the afterpart of the felucca, where was a low, stifling hole of a cabin, dank with stale tobacco-smoke, and smelling awfully of rats and roaches. There was a little round table in the middle, and on one side was a single berth, with some dirty bedding, which had not been cleaned, apparently, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... in the sunlight. There, out in the middle, was a wreath of bubbles on the water. That marked the end of the tunnel, over the shield. Down beneath those bubbles the sand-hogs were rooting. But what was the mystery that the tunnel held in its dark, dank bosom? Had Kennedy ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... setting sun from beneath the clouds, Veronique came in sight of her Lady, the Queen's favourite, it was to see her leading by a string a little shaggy cow, with a bell round its neck, her gray cloak huddled round her, though dank with wet, a long lock of black hair streaming over her brow, her garments clinging with damp, her bare ankles scratched with thorns, her heavy SABOTS covered with mire, her cheeks ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the canyon was chill and dank, lit only by a half light which at times dwindled to a deep dusk as the rock walls beetled together hundreds of feet above his head. Always when he stumbled through one of the darkest passages, he heard and half ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... luxurious, and among the thick undergrowth are found some lovely ferns, broad-leaved plants, and flowers of every hue, all alike nearly scentless. Here is no odorous breath of violet or honeysuckle, no delicate perfume of primrose or sweetbriar, only a musty, dank, earthy smell which gets more and more pronounced as the mists rise along with the deadly vapours of the night. Sleeping in these forests is very unhealthy. There is a most fatal miasma all through the year, less during the hot months, but ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... over his brows, though the morning was yet too dark for the curate to perceive more than the outline of his features. Milestone after milestone glided by the wheels, and neither of the travellers broke the silence. It was a cold, raw morning, and the mists rose sullenly from the dank hedges ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book X • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the rain got out at the appointed place of embarkation, went on board the Fairy, accompanied by the Mayor and other officials, and sailed along the quays round the mouth of the Mersey, surveying the grand mass of shipping from the pavilion on deck as well as the dank mist would permit. On landing, the Town Hall and St. George's Hall were visited in succession. In the first the Queen received an address and knighted the Mayor. She admired both buildings—particularly St. George's, which she called "worthy ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... "Dank you, Vrankie. I admire der vay you vork dose revolfers. Dot peat der pand, und don'd you ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... severe with the girl on the indiscretion of gadding in strange places with no better escort than Diccon, and of entering into conversation with unknown persons. Moreover, Cicely's hair, her shoes, and camlet riding skirt were all so dank with dew that she was with difficulty made presentable by the time the ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I lay in a dank and gloomy cell of the prison of Toulouse, with never a hope to bear company during those dark, ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... long breath, she pushed her dank hair back into her hood and pressed her hand upon her heart. Then she was calm a while, but a new terror set it throbbing again. Close beside her—this time at her right—the loud laughter of men's harsh voices echoed through ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... approached the fringe of rushes which marked its border, a foul, dank smell rose up from the stagnant wilderness, as from impure water and decaying vegetation—an earthy, noisome smell which ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mephitic cellar, with the two long wooden platforms where the subterranean trains land or load their freights. A strangling gas tickled their throats and set them coughing. It was all dank and dark and gloomy. But little youth and love care for that! They were bubbling over with the happiness of this abnormal meeting. Both talked together in their delight, and Maude patted Frank's sleeve with every remark. They could even illuminate ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... house would be surrounded by a vestibule—a mere projection from the roof supported on a few rough beams—but never a garden, scarcely a tree to cast a cooling shade on hot summer afternoons, or clump of lilies or mimosa to sweeten the air that came dank and fetid from over the marshes beyond ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Blinkerly Dank-some-Hankly triumphantly, "a perfect human race and teach it the immortal principles of woman's rights. So, if we can't persuade Parliament to come out for us, we'll take Parliament by the slack of its degraded trousers, some day, ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... Italy the oracles of Lycia. Here is my desire; this is my native country. If thy Phoenician eyes are stayed on Carthage towers and thy Libyan city, what wrong is it, I pray, that we Trojans find our rest on Ausonian land? We too may seek a foreign realm unforbidden. In my sleep, often as the dank shades of night veil the earth, often as the stars lift their fires, the troubled phantom of my father Anchises comes in warning and dread; my boy Ascanius, how I wrong one so dear in cheating him of an Hesperian kingdom and destined fields. ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... followed by Roger and Tom, and Connel brought up the rear. They moved directly to the spot where they had last seen the tyrannosaurus, found the trampled underbrush and massive tracks, and moved purposefully into the dank, suffocating green world. ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... through this inner womb of the true tropical forest." The mind of man with difficulty endeavours to realise this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a territory half as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into cannibals lurk and live and die. Mr Stanley vainly endeavours to bring home to us the full horror of that awful gloom. ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... he had seen everything; but his blank and frank bewilderment was more reassuring at a second glance, and at a third I guessed what had happened to him. His crumpled clothes were dank with dew. His eyes were puddles of utter stupefaction. He had been sleeping in the Park, and walking in his sleep, and in all probability it was my shot which had brought him to himself; of this, however, I was less sure, and in my doubt I was disastrously ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... deadlily dark in the wood, with a darkness more unbroken than the stillness which yet seemed part of it. A thousand little scraping noises broke the quiet air, chill and dank. Leaves pattered against each other, twigs rubbed faintly, brittle things broke under the lightest foot. Still hardly a wing unfolded ever so little, not a distressful chirp heralded the slaughter that threatened. Gradually, to eyes growing used to the gloom, differing ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... without any covering to shelter them from the wind and rain, without bedding or sufficient food, with the dank grass for their couches and graves for pillows, did most of these unfortunates—from twelve to fifteen hundred—live during the succeeding five months. They were rigorously guarded night and day by sentinels who ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... they were on shuffled into the narrow track, whose sides and roof brushed the great cane howdah, and in a few moments they had passed from the glaring sunshine into the hot dank gloom of the forest, where the swishing noise of the abundant growth, forced aside and trampled down by the huge animals, was for a time ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... sounded subdued on the deck below, and their movements were languid. That tropical daybreak was chilly. The Malay quartermaster, coming up to get something from the lockers on the bridge, shivered visibly. The forests above and below and on the opposite bank looked black and dank; wet dripped from the rigging upon the tightly stretched deck awnings, and it was in the middle of a shuddering yawn that I caught sight of Almayer. He was moving across a patch of burned grass, a blurred, shadowy shape with the blurred bulk of a house behind him, a ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... disconcerted him at first. But he warmed to his work, and in deliberate, mathematical fashion wrought through his subject. He told of the long Night; the dark age of the North Sea. The little shivering cabin-boy lay on his dank wooden couch, and curled under the wrench of the bitter winter nights; he had to bear a hard struggle for existence, and, if he were a weakling, he soon went under. Alas! there had been instances, only too well ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... Dennis entered, he rose and came forward. He tried to speak, but for a moment could not. At last he said, hoarsely: "Mr. Vleet, you haf done me and mine a great kindness. No matter vat the result is, I dank you as I never danked any living being. I believe Gott sent you, but I fear too late. You see before you a miserable wreck. For months and years I haf been a brute, a devil. Dot picture dere show you vat I vas, vat I might haf been. You see vat I am," he added, with an expression ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... in a fiery rank, Panting and fierce, drew up along the shore; (For here the vain pursuing they forbore, Nor cared they to surpass the river's bank,) Then, looking from the rocks and rushes dank, A sight they witnessed never seen before, And which, with its accompaniments glorious, Is writ i' the golden book, or ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was not like to die, at least from his wounds, he set about stretching to lie down again, and found some straw on the floor. He drew it up with his feet and gathered it about him; it was dank and smelled vilely, but at the least it gave his frozen body some warmth, so that he fell asleep ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... to one side like a lame hen, gave access to a dark passage, dank with moisture, whereon the door of the house gave some eighteen feet up on ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... that came from the cook, nor would Hankinson have listened to more had there been more to hear, for simultaneously with the moan he became uncomfortably conscious of a presence. In trying to describe it afterwards, Hankinson said that at first he thought a cold draught from a dank cavern filled with a million eels, and a rattlesnake or two thrown in for luck, was blowing over him, and he avowed that it was anything but pleasant; and then it seemed to change into a mist drawn largely from a stagnant pool in a malarial country, floating through which ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... be a human head, though with scarcely a vestige of the features remaining. Here and there, patches of flesh adhered to the bones, and the dank dripping hair hanging about what had once been the face, gave it ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the branch of a tree was a worn and mud-stained skirt. Do not ladies in hotels, in similar fashion, hang out their dusty and travel-soiled attire at the doors of their chambers? And perhaps the dark-skinned owner had hung up her dank and dripping weeds in the hope that some silvan faun or Robin Goodfellow would, without a tip, perform the dusting process, in this case so palpably necessary. We do wrong in supposing that imagination is not the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... strangely-painted bird for us; it was even better when he went fishing, for then he took us with him, and while he stood motionless on the bank, rod in hand, looking, in the light-blue suit he always wore, like a vast blue pillar crowned with that broad red face, we romped on the sward, and revelled in the dank fragrance of the ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... the whirl of madness slips From off him and he falls, quite weak, his lips Dropping with foam. When once we saw him fall So timely, we were at him one and all To pelt and smite. The other watched us come, But knelt and wiped those lips all dank with foam And tended the sick body, while he held His cloak's good web above him for a shield; So cool he was to ward off every stone And all the while care ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... with life as there enjoyed; To brighter world they never had aspired, Had they not felt unfilled an aching void, And heard a whisper of a life attired In sapphire robes, 'midst gleams of golden light, Above their present world, so dank and chill, Where all day long they wing their happy flight From roses ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... it is seen by all. Oft through his groves, With folded arms and downcast looks he saunters, Ev'n 'midst the dank inclemency ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... "I dank you. You see my boy, Ebenezer, is Barmitzvah next Shabbos a veek, and I may not be passing again. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... His mind went back, suddenly, to one afternoon, months before, at Abbazia, when they had come up from sea-bathing in the Adriatic. He had leaned down over her, to help her up the Angiolina bath steps, wet and slippery with sea-water. The mingled gold and chestnut of her thick hair was dank and sodden with brine, the wistful face that she turned up to him was pinched and colorless and blue about the lips. She seemed, of a sudden, as she leaned heavily on his arm, a presaging apparition out of the dim future, an adumbration of her own body ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... the silence, the darkness. The wolves howling at night. Worst of all is the creeping horror of being chased. No! No! I can't stand any more, Basdel. The black horror comes over me when I let myself think of it. The dank woods—the silence—the awful stealth of night. No, no, Basdel. Let me ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... and gone, To the rice-swamp, dank and lone; There no mother's eye is near them, There no mother's ear can hear them; Never, when the torturing lash Seams their backs with many a gash, Shall a mother's kindness bless them, Or a mother's arms ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... knew nothing of the seasons of the year, and quaint-natured mosses were revealed on the wellside as the lantern descended; till its rays fell upon a confused mass of rope and bucket dangling in the dank, ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... involuntary terrors as I heard overhead the dull hum of the wings of some hurrying wood-pigeon. The earth is dank; you must be on the watch for lizards, vipers, and frogs, wandering about with the wild freedom of nature; above all, you must have no fear of cold, for in a few moments you feel an icy cloak settle on your shoulders, like the Commendatore's hand on ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... Shapcott (a tall and straight young woman, as Beautiful as an Angel), were continually bringing me Comforts and Needments, both in Raiment and Food. It churns my Old Heart now to think of that Beautiful Girl, sitting beside me in my dank Prison Room, the tears streaming from her mild eyes, calling me by Endearing names, and ever and anon taking my hand in hers, and sinking on her knees to the sodden floor (with no thought of soiling her kirtle), while with profound Fervour she prayed ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... a foul, dark place, and full of evil smells. Drops of water stood on the cold stone walls, and a green mould crept along the floor. The air was heavy and dank, and it began to be hard for Nick to breathe. The men in the dungeons were singing a horrible song, and in the corner was a half-naked fellow shackled to the floor. "Give me a penny," he said, "or I will ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... of dock-hands, wiping their hands on cotton-waste, came after a while to the door of the pier-house to observe and comment. Conscious of that observation, she moved then through the great dank sheds in and among the bales and boxes, down a flight of stairs and out to the cobbled street. Her motor-car, the last at the entrance, stood off at a slant, the chauffeur lopping slightly and dozing, his face scarcely above the steering-wheel. She ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... beautiful when one leaves it to go south. Nothing can efface from my mind the picture of it as I saw it when first going to the Caucasus. The sunset illumined it with the hues of romance. All the multiplicity of its dingy buildings shone as if lit up from within, and their dank and mouldy greens and blues and yellows became burning living colours. The town lay spread out upon the high banks of the Don and every segment of it was crowned with a church. The gilt domes blazed in the sunlight and the crosses above ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... years drew on and on Till no sun came, dank fogs the house enfolding; And she saw inside, when the form in the flesh had gone, As a vision what she had missed when the ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... went forth, splashing warily through the rich mud and the dank mist of Trafalgar Road, past all those strange little Indian-red houses, and ragged empty spaces, and poster-hoardings, and rounded kilns, and high, smoking chimneys, up hill, down hill, and up hill ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... sluggish countrymen at home Still creep around their little isle of fogs, Drink its dank vapours, and then hang themselves. In this free atmosphere and ample range The bosom can dilate, the pulses play, And man, erect, can walk a ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... intact—oh, by no means. Its wide weather-boards were broken and falling; the red paint they had once known had become a mere memory, its shingles were moss-grown and curling, the grass was uncut. The weeds about the entrances and rotting well-curb grew tall and dank; the appearance of things in general was far from gay. Clouds had overcast the sky, and on that dull afternoon a sort of still deadliness hung about the premises. No cheap, common house can be a haunted ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... milk and honey flowing, The promise of our God, our fancy's theme? Here over shattered walls dank weeds are growing, And blood and fire have run in mingled stream; Like oaks and cedars all around The giant corses strew the ground, And haughty Jericho's cloud-piercing wall Lies where it sank at ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... declivitous, with baleful yew Dark shaded, leads, a dreary silent road, Down to th' infernal regions: sluggish Styx Dank mists exhales: here travel new-made ghosts, With rites funereal blest: pale winter's gloom Wide rules the squalid place: the stranger shades Wander, unknowing which the path to tread, Straight to the infernal city, where is held Black Pluto's savage court. A thousand gates, Wide ope, surround ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... against slack water all day, water so slack you could dip your hand down and fail to tell which way the current ran. Where the high banks dropped suddenly to such a dank tangle of reeds, brush wood, windfall and timbers drifted fifteen hundred miles down from the forests of the Rocky Mountains—such a tangle as I have never seen in any swamp of the South—the skeleton of a moose, ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... along the line of march. This kind of work continued for two days, until we came in sight of the Rudewa river, another powerful stream with banks brimful of rushing rain-water. Crossing a branch of the Rudewa, and emerging from the dank reedy grass crowding the western bank, the view consisted of an immense sheet of water topped by clumps of grass tufts and foliage of thinly scattered trees, bounded ten or twelve miles off by the eastern front of the Usagara mountain range. The acme ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... door revealed the gloom of the dank rooms and twisting staircase, then fell to behind ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... but an occasional policeman, twirling his night-stick. On the wharves the daylight confusion was dispelled; there was no clatter of teaming, no sound but the water fingering dank piles, and the little noises aboard sleeping vessels. But the Celestine was awake. Lights gleamed aboard her, men were stirring, the great mass of her canvas blotted half the stars. She was sailing, that ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... had so long been fed by the residual waters escaped from the abattoirs of Tiffauges and Machecoul. He had sobbed in despair of ever draining this stagnant pool. And thunder-smitten by grace, in a cry of horror and joy, he had suddenly seen his soul overflow and sweep away the dank fen before a torrential current of prayer and ecstasy. The butcher of Sodom had destroyed himself, the companion of Jeanne d'Arc had reappeared, the mystic whose soul poured out to God, in bursts of adoration, in ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... der Nacht denket an euch mein Lied, Wo mein ewiger Gram jeglichen Stundenschlag, Welcher naeher mich bringt dem Trauten Grabe, mit Dank begruesst.[56] ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... couch—moments which seemed long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting commonplace of Interior China. Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air, and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, I seemed to gaze out to a disconsolate eternity—gaping, empty, unsightly. Waking from my dozing at the hour when judgment sits upon the hearts of men, I sat in ponderous judgment upon all to whom the bungling of the ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... mining, dredge it up, and transport it back to Earth to extract the drug. It was the first two steps of the operation that depended so heavily on the mud-acclimated natives of Venus for success. They were as much at home in the mud as they were in the dank, humid air above. They could distinguish one type of mud from another deep beneath the surface, and could carry a dredge-tube down to a lode of the blue-gray muck with the unfailing accuracy of a ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... whistled through the glaucous green of this silent, majestic wood; nor was there any treacherous bramble to crackle beneath his feet. For upon this chill, grey carpet no flood of sunshine ever came to coax tiny sprays out of the ground; and the layers of fine needles, or tufts of dank, sunless moss were soft and noiseless as down under his tread. The stately trees grew far enough apart to allow him to move with considerable speed, and after he had satisfied himself that he was beyond the sight of his pursuers, he changed his course and proceeded in ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... windows on the porch side. On a summer afternoon, the deep shade they made was welcome enough; but on a rainy day the Rector's front-garden, with its coarse grass, its few straggling rose-bushes, and its pushing throng of half-dead or funereal trees, shed a dank and dripping gloom upon the visitor approaching his front door. Of this, however, the Rector himself was rarely conscious; and to-day, as he with difficulty gathered all the letters and packets taken from the postman into one hand, while he opened his front door ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tracery of stems and boughs, through which was seen, not merely the outer, but the upper world. For he craved, as all true artists crave, for light and colour; and had the sky above been one perpetual blue, he might have been content with it, and left his glass transparent. But in that dark dank northern clime, rain and snowstorm, black cloud and grey mist, were all that he was like to see outside for nine months in the year. So he took such light and colour as nature gave in her few gayer moods; and set aloft his stained glass windows the hues of the noonday and the rainbow, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... or leaped to his feet as the uncanny laugh of a hyena burst suddenly upon a momentary jungle silence. But at last the tardy morning broke and a sick and feverish Tarzan wound sluggishly through the dank and gloomy mazes of the forest in search of water. His whole body seemed on fire, a great sickness surged upward to his throat. He saw a tangle of almost impenetrable thicket, and, like the wild beast he was, he crawled into it to die alone and unseen, ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bewildered amazement. Mollie was pale and worn, and painfully thin, yet nothing could spoil the wonderful color of her hair and eyes, nor take away the peculiar grace of her figure. Her expression was dull and listless. Even so Mollie looked like a lily transplanted to some field of dank weeds, but growing tall and sweet ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... warm glow of the sun, inviting Noozak and Neewa to the feast. All these things Noozak smelled with the experience and the knowledge of twenty years of life behind her—the delicious aroma of the spruce and the jackpine; the dank, sweet scent of water-lily roots and swelling bulbs that came from a thawed-out fen at the foot of the ridge; and over all these things, overwhelming their individual sweetnesses in a still greater thrill of life, the smell of ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... the vicolo, dark of wall and dank of pavement, with petticoats and shirts dangling from numerous windows and fluttering like gibbeted wretches in the air; with frowzy women sewing or knitting in the sombre doorways and squalid urchins screaming everywhere; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... to break, and presently the first cheerful rays of the warm sun come slanting on us brightly. It sheds its light upon a miserable waste of sodden grass, and dull trees, and squalid huts, whose aspect is forlorn and grievous in the last degree. A very desert in the wood, whose growth of green is dank and noxious like that upon the top of standing water: where poisonous fungus grows in the rare footprint on the oozy ground, and sprouts like witches' coral, from the crevices in the cabin wall and floor; it is a hideous thing to lie upon the very threshold ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... pale face, her hair hanging dank and wet about it, and saw that, even under these disadvantageous conditions, she had grown more beautiful than before. Of late he had heard of her—heard a good deal of her—but had never dreamed that they would meet again ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... pulled his moustache and watched the occasional carriage that rolled his way up the narrow lane from Chowringhee. He thought bitterly, standing there, of Calcutta's recognition of the claims of legitimate drama, for the dank darkness was full of the noise of wheels and the flashing of lamps on the way to accord another season's welcome to Jimmy Finnigan. "I might've learned this town well enough by now," he reflected, "to know that a bally minstrel show's about the size of it." Mr. Stanhope had not Mr. ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... shall give the means to the war-worn Greeks to break Neptune's stone bonds of the Dardanian city, the tall tomb shall be made dank with Polyxena's blood, who as the victim succumbing 'neath two-edged sword, with yielding hams shall fall forward a headless corpse. Haste ye, a-weaving the woof, O hasten, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... spell, Of malisons and curses fell, Which steeped that soil with venom dank, Of which the fated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... talks like the heroine of a romance. Listen. (Ansard reads.) "The beauteous and divinely-moulded form of the angelic Angelicanarinella pressed the dank and rotten straw, which had been thrown down by the scowling, thick-lipped Ethiop for her repose—she, for whom attendant maidens had smoothed the Sybaritic sheet of finest texture, under the elaborately carved and sumptuously ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... widely isolated and remote cabins which sent their smoke curling into the dank morning air of the region thereabouts, there was not one in which disease was not already raging with fearful malignity. Doctors or hired nurses there were none; each stricken household was forced to battle single-handed with the destroyer who dealt his blows stealthily, suddenly, ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... enough to make him break into a sweat of fear lest something should have gone wrong. Such thoughts come easily enough when you are lying full length in black darkness, in a hole just large enough to hold a man; in air so stifling that the laboured breath can scarcely come; with the dank earth just under mouth and nose, and overhead a roof that may fall in at any moment. The dragging minutes went by. Then, just as despair seized him, the boots ahead moved. He wriggled after them, finding himself praying desperately ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... shutters were closed, darkness deepened the gloom in the dismal chamber. The sick man himself had wasted greatly. All the life in him seemed to have taken refuge in the still brilliant eyes. The livid whiteness of his face was something horrible to see, enhanced as it was by the long dank locks of hair that straggled along his cheeks, for he would never suffer them to cut it. He looked like some religious fanatic in the desert. Mental suffering was extinguishing all human instincts in this man of scarce fifty years of age, whom all Paris had known as so ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... Over dead and dying; Piped and played he well. Sure that flute of his was made Of the dank reed sighing O'er the streams of Hell. There beneath the shadows grey, With the sisters three, Shall he pipe for many a day. May the Frog his butler be! And his wine the water of that countrie— Ptolemy ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... of osiers they passed, and again by a path through the jungle where the briar-vines caught at them like eager fingers, and a tiger crossed their track, disturbed in his night's rest. At length out of the dank distance they saw the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... say? No: a new influence began to act upon my life, and sadness, for a certain space, was held at bay. Conceive a dell, deep-hollowed in forest secresy; it lies in dimness and mist: its turf is dank, its herbage pale and humid. A storm or an axe makes a wide gap amongst the oak-trees; the breeze sweeps in; the sun looks down; the sad, cold dell becomes a deep cup of lustre; high summer pours her blue glory and her golden light out of that beauteous sky, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... are dim with rain, The cornfields dank and bare; And eyes that look for golden grain Find ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... have seen Verona under a disadvantage: there was no sunshine during our short stay. The beautiful, lordly gardens of the Palazzo Giusti on the declivity of a hillside on the left bank of the Adige were dank and dripping; there was no temptation to linger near their chilly statues and gloomy cypresses; even the view from their noble terraces, formed partly by the wall of the town, was cold and colorless under the November sky. Out-of-door ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... look at her daughter-in-law. She had always hated her. Stringy hair, Mabel had. Dank, stringy hair. Grandma Twilly thought how it would look hanging at an Indian's belt. But all that she did was to place her tongue against her two front teeth and make a noise ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... were wet, my throat was cold, My garments all were dank; Sure I had drunken in my dreams, And still my ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... at the window. It was cold and dank in the dawn light at this altitude, but he wanted to know what that completely unbelievable roar had been. A crane beam by the hangars tilted down, slowly, and then lifted as if released of a great weight. The light was growing slowly brighter. Joe saw ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... was the Grand Bank—a triangle two hundred and fifty miles on each side—a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by the tracks of the reckless liners, and dotted with the sails ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... pendent dome, That now is void, and dank with rain, And one,—oh, hope more frail than foam! The bird to his deserted ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... meadows, but it rose at intervals, though the clearance was only momentary, and had scarcely become perceptible before reinforcements of dull white vapour, tainted with miasma, rolled up from the marshy ground, bringing dank odours of standing water and weedy vegetation, half decayed, and gradually encroaching on the river, the smooth surface of which glowed with a greasy gleam beneath it, making it look like a ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... ages back, to members of my race; and when I was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, "miching mallecho." The inn at Burford Bridge, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mute, subservient common people looked on all this as a part of their daily amusement. Meek dwellers in those dank, noisome caverns, without any opening but a street-door, which are called dwelling-places in Italy, they lived in uninquiring good-nature, contentedly bringing up children on coarse bread, dirty cabbage-stumps, and other garbage, while all that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... Murree, dank boughs dripped and drooped above ill-made houses, that gave free admittance to the moist outer world; tree ferns, springing to sudden life on moss-clad trunks and boughs, showed brilliant as emeralds on velvet. The whole earth was quick with hidden stirrings and strivings, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... many flowers unknown to warmer zones come bravely forth to flourish for a few weeks only, and wither in the August winds. Very few of the flowers, so refreshing and charming to the eye, have any perfume. Nearly all smell of the dank moss that ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... Paris which was being revealed to me through the medium of this rogue's adventures. And even as, holding the fragments in my hand, I walked home that morning through the rain something of that same quaint personality seemed once more to haunt the dank and dreary streets of the once dazzling Ville Lumiere. I seemed to see the shabby bottle-green coat, the nankeen pantaloons, the down-at-heel shoes of this "confidant of Kings"; I could hear his unctuous, self-satisfied laugh, and sensed his furtive footstep whene'er ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... versifier, but there was no rest for the dead who tried to sleep within its broken walls. The sea kept undermining the crumbling cliffs upon which it stood, carrying away earth, and tombstones, and bones. Nor was it a garden. Nothing grew in the dank air but crawling things which were horrible to the eye. There were great rank growths of toadstools, yellow, blue, livid white, or spotted like adders, which squirmed and squelched underfoot to send up a sickly odour of decay. The only green thing was some ivy, a parasitic ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... kept swarming to and fro the close courts and pestilential cul-de-sacs that continually communicated with the streets by narrow archways, like the entrance of hives, so low that you were obliged to stoop for admission: while ascending to these same streets, from their dank and dismal dwellings by narrow flights of steps the subterraneous nation of the cellars poured forth to enjoy the coolness of the summer night, and market for the day of rest. The bright and lively shops were crowded; and groups ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... palace itself we soon secured a semblance of order. Maida's girls were here, with wet veils and long dank tresses clinging to their sleek bodies. Lips painted alluring red. But eyes which now were solemn and grim. Their demeanor alert and business-like. Unconscious of themselves they moved about the palace, executing ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... Radisson had sprained his ankle; and the long portages by the banks of the ice-laden, rain-swollen rivers were terrible. The rocks were slippery as glass with ice and moss. The forests of this region are full of dank heavy windfall that obstructs the streams and causes an endless succession of swamps. In these the paddlers had to wade to mid-waist, 'tracking' their canoes through perilous passage-way, where the rip of an upturned branch might tear ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... and with the lightest of fingers untied the collar of her son's doublet and linen shirt, before bending lower, with her long curls drooping round his face, till she could kiss his brow, no longer dank and chilly, but ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... breaking. Moon and stars were gone, and the east was dull pink, like faded roses. A ribbon of silver mist, marking the course of the stream below, drew itself like a serpent through the woods that were changing from gray to green. The dank smell of early morning rose from the dew-drenched earth, and in the countless trees of the forest ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... by day for there (so my sister Harriet warned me) serpents swarmed, eager to bite runaway boys. "And if you step in the mud between the tufts of grass," she said, "you will surely sink out of sight."—At night this teeming bog became a place of dank and horrid mystery. Bears and wolves and wildcats were reported as ruling the dark woods just beyond—only the door yard and the road seemed safe for little men—and even there I wished my mother to be within ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... still ran was a support for the back, and he sat down and rested after his toil. It was not really so comfortable a seat as one of the school forms, but the satisfaction was to find anything at all that would serve for a chair. He sat there, still panting after the climb and his struggle through the dank and jungle-like thicket, and he felt as if he were growing hotter and hotter; the sting of the nettle was burning his hand, and the tingling fire seemed to spread all ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... those days of work piling up behind us, that we owned the world; as Carl wrote in another letter: "We'll stick this out [this being the separation of his last trip to London, whence he was to start for Heidelberg and his examination, without another visit with us], for, Gott sei dank! the time isn't so fearful, fearful long, it isn't really, is it? Gee! I'm glad I married you. And I want more babies and more you, and then the whole gang together for about ninety-two years. But life is so fine ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... strip of sand-bank between the dank bush and the bar-bound mouth of the Hokitika river a mushroom city sprang up, starting into a bustling life of cheerful rashness and great expectations. In 1864 a few tents were pitched on the place; in 1865 one of the largest ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... warm inflowing tide of spring seemed to renovate the muddy flats, setting the weeds, that had lain dank and dispirited, a-floating again on the return of the water. No one could quite resist the magic of the season, and Georgie, who had intended out of mere politeness to go to see the earliest of Perdita's stupid flowers ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... is very different from what it was in Paris. For the phase I am going through is the very contrary to that in which I previously lived; in Paris my soul was not dry and friable, but dank and soft; it was saponaceous; the foot sank in it. In short, I was melting away, in a state of langour, more painful perhaps than this state of drought which is toughening me to horniness. Still on close examination, though the symptoms have changed, the evil persists; softness ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... broad, dry space with a lofty, salt-icicled roof. The green, translucent sea, as it rolled back and forth at their feet, gave to their brown faces a ghastly white glare. The scavenger crabs scrambled away over the dank and dripping stones, and the loathsome biting eel, slowly reached out its well-toothed, wide-gaping jaw to tear the tender feet that roused it from its horrid lair, where the dread ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... circles, like the annular rings seen upon the stump of a tree. Between each ring of buildings and the one next inside it there were lagoons, lawns and groves—lagoons of tepid, sullenly-steaming water; lawns which were veritable carpets of lush, rank rushes and of dank mosses; groves of palms, gigantic ferns, bamboos, and numerous tropical growths unknown to Earthly botany. At the very edge of the city began jungle unrelieved and primeval; the impenetrable, unconquerable jungle, possible ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... the streak of the pearly dawn—the flash of a sentinel's gun, The gallop and glint of horsemen who wheeled in the level sun, The shots in the clear still morning, the white smoke's eddying wreath, Is this the same land that I live in, the dull dank air that I breathe? And if I were forty years younger, with my life before me to choose, I wouldn't be lectured by Kafirs or bullied by fat Hindoos; But I'd go to some far-off country where Musalmans still are men, Or take to the jungle like Chetoo, and die in ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... rolling over the long ridges which girt the landscape in that quarter. They came in yet greater volumes, and indolently crept across the intervening valleys, and around the withered papery flags of the moor and river brinks. Then their dank spongy forms closed in upon the sky. It was a sudden overgrowth of atmospheric fungi which had their roots in the neighbouring sea, and by the time that horse, man, and corpse entered Yalbury Great Wood, these silent workings of an invisible hand had reached them, and ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy |
