"Distressful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the pleasure of hearing that that scoundrel, Billy Chase, is no longer in the land of the living. And I must compliment you upon your good-nature and sound judgment in carrying back his natives to Bouka. I wish there were more trading captains like you in the distressful South Seas." ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... made demand for city housing of an inexpensive sort, and there came into being all over the land the type of the family house squeezed by the price of land to four stories high, 16 to 20 feet wide, built in long rows and blocks. The "ugly sixties" bred not only distressful village "villas," but unpleasant city houses of this type, which are to-day a real menace to wholesome living. Many such blocks may be found in any of our older cities, casting a depressing influence upon all who ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... obliged in 1838 to offer $18 per month together with the customary weekly rations of three and a half pounds of bacon and ten quarts of corn and also the services of a staff physician as a sort of substitute for life and health insurance.[25] The beginning of the distressful 'forties eased the market so that the town of Milledgeville could get its street gang on a scale of $125;[26] at the middle of the decade slaveowners were willing to take almost any wages offered; and in its final year the Georgia Railroad paid only $70 to $75 for section hands. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... corner—such a little bed!—and such a tearful little face looked up at us, as we stopped beside it! The twelve years old drummer boy was not singing now, but sobbing, with a manly effort all the while to stifle the distressful ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... dropped, he followed the trail. Large red stains at intervals showed that the animal had stopped frequently to grovel on the snow. About half a mile from the knoll, Mr. Edwards came upon the beast, in a fir thicket, making distressful sounds, and quite helpless to defend itself. A blow on the head from the poll of the axe finished the creature; and, taking it by the tail, Mr. Edwards dragged it to the house. The carcass was lying in the dooryard when Tom's ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... I was so feeble. She was there too: She bent above me too: her cheek was pale, Oh! very fair and pale: rare pity had stolen The living bloom away, as tho' a red rose Should change into a white one suddenly. Her eyes, I saw, were full of tears in the morn, And some few drops of that distressful rain Being wafted on the wind, drove in my sight, And being there they did break forth afresh In a new birth, immingled with my own, And still bewept my grief. Keeping unchanged The purport of their coinage. Her long ringlets, Drooping and beaten ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... monitor and measurer of the flight of the hours; divinely right, not to be argued with; though I warrant there be some would still swear by their watches. This were the true cosmopolitanism, destroying those distressful variations which make your clock vary with your climate, and which throw the shadow of pyrrhonism over truths which should be clear as daylight. For if, when it is five o'clock here, it may be two o'clock there and supper-time yonder, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... other relations, who subsisted wholly on the income arising from his place. The ladies, as well as Sandford, knew him well, and they all, almost at once, asked, "What was the matter?" for his looks told them something distressful ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... eyebrows and lashes were carefully darkened so as to sweeten the lines of her face, and a dimple had been made in one cheek by the aid of an orange stick. She was the picture of delicate femininity appealingly distressful, and yet to ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... patronized—a sum he was ashamed to see standing as the gift of a Beltham; and she had stopped the building of a wing of her village school-house, designed upon his plan. Altogether, she was fretful and distressful; she appeared to think that I could have kept my father in better order. Riversley was hearing new and strange reports of him. But how could I at Chippenden thwart his proceedings in London? Besides, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the inner room. The Baron, in his boots, lay upon the bed, his body bent almost double by the unrelenting gripe of a distressful pain. His teeth were tightly clenched, and the rigid muscles around the mouth distorted the natural expression of his face. Every few seconds a prolonged groan escaped him. His fine eyes rolled piteously. Anon, he would press both hands upon his abdomen and shiver in every limb ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... fun up here. I, even I, have won a great victory for the Comic Muse. George Meredith's right—the cause of Comedy and the cause of Truth are really the same; and I, even I, have found tenants for the distressful Cissie Villa. Don't be angry! Don't be angry! You'll forgive me ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... on a pile of cushions that lay beside the basin, and beckoning Christie to sit near, said, as she pressed her hands to her hot forehead and looked up with a distressful brightness in the haggard eyes that seemed to have no ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... these are the crises which prepare a boy for the business difficulties of his later life. Penrod, with the huge weapon beneath his jacket, insecurely supported by an elbow and by a waistband which he instantly began to distrust, experienced distressful sensations similar to those of the owner of too heavily insured property carrying a gasoline can under his overcoat and detained for conversation by a policeman. And if, in the coming years it was to be Penrod's lot to find himself in that precise situation, no doubt ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... like. Without women I am a wasting fever of distressful toil. Without them there is no kindness in existence, no rest, no sort of satisfaction. The world is a battlefield, trenches, barbed wire, rain, mud, logical necessity and utter desolation—with nothing whatever worth fighting ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... is here begun should not proceed, how thou wouldst have distressful want of knowing more; and by thyself thou wilt see how desirous I was to hear from these of their conditions, as they became manifest to mine eyes. "O well-born,[1] to whom Grace concedes to see the thrones ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... Garstin was rather a distressful youth by the time the shanty was reached, for the pace had been hot, and he had been impeded by the fatal greatcoat and muffler. After divesting himself of these he stood still and breathed hard in front of a cheerful coke fire, while Trevannion unrolled the ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... the ornament of Italy and of literature, languished, in his old age, in the most distressful poverty; and having sold his palace to satisfy his creditors, left nothing behind him but his reputation. The learned Pomponius Laetus lived in such a state of poverty, that his friend Platina, who wrote the lives of the popes, and also a book ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... last ten hours. The Chronicle was the source from which the first word would be expected; it would give the people of Wellington their cue as to the position which they must take in regard to this distressful affair, which had so far transcended in ferocity the most extreme measures which the conspirators had anticipated. The burden of his own responsibility weighed heavily upon him, and could not be shaken off; but he must do first ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... distressful when one cannot recount all sorts of exciting things as nicely fitted together as if they had been carefully planned and rehearsed beforehand. It would have been extremely gratifying and romantic if Charming Billy Boyle had dropped everything ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... hole, thinking it might perhaps be more interesting to wait and see what would naturally happen without my interference. While I stood there looking and listening, I heard a great disturbance going on in the burrow, a mixed lot of keen squeaking, shrieking, distressful cries, telling that down in the dark something terrible was being done. Then suddenly out popped a half-grown gopher, four and a half or five inches long, and, without stopping a single moment to choose a way of escape, ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... only comfort, obtaining the necessaries of life by means of which we are not aware. By the tenderest affection Eponina softened the anxieties of her husband, the birth of two sons served still more to alleviate the misery of their distressful situation, and all the happiness that could possibly come to two so circumstanced attended the pair in their ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of distressful voices, whining the discords of a mendicant psalm. A man, a woman, and two small children crawled along the street; their eyes surveyed the upper windows. All were ragged and filthy; the elders bore the ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... novels in view. The precipitate flight of Cherubina, "dressed in a long-skirted red coat stiff with tarnished lace, a satin petticoat, satin shoes and no stockings," and with hair streaming like a meteor, described in Letter XX, is clearly a cruel mockery of Cecilia's distressful plight in Miss Burney's novel. Even Scott is not immune from Barrett's barbed arrows, and Byron is glanced at in the bogus antique language of "Eftsoones." Barrett, indeed, jeers at the mediaeval revival in its various manifestations and even at "Romanticism" ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... away on my right hand, and the next moment a second fox screamed on my left, and from that time I was accompanied, or shadowed, by the two foxes, always keeping abreast of me, always at the same distance, one screaming and the other replying about every half-minute. The distressful bird-sound ceased, and I turned and went off in another direction, to get out of the wood on the side nearest the place where I was staying, the foxes keeping with me until ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... I was not at all unwell, when I arrived there, though wet of course to the skin. My right eye had nothing the matter with it, either to the sight of others, or to my own feelings, but I had a bad night, with distressful dreams, chiefly about my eye; and waking often in the dark I thought it was the effect of mere recollection, but it appeared in the morning that my right eye was blood-shot, and the lid swollen. That morning ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... were easy enough for her to carry, even up a rope thirty feet long. But Vivia Varnham, with all her lightness and quickness, had little strength in her wrists. They ached painfully, but she would not give up. Her face flushed, her breath came in distressful gasps, she struggled on and up. They were more than half-way up; they had passed the quiet observer, swinging comfortably with her feet twisted in her rope. "Better go down, V.!" said the girl with the sad eyes. "She's ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... to our joint satisfaction, she had to return to the distressful main theme of our talk. She harked back to Sir Anthony, touched on his splendid behaviour, recalled, with a little dismay, the hitherto unnoted fact that, after the ceremony he had held himself ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... Dorian Corinth, where thy crown of towers? where thy treasures of old, where the temples of the immortals, where the halls and where the wives of the Sisyphids, and the tens of thousands of thy people that were? for not even a trace, O most distressful one, is left of thee, and war has swept up together and clean devoured all; only we, the unravaged sea-nymphs, maidens of Ocean, abide, halcyons wailing ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... Cabiria with mixed emotions. And I had to forget the distressful eye-strain. Few eyes submit without destruction to three hours of film. But the mistakes of Cabiria are those of the pioneer work of genius. It has in it twenty great productions. It abounds in suggestions. Once the classic rules of this art-unit are established, men with ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... doubt about the disease having "come out" in the person of the speaker. It had "come out" in her face, which was brilliantly rubicund; in her hands, and ankles and feet, which were a distressful spectacle of "knobs" and "bumps" of an exaggerated phrenological type— perhaps also in her temper, which was fierce and fiery as her complexion, as most of the frequenters of the Baths knew, and the ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... in my dream, methought, I went To search out what might there be found; And what the sweet bird's trouble meant, That thus lay fluttering on the ground. I went and peered, and could descry No cause for her distressful cry; But yet for her dear lady's sake I stooped, methought, the dove to take, When lo! I saw a bright green snake Coiled around its wings and neck. Green as the herbs on which it couched, Close by the dove's its head it crouched; And with the ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... drive back a force, some of whose members had been his companions in those earlier campaigns. That night the relieved British slept secure in Quebec, while the bedraggled American force was making its distressful way towards Montreal. ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... a more distressful lady on the eve of a party of pleasure. Lancelot's serious enjoyment of the prospect, evident in every line of his letters, was her only relish; but even that could not sting her answers to vivacity. "I hope the Norwegians are very sensible. They will need all their sense, because we shall ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... mother," said he, "thought it had something to do with Delphos; but of that I know nothing." "Who founded Rome, then ?" inquired Mr. Thrale. The lad replied, "Romulus." "And who succeeded Romulus?" said I. A long pause, and apparently distressful hesitation, followed the difficult question. "Why will you ask him in terms that he does not comprehend?" said Mr. Johnson, enraged. "You might as well bid him tell you who phlebotomised Romulus. This fellow's dulness ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... side of South Africa. Though he had left England in autumn, it was spring-time at the Cape, and the winter drought had parched up all the grass, leaving the bare red dust in the roads or streets as dry and desolate as the sand of the desert. The town itself consisted of some sixty melancholy and distressful houses, bare, square, and flat-roofed, standing unenclosed along a dismal high-road, and with that congenitally shabby look, in spite of their newness, which seems to belong by nature to all southern buildings. Some stagnant pools alone ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... his remarks, his comment, or his jest, a pleasantry or a proverb. This was no longer exclusively a discussion of life on the colossal scale just described by Marcas, the soldier of political warfare. Nor was it the distressful monologue of the wrecked navigator, stranded in a garret in the Hotel Corneille; it was a dialogue in which two well-informed young men, having gauged the times they lived in, were endeavoring, under ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long been growing worse and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She turned her head as the carriage came up to her, rose quickly, and presented herself at ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... ended happily to the principal persons, however serious or distressful through its intermediate incidents, in their opinion constituted a comedy. This idea of a comedy continued long amongst us, and plays were written, which, by changing the catastrophe, were tragedies to-day, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... STRONGER than the ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely more real than any ordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like unto myself so to speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't recognize it as any individual being ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... Interlachen to-day,—with great regret, for the peace and sweetness of this place are wonderful and the people are good; and though there is much drinking and quarrelling among the younger men, there appears to be neither distressful poverty, nor deliberate crime: so that there is more of the sense I need, and long for, of fellowship with human creatures, than in any place I have been at for years. I believe they don't so much as lock the house-doors ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... word "funds," Roland, who had become thoroughly bored with the lecture on Paranoyan history, sat up and took notice. He had an instinctive feeling that he was about to be called upon for a subscription to the cause of the distressful country's freedom. Especially ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... destitute children of poor Elton the actor, who was drowned in the Pegasus. They are exceedingly anxious to have the great assistance of your name; and if you will allow yourself to be announced as one of the body, I do assure you you will help a very melancholy and distressful cause. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... frame already marked out for death; nor can we help feeling, while we contemplate this last scene of his life, that, much as there is in it to admire, to wonder at, and glory in, there is also much that awakens sad and most distressful thoughts. In a situation more than any other calling for sympathy and care, we see him cast among strangers and mercenaries, without either nurse or friend;—the self-collectedness of woman being, as we shall find, wanting for the former office, and the youth and inexperience ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... tragic Muse, l. 246. Why we are delighted with the scenical representations of Tragedy, which draw tears from our eyes, has been variously explained by different writers. The same distressful circumstance attending an ugly or wicked person affects us with grief or disgust; but when distress occurs to a beauteous or virtuous person, the pleasurable idea of beauty or of virtue becomes mixed with the painful one of sorrow and the passion of Pity is produced, which is ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... about, and flung face downward upon their canvas bed. She did not sob, she made no sound. She lay still upon her face. After a vast, distressful void her shoulders heaved and she began to ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... an exceptionally genial mood, merely saw this distressful exclamation as modesty. 'Well,' he added, after a minute, 'I like you all the better, you know, for such moral precision, although I called it absurd.' He went on with tender earnestness: 'For, Elfride, there ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... was the door of his sitting-room; he flung it open, and stood in a coaxing attitude. Try how she would, Grace could not resist the supplicatory mandate written in the face and manner of this man, and distressful resignation sat on her as she glided past him into the room—brushing his coat with her elbow ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... nought were fix'd: Sad proof of thy distressful state! Of differing themes the veering song was mix'd; And now it courted Love, now raving ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... wanted for resisting arrest and assaulting the minions of the law; hounded by a vengeful and determined posse; unacquainted with his whereabouts, ignorant of any way of escape from that hollow square, round whose sides window after excitable window was lighting up in his honour; all in all, as distressful a figure of a fugitive from justice as ever ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... It has successfully adjusted itself to changing conditions in the past. It will do so again. The mobility of our institutions, the richness of our resources, and the abilities of our people enable us to meet them unafraid. It is a distressful time for many of our people, but they have shown qualities as high in fortitude, courage, and resourcefulness as ever in our history. With that spirit, I have faith that out of it will come a sounder life, a truer standard of values, a greater ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... it for him—and picked his way over the gutters to the shop of his Chinaman opposite. From there he watched the little company issue forth and turn into Crooked lane, where the entrance was. It gave him a sense that she had her part in this squalor, which was not altogether distressful in that it also localised her in the warm, living, habitable world, and helped to make her thinkable and attainable. Then he went to his room at the club and found there a note from Miss Howe, written apparently to forgive him in advance, to say that she had not expected ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... was expecting too much of them when I accorded them that faint gleam of intelligence which the tribulations of a distressful stomach ought, one would think, to have aroused. I visit them at dawn. They are lined up as on the day before, but motionless. When the air grows a little warmer, they shake off their torpor, revive and start walking again. The circular procession begins ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... residents, of the ancient tragedy, and a short sketch of the deceased Bledsoe, the facts regarding him being drawn from the same veracious sources; and at the end of the article was a somewhat guarded but altogether sympathetic reference to the distressful recollections borne for so long and so patiently by an esteemed townsman, with a concluding paragraph to the effect that though the gentleman in question had declined to make a public statement touching on the remarkable disclosures now added thus strangely as a final ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... try to sneer him into the rank of inferior poets, he was without rancor for the clumsy misliking that he felt. He could not understand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he could know it only as Swedenborg's most celestial angels perceived evil, as something distressful, angular. The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with adverse criticism made him distrust criticism, and the discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise gives probably made him shy of all criticism. He said that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... all his influence for its suppression. He proposed it to his fellow officers, and urged it with all his powers. It met an opposition which was observed to cloud his face with an anxiety, that the most distressful scenes of the war had scarcely ever produced. It was canvassed for several days, and, at length, it was no more a doubt, what would be its ultimate fate. The order was on the point of receiving its annihilation, by the vote of a great majority of its members. In this ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... drawings, china, scarabaei, lepidoptera—keep it to yourself and for those like-minded with you. Sweet indeed is the community of interest, delightful the intercourse which a common foible begets; but correspondingly bitter and distressful is the forced union of nervous zeal and pitiless indifference. Spare us the so-called friends who come and gape and stare and go! What is more painful than the chatter of the connoisseur as it falls upon the long ears of the ignoramus! Collecting is a secret sin—the great pushing public ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... quiet presence, a man and a boy from that distressful outer world had entered. They moved with effort and difficulty into its untrodden depths. Uninvited and unasked, they sought its hidden and invisible centre, the mysterious heart of it which the younger of the adventurers ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... the New-England churches presents no epoch more melancholy, distressful, and stormy than the first, and none more united, prosperous, or commendable than the second period in the annals ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... eldest son's funeral, his stricken mother had locked it. Perhaps she scarcely knew at first that the time would never come when she should find courage again to open it; but she took away the key to satisfy some present distressful fancy, and those about her respected her desire that the place should not be entered. They did not doubt that there was some pathetic reason for this desire, but none was evident, for her son had gone down to his death in a secluded and now all but inaccessible ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... coins on a table before him, and he would sit for hours together with his eyes fixed upon them, like a child who, at the moment it first begins to see, gazes in stupid contemplation at the same object, and like the child, a distressful smile would ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... chanced to see you pass the gate, and followed. You might have heard me knocking for admission, had you been less swift of foot, or lingered in the garden. Please to withdraw. Your presence here is offensive to me and distressful to my niece.' As he said these words, he passed his arm about the waist of the terrified and weeping girl, and drew her closer to him; and though the habitual severity of his manner was scarcely changed, there was yet apparent in ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... who, with distressful breath, Forth issued from the sea upon the shore, Turns to the water ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... eye, as she approached the door of my Uncle TOBY'S Sentry-Box—"a mote, or sand, or small fly, or something, I know not what, has got into this eye of mine. The Gardener declares it is one of those Green Flies which are the pest of this Distressful Country. I refuse to believe that. There never was, never will, never can, never shall be any Green in my eye. But whatever it is, mote or beam, it is awfully irritating. Do look into it; it is not in the white, or perhaps I should say—for I am a brunette ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... present all around her fades, Her listless ear no sound pervades. Her senses, wearied and distraught, Perceive not how the stream of thought, Rising from her distressful song, In hurrying tide has swept along, With startling and resistless swell, The panic-stricken Isabel! Who—falling at her father's feet, Like the most lowly suppliant, kneels; And, with imploring voice, unmeet For one so fondly ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... Othello's discourse. And once he took advantage of a pliant hour, and drew from her a prayer, that he would tell her the whole story of his life at large, of which she had heard so much, but only by parts: to which he consented, and beguiled her of many a tear, when he spoke of some distressful stroke which his ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... eastward to take their direction from the coast of New Guinea: yet I likewise think that a ship coming from the southward will find a fair strait in the latitude of 10 degrees south. I much wished to have ascertained this point but in our distressful situation any increase of fatigue or loss of time might have been attended with the most fatal consequences. I therefore determined to pass ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... which Skinner expected. Chayne, instead of turning his back upon so distasteful a company, frequented it in the resolve to take Sylvia out of its grasp. It did not need a lover to see that she slept little of nights and passed distressful days. She had fled from her mother's friends at Chamonix, only to find herself helpless amongst a worse gang in her father's house. Very well. She must be released. He had proposed to take her away then and there. She had refused. Well, he had been blunt. He would ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... focusing his full strength on the opposite end. The rock, however, refused to move an inch, and, because a few crackers are not much for a hungry man to work on after an all-night march, Thurston became conscious that he had a headache and a distressful stitch in his side. Still, being obstinate and filled with an unreasoning desire to prove his trustworthiness to his fair employer, he continued doggedly, and after another hour's digging found the stone still immovable. Then it happened that ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... the Major, as they were meant to do; and Ardea, the loyal, happening on one of them in her first Deer Trace summer, read it through with childish sobs and never thereafter opened her lips on the story of those distressful Paris days. Later she understood her father's motive better: how he would not be a charge on an old man rich in nothing but ruin; and the memory of the pinched ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... Lida's distressful inability to pull herself together at that moment, and he employed his ready tact, giving her time for thought. "It's quite a natural thing, this taking away of the new bridegroom for the service of the Flaggs," he declared with a chuckle. "There's even ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... Yet rest where thou art, 'Twill be dreadful to meet, And distressful to part. The champion of Ulster! Oh! think what a foe! In that meeting there's grief, In that journey ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... they sing now:— "Bravo, our brave Tristan!"— he was that distressful man. A thousand protestations of truth and love he prated. Hear how a knight fealty knows!— When as Tantris unforbidden he'd left me, as Tristan boldly back he came, in stately ship from which in ...
— Tristan and Isolda - Opera in Three Acts • Richard Wagner
... be of no assistance to the distressful Henry we continued our own search, and, by hailing all within call, eventually reached our trench, where we found the colonel, always in good mood when something practical wanted doing, superintending Headquarters' occupation ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... were supposed to have happened in, the environs of Milan, about a hundred years ago, when the Torriani and Visconti families disputed for superiority. Its construction was compounded of comic and distressful scenes, of which the last gave me most delight; and much was I amazed, indeed, to feel my cheeks wet with tears at a friar's play, founded on ideas of parental tenderness. The comic part, however, was intolerably gross; ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... of trying to obtain further admissions from a woman in her distressful state of mind. The fear that had seized her would prove a padlock on her lips. So he permitted her to lean heavily on his arm while she passed through the door and descended the steps to the street. Then, helping her into the machine, he waited until ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... isolation depressed him greatly. He was alone; from this world with its vesper lights and hues, and fires, and stars, and human sounds, he stood aloof and apart, as though shut close within a dark room. So distressful was this sense of solitude, that as he crossed the melon-field where hundreds of melons were growing in the gloom, to him they seemed like human skulls that ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... answered in English, "because I know. Your position's this." He sat down in his rocking chair, crossed his legs, and looked at me as if he expected me to show signs of astonishment at his knowing so much. "You're in a hole. You must leave this island of Jamaica—surely it's as distressful as my own dear land—and you can't go home, because the runners would be after you. You're 'wanted' here as well as there, and ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... various aspects to satisfy the tastes and cravings of each soul. At La Salette, where She descended in a distressful spot, all in tears, She revealed Herself no doubt to certain persons, more especially to the souls in love with sorrow, the mystical souls that delight in reviving the anguish of the Passion and following the Mother ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... each other, tenderly as women, and so parted; for poor Ned could not stay to see his comrade die. For a little while, there was no sound in the room but the drip of water from a stump or two, and John's distressful gasps, as he slowly breathed his life away. I thought him nearly gone, and had just laid down the fan, believing its help to be no longer needed, when suddenly he rose up in his bed, and cried out with a bitter cry that broke ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... with you, good William! You describe the guano-carrying industry by a somewhat rude expression; but as a seafaring man who has had the misfortune to be engaged in the transportation of the distressful but highly useful product, I shake your hand even as I shake the greasy hand of Mr. William Miller, the New Bedford blubber-hunter. My ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... ascites. Now his urine was small in quantity and much saturated, the dysuria was more dreadful than ever; his breath would not allow him to lie in bed, nor would the dysuria permit him to sleep; in this distressful situation, after having used other medicines to little purpose, I directed an infusion of Digitalis to be given. When the quantity of urine became more plentiful, the pain from his stone grew easier; in a few days the dropsy and asthma disappeared, and he soon ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter grass among their shallows, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... mastered it, and went on to the distressful strokes his youth had suffered, and then ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... stranded in this distressful mood on his post for some minutes when a Capuchin friar stepped up ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... treachery, I should disgrace every feeling that is honourable and respectable between man and man. I have no choice; my immediate return is as much a duty and obligation upon me as can in human society be laid upon one who would not renounce the character of a gentleman. Judge, then, of the distressful situation I must have been in at the time of decyphering your last lines, and judge how sacred and indispensable those circumstances must be, that do not give me even room to hesitate in a difficulty of so much delicacy. I love you, my dearest brother, with the truest and sincerest ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... of the Orioles, he continued his benevolent offices the whole day, roosting at night as before. On the third or fourth day he seemed extremely solicitous for the liberation of his charge, using every expression of distressful anxiety, and every call and invitation that nature had put in his power, for him to come out. This was too much for the feelings of my friend. He procured a ladder, and mounting to the spot where the bird was suspended, opened the cage, took out ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... present period of our narrative the neighborhood of Ballymacan was in an unsettled and distressful state. The small farmers, and such as held from six to sixteen acres, at a rent which they could at any period with difficulty pay, were barely able to support themselves and their families upon the produce ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Paris was completely broken off. The rumour was that McMahon had crossed the Rhine at Strassburg with one hundred and fifty thousand men on the march to interpose between Southern and Northern Germany. The house had not heard from Paris and could not expect to hear. Acting on their advice I sent a distressful telegram roundabout through Switzerland to Paris. There was a possibility that such a message might go through; otherwise there was no hope. I then spent at Munich one of the most anxious weeks of my life. I was nearer the pavement than I have ever been ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... face was distressful. They were all silent for a little, Hugh kissing his mother's wet cheeks. Fleda had softly nestled her head in her bosom. But Mrs. ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Distressful she had been, a land Of kine curtailed and burning ricks, Until we others oped our purses To rectify her feudal curses And freed the soil with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... the high shore of this world,— No, not all these, thrice gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave Who, with a body fill'd and vacant mind Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the sudden thrust that saved me from a levelled gun; the quick swerving of our horses as they came in contact with the cannon; the shouts of rage; the blows; the screams of pain; the white face of Colgate as he reeled and fell. These are all in my memory, blurred, commingled, indistinct, yet distressful as any nightmare. In some way, how I know not, I realized that we had hurled them back, shattered them by our first fierce blow; that the guns were once again ours; that fifty dismounted troopers were tugging desperately at their wheels. Then that dense blue mass surged forward once again, engulfed ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... wise that she could make no outcry and carry her forth by a privy door, whereat he had entered; then, setting her on horseback, he took to the road with all his men, as softliest he might, and returned to his own dominions. However (for that he had a wife) he carried the lady, who was the most distressful of women, not to Athens, but to a very goodly place he had by the sea, a little without the city, and there entertained her in secret, causing honourably furnish her with all that ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... grave, as Pericles's rival, one Afranius Silo, a centurion; the flood of rhetoric which follows is so copious and remarkable that it drew tears from me—ye Graces!—tears of laughter; most of all where the eloquent Afranius, drawing to a close, makes mention, with weeping and distressful moans, of all those costly dinners and toasts. But he is a very Ajax in his conclusion. He draws his sword, gallantly as an Afranius should, and in sight of all cuts his throat over the grave—and God knows it was high time for an execution, if oratory can be ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... in general to improve; but I have been troubled for many weeks with a vexatious catarrh, which is sometimes sufficiently distressful. I have not found any great effects from bleeding and physick; and am afraid, that I must expect help from brighter ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... stating the hour of Rosamund's arrival at Paddington was wired back to London, and shortly afterwards the girl went up to her own room to pack a few things. She was not depressed, for her father was subject to sudden attacks, which, although distressful, were ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... small hope of prosperity now and again. If the opium crop were good, money was plentiful. But now no opium is grown, and the misery-stricken people have lost all hope of better times, and seem to have sunk in many instances to the lowest pangs of distressful poverty.[K] ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... often did beguile her of her tears, When I did speak of some distressful stroke That my youth suffer'd. My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs; She swore, in faith, 't was strange, 't was passing strange. 'T was pitiful, 't was wondrous pitiful; She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd That Heaven had made her such ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... yelled Jukes, so that every head on the Nan-Shan's decks looked towards the bridge. Then he sighed, and with sudden resignation: "It would certainly be a dam' distressful sight," he said, meekly. ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad |
