"Fiendish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... both is called "Nature's Awakening;" such an idea is inevitable in any spring composition, from poetry up—or down. For a second movement Raff has a wild "Walpurgis Night Revel," while Paine has a scherzo called "May Night Fantasy." Where Raff is uncanny and fiendish, Paine is cheerful and elfin. The third movement of Raff's symphony is called "First Blossoms of Spring," and the last is called "The Joys of Wandering." The latter two movements of Mr. Paine's symphony are "A Promise of Spring" and "The Glory of Nature." The beginning ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... last agony of excitation. I ventured to raise my eyes upon the gaze, which I felt must still be upon the gambler—there it was fixed, and stern as before; but it now conveyed a deeper expression of joy than of the other passions which were there met. Yet a joy so malignant and fiendish, that no look of mere anger or hatred could have so chilled my heart. I dropped my eyes. I redoubled my attention to the cards—the last two were to be turned up. A moment more!—the fortune was to the noir. The stranger had lost! He did not utter a single ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... your religion, Mr. Orthodox, is that it violates reason and conscience. To be more specific, let us consider a few instances. There is your doctrine of eternal punishment, in which you ascribe fiendish qualities to our dear heavenly Father such as the most savage human being could not be capable of. Then, take your doctrine of the Trinity, around which most of your dogmas cluster, and we see at once that it violates the simplest postulates of reason. I know that you will answer ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... canine pathology there are none more bothersome to treat successfully nor more difficult to diagnose than those of the skin. There are none either that afford the quack or patent-nostrum monger a larger field for the practice of his fiendish gifts. If I were to be asked the questions, "Why do dogs suffer so much from skin complaints?" and "Why does it appear to be so difficult to treat them?" I should answer the first thus: Through the neglect of their owners, from want of cleanliness, from injudicious feeding, from bad kennelling, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... community of which he was a part. Even as man developed in knowledge and civilization, this sort of crime continued to furnish the greater proportion of victims and the most cruel punishments. Torture of the most fiendish sort was evoked to catch offenders and extort confessions. Difference of religious opinions was the worst crime. The inquisition became an established thing. Sometimes a nation was almost wiped out that heretics should be killed and heresies destroyed. The heretic was the one who did not accept ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... down and over the sounding sea, And the sea-birds cried as they dropp'd and died at the terrible sight of me, For my head was bound with a star, and crown'd with the fire of utmost hell, And I made this song with a brazen tongue and a more than fiendish yell: ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... quaft Like ZEMZEM'S Spring of Holiness[47] had power To freshen the soul's virtues into flower! And still he drank and pondered—nor could see The approaching maid, so deep his revery; At length with fiendish laugh like that which broke From EBLIS at the Fall of Man he spoke:— "Yes, ye vile race, for hell's amusement given, "Too mean for earth, yet claiming kin with heaven; "God's images, forsooth!—such gods as he "Whom INDIA serves, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... bloodthirsty comrades, they left him to dangle and to die with them there! The Archbishop, still in his gorgeous vestments, turned in fury, as he hung head downwards in that ghastly company, and, seizing his fiendish confederate, fixed his teeth in his bare breast, and so the guilty pair expiated their hellish rage—unlovely in their lives, revolting ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... beside him, and he had evidently experienced the discomfort and feverous heat arising from intoxication, for his silken vest was loosened as though for greater ease and coolness, thus leaving the smooth breadth of his chest bare and fully exposed. To this Lysia pointed with a fiendish glee, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... thralls of bets and "booze," Had sworn could he not win he should not lose. DARES, you see, was "Champion" of his land, And these were "Trojans all" you'll understand. ("Champion be blowed!" SAYERIUS said. "Wus luck, They wasn't Trojans. This is British pluck!") Then from the Corner fiendish howls arise, And oaths and execrations rend the skies. ENTELLUS stoutly to the fight returned. Kicked, punched and mauled, his eyes with fury burned, Disdain and conscious courage fired his breast, And with redoubled force his foe he pressed, Laid on with either hand like anything, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... possible dangers. And it appeared there was not, in Her Majesty's dominions, a more lawless and fiendish set of ruffians than those who lurked in Kilronan. Why, what did they do in the days of the Lague? Didn't they take his predecessor, as honest a man as ever lived, and strip him, and nail him by the ears to his door, where his neighbors found ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... Edward Grey and Prince Lichnowsky is recorded in the famous No. 123. With the rather childish subsequent attempt to minimize No. 123 on the ground that the Prince was merely an amiable nincompoop who did not really represent his fiendish sovereign, neither I nor any other serious person need be concerned. What is beyond all controversy is that after that conversation Prince Lichnowsky could do nothing but tell the Kaiser that the Entente, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... reach—but the instinct of cowardice kept him from making any more noise than was necessary to rend and break the heart of the woman beside him,—that, although he was only half conscious of it, was his purpose in crying. He had a fiendish desire to make her suffer ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... There is every reason to hope that it is not. That some deliverance of the Jews from their enemies in Persia may be commemorated by the feast of Purim is possible; that precisely such a fiendish outbreak of fanatical cruelty as this ever occurred, we may safely and charitably doubt. The fact that the story was told, and that it gained great popularity among the Jews, and by some of those in later ages came to be regarded as ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... knees, then to her waist, then to her chin, then to her lips; and when she was almost stifled by the rising waves, and the bubbling groan of her last agony was reaching her fellow-martyr farther up the beach, one heartless ruffian stepped up to Margaret Wilson, and, with a fiendish grin and mocking laugh, asked her, 'What think you of your friend now?' And what was the calm and noble reply? 'What do I see but Christ, in one of his members, wrestling there? Think you that we are ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... two fiendish things were placed, and their devilish tails hanging out behind them. The fuses had been cut with the utmost nicety to burn the same ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... you, sir, before 'e 'ad the stroke—and 'e says to 'im, says 'e: 'Remember, I cawst you off. Don't come to me for nothin' after this. Don't ever you darken my doorstep ag'in,' 'e says. And Mr. Bayard, sir, 'e ups and laughs fiendish in 'is own father's fice. 'You've got another guess comin',' he mocks 'im open': 'you're in this business as deep as me,' 'e says, 'and if you cross me, I'll double-cross you, s'elp me Gawd, and in the newspapers, too.' And with that, out ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... repose," as they are pleased to call it. Every man carries his character in his brain. You all know that, and act upon it when you have to deal with a man for sixpence; but your religious dogmas, which make out that everyman comes into the world equally brutish and fiendish, make you afraid to confess it. I don't quarrel with a "douce" man like you, with a large organ of veneration, for following your bent. But if I am fiery, with a huge cerebellum, why am I not to follow mine?—For that is what you do, after ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... flower in the bouquet of the corporation; we mean the corporation that banquets and becomes jubilant while assassins stab their victims in the broad street-that becomes befogged while bands of ruffians disgrace the city with their fiendish outrages-that makes presidents and drinks whiskey when the city would seem given over to the swell-mobsman-when no security is offered to life, and wholesale harlotry, flaunting with naked arms and bared bosoms, passes along in possession of ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... there more fiendish craft in Glam than in most other ghosts, that he spake now in ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... indignation, he looked up into the face that was bending over him, and recognized Pierre Costello, whose features wore a fiendish expression, the effect of which was heightened by a murderous-looking knife which he carried between his teeth. Scowling fiercely, as if he were trying to strike terror to the boy's heart by his very appearance, he loosened his grasp on Frank's ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... tongue that stole Her husband's love and honour old, And smites him stark and cold, tho' loath, It peers to me her demon-ague That binds her to this perjured soul, She drinks his gore from carvels cold And leers with fiendish lips at him, Now tossed in phosphorescent holes. And as I list to aspen cries, Veiled augueries in vapours hie And spell these tokens to each Inn: Kingdoms, empires, nations, souls, Shall miss the haunts of Paradise, And ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... soldiers died, and bravely the more fortunate came on. They tore through the barbed wire with a fiendish frenzy and leaped down on to parts of their enemy's lines. With that mad ferocity which only a Moslem fanatic can display, they plugged their bayonets into the first opposing man. Cold steel is hard to face. Few armies can face it. Only Russians, Britishers, and Japs are good at the game. And ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... wagonette had topped a rise and in front of us rose the huge expanse of the moor, mottled with gnarled and craggy cairns and tors. A cold wind swept down from it and set us shivering. Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast him out. It needed but this to complete the grim suggestiveness of the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... chiefs kept their eyes intently fixed on one another, passed anxiously away; and then nearer to the gate, apparently on the very drawbridge itself, was pealed forth the wild and deafening yell of a legion of fiendish voices. At that sound, the Ottawa and the other chiefs sprang to their feet, and their own fierce cry responded to that yet vibrating on the ears of all. Already were their gleaming tomahawks brandished wildly over their ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... fluty, mellifluous sound in order to depict the hearty laugh of the peasants in the first chorus. They were almost scandalized when I asked for a somewhat raucous, devil-may-care carousal, tone in the "Auerbach's Wine-cellar" scene, and when a fiendish, snarling utterance was called for in the "Pandemonium" scene they thought I was mad. However, the performance settled all these objections. It was seen by contrast how ridiculous it was for a choir to laugh like Lord Dundreary with a sort of throaty gurgle; how ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... looking back from the felon's cell which he was about to enter, and addressing Redding, who stood mimicking, with fiendish glee, the groans and contortions of French, as he lay gasping and writhing in mortal agony on the spot where he fell, just beyond the short passage dividing the prison-rooms—"monster," he repeated, "would you insult ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... threes, are easily distinguished, and are permitted to carry larger walking-sticks than the Romans, whom the French commandant has forbidden to come abroad with any but the merest twig. Some of these spies wear spurs, the better to deceive and to succeed in their fiendish work. No disguise, however, can conceal the sbirro. His look, so unmistakeably villanous, proclaims the spy. These fellows will not be defeated in their purposes. They carry, it is said, articles of conviction, that ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... girl had been an angel of light all the week, existing in a paradise which she had created for herself, and for him! And now, to defend an action utterly indefensible, she was employing a tone that might be compared to some fiendish ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... got there it wouldn't be a week before he had decided the air was bad for him. They should have known better than to take him there. Most likely one more week would finish him. Another long railroad trip would anyway. So he might as well stay. But wouldn't Marion see the landlord and have those fiendish children kept quiet on that tennis court outside? And wouldn't Mother try to make an eggnog that didn't taste like a ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... degree with all the fiendish deviltries of their distorted minds, to get the exact location of this rival of the Comstock lode. The aged man was tied hand and foot and beaten and abused the whole night long. In pushing splinters under his toenails, the lamp was upset, ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... freed from his severe bondage. Michael dared him to do such a thing, as he had him wholly in his power, dead or alive. "Were you to take away your life by a ghastly wound," said the wizard, "I would even make one of these fiendish spirits enter into your body, reanimate it, and cause you to go about with your gaping wound, unclosed and unpurified, as when death entered thereat." "Cursed be the day that I saw you, and ten times cursed the confession ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... corporeal degradation; which, in the time of Dante, could be done frankly, but cannot now. And, therefore, I think the twenty-first and twenty-second books of the "Inferno" the most perfect portraitures of fiendish nature which we possess; and at the same time, in their mingling of the extreme of horror (for it seems to me that the silent swiftness of the first demon, "con l'ali aperte e sovra i pie leggiero," cannot be surpassed ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... was enough to send her writhing upon her bed in the darkness of a wakeful night. She would clench her pretty hands until the nails dug into the flesh and brought the blood. She would bite the pillow or the blankets with an almost fiendish clenching of her teeth upon them and mutter, as she did so: "I hate her! I hate her! ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... say, from the Land of Shades beyond the river Styx—and may be it is a good thing for them that they don't—but you can see that there is an occasional exception even to that rule, for I have just returned from a hell, the like of which, for human brutality and fiendish barbarity, is not to be found even in the fire-and-brimstone creeds ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... hell. And Leclere, with fiendish ken, seemed to divine each particular nerve and heartstring, and with long wails and tremblings and sobbing minors to make it yield up its last shred of grief. It was frightful, and for twenty-four hours after, Batard was nervous ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... conversation became general. Each individual had some invalid story to relate, and I too, so far forgot my usual taciturnity as to indulge my hearers with a detail of my late indisposition—of its origin in the Mysterious Tailor—of the wretch's inconceivable persecution—of the fiendish peculiarities of his appearance—of his astonishing ubiquity, and lastly, of my conviction that he was either more or less than man. Scarcely had the very uncourteous laughter that accompanied this narrative concluded, when ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... deafening noise; the hoarse, grating sounds from the French mitrailleuses, in particular, made a horrible accompaniment to the dying groans of the wounded. But the French mitrailleuses had found their match in the Krupp cannon. These fire no balls, but some fiendish contrivances, longitudinal, cylindrical projectiles, which explode as they alight, and scatter their deadly fragments ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... Hugh really needed was a war, and he had too much money. He has a curious literary streak, I'm told, and wrote a rather remarkable article—I've forgotten just where it appeared. He raced a yacht for a while in a dare-devil, fiendish way, as one might expect; and used to go off on cruises and not be heard of for months. At last he got engaged ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... shows the nature of the wretches. They are so fiendish and so eager to fight that ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... not so reckless of our true interest, so blind to utter helplessness—not to say so devoid of humanity, as to entertain the hostile designs, or to cherish the fiendish passions, which it seems have been, by the unthinking, so unjustly ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... standing over the great kettle, dancing round it, and making sudden plunges with a stick into it, in the desperate effort to stir its boiling contents—desperate, because the fire was very fierce and large, and the flames seem to take a fiendish pleasure in leaping up suddenly just under Pierre's nose, thereby endangering his beard, or shooting out between his legs and licking round them at most unexpected moments, when the light wind ought to have been blowing them quite in the opposite ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... somewhere and 'ate around,' I left my bag at the station, while I went to an address given me by a young man I met on the train. He said it was plain but clean. He told me some experiences he had had in boarding and lodging houses. They were awful! This place is an old three-story house, of the fiendish mid-Victorian brand—dark halls, high ceilings, and marble mantels. It seemed clean, so I took a room, almost as large as your linen closet, where I shall spend the few days I am here. My room has a court outlook, and was hotter than Tophet last night, but of course you expect ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... the sail swells to the voiceful breeze; the high mast bends with hideous creak, and every separate rib in the huge fabric quivers. Yet the ship on the unmoved waters motionless struggles, as one, who in a feverish dream nervelessly fleeing o'er a haunted waste, strives horribly to shun some fiendish shape, with straining sinews, and convulsive gasp, and faint limbs, magic-stricken. There is rest, dismal and dreary, on the silent sea: most dismal quiet: for the viewless might of the keen frost-wind[14] ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... a manner as to charge human speech with a sinister double meaning which bodes ruin under the mask of words of innocence. Few dramatic personages have used this device so effectively as Clytemnestra, certainly none with a more fiendish intent. Again, in this play the Chorus is employed with amazing skill; their vague uneasiness takes more and more definitely the shape of actual terror in every ode; this terror is raised to its height in the masterly Cassandra scene—it is then abated a little, ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... I knew but one: yet her kind destiny, Which seem'd to us so terrible, betimes Removed an elder sister from the woe That dogs the race of Pelops. Cease, oh cease Thy questions, maiden, nor thus league thyself With the Eumenides, who blow away, With fiendish joy, the ashes from my soul, Lest the last spark of horror's fiery brand Should be extinguish'd there. Must then the fire, Deliberately kindl'd and supplied With hellish sulphur, never cease to sear ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... fallen from his lips when the real Capuzzi leapt to his feet, utterly beside himself, quite out of his mind, his face all aflame with the most fiendish rage, and doubling his fists and shaking them at his counterpart on the stage, he yelled at the top of his voice, "No, you won't, no, you won't, you rascal! you scoundrel, you,—Pasquale! Do you mean to cheat yourself out of your ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... with cold, relentless zeal, With fiendish science both sides fought and watched, From loop-holes or from clouds which half conceal, Or in deep tunnels all their skill was matched. On sentry in the firebay, or the hov'ring 'plane, Mining and countermining ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... still pursued by this fiendish spirit, the reader will see by the following paragraph of a letter received from ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... grinning at him, as though in mockery. He felt stupefied and bewildered. Fascinated by terror, he could not refrain from following this horrible appearance, which, as if delighted to have ensnared him, frisked away with uncouth and fiendish gambols, to the very centre of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... the midst of all of these A demon seemed to dance, Who asked him with a fiendish grin, "I ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... to Herr Pappelmeister—it wouldn't be fair. Even now [Shuddering] there comes up before me the bleeding body of my mother, the cold, fiendish face of the Russian officer, ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... meat, lumps of butter, loaves of bread, basins of milk, hot puddings, black puddings, and other rural dainties, fell from the halters on to the floor. While engaged in this charm, they made such ugly faces, and looked so fiendish, that he was quite frightened. After they had pulled in this manner enough for an ample feast, they set-to, and shewed, whatever might be said of the way in which their supper was procured, that their epicurism was a little more ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... 'pageant' all the little that was possible was done to meet the needs of the presentation. Below the main floor, or stage, was the curtained dressing-room of the actors; and when the play required, on one side was attached 'Hell-Mouth,' a great and horrible human head, whence issued flames and fiendish cries, often the fiends themselves, and into which lost sinners were violently hurled. On the stage the scenery was necessarily very simple. A small raised platform or pyramid might represent Heaven, where God the Father was seated, and ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... field, who know nothing and care for nothing but the filling of their insatiable appetite;—this man's nature was too hard, too iron in its moulding, to give way to temporary imbecility; liquor made him savage, fierce, brutal, excited his fiendish temper to its height, nerved his muscular system, inflamed his brain, and gave him the aspect of a devil; and in such guise he entered his wife's peaceful Eden, where she brooded and cooed over her child's slumbers, with one gripe of his hard hand lifted her from her chair, kicked the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... cannot be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial within him, what is there left for us to refer to it, but the fiendish? Passion without any appetite ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... issued from one of the cells were like nothing I had ever heard before. They were a series of unearthly, fiendish shrieks, intermingled with furious imprecations, as of a lost spirit in an ecstasy of ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... offended. He tapped on his teeth, and remarked that the weather bad no business to be so warm in winter. "But it was fiendish before Christmas," said Agnes. ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... antagonist was coolly taking these terrible chances in the hope that he would receive no staggering wound from any of De Coude's three shots. Then he would take his own time about shooting De Coude down deliberately, coolly, and in cold blood. A little shiver ran up the Frenchman's spine. It was fiendish—diabolical. What manner of creature was this that could stand complacently with two bullets in him, waiting ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that insipid dialect in which a fine woman was called an "elegant female." The following is a sample description of one of Brown's heroines, and is taken from his novel of Ormond, the leading character in which—a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish wickedness—is thought to have been suggested by Aaron Burr: "Helena Cleves was endowed with every feminine and fascinating quality. Her features were modified by the most transient sentiments and were the seat of a softness ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... holocaust of fire and smoke and thunder that had disrupted a mountain, a chaos of writhing, twisting fury, and in that moment his heart seemed to cease its beating. He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. Was it possible that there lived men so fiendish as to condemn him to this sort of death? Why had not his enemies killed him out among the rocks? That would have been easier—quicker—less troublesome. Why did they wish to torture him? What terrible thing had he done? Was he mad—mad—and this ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... is a truth that wine attracts the bees, particularly sweet wine. But it is not to be wished that those nefarious flies should place themselves on the mouth of my Jacquot, as their sting is cruel. One day in biting into a peach a bee stung me on the tongue, and I had to suffer fiendish pains. They would be calmed only by a little earth, mixed up with spittle, which Friar Ange put into my mouth in reciting the ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... whilst Gatton accomplished this task; then together we bore Coverly out into the porch. At this point we were both overcome again by the fumes. Gatton was the first to recover sufficiently to stoop and examine the victim of this fiendish outrage. I clutched dizzily at an upright of the ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... with him. Further report we read in the Democratic Evening Post of Vicksburg as follows: "When the two Negroes were captured, they were tied to trees, and while the funeral pyres were being prepared they were forced to suffer the most fiendish tortures. The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... served as a sleeping apartment, the disorder was even greater. It seemed as though some furious hand had taken a fiendish pleasure in upsetting everything. Near the fireplace, her face buried in the ashes, lay the dead body of Widow Lerouge. All one side of the face and the hair were burnt; it seemed a miracle that the fire ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... to myself, ashamed of my fears; "a poor innocent bird—a companion and watcher of the dead, and therefore its voice is full of sorrowful lamentation—but it is harmless," and I crept on with increased caution. Suddenly out of the dense darkness there stared two large yellow eyes, glittering with fiendish hunger and cruelty. For a moment I was startled, and stepped back; the creature flew at me with the ferocity of a tiger-cat! I fought with the horrible thing in all directions; it wheeled round my head, it pounced ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... noble warriors in good sooth, "With bearing worthy of so fair a cause; "Spoilers of love, and constancy, and truth, "And laurelled by a sordid world's applause! "Curses upon ye and your gilded ruth, "Whom pity nor remorse could ever pause; "Curses upon ye, deep as your own shame, "Deep as your fiendish hearts themselves ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... butchery, and gladly abandoning, in his terror, all solicitude about the fate of the Ourang-Outang. The words heard by the party upon the staircase were the Frenchman's exclamations of horror and affright, commingled with the fiendish jabberings ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Church sternly sets its face against the old customs with which the Christmas season was associated, denouncing the "fiendish songs," and "devilish games," the "graceless talk," the "nocturnal gambols," and the various kinds of divination in which the faithful persisted in indulging. But, although repressed, they were not to be destroyed, and at various seasons of the year, but especially ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... again from the pamphlet, and then added: I am accused of being emphatic; I confess my blood boils when I read the closing sentence of this libel—this taunting us with the torch of the negro at our threshold, and his knife at our throats—this fiendish allusion to the beauty and chivalry of the South; it displays cool and demoniac malignity! Mr. K. then alluded to the pictures, saying that they could be meant only for the illiterate, and tended only ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... of a Buff population; which is to be conducted by a Buff master of the ceremonies; which is to be attended by four ultra Buff members of Parliament, and the admission to which, is to be by Buff tickets! Does our fiendish contemporary wince? Let him writhe, in impotent malice, as we pen the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... THE fiendish and heartless conduct of a large number of the people of the South towards Union men during the war, and especially the unlady-like demeanor of rebel women at New Orleans and other points, is a matter that has passed into history. In few places were the women more abusive to those of ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... positively fiendish next day when watching Hambone wriggling uneasily in his clothes at parade. Gunboat had sent us an underground message telling us what he did, and we did not fail to recognize the symptoms at once; every moment ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... or make a series of crouching sprints between the gusts. Over the scattered boulders to the east of the Hut, across a patch of polished snow they push to the first low ridge, and there they stop for breath. Up on the side of "Annie Hill," in the local phrase, the tide sweeps by with fiendish strength, and among the jagged rocks the man clutching the puffometer-box has a few desperate falls. At last both clamber slowly to an eminence where a long steel pipe has been erected. To the top of this ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... to the chair. His arms and legs were pinioned so tightly that the rope cut into his flesh. One of them now withdrew from the room and the other remained on guard at the door. Every once in a while the German officer on guard walked over to Jack and glared at him with a fiendish sort of grin; kicking at the boy's bound legs and brandishing his revolver ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... the much-needed catalogues, or the body of the printer dead or alive. Upon arriving in the City, however, to my chagrin I found his place of business closed, though the caretaker, with a touch of fiendish malignity, showed me through a window whole piles of my non-delivered catalogues. Not to be beaten, I hastened back to the West End and despatched a very long and explicit telegram to the printer at his private house (of course he would not be ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... lashings, exhausted with clutching, screwed up in corners, they breathed heavily. Their lips twitched, and at every sickening heave of the overturned ship they opened them wide as if to shout. The cook, embracing a wooden stanchion, unconsciously repeated a prayer. In every short interval of the fiendish noises around he could be heard there, without cap or slippers, imploring in that storm the Master of our lives not to lead him into temptation. Soon he also became silent. In all that crowd of cold and hungry men, waiting wearily for a violent death, ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... avoided the reproachful starings of the members of the Smyrna fire department as they struggled on board. Mr. Butts came last and attempted to say something, but retreated promptly before the Cap'n's fiendish snarl ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... minute I set eyes on you near the door something must have begun to drag me back. I'll own I've never liked to let myself dwell on that memory. It wasn't a good thing because it had a trick of taking me back in a fiendish way to the little chap with his heart bursting in the railway carriage—and the betrayal feeling. It's morbid to let yourself grouse over what can't be undone. So you faded away. But when I danced past you somehow I knew I'd come on SOMETHING. It made me restless. I couldn't keep ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... stirring up the mob to burn the houses of the heretics. A fresco that adorns the gate explains the means employed, adding insult to the old injury. It is a picture of a beautiful child hanging upon a cross; a fiendish-looking Jew, on a ladder beside him, holds in his hand the child's heart, which he has just taken from his bleeding breast; he holds the dripping knife in his teeth. This brutal myth was used for centuries with great effect by the priesthood upon the mob whenever they wanted a Jew's money ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... may, as the legends assert, have lingered on, or been at least revived during the later ages of the empire, in remote provinces, left in their primeval barbarism, at the same time that they were brutalised by the fiendish exhibitions of the Circus, which the Roman governors found it their interest to introduce everywhere. Thus the serpent became naturally regarded as the manifestation of the evil spirit by Christians as well as by the old Hebrews; thus, also, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... from the imperial camps. Wallenstein himself, and other imperial commanders, but, above all, Holk, had attracted to their standards the very refuse of the German jails; and, allowing an unlimited license of plunder during some periods of their career, had themselves evoked a fiendish spirit of lawless aggression and spoliation, which afterwards they had found it impossible to exorcise within its former limits. People were everywhere obliged to be on their guard, not alone (as heretofore) against the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... was nerves. Maybe I really had taken care of the baby too long. But however that may be, for the first time in my life I enjoyed the consciousness of having a bad disposition—or perhaps I ought to say that I felt a fiendish satisfaction in the ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... kindly received, adopted into the tribe, had married the daughter of a chief, and become the father of two children. With the prospect of gaining a reward for Indian scalps, all the cupidity of this man's fiendish nature was aroused, and on the approach of Bouquet's army he conceived a plan for enriching himself and at the same time escaping the punishment due him as a deserter. While meditating it he found himself encamped one night with two warriors, his own wife, another woman, and his two ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... was spent in this fiendish work, and no attempt was made to rescue him. Towards sundown the body was dragged into his own back-yard, his regimentals all torn from him, except his pantaloons, leaving the naked body, from the waist up, a mass of ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... error is the hindrance—yes, the suppression and destruction—of the beautiful virtues of humility, meekness, patience and spiritual harmony here commended of Paul. At the same time the devil is given occasion to encourage fiendish blasphemy. In every instance where the Word of God is set aside for humanly-appointed works, differing views and theories must obtain. One introduces this and another that, each striving for first recognition; ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... The soft keen curves of that fatal dagger, which had not only slain Charley but all my hopes—for had he lived this horror could not have been—grew almost lovely in my eyes. Until now it had looked cruel, fiendish, hateful; but now I would lay it before me and contemplate it. In some griefs there is a wonderful power of self-contemplation, which indeed forms their only solace; the moment it can set the sorrow away from itself sufficiently to regard it, the tortured ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... lord Duke," he cried, "ye noble lords and ladies fair— good people all, God save ye. Know that before you here assembled, hath been brought one Mellent—that hath been denounced a notable witch and sorceress, who, by her fiendish arts and by the aid of demons foul and damned, doth seek the hurt of our lord the Duke, whom God and the saints defend. Forasmuch as this witch, yclept Mellent, did, by her unhallowed spells and magic, compass and bring about the escape from close duress of one Beltane, a notable outlaw, malefactor ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... in large bold letters, 'John Othard.' Now, I must know what it contained; I could wait no longer; a sort of determined malice took possession of me to connect it with the newspaper, and with my husband—fiendish thought. I did not desire to prove him other than the pure and noble man I had loved; but I was not myself—I would do it just to still my excited suspicions. Putting the lamp down over the name, as if that could blot it out, I went up the creaking steps, and hastened back with the ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... heralds of victory, bearing their bloody banner, hastened on in advance of the procession to Paris. In Sevres they made a halt—not to rest, or wait for the oncoming train—but to have the hair of the two heads dressed by friseurs, in order, as Jourdan announced with fiendish laughter to the yelling mob, that they might make their entrance into the city as ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... the cliff, with a sudden ferocious scowl. Lennon was gasping for breath against the frightfulness of what he had heard. To save herself, Carmena was betraying her foster-sister to the fiendish savage. Elsie's fate in the hands of Slade was fearful enough without the added horror of what she would suffer in the hands ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... my shoulder. So I quickly made my way to more healthy quarters, and even as I left the shells overhead began to shriek with redoubled fury, as if the very legions of hell were moaning, aghast at the terrible crime which the fiendish Huns had perpetrated. ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... admiration which we naturally feel for noble diction and versification, forget the great distinctions of good and evil. The spirit by which Dryden and several of his compeers were at this time animated against the Whigs deserves to be called fiendish. The servile Judges and Sheriffs of those evil days could not shed blood as fast as the poets cried out for it. Calls for more victims, hideous jests on hanging, bitter taunts on those who, having stood by the King in the hour of danger, now advised him to deal mercifully and generously ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... which none but the basest of villains could have attempted. It was this consideration which gave the sharpest edge to the young man's hatred: and it was his belief that a wretch capable of such a revenge, was willing to add to it any other measure of villany, however daring and fiendish, that had turned his thoughts upon Braxley, when Nathan's words first woke the suspicion of a foeman's design and agency in the attack on his party. How Braxley, a white man and Virginian, and therefore the foe of every western tribe, could have ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... at your shrine, And have lashed their bare backs, and—no matter—with twine, Oh! list to the vow Which I make to you now, Only snatch my poor little boy out of the row Which that Imp's kicking up with his fiendish bow-wow, And his head like a bear, and his tail like a cow! Bring him back here in safety!—perform but this task, And I'll give—Oh!—I'll give you whatever you ask!— There is not a shrine In the county shall shine With a brilliancy half so resplendent as thine, Or have ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the magic of the evil ones!" he cried as he flung his arms upwards and turned to the captives with a fiendish grin of exultation. ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... one material thing was hunger, the two spiritual things were a feeble love for Clare, and a strong horror of water of any seeming depth. Now a new element was added to this terror by the meddling of the moon in the fiendish mystery—the secret of which must, I think, have been the bottomless depth she ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... the tattooing of various barbarous races, it was necessary that the prisoner should be similarly tattooed. It would be shown that, with unusual heartlessness, he had persuaded his victim to reproduce on his body the distinctive marks of Johnson, and then had destroyed him with fiendish ingenuity, in the very act of assuming his personality. The very instrument, it might be said, which stamped Cranley as Johnson, slew Johnson himself, and the process which hallmarked the prisoner as the heir of vast ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... not be quite sure that the accident at Bolsover was the result of a deliberate murderous design, or indeed of anything more than the accidental catastrophe of a blundering fit of temper—criminal, if you like, and cowardly, but not fiendish. And his conscience made coward enough of him just now to cause him to hesitate before plunging into ruin one who, hateful as he was to him, was after all a poor wretch, ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... made reply— "Begone with your fiendish grin! How hope you to profit by such as I? For I have no darling sin. But many there be, and I know them well, All foul with sinning and ripe for Hell. And I name no names, but the whole world knows That I am never ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... knowledge of him she understood his anxiety argued a very real danger. She had heard tales before she left Biskra, and since then she had been living in an Arab camp, and she knew something of the fiendish cruelty and callous indifference to suffering of the Arabs. Ghastly mental pictures with appalling details crowded now into her ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... time, in the more remote town of Cavour, the fiendish plot was revealed to Captain Odetti, an officer of the Piedmontese militia, then enrolled to act against the French, with a request that he would take part in its execution. Being a rigid Romanist it was confidently expected that he ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... on his black horse, wrapped in his black cloak, and long ago bareheaded (his hat had fallen off), Gaston was like some fiendish cavalier bound to ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... wood, and the rock, and the water, gleaming back the dark-red furnace-light, that is shed on them by his dragon wings! By my soul, I can hardly suppose it fancy—I can hardly think but that I was under the influence of an evil spirit—under an act of fiendish possession! But gone as he is, gone let him be—and thou, too ready implement of evil, be thou gone after him!" He drew from his pocket his right hand, which had all this time held his hunting-knife, and threw ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... but one: yet her kind destiny, Which seemed to us so terrible, betimes Removed an elder sister from the woe Which o'er the house of Pelops aye impends. O cease thy questions, nor thus league thyself With the Erinnys; still they blow away, With fiendish joy, the ashes from my soul, Lest the last embers of the fiery brand The fatal heritage of Pelops' house, Should there be quenched. Must then the fire for aye, Deliberately kindled and supplied With hellish ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... It took its bloody toll of the fairest and bravest of two gallant nations. It ravaged Poland as well and wreaked its fiendish will on wounded soldiers on ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... me dead, here at your feet, Doctor Walsingham, but 'tis a lie,' cried he. 'I never promised—she'll tell you. I thought she told you long ago. 'Twas that devil incarnate, her mother, who forged the lie, why or where-fore, except for her fiendish love of mischief, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... guide; and down he went, down, down, down, till Neverbend looking over, could barely see the glimmer of his disappearing head light. Was it absolutely intended that he should disappear in the same way? Had he bound himself to go down that fiendish upright ladder? And were he to go down it, what then? Would it be possible that a man of his weight should ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... "The Spaniards had sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had depopulated some of the best peopled of the islands and renewed them with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty, driving them to self-starvation and suicide, as a way of mercy and release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel desperation and mercilessness in passion. The hell which they denounced ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... room with the supple grace her slender figure had never lost and sat down beside the older woman. In a moment the astonished dowagers who had "suffered from her fiendish temper all evening," saw her talking with spontaneous graciousness to both the strangers. Madame Delano was at first more distant and reserved than Mrs. Thornton had ever been, manifestly betraying all the suspicion and unsocial instincts ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... they lined up along the shore was a study in discipline, and a terror to any one unused to war. Above all the din and clash of arms rang the hearty, stentorian laughter of the Red Margrave actually echoing back in gusts of fiendish merriment from the hills on the ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... As the fiendish suggestion is spoken in a whisper, the three listeners do not hear what it is. They can only guess by the behaviour of the young girl that some offer has been made which she indignantly rejects. This can be told by her rejoinder, and the air ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... around this solitary rock bear much resemblance to those that are told about its French counterpart, the Mont St. Michel of Normandy. The romantic legends of both concern great heroes and super-terrestrial beings doing battle with evil dragons and fiendish monsters. ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... moment felt an unprincipled and fiendish wish to annihilate his rival at all cost. By the exercise of that treachery which love for the same woman renders possible to men the most honourable in every other relation of life, he could send off Phillotson ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... factor intended to facilitate the attainment of the chemical initiative was the German use of propaganda. Rumours, reflected in the Press, were often current at the Front, at home, and in neutral countries, that some particularly fiendish chemical contrivance was about to be launched against the Allies by Germany. Thus, in January and February of 1916, vigorous propaganda activity of this kind in Switzerland preceded the great German offensive ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... enforce what they believed the wishes of the Almighty; so that a good intention, without the enlightenment to direct it to a fitting object, may be as pernicious to human happiness as one the most fiendish. We are told of a whole people who used to murder their guests, not from ferocity or interest, but from the pure and praiseworthy motive of obtaining the good qualities, which they believed, by the murder of the deceased, devolved upon them!] But what, if neither sincerity ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... any amount of evidence. I've been an ass—and worse. But I can't get out of it. I don't mean to try to get out of it. I promised of my own free will. Only I've found out now I can never live with her. Her temper is fiendish. It degrades her—and me. But you saw! She has made my life a burden to me lately, because I wouldn't name a day for us to be married. I wanted to see my father quietly first—without my mother knowing—and ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... rising up in many a cottage, reached my ears in every direction as I walked abroad. The hatred in itself seemed horrid and unchristian, and still more so after the man's death; but, though horrid and fiendish for itself, it was much more impressive, considered as the measure and exponent of the damnable oppression which must have ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... edge of the cliff and looked down I could see nothing, but below me I heard the waves break upon the rocks, and they seemed to laugh with fiendish glee, and mock me ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... music. He crouches around between the dancers brandishing his ax, he deftly all but cuts off a hand here, an arm or leg there, an ear yonder. He suddenly rushes forward and grinningly feigns cutting off a man's head. He contorts himself in a ludicrous yet often fiendish manner. This dance represents the height of the dramatic as I have seen it in Igorot life. His is truly a mimetic dance. His colleague with the spear and shield, who sometimes dances on the outskirts of the circle, now charging a ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... climbers' law held the others rigid. That command implied danger. It called for an instant tightening of every muscle to withstand the strain of a slip. Even Bower, a man on the very brink of committing a fiendish crime, yielded to a subconscious acceptance of the law, and kept himself braced ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... of Gourdon! Maddened by the pain of the wound, the brute nature of Richard was aroused: his fiendish appetite for blood rose to madness, and grinding his teeth, and with a curse too horrible to mention, the flashing axe of the royal butcher fell down on the blond ringlets of the child, and the children of Chalus were ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... That wretch who is removing the lid of the coffin to gaze upon the corpse with a face which indicates a perfect negation of all goodness or womanhood—the hypocrite parson and his demure partner—all the fiendish group—to a thoughtful mind present a moral emblem more affecting than if the poor friendless carcass had been depicted as thrown out to the woods, where wolves had assisted at its obsequies, itself furnishing forth its own ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... was once within my brain; And in my head a dull, dull pain; And fiendish faces, one, two, three, Hung at my breast, [1] and pulled at me; But then there came a sight of joy; 25 It came at once to do me good; I waked, and saw my little boy, My little boy of flesh and blood; Oh joy ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... great services to her, she gave him one of the magic necklaces. While they were whispering words of love in each other's ears, they heard a deafening noise at the bottom of the tower. "Rush for safety to your ladder!" cried Clotilde. "One of the fiendish friends of the magician is going ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... the Imperial Guard; and the Prussians had no supports. "They have no reserve," he remarked, as he swept the hostile position with his glass. This was true: their centre consisted of troops that for four hours had been either torn by artillery or exhausted by the fiendish strife ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... without information as to how he received and understood the reply to his inquiry, as brought by his messengers. His captivity was destined soon to end, though not by restoration to liberty on earth. The hatred of Herodias increased against him. An opportunity for carrying into effect her fiendish plots against his life soon appeared.[581] The king celebrated his birthday by a great feast, to which his lords, high captains, and the principal officials of Galilee were bidden. To grace the occasion, Salome, daughter ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... done by Comstockery was the practical suppression and elimination of the obscene book; but when that is said, all is said. How worse than fatuous, how absolutely fiendish that physician would be deemed who hid the signs of small-pox with paint and powder and permitted his patient to roam at will among his fellows, unwarned even of the nature of the fell disease that was devouring his life. Nay, worse! ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... instantly divined what her relatives had been hiding so carefully, and though she became very pale while Athenais looked at her in fiendish delight, she determined to die rather than own her love for Gaston, and exerted all her will to master herself. The noise of a furious gallop resounded, and the Duc de Bligny dashed into the courtyard ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... leaders, and still more the infatuated people, would have suffered much and hesitated long before assuming the dread responsibility. Hate itself, though reenforced and supported by all other passions of a fiendish nature, would have stood aghast at the overwhelming avalanche of horrors which hung ready to be precipitated on our unhappy country. It is hardly within the limits of human depravity, that evils of such magnitude, attended by such world-wide results, should be attributable to the deliberate will ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... head. "There it is again. I couldn't take it home without lying about where I got it. And Kate would catch me up on it—she takes a perfectly fiendish delight in cornering me in a lie, lately." She brightened a little. "I'll tell you, Jack. We'll go up to the cave and cook some there. Kate can't," she told him grimly, "tell what I've been eating, thank goodness, ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... naked except for her kirtle and the thin, gold-spangled robe upon her shoulders over which streamed her black, disordered hair. Contrasting strangely in the silver moonlight with her glistening, copper-coloured body, the mask of Little Bonsa on her head glared round with its fixed crystal eyes and fiendish smile as she turned her long neck from side to side. Seen thus she scarcely looked human, and Alan's heart was filled with pity for the poor bedizened wretch she named her husband, who had just been forced to announce the date of ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... these, throw the book out of the railway-carriage window! You have paid your money, and to the verdict of your pale morality or absurd sense of art in fiction I am therefore absolutely indifferent. You are too angelic for me; I am too fiendish for you. Let us agree to differ. I say nothing about my boyhood. Twenty-five years ago a poor boy-but no matter. I was that boy! I hurry on to the soaring period of manhood, 'when the strength, the nerve, the intellect is or should be at its height,' or ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... attempt it, because I had succeeded in rousing his rage a pitch above his malignity. Pulling out the nerves with red hot pincers requires more coolness than knocking on the head. He was worked up to forget the fiendish prudence he boasted of, and proceeded to murderous violence. I experienced pleasure in being able to exasperate him: the sense of pleasure woke my instinct of self-preservation, so I fairly broke free; and if ever I come into his hands again ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... they appear as the brush, comb, and mirror of the German water-sprite;[164] or the rod, stone, and pitcher of water of the Norse Troll;[165] or the knife, comb, and handful of salt which, in the Modern Greek story, save Asterinos and Pulja from their fiendish mother;[166] or the twig, the stone, and the bladder of water, found in the ear of the filly, which saves her master from the Gaelic giant;[167] or the brush, comb, and egg, the last of which produces a frozen lake with "mirror-smooth" surface, whereon the pursuing Old Prussian witch slips ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... point that another notion came into my mind, so antic, so impish, so fiendish, that if there were still any Evil One, in a world which gets on so poorly without him, I should attribute it to his suggestion; and this was that the procession which Jan saw issuing from the tenement-house door was not a funeral procession, as the reader will ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... haven't any business." No one could be more exasperating than the guileless Louis. Tyson darted another glance at him that was quite fiendish in its ferocity, and flung himself on the sofa. Sprawling there with his hands in his pockets, he remarked with freezing politeness, "I don't say much, Stanistreet, but I ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... "I alone can save you from yon bloody pirut! Ho! a peck of oats!" The oats was brought, and the Juke, boldly mountin the jibpoop, throwed them onto the towpath. The pirut rapidly approached, chucklin with fiendish delight at the idee of increasin his ill-gotten gains. But the leadin hoss of the pirut ship stopt suddent on comin to the oats, and commenst for to devour them. In vain the piruts swore and throwd stones and bottles at the hoss—he wouldn't budge a inch. Meanwhile the ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne
... battle took place between a large force of Tories and Indians and a hastily organised force of patriotic Americans. The Americans were defeated with horrible slaughter, and many of those who were made prisoners were put to death by fiendish torture.... More than six thousand American sailors had been seized by British warships and pressed into the hated service of ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... they find her," he said accurately, and I could see his hand come up to cut the image. "For my dough they've given up trying to find her and are using you for a stalking horse," he added with fiendish accuracy. ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett
... no such case here, / O high and royal dame. Dared I but give the lie to / one of thy lofty name, Thou hast in fiendish manner / Ruediger belied. He and all his warriors / have laid all thoughts of ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... him as he lay defenseless, and then, spying a row of coat-hooks in an inner hallway, with fiendish ingenuity directed the others who had joined him. They strung Locke up by his thumbs so that he hung, half suspended, with his toes ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... eyes are masked by blue glasses; his breathing is noisy. The top of his head is of puny dimensions, and the huge thickness of his neck has a conical shape. To see him thus pricking and unhanging from the air strips of viscera and rags of flesh, you could take him for a butcher at some fiendish task. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... fear the women—if women they were—fled, their lights showing again from the second exit, where was the beaten footway, and then out of the dark tunnel came a peal of fiendish laughter. Then silence, or, rather, a relief from the mocking voices; but there was a reminder of their presence in one of those pale greenish lights. He strode towards it, saw it had been dropped, picked it up, and found that it came from some substance held in a ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... book he thought might be written on the rise of modern society in Gaul, dwelling first of all on the outward spectacle of the blood-stained Frankish world as it was, say, in the days of Gregory the Great, on its savage kings, its fiendish women, its bishops and its saints; and then, on the conflict of ideas going on behind all the fierce incoherence of the Empire's decay, the struggle of Roman order and of German freedom, of Roman luxury ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... way to the future in another place he had a faint glimmering of the coming revolution: "There might, there should be yet, a new Medea as an opera. Nothing can be grander, more antique, more Greek, than Cherubini's setting of the 'grand fiendish part' (to quote the words of Mrs. Siddons on Lady Macbeth). But, as music, it becomes simply impossible to be executed, so frightful is the strain on the energies of her who is to present the heroine. Compared with this character, Beethoven's Leonora, ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten |
