"Gruesome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... golden yellow sand, upon which the feathery tops of the cocoa-palms look like pins planted in the ground. To the travelled man the view suggests many a nook in the Pacific islands. The bathing is here excellent: natural breakwaters of black rock exclude the shark. The place derives its gruesome name from olden days, when the smooth waters and the abundant fish and fruit tempted the fiery filibusters to a relache. It was given in 1726 by Mr. Smith, surveyor to the Royal African Company, after Roberts the pirate, who buried ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... in the Rue Oberskampf—another forgotten story—he had taken to one of the editors of the "Epoque,"—a paper then rivalling the "Matin" for information,—the left foot, which was missing from the basket in which the gruesome remains were discovered. For this left foot the police had been vainly searching for a week, and young Rouletabille had found it in a drain where nobody had thought of looking for it. To do that he had dressed himself as an extra sewer-man, one of ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... New York to live, I had explored the Eden Musee. One of the most gruesome of the spectacles which I had seen in its famed Chamber of Horrors was a representation of a gorilla, holding in its arms the gory body of a woman. It was that impression which now revived in my mind. But by a process ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... the apartment. Through the darkness only a few feet away from Jimmie Dale, the two men sat there silently, waiting, as he had waited, in the darkness, and the silence—for the Magpie. There seemed an abhorrent, gruesome analogy in the situation—this waiting for a murdered man ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... exclaimed his listener, unconsciously pushing back his chair, shocked at the gruesome humour. Besides, the man was looking at him with something like a professional eye, as if making an estimate of ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... bitterness against him and Sally Salisbury revived. Then came a revulsion of feeling. Why should he not be ill? Nay, he might even be dead. Perhaps worse. If he had carried out his despairing threat? She pictured him floating on the surface of a Hampstead pond and a shudder went over her at the gruesome thought. Finally she subsided into dull resignation and strove to think no ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... the seat, in a white evening frock, looking—for an aunt—really quite nice. On the lawn stood an incensed curate, grasping our small brother by a large ear, which—judging from the row he was making—seemed on the point of parting company with the head it adorned. The gruesome noise he was emitting did not really affect us otherwise than aesthetically. To one who has tried both, the wail of genuine physical anguish is easy distinguishable from the pumped-up ad misericordiam ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... place was gruesome in the extreme. On three sides was solid rock, forming a semicircular back to the room. The partition, closed the entire front. Near its top in several places were cut out apertures, admitting air and a ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... impossible to identify the victim, and Harley had his own reasons for concealing the truth. The house on the wharf with its choice Oriental furniture was seized by the police; but, strange to relate, no arrest was made in connection with this most gruesome outrage. The man who dropped through the trap had been wounded by one of Harley's shots, and he sank for the last time under the very eyes of the ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... death's gloomy gate Shall fade away the mists that hide The gruesome and the nobly great, Borne ever on by time and tide. This from thy book of fate alone A liberated soul may tell thee: Perish thou shalt by deed thine own, And yet a ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... the solution of the problem, although the task was a gruesome one and they would have gladly evaded it if they could. It made chills run down the spine to trudge along leading the horse with that huge figure towering behind them in the darkness, mocking at them because he had escaped to the silent ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... he spent in trying to lower the army's confidence by telling all the gruesome stories of Indian warfare he could think of; but he frightened himself a great deal more than them, and at last had to abandon the attempt ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... their white fingers and struck the kale and the pebbles and the soft moss upon the beach, for they sought to make music for the seal-folk to dance thereby; but the music that was made was not merry nor gleeful, but was passing gruesome and mournful. And presently the seal-folk came where lay the wife of Harold wrapped in the fair velvet skin, and they knew her of old, and they called her by what name she was known to them, "Persis! Persis!" over and ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... the skulls and bones of Incas that were strewn about and amused themselves by playing ten pins on the hard sand, sticking the bones up and rolling the skulls at them. Don Nicholas paid no attention to the gruesome sport; but stood calmly conversing with the ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... Somehow, since learning Tony's opinion, the sound, as it came welling out of the swamp far away, seemed more gruesome than ever. Phil could easily in imagination picture the scene, with a posse of determined keepers from the convict camp following the lead of dogs held in leash, and chasing after a wretched fugitive, who ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... little at the gruesome company as they slowly paced about her in a narrowing circle, and when the leader took her hand and led her to the model stand, motioning to her to mount it, ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... which was greatly venerated in early days, and many stories are told of the miraculous power of its waters. Inside the churchyard a grave is pointed out as the burial place of the robber whose tragic end was told by James Hogg in his gruesome story ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... manner in which the tornado had whirled him round and round. Caught in a different set of gyrations and then borne out from the center—flung out would come nearer it—the burros and William might have been carried in any direction save his own. Into that gruesome Crevice, for instance. They had not been more than a mile from the Crevice when the ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... behind him, and saw an animal whose gruesome oddity even he, who knew so many of the strange creatures, two of which were never the same, that used to live inside the mountain with their masters the goblins, had never seen equalled. Its eyes were flaming with anger, but it seemed to be at the housekeeper, ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... If this is gruesome why should one be asked to present a subject which cannot be adequately presented without showing what pygmies we are and how helpless in the grasp of an ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... cheer. You'd think I had said something. At least they were reminded of the summary powers granted the F.B.I. to deal with telepaths, because of the gruesome danger they ...
— Tinker's Dam • Joseph Tinker
... of the most charming spots that Nature gave to this scenic Ohio region dwelt a being—a wretch—by the name of McKinney, the tales of whose terrible deeds recall the gruesome acts of the days of the Inquisition or the horrible tortures of the fierce Iroquois. In one of the caves embowered in this leafy wilderness, where the rays of the noonday sun scarce ever fall and there reigns perpetually a cavernous gloom, dwelt this bold ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... one step, it made her feel "that low in her spirits," and Fred replied, by gosh, he didn't blame her one mite; whereat they wandered off and spent the evening at a very comfortable distance from the house, but fairly close together, revelling in a wealth of gruesome facts and suppositions. Katherine said she certainly never would marry at all, men were such dreadful creatures, and Molly said, yes, indeed, but what else could a girl marry?—while Edith determined to devote the rest of her life to attending ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... as Andy reached the door amid the gruesome silence and awe of his sympathetic comrades, Mr. Darrow added the final ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... they invariably are disappointed. One lady I met even thought "how delightful" it would be "if the Apaches would only hold up the train!" It failed altogether to occur to her that, in the days when wagon-trains were held up by Apaches, few of those in them escaped to tell the gruesome tale. And yet this estimable lady, fresh from the drawing-rooms of Upper-Radcliffe-on-the-Hudson and the ballroom of Rector's, thought how "delightful" this would be! Ah, fortunate indeed is it that the pluck and ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... a while we were sure of it. The other could not be revived, so we weighted his feet, and let him slide the plank to his watery grave. But that wasn't all—however I guess I won't tell any more. It's downright gruesome, and I've got to go up and take a lookout, for we're likely to have ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... happen in my house, for I think, of all "shop," ours is the most unsuitable for general conversation because of the morbid fascination it has for most people. Ladies especially will listen with avidity to medical matters, perceiving nothing gruesome in the details at the moment; but afterward developing nerves on the subject, and probably giving the young practitioner good reason to regret unwary confidences. I tried to stave off the topic, but the will-power of the majority was against ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... account of how the body was found and how further investigation led the constable to the kitchen to make his second gruesome discovery. ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... home to his blood-stained halls a young bride of purest Rajput descent from beyond Nanakpur, who had borne him a son, commonly reported to be the apple of his eye. There had been an elder son, but no one knew whether he was alive or dead, though a gruesome tale was whispered of his father's having ordered his eyes to be torn out. A faithful foster-brother was said to have sacrificed himself to save him, and to have died in the prison after his eyes had been duly exhibited to the Rajah as those of his son, while the prince made his ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... from the door, and asked what news?—I was ower big, and ower vexed to hear her; so, never letting on, I went to the little looking-glass on the drawers' head, and set it down on the table. Then I looked myself in it for a moment, and made a gruesome face. Syne I pulled out the little drawer, and got the sharping strap, the which I fastened to my button. Syne I took my razor from the box, and gave it five or six turns along first one side and then the other, with great precision. Syne I tried the edge of ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... my child! unsay these words that be freighted with death for thee, and ruin for all that be near to thee. Shake of this gruesome dream. Call back thy poor wandering memory. Look upon me. Am not I thy mother that bore ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... than to get possession of that ghastly relic. Since losing his own scalp the subject of crownlocks had grown upon his mind until its fascination was irresistible. He studied the hair of every person he saw, as a physiognomist studies faces. He held the gruesome thing up before him, scrutinizing it with the expression of a connoisseur who has discovered, on a grimy canvas, the signature of an ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... with the head bowed to the knees and the hands clasped in front of them had been absolutely necessary; and the miserable creatures had died and stiffened in this cramped and painful posture; it was gruesome enough, therefore, to see the bodies passed up and thrown overboard in so woeful an attitude; but the worst sight of all was in those cases where, in the dying agony, some unfortunate wretch had writhed his head back until it looked as though the neck ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark too", who exhibited a bloated pair of shoes "as interesting relics that he had taken from the feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore". This type of the gruesome long-shoremen whom Dickens had encountered in his waterside rambles, as he collected the materials for Great Expectations, was afterwards elaborated in the Rogue Riderhood ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... some water, Cricket. Oh, baby, speak to me," poor frightened Eunice cried, half beside herself at the gruesome sight of the baby's white, still face, and that dreadful blood welling up so fast, and staining everything with its vivid red. Cricket flew to the edge of the beach, dipping water up in the crown of her sailor hat. She tore off her soft ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... of that gruesome weapon, more frightful than the unsheathed claws of the royalest Bengal tiger, hanging over the head of his chosen among women, stung Dick Bellamy to very unceremonious removal of the body, which, after rifling it ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... however, the play was growing scene by scene. In the lone hours of the night he spun upon the loom of his fancy a brilliant weft of swift desire—heavy, perfumed, Oriental—interwoven with bits of gruesome tenderness. The thread of his own life intertwined with the thread of the story. All genuine art is autobiography. It is not, however, necessarily a revelation of the artist's actual self, but of a myriad of ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... near-by slopes of gray rocks scantily covered with yellow-green grass. All was bare, wild, desolate, and drear. The wind continued to whirl down over the divide, carrying torn gray masses of vapor which cast a gloomy half light across the gruesome little meadow covered with rotting carcasses and crates of bones which filled the air with odor of disease ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... burying the dead. But from the looks of the field the task seemed difficult. In the little clusters of bushes, behind trees, in gullies, and in every conceivable place that seemed to offer shelter, lay the dead. What a shudder thrills the whole frame when you stand and contemplate the gruesome faces of the battle's dead. In every posture and all positions, with every conceivable shade of countenance, the glaring, glassy eyes meet you. Some lay as they fell, stretched full length on the ground; others show a desperate struggle for the last few remaining breaths. There ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... series of blood-curdling yells broke from the direction of the corral, and they stopped. But Clarence at once recognized the well-known war-whoop imitation of Jim Hooker,—infinitely more gruesome and appalling than the genuine aboriginal challenge. A half dozen shots fired in quick succession had ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... know, in theory, how to make The matutinal tea and coffee, And, when at school, I used to bake A gruesome mess described as toffee; But these, which form my whole cuisine, Are scarce the kind of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... reached the bottom of the valley, the moon peered up over its edge. He had never seen the moon before—except in the daytime, when he had taken her for a thin bright cloud. She was a fresh terror to him—so ghostly! so ghastly! so gruesome!—so knowing as she looked over the top of her garden-wall upon the world outside! That was the night itself! the darkness alive—and after him! the horror of horrors coming down the sky to curdle his blood, and turn his brain to a cinder! He gave a sob, and made straight for the river, ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... Telly buff endorsed the more sadistic of the fictional and nonfictional programs presented him. Even in the earliest years of the industry, producers had found that murder and mayhem, war and frontier gunfights, took precedence over less gruesome subjects. Music was drowned out by gunfire, the dance replaced by the shuffle of cowboy and rustler advancing down a dusty street toward each other, their fingertips brushing the grips of their six-shooters, the comedian's ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... and lay a short distance away from the other remains, the eyes staring wide open with a startled, horrified look in them. The place was considerably cut up, and on closer examination we found that two lions had been there and had probably struggled for possession of the body. It was the most gruesome sight I had ever seen. We collected the remains as well as we could and heaped stones on them, the head with its fixed, terrified stare seeming to watch us all the time, for it we did not bury, but took back to camp for identification before ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... was embarrassed again—"it is considerable. I have barbed wire fencing, and—other arrangements. You see, it is a lonely spot," he added apologetically. "And now, if you will excuse me, we will resume these gruesome inquiries after the more pleasant ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... residence from without, looked at some of the famous paintings in the art gallery, then shuddered over the instruments of torture on exhibition in the "Torture Chamber" found in the old prison. There were some gruesome articles here. ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... four and a half centuries later; it survives them all. It attains, in addition, the crowning glory, coveted by Stevenson, of appearing typical. There may never have been a Christian child who was martyred by the Jews in the particularly gruesome way described—probably there never was; but, in listening to the Prioress, it does not enter into our heads to doubt her word—the picture which she leaves with us of how the Christian regarded the Jew ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... interpretation of Duty. We are not sure that his own optimistic doctrine did not play him the same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes to at least one half of the actualities of nature and the gruesome possibilities of things. It had no unimportant effect on Emerson's thought that he was born in a new world that had cut itself loose from old history. The black and devious ways through which the race has marched are not real in North America, as they are to us in old Europe, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... moment in the successful effort to maintain a poetic equilibrium. Then he began pouring forth volumes of shattered French, English and Arabic sentiment, accompanied by facial contortions so intense that they were little less than gruesome. ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... find there I could not imagine. Whatever it had been he was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning perplexedly, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick which reminded me of gruesome things we had lived through in ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... of that gruesome discovery, Simon Varr reeled back both mentally and physically. Involuntarily, he threw up a hand to shield his eyes, then got the best of his terror and fell to rubbing them, pretending to himself that this had been the ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... as Hop Bitters is said to owe many of its supposed virtues to the bryony root, substituted for the mandrake which it is alleged to contain. The true mandrake is a gruesome herb, which was held in superstitious awe by the Greeks and the Romans. Its root was forked, and bears some resemblance to the legs of a man; for which reason the moneymakers [67] of the past increased the likeness, and attributed supernatural ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... when he came forth to start for the Platte was a gruesome sight. "He looked," said the unfeeling linesman, after he'd gone, "as though he'd seen ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... his wings and flew away, but soon returned to his gruesome feast. His followers, made bold by their leader, floated down into the glade. Their black feathers shone in the sun. They hopped over the moss; they stretched their grizzled necks, and ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... in question have been laid out in a small artificial lake fed by a tiny streamlet which forms one of the numerous tributaries of the River Cray. Its depth is greater than is usual in watercress-beds, otherwise the gruesome relics could never have been concealed beneath its surface, and the flow of water through it, though continuous, is slow. The tributary streamlet meanders through a succession of pasture meadows, in one of which the beds themselves are ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... gruesome torture. The third act began. Hamlet collogued with the Queen. The poet pricked up his ears. Whose language was this? Certainly not Shakespeare's or his superior's. Angels and ministers of grace defend him! this was only the illiterate jargon of the hack playwright, with its peppering of the ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... tends to rob the glory from anything to analyze it into its parts and study the natural causes that produced it. The loveliest painting is but a mess of pigments to the microscope, the loveliest face but a mess of cells and hairs and blood vessels. There is something gruesome and inhuman about embryology and all other ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... not have been paid to this gruesome tale had it not been repeated to various people during the course of several months. The boy wrote letters reiterating these incidents. His stories always went on to include the most surprising amount of abuse. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... than Olga Loschek had been in comprehending his surroundings. His old eyes at first saw little but the table and its candles in their gruesome holders. But when he saw the Committee his heart failed. Here, embodied before him, was everything he had loathed during all his upright and loyal years anarchy, murder, treason. His face worked. The cords in his neck stood out like strings drawn ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... children can read for themselves, they will take from their stories what suits their stage of development, their standard of judgement, and we need not interfere, even though they regard with perfect calm what seems gruesome to the adult. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... are right," answered the young man. "Things are not often so serious as they are supposed to be. It's like being in a house that's supposed to be haunted—on All Hallow E'en, for instance—it's awfully gruesome and creepy at night when the wind moans and the owls screech. And then, the next morning, one wonders how one could have been such an idiot. Other things are often like that. You think the world's coming to an end—and then it doesn't, you know. ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... which the naked corpses are laid, and no sooner are they there than the awaiting vultures descend and consume the flesh. I saw these grisly birds sitting expectantly in rows on the coping of the towers, and the sight was almost too gruesome. Such is their voracity that the body is a skeleton in an hour or so. The Parsees choose this method of dissolution because since they worship fire they must not ask it to demean itself with the dead; and ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... that once had received me as a guest and that sheltered the fairest eyes that had ever gazed in mine. And now I was to appear before that house as the bearer of ill-tidings. Ah, duty often wears a gruesome countenance; yet it is a sign of courage to face this duty down, and I sat more firmly in my saddle and rode nearer to the High Sheriff. He was a stern and determined man; he was short of stature, stout of frame, and sat his powerful horse like the fox-hunter that he was. ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... the trips their flagpole and staff, which was put up on a high point, called Observation Hill, was missing. Later on a gruesome skeleton was found on the seashore not far from Observation Hill, and the wrecked portions of a boat, and to this may be added the discovery of a lifeboat, similar to their own, among debris on South ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... large relief on the L. wall from the old church of St. Jacques de la Boucherie, 199, is an excellent example of transitional Franco-Italian sculpture; and the half-reclining bronze effigy of Prince Carpi from the great Franciscan church (the Cordeliers) of Paris, is wholly Italian in style. The gruesome figure, La Mort, in the embrasure of a window, from the old cemetery of Les Innocents, and a fine bust, 173, of John of Alesso, will also be noted. We pass to Room IV., dominated by the most eminent sculptor of the French renaissance, Jean Goujon (? 1520-1567), whose famous Diana and the Stag, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... the saints, and no larger than they. Next to the silk-enveloped head of St. John the Great Sufferer, which still projects as in life, when he buried himself to the neck in the earth,—as though he were not sufficiently underground already,—in order to preserve his purity, the most gruesome sight which we beheld in those dim catacombs was a group of chrism-exuding skulls of unknown saints, under ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... theatrical—unjustly; for even though we regard the play as but the scenic representation of the incidents of a night, the representation is of absorbing interest and is entirely free from the crudities which make Muellner's dramas more gruesome than dramatic. But Grillparzer nevertheless resolved that his next play should dispense with all adventitious aids and should take as simple a form and style as he could give it. A friend chanced to suggest ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... gruesome. I sneaked away, and had already reached the foot of the hill, when, to my horror, I noticed the grey man approaching. He took off his hat, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Ainsworth, I insisted on calling the documents connected with this, "death-warrants." I begged and implored my father to let me see a "death-warrant." He told me that there was nothing to see, but I went on insisting, until one day he told me that I might see one of these gruesome documents. To avoid any misplaced sympathy with the condemned man, I may say that it was a peculiarly brutal murder. A man at Cork had kicked his wife to death, and had then battered her into a shapeless mass with the poker. I went into my father's study on the tip-toe of expectation. ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... sage-brush on the hearth laid ready for lighting. I touched a match to it, and Kitty dropped on her knees in front of its riotous warmth and glow. Suddenly she sprang up and stared about her, sniffing and catching her breath. I had noticed it too; it fairly took one by the throat, the gruesome odor. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... Opium dens flourish as a matter of course, for opium and Chinese are synonymous words. You can tell an opium fiend as far as you can see him; his face looks like wet parchment stretched over a skull and dried, making a truly gruesome sight. Every ship that comes into the bay from the Orient is searched for opium, and quantities of it are found hidden away under the planking, or in other places less likely to be detected by the sharp-eyed officials. When found it is ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... formed a weird contrast to the other two. This one was lean, bent, and twisted like a gnarled tree that had been starved and warped in the forest. His dress was alike native, but the grotesque ornaments of animals' skulls, tails, dried monkeys' hands, and other gruesome relics gave the wearer an appearance that was repulsive to Saxon eyes. This freak of figure and dress was Thunder-maker, the great Medicine Man of the tribe. Without his presence no state conclave was complete; without his opinion no tribal law or ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... out of his pocket, and, a propos to one of his own remarks, began to read a highly decorated account of the fearful injuries under which the last victim of the last diabolical explosion had been in danger of succumbing. Sir Roger read his gruesome narrative with much emphasis, and as he laid ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... school studies. I cannot pretend to diligence. The passing months found me less frequently in the classroom than in secluded spots along the Calcutta bathing GHATS. The adjoining crematory grounds, especially gruesome at night, are considered highly attractive by the yogi. He who would find the Deathless Essence must not be dismayed by a few unadorned skulls. Human inadequacy becomes clear in the gloomy abode of miscellaneous bones. My midnight vigils were thus of a different ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... little Abe Lincoln had no idea of the White House then. He may never have heard of "the President's Palace," as it used to be called—for the White House was then a gruesome, blackened ruin, burned by the British in the War of 1812. President Madison was living in a rented house nearby, while the Executive Mansion was being restored. The blackened stone walls, left standing after the fire, were painted white, and on that account the President's mansion came ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... built on the edge of the camp at Bazoilles. I saw it on my afternoon trip and knew that the report was true. Being interested in the psychology of such a scene on the men present, I put aside my inward rebellion at so gruesome a sight and arranged my trip so as to be present. I reached the camp at nine forty-five and was the last man admitted. The gallows was built in the center of the semicircle facing two hills which came abruptly together, leaving a large grass plot at their base. This formed ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... come through the door after bearing out one of their gruesome loads, and the young Indian hurried to his side. He weighed one of the pieces in ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... the book, we come to another story by a novelist, this time a man of genius, Charles Dickens. The agreeably gruesome trifle occurs in the essay in The Uncommercial Traveller on 'Nurses' Stories,' and it was told to the little Dickens by a dreadful girl named Sarah, who chilled him also with the dark history of Chips, the ship's carpenter, and the ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... loving daughter Meg when she heard this! What could she do? She could not suffer it to stay there, so she bribed two men and took a boat, and, going down the river, stole her own father's head, and, wrapping it in a cloth, returned with her gruesome burden to Chelsea, where she is said to have buried it in the church. Can you picture anything more awful than the task ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... deviltry began. Mr. Mostyn found himself wholly unable to sleep. Many relics have curious histories, and the experienced archaeologist becomes callous to that uncanniness which seems to attach to some gruesome curios. But the slipper of the Prophet was different. No mere ghostly menace threatened its holders; an avenging scimitar followed those who came in contact with it; gruesome tragedies, mutilations, murders, had marked its ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... general opinion of the Boche among the British troops is that he is only good at one thing, and that is destroying other people's property. One of Mr. Punch's correspondents writes to say that while the flattened villages and severed fruit trees are a gruesome spectacle, for him "all else was forgotten in speechless admiration of the ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... burning. Lady Caroom leaned back in her chair with an indrawn sobbing breath. The action at such a moment seemed grotesque. His own coolness, whilst with steady fingers he probed away amongst the wounded places of his life, was in itself gruesome. ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... brave jackals! Come to the feast prepared for thee." She lowered her hand and with a contemptuous smile indicated the gruesome results of the ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... out of your chosen home by suggestion. No real ghost is required. Having selected the house you pay a call and lay ground-bait, so to speak. You tell the tenant you are interested in the place because you happen to know that at one time it was haunted. You relate a gruesome tale of some mysterious tragedy that you say has occurred there, and generally make your ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... beneath. He counted fifty Arabs and estimated that there were five times as many Manyuema. The latter were gorging themselves upon food and, under the very noses of their white masters, preparing the gruesome feast which is the PIECE DE RESISTANCE that follows a victory in which the bodies of their slain enemies ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... be two weeks to-morrow since I dined with Judge Howe, the postmaster-general, going out to the table with him, and here he is dead! Poor Arthur, he will find the Presidency more gruesome with a favourite cabinet minister gone! If it were Folger now, I suppose he would not care, for they really do not know what to do with him."—Mrs. James G. Blaine, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... agonies. Many victims are credibly reported to have been buried alive. History, from its earliest dawn down to the present day, has recorded nothing so profoundly revolting as the nameless cruelties in which these human fiends reveled. One gruesome picture of the less loathsome scenes enacted will live in history on a level with the noyades of Nantes. I have seen several moving descriptions of it in Russian journals. The following account is from the pen ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... say, was his bride to see, And wilful she must have been, That she could bide at his gruesome side When the first red ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... only about two minutes, because his spirit came upon him, and he fell down upon one knee, unable to rise. I never saw a more gruesome spectacle. A bright unnatural light gleamed in his eyes, his countenance became livid, the eyeballs protruded, a copious perspiration streamed from his body, the muscles of his face twitched, and his whole frame shook ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... he liked, free to speculate on its pictures and engravings; to rummage the immense collection of china in the basement rooms which no one but himself ever looked at; to examine some new corner of the muniment-room, and to ponder the strange and gruesome collection of death-masks, made by Coryston's grandfather, and now ranged in one of the annexes of the library—gave him endless entertainment. He was a born student, in whom the antiquarian instincts would perhaps ultimately overpower ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... currents in those seas are strange and gruesome. Even as they lay, apparently motionless, with the sea as smooth as oil all round them, there came a sudden turmoil, and they were in a wild race of waters, with bubbling coils and swirls and frothing gouts of foam from rocks that lay ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... species, must have originally escaped from Zoological Gardens and travelling beast shows. "Giraffes drinking at the fountain pools, Trafalgar Square," was one of the most notable and characteristic of his studies, while even more sensational was the gruesome picture of "Vultures attacking dying camel in Upper Berkeley Street." There were also photographs of the large canvas on which he had been engaged for some months, and which he was now endeavouring to sell to some enterprising dealer or adventurous amateur. The subject was "Hyaenas asleep ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... strain for longer hours than that. The night operators will have a cot for the one off duty, so that if anything unusual happens the waking one can call the other. I think it must be doleful to stay alone in such a place during those gruesome night hours. I couldn't have ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... them, and beside was an ink-bottle of the commonest type, the ink in powder and flakes. He took up one of the sheets. It had a great stain on it. The bottle must have been overturned! But was it ink? No; it stood too thick on the paper. With a gruesome shiver Donal wetted his finger and tried the surface of it: a little came off, a tinge of suspicious brown. There was writing on the paper! What was it? He held the faded lines close to the candle. They were not difficult to decipher. He sat down on the stool, and read thus—his reading ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... struggle five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along miles ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... home with all of Gordon's weight behind it. The stranger's jaw buckled and gave beneath that shattering impact. Then abruptly his entire face crumpled into distorted ruin. Gordon staggered back a step in sheer horror at the gruesome result of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... because he happened to have had the experience himself. He dreamt of a wax-work show. The classical writers stood there, elegantly represented in wax and beads. Their arms and eyes moved, and a screw inside them creaked an accompaniment to their movements. He saw something gruesome among them—a misshapen figure, decked with tapes and jaundiced paper, out of whose mouth a ticket hung, on which "Lessing" was written. My friend went close up to it and learned the worst: it was the Homeric Chimera; in front it was Strauss, behind it was Gervinus, and in the ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... almost equally stalwart woman were both caught by one gigantic Quabo which had a tentacle around the throat of each. The man and woman were chopping at the viscous, gruesome head. One of the Thing's eyes was gashed across, giving it a fearsome, blind appearance. It heaved convulsively, and the three struggling figures toppled into the water ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... the door and picked up the gander and, whirling it around his head, dashed it violently at the one candle which was thus knocked over and extinguished, leaving the room in darkness but for a few smouldering embers on the hearth, and with the gruesome addition to the company of what two of those present believed to be the severed head of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... his wife. "It was gruesome to hear her. She made me look up to see if there was really any one there; and she wasn't speaking to our Lady either. Art sure she is a child ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... in normal size, with the wrecked dome-laboratory around us. The dome had a great jagged hole halfway up one of its sides, through which the snow was falling. The broken bodies strewn around were gruesome. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... meant he was badly frozen and probably out of his mind before he got back to the shack. He wasn't able to keep up a fire, of course, or do anything for himself—and I suppose the poor boy simply froze to death. He was alone there, and it was weeks and weeks before his body was found. But the most gruesome part of it all is that his horses had been stabled, tied up in their stalls without feed. They were all found dead, poor brutes. They'd even eaten the wooden boards the mangers were built of. Hugh Cochrane couldn't get over it, and was going to sell the ranch for fourteen ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... instruction because it is gruesome, or because it may seem like intimidation, is sentimentalism: in this matter, as elsewhere in the realm of knowledge, the truth should scare no one who does not need to be scared. It is better to be safe than sorry; and ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... football days, if he had ever had any, were long past, had gone down with a crash, and remained on the pavement, motionless. Fenn was conscious of an ignoble impulse to fly without stopping to chat about the matter. Then he was seized with a gruesome fear that he had injured the man seriously, which vanished when the stranger sat up. His first words were hardly of the sort that one would listen to from choice. His first printable expression, which did not escape him until he ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... my eyes—been snow-blind twice; look where my foot's half gone; And that gruesome scar on my left cheek where the frost-fiend bit to the bone. Each one a brand of this devil's land, where I've played and I've lost the game, A broken wreck with a craze for 'hooch,' and never ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... passion, he certainly was, but his position in the world was a counselling spouse, jealous of his good name. He did not regret his proposal to take the leap; he would not have regretted it if taken. On the safe side of the abyss, however, it wore a gruesome look ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... old, abandoned cemetery. It was nearly in the heart of the town, yet by night it was as gruesome a place as the most dismal of human moods could crave. The railings about the plats were prostrate, decayed, or altogether gone. Many of the graves were sunken, from others grew sturdy pines, whose roots had committed unspeakable sin. The headstones ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... his shoulder, and seizing his gun, G. W. tore on down the hill straight toward the gruesome place below, and right into it. No one noticed him. The surgeons were too busy to look up as he ran around the table scanning the faces upon the boards. The men carrying the helpless burdens, or ministering to their wants, had no time to question why a ...
— A Little Dusky Hero • Harriet T. Comstock
... trumpets recalling us," said St. Clair. "The men have finished the gruesome task. I want you to know, Mr. Mason, that we bear you no animosity, and we're quite sure that you ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... next morning was a gruesome one, and it was a most pathetic sight to watch the drivers, with tears running down their cheeks, bidding a last farewell to their lost charges before burial, for the men become exceedingly attached to their four-legged comrades, especially when they have had charge of them for a ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... eyes well open, having been admitted to the temple by a young priest, who, carrying a taper, led him through several winding passages. A man could get into this gruesome building and never find his way out, thought Alyrus, and though a brave chieftain in his own country, he shivered here in the black corridors, echoing ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... while Pan was away for a few hours deer hunting, Wiggate's men, accompanied by Blinky, attended to the gruesome detail of burying ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... cell with a gruesome gesture. "This isn't my idea of a pleasant home. And yet it will be my home until someone decides that I'm too ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... contradiction in terms involved in speaking of "Christian warfare." Few theologians or churchmen have dared to swim against the stream. In his admirable book La Guerre infernale,[58] Gustave Dupin has pilloried gruesome specimens of militarist Christianity. Nicolai gives other samples, which it would be a pity to leave unrecorded. In 1915, Professor Baumgarten, a Kiel theologian, placidly pointed out that there is opposition between the morality of bellicose nationalism and the morality of the Sermon ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... part faire une visite." And the ladies would be welcome. This is to take the most savage of Polynesians; take some of the most civilised. In Honolulu, convicts labour on the highways in piebald clothing, gruesome and ridiculous; and it is a common sight to see the family of such an one troop out, about the dinner hour, wreathed with flowers and in their holiday best, to picnic with their kinsman on the public ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me of you in the night, howadji," pursued Najib, taking from the soiled folds of his abieh a large old volume, bound in stout leather, after the manner of religious or scientific books of a half-century ago. On the brown back a scratched gold lettering proclaimed the gruesome title: ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... said—"Here at last is our opportunity for gratifying our natural taste in colours. It will probably be of but short duration. Therefore let us select a combination of all the most brilliant tints and wear them, for who knows how soon that gruesome pall of woe may again ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... the sinister and repulsive figure of Jean Paul Marat. She knew nothing of his associates, Danton and Robespierre. It was in Marat alone that she saw the monster who sent innocent thousands to their graves, and who reveled like some arch-fiend in murder and gruesome death. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... chuckle over his gruesome suggestion, and lazily getting to his feet, selected another tune ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... business lay moored on the river ready to carry him that last sad journey to the Tower; and sadder still, to bring back the devoted daughter when the execution was accomplished, and later also when she bore her gruesome burden of a father's head, said to have been buried with her ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... almost close at hand and with which we took in that age of lingering forms no liberty of abbreviation; to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, then in our interminable but so amiable Baker Street, the only shade on the amiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portal of the Bazaar—since Madame Tussaud had, of all her treasures, most vividly revealed to me the Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of the Chamber of Horrors which lurked just within it; whom, for days after making ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... apart, and each side had developed a strong and elaborate system of defense. One flank was protected by an impassable marsh and the other by the river. When we passed, the field presented an unusually gruesome appearance even for a battle-field, for the wandering desert Arabs had been at work, and they do not clean up as thoroughly as the African hyena. A number had paid the penalty through tampering ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... he had roused in Alison, Mr. Hadley found that suspicion of his own folly develop into a gruesome conviction. It compelled him to labour with Sir John vehemently until that blundering knight consented to wait before exploding his alarms upon Lady Waverton. Even as the first blundering remonstrances had irritated Alison's wanton will into passionate resolution, so this ensuing vacillation ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... self-sacrifice; but scarcely any attention has been drawn to Teaism, which represents so much of our Art of Life. Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilisation were to be based on the gruesome glory of war. Fain would we await the time when due respect shall be paid to our ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... stout ropes to rings fixed in the rafters of the barn. Their heads dangled from the slip-knots. The one against which Perenna had struck was still moving slightly and the bones clicked together with a gruesome sound. ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... alone. I had reasons to believe I had solved it. I found the Rhamda and the Nervina. I had iron will and courage—also strength. The Rhamda was never able to control me. My life is gone but not my will. Now I have left him another. Do not surrender, Harry. It is a gruesome task; but hold on to the end. Help me up the steps. There now. Just wait a minute till I fetch ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... abruptly turned up. The head is large, the eyes deeply embedded in their sockets, and the animal has the power of protruding and withdrawing the head much more extensively developed than usual. The "death's head" staring from beneath the dome-shaped back gives to the animal a most gruesome aspect. These details are supplied by the master of a beche-de-mer schooner, to whom all the nooks and corners of the Great Barrier Reef and of the other Coral Sea beyond, from New Guinea to New Caledonia, are familiar. He says that the species, as ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... possess this gruesome accomplishment; he could somehow make a blood-curdling click with his jawbone. When he did it in "prep." his neighbours smote him on the head with dictionaries, and when he repeated the performance in the dormitory, fellows rose in their beds and ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... the original version of a book by Paracelsus. I have not read it yet, for the writing is most difficult to decipher, but one point caught my eye on turning over the pages. That is the gruesome fact that Paracelsus fed the homunculi he manufactured on human blood. One wonders how he ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... he had subjects and treasures and a borough. The son of Beanstan performed faithfully all that he had pledged himself to. So I expect for thee a worse fatality,—though thou hast everywhere prevailed in rush of battle,—gruesome war,—if thou darest await Grendel at close quarters for ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... artist's eye the gem of the building is undoubtedly the fine grouping and ensemble of the flying buttresses at the rear of the choir. Most persons, so gifted, have tried their prentice, or their master, hands at depicting this grand marshalled array of "folded wings," and, but for the gruesome morgue at its foot, which ever intrudes into the view, one might almost say it is the most idyllic and most specious view of a great cathedral that it were possible to have. Were it not for this charming view of these ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun |
