"Gruesome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where the Peace Congresses are held, observed Queen Wilhelmina's 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
... the morose but rather dressy foreigner who resides in a cage on the verandah. Miss Ropes, who owns him and ought to know, says he is a Grey Cardinal, but neither his voracious appetite for caterpillars nor his gruesome manner of assimilating them are in the least dignified or ecclesiastical. It takes the unremitting efforts of Miss Ropes and the entire available strength of convalescent officers (after deducting the players of bridge, the stalkers of rabbits ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... old Greeks, there lay far to the west, in the ocean, a wonderful island where were kept, under the guard of a gruesome dragon, the beautiful golden apples which Gaea gave as a wedding present to Zeus. The Hesperides were the three daughters of Night, who ruled the guardian dragon. These golden apples, then, came to be known as the apples of Hesperides. When Hercules ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... deposited a white crust on the margins. Nielsen, kicking around in the sand, unearthed a skull, bleached and yellow, yet evidently not so very old. Some thirsty wanderer had taken his last drink at that deceiving spring. The gruesome and the beautiful, the tragic and the sublime, go hand in hand down the naked shingle ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... A gruesome cannibal chant followed, accompanied by the booming of the drums, and then, warmed by the liquor that fired their brains, the dancers began the haka, the sexual dance. Inflamed by the rum, they flung themselves into it with such abandon as I have ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... know was that I had been much troubled about her and was anxious to help her. I went into a very heavy, deep sleep; but until next morning, when I heard of it from Mrs. C. I had no idea that my double had left my room." I said, "This power is rather gruesome, for you might take to haunting me." "I do not think so, unless there was something to be gained which could not be otherwise secured, some benefit to be conferred upon you." "That is to say, if I were in trouble ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... stake sent physical pains tingling down the nerves of my body; and yet, turn as I would, my eyes would keep coming back t it, such fascination has the gruesome and the terrible ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... tarried at this gruesome scene only for a moment. They wished only to make sure that the two Spaniards were really out of the fight, and when they saw the Iowa was going to stand by both, away they went to join the race between the Brooklyn and the Oregon on our side, and ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... and such like matters, and gave me cake and cocoa; a delicious repast I thought it. And so, while crushed and beaten London lay sleeping off its exhaustion, I slept under Constance Grey's roof, full of gratitude, and of a kind of new hope and gladness, very foreign, one would have said, to my gruesome experiences ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... have been, he was no faint heart, and despite the shock of the gruesome discovery he continued his investigation of the silent ship. Apparently some attempt had been made when first the Buena Ventura was caught in the deadly embrace of the Sargasso to convey her treasure to the boats, for, at the head of the main companion-way, ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... thousands go annually upon pilgrimages. One of the most gruesome spectacles to be found anywhere is in a side room near the altar. From the ceiling are suspended wax and plaster of paris reproductions called ex-votos of literally every portion of the body—feet, hands, limbs, heads, all portions—the ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... the dead. He did so, and found the money; but in nailing on the coffin lid again, a part of his soutane was fastened down with it. The priest turned to go, advanced a step, and, being suddenly held, dropped dead with fright. These gruesome stories were happily followed by an hour or two of song and pleasantry in Mr. McKenna's tent, ending in "Auld Lang Syne" and "God Save the Queen." It was a unique occasion in which to wind up so laborious a day; and our camp itself was unique—on a lofty bluff ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... floor of the office lay a charred, shapeless, unrecognisable mass. What was that gruesome odour in the room? Burned human flesh? I recoiled from what had once been the ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... distended limbs, the bleeding wound in His side, the face smeared with bloody sweat and dust, the torn brow and hair, and the swollen features, must have combined with all the horrible surroundings to make one of the most gruesome sights that ever man saw. And it was at this moment, in His extremity, that He says: "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." "Father, I have done all that I can do; now I leave Myself and ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... would be hard to say how deeply this ballad, wedded to its wailing music, touches and moves a Manxman. Even to my ear as I have heard it in Manx, it has seemed to be one of the weirdest things in old ballad literature, only to be matched by some of the old Irish songs, and by the gruesome ditty which tells how "the sun ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... for which Loomis has struck out a superb frenzy, and a group of songs by John Vance Cheney, Loomis has found some of his most powerful inspirations in the work of our lyrist, Aldrich,—such as the rich carillon of "Wedded," and his "Discipline," one of the best of all humorous songs, a gruesome scherzo all about dead monks, in which the music furnishes out the grim irreverence of the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... dead Marine, and beside him stood a French surgeon, who greeted them warmly. The wounded were in a cellar, and if they were not got out soon, it was obvious that they would be burned alive. Inside the hall were piles of bicycles, loaves of bread, and dead soldiers, all in gruesome confusion. In the cellar dead and wounded were lying together. The wounded had all to be carried on stretchers, for everyone who could crawl had fled from that ghastly inferno, and only those who have shifted wounded on stretchers can appreciate the courage it requires to do it under shell fire. ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... themselves the result of a knowledge of Greek art and myth.[849] Early in the second century B.C. Plautus in the Captivi alluded to these paintings as familiar;[850] and we must not forget that the Etruscans habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for illustration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his work on the Roman religion ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... demons and witches—a "Sabbath," as it was called—and here were recounted all the evil deeds of the past year, and here the witches saw and conversed with the devil himself, and received their instructions from him. It would be almost impossible to conceive a more grotesque and gruesome picture than some of these Sabbaths were supposed to be: every impossible and inconceivable thing that man's mind could invent was apparently attributed to these meetings. In order to form some faint idea of men's ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... their spirits at the very highest pitch of exhilaration, and their nerves by so much the steadier, and such rapid progress did they make that ten minutes later saw them clustered together clinging to the rocky pinnacle before mentioned. And a gruesome-enough looking spot it was—a sharp projecting point of rock overhanging a sheer precipice some two hundred feet deep, with a narrow snow-bank immediately beneath, and then another frightful abyss of unknown depth beyond. ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... "What a perfectly gruesome subject for tea-table talk," he said lightly, and beckoned the head-waiter. "You are keeping ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... a pit—and it seemed to be a natural cavity, with nothing remarkable about it. But I turned my attention to the floor, which felt curiously soft and greasy to the touch. It was strewn with pieces of human bones and skulls! The gruesome place weighed rather upon me, I confess, silent and stifling as it was, but having come to explore I proceeded to excavate lightly in the yielding material of the floor with a light pick. The singular nature of this material aroused ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... SPATULATE-LEAVED SUNDEW (D. intermedia) and the THREAD-LEAVED SUNDEW (D. filiformis) whose purplish-pink flowers are reared above wet sand along the coast, possess contrivances similar to the round-leaved plant's to pursue their gruesome business. Why should these vegetables turn carnivorous? Doubtless because the soil in which they grow can supply little or no nitrogen. Very small roots testify to the small use they serve. The water sucked up through them from the bog ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... upon his chum, for Hugh laughed merrily at the gruesome picture Thad drew of his complete subjugation to the wiles of ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... thought that could not but be fraught with some terror to the boy, who knew that he had been instrumental in hiding the threatened monk, and that if by some gruesome chance the secret were to be discovered, their bitter enemy would make it an excuse for prosecuting his malicious and covetous purpose towards Chad with redoubled ardour, and with every prospect of ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... water and dragon-flies hummed on their great stiff wings. Up on the surface the lake was clear as a mirror. But whether we wished it or not, we had to run right down by the bottom, where it was dark and gruesome. And this I could not endure. I longed for the sunbeams. I knew them so well from the time I used to run in the brook. There they used to peep down through the leaves and pass over me in fleeting gleams. I longed so much to see them again that I stole up to ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... heads into our Throne Room, making all that horrible mess! It's a piece of bad taste which, perhaps—in an under gardener—please have them removed directly. Well, young man," she continued to the indignant Mirliflor, who, it need not be said, had nothing to do with the gruesome introduction of the heads, "I'm sure we are all very much obliged to you—very much obliged indeed. If you hadn't come forward as you did, it's dreadful to think what might have happened. And, though it seems you did take the liberty of borrowing the Crown Prince's sword without permission, ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... mouth had been open, the nostrils of her fine little nose had quivered. Hans Fuellenberg was correct in his observation that her eyes, as she held her head back, had been closed. The second time, she seemed to be drawn against her will by a gruesome something, which alternately aroused fear, horror, and curiosity. She held her eyes wide open, and now and then covered them with both hands, as if in ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... was able to reassure them with the statement that Captain Vavassour would undoubtedly take immediate steps to have it found and restored to them. Having done which, and excused myself upon the plea of urgent business— coupled with a suggestion that the ladies should remain below until the more gruesome evidences of the recent conflict could be effaced—I hurried away to the other end of the ship and effected the release of her officers and crew, who at once ascended to the deck and assisted our own lads to put matters to rights. Fortunately, there ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... nothing especially gruesome or repellent about the corpse. It was the body of a man of about fifty years of age, with a pronounced brick-red complexion, and a lofty brow, the height of which was increased by premature baldness. Long, fair moustaches drooped from the upper lip almost ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... burdening themselves with queer weights on their backs, now invaded the wilderness which they and their fathers had roamed untrammeled for centuries. The invaders in turn studied the faces of the Mayorunas, of whom so many gruesome tales were told. For long silent minutes primitive and civilized man probed each other for signs of ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... a collection of spear-heads, gruesome execution knives, elephant swords, and wonder-working ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... carriers were coming along. The little group passed up the road, Tom pushing his wheel and answering their questions briefly and soberly as he always did. Planks had been laid across the German trenches where they intersected the road and as they passed over them Tom looked down upon many a gruesome sight which evidenced the surprise by the Americans and their undoubted victory. Not a live German was to be seen, nor a dead American either, but here and there a fallen gray-coat lay sprawled in the crooked topsy-turvy ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... One speak to-day?" Bassett asked, by this time so accustomed to the old man's gruesome occupation as to take even an interest in ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... as he did so she raised her head with a blush and an invitation in her eyes, and he kissed her on the lips. "See here, dearest," he said, "your first dance! And as many as you will give me afterward. Did I ever mention that I was jealous? Nell, I inform you of the gruesome fact now; and that I shall endure agonies every time I see you dancing ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... a gruesome sight. At the head of the column of doolies and stretchers were the bodies of the killed, each tied with cords upon a mule. Their heads dangled on one side and their legs on the other. The long black hair of the Sikhs, which streamed down to the ground, and was draggled with ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... rude, unskilled, and illiterate, shunning as profane the Christian churches of the land, and bowing in unknown rites as devotees of a system known, and by no means favorably known, only through polemic literature and history, and through the gruesome traditions of Puritan and Presbyterian and Huguenot, was an impression not far removed from horror; and this impression was deepened as the enormous proportions of this invasion disclosed themselves from year to year. The ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... afternoon 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 ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... mechanics had felt sure some disaster would overtake me. But, as it happened, their anticipations were not fulfilled. The journalists and photographers did not, however, have a fruitless journey. Though there was nothing gruesome to chronicle, they found ample material, when they learned of them, in the early morning adventures of myself and my friend with this 60 h.p. monoplane. Next day, in fact, our exploits were given prominence in the newspapers, and I received a number of congratulatory telegrams; not forgetting one ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... Yggdrasil when, growing suddenly faint, she loosed her hold and dropped to the ground beneath, and down to the lowest depths of Nifl-heim. There she lay, pale and motionless, gazing with fixed and horror-struck eyes upon the gruesome sights of Hel's realm, trembling violently the while, like one overcome by ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... terrible crime he was led to commit at the instigation of that human viper, Queen Caroline, and the licentious Emma Hamilton. He, to some extent, whittles down Nelson's share of the responsibility by putting the whole blame on them. But who can read the gruesome story of the trial and hanging of the aged Prince Carraciolli without feeling ashamed that a fellow-countryman in Nelson's position should have stamped his career with so dark a crime? At the capitulation of St. Elmo, Carraciolli made his escape. He commanded a Neapolitan warship called the Tancredi, ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... overhead had shut them from his ears, he stood there, with puckered brows and pursed-up lips, drumming with his finger-tips a faint tattoo upon the framework of the shattered lid; then he walked over to the skeleton case, and silently regarded the gruesome thing within. ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... the Samurai,—the Art of Death which makes our soldiers exult in 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
... that were drawn from the very earth increased in the gun and spumed out like lightning bolts. The Things squeaked excitedly and surged forward. Asher's finger pulled the ratchet trigger full force, and like dew before a strong shaft of sunlight, the gruesome Things were ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... Zyobite and an 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
... and answered: "Two days ago we did a portage on the Albany, and came, at camping time, upon the gruesome spectacle of two skeletons lying side by side under a little shelter formed of snowshoes and spruce boughs. We supposed that they must have been the Indians dispatched from Maxohama months ago with mails, only there were no mail bags, ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... upon them, but their bodies were saved from harm. For their beauty was no wise injured, nor was any harm come upon their garments, nor their hair singed by the fire, but in God's protection they came forth gladly from that gruesome horror, wise of heart and favoured by ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... 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 potential ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... dead, and one could have walked all over it on their bodies. Gen. Grant, in substance, makes the same statement in his Memoirs. It was a fearful sight. But not far from the Peach Orchard field, in a westerly direction, was a still more gruesome spectacle. Some of our forces were in line on an old, grass-grown country road that ran through thick woods. The wheels of wagons, running for many years right in the same ruts, had cut through the turf, so that the surface of the road was somewhat lower than the adjacent ground. To men ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... the lower jaw series at Teddington, which is also, in all probability, the only instance of a man's nightcap figuring in such gruesome circumstances. ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... der tip-toes, en dey'll set dar en run over de ole times wid one er n'er, en crack der jokes same ez dey useter. En den ag'in," continued the old man, shutting his eyes and giving to his voice a gruesome intonation quite impossible to describe,—"en den ag'in hit look lak dat Brer Rabbit'll gin de wink all 'roun', en den dey'll tu'n in en git up a reg'lar juberlee. Brer Rabbit, he'll retch up en take down de trivet, en Brer Fox, he'll snatch up de griddle, en Brer B'ar, he'll ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... even printed verses upon her genius. In a letter to Wieck, in 1833, he says, "It is easy to write to you, but I do not feel equal to write to Clara." She was still, however, the child to him; the child whom he used to frighten with his gruesome ghost-stories, especially of his "Doppelgaenger," a name, Clara afterwards took to herself. Child as she was, he watched her with something of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... to fear. Penarvon here has all the pluck in the world. Hinckley is a V.C. Captain Vandermere is a soldier, and I will answer for it that he has no nerves. Guerdon and I, I am sure, are safe. Let us hear your gruesome prophecy, my dear Saton, and if it comes true, we will form a little society, and you shall be our apostle. We will study occultism in place of bridge. We will be the founders ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 thing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... was leisurely coming down National pike from Jane Aydelot's, an' it was gettin' late, an' no cheerful plate nor job in a crowd in sunshiny weather, let alone there in the dusk of the evening. Wow! I dreamt of that there gruesome thing two weeks. I throwed the shovel in the crick. Would you like me to show you where to go to dig, so's you can be sure your plan with Tank Shirley worked and you didn't drown, after all? And are you sure you ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... A gruesome statue on St. Sebald's in Nueremberg represents the puritanical idea of "the world," by exhibiting a good-looking young woman, whose back is that of a corpse; the shroud is open, and the half decomposed body is displayed, with snakes ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... beyond 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
... taken. The front-line trenches were but a short distance 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 with unexploded grenades and "dud" shells, and left their own bones to be ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... way, like an elephant over egg-shells. Her household did her one service, at least, in return for their maintenance, and that was to provide the old lady with an audience. It was in no sense an unwilling service, for her imagination ran to the gruesome, and she never planted a precept but she drove it home with a case in point. As a result night was often shattered by a yell from some sleeper whose dreams had trespassed on devilish domains. The Vrouw Grobelaar believed most entirely in Kafir magic, ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... gruesome about the long ascent. He thought of stories he had read of lonely turrets in which men were beheaded, and otherwise made away with. It seemed he would never come to the top, and when at last he did it was to find two of the most awful-looking eyes he ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... had resulted in a carnival of blood. Now the colonials, owing to their numbers, were able to get together and to place themselves on the defensive. The fight soon became hand to hand and there ensued one of the most gruesome melees of the whole War of the Revolution. The men were able to look into one another's faces; they fought at quarters too close for bullets, and relied upon gun-stock, knife-blade, and bayonet. There was slashing and cutting, clubbing and throttling, ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... things in a detached, impersonal manner, as one who states commonplace facts. He had not particularly desired to speak of them. For him those gruesome incidents of war and invasion held no special horror. They might have rested heavily enough on his mind once. But he had come apparently to accept them as the grim collateral of war, without reacting emotionally to their terrible significance. And when ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... alive." (Honoria deprecates gratitude.) "No, I don't want money—yet. You made me take and bank L700 last January over that Rio de Palmas coup—heaps more than my share. Altogether I've got about L1,000 on deposit at the C. and C. bank, the Temple Bar branch. I've many gruesome faults, but I am thrifty. I think I can win through to the Bar on that. Of course, if ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... the Moon lay buried. And all at once they stopped, quaking and mazed and skeery, for there was the great stone, half in, half out of the water, for all the world like a strange big coffin; and at the head was the black snag, stretching out its two arms in a dark gruesome cross, and on it a tiddy light flickered, like a dying candle. And they all knelt down in the mud, and said, "Our Lord, first forward, because of the cross, and then backward, to keep off the Bogles; but without speaking out, for ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... the gruesome situation dimly. There seemed no longer any good reason for silence, and startled exclamations dropped from the lips ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... sorrows through which they have passed. Such individuals find their chief delight in portraying, in vivid details, the terrific sufferings which they have had to endure. No one has suffered quite so much as they have. They harrow their friends by going over frequently and persistently the long, gruesome details of their "awful" past. This habit is destructive to an extreme degree. Why harbor past experiences that only bring sorrows to mind? Why add to the bitterness of your daily life by dragging up the lamentable past? Why pass ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... arrangement of the room. Why should the horsehair sofa be placed straight against the wall, and those ghastly wax flowers under glass covers adorn the stiff chimneypiece, which might be made so pretty? The memorial cards, that are framed and hung on the wall—how gruesome they appear in the spring sunshine! She longs to pull them down, and burn them, but to do so would be to violate poor Mrs. ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... began a wary journey through the corn. One by one the long aisles between the rows appeared. As they glanced along each of them it seemed as if some gruesome thing had just previously vacated it. Old Peter halted once and whispered: ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... gamester. He did not seem to be enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his back, as people say, in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed hard under the gruesome burden. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality; but he realized that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations. ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Blackbird whistled: "I say, you know, What is the trouble down there below? Are you in sorrow, or pain, or what?" The Frog said: "Mine is a gruesome lot! Nothing but mud, and dirt, and slime, For me to look at the livelong time. 'Tis a dismal world!" so he sadly spoke, And voiced his ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the late lamented Mr. Job," said Bob Dashwood, with a wry face. "But never mind, keep on rubbing. I'm feeling more life in it already. But, I say, Den, this is a weird place we're in. These German fellows don't seem to take their gruel like our chaps. It's a gruesome thing ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... had looked upon many a gruesome sight during my somewhat chequered career, though scarcely one more hideous than this which I had ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... scenes of exquisite tenderness and pathos, with men and women of such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had a creative imagination ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... gruesome drama was the attack upon the second line represented by the sacks lying upon the parapet of the trench beyond. The completed action thus included the guard, thrust, recovery, the leap forward past the swinging ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... It was a grim, gruesome task. Another nameless grave! Neale had already seen nine graves. This one was up the slope not a hundred feet from the ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... It happened that my aunt was on a visit to the Byrons when the poet's body, which was consigned to the Admiral, was brought to London. The Admiral, who lived near Windsor, posted up to receive the barrel of spirits in which the remains were preserved. When he returned from his gruesome visit the ladies of his family, and none more so than my aunt, then a girl of fifteen or sixteen, were very anxious to know what he had seen and what the remains of the most-talked-of man in the Europe of his day looked like. "What did he look like, my dear? ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... in the kitchen when the fray began. She was nearly incoherent with fright; but Felix managed to reassure her, and piloted her skilfully out of the hotel by an exit that concealed the gruesome staircase. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... A gruesome sight met them as Eli brought the dogs to a stop. Huddled close and lying by the side of the toboggan, partially covered by drift, were the stiff-frozen ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... exhume the skeletons, disarticulate them, and seal the bones in the huge jars of Chinese porcelain which are a Dyak's most prized possession. Sometimes these burial-jars are kept in the family dwelling—a rather gruesome article of furniture to the European mind—but more often they are deposited in a grave-house, a small, fantastically decorated hut or shed which serves as a family vault. But I doubt if any people on the face of the globe have so weird a custom of disposing of their dead as the Kapuas ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... 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 of a French ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... indiscriminately together like that! . . . Lack of space was no excuse. Millet's "Angelus," "Ally Sloper at the Derby," a splendid lithograph of "The Angel of Pity at the Well of Cawnpore," Lottie Collins, scantily attired, in her song and dance "Tara-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," Sir Frederick Leighton's "Wedded," a gruesome depiction of a Chinese execution at Canton, an old-fashioned engraving of that dashing, debonair cavalry officer, "Major Hodson," of Indian Mutiny fame, George Robey, as a nurse-maid, wheeling Little Tich in a perambulator, the grim, torture-lined face of Slatin Pasha, a ridiculously ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... "Now surely 'tis gruesome To gaze all around. When bloodred through heaven Drives cloudrack o'er head; Air soon shall be deep hued With dying men's blood When this our spaedom ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... Jackal shivered and shook with fear, and when the Crocodile, in a gruesome growl, remarked that he was hungry and wanted a good meal, the wretched creature hadn't ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... without fear of comment from such British visitors as came across them; and they therefore attempted to block up the path of travellers, refusing them a passage through the Republic, and in some instances ordering the expulsion of visitors across the Vaal. About this time one of the most gruesome of all the many massacres in which the Boers were concerned took place. One Potgieter (not the Potgieter who was the rival of Pretorius), in charge of a small party of thirty men, women, and children, went forth to barter ivory unlawfully ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... of vantage looked down upon the savage horde 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 fall into their ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... taste, old Time, it is more agreeable to make this evening a season of gruesome brooding. Morosely I survey the faults and follies of my last year. I am grown too canny to pour the new wine of good resolution into the old bottles of my imperfect humors. But I get a certain grim satisfaction ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... panorama Passing slowly, dully by, With the sun's brass disc high gleaming From a white and cloudless sky, Sometimes drew fantastic pictures. Many a strange and gruesome sign— Phantom trees and fairy castles— Blurred the far horizon line. Then they'd vanish like the fancies Of a fever-smitten brain, And returning, changed in outline, Elsewhere on the mighty plain Would allure the eyesore trav'ler Till the very sky above Seemed to mock with ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... carefully balancing myself with a khudstick. The men came prancing over as if they were on a good high-road, the careless ease with which they made the passage bordering on impertinence! I reflected, however, that sheep, and such like beasts of humble brain, can stroll upon the brink of gruesome precipices without any fear of falling, and my ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... 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 ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... be in the story of the pawnbroker and his daughters, M. Zola much preferred the popular and gruesome legend of the little girl murdered in the scullery; and, some time later, when he consented to write a short story for 'The Star,' it was this legend which he took as his basis, building thereon the pathetic sketch of 'Angeline,' the scene of ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... steering-rocket fuel, and he was uncomfortable about the business of releasing the spaceship from the launching cage. There was, too, cause for worry in the take-off rockets—if the tube linings had shrunk there would be some rather gruesome consequences—and there could always be last-minute orders from Washington to ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... Zoological Gardens, 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 ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... the manner in which the bone had been cracked open with a stone to let the marrow be sucked out. The sight of this gruesome relic revived all his fears, tenfold more acutely than ever, and filled him with a sense of vague, impending evil, of peril deadly to ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... which a man runs after for the remainder of his life. A single kiss had been enough. Never had rendezvous been spent in a manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous divinity; for the mother had remained in Henri's imagination like some infernal, cowering thing, cadaverous, monstrous, savagely ferocious, which the imagination of poets and painters had not yet ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... field. Mrs. Patterson became hysterical, and was taken into the spare room with such remedies as could be suggested. Everybody blamed poor Dan. Cecily asked him what he would feel like if Jimmy was never, never found. The Story Girl had a gruesome recollection of some baby at Markdale who ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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
... of Gimp's quarters, the bundles were opened; the contents, some of them dried and gruesome, all of them rather wonderful, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... spiked helmets, the gruesome figures in the foreground of this cartoon might have belonged in life to any one of the warring nationalities. It is a noteworthy fact, however, that not one of the nations at war has shown so little care ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... and, moreover, to St. James of Compostella, and St. Martha of Provence, not to speak of lesser chantries and Saints. Aye, and I crossed the sea to see the holy coat of Treves, and St. Ursula's eleven thousand skulls—and a gruesome sight they were. Nay, if the Lady Countess be not in London it would cost me little to go on to the north with her. There's St. Andrew of Ely, Hugh, great St. Hugh and little St. Hugh, both of them at Lincoln, and there's St. Wilfred ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tell me when this butchery will cease! For seventy-two hours I have been plying my knife, and look at those who have yet to come"—he swept the circle of wounded with an outstretched bloody hand. "O God! If you know how to write, write to your papers and tell Europe she must stop this gruesome war." Then, tired out and enervated, he swooned into the arms of the medical orderly. As he came to to be apologized. "That," he said, "is the third time I have fainted; I suppose I must waste precious time in eating something to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... and we had to shut the door to exclude the slant sheets of rain. All gathered in the upper end of the room where my chair stood, the only seat there except the floor. To the accompaniment of hissing rain and angry winds, the gruesome particulars of the triple funeral were narrated. Mariposa—with the baby on her lap—was chief spokeswoman, but nearly every one present had some item of his own, authentic or imaginary, to add. All were sure that the three whose fate had aroused the ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... there was logic in his contention and so I gave in and made the Children's Hell. It is a gruesome doctrine, that a child who kills himself does not really die. It is the one thing in the whole book that makes me feel most intellectually unclean for writing it. But I wrote it and when the book was finished and His Majesty had signed the manuscript, ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... school; the year following she had taken a place as nursery-governess; then she had been reading-companion to an unpleasant old woman in Northumberland. The old woman had lived in the country, and her relatives had hovered over her like vultures awaiting her decease. The household had been gloomy and gruesome enough to have driven into melancholy madness any girl not of the sanest and most matter-of-fact temperament. Emily Fox-Seton had endured it with an unfailing good nature, which at last had actually awakened in the breast of her mistress a ray of human feeling. When the old ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... now thrust out from the verge into the abyss, to go hurtling into the mist-wreathed depths.... No, Zeke must not come back. The hardness crept again into her face, as she went forward. She held her eyes averted from that gruesome cavern ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... paused but for the fraction of a second, had she stopped to read the placard setting forth this odious law, had she only reflected, then she would even now have turned back, and fled from that gruesome box of infamies, as she would from a dangerous and noisome reptile or ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... that uncanny apparition that had come and gone so suddenly—that weird strange thing that was so soft-spoken and so gentle of manner and yet had shaken them up like an earthquake with the shock of its gruesome aspect. At last a cold little shudder quivered along down the widow's meager frame and she said in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... comfortable, I thought, for the shadow of doom, which, in my eyes, overlay its cheerful front, wide-open doors and windows. How should I tell my story here! What credence could I expect for a tale so gruesome, within walls warmed by so much sunshine and joy. None, possibly; but my story must be told ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... disaster had taken place, but what had happened on those gruesome sands I could only conjecture until I reached the Boatmen's Rooms. Outside the building I found in groups and knots a crowd of boatmen and pilots, and also Richard Roberts, the coxswain of the ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... the gruesome gallery and went down the stairway with the Olema's torch leaving vague, fantastic wreaths of odorous smoke curling up along the polished, dull-yellow slant of the pyramid. Back on the floor again, the Master ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... beast, but it was late before he had it skinned and dressed. When the carcase was hoisted to the gallows—and it seemed gruesome enough as it hung there in the pallid light of the moon, with the night birds dismally wailing like mourners from the lonely trees—we went ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... dark when I had finished the manuscript. The far corners of the attic were peopled with fantastic shadows, and the spiders in the window were swaying, lazy and full-stomached, in the midst of the day's spoils of gruesome wings and legs. I got up slowly, stiffly, shivering a little. I felt suddenly old and worn and ineffably weary. It is a long, long journey back to our childhood—sometimes, even though one may be ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... a while. He could let it appear that he had not been at the house at all and so had not discovered the crime when he did. That would give Aleck Douglas more time to get away. But there was Jean, due at any moment now. He could not go away and let Jean discover that gruesome thing on the kitchen floor. He could not take it up and hide it away somewhere; he could not do anything, it seemed to ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... fire by flashing sparks with flint and steel, and ate their supper consisting only of pounded parched corn and dried meat. This they shared with Ree, and though he ate heartily he was thinking of other things. Every time he looked across the fire he could see the gruesome scalp at the belt of the chief of the party. Little wonder that he became apprehensive for his safety. It would not do, however, he thought, to let the Indians see that he was worried, and he began to whistle. The savages ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... buzzard flapped 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 turned their ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... nothing but a dream,—a gruesome, haunting dream. With an instinct of wiping out the dreadful memory, I raised my hand wearily to my forehead. As I did so, I became conscious again of how it hurt me. I looked at it. It was covered with half-dried blood, and two straight clean cuts appeared, one across the palm and one across ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Pare describes and pictures a monster, at Rome, on November 3, 1520, with the upper portion of a child apparently about five or six years old, and the lower part and ears of a fish-like animal. He also pictures a sea-devil in the same chapter, together with other gruesome examples of the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... lights and those that illumine the King's Highway! They shine from above, with increasing splendor, while these cast forth, from below, their uncertain lights. It seems to me that the farther we go the darker becomes the way, and its lights the more inconstant,—so fitful is their gruesome glare." ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... chair and watched his tea getting cold. The suggestion of something having happened to Bobby had changed his anger to sharp solicitude. Gruesome tales of brutality toward foreigners in Eastern ports ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... read in some old bound volume at home a very gruesome account of the "Life and Misdeeds of Mr. Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner." The impression that still remained with her was of a man standing in the shadowy hall of just such an hotel as this, and pouring poison into ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... my life has thus far brought me; but I scarce know which to admire most—the patient endurance of the sufferers or the skilled devotion of the army doctors, whose outspoken hatred of war was still more intensified by the gruesome ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... "foursome" some would fain Find nepenthe for their woe; Following through shine or rain Where the "greens" like satin show; But I vote such sport as "slow"— Find it rather glum and gruesome; With a little maid I know I would play ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... far such gruesome topics should be introduced into a book for children, but as a matter of fact the katharsis of pity and terror among the little ones is as effective as among the spectators of a drama, and they ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... gruesome wail came to them, this time louder and clearer, and in a moment or two a hand was at the door. The latch clicked softly, and the door ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... 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
... absolutely to the nursery; and the collection of these even, though fairly ample, is not so full as it might be. We will conclude with a few, each of which forms a puzzle or conundrum—some of them, in all conscience, gruesome enough, and full of terrible mystery—but, individually, well calculated to awaken thought and stir ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... said I had chosen a gruesome house, but not if I had described the forest from which I came, and I was in need of any spot wherein I could rest my mind from ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... creature was to be seen as she made her way eastward, shaping her course for Princes street, and peering, with a gruesome fear of the school-board officer, round every corner. That early bird, however, was not so keenly on the alert as she gave him the credit of being, and she reached her goal unchallenged after coasting along in parallel lines ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... listening open-mouthed. Mrs. Halsey laid down her knitting, and stared at the speaker over the top of her spectacles; while across Betts's gnome-like countenance smiles went out and in, especially at the more gruesome points of the tale. The light sparkled on the young Canadian's belt, the Maple Leaf in the khaki hat which lay across his knees, on the badge of the Forestry Corps on his shoulder. The old English cottage, with its Tudor brick-work, and its overhanging beams, the old English labourers with ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has the true knack of the story-teller, and lovers of the gruesome will find all they want in this collection of ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... first, out. The thousands massed near the entrance and along Taylor's Creek, watched with fevered excitement the return of the brave men who had thus placed their lives in such jeopardy for a cause they, perhaps, felt no interest. Quickly they placed new fuse, lit them, and quickly left the gruesome pit. Scarcely had they reached a place of safety than an explosion like a volcano shook the earth, while the country round about was lit up with a great flash. The earth trembled and swayed—great heaps of earth ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... of the Old.—In the annals of savage life we find many gruesome tales of intentional disposal of the aged. The use of the old grandmother as a target for the training of young boys in the art of slaying one's enemy is an extreme example. The pathetic couple left behind when the tribe migrated, often with a small supply of food saved for them by some pitiful ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... he, and he leaned over the desk, and spoke in a gruesome whisper which made the cold run down our backs, 'that yon paper was your finger, one finger only of your hand, and it burned like that for ever and ever, and think of your hand and your arm and ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... drawback lay in the fact that one sometimes found it objectionable to have to look at these poor old creatures, dragging themselves around. They had nothing to do, it seemed, but to wait and die. One old man was a gruesome sight. He was about ninety years old and spent his days walking about the courtyard, wearing a cigarette tin hung around his neck, into which he used to cough with such terrible effort that it seemed as if he would die every time the spasm shook ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... 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 |
