"Reek" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the yellow dust clouds and the powder smoke and all the horrid reek of war, a child came running with outstretched arms and piteous voice—a frightened child, weeping for the father who had thrown himself headlong into peril to save another's life and who, perhaps, had ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... tone of dismay. 'God guide my gudeman's wits: I never heard such a prayer from human lips before. But, Sandie, my man, Lord's sake, rise. What fearful light is this? Barn and byre and stable maun be in a blaze; and Hawkie, and Hurley, Doddie, and Cherrie, and Damsonplum will be smoored with reek, and ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... himself out of a cave. Sigurd thought it was the image of the most hateful thing in the world, and the light of the smithy fire falling on it, and the smoke of the smithy fire rising round it, made it seem verily a Dragon living in his own element of fire and reek. ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... in the reek of that evil cloud, The Hun swept over the plain; And the murderer's dirk did its monster work, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... times were not gentle. The prelates whom he supposed himself to be addressing were the men who filled our Smithfield with the reek of burning human flesh. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... pussy-cats, brought for sale, Spat at the dogs from the camel-bale; And the tribesmen bellowed to hasten the food; And the camp-fires twinkled by Fort Jumrood; And there fled on the wings of the gathering dusk A savour of camels and carpets and musk, A murmur of voices, a reek of smoke, To tell us the trade of ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... is well named "Woodbine," and others might be called "Rose," "Violet," "Lily." The discerning eye sees the flowers through the mist of steaming tea. We catch the perfume while we choke in the reek of tobacco smoke, damp ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... island of Jamaica and sink it at once. Don't you think certain heads might be found heavy enough for the purpose? No insinuation, I assure you, against the Administration, in spite of the dagger in their right hands. Mr. Atwood seems to me a demi-god of ingratitude! So much for the 'fickle reek of popular breath' to which men have erected their temple of the winds—who would trust a feather to it? I am almost more sorry for poor Lord Grey who is going to ruin us, than for our poor selves who are going to be ruined. You will hear that my 'Prometheus and other Poems' ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... have no need to goad me on much more," he says, and then he seized his weapons, and takes his horse and mounts, and rides to Thorolfsfell. There he saw a great reek of coalsmoke east of the homestead, so he rides thither, and gets off his horse and ties him up, but he goes where the smoke was thickest. Then he sees where the charcoal pit is, and a man stands by it. He saw that he had thrust his ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... dust, of intricate machines, the racing threads of looms, the heavy beat of stamping machinery, the roar and rattle of belt and armature, of ill-lit subterranean aisles of sleeping places, illimitable vistas of pin-point lights. Here was the smell of tanning, and here the reek of a brewery, and here unprecedented reeks. Everywhere were pillars and cross archings of such a massiveness as Graham had never before seen, thick Titans of greasy, shining brickwork crushed beneath the vast weight of that complex ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... ever set eyes on, and the tallest-grown: nor did it relieve my astonishment to note that they wore bonnets and shawls, as if for a journey, and that two or three were smoking long clay pipes. The room, in fact, was thick with tobacco-smoke, through the reek of which my eyes travelled to a disorderly table crowded with glasses and bottles of strong waters, in the midst of which two tallow dips illuminated the fog; and beyond the table to the figure of a man stooping over a couple ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... enjoyment, in the arm of love, Beneath the olive's shadow, The Daneman sat; Whilst wet and steaming wav'd the bloody flag Above the regions of the sunny South. Pure was our heaven,— Pure and blue; For, with his pinions, angel Peace dispell'd All reek and vapour from mild virtue's sphere; Then lower'd Battle's blood-bespatter'd son Upon our coast,— And haggard Envy lent to him her torch, Which sparkled high with hell's sulphureous light, Then fled the genius of ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... a deprecating tone, "I believe you mean to kill us all clar, horses and all. Here we are all just ready to drop down, and the critters all in a reek of sweat. Why, Mas'r won't think of startin' on now till arter dinner. Mas'rs' hoss wants rubben down; see how he splashed hisself; and Jerry limps too; don't think Missis would be willin' to have us start dis yer way, no how. Lord bless you, Mas'r, we can ketch up, if we do stop. Lizy ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... lamentable objects there, In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life: Many a dry drop seem'd a weeping tear, Shed for the slaughter'd husband by the wife: The red blood reek'd, to show the painter's strife; The dying eyes gleam'd forth their ashy lights, Like dying coals burnt out in ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... obliged to procure an elevated plank- floor for the orchestra, and the whole concern so disgusted me that my first impulse was to dismiss the seedy-looking musicians on the spot. My friend Damrosch, who was very much upset, had to promise me that at least he would have the horrible reek of tobacco in the place neutralised. As he could offer no guarantee as to the amount of the receipts, I was only induced in the end to go on with the enterprise by my desire not to compromise him too severely. To my amazement I found almost the entire room, at all events the front ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... I wish you could have a turn at it, my bonny boy! Your hair'd go grey, like mine! And look here—what are the plays to-day? They're either so chock-full of intellect that they send you to sleep—or they reek of sentiment till you yearn for ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... because I had a shrinking horror of all brutal and sordid things, a detestation for anything smacking of vulgarity or bad taste. To me, the subtle beauty of line or colour, the singing music of a phrase, were of more account than the reek of stables or the whooping clamour and excitement of the hunting-field, my joys being rather raptures of the soul than the more material ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... society in the future. The private kitchen will disappear."[970] "Instead of a hundred kitchens and fires and cooks, we shall have one. Instead of a hundred meals to prepare, we shall have one. Instead of a hundred homes being made to reek of unsavoury dishes, or the detestable odour of bad cooking, the offensive effluvia will be confined to one building. Under Socialism domestic duties will be reduced to a minimum."[971] "We set up one great kitchen, one general ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... tell you: This is no place for such companions, Such lousie Gentlemen shall find their business Better i'th' Suburbs, there your strong pitch perfume, Mingled with lees of Ale, shall reek in fashion: ...
— The Scornful Lady • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... about, some inky As coal, some snowy (I ween) as curds; Or rosy as pinks, or as roses pinky— They reek of no eerie ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... see what it is. I snuff, I smoke, I reek of tobaccos. The pretty Miss smells me. She says in her inmost heart—Ach ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... inside the doors of the House of Representatives the rush of foul air staggered him. The reek of vile cigars and stale whiskey, mingled with the odour of perspiring negroes, was overwhelming. He paused ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... across a fox or badger earth, not very recent, which seemed, though I could not be certain, to broaden out inside. I lay down and thrust my head down the hole, and that confirmed me. From up the hole there came the reek of strong ship's tobacco. I had stumbled upon ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... blow home. Yet a fellow-feeling touched me with remorse, as I stood over the senseless body, sprawling prone, and perceived that I had struck an unarmed man. The lantern only had fallen from his hands; it lay on one side, smoking horribly; and a something in the reek caused me to set it up in haste and turn the ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... out in No-man's land with just a small bunch o' mangy cows, an' the grass so scarce I purt' nigh had to get 'em shod—they had to travel so far in makin' a meal. It was hot an' it was dusty an' it was dry—the whole earth seemed to reek. My victuals got moldy an' soft an' sticky, my appetite laid down an' refused to go another peg; 'I was just simply dyin' o' thirst, an' every single drop o' water we came across had a breath like the dyin' ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... soldier leaned back against the rock and drew in the fragrant smoke. It was then that his jangled nerves knew the full virtue of tobacco, the gentle anodyne which stays the failing strength and soothes the worrying brain. He watched the dim blue reek swirling up from him, and he felt the pleasant aromatic bite upon his palate, while a restful languor crept over his weary and harassed body. The three ladies sat together ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of Chinese Chestnut was found in a lot of about 60 trees which the writer sent to Mr. W. R. Reek of the Experiment Station at Ridgetown, Ontario, in 1927. The best tree has made a good growth, and bears large nuts of good quality. Scions of this tree were obtained last spring and grafted onto several Chinese seedlings at the Kellogg Farm. An attempt will ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... the wagons as they neared the emplacements. Peter swung off and led his pony. Infantry was already engaged down in the hollows; the reek of powder began to cut the air at intervals, but the strong wind as often cleansed it away, and the scent of woods came up startlingly, with the warmth of the sun upon the ground—the sweet healing breath of ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... need to goad me on much more," he says, and then he seized his weapons, and takes his horse and mounts, and rides to Thorolfsfell. There he saw a great reek of coal smoke east of the homestead, so he rides thither, and gets off his horse and ties him up, but he goes where the smoke was thickest. Then he sees where the charcoal pit is, and a man stands by it. He saw that he had thrust his spear in the ground ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... reek, like chimneys, with foul smoke, Their neighbors and themselves to nearly choke? Avoid it, ye John Bulls, and eke ye Paddies! Avoid it, sons of Cambria, and Scottish laddies! Let reason convince you that it very sad is, And far too bad is, And enough to make one mad is To be smoked like a red herring ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... or Wash-Horse. The cause of which thinness will easily be granted to be only an exhaustion of Juice, expended out of the Blood, which did stuff out these Vessels. And whoever, that is used to ride hard, shall observe, how thick this foul Horse breaths, and at what a rate he will reek and sweat, will not much wonder at the alteration. But if the Horse be a hardy one, and used to be hard ridden, then you will see, that one days rest, and his belly full of good meat and drink, will in one day or two almost restore him to his former plight, the food being within that short ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... if he would take his kail with the family. In the same usage of the word, the Scottish proverb expresses distress and trouble in a person's affairs, by saying that "he has got his kail through the reek." In like manner haddock, in Kincardineshire and Aberdeenshire, used to express the same idea, as the expression is, "Will ye tak your haddock wi' us the day?" that fish being so plentiful and so excellent that it was a ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... forests, when, amid scenes of revolting horror, Obi and the devils of his kind seemed to reveal themselves to reckless worshippers, surfeited with horror, whose lives counted for naught; when even human sacrifice was an episode, and the reek of old deviltries and recent carnage tainted the air, till even I, who was, at the risk of my life, a privileged spectator who had come through dangers without end to behold the scene, rose and fled ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... annual temperature of Las Canadas is that of N. latitude 53 degrees, Holland and Hanover; in fact, here it is the Pyrenees, and below it Africa. The sun blazed from a desert of blue, and the waving heat-reek rose trembling and quivering from the tawny sides of the foregrounds. The clouds, whose volumes were disposed like the leaves of a camellia, lay far down to the north-east, as if unable to face the fires of day. And now the great trachytic ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... giving out as much smoke as light, I hurriedly shifted my coat for a "jumper" or blouse, put on an old cap, and climbed into the fresh air again. For a double reason, even MY seasoned head was feeling bad with the villainous reek of the place, and I did not want any of those hard-featured officers on deck to have any cause to complain of my "hanging back." On board ship, especially American ships, the first requisite for a sailor who wants to be treated properly is to "show willing," any suspicion of slackness being ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... riding low to the west; he was still sitting in the darkness that comes before dawn, and young Pete had not yet come. Then when even June could not make gracious that dismal hour that brings fog and reek before the first gray streaks the east, the old man heard a voice outside his door and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Shivering Flood goeth out of Shadowy Vale. There when ye have clomb a little may'st thou stand on the edge of the rock-wall, and look down and behold the Flood swirling and eddying in the black gorge of the rocks, and see presently the reek of the force go up, and hear the thunder of the waters as they pour over it: and all this about us now is as the garden of our house—is ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... the other, in mocking triumph—"I knew it the moment you came up the steps there. I could tell it by your walk; by the air with which you carried yourself; by your manner, your voice, your laugh—you fairly reek of prosperity and achievement—you are going ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... others again were silent, if with a silence no less sinister. The rain made incessant crepitation on the roof of the fiacre, and the windows wept without respite. Within the cab a smell of mustiness contended feebly with the sickening reek of a cigar which the man was forever relighting and which as often turned cold between his teeth. Outside, unwearying hoofs were beating their deadly ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... I have guarded my secret well! And who would dream as I speak In a tribal tongue like a rogue unhung, 'mid the ranch-house filth and reek, I could roll to bed with a Latin phrase and rise with a ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... long and drank more than usual, while the elder man's grim and moody spirit lightened a little before his determination and his wine. The reek of past passions, the wreckage of dead things, seemed to be sweeping out of his mind. He forgot the hour and their engagement until the time fixed for that conference was past. Then he looked at his watch, rose from the table, and hurried ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Ye thankless ones!" the Old Year cried; "Have I not given you night and day, Over and over, score upon score, Wherein to live, and love, and pray, And suck the ripe world to its rotten core? Yet do you reek if my reign be done? E're I pass ye crown the newer one! At ball and rout ye dance and shout, Shutting men's cries of suffering out, That startle the white-tressed silences Musing beside the fount of light, In the eternal space, to press Their roses, each a nebula bright, More ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... wood lay between them and the Hall. The great red walls stood so high round the glen that you could not even hear the sea calling. As for the village, it was a long way below. You had to go down a steep path from the glen before you came to an open space, where you could see the reek of the chimneys under you. Every morning Margret brought the eggs and the trussed chickens to the Hall. But no one disturbed her solitude, except when the deer, or the wild little red cattle came gazing curiously through the netting at Margret and her charges. There, for twenty-seven years, ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... panting. "No wonder they smoked so much in Leipsic. Even so they couldn't keep the reek out of the staircases. Still, it's a great country is Germany. Our house does a ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... sprouting hair upon his face took wreak * For lovers' vengeance, all did vainly seek. I see not on his face a sign fuli- * genous, except his curls are hue of reek. If so his paper[FN247] mostly be begrimed * Where deemest thou the reed shall draw a streak? If any raise him other fairs above, * This only proves the judge ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Mott; but I didn't come here to be feasted on horrors. I can get quite enough of them in the newspapers at home, and it isn't good for you and Zelphine either. You both look quite pale; let us leave these rooms that reek with blood and crime and find something more cheerful to ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... down the cliff, it touched the drifted masses at its base and incontinently came striding with seven-leagued boots towards us. The distant cliff seemed to shift and quiver, and at the touch of the dawn a reek of gray vapour poured upward from the crater floor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of gray, thicker and broader and denser, until at last the whole westward plain was steaming like a wet handkerchief held before the fire, and the westward cliffs were no ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... become a heroic figure in the world to-day and has saved lives by hundreds of thousands in every quarter of the globe; she has labored under fire on the battlefield and in the reek of pestilence in the rear; her form is as familiar in war as that of the soldier, and her name betokens every charity and kindness—but of all the heroic women who ever bore their healing art into the dark places ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... look tragic when their bricks reek of tragedy? Why is industrial misery the only form in which the cry of the oppressed is allowed to take visible shape and to make the reputation of Realist artists? In Uskub is concentrated the whole problem of the Balkans ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... McPherson, who had evidently paid many a visit there before. Pushing open a swinging door, he made his way into the crowded bar, where the reek of bad spirits and the smell of squalid humanity seemed to Tom to be even more horrible than the effluvium of ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... science and art; here human life was to reach its intensest, most breathless, relentless and insatiable expression; here was to stand a city whose arms should reach westward over a continent, and eastward round the world; here were to thunder the streets and tower the buildings and reek the chimneys and arch the bridges and rumble the railways and throb the electric wires of American New York, the supreme product of Nineteenth Century civilization, radiant with the virtues and grimy with the failings that mankind has up to this ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the horror of the rower's bench? to sit day in day out, night in night out, chained naked to the oar, amid the reek and stench of your fellows in misfortune, unkempt, unwashed save by the rain, broiled and roasted by the sun, festering with sores, lashed and cut and scarred by the boatswain's whip as you faint under the ceaseless, endless, ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... so weary and weak. My hands are a-quiver and so is my heart, And my eyes are too tired for the tear-drops to start, And the worn horses reek With the anguishing pull and the hot, heavy harness's smart, While I am ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... chill through you as you breathe it; it has a stuffy, musty, and rancid quality; it permeates your clothing; after-dinner scents seem to be mingled in it with smells from the kitchen and scullery and the reek of a hospital. It might be possible to describe it if some one should discover a process by which to distil from the atmosphere all the nauseating elements with which it is charged by the catarrhal exhalations ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... sins against confiding innocence which cry for vengeance, as did Valentine against Faust, and which strengthen the hate of social classes and make mothers and sisters seem tedious because low ideas of womanhood have been implanted, and which give a taste for mucky authors that reek with suggestiveness; and to avoid the waste of nerve substance and nerve weakness in ways which Ibsen and Tolstoi have described. These things are the darkest blot ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... as he sat with Hagthorpe and Wolverstone over a pipe and a bottle of rum in the stifling reek of tar and stale tobacco of a waterside tavern, he was accosted by a splendid ruffian in a gold-laced coat of dark-blue satin with a crimson sash, a ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... bird insisting, as women will, that the beautiful traditions of the spot made it, for home building, peculiarly desirable. It was a well known fact, said she, that brown birds had builded there for no one knows how many ages. Even in the far away city, the man felt the season in the air. The reek of city odors could not altogether drown the subtle perfume that betrayed the near presence of the spring. As though the magic of the budding, sprouting, starting, time of the year placed him under its spell, the man went back to the springtime of ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... unadulterated—spirits of evil rose like horrid fumes from the pit, and maddened the human spirits overhead. These, descending to the foundation-den, soaked themselves in the material spirit and carried it up, until the whole tenement seemed to reek and reel under ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... cold sweat melted from their limbs, Ne rot, ne reek did they; The look with which they look'd on ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... heat-wearied eyes for another whelming the blood-soaked, sudden flood that was to burst the dam of servitude and rid India of her latest horde of conquerors. But eight hundred yards from where her high brick walls lifted their age-scars in the stifling reek, gun-chains jingled in a courtyard, and, sharp-clicking on age-old flagstones, rose the ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... poisoned and shoulders bowed, In the smothering reek of mill and mine; And death stalks in on the struggling crowd— But he shuns the shadow of oak ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... fir-apples were shown under the strings of dry tomatoes which festooned the doorways; and the only shops which were at all attractive were those of the pork butchers with their salted provisions and their cheese, whose pungent smell slightly attenuated the pestilential reek of the gutters. Lottery offices, displaying lists of winning numbers, alternated with wine-shops, of which latter there was a fresh one every thirty yards with large inscriptions setting forth that the best wines of Genzano, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... she kissed him, ere she turned about again, And a little while was Signy beheld of the eyes of men; And as she crossed the threshold day brightened at her back, Nor once did she turn her earthward from the reek and the whirling wrack, But fair in the fashion of Queens passed on to the heart ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... mantle of the snow. Great wreaths formed in the first swirl of the storms had piled themselves up so as to overhang the low chimney. You might pass it a score of times, and if you missed the faint blue reek stealing up along the side of the precipitous Knock Hill, you would see nothing of it, nor so much as suspect that there was a habitation of living men ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... therefore not be regarded as a chronicler who revels in scandals, although his pages reek with them; but as the true mirror of the Valois court ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the commerce thus ordained; And not a reek ascends the rock, And not a drift of dew is rained, But eyrie-brood and tended flock By the sweet gift ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... hundreds! All those faces seem as one face, with fear. Not a than mounts the ladder. Yes, there,—gallant fellow! God inspires, God shall speed thee! How plainly I see him! his eyes are closed, his teeth set. The serpent leaps up, the forked tongue darts upon him, and the reek of the breath wraps him round. The crowd has ebbed back like a sea, and the smoke rushes over them all. Ha! what dim forms are those on the ladder? Near and nearer,—crash come the roof-tiles! Alas and ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... business of his. The people here refuse to believe evil of a man who drinks water, goes to church, and catches horse- thieves. I'll add one word more. To give the old fraud his due, he really holds in abhorrence any crime that might land him in the State penitentiary. Hullo! There's a faint reek out yonder. I'll take a ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... they passed into the room where their suppers were prepared, Mr. Hoopdriver caught a glimpse through a door ajar and floating in a reek of smoke, of three and a half faces—for the edge of the door cut one down—and an American cloth-covered table with several glasses and a tankard. And he also heard a remark. In the second before he heard that remark, Mr. Hoopdriver had been a proud and happy ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... in a reek from every pore; but the icy revulsion came quickly. As I drew up my knees to get a better purchase on the sill, heaven's torch was suddenly lit up, the closet became a pit of dazzling whiteness amid which I saw the blot of that dead ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... overnight, and it gave forth a scent of smouldering ash which, whenever and wherever I have encountered it, has not failed to bring back the scene in which I smelt it first. There is an odour less easy to define, but just as easy to recognise, in the air of the morning street; in the reek of horse and harness going up Snow Hill; in a mingling of wet rot and dry rot in the station; in the acrid, faintly-tinctured coffee smell at Oxford; in the scent of a London fog, or the fragrance of a London egg—any one of which will infallibly take me back to the scene and the time at which ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... savage ally. A huge driving-wheel and a shaft half-filled with rubbish showed the position of an abandoned mine. Beside it were the crumbling remains of the cottages of the miners, driven away no doubt by the foul reek of the surrounding swamp. In one of these a staple and chain with a quantity of gnawed bones showed where the animal had been confined. A skeleton with a tangle of brown hair adhering to ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... were ranged round the room in various attitudes of repose. All were smoking heavily. On the top of the stove stood a tin billy full to the brim of steaming coffee, the scent of which, blending with the reek of strong tobacco, ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... and bleeding feet, To wander over the deserted places Where once thy princely palaces arose, And 'mid the weeds and wild-flowers mark the traces, Where the ground, yawning in its earthquake throes, The ark of covenant and the cherubim Received, lest stranger hands, that reek'd the while With blood of thine own children, should defile Its heaven-resplendent glory, and bedim: And my dishevell'd locks, in my despair, All madly should I tear; And as I cursed the day that dawn'd in ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... in her heart ... poor heart!... but one day the presence would be exercised, and the room swept and garnished.... Some day she would marry him, and he would bring her home to Ulster.... And who better than she could understand the springy heather and the blue smoke-reek, the crickets of the evening and the curlew's call? And in the house where his mother was cold and arrogant, would be a warm and gracious ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... such morn as mocks despair; And she that bore the promise of the world Within her sides, now hopeless, helmless, bare, At random o'er the wildering waters hurled; The reek of battle drifting slow a-lee ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... by curates and teachers, awaited the party from the vicarage. The thick and darkened sunshine of Bludston flooded the asphalt of the yard, which sent up a reek of heat, causing curates to fan themselves with their black straw hats, and little boys in clean collars to wriggle in sticky discomfort, while in the still air above the ignoble town hung the heavy pall of smoke. Presently there was the sound of wheels and the sight of the head of the vicar's ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... their shoulders great battle-axes. Then said Gillomar the king a thing very strange:—"Here cometh Uther, Aurelie's brother; he will ask my peace, and not fight with me. The foremost are his swains; march we against them; ye need never reek, though ye slay the wretches! For if Uther, Constantine's son, will here become my man, and give to Pascent his father's realm, I will him grant peace, and let him live, and in fair bonds lead him to my land." The king spake thus, ...
— Brut • Layamon
... husband, "is approaching the obscene. I dine off tepid wash and raw fish, I am tormented by the production of a once luscious fillet deliberately rendered unfit for human consumption, and I am deprived of my now ravening appetite by the nauseating reek from the shock of whose assault I am still trying to rally my olfactory nerves. All this I endure with ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... thunder god staggers and falls dead. Fenris swallows Odin, but is instantly rent in twain by Vidar, the strong silent one, Odin's dumb son, who well avenges his father on the wolf by splitting the jaws that devoured him. Then Surtur slings fire abroad, and the reek rises around all things. Iggdrasill, the great Ash Tree of Existence, totters, but stands. All below perishes. Finally, the unnamable Mighty One appears, to judge the good and the bad. The former hie from fading Valhalla ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... canna thole my ain toun, Sin' I hae dwelt i' this; To hide in Edinboro' reek, Wad be the tap o' bliss. Yon bonnie plaid aboot me hap, The skirlin' pipes gae bring, With thistles fair tie up my hair, While I ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... fearsome yell, and dumb for ever. The feet ran up again, but fewer. I heard them hack with their swords a little way up at the mill's wooden sides; but they had no time to hew their way out: the fire and reek were at their heels, and the smoke burst out at every loophole, and oozed blue in the moonlight through each crevice. I hobbled back, racked with pain and fury. There were white faces up at my window. They saw me. They cursed me. I cursed them back and shook my naked sword: 'Come ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... to feu her interest of that Earldome. Sir John, hearing of their coming to his house of Killin, he caused his servants put on a great fyre of ffresh arn wood newly cutt, which when they came in (sitting on great jests of wood which he caused sett there a purpose) made such a reek that they were almost blinded, and were it not the night was so ill they would rather goe than byde it. They had not long sitten when his servants came in with a great bull, which presently they brained ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... the sun; In ocean earth sinks; From the skies are cast The sparkling stars; Fire-reek rageth Around Time's nurse, And flickering flames With ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... near the size of the moon, but blinding white to look at, and hot; and a breath of hot wind blew now with its rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and down the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through a driving reek of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hail unprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods. And upon all the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that night, and all the rivers ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... approached the forecastle. Presently he saw a tiny point of light flare up and die away. Then he caught the spicy aroma of a native cigarette in the soft air charged with the acrid smell of new hemp, the resinous odour of the deck seams, the sweet reek of opium smoked by forgotten crews and the earthy flavour of the jungles close ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... melted from their limbs, Nor rot nor reek did they: The look with which they looked on me Had never ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... "Tell us the most remarkable thing that thou hast ever seen." Answered he: "I hear and obey, O Commander of the Faithful. Know that I rode out one day, a-pleasuring, and my ride brought me to a place where I smelt the reek of food. So my soul longed for it and I halted, O Prince of True Believers, perplexed and unable either to go on or to go in. Presently, I raised my eyes and lo! I espied a lattice-window and behind it a wrist, than which ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... an old fiend, and then began to cut up another pipe of tobacco in the palm of her hand like a man. She smoked negro head, and the reek of it came out through the keyhole to me. But the younger woman was evidently impatient, for she rose ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... and I think it was that, added to the description of her blindness, which stirred my memory within me. I closed my eyes for a second and it all came back to me, the gun stuck in the mud, the men straining at the wheels, the shells bursting, the reek of high explosive, the two leaders lying dead on the road, and, above all, two gallant horses doing the work of four and pulling till you'd think their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... in a horrible, deadly, playful fashion over the veld, as though looking for dishonest folks to shrivel. One terrible flash struck the wheel-oxen, a thin double tongue of blue flame sped flickering from ridge to ridge of the six gaunt backs ... there was a smell of burning hair—a reek of sulphur. The team lay outstretched dead on the veld, the heavy yoke across their patient necks, the long horns curving, the thin starved bodies already beginning to bloat and swell in the swift decomposition that follows death by ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... scanning them. They rush elate to stern debate, the battle call has never Found tardy cheer or craven fear, or grudge the prey to sever. Ah, fell their wrath! The dance[123] of death sends legs and arms a flying, And thick the life blood's reek ascends of the downfallen and the dying. Clandonuil, still my darling theme, is the prime of every clan, How oft the heady war in, has it chased where thousands ran. O ready, bold, and venom full, these native warriors brave, Like adders coiling on the hill, they dart with stinging glaive; ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... were registered they were hurried out of their uniforms and into the bathroom. At the door two nurses in white—so calm and clean and strong that they must have seemed like goddesses, in that reek of steam and disinfectants and festering wounds—received them, asked each man how he was wounded, and quickly, as if he were a child, snipped off his bandages, unless the leg or arm were in a cast, and turned him over to the orderlies. Those who ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... preached to thee the tidings of salvation, though I knew for sure that, if this came to his knowledge, he would, were that possible, put me to a thousand deaths. But I, honouring the word of God afore all things, and longing to win it, dread not temporal death, nor reek on it at all worthy of such an appellation, in obedience to my Lord's command, which saith, 'Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... Flashlights picked out the trawler. It had driven with force right up on the reef, ripping out the bottom and dumping thousands of dead menhaden into the water. They lay in clusters around the wreck, floating on the water in silvery shoals. The air was heavy with the reek of fish and ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... But, unless the lad marries in his own rank, I'll change my will. It's in the hidie hole at Kirkburn, that Logan built to keep King Jamie in, when he caught him. But the fool Ruthvens marred that job, and got their kail through the reek. I'm wandering.' He helped himself to another dram, and went on, 'Ye see what I want, ye must ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... Lord. Now, Mr. MEREDITH, will you be kind enough to explain the following passage from a book with which you may perhaps be acquainted. (Reads.) "This he can promise to his points. As for otherwhere than at the festive, Commerce invoked is a Goddess that will have the reek of those boards to fill her nostrils, and poet and alderman alike may be dedicate to the sublime, she leads them, after two sniffs of an idea concerning her, for the dive into the turtle-tureen. Heels up they go, poet first—a plummet he!" Is that ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... (to avow the truth) in jealous mood Alone I came, alone with thee to fight; Because I grudged that king so puissant shou'd Exist on earth, save he observed my rite. Hence reek they ravaged fields with Christian blood; And yet with greater rancour and despite, Like cruel foe, I purposed to offend, But that it chanced, one ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... himself, as he stood slapping the dust from hunting-shirt and leggings and smoothing the fringe. And, "Damme, Loskiel," he said, "we're like to cut a most contemptible figure among such grand folk—what with our leather breeches, and saddle-reek for the only musk we wear. Lord! But yonder stands a handsome girl—and my condition mortifies me so that I could slink off to the mews for shame and lie on straw with ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... N. gaseity^; vaporousness &c adj.; flatulence, flatulency; volatility; aeration, aerification. elastic fluid, gas, air, vapor, ether, steam, essence, fume, reek, effluvium, flatus; cloud &c 353; ammonia, ammoniacal gas^; volatile alkali; vacuum, partial vacuum. [Science of elastic fluids] pneumatics, pneumatostatics^; aerostatics^, aerodynamics. gasmeter^, gasometer^; air bladder, swimming bladder, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... had been a hospital since the beginning of the war. A heavy smell of ether and iodoform lay about it, mixed with the smell of the war. This effluvia of an army, mixed with the sharper reek of anaesthetics, was the atmosphere of the hospital. The great rush of wounded had begun. Every few minutes the ambulances slopped down a miry byway, and turned in the gates; tired, putty-faced hospital attendants took out the stretchers and the nouveaux clients; mussy bundles of blue rags ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... the crossing swords played round her, the glitter of the lances dazzled her eyes, the reek of smoke and of carnage was round her; but she dashed down into the heart of the conflict as gayly as though she rode at a review—laughing, shouting, waving the torn colors that she grasped, with her ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... hopelessness began to grow upon her. Now this way, now that, she urged her horse. How far could Barney hear her calling? How far could he wander? How far would she ride? There were forty miles in length and fifteen in width of this reek of wind-driven alkali. God keep them if ever they got more than two miles away ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... talked. They were not fools, they were merely old. And, naturally, their guts a-reek with pavement offal, they talked of bloody revolution. They talked as anarchists, fanatics, and madmen would talk. And who shall blame them? In spite of my three good meals that day, and the snug bed I could ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... in his town beleaguered, Past the fortressed Ghibelline, Through lands that reek with slaughter, Treason, ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... distinctive of sailors. As he came slouching across the lawn I heard Mr. Trevor make a sort of hiccoughing noise in his throat, and jumping out of his chair, he ran into the house. He was back in a moment, and I smelt a strong reek of brandy ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the breakers and struck deep through the green waves beyond, showing up the purple patches where the beds of seaweed are lying. Such a morning as that, with the wind in his hair, and the spray on his lips, and the cry of the eddying gulls in his ear, may send a man back braced afresh to the reek of a sick-room, and the dead, ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of innocent, lamb-like, confiding virtue. In such a world there should be no guile—but there is a great deal of it notwithstanding. Indeed, at no other season is there so much. This is the moment when the two whited sepulchres at either end of the Avenue reek with the thick atmosphere of bargain and sale. The old is going; the new is coming. Wealth, office, power are at auction. Who bids highest? who hates with most venom? who intrigues with most skill? who has done the dirtiest, the meanest, the darkest, and the most, political work? ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... stones were dislodged and fell with a rattle in the stillness of the night; he bore away to the left. A moment later there was Something nearly at his left elbow, and he smelt again the nameless, f[oe]tid reek. He doubled, and the ghastly truth flashed upon him. The Thing was playing with him! He was being hunted for sport—the sport of a horror unthinkable. The sweat ran down into ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... towards Dudley Town, appeared spots of lurid glow. But on the scarred and barren plain which extends to Birmingham there had settled so thick an obscurity, vapours from above blending with earthly reek, that all tile beacons of fiery toil ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... with strange cries, And Sphinx-like shapes about the ruined lands, And the red reek of parricidal hands And intermixture of incestuous eyes, And light as of that self-divided flame Which made an ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... kye rowte at the stake An' pownies reek in pleugh or braik, This hour on e'enin's edge I take, To own I'm debtor To honest-hearted, auld Lapraik, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... my eyes had been so busy recording impressions that my nose had neglected its duty; now for the first time I sensed the vile reek that arose from all about me. The place was one big, horrid stink. It smelled of ether and iodoform and carbolic acid—there being any number of improvised hospitals, full of wounded, in sight; it smelled of sour beef bones and stale bread and moldy hay and fresh horse dung; it smelled ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... the other. No reek of alcohol met his nostrils, as with the boatswain, but, none the less Little Billy's cryptic jargon confirmed his suspicions. Also drunk, he reflected. The revered and gentle old mate of the brig Cohasset ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... know if you are a Barbey d'Aurevilly-an. I am. I have a great delight in his Norman stories. Do you know the Chevalier des Touches and L'Ensorcelee? They are admirable, they reek of the soil and the past. But I was rather thinking just now of Le Rideau Cramoisi, and its adorable setting of the stopped coach, the dark street, the home-going in the inn yard, and the red blind illuminated. Without doubt, there was an identity of sensation; one of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... naught of it, Mopo?" said the king. And again he looked at me terribly through the reek of the fire. "Thou knowest naught of it, Mopo? Surely thou art a-cold; thy hands shake with cold. Nay, man, fear not—warm them, warm them, Mopo. See, now, plunge that hand of thine into the heart of the flame!" And he pointed with his little assegai, the assegai handled ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... mixing paint. Wilbur was conscious that he still wore his high hat and long coat, but his stick was gone and one gray glove was slit to the button. In front of him towered the enormous red-faced man. A pungent reek of some kind of rancid fat or oil assailed his nostrils. Over by Alcatraz a ferry-boat whistled for its slip as it elbowed its ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... about half-a-mile across the top, and its rocky sides glowed everywhere with the glare of the subterranean fires. A reek of sulphurous fumes filled the air and made the adventurers feel dizzy. They, therefore, worked round on the windward side of the crater, and after that ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... vision of the latter days of one of the less happily situated lines. Along a weedy embankment there pants and clangs a patched and tarnished engine, its paint blistered, its parts leprously dull. It is driven by an aged and sweated driver, and the burning garbage of its furnace distils a choking reek into the air. A huge train of urban dust trucks bangs and clatters behind it, en route to that sequestered dumping ground where rubbish is burnt to some industrial end. But that is a lapse into the merely ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... cries Mr. Tawnish, in a horrified tone, "in the tap of an inn, with a—pink my immortal soul!—a sanded floor, and the very air nauseous with the reek of filthy tobacco? No, no, Sir John, indeed, keep to horses and dogs, I beg of you; 'tis a subject more in ...
— The Honourable Mr. Tawnish • Jeffery Farnol |
