"Stench" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... during the hunt for a room, brightened considerably. Pipe in mouth I made some alterations in the disposition of my furniture, placing the little table nearer to the window, and shifting the bed to give me a glimpse of sky when I should be occupying it. The oil-stove made a regrettable stench I found, and the lamp appeared to suffer from some nervous affection which made its flame jump spasmodically at intervals. The mattress on my bed was extraordinarily diversified in contour by little mountain ranges, kopjes which could ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... my proud beauty, the effervescence of hayseed is less noxious than the stench odors inhaled from dissipation and vice, notwithstanding the fact that they are perfumed over with all the garish compliments and conventional ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... the breath of a toad! The very saints could not be revivified from such a poison, much less our poor selves, sir, who strive a lifetime constructing character for those damned polluters to blight with their graveyard whisperings! I detest it, sir! The stench of it is repulsive to honest men and gentle women! But come," he added more genially, "before ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... wise and mighty, and Karma is a fool to us; we are the children of MODERN CIVILIZATION; what have Nature and its laws to do with us? Our inventions and discoveries have certainly put them out of commission.—And sure enough, the mere foulness of the battlefield, the stench of decay, bred no pest; our Science had circumvented the old methods through which Natural Law (which is only another way of saying Karma) worked; we had cut the physical links, and blocked the material channels through which wrong-doing flowed into its own punishment.—Whereupon ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... fleas I have ever seen; these fleas are as large as ordinary mosquitos, they breed in the mine and are carried up on the men's clothes. Often these pests were so bad that the men lay out in the yard at night instead of going to bed—anyway, in the hot weather the stench from ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... impossible to clear away the ruins or to bury the dead. Soon the stench from the corpses became intolerable. Epidemics raged and caused innumerable deaths, while they also rendered the survivors feeble and listless. Famine carried off almost all who were left. A hundred and one days after the first outrage, whilst six army corps with field ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... description, but ought to apply itself to all men who have wants, they are not deprived of a due and anxious sensation of pity to the distresses of the miserable great. They are not repelled, through a fastidious delicacy, at the stench of their arrogance and presumption, from a medicinal attention to their mental blotches and running sores. They are sensible that religious instruction is of more consequence to them than to any others: from the greatness of the temptation to which they are exposed; from the important ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... illusions, turned to them, he found that they had changed places with him. The death of their son had produced on them the opposite effect. And now they were awkwardly taking part in the conflict, as if to replace their lost boy. They snuffed up eagerly all the stench in the papers, and Clerambault found them actually rejoicing, in their misery, over the assertion that the United States was prepared to fight ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... six to ten rotten birds' eggs, and the glands taken from a female fox—all thoroughly mixed in a jar and then buried underground to rot it, as well as for safe keeping. The reason for such a concoction is that the cold in winter does not affect the stench of asafoetida; aniseed forms a strong attraction for many kinds of animals; foxes are fond of eggs; and no stronger lure exists for an animal than the smell of the female gland. So powerful is the fetor of this "mixed bait," and so delicious is the merest whiff ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... ever be willing (Rufus!) her tender thigh under thyself to bestow, Not an thou tempt her full by bribes of the rarest garments, Or by the dear delights gems the pellucidest deal. Harms thee an ugly tale wherein of thee is recorded 5 Horrible stench of the goat under thine arm-pits be lodged. All are in dread thereof; nor wonder this, for 'tis evil Beastie, nor damsel fair ever thereto shall succumb. So do thou either kill that cruel pest o' their noses, Or at their reason of flight blatantly ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... it is! Yet our lantern has not gone out. But it seems to grow darker and darker. And at night, when all is shut up, how one smells the odour of the oils in which the shrouds are saturated, and, more intolerable still, the sickly stealthy stench, almost, of all these dead ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... other some divers kinds of spiceries,[7] which they set often to their noses, accounting it an excellent thing to fortify the brain with such odours, more by token that the air seemed all heavy and attainted with the stench of the dead bodies and that of the sick ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... from the mother country, or die in the attempt. He seemed to feel that the whole responsibility of the struggle rested on him. Always ready to obey orders from superior officers cheerfully, and never wanting in energy to execute them. The deep snows of Quebec had not cooled his ardor. The fetid stench of an English prison ship could not abate his love of liberty and country. The blood and carnage of Saratoga and of Monmouth had given him confidence. The blood-stained soil of Valley Forge had inured him to hardships to which ...
— Reminiscences of the Military Life and Sufferings of Col. Timothy Bigelow, Commander of the Fifteenth Regiment of the Massachusetts Line in the Continental Army, during the War of the Revolution • Charles Hersey
... fury that shook the feartortured people of Europe, helpless in the nightmareridden days, dreaming through twitching nights of an escape geographically nonexistent. Dismembered corpses in the streets, arenas packed with dead bodies, fallow fields newly fertilized with human blood added their stench to that of an unwashed, disease riddled continent. A rumor was circulated that there were still Jews alive and those who but yesterday had sought each other in mortal combat now happily united to hunt down a common prey. And sure enough, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... out for his post, and in the next winter tried to follow the roving hordes of Tadoussac to their frozen hunting-grounds. He was not robust, and his eyes were weak. Lodged in a hut of birch bark, full of abominations, dogs, fleas, stench, and all uncleanness, he succumbed at length to the smoke, which had wellnigh blinded him, forcing him to remain for several days with his eyes closed. After debating within himself whether God required of him the sacrifice ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... agony, keeping alive faint hope that hell must have an end. Dawn broke sweet and calm. For it makes no matter if a nation writhes in agony, or man wreaks hate on man, the wind and the sky still whisper and smile; and the scent of wild flowers is not canceled by the stench ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... to the trees, to a broomstick, to the parish bull. As yet, however, he was only entering the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing were in his ears. His way ran through stench and fire, close to the mouth of the bottomless pit. He began to be haunted by a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin, and by a morbid longing to commit it. But the most frightful of all the forms which his disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and especially to ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... mignonette roused with the dust of letters half a century old, and eyes too dim and watery to show the glaze of tears turn backward fifty years upon the mignonette-bowered scene of love's young dream. A steel drawing-room car rolling through the clean and heavy stench of cow pasture, and a steady-eyed, white-haired capitalist, rolling on his rolling-stock, leans back against the upholstery and gazes with eyes tight closed upon a steady-eyed, brown-haired youngster herding in at ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... therefore, I determined to ask to be taken on board the ship when she arrived. By the first of August, we finished curing all our hides, stored them away, cleaned out our vats, (in which latter work we spent two days, up to our knees in mud and the sediments of six months' hide-curing, in a stench which would drive a donkey from his breakfast,) and got in readiness for the arrival of the ship, and had another leisure interval of three or four weeks; which I spent, as usual, in reading, writing, studying, making and mending my clothes, and getting ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,— The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? Do you remember the rats; and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,— And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... half-decayed turnip stuck upon a mop-stick. Let the reader only imagine to himself a figure of this sort, constantly opening the slit that I have above described, and vomiting forth at once, from a fetid carcase, the most disgusting sound and stench, and then he will have some faint idea of the scene exhibited by this animal of a Customhouse officer. After being admonished twice to be peaceable, and not attending to it, he and his satellites were handed out of the crowd, and banished from the scene of action, amidst the cheers of the ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... I feel his foetid breath: The thick air reeks with the stench of death; My will is Thine. Thy will be done On Turk ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... chief to save; But ah! his reckless generous ire Served but to share his grave! 'Mid blazing beams and scalding streams, Through fire and smoke he dauntless broke, Where Muggins broke before. But sulphury stench and boiling drench Destroying sight o'erwhelmed him quite, He sunk to rise no more. Still o'er his head, while Fate he braved, His whizzing water-pipe he waved; "Whitford and Mitford, ply your pumps, You, Clutterbuck, come, stir your ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... with you, you will know architecture from the ground up. You will know its virtuous reality and you will know the fake and the fraud and the humbug. I will spare nothing—for your sake. I will stir up the cesspool to its utmost depths of stench, and also the pious, hypocritical virtues of our so-called architecture—the nice, good, mealy-mouthed, suave, dexterous, diplomatic architecture, I will show you also the kind of architecture our "cultured" people believe ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... nor any light but what comes over the door, or through a hole of about eight inches square. It is neither paved nor boarded; and the rough bricks appear both on the sides and top, being neither wainscotted nor plastered; what adds to the dampness and stench of the place, is its being built over the common sewer, and adjoining to the sink and dunghill where all the nastiness of the prison is cast. In this miserable place the poor wretch was kept by the ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... I discovered by the aid of the little light that came from above the nature of this subterranean place, it seemed an endless cavern, and might be about fifty fathom deep. I was annoyed by an insufferable stench proceeding from the multitude of bodies which I saw on the right and left; nay, I fancied that I heard some of them sigh out their last. However, when I got down, I immediately left my coffin, and getting at a distance from the bodies, held my nose, and lay down upon the ground, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... laid by th' heels. Never durst a Muse before Enter that infernal door; Clio, stifled with the smell, Into spleen and vapours fell, By the Stygian steams that flew From the dire infectious crew. Not the stench of Lake Avernus Could have more offended her nose; Had she flown but o'er the top, She had felt her pinions drop. And by exhalations dire, Though a goddess, must expire. In a fright she crept away, Bravely I resolved to stay. ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... place was the stench of decaying horses. About twenty yards down the hill the horses belonging to a whole Battery had been struck by a shell. About a dozen of them lay dead where they had been standing. The story had been told of how one of the ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... uttering low, deep, and piteous moans, that told of the great sufferings, or a life passing away. The main hall of the deserted farm house, as well as the rooms, were filled to overflowing with those most seriously wounded. The stifling stench of blood was sickening in the extreme. The front and back yards, the fence corners, and even the out-buildings were filled with the dead and dying. Surgeons and their assistants were hurrying to and fro, relieving ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... filled the market-place, had resembled some darkly-traced picture placed against the opening. In the middle of the square still smoked, in a heavy volume of cloud, the last gleaming ashes of a lately blazing pile, still filling the air with a noisome stench. The night was closing darkly in, and one human being alone seemed yet to linger in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... captivity, under the law of sin, which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death!" He referred to the ancient custom of binding a murderer face to face with the dead body of his victim, until suffocated by its stench ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... effect: 'Find out what you can without damaging the specimen; when I think that you have done the work I will question you.' In the course of an hour I thought I had compassed that fish; it was rather an unsavory object, giving forth the stench of old alcohol, then loathsome to me, though in time I came to like it. Many of the scales were loosened so that they fell off. It appeared to me to be a case for a summary report, which I was anxious to make and get on to the next stage of the business. But Agassiz, though always ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... green is vanished; the whole surface of Hyde Park is dry, crumbling sand (Arabia Arenosa), not a vestige or hint of grass ever having grown there; booths and drinking-places go all round it, for a mile and a half, I am confident,—I might say two miles in circuit; the stench of liquors, bad tobacco, dirty people and provisions, conquers the air, and we are all stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park [2]. Order after order has been issued by Lord Sidmouth in the name of the Regent (acting in behalf of his royal father) ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... carefully received him; and then, leaping back again on board himself, the whale-boat was scuttled by a plank being knocked out of her bottom and cut adrift, to sink with her mortal freight into the common grave of those who die on the deep, the stench from the remains being horrible and permeating the whole ship while the boat was in ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... or other, the interview was arranged. 'Little James' found his desire fulfilled at last. When he passed into the stifling, crowded prison den, where human beings were herded together like beasts, he never heeded the horrible stench or the crawling vermin that abounded everywhere. Rather, he felt as if he were entering the palace of a king. He paid no attention to the crowd of savage figures all around him. He saw nothing, knew ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... amid the stifling stench and babel of the caravansary, secluded by the very denseness of the many-minded swarm, five other Rajputs and Mahommed Gunga—all six, according to their turbans, followers of Islam—discussed matters that appeared to bring them ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... unendurable to himself, and to those who were about him, because of the stench of ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... of the paths were covered ankle deep with filth of all kinds, and when the sun shone warm and bright, the stench was too horrible to be described ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... the sun shining on the deck above them, the never-ceasing fire of the kitchen, which was situated alongside their place of confinement, created such a stifling heat, that the prisoners had to take off their shirts to relieve their agony. The horrid stench arising from so many persons being crowded together, and the entire want of the means of cleanliness, caused the inmates to become covered with vermin. They were also tormented by the intolerable thirst which no means were taken to allay. Their feeding was horrible; for ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... smoke. And they sat down there, and after a while Finn said: "It is a wonder such a beautiful house to be here." "There is a greater wonder than that," said Goll; "that fire that was so pleasant when we came in is giving out now the worst stench in the world." "There is a greater wonder than that," said Glas; "the walls that were of all colours are now but rough boards joined together." "There is a greater wonder than that," said Fiacha; "where there were seven high doors to the house there ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... been chained by wounds to a hospital cot until his canvas tent seems like a dungeon cell, until the groans of those who lie about tortured with probe and knife are piled up, a weight of horror on his ears that he cannot throw off, cannot forget, and until the stench of festering wounds and anaesthetic drugs has filled the air with its loathsome burthen,—when he at last goes out into the open field, what a world he sees! How beautiful the sky, how bright the sunshine, what "floods of delirious music" pour from the throats of birds, how sweet the fragrance ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... they could say, go they did, and we behind them, to a black flood of great magnitude, and through it they went, and we across it, my companion holding the celestial water continually to my nostrils, to strengthen me against the stench of the river, and against the time when I should see some of the inhabitants of the place, for hitherto I had not beheld so much as one devil, though I had heard the voices of many. "Pray, my lord," said I, "what is the name of ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... provision for me in the waters; let me leave this craft.' And she still answereth me, 'Allah is bountiful: good will presently betide thee.' Is this dead ass the good whereof she speaketh?" And he grieved with the sorest grief. Then he turned to another place, so he might remove from the stench of the dead donkey, and cast his net there and waited a full hour: then he drew it in and found it heavy. Thereupon quoth he, "Good; we are hauling up all the dead donkeys in the sea and ridding it of its rubbish.[FN241]" However he gave not over tugging at the net, till blood came from the palms ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... thing which had come to the side of the boat in the dawn-gloom, before we discovered the island, roused me to a terror beyond that of the sickness of my stomach; for, suddenly, I knew what manner of thing it was that had beslimed my face and throat upon the previous night, and left its hideous stench lingering in my nostrils. And with the knowledge, I cried out to the bo'sun to make haste, for there were demons with us in the valley. And at that, some of the men made to run; but he bade them, in a ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... a question or two in the name of common sense. We must balance good and evil; and, granting that the theatre has a tendency to make children light-minded, is it worse than the horror of the slums and the stench and darkness of the single room where a family herd together? The youngster who is engaged at the theatre can set off home at the very latest as soon as the harlequinade is over. Very well; suppose it is late. Would he or she be early if the ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... aloud a great deal on that rocky shelf overlooking the river. I was feverish, and on occasion I drank sparingly of water from a stinking goatskin. This goatskin I kept hanging in the sun that the stench of the skin might increase and that there might be no refreshment of coolness in the water. Food there was, lying in the dirt on my cave- floor—a few roots and a chunk of mouldy barley-cake; and hungry I was, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... no sooner put our heads within the door but we found ourselves assaulted with a smell, or rather stench, so intolerable as almost to drive us back: but the fury of the elements, and perhaps the less delicate organs of Clarke, who seemed determined to profit by the shelter we had obtained, induced us to brave an inconvenience which, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... heavy with the stench of oil. The room hung with soot from the lamp. A thin spiral thread of black smoke rose from the taper. In the dim light the leering face of Sipsu appeared like the face of the great demon himself. His small half-closed eyes ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... or heaps, made up of branches, twigs, and leaves, and dead flowers. Many of these heaps are recent, while others have fallen into decay. Investigation shows they are burial places. Among the debris of an old one there are human bones, and out from one of the new ones comes a stench and a hurrying, exceedingly busy line of ants, demonstrating what is going on. I own I thought these mounds were some kind of bird's or animal's nest. They look entirely unhuman in this desolate reach of forest. Leaving these, I go down to the water edge ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... hour ran down from nose, eye, and mouth, and at the very moment before the miracle had fallen upon her cheek (as she declared in her deposition), was found to be quite dried up; the bone, which had been rotted and putrified, was restored to its former condition; all the stench, proceeding from it, which had been so insupportable that by order of the physicians and surgeons she was separated from her companions, was changed into a breath as sweet as an infant's; and she recovered at the same moment her sense ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... path thou mayst attain the goal That shall conduct thee to celestial rest! Break heart, drop blood, and mingle it with tears, Tears falling from repentant heaviness Of thy most vile[155] and loathsome filthiness, The stench whereof corrupts the inward soul With such flagitious crimes of heinous sin[156] As no commiseration may expel, But mercy, Faustus, of thy Saviour sweet, Whose blood alone must ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... Wood," and with, whom the Red Cross Knight had his first adventure. She had a brood of 1000 young ones of sundry shape, and these cubs crept into their mother's mouth when alarmed, as young kangaroos creep into their mother's pouch. The knight was nearly killed by the stench which issued from the foul fiend, but he succeeded in "rafting" her head off, whereupon the brood lapped up the blood, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... a fashion as to create a vast amphitheatre; and that this was the place where sacrifice was offered by the priests was shown by the blood-stained altar in the centre of it, to which fragments of flesh also adhered, whence was wafted up to us a dreadful stench that instantly racked us with queasy qualms. Save directly in front of the entrance to the temple, where was a great stone balcony with a smaller balcony below it, all the sides of the amphitheatre were cut ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... first caused me to regard it with particular attention, but even then I could not, for the moment, see anything to account for either the birds or the odour. But a minute or two later, as we drew nearer the tree, the stench meanwhile becoming almost overpoweringly strong, I detected fastened to the trunk of the tree, in a manner that was not at first apparent, nine human corpses, some of them so far advanced in decomposition that even the birds would not approach ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... that the anaconda kills its prey by its pestilent breath, is wholly fabulous. Waterton altogether denies the existence of any odour in the snake's breath. It is possible, however, that some species may produce a horrible stench, from a substance secreted in certain glands near the tail—a fact which has probably given ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... for culinary uses. The seats were round stones and black bosses which were made of a light hard moss found in the mountains and bogs, and frequently used as seats in rustic chimney corners. On entering, your nose was assailed by such a mingled stench of warm grains, sour barm, putrid potato skins, and strong whiskey, as required considerable fortitude to bear without ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... bullet out of a gun He passed me by with an inch to spare, Raising a dust-cloud thick and dun While the stench of lubricant filled the air. I must admit that I did not like The undergrad on ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... lived return apace into life's treasure house: these are things that long haunted my mind. I regretfully left the mole lying in the dust of the road. I had to go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters. It was not the place for philosophizing over a stench. What would people say who passed ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... carcases of Buffalow which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immence pile of slaughter and still their remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcases they created a most horrid stench. in this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke; for this purpose one of the most active and fleet young men is scelected and disguised in a robe of buffaloe skin, having also the skin of the buffaloe's ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... look.... But, strange to say, I had no inclination to forsake my pure dark airy height. I had no inclination to get nearer to this human ant-hill. It seemed as though a hot, heavy, reddish vapour rose from it, half-fragrance, half-stench; so many lives were flung struggling in one heap together there. I was hesitating.... But suddenly, sharp as the clang of iron bars, the voice of a harlot of the streets floated up to me; like an insolent tongue, it was thrust out, this ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... carrion a long distance, and they are seldom at fault. In this case, they may be. They base their hopes on Johnson's speech, at Washington, on the 22d. There may be suthin in it; but ain't it possible that the stench wich they took for Dimocrisy, and wich they sposed cum from Johnson, ariz ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... out the nests and blocked up the holes. I shall consult with the carpenters and builders and leave in our town not even a trace of the rats.' I've routed out hereditary grafters and looters. I've run down wealthy gunmen and I've turned men's fame to a notoriety that carried a stench. But they'll get me, Lucy! They'll either kill me or send me back ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... any Iroquois. They lodge me forthwith down in the hold; and in order to conceal me they put a great chest over the hatchway. I was two days and two nights in the belly of that vessel, with such discomfort that I thought I would suffocate and die with the stench. I remembered then poor Jonas, and I prayed our Lord, Ne fugerem a facie Domini, that I might not hide myself before his face, and that I might not withdraw far from his wishes; but on the contrary, infatuaret omnia consilia quae non essent ad suam gloriam, I prayed ...
— Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 • Various
... the physical consequences of filth and wretchedness; that the proper mode of avoiding them is not by praying to the saints, but by insuring personal and municipal cleanliness. In the twelfth century it was found necessary to pave the streets of Paris, the stench in them was so dreadful At once dysenteries and spotted fever diminished; a sanitary condition approaching that of the Moorish cities of Spain, which had been paved for centuries, was attained. In that now beautiful metropolis ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... little fray, our guide conducted us to the dwelling of the Holy—Pigs! {105} A beautiful stone hall is set apart for their use, which hall these remarkable divinities fill, in spite of all the care bestowed on them, with so horrible a stench, that it is impossible to approach them without holding one's nose. They are taken care of and fed until death summons them away. When we visited the place there were only a pair of these fortunate beings, and their number ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... Dante? "There was such a moan there as there would be if all the sick who, between July and September, are in the hospitals of Valdichiana, and of the Tuscan swamps, and of Sardinia, were in one pit together; and such a stench was issuing forth as is wont to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet some wild-beast ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... are always to be of a party with the last and victorious assassins. I confess I am of a different mind, and am rather inclined, of the two, to think and speak less hardly of a dead ruffian than to associate with the living. I could better bear the stench of the gibbeted murderer than the society of the bloody felons who yet annoy the world. Whilst they wait the recompense due to their ancient crimes, they merit new punishment by the new offences they commit. There is a period to the offences of Robespierre. They survive in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... sage-brush and whip-lash, were picketed among the lodges. Cayote-like dogs and unclad children, shrill and impish, ran riot, fighting together for half-dried, half-decayed pieces of salmon. Prevailing over everything was the stench which is unique and unparalleled among the stenches of the earth,—the stench of an Indian ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... rifle, cutlass, and revolver. Mr. Carmichael in the middle, I on the lower, and Gazen on the upper side, or that nearest to Miss Carmichael. The rocks around were slippery with ordure, and the sickening stench of rotting skeletons made our very gorge rise. Suddenly a loud squeaking in the direction of the cave arrested us, and before we had recovered from our surprise, nearly a dozen young dragons, each about the size of a man, tumbled hastily down the slope, and rushed ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... him—buzzard and strange bird in the air, and crab and snail and lizard and scorpion and hairy tarantula scuttling through the tropical green rushes along the path. And the hunger and thirst and heat and dirt and rolling sweat of the last day's march and every detail of the day's fight; the stench of dead horse and dead man; the shriek of shell and rattle of musketry and yell of officer; the slow rush through the long grass, and the climb up the hill. And always, he was tramping, tramping, tramping through long, green, thick grass. Sometimes a kaleidoscope series of pictures would go ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... Pete had to pick his way over boulders and across stretches of sand and boggy patches of black mud formed by little springs leaking out under clumps of willows. Here and there the white ribs of a steer's skeleton peered through the brush; once or twice an overpowering stench gave notice of a carcass not ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... sailor, with its coarseness and drudgery, its inadequate pay, its evil-smelling food, its maggoty bread, its beer drawn from casks that once had held oil or fish, its stinking salt-meat barrels, the hideous stench of the bilge-water—all this could in one sense be no worse than his sufferings in jail. In spite of self-control, jail had been to him the degradation of his hopes, the humiliation ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... greeted the delegation cordially, receiving an equally cordial return of the greeting from all except Mrs. Pennycook, who swept into the Hat Ranch in dignified silence, head up and nose in the air, after the manner of one who scents a moral stench and is resolved to eradicate ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... its appearance, the tide was certainly at the ebb. We observed some cradles, or wicker frames, placed far below high water-mark, that were each guarded by two natives, who threatened us violently as we approached. In running along the land, the stench from them plainly indicated what they were which these poor creatures ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... o'er, And to the vast eternal shore, Launched forth by death's o'erwhelming gale His gallant spirit spread its sail! O'er flowing bowl with might and main, He fought his battle's o'er again, Talked of chain shot, and "Stinkpot's" stench, And hated cordially the French, Whom he believed were but created To be by sailors killed and hated What e'er he was, what passage o'er, He took to the mysterious shore, Old Charon never cleft the wave. Yet with a soul more true and brave! And Baptiste Homier, when alive, ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... directions, to strike him at will. Blows fell on his back, his legs, even his face, and he cringed away, trying desperately to escape the stinging pain. Under the smarting blows, he remembered previous whippings, administered by a strong-armed kitchen master, and he seemed to smell the stench of the scullery once more. Suddenly, he sank to ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... fire, and during the nights and days of all that time continued to burn, and at all times, every hour of day and night, you could hear the shrieks and screams of the poor fellows who were left on the field, and a stench, so sickening as to nauseate the whole of both armies, arose from the decaying bodies of the dead left ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... case of the poor girl, whose mother finishes pants for the postal uniforms at nine and one-half cents a pair, slaving eighteen hours for fifty-seven cents; and she, the daughter, toils all day long, in the midst of the physical and moral stench of a Jewish sweater's shop, for sixteen and two-thirds cents. But she is better off than the orphan girl that works beside her, whose condition ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... was cleared, and the white men emerged into the open. The air which still reeked of burning was preferable to the unwholesome stench which these bestial northern ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... Vapour no Force, all his Notion dissolv'd in its Native Vapour call'd Wind, and flew upward in blew Strakes of a livid Flame call'd Blasphemy, which burnt up all the Wit and Fancy of the Author, and left a strange stench behind it, that has this unhappy quality in it, that every Body that Reads the Book, smells the Author, tho' he be never so far off; nay, tho' he took Shipping to Dublin, to secure his Friends from the least ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... young Astolpho: Here's the place Which men (for being poor) are sent to starve in; Rude remedy, I trow, for sore disease. Within these walls, stifled by damp and stench, Doth Hope's fair torch expire; and at the snuff, Ere yet 'tis quite extinct, rude, wild, and way-ward, The desperate revelries of wild despair, Kindling their hell-born cressets, light to deeds That the poor captive would have died ere practised, Till ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the steam-tug blackened the dull air and roiled the turbid water as it dragged its schooner on towards the lumber-yards of the South Branch, and a long line of waiting vehicles took up their interrupted course through the smoke and the stench as they filed across the stream into the thick of business beyond: first a yellow street-car; then a robust truck laden with rattling sheet-iron, or piled high with fresh wooden pails and willow baskets; then a junk-cart bearing a pair of dwarfed and bearded Poles, ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... been deserted by the poor people around, although it was known that some of its inmates were still alive, though dying in the midst of the dead. He knocked at the door; and hearing no voice within, burst it open, with his foot; and was, in a moment almost overpowered by the horrid stench. Seeing a man's legs protruding from the straw, he moved them slightly with his foot; when a husky voice asked for water. In another part of the cabin, on removing a piece of canvas, he discovered three dead bodies, which had lain there unburied for the fortnight; ...
— A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood • Elihu Burritt
... I awoke with this irritating conflict in my senses to discover that I'd dropped out of my character as Tarzan and my surroundings of the jungle, but I'd somehow brought the stench of cheap liquor and ...
— The Big Fix • George Oliver Smith
... drew a slightly deeper breath and at once became conscious of a horrible, throat-wrenching stench. Dimly, he recalled having once before encountered such an odor; when was it? Oh, yes; during the Great War when he'd stumbled into a dugout tenanted by long unburied corpses. A cold finger stabbed ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... source of great inconvenience, and some disease, at the Asylum. This focus of effluvia, together with the general and copious use of similar materials in manuring the adjacent fields, occasioned an intolerable stench, and generated diarrhoeas, in the early part of the spring. When the grass and weeds, however, were grown sufficiently to protect the surface of the soil from the sun and wind, this effect entirely ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... about four paces in width, and about eight feet high—the roof being roughly arched. The walls and roof were covered with thick, black, greasy soot; and an indescribably horrible stench, which increased the further they advanced, made them almost vomit. They found that where the cave curved to the left, it ended in a circular chamber about eight paces in diameter, and at one side of this crouched the four old hags, ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... prevail upon the floors; and at the side of the couch which her form lately pressed in slumber, you observe a French novel and a wasted candle in the society of a half-bottle of the wine of the country. A bedroomy smell pervades the whole suite, and through the open window comes a curious stench explained as the odor of Madama la Baronessa's guinea-pigs, of which she is so fond that she has had their sty placed immediately under her window in the garden. It is this garden which has first taken your heart, with a glimpse caught through ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... can but repeat that it is exquisite and far superior to any sweet dainty prepared by cook or confectioner. There is nothing to equal it, and in eating one does not discern the least smell as the disagreeable stench comes from the husk alone and the worse it is, the more delicate is the taste of ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... languished, for there trickled a poisonous blood from his wound. The doctors found that the Morholt had thrust into him a poisoned barb, and as their potions and their theriac could never heal him they left him in God's hands. So hateful a stench came from his wound that all his dearest friends fled him, all save King Mark, Gorvenal and Dinas of Lidan. They always could stay near his couch because their love overcame their abhorrence. At last ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... Glared in a sudden flooding of harsh light Stabbing the eyes; and as I stumbled out The curtain rose. A fat girl with a pout And legs like hams, began to sing "His Mother". Gusts of bad air rose in a choking smother; Smoke, the wet steam of clothes, the stench of plush, Powder, cheap perfume, mingled in a rush. I stepped into the lobby — and stood still Struck dumb by sudden beauty, body and will. Cleanness and rapture — excellence made plain — The storming, thrashing arrows of the ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... stomach into Steerage No. 1 was an adventure that required some nerve. The stench was atrocious; each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and the squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by so many people worming themselves into their clothes in the twilight of the bunks. You may guess if I was pleased, not only for him, but for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the atmosphere. Enter any Western hotel and what do you see, General? Sitting around the stove you will see dirty, unwashed-looking men, with hats on, and feet on the chairs; huge cuds of tobacco on the floor, spittle in pools all about; filth and dirt, condensed tobacco smoke, and a stench of whisky from the bar and the breath (applause, and "that's so,") on every side. This, General, is the manhood picture. Now turn to the womanhood picture; she, whom you think will debase and lower the morals of the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... one morning as was bound to happen, war broke out. As Florent reached La Normande's stall that day an unbearable stench assailed his nostrils. On the marble slab, in addition to part of a magnificent salmon, showing its soft roseate flesh, there lay some turbots of creamy whiteness, a few conger-eels pierced with black pins ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... forms of sensuality are universally prevalent, and induce in them the habit of looking for their signals in every direction. To every pure and lofty soul, such a suspicion and habit are enough to turn the sunshine into a stench and make the very landscape loathsome. The crowding of population in manufacturing and commercial centres, our thronged and exposed hotel-life, the expensive habits of fashion, the excessive luxury of wealth and vanity, are, undoubtedly, causes of much ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... be said, right here and now," interposed Gram with decision. "I cannot and will not have that awful mess of poke, tobacco and what-not brewed in the kitchen arch-kettle. Now you hear me, Joseph. Last year you stewed it there and you nearly drove us out of the house. Such a stench I never smelled. It made me sick all night and filled the whole house. I said then it should never come into the kitchen again. You must take the other kettle and set it ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... to the Hotel d'Allemagne, where I fell ill, either because I had a touch of Neapolitan malaria in me (in those days the stench of the city was perceptible three miles out at sea, and might have risen unto heaven above and been smelt by the angels, had they and their home been as near to earth as was believed by the schoolmen), or because the journey had been too much for me. However, an English physician ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... match, and perceived that the eyes belonged to an old woman, wrapped up in a greasy leather garment. Taking her by the arm, I dragged her out, for she could not, or would not, come by herself, and the stench was overpowering me. Such a sight as she was—a bag of bones, covered over with black, shrivelled parchment. The only white thing about her was her wool, and she seemed to be pretty well dead except for her eyes and ...
— Long Odds • H. Rider Haggard
... "After the sickening stench of personality in theatrical life," the great Madame Orloff told the doctor with her usual free-handed use of language, "it is like breathing a thin, pure air to be here again with our dear inhuman old Vieyra. He hypnotizes me into his own belief that nothing matters—not ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... Ludlow Street Jail the door is carefully closed after you, and locked by means of an iron lock about the size of a pictorial family Bible. You then remain on the inside for quite a spell. You do not hear the prattle of soiled children any more. All the glad sunlight, and stench-condensing pavements, and the dark-haired inhabitants of Rivington street, are seen no longer, and the heavy iron storm-door shuts out the wail of the combat from the alley near by. Ludlow Street Jail may be surrounded by a very miserable and dirty quarter of the city, but when you get inside ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... retired before dinner, and did not wait to partake of our Christmas cheer. Indeed I believe no one invited them, and for good reasons; for their dirty persons, and the stench they carried about them, were enough to spoil the appetite of any European; and that would have been a real disappointment, as we had not experienced such fare for some time. Roast and boiled geese, goose-pye, &c. was a treat little known to us; and we had yet some Madeira ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... a silence, and it lasted for a full hour. The rank petroleum lamp in the sconce burnt out and left a sickening stench upon the air. The whole space in which the wounded men lay went dark, and the wild free wind and the cruel driving rain beat at the window. In the black darkness voices spoke here and there. There were notes of fever from wounded men, and once ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... hair of his beard "as big as a cornel-wood spear." The stench that arose was fearful; the demens and snakes fell upon the invaders at once; only Thorkill and five of the crew, who had sheltered themselves with hides against the virulent poison the demons and snakes cast, which ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... on actual sightseeing. The excavators in 1845 had a gruesome experience, for they discovered a charnel pit containing thirteen cart loads of bones of the fallen warriors at the battle of Lewes. Although nearly six centuries had elapsed the stench was dreadful. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... Bluebottle and the Flesh-fly perch on the trellis-work, make a short investigation and then decamp. Throughout the summer season, for three whole months, the apparatus remains where it is, without result: never a worm. What is the reason? Does the stench of the meat not spread, coming from that depth? Certainly it spreads: it is unmistakable to my dulled nostrils and still more so to the nostrils of my children, whom I call to bear witness. Then why does the Flesh-fly, who but now was dropping her grubs from a goodly height, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... house; and at night armed men go to act as sentinels about his coffin, for fear that the sorcerers (who are in this country also) may come and touch the coffin; for then the coffin would immediately burst open and a great stench issue from the corpse, which could not any longer remain in the coffin. For this reason they ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... I find that my three thrills would be denied to a deaf man. The second occurred once when we were in reserve. The stench of the house in which the section was billeted was terrible. By (p. 113) day it was bad, but at two o'clock in the morning it was devilish. I awoke at that hour and went outside to get a breath of fresh air. The place was so eerie, the church in the rear with the ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... couples, from whence we supposed this to be the season when the sexes meet. Whenever they spouted up the water, or, as the sailors term it, were seen blowing to windward, the whole ship was infested with a most detestable, rank, and poisonous stench, which went off in the space of two or three minutes. Sometimes these huge animals lay on their backs, and with their long pectoral fins beat the surface of the sea, which always caused a great noise, equal to the explosion ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... Lime into foxed Drinks while they are working in the Tun or Vat, that its Fire and Salts may break the Cohesions of the Beer or Ale, and burn away the stench, that the Corruption would always cause; but then such Drink should by a Peg at the bottom of the Vat be drawn off as fine as possible, ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... into his lungs, breathed deeply, and answered,—"By Pollux! they are sweating! and such a stench! Will some one give me an epilimma?—for I am faint." Then he turned ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... on the Canada shore up past the Clifton House, towards the Burning Spring, which is not the least wonder of Niagara. As each bubble breaks upon the troubled surface, and yields its flash of infernal flame and its whiff of sulphurous stench, it seems hardly strange that the Neutral Nation should have revered the cataract as a demon; and another subtle spell (not to be broken even by the business- like composure of the man who shows off the hell-broth) is added to those successive sorceries by which Niagara gradually changes ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... terror for mercy; blacks chained in their trenches, slaughtered in their chains—always onwards marched the conquerors, with bayonets running blood; clothes, hands, and faces all besmeared; the foul stench of a month's accumulated filth in their nostrils, and the savage whistle of random bullets ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... Like the Israelites in the wilderness, the Parisians had to rise before daybreak if they wished to eat. The crowd was lined up, men, women and children tightly packed together, under a sky of molten lead. The heat beat down on the rotting foulness of the kennels and exaggerated the stench of unwashed, sweating humanity. All were pushing, abusing their neighbours, exchanging looks fraught with every sort of emotion one human being can feel for another,—dislike, disgust, interest, attraction, indifference. Painful experience had ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... more, weak and worn and sick." Then, after all had come up and been splashed with salt water from the pumps, men went below to bring up the dead. There was never a morning search of this sort that was fruitless. The stench, the suffocation, the confinement, oftentimes the violence of a neighbor, brought to every dawn its tale, of corpses, and with scant gentleness all were brought up and thrown over the side to the waiting sharks. The officer who had this experience writes also that it was thirty days after ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... that all men who lived lazy and inactive lives, and died natural deaths, by sickness, or by age, went into vast caves under ground, all dark and miry, full of noisom creatures, usual in such places, and there forever grovelled in endless stench and misery. On the contrary, all who gave themselves to warlike actions and enterprises, to the conquests of their neighbors, and slaughters of enemies, and died in battle, or of violent deaths upon bold ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... be merry. He ordered the overseer of the spectacles and wild beasts to be scourged in fetters, during several days successively, in his own presence, and did not put him to death until he was disgusted with the stench of his putrefied brain. He burned alive, in the centre of the arena of the amphitheatre, the writer of a farce, for some witty verse, which had a double meaning. A Roman knight, who had been exposed to the wild beasts, crying out that ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... appeared with the brandy, which Lovell administered externally. Still, Scaife remained unconscious. Then a pillow was ripped open, and enough feathers burned to restore—as the Caterpillar put it afterwards—a ruined cathedral. The stench filled the passage and brought to No. 15 a chattering crowd of Lower Boys. And then the conviction seized everybody that Scaife was ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... which was charring, gave an insufficient light. He could not manage to snuff it, and it was giving out a horrible stench of paraffin. Thinking of the author of the passage relating to the Roman lady, he said to himself: "Sure enough, it was a queer idea that he ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... secretary, but the secretary of the Senate, who have taken upon themselves his sins, and who place him there under a large salary to annoy and obstruct the operations of the Executive. This the people well enough understand, and he is a stench in the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... dash relaxed, and presently he had resumed his sober gait and begun to piece together, out of the confused report of his senses, some theory of the occurrence. But the occasion of the sounds and stench that had so suddenly assailed him, and the strange conjunction of fugitives whom he had seen to issue from the house, were mysteries beyond his plummet. With an obscure awe he considered them in his mind, continuing, meanwhile, ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... to be patient. As he saw that the man became calmer, he asked him what might seem most agreeable to him; what he should do for him. He said that he should now wash his whole body, that he could no longer endure the stench of the infection. The saint quickly got some water warmed, into which he put aromatic herbs, and began to wash him himself, while his companion poured out the water. As he washed, his cure advanced, ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... terrific scene. The details he had formerly read of this ordination, the ceremonies lasting seven days, recurred to his mind. After ablution and the anointing with oil, the holocaust of victims began. Flesh sputtered on the walls, mingling the black stench of burnt fat with the blue vapour of incense; the Patriarch anointed the right ear and thumb and foot of Aaron and his sons with blood; then, taking up the flesh of the sacrifice, he placed them in the hands of the new-made priests, who rocked first on one foot and then on the other, thus waving ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... had the stomach for it afterward. I was not satisfied with the outside of the house, but when I entered the open doorway, meaning to mount to the upper floor, it was as if I were immediately blown into the street again by the thick and noisome stench which filled the place from some unmentionable if not ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... them blazing, until the whole island seemed one mass of fire. The sea boiled like a boiling cauldron, and all day long the travellers heard an awful wailing. Even when they were out of sight of the island, the howls still rang in their ears, and the stench made their nostrils smart. 'And Brendan said, "O ye soldiers of Christ, make you strong in faith not feigned, and in the armour of the spirit, for we are upon the coasts of hell. Watch, therefore, ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... the suburbs, taking about twenty-four hours to reach the end. Some persons related that for several successive evenings before the fever broke out the atmosphere was thick, and that a body of murky vapour, accompanied by a strong stench, travelled from street to street. This moving vapour was called the "Mai da peste" ("the mother or spirit of the plague"); and it was useless to attempt to reason them out of the belief that this was the forerunner of the pestilence. The progress of the disease was very rapid. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... therefore walked abroad, carrying in their hands flowers or fragrant herbs or divers sorts of spices, which they frequently raised to their noses, deeming it an excellent thing thus to comfort the brain with such perfumes, because the air seemed to be everywhere laden and reeking with the stench emitted by the dead and the dying and the odours ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... that the swagger of Bob Acres and the ferocity of the Malay cannot add dignity to this body.... No person with the upright form of a man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality. Sir, that is not a proper weapon of debate, at least, on this floor. The noisome, squat, and nameless animal, to which I refer, is not a proper model for an American Senator. Will the Senator from Illinois take notice?" And upon Douglas's unworthy retort that he ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... how, and the place where, those vicars of Jesus Christ handled the living members of Jesus Christ, and show you how they proceeded for their healing. You descend into the vaults by very narrow stairs. A narrow corridor leads you to the several cells, which, for smallness and stench, are a hundred times more horrible than the dens of lions and tigers in the Colosseum. Wandering in this labyrinth of most fearful prisons, that may be called 'graves for the living,' I came to a cell full of skeletons without ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... glare of smoky lamps, a huge place full of smoke and men and sounds. Kells led the way slowly. He had his own reason for observance. There was a stench that sickened Joan—a blended odor of tobacco and rum and wet sawdust and smoking oil. There was a noise that appeared almost deafening—the loud talk and vacant laughter of drinking men, and a din of creaky fiddles and scraping boots and boisterous ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... Namakusaki-kaze really means a wind having a "raw stench;" but the smell of bait is suggested by the second line of the poem. A literal rendering is not possible in this case; the art of the composition ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... would be very expensive, and might cause a famine. Sometimes they determined to starve me; or at least to shoot me in the face and hands with poisoned arrows, which would soon despatch me; but again they considered, that the stench of so large a carcass might produce a plague in the metropolis, and probably spread through the whole kingdom. In the midst of these consultations, several officers of the army went to the door of the great council-chamber, and two ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... uproar into which entered sounds of every kind: shrieks, groans, the rattle of musketry, the crash of falling walls. Men could scarce see one another; great livid clouds drifted athwart the sun and obscured his light, bearing with them an intolerable stench of soot and blood, heavy with the abominations of the slaughter. In every quarter the work of death and destruction still went on: the human brute unchained, the imbecile wrath, the mad fury, of man devouring ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the Frangees. Mind I am not telling you facts only what the people are saying—in order to show you their feelings. One most respectable young man sat before me on the floor the other day and told me what he had heard from those who had come up the river. Horrible tales of the stench of the bodies which are left unburied by the Pasha's order—of women big with child ripped open, etc., etc. 'Thou knowest oh! our Lady, that we are people of peace in this place, and behold now if one madman should come and ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... the hold like corpses, and clutched at one another like madmen. In despair some offered all their money, all that they had, to a priest as a votive offering to St. Nicholas, that the storm might abate. The state of the ship I should not dare to depict—the filth, the stench, the vermin. For nearly a thousand passengers there were three lavatories without bolts! Fitly was the boat named Lazarus—Lazarus all sores. What the poor simple peasant men and women suffered none can tell. They had not the thought to take care of themselves ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... that their strong Holds have all the open Places cover'd with Canvass stretch'd from Side to Side; upon which is strew'd an Herb so venemous, that, in six Hours after it has been expos'd to the Sun, it emits so pestiferous a Stench, that no Fowl can approach it by many Yards, but what will fall dead; and this Stench, by the Effluvia mounting, is no way offensive to those below. This is the Reason their Sieges are rather Blockades, and no fortify'd Town was ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... prize. He crouched lower and drew back for the spring. Then a curious thing happened. The dainty little creature whisked around and puffed up to twice its former size. At the same time Warruk felt a fiery sting in his eyes; and, the odor of carrion was like a soothing incense compared to the stench that assailed his nostrils. He recoiled as if he had been struck a heavy blow. His eyes burned; his breath came in gasps; for a moment he was stunned. The first thing he thought of was his mother; but his call sounded hollow and unnatural ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... feet, and a like matter afflicted him at the bottom of his belly. Nay, further, his privy-member was putrefied, and produced worms; and when he sat upright, he had a difficulty of breathing, which was very loathsome, on account of the stench of his breath, and the quickness of its returns; he had also convulsions in all parts of his body, which increased his strength to an insufferable degree. It was said by those who pretended to divine, and who were endued with wisdom to foretell ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... and the hunters entered the fringe of dead trees. By the time they reached the center of the little island where the dead trees were thickest, the little party was nearly overcome by the horrible stench. At every step they crushed in nestfuls of decayed eggs which sent up ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... There were also modern stoves; but the sexton said it was very cold there, in spite of the stoves. It had, I must say, a disagreeable odor pervading it, in which the dead people of long ago had doubtless some share,—a musty odor, by no means amounting to a stench, but unpleasant, and, I should think, unwholesome. Old wood-work, and old stones, and antiquity of all kinds, moral and physical, go to make up this smell. I observed it in the cathedral, and Chester generally ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... minded to lay a snare for her father. She scooped hiding-places for us in the sand, and made us lie down therein, and cast the skin of a sea-calf over each of us. It would have been a grievous ambush, for the stench of the skins had distressed us sore,—who, indeed, would lay him down by a beast of the sea?—but she wrought a deliverance for us. She took ambrosia [Footnote: ambrosia, the food of the gods.], very sweet, and put it under each man's nostrils, ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... desert was covered by a sea of their dead—and ours! The stench was unbearable, for the Termans exude an odor of their own, particularly in death, which is sheer nausea ... but lest I offend your refined sensibilities, O Serene Empress, perhaps it were best that I draw a veil ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse
... taken captive at the siege of Oran in 1706, and taken to Algiers. Here they were thrust into the Government prison, along with other prisoners and slaves, to the number of two thousand. Faint with the stench, they were removed to the Kasaba or Castle, where they remained two years. News was then brought that the galleys of Malta had captured the capitana or flagship of Algiers, with six hundred and fifty ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... which is done to her in making her swear and in proclaiming her publicly as an adulteress. Giotto has also expressed with great realism a man afflicted with sores, as all the women who are about him, disgusted by the stench, turn away with various contortions in the most graceful manner imaginable. Then again the foreshortening in a picture containing a number of lame beggars is highly praiseworthy, and should be much prized by artists, since it is ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... sense who would say that tobacco did him any good." What did Thomas Jefferson say? Certainly he is good authority. He says in regard to the culture of tobacco, "It is a culture productive of infinite wretchdness." What did Horace Greeley say of it? "It is a profane stench." What did Daniel Webster say of it? "If those men must smoke, let them take the horse-shed!" One reason why the habit goes on from destruction to destruction is that so many ministers of the gospel take it. They smoke themselves into ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... I'm one of 'em—dragging my idleness and viciousness and my stupidity and my money at my heels. I tell you, Kathleen, this is no good. There's a stench of money everywhere; there's a staler aroma in the air, too—the dubious perfume of decadence, of moral atrophy, of stupid recklessness, of the ennui that breeds intrigue! I'm deadly tired of it—of the sort of people I was born among; of their women folk, whose sole intellectual ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... time, evidently a very long time. They had been carried in the ice boxes without being drawn, and when exposed to the air the odor of decay was so strong that they were positively nauseating. I saw strong men turn exceedingly sick just from the stench, and I do not believe it is an exaggeration to say that there was more upset stomachs on that trip from the decaying rabbits that were given us to eat than from ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... the sentiment, than this town of mud and money, contrasted with its beautiful environs. The distant view of Lyons is imposing from most points; but the interior presents but few objects to repay the traveller for its closeness, stench, and bustle (not even good silk stockings). Its two noble rivers have had no apparent effect in purifying it, nor the easterly winds from the Alps, which stand in full sight, in ventilating its narrow smoky streets: and though usually considered the second ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... kings of the neighbouring countries assembled to thank the man who had rid the world of its worst enemy. But amid the marriage festival and the general rejoicings it was forgotten that the monster's carcass had been left unburied, and as it was now decaying, it occasioned such a stench that no one could approach it. This gave rise to diseases of which many people died. Then the king's son-in-law determined to seek help from the sorcerer of the East. This did not seem difficult ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... certainly strange that the air should continue so dank and depressing at our high altitude, and several times a most extraordinary stench, as of decaying carcasses, would assail our nostrils and cause us to grow faint and sickly. Soon we began to notice that these poisonous vapours were most pungent in the vicinity of certain enormous cactus-like ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... the nest rested, and of which it was formed, and finding they would support his weight, he grasped them firmly, and swung himself up from the ladder till his head and breast were above the nest, and then what an overpowering stench came from it, for in it lay the putrid remains of lambs, chamois, and birds. Vertigo, although he could not reach him, blew the poisonous vapor in his face, to make him giddy and faint; and beneath, in the dark, yawning deep, on the rushing ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... inches, but the body measured eight feet round. Among the vast quantity of things contained in the stomach was a tolerably large seal, bitten in two, and swallowed with half of the spear sticking in it, with which it had probably been killed by the natives. The stench of this ravenous monster was great, even before it was dead; and, when the stomach ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... sunk about twelve feet under ground. Walls secure it on every side, and over it is a vaulted roof connected with stone arches; but its appearance is disgusting and horrible, by reason of the filth, darkness, and stench. When Lentulus had been let down into this place, certain men, to whom orders had been given, strangled him with a cord. Thus this patrician who was of the illustrious family of the Cornelii, and who had filled the office of Consul at Rome, met ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various |
