"Suffocating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... endeavoured to pull him up. He was almost once more on his feet, when another creeper caught his foot. Again he fell, and this time our enemies were too quick for him. Rushing on him by hundreds, they threw themselves on his body, almost suffocating him as they held him down by main force. I was treated much in the same way, when a huge negro caught me up by the back of the neck, and made as if he was about to cut off my head. He did not ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... distance from the excessively offensive stench of the dung, they have built their wretched habitations on the main, in a most hideous situation, and still even too near the guana, the vapours from which are even there very bad, yet not quite so suffocating as on the island. The sea here affords abundance of excellent fish, some kinds of which I had never before seen; one of them resembling a large silver eel, but much thicker in proportion. The inhabitants of this desolate and forbidding place ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... other ploughmen were driven from their work by the heat and the swirling smoke, they set back-fires all along the line, and retreated in good order to the house. Here, although the heat was intense and the smoke almost suffocating, they made a stand. Mrs. Elmer and Ruth had already taken refuge on the ferry-boat, from which they watched the progress of the flames with the ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... all the meteorological instruments and changed the daily charts; at times having to feel his way from one place to the other. Attending to the exposed instruments in a high wind with low temperature was bad enough, but with suffocating ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... Malan, returning suddenly. We passed the sentry between white enamelled walls of speckless small arms, and since that Royal Marine Light infantryman was visibly suffocating from curiosity, I winked at him. We entered the chintz-adorned, photo-speckled, brass- fendered, tile-stoved main cabin. Moorshed, with a ruler, was demonstrating before the frame-plan ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... winches hammered and pulleys screamed as the cases came up and the empty slings went down. The heat got suffocating and the slant of masts and deck made matters worse, because the men must hold the derricks back with guys while the heavy goods cleared the coamings of the hatch. Much judgment was needed to drop them safely in the boats. Men gasped and choked, quarreled with each other, and growled ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... But one suffocating look from the aqueous eyes of Mirandy destroyed the last spark of Ralph's pleasure in his triumph, and sent that awful below-zero ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... serve for the detection of manganese; the higher oxides are distinguished by causing the evolution of chlorine (with its peculiarly suffocating smell) when acted on with hydrochloric acid; while the green "melt," with sodium carbonate, can be relied on for the recognition of manganese itself. There is no dry assay ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... that Aileen Armagh, trying to explain that queer feeling of timidity, should suddenly press her hand hard over her heart! It was throbbing almost to the point of suffocating her, so possessed was it by the joy of a sudden and wonderful ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... no concern about this, though, the only impression on my mind being the necessity of getting hold of Mr Macdougall as soon as I could; and when I had recovered from the half-suffocating feeling produced by my impromptu long dive beneath the Atlantic rollers, I raised myself on the top of one of these, and proceeded to look for the first mate, who ought, I thought, to be pretty ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... could distinguish the red glare of angry flames leaping beneath, fanned by the wind into great sheets of fire, and sweeping forward with incredible swiftness. These might not succeed in reaching the imprisoned men, but the stifling vapor, the suffocating smoke held captive by that overhanging rock, would prove ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... that the pretty, bell-shaped pink and white flower on the vigorous vine clambering over stone walls and winding about the shrubbery of wayside thickets in a suffocating embrace is akin to the morning-glory of the garden trellis (C. Major). An exceedingly rapid climber, the twining stem often describes a complete circle in two hours, turning against the sun, or just contrary to the hands of a watch. Late in the season, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... windows and shout for help from below. But we lost our way in the smoke and could not find the way back. There we were, caught like rats in a trap, with the flames beginning to come through the floor in places, and the smoke rolling around us in blinding, suffocating clouds. There was no escape, then. We were to perish in this hotel blaze. Would we ever be identified? How soon would they know at home? All these things flashed through my mind as we stood there in the midst ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... humor passed very quickly. He grew full of a most delectable sense of freedom. It seemed as if a suffocating network had been tightening about his heart and, now that it had burst, the joy of the great and unexpected deliverance was more than his breast could hold. He could not breathe in-doors,—he wanted all the air he could get on the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... and at Pit Place he died, leaving behind him a profligate name and a ghost story which Dr. Johnson thought the most extraordinary he had ever heard. It was in November, 1779; Lord Lyttelton had just returned from Ireland, and was seized with suffocating fits. One night he dreamt a dream. A dove hovered over him, changed to a woman in white, and spoke to him. It was a dead face, and he knew who it was; her two daughters were under his roof. Her words were ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... downstairs?" she said kindly; "the atmosphere of this place is quite suffocating." And Malcolm agreed to this; he was just thinking that he would make some excuse to leave her, when to his chagrin she led the way to the little waiting-place by the entrance, and, seating herself, beckoned to him to follow her example. "There is something I ought to tell you," she ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in some unexpected transformation. Sometimes the scene changed, and it was the dreamer that was flying, while Sandford, shod with swiftness, pursued him, swinging a lasso; and as often as the fierce hunter whirled the deadly coil, Fletcher awoke with a suffocating sensation, and a cold sweat trickling from his forehead. At breakfast, his wife noticed with intense anxiety his sharpened features and his evident preoccupation of mind. He hurried off, snatching a kiss from the baby and from the mother ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... seemed to be almost suffocating his hostess. Without understanding how or why, she felt convinced that she had been duped; and if she had obeyed her first impulse she would have attacked M. Isidore then and there. If she restrained this impulse, if she made an ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... provides for the skin surface as well as for the lungs. The mind, for it is housed in the body and its tenant, must depend for its vigour or tone upon the fresh air in school or college study. Even a very good head cannot work well set upon an anaemic body which is suffocating for want of good clean air. If you wish to do your best work and keep well, the first thing to do is not to open your books but to open your windows. After that the books and a reasonable number of hours of continuous ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... very place that had now grown so vivid to us. "Ah, this is how it looks in sunlight!" I would think to myself, having seen it always in the early morning and cold. Behind me the long white house, the hunters, the dogs.... No, they were not here in the burning suffocating sunlight, but ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... lady less, no earthly power could have driven me into that dismal stifling place. All my life long I have had a most unspeakable horror of low-roofed caverns and squeezing passages that cramp a man for breath and for the room to draw it in; and when the suffocating madness came upon me, as it did when we were well jammed in this cursed horror-hole, I was right glad to have my love for Margery to make an outward-seeming man of me; glad, too, that my dear lad was close behind to shame me ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... that the wings of the lodge turned toward the west, and the wind could blow in freely through the smoke hole. All this time she was threatening terrible things against them. The lodge began to get full of smoke, and the children were crying, and all were in great distress—almost suffocating. So they said, "Let us lift one man up here inside, and let him try to fix the ears, so that the lodge will get clear of smoke." They raised a man up, and he was standing on the shoulders of the others, and, blinded and half strangled ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... glaring light spread through the landing! The face of Miss Anne coming from the servant's room shone rosy and bright in it, though she was pale with fear. Through the open window drifted a suffocating smoke of burning wood and thatch, and the crackling and splitting of the old roof sounded noisily above their voices; but Miss Anne commanded herself, and spoke ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... was beginning to boil over, and the old-maid regime, which had crushed the life out of the Frenchwoman, was suffocating the Manx girl with its formalism. She was always forgetting the meal times regulated by the sun, and she could sleep at any time and keep awake until any hour. It tired her to sit demurely like a young lady, and she had a trick ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... by the sound of a muffled fall in the next cabin. He sprang to his feet, seizing his weapon. The electric light wire had been cut so that the cabin was in suffocating darkness. By some instinct he forced himself flat against the wall by the door. The next second the door was flung open and two forms hurled themselves with a grunt upon the bunk. He fired twice and darted out into the passageway. Here all was ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... that she was an idle, silly, frivolous girl? The revelation came upon her with stunning force. These people too, these coarse country people, despised her and laughed at her! The thought was more than she could bear. She sprang up, feeling as if she were suffocating, and walked up and down the little room with hurried and nervous steps. Then suddenly there came into her mind one sentence of her mother's that Dame Hartley had repeated: "Hilda has a really noble nature—" What was the rest? ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... things. The room looked dreary, clothing was strewn about, the chairs were out of their places, and the remains of the evening meal were still on the table. A moist heat pervaded this scene of disorder. The suffocating air seemed laden with a sense ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... sharp explosion cut through her sentence and instantly the whole place was in an uproar. Suffocating fumes filled the room with smoke as the lights went out. Then somebody screamed, "Fire! Fire!" and pandemonium reigned. Women shrieked, children wailed, and men and boys fought savagely to get to the doors. Lena was swept on by the first mad rush of the crowd, crazy with fear, but catching ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... as a wall, "the whole city is one sea of flame; smoke is suffocating the inhabitants, and people faint, or cast themselves into the fire from ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... uncertain and uncomfortable state of his mind, his body felt feverish and oppressed. This was chiefly owing to the close and confined air of the small apartment in which they slept. After enduring for some time the broiling and suffocating feeling attendant upon such an atmosphere, he rose to endeavour to open the window of the apartment, and thus to procure a change of air. Alas! the first trial reminded him that he was in jail, and ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... to sympathize. Their cares seemed to her to be exaggerations of trifles—she could feel no pity for them: their satisfaction was derived from sources unintelligible to her. And the social atmosphere around her seemed still and close and suffocating; so that she was like to cry out at times for one breath of God's clear wind—for a shaft of lightning even—to cut through the sultry and drowsy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... became shiny and gray-black. Membranes in the throats thickened, and lungs seemed to be eaten by the chlorine poison. Yet the men fought on until exhausted, and then fell to suffer through a death struggle which continued from twenty-four hours to three days of suffocating agony. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... him, who was no longer sensible either of human grief or of human joy. Close at the head of the bed stood an old man, with his face buried in his hands; the latter reposing against the wainscoting of the room. He, too, wept, but his weeping was more audible, more painful, and accompanied by suffocating sobs. It was the humble, yet almost paternally attached servant ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... relaxed her grasp, and he had now to hold her safe with one arm, thus having only one with which to struggle against the suffocating, swirling waters. In a very few minutes he realised that the fight was dead against him; in spite of all his strength and his powerful frame, he was lifted and tossed about like a straw. The only thing in his favour was the fact that the tide had turned, and was even ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... their health miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close vapor of these malignant minerals. A hundred thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and managing the products of those mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of our friends at our parting was so suffocating that I clung to the shelter of my new friend, the stranger of that ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... incessantly, and mopped his mouth with a vast silk handkerchief, but his dull blood craved for warmth, and he got his knees close to the grate, and piled up the coal till it smoked and smoked, and filled the close apartment with a suffocating haze of carbon. To be asked into Father Iden's sanctuary was an honour, but, like other honours, it had to ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... light and there rose that hot, sickening reek, that suffocating stench that is like unto nothing on earth save one of these floating hells, and the which, if a man hath but smelled it once, he ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... suffocating evening," added the Squire, wiping his forehead. "I don't recollect so warm an October for a year or two. Cilly's been out of town, Miss Faith, and since she come back ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... size of a nutmeg, rising and falling alternately, with the top not too thick nor too thin, and with the appearance of waves, mixed with the grain in the hogshead, rising and falling in succession, and when you put your head over the steam, and it flying into your nose, will have a suffocating effect, or when it will instantly extinguish a candle when held over it, you may feel assured, it ...
— The Practical Distiller • Samuel McHarry
... July: "Sir Guy Carleton is using every art to soothe and lull our people into a state of security. Admiral Digby is capturing all our vessels, and suffocating as fast as possible in prison-ships all our seamen who will not enlist into the service of his Britannic Majesty; and Haldimand, with his savage allies, is scalping and burning on the frontiers." Facts always were the ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... fact that we were under the protection of the wall. Had we been further out the coping would assuredly have landed on us or else we should have been hit by the shrapnel contained in the bombs, for the wall opposite was pitted with it. The dust was suffocating, and I heard Pierre saying, "Come away, Mademoiselle." Though it takes so long to describe, only a few minutes had elapsed since leaving to cross the yard. The beautiful East window of the Cathedral was shivered to atoms, and likewise every window ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... chat ere my bed was made and I was cosily and thoroughly tucked in by my faithful comrades. It was hard at first to sleep with the head completely covered; there was such a sense of smothering, that I often ran the risk of the freezing rather than the smothering. One night, perhaps because of this suffocating sensation, I unconsciously uncovered my head. After a time I awoke suddenly to consciousness, to find that I was trying to pull off my now frozen nose which I thought was the ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... am suffocating with anxiety," she said. "I feel that this hour is to decide the lives of us all, and it seems to me as if Death were already stretching out his cold hand toward me. We are lost, and my son, my unhappy son, will never wear any other than the ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... "therefore do not believe it exists." It is quite possible they may not be able to see the foulness, but if in the majority of railroad cars run in this country, they are not able to feel it in gritty, grimy accumulations on skin and linen, and smell it in suffocating stenches which serve, with sneeze-provoking dust, to stifle anything like comfort, their skin must be thicker, their linen more neglected, and their noses less sensitive than those of the majority of fellow travellers it has ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... degree from the shock of finding herself actually on trial, she endeavored to collect her faculties; but the violent palpitation of her heart was almost suffocating, and in her ears the surging as of an ocean tide, drowned the accents of the magistrate. At first the words were as meaningless as some Sanskrit formula, but gradually her attention grasped and comprehended. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... both the flagstaff at the South Head, and that at the entrance of the Cove, on Point Maskelyne, were shivered to pieces by the lightning. The vast blazes of fire which were seen in every direction, and which were freshened by every blast of wind, added much to the suffocating heat that prevailed. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... desert. You know how terrible the first hours of the night are. When the moon comes up, huge and yellow, a sharp dust seems to rise in suffocating clouds. You move your jaws mechanically as if to crush the dust that finds its way into your throat like fire. Then usually a kind of lassitude, of drowsiness, follows. You walk without thinking. You forget where you are walking. You remember only when you stumble. Of course ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... audience to a state of abject and tearful mirth, the creature stopped suddenly, announced, "You've seen the Jabberwock," in sepulchral tones, and flopped on to the end of a couch, saying breathlessly, "Mary Brooks, please help me out of this. I'm suffocating." ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... spectators, and even forgetting Bobby, he doggedly grappled with those yielding ropes until he got a foothold, swung himself over the top, cleared the entanglement below, and made a flying dash for the yawning mouth of canvas at the far end of the deck. It was incredibly hot and suffocating inside, but he wriggled frantically forward, clawing and kicking like a crab. At last a dim light ahead spurred him to one final ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... which they are not particularly chary. Nor are these roosting-places attractive to the Indians only, for the settlers near them also pay them nocturnal visits. They come with guns, clubs, pots of suffocating materials, and every other means of destruction that can well be imagined to be within their command, and procure immense quantities of the birds in a very short time. These they stuff into sacks and carry ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... around the shores of the great bay upon which Port-au-Prince is situated, are severe, and sometimes very disastrous. At mid-day the wind falls instantly, there is a dead calm on land and sea, the heat is consequently more intense, and the atmosphere suffocating; then the vibrations occur, after which the wind begins to blow again. Sometimes, at an interval of ten or twelve hours, there is a supplementary shock, less violent than the first one. It is said that the coast-caves bellow just before an earthquake. Their noise probably seems more emphatic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... his rider fell; and as I laid hand on the reins I thought I heard a shot off beyond the river. But I couldn't be certain. The whine of the wind that comes with a fire, the crackle of the fire itself, the manifold sounds that echoed between the canyon walls and the pungent, suffocating smoke, all conspired against clear thinking or hearing. I listened a moment, but heard no more. Then, with time at a premium, I hastened to straighten out the tangle of pack-animals. Mac loomed up in the general blur with Lessard's body on his horse, as I ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Beynac left some pleasant memories. The days were fiery, and, when the south wind blew, almost suffocating; but when the sun went down into the west there usually came a beneficent change. During the few minutes that the golden circle lay seemingly upon the edge of the world, a boat crossing the river appeared to glide over unfathomable ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... and Khosrul's life would have paid the forfeit for his temerity...when crash! ... a sudden and tremendous clap of thunder shook the hall, and every lamp was extinguished! Impenetrable darkness reigned, . . thick, close, suffocating darkness, . . the thunder rolled away in sullen, vibrating echoes, and there was a short, impressive silence. Then piercing through the profound gloom came the clamorous cries and shrieks of frightened women, . . the horrible, selfish scrambling, pushing and struggling of a bewildered, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... sunk, and the labour was considerably increased from the nature of the weather. The wind was blowing as if through a furnace, from the N.N.E., and the dust was flying in clouds, so as to render it almost suffocating to remain exposed to it. This was the only occasion upon which we felt the hot winds in the interior. We were, about noon, endeavouring to gain a point of a wood at which I expected to come upon the river again, but it was impossible for the teams to reach it without assistance. I therefore ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... running noose was thrown round its neck, and two men held the ends of the ropes. The animal struggled, made a rush, and attempted to bite, but its efforts tended only to tighten the noose still more firmly, and it at length gave in, half strangled; after alternating struggles and suffocating paroxysms, it became somewhat calmer, and allowed itself to be led. It was finally tamed, if not to the extent of becoming useful in agriculture, at least for the purposes of war: before the horse was ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... lonely duty was not enhanced in pleasure by the contemplation of scores of stretcher bearers carrying out men who had been caught unprepared by the gas and who were choking and suffocating ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... governments, are never put to death; but the punishments inflicted on them are abundantly severe. The most common is the cutting off their noses. Even those of considerable rank are tortured, by being smoked in a small chamber with the suffocating fumes of burning capsicum, and by having their private parts ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... the liquid mud streamed down, and the people fled and struggled on, and still the sentry stood at his post, unflinching, till death had stiffened his limbs; and his bones, in their helmet and breastplate, with the hand still raised to keep the suffocating dust from mouth and nose, have remained even till our own times to show how a Roman soldier did his duty. In like manner the last of the old Spanish infantry originally formed by the Great Captain, Gonzalo de Cordova, were all cut off, standing fast to a man, at the battle of Rocroy, ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... when each is at liberty, in freedom to be itself, in order that it may perform its own, its peculiar and appropriate function, in harmonious connection with others performing theirs. Despotism is the binding, compressing, suffocating of individual life; first of the three functions of government, which should always be kept separate, and next, as a natural and inevitable consequence, of those who come under that solidified administration. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... These vertical tiers of bunks looked for all the world like boarded up book shelves in a library, one adjoining the other as far as their eyes could penetrate the darkness of the hall, and in each and every bunk was a snoring human wretch, while the suffocating atmosphere caused by the overcrowding and the insufficient ventilation, which was greatly enhanced by the heat of the summer, made the "Golden Rule Hotel" an absolutely unfit place for ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... a bed. There was no chimney, and, indeed, no ventilation whatever. I was near losing my life there—the foul air of so many people working all day in the place, and sleeping there at night, was quite suffocating. Almost all the men were consumptive, and I myself attended the dispensary for disease of the lungs. The room in which we all slept was not more than six feet square. We were all sick and weak, and both to work. Each of the six of us paid 2s. 6d. a week ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... in the snow until they reached the ice itself. It was suffocating, for the wind had blown in the entrance and fresh air was excluded.... Jim felt the body close to him—it was still as death. A great fear swept through him. She was not strong enough for this trial—she was——! He thrust his hand inside the thick coat and felt the heart. It was ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... it will readily be imagined that a Puna hut is no very agreeable or inviting retreat. Yet, when worn out by the dangers and fatigues of a long day's journey, and exposed to the fury of a mountain storm, the weary traveller, heedless of suffocating clouds of smoke and mephitic odors, gladly creeps into the rude dwelling. Taking up his resting-place on the damp floor, with his saddle-cloth for a pillow, he is thankful to find himself once again in a human habitation, even though its occupants be not ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... another more solemn summons had preceded her own, and that she might call and Geoffrey Thurston would not hear! He had won his right to rest by work well done, but she—it now seemed that a lifetime would be too short to mourn him. Helen shivered at the thought, then she felt as if she were suffocating. Turning the light low, she flung the long window open. Beyond the electric glare of the city, with its shapeless pile of roofs and towering poles, the mountains rose, serenely majestic, in robes of awful purity. They were beckoning her she ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... think she is not; I think that thou art just, and think thou art not: I'll have some proof: her name, that was as fresh As Dian's visage, is now begrim'd and black As mine own face.—If there be cords or knives, Poison or fire, or suffocating streams, I'll not endure 't.—Would I ...
— Othello, the Moor of Venice • William Shakespeare
... thousand five hundred miles, wherever climatic and physical conditions were favorable to their irrigated tillage and highland herds of llamas. They found it easier to climb pass after pass and mount to ever higher altitudes, rather than descend to the suffocating coasts where neither man nor beast could long survive, though they pushed the political boundary finally to the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... had the likeness between father and son shown itself so conspicuously, and in the handsome features and insinuating, beguiling velvet voice she found sickening resemblances that made her heart surge, until she seemed suffocating. Hastily she loosened the ribbons of her hat that were tied beneath ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... my grave across my brow Plays no wind of healing now, And fire and ice within me fight Beneath the suffocating night. ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... flowers as in winter-time. In cold weather the frost blossoms on her window pane, and the snow falls in wreaths in the alley. God pity the wretchedness that pants and sweats and festers and dies on the hot pavements and in the suffocating ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... suddenly to her throat, for the catch in her breath seemed to be suffocating her, then looked up and saw Lord Donal Stirling, in the ordinary everyday dress of an English gentleman, as well groomed as if he had come, not from a train, but from his own house. There was a kindly smile on ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... the white edge of the bursting surge, Where they had sunk together, would the snake Relax his suffocating grasp, and scourge The wind with his wild writhings; for, to break That chain of torment, the vast bird would shake The strength of his unconquerable wings As in despair, and with his sinewy neck Dissolve in sudden shock those linked rings, Then ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... rising, and the storm was increasing in fury. Before he had reached the marsh, the gale was sweeping the snow before it in suffocating clouds, and he was forced frequently to turn his back upon it that he ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... same was done in several other places, and in a few minutes the two men were in the centre of a ring of fire, which enlarged and increased in fury as the flames seized upon the dry material on all sides. The heat now was intense, and the smoke was blinding and suffocating. ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... then set fire to the church. They must come and let us out, you know; at least I take it for granted that they will before the roof comes down. If they don't, we must force the doors ourselves—I've looked at them—and until we do there is no fear of suffocating, for there are no panes to the windows. So, after all, it will only be a bonfire, without ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... with a blinding, suffocating suddenness which set his brain to reeling and wrung a rapturous ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... followed the storm, which swelled the brooks and streams and flooded the surrounding country, causing much damage amongst the corn. After riding about five leagues, we began to enter the mountainous district which surrounds Astorga: the heat now became almost suffocating; swarms of flies began to make their appearance, and settling down upon the horses, stung them almost to madness, whilst the road was very flinty and trying. It was with great difficulty that we reached Astorga, covered ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... thrill of hope, she was hardly conscious of the suffocating smoke which now filled the cabin, stinging her eyes so that she could hardly see, or of the heat which with her exertions had sent the perspiration streaming down her face. For now, balancing herself with ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... his fault. The process of becoming a gentleman had pained and irked him, but he had a masterful son who could not afford that his father should wear a shaggy bark, and that masterful son had been suffocating him with opulence until his powers of resistance ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... money back? Isn't my son to receive the five thousand dollars for informing as to the identity of the thief—isn't he?" demanded Mr. Foger, almost suffocating from his ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... very suffocating, thermometer 85 above at three p.m., not as much as a cloud to be seen in the firmament and not the least air to afford any refreshment; this along with the solitude of the time is enough to make people dull. No Indian from ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... steps, and started across the street; but halfway over, he hesitated uncertainly, as a child's cry came petulantly from the doorway. It was dark in the street; and, likewise, it was one of those hot, suffocating evenings when, in the crowded tenements of the poorer class, miserable enough in any case, misery was added to a hundredfold for lack of a single God-given breath of air. These two facts, apparently irrelevant, caused Jimmie Dale to change his mind again. He had not noticed the woman with the baby ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... what the old hag downstairs had called the music-room. The partitions of all the rooms on the floor had been roughly torn down to form this apartment; hardly a pane of glass remained intact in the windows; the dingy, whitewashed walls were covered with scrawls and drawings in charcoal. A suffocating, nauseous odor rose up, absolutely overpowering the smell from the neighboring tanyards. There was no furniture except a broken chair, upon which lay a dog whip with plaited leather lash. Round the room, against the wall, stood some twenty children, dirty, and in tattered clothes. Some had violins ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... hour and three-quarters by my watch I stood in the suffocating, smoky, hot atmosphere listening to, but only faintly understanding, the war of words and gesture that raged round us. At last the fact that we were to be received being settled, Gray Shirt's friend led us out of the guard house—the crowd flinching back as I came through ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... with the great ozonic brine on both sides, it comprises the most favorable health-chances in the world. (If only the suffocating crowding of some of its tenement houses could be broken up.) I find I never sufficiently realized how beautiful are the upper two-thirds of Manhattan island. I am stopping at Mott Haven, and have been familiar now for ten days with the region above One-hundredth street, and along the Harlem river ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... stricken bungalow. The whole westward wing of the house was now alight. Great clouds of crimson flame wrestled with the looming fog above us; they illumined all the garden about as with the light of ten thousand fiery lamps. Suffocating smoke, burning breezes, floating sparks, leaping tongues of flame drove us on. Cries you heard, one naming the heights for a haven, another clamouring for the beach, one answering with an oath, another, it may be, with ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... terribly long one. What could she do whilst waiting for the night? For some time past she had abandoned her needlework; sewing had become a terrible weariness. For hours she lingered in her seat with idle hands, almost suffocating in her room, and craving to go out into the open air for breath, yet never stirring. It was this room which made her ill; she hated it, in angry exasperation over the two years which she had spent within its walls; its blue velvet ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... blizzard that descended upon them, though when it came rolling down from the hilltops it much resembled one. The wind had changed and brought fog, cold, suffocating, impenetrable. Yet such was the mood of them that no one said anything about it. Weary had been about to turn off a couple of men, but did not. What was the use, since they ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... ceased throbbing for a few moments, and then went on again in a way which felt suffocating, as he felt convinced that there was some ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... were brief and broken. Winter was the season of Huron festivity; and, as they lay stretched on their hard couch, suffocating with smoke and tormented by an inevitable multitude of fleas, the thumping of the drum resounded all night long from a neighboring house, mingled with the sound of the tortoise-shell rattle, the ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... two-thirds of these apparently saloons, with dirty, flapping tents sandwiched between, and huge piles of tin cans and other rubbish stored away behind. The street was rutted and dusty, and the ceaseless wind swirled the dirt about in continuous, suffocating clouds. The hotel itself, a little, squatty, two-storied affair, groaned to the blast, threatening to collapse. Nothing moved except a wagon down the long ribbon of road, and a dog digging for a bone behind a near-by ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... tightened on her neck. She was suffocating, dying she thought, and her heart was filled with a wild, mad longing for life and a terror undreamt of. She could faintly hear her father's voice calling her and ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... and grape. Through tangled shrubberies, bright with flowers and colored berries, pierced the discharge of canister; the air, fragrant at the dawn with orange blossom and starry jessamine, was noisome with suffocating, sulphurous fumes, and, beneath the fetid shroud, figures in a fog heedlessly trampled the lilies, the red roses and "flowers of ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... his northern progress passes vertically over the island. A mirage fills the hollows with mimic water; the heat in close apartments becomes extreme, and every living creature flies to the shade from the suffocating glare of mid-day. At length the sea exhibits symptoms of an approaching change, a ground swell sets in from the west, and the breeze towards sunset brings clouds and grateful showers. At the end of the month the mean temperature attains its greatest height during the year, being about 83 deg. in ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the last of such delight. The sun rose clear and bright, and at high noon, as they approached the equator, it was sometimes hot, but the breeze which continually swept the deck tempered it to the crew and passenger. Had they been caught in a calm the heat would have been suffocating; but Providence favored them, and they sped along like a seagull toward their destination. There seemed to be times when the green surface of the sea was at perfect rest; but the regular rising and sinking of the Coral showed that the bosom of the great deep was heaving as it always ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... thing. Roads there were none, and supplies became difficult to secure. The surface of the land melted and spinning wheels churned it; traffic halted, vehicles sank, horses drowned. Between rains the sun dried the mud, the wind whirled it into suffocating clouds. Sandstorms swept over the miserable inhabitants; tornadoes, thick with a burden of cutting particles, harried them until they cursed the fate that had brought ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... hot and suffocating staircase to the first floor, where the fire raged with the utmost fury. Here the flames were bursting from the burning wing through every crevice into the passage. Ishmael, in his wet woollen clothes, and the boys in their blankets, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... up a mountain side. They run along the ground licking up the leaves and dead branches. They leap from tree to tree, and then with a roar the sheet of flame goes to the top of a tall pine. The air is like the breath from an oven and is filled with sparks and with suffocating smoke. The birds and animals flee away ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... were frightful, suffocating in their intensity. The roar of the unseen flames seemed to fill ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... blood for its own sake, who, not content with subjugating, were impatient to destroy, who found a fiendish pleasure in razing magnificent cities, cutting the throats of enemies who cried for quarter, or suffocating an unarmed population by thousands in the caverns to which it had fled for safety. Such were the cruelties which daily excited the terror and disgust of a people among whom, till lately, the worst that a soldier ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that the gray wall no longer stood between her and happiness; was a menace that with the sun's rays would disappear out of her life like so much mist. But the effort was useless. The aura of shadow that hung always over that place wrapped her in its suffocating miasma, became part of the very ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... o'clock on an intolerable day peculiar to the Dakota plain. A frightfully hot, withering, and powerful wind was abroad. The thermometer stood nearly a hundred in the shade, and the wind, so far from being a relief, was suffocating because of its heat and the dust it swept ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... rudely hurled Against the jutting angle of a wall, And cursed, and reeled against, and flung aside By drunken brawlers as they shuffled past, A man was groping to what seemed a light. His eyelids burnt and quivered with the strain Of looking, and against his temples beat The all enshrouding, suffocating dark. He stumbled, lurched, and struck against a door That opened, and a howl of obscene mirth Grated his senses, wallowing on the floor Lay men, and dogs and women in the dirt. He sickened, loathing it, and as he gazed The candle guttered, flared, ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... had seen nobody on my way. There was no talking within. The last sunset ray struck on my hand its yellow shade, through the fan-light, and faded before I opened the door. I was arrested on the threshold by a silence which rushed upon me, clutching me in a suffocating embrace. Mother was in her chair by the fire, which was out, for the brands were black, and one had fallen close to her feet. A white flannel shawl covered her shoulders; her chin rested on her breast. "She is ill, and has dropped asleep," I thought, ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... into the attic, but the staircase, he found, was full of suffocating smoke, and he dared not venture below the next floor. He took her into a long dormitory, shut the door on those pungent and pervasive fumes, and opened the window to discover the fire escape was now against the house, and all Fishbourne boiling with excitement ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... cried; "i' God's name and by all the Saints, I warn you go no farther! 'T will be your death, and you are not the man we could see perish without grief and dolour. A few steps more and you are a dead man! They are suffocating up yonder. Already full six hundred pilgrims have given up the ghost. And this is but a small beginning! Do you not know, messire, that twenty-two years agone, in the year of grace one thousand four hundred and seven, on the selfsame day and at the selfsame hour, under yonder porch, ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... decoction of equal quantities of rue, wormwood, and tobacco, sprinkled on the leaves and branches while the fruit is ripening. Or take a chafing-dish of burning charcoal, place it under the branches of the bush or tree, and throw on it a little brimstone. The vapour of the sulphur, and the suffocating fume arising from the charcoal, will not only destroy all the insects, but prevent the plants from being infested with them any more that season. Black cankers, which commit great devastation among turnips, are best destroyed by turning a quantity ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... judgment. But Hearne answered, perhaps, his Lordship's design of making the world have a very great opinion of his collections, and setting an inestimable value on them. And this Hearne attempted; but his daubing is, I think, too coarse, and the smoke of his incense troublesome and suffocating." But it is to the loan of a copy of Lewis's folio edition of the History of the Translations of the Bible, belonging to my friend Mr. G.V. Neunburg, that I am indebted for the following further, and more interesting, particulars. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Masanath, suffocating with wrath and rebellion and overpowered with an exaggerated appreciation of her shame, tumbled down in the shadows of the narrow passage and wrapped her ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... to $3.50 per square foot. A rug is an essential, but it should be of a sort that will not readily absorb and retain water. Speaking of the window, it must be observed that outdoor ventilation, without disturbing privacy, should be made possible. Often a bathroom becomes quite suffocating, and with weakly persons the danger of being overcome in a locked room is not to ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... elastic stomach of youth! Some fifty persons, the ban and arriere ban of the relations of the young couple, guzzled in a wedged and weltering mass. Wizened grandfathers and stolid large-eyed children ate and panted in the suffocating heat, and gorged again. Not till half way through the repast did tongues begin to wag freely. At last the tisane of champagne—syrupy paradise to my uncultivated palate—was handed round and the toasts ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... pressed them against the hair which was hanging, as it was apt to do, in a mass on his forehead, while he rested his elbows on his knees. He was feeling bitter disappointment, as if he had opened a door out of a suffocating place and had found it walled up; but he also felt sure that Rosamond was pleased with the cause of his disappointment. He preferred not looking at her and not speaking, until he had got over the first spasm of vexation. After all, he said in his bitterness, what can ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... a position which I have no right to occupy. What interest can I feel in it? Oh God! what do I care about the woman to whom I have given a new life?" His voice broke into a sob at those last wild words. He tore at the breast of his coat as if he was suffocating—and ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... steps, opened and shut numberless doors, and threaded several narrow corridors in silence, before reaching the place of destination. While Gelsomina sought the key of the door before which they stopped, in the large bunch she carried, the Bravo breathed the hot air of the attic like one who was suffocating. ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... himself at the impression the man's information had made upon him. Dismay, anger, and shame struggled for the mastery in his breast. What a suffocating air he breathed in this house! How vile and underhand and insincere were the people by whom he was surrounded! But was this true that Auguste told him? Did he not lie and slander like the rest? Was he not doing the servant far too ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... and on, asking herself these questions and finding no answer in the whirl and eddy of dust blown at her by the wind, in the limitless stretch of prairie, in the suffocating thickness of heat which enveloped the way ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... they threw themselves up into the air in high columns; then, borne down by the wind, burst through the boughs of the forest, scorching here and there on the way the trunks of the large trees; while such a torrent of sparks and ignited cinders was poured down upon the prairie, that, added to the suffocating masses of smoke, it was impossible to ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... wind shifted again, and the fire swept north. The head of the triangle became a death-trap. All through the night the southern sky was filled with a lurid glow, and by morning the heat and smoke and ash were suffocating. ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... issued from the tank and breathed hard for some moments. Despite his ingenious contrivance for feeding his lungs he was not far from suffocating. ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... be a plunge down into that swollen rushing torrent, and he would be past all rescue. An instant of suffocating pain, then singing in his ears, sparks in his eyes, unconsciousness—annihilation perhaps—who knew? Just then any other world, any other penalty, seemed preferable to life and ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... helped to entomb him in a living grave. Still, though the jail resounded with shrieks and cries for help,—though the fire bounded up as if each separate flame had had a tiger's life, and roared as though, in every one, there were a hungry voice—though the heat began to grow intense, and the air suffocating, and the clamour without increased, and the danger of his situation even from one merciless element was every moment more extreme,—still he was afraid to raise his voice again, lest the crowd should break in, and should, of their own ears or from the information ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... very much in the meanwhile, and you haven't heard what led up to the demand, or why I came back to you. You are evidently not curious, but I'm going to tell you. Soon after I left you, I fell very sick, and lay in the saloon of a little desolate settlement for days. The place was suffocating, and the wind blew the alkali dust in. They had only horrible brandy, and bitter water to drink it with, and I lay there on my back, panting, with the flies crawling over me. I knew if I stayed any longer it would ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... clapped over his nose, so that in breathing the wet cloth would keep much of the suffocating vapor from ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... place more calculated to quickly shatter the nerves and break the health of a human being than one of those foul, suffocating ...
— Through Canal-Land in a Canadian Canoe • Vincent Hughes
... heart was going in great, suffocating plunges against her side, now that the supreme moment ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... and as a disinfectant. Greenish-yellow colour, suffocating odour. In poisoning, inhalation ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... a banquet smiles, A common cheer for all;... e'en humble Giles, Who joys his trivial services to yield Amidst the fragrance of the open field; Oft doom'd in suffocating heat to bear The cobweb'd barn's impure and dusty air; To ride in murky state the panting steed, Destin'd aloft th' unloaded grain to tread, Where, in his path as heaps on heaps are thrown, He rears, ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... the doors and windows were closed, and the juniper boughs put on the fire. When the smoke reached a suffocating point, the fresh air was admitted. The cattle were fumigated in the same way and the painful solemnities ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... themselves with a "Mezzanine," seated themselves at well-provided tea-tables and entertained a regularly flowing throng of tea-drinking, scandal-mongering women, accompanied by a circle of men of some interest and distinction. In the evening, Florence did still more. By this time, the salons were suffocating and airless. Yet there were few nights in the week when, somewhere, the sober reception was not heightened to a ball, sometimes impromptu, more often formally prearranged. Morning found the indefatigable leisure world ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... seasoned to take fire, they were all too damp and soaked to burn. Oonamoo had hardly spoken when the blaze went out of itself. A perfect storm of arrows, tipped with burning tow, now came sailing in upon them, but the only inconvenience they occasioned was a blinding, suffocating smoke, which lasted, however, but ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... had done I sat motionless and speechless, with an aching and suffocating heart, staring down on the garden over which the night ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... crunched into it, throwing a strain heavily on the back of the thigh, and then the ball of the foot slipped back in the midst of a stride. Also the labor raised the temperature of the body incredibly. With no wind stirring it was suffocating. ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... Meryon, more natives die annually of consumption than in any town in England of the same amount of population. In Genoa, one of the most prevalent and fatal of the indigenous diseases is pulmonary consumption. In Florence, pneumonia is marked by a suffocating character, and rapid progress towards its last stage. In Naples, 1 death from consumption occurs in a mortality of 2-1/3; while in the hospitals of Paris, where phthisis is notoriously prevalent, the proportion is only 1 in 3-1/4. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... men worked with a will at this cheerless task, and in spite of darkness, heat, thirst, and the suffocating atmosphere, never was a well sunk more quickly. At the same time it was not half completed when so serious a fire broke out on the roof that the entire remaining stock of water ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... of these curious old historical towns strangely persuade me, but it is so lovely afloat that I don't stop, but view them from the outside and sail on. We get abundance of grapes and peaches for next to nothing. My, but that inn was suffocating with garlic where we stayed last night! I had to hold my nose as we went up-stairs or I ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... opened mine, who would lament, who would accuse, when we had nothing to accuse, none to lament against but fortune, who is less than a vapour? But when ourselves are the well that breathes out this exhalation, the oven that spits out this fiery smoke, the mine that spews out this suffocating and strangling damp, who can ever, after this, aggravate his sorrow by this circumstance, that it was his neighbour, his familiar friend, his brother, that destroyed him, and destroyed him with a whispering and ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... betook himself. Here he found only a few bargemen and villagers, carousing upon the wooden benches of a tap-room, drinking their beer out of yellow earthenware mugs, and enjoying themselves in an atmosphere that was almost suffocating from the fumes ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... shapes crawling forward on all sides of them and accompanying them along the cavern's length. He glimpsed worm monsters here and there emerging from the upward tunnels with masses of strange plant stuff in their grasp that others blindly devoured. His senses reeled from the suffocating air, the great cavity being but a half-score feet in height, burrowed from the damp earth by ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... in the law-office in town, Mr. BLADAMS was upon his knees on the floor, tossing crackers from all directions on the carpet into his mouth, like a farinacious goblin, and nearly suffocating whenever he glanced at the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... corner and wondered at the people. Hot? and suffocating? she had no recollection of any such thing all day. How delicious it had been in that green dell under the walnut tree, ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and with a suffocating sensation he began sinking to the floor. He was aware of a feeble gratification as he saw solicitude leap into her eyes; then blackness smote him, and at the moment of smiting him his thought was that at last, and for the first time in his ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... of us used to sling our hammocks on deck, for down in the teeming troop-deck it was suffocating. It was delicious to lie in the cool night air, with only the stars above, and your feet almost overhanging the heaving sea, where it rustled away from the vessel's sides. At dawn you would see through sleepy eyes an exquisite sky, colouring for sunrise, and just at reveille the golden ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... sadness for which tears are the sole remedy; so Mary Seyton, perceiving that not only would every consolation be vain, but also unreasonable, far from continuing to react against her mistress's melancholy, fully agreed with her: it followed that the queen, who was suffocating, began to weep, and that her tears brought her comfort; then little by little she regained self-control, and this crisis passed as usual, leaving her firmer and more resolute than ever, so that when she went up to her room again it was impossible to read ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... not yet come, and he who suffers suffers alone. Then the imagination came to the rescue. He fell into blissful unconsciousness by a process of consoling half dreams in which he vindicated himself by feats of extraordinary valor, carrying the suffocating Tough McCarty and the Coffee-colored Angel out of burning houses at the risk of his own life, and earning the plaudits of ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... Objects may be clearly distinguished at the distance of several hundred yards, so that one may even shoot by moonlight. The months of June and July offer very little variation in the weather or temperature. In August a suffocating heat reigns throughout the day, and at night it is useless to seek for coolness; a faint zephyr is succeeded by a calm of several hours. The atmosphere is heavy and oppressive, and the body, weakened by perspiration, becomes languid; the appetite fails, and the mosquitos, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... there be such a thing when there is a single sick baby dying for lack of nutrition—a single convalescent suffocating for want of country air—a single family without fire or blankets? Suggest to your wife that she give up a dinner gown and use the money to send a tubercular office boy to the Adirondacks—and listen to her excuses! Is there not some charitable organization that ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... And fell LOBELIA'S suffocating breath Loads the dank pinion of the gale with death.— 195 With fear and hate they blast the affrighted groves, Yet own with tender care their kindred Loves!— So, where PALMIRA 'mid her wasted plains, Her shatter'd ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... seclusion Mrs. Thropp dared to exclaim at the wonders of modern invention. Kedzie was enfranchised and began to jump and squeal at the almost suffocating majesty. Adna took to himself ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... but I could not; my bosom rose and fell with quick little gasping breaths, as if I was suffocating. ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... downy pillow more welcome than the sod on its banks. Without blankets or covering we sank in each other's arms for mutual warmth on the dew-drenched grass; and blistered feet and aching limbs and hunger and thirst and suffocating despair are all forgotten! ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... pain. Worse than thirst it was, or the soreness of my bones. A new misery was fast growing upon me. My head swam with dizziness, the sweat started from my brow, and I felt sick both at the heart and in the stomach. I experienced a suffocating sensation in my breast and throat, as if my ribs were being compressed inwardly, and my lungs had not room enough to expand and let me breathe. My nostrils were filled with a nauseating smell—the smell of "bilge-water"—for being at the ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... the world, which it is so wicked to disturb! How miraculously beautiful must be that system which makes wine out of the scorching tears of guilt; and from the suffocating suspense, the agonized fear, the compelled and self-mocking bravery, the awful sentence, the despairing death-pang of one man, furnishes the smirking expectation of fees, the jovial meeting, and the mercenary holiday to another! "Of Law, nothing less ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... poet was feeling only the indignity of the position, and the Heathen Journalist as trumpeter of his wrongs and avenger of the Muses had not occurred to him. He smoothed out the magic scrap, and was inside the suffocating, close-packed theatre before the disconcerted janitor could meet the new situation. Pinchas found the vacated journalistic chair in the stage-box; he was installed therein before the managerial ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... voice in speaking acquires a sharp, crowing, or croupy sound, while the inspirations have a harsh, metallic intonation. After a few hours, a quantity of thick, ropy mucus is thrown out, hanging about the mouth, and causing suffocating fits of coughing ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... to liberty. He even spoke to his leader, contrary to his custom unless addressed:—"Methinks the air of yonder halls, valorous Captain, carries with it a perfume, which, though it may be well termed sweet, is so suffocating, as to be more suitable to sepulchrous chambers, than to the dwellings of men. Happy I am that I am free, as I trust, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... an attempt to examine their wounds; but before we could strip off one of their shirts, we heard a crashing and roaring beneath our feet, and up through the floor streamed clouds of smoke, black and suffocating, as though ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... deg.; and this perhaps by night as well as by day, with no great variation. Now, those who have attended to thermometrical observation will readily allow, that a continuance of this degree of heat for a length of time, would be found violent and suffocating by the generality of mankind. But at Petersburg, though the heat, as measured by the thermometer, may happen to be a few times in the year considerably higher than at St Catharines, yet, at other times, the cold is intensely sharper, and the medium for a year, or ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... enough of weight and spite in it to sweep one of the poor fellows from his precarious foothold into the seething, hissing swirl to leeward. The man tossed his arms over his head, with a wild shriek for help, as the smother carried him along in its suffocating embrace, and Joe promptly made a spring for a spare life-buoy that we had provided for such an emergency; but before it could be thrown the unfortunate wretch was hurled over the brig's mainyard as it lifted out of the water, and the next instant he disappeared beneath ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... helped. But when he spoke of diphtheria I couldn't help it and thought of my little chaps. I have already seen that dreadful thing come and sweep little lives away, just in a day or two. It took the one we buried on the other side of the cove, and we saw it suffocating, helpless to aid. And that's why I ran out, terror-stricken. But I hear that you held the baby for him. You don't know what it is to have babies of your own, and were not afraid. It is dreadful, you know, that fear that ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... wall of vapor—at times thickening to an almost impenetrable barrier, and again half suffocating him in its soft embrace—which he had breasted on the night he swam ashore, carried back his thoughts to that time, now so remote and unreal. And when, after a few moments' silent rowing, the boat approached ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... absolutely nothing of what was taking place around us. Not one word did we dare even whisper to each other, our only means of communication being through our hands. The night was intensely dark and the air was close—almost suffocating. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe |
