"Fetid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they abide, Thus fouled and desecrate, The summons of the Trumpet, and the while These Twain, their murderers, Unravined, imperturbable, unsubdued, Hang at the heels of their children—She aloft As in the shining streets, He as in ambush at some fetid stair. ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... skin—the mezquite slapped me in the face, drawing blood. I laid my hand upon a pendent limb; a clammy object struggled under my touch, with a terrified yet spiteful violence, and, freeing itself, sprang over my shoulder, and scampered off among the fallen leaves. I felt its fetid breath as the cold scales brushed against my cheek. It was ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... things the scum and rotten Sewer, where ordures best forgotten And unmentioned still descend! Filth and garbage, stench and poison. Thou dost bear in fetid foison! Here I stop ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... The fetid odour of the creatures—which was quite as strong as that of the carrion itself—was too much for the olfactory nerves of our heroes; and they were all three glad enough to let the king-vultures ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... was abominable, some unpleasant kind of meat cooked with cabbage, and though they tried to eat it, many of them could not keep it down. The ship rolled and the men grew sick. The atmosphere became fetid. Each moment seemed more impossible than the last. There was no room to move, neither could one get out and away. After supper the men lay down in the only place there was to lie, two men on the ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... has just been crowned at Moscow at an expense of some millions, and whose emblem of authority is ornamented with rubies as large as eggs and ablaze with 2,564 costly diamonds—while half his people are feeding on fetid offal—is a weak-faced pigmy who would probably be peddling Russia's favorite drunk promoter over a pine bar had he not chanced to be born in the purple. Having been spawned in a royal bed—perchance the same in which his great gran'dame Catherine was wont to receive her paramours—he becomes the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... thee foul and rank and fetid, Walt, Who cannot tell Arabia from a sty. Thou followeth Truth, nor feareth, nor doth halt; Truth: and the sole uncleanness is a ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... trodden down at the heels, and full of holes. A pair of blue trousers, mended in various places, were covered with a species of fluff which made them offensive to the eye. Whether it was that his damp clothes exhaled a fetid odor, or that he had in his normal condition the "poor smell" which belongs to Parisian tenements, just as offices, sacristies, and hospitals have their own peculiar and rancid fetidness, of which no words can give the least ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... pickpockets,' shouted a Metropolitan. Every body then tried to button his coat over his breast, and every body gave it up as a bad job. In at last, but with the heat of that exertion—the smell of the hot gas—the fetid breath of two thousand souls, not particular, many, as to the quality of their gin—what a sweltering bath follows! The usher sees a ticket clutched before him, and a breathless individual saying wildly, 'Where?' He points ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... been watered at some fetid alkali holes that had scarce given enough to slake their thirst. The effect of the water had weakened them, and the steers that had been without water for thirty-six hours were being pushed on a course slightly northwest as rapidly as the enfeebled condition of the saddle-horses would permit. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... poisoned brewage of doubt. Already things were drifting toward the abyss, when the jackals suddenly emerged from the earth. A deathly and infected literature, which had no form but that of ugliness, began to sprinkle with fetid blood ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... health. But before the time of Richard Henry Dana, many a young man of good family and education—a Harvard graduate like him, perhaps—bade farewell to a home of comfort and refinement and made his berth in a smoky, fetid forecastle to learn the sailor's calling. The sons of the great shipping merchants almost invariably made a few voyages—oftenest as supercargoes, perhaps, but not infrequently as common seamen. In time special quarters, midway between the cabin and the forecastle, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... numbers are found than in the tropical regions of America. Some are insect-eaters, while others live entirely on vegetable substances; but all have the same unsightly and repulsive appearance. The odour of some kinds is extremely fetid and disagreeable. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... shins, his knee struck me in the stomach and for an instant I sickened. Now I tripped him; we toppled together, came to the ground with a thump. Here we churned, while he flung me and still I stuck. The acrid dust of the alkali enveloped us. Again he spat, fetid—I sprawled upon him, smothering his flailing arms; gave him all my weight and strength; smelled the sweat of him, snarled into his snarling face, close ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... animal improves, the appetite returns, and the symptoms above detailed rapidly subside; if, on the other hand, resolution is not progressing, the lung substance degenerates, becomes clogged up, and ceases to function. In fatal cases the breath has a peculiar, fetid, cadaverous odor, and is taken in short gasps; the horns, ears, and extremities become cold and clammy, and the pulse is imperceptible. On auscultation, when suppuration is taking place and the lung structure is breaking down, a bubbling or gurgling crepitation, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... overcoat over him, he fell immediately into a deep sleep. He awoke in a high fever and delirious. Some days later he came to himself, rose and went out. It was eight o'clock, and the sun had disappeared. The heat was as intolerable as before, but he inhaled the dusty, fetid, infected town air with greediness. And now his head began to spin round, and a wild expression of energy crept into his inflamed eyes and pale, meager, wan face. He did not know, did not even think, what he was going to do; he only knew that ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... who flung off the yoke of the Roman classicists, and from whose simple, austere atelier issued works instinct with a new life, such as the dramatic group, The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, on the E. base of the Triumphal Arch of the Etoile. Rude, who rescued the art from the fetid atmosphere of a corrupt society and emancipated it from a hide-bound pedagogy, is here represented by his Jeanne d'Arc, 813; Maurice de Saxe, 811; and 815, Napoleon awakening to Immortality, a ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... even as the larks sang, climbing up and upward from salt marsh and meadow, on either side the rutted road, into the limpid purity of the spring sky. A light wind flapped the travel-stained, high-collared blue cloth cloak which he wore; and brought him both the haunting fetid-sweet reek of the mud flats—the tide being low—and the invigorating tang of the forest and moorland, uprolling there ahead, in purple and umber to the pale northern horizon. Against that sombre background, fair and stately in the tender sunlight as a church ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... packages. Education has ceased, save that fierce Nietzschean education which declares: "The weak and helpless must go to the wall; and we shall help them go." All that made life humanly fair is hidden in the fetid clouds of war where savages (in terror and hysteria) grope for ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... peculiar and fetid species of West Indian cockroach, so called on account of the knocking noise they make in ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... for them—officers, organization, equipment, all is ready. The endless trains decant them; they swing in leisurely columns through the streets to their depots, motley as a circus—foresters, moujiks in fetid sheepskins, cattlemen, and rivermen, Siberians, tow-haired Finns, the wide gamut of the races of Russia, all big or biggish, with those impassive, blunt-featured faces that mask the Russian soul, and all sober. No need now to make men of them before making soldiers; no ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... need the sand waste of Palestine or a tournament to call it into life? Down in that trading town, in the thick of its mills and drays, it could live, she thought. That very night, perhaps, in some of those fetid cellars or sunken shanties, there were vigils kept of purpose as unselfish, prayer as heaven-commanding, as that of the old aspirants for knighthood. She, too,—her quiet face stirred with a simple, ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the swift sad bright lightnings of laughter from the lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless disappearance from the stage of King Lear seems for once a sure sign of inexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare's part, so nauseous and so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldry of Pandarus and Thersites. I must have leave to say that the coincidence of these two in the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bearable by men who object to too strong a savour of those ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... whose fetid odors were quite sufficient to deter the dainty from penetrating beyond—they went, and into a miserable room where was scarcely space for them to stand, so huddled was it with broken furniture and ragged children. A fire was burning ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... let four people walk abreast. The drainage is carried away in uncovered channels alongside the house, in the street itself; and, the windows being directly over these drains, the good people of Cho-sen, when inside their homes, cannot breathe without inhaling the fumes exhaled from the fetid matter stagnant underneath. When rain falls, matters get somewhat better; for then the running water cleans these canals to a considerable extent. During the winter months, also, things are passable enough, for then everything is frozen; but, in the beginning of spring, when ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... half-armed Coccosteus, a heavy fish, indifferently furnished with fins, may have burrowed, like the recent Silurus glanis or Pimelodus gulio, in a thick mud,—of the existence of which in vast quantity, during the times of the Old Red Sandstone, the dark Caithness flagstones, the fetid breccia of Strathpeffer, and the gray stratified clays of Cromarty, Moray, and Banff, unequivocally testify; and that it may have thus not only succeeded in capturing many of its light-winged contemporaries, which it would have vainly pursued in open sea, but may have been ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... discusses all the ailments of the various organs, the brain, the eyes, the teeth, the heart, the spleen, the stomach, the liver. She has special chapters on redness and paleness of the face, on asthma, on cough, on fetid breath, on bilious indigestion, on gout. Besides, she has other chapters on nervous affections, on icterus, on fevers, on intestinal worms, on infections due to swamp exhalations, on dysentery, and a number of forms of pulmonary diseases. Nearly all of our methods of diagnosis are to be found, hinted ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... before the philosophy of history, and before the social progress of our race. The first issue is the struggle between the pure democratic spirit embodied in the Free States, and the fetid remains of the worst part of humanity embodied in the South. The second issue is between the perennial vitality of the principle of self-government in the people, and the transient and accidental results of the self-government as manifested in Mr. Lincoln, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... fetid air on a hot day will bring the smell of that Sac camp to me even now. The Sacs were a migratory, brutish people, who snatched at life red-handed and growling, and as I squatted in their dirty hovels, I lost, like a dropped garment, all ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... dying breath to surrender, and Konrad was carried, a half-senseless captive to Bothwell's castle of Hermitage. Even then the earl spared his life. He lay in a hideous den, in pitch darkness and dead silence broken only by the splash of drops of fetid water that fell from the slimy ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the church; they pass through it in solemn march; they find themselves in a vaulted passage. The Swiss looks around. 'Dig here,' said he suddenly. 'Yes, dig here,' said the meiga. The masons labour; the floor is broken up—a horrible and fetid ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... to Cowan's Bridge, and with swift strides cleared away the old order of things. The site was declared unhealthy; the clothing insufficient; the water fetid and brackish. When the doctor who inspected the school was asked to taste the daily food of the scholars he spat it out of his mouth. Everything, everything must be altered. It was a time of sore and grievous humiliation to Mr. Wilson. ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... that was wrapped around him had fallen below his loins, and his shoulders and chest and lean arms were hidden under blotches of scaly pustules. Enormous wrinkles crossed his forehead. Like a skeleton, he had a hole instead of a nose, and from his bluish lips came breath which was fetid and as thick ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... das seine Mutter verachtet, hat einen stinkenden Atem. [The child that despises its mother has a fetid breath.]—German. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... plantain and orange-trees outside the city walls seems chilly by comparison. Heaven help all sick persons and young children within the city to-night! The high house-walls are still radiating heat savagely, and from obscure side gullies fetid breezes eddy that ought to poison a buffalo. But the buffaloes do not heed. A drove of them are parading the vacant main street; stopping now and then to lay their ponderous muzzles against the ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... head bears a tuft in shape like a crown; it has a strident voice, and its eye is murderous, "A look," says the "Romance of Alexander," "so piercing, that it is pestilential and deadly to all beasts, whether venomous or no." Its breath is no less fetid, nor less dangerous, for, "by its breath are all things infected, and when it is dying it is fain to disgorge it; it stinks so that all other beasts flee ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... which you hoped such great things, Science predicts extinction in a night of Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly—as slowly as doom came on Jupiter in your "Prometheus," but as surely. If this nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the ice-bound Equator, will read, by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the latest of his race, will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... easily obtainable, for the country is but partially cultivated; great rivers, bridged at rare intervals, issue from the barren solitudes of rugged plateaus; in many low-lying regions a single storm is sufficient to convert the undrained alluvial into a fetid swamp, and tracts as large as an English county are covered with pathless forest. Steam and the telegraph, penetrating even the most lonely jungles, afford, it is true, such facilities for moving and feeding large bodies of men that the difficulties presented by ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... plans succeed, and each is well content. Thus under Satan's all paternal care They brothers are, this royal bandit pair. Oh, noxious conquerors! with transient rule Chimera heads—ambition can but fool. Their misty minds but harbor rottenness Loathsome and fetid, and all barrenness— Their deeds to ashes turn, and, hydra-bred, The mystic skeleton is theirs to dread. The daring German and the cunning Pole Noted to-day a woman had control Of lands, and watched Mahaud like evil spies; And from the Emp'ror's ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... room, the exhalations of unhealthy trades, the dense, greasy fumes of cooking done in chafing-dishes on the floor, the stench of rags and the faint damp smell of clothes drying in the house, came forth and filled the hall. The broken-paned window behind Germinie wafted to her nostrils the fetid stench of a leaden pipe in which the whole house emptied its refuse and its filth. Her stomach rose in revolt every moment at a puff of infection; she was obliged to take from her pocket a phial of melissa water that she always carried, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... questionable, then all things become material and vile. The world becomes a world of sight and sound, of taste and touch. The soul is poured through the senses and dissipated; the current of life stagnates, and grows fetid in sloughs and marshes. Minds for whom God is the Unknowable have no faith in knowledge at all, except as the equivalent of weight and measure, of ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... The immaterial soil of England is heavy and fertile with the decaying stuff of past seasons and generations. Here is the floor of a new wood, yet uncumbered by one year's autumn fall. We Europeans find the Orient stale and too luxuriantly fetid by reason of the multitude of bygone lives and thoughts, oppressive with the crowded presence of the dead, both men and gods. So, I imagine, a Canadian would feel our woods and fields heavy with the past and the invisible, and suffer claustrophobia in an English countryside ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... Mediterranean" is a most filthy, fetid, uncovered gutter, running down the middle of the most, even of the best streets, and with which every merciless Jehu most liberally bespatters the unhappy pedestrian. Truly la belle nation has little idea of decency, or there ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... its double doors, and shutting himself into the tiny box where the fetid air seemed to take him by the throat and the space was so narrow he could hardly crowd his long legs into it, rushed into another delay. Wrong number! ... When at last he got the right number and the hospital, there were the usual deliberate questions; and the, "I'll connect ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... (Small ache) or wild Celery (Apium graveolens), which grows abundantly in moist English ditches, or in water. This is an umbelliferous herb, unwholesome as a food, and having a coarse root, with [95] a fetid smell. But, like many others of the same natural order, when transplanted into the garden, and bleached, it becomes aromatic and healthful, making an excellent condimentary vegetable. But more than this, the cultivated Celery may well take rank as a curative Herbal Simple. ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... filled with increasing astonishment; for he found that the dwelling was thirty miles in circuit, and composed of one entire carbuncle, lucid and vermilion. What became of the boasted wonders of the world before this? The world itself, in the comparison, appeared but a lump of brute and fetid matter.[6] ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... these monsters, whose hate was ablaze? Both on revenge were bent; He for a menace sent, She for the merriment Caused by his lays. "Dungeon and torture-rack, These shall now pay thee back! Minstrel and poet rare, Rave in thy mad despair, And in that fetid ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... dwellings marched shoulder to shoulder along the ways, shuttered, dark, grim, with an effect of conspirators, their heads together in lawless conference. The streets were intolerably narrow, the paving a farce; pools of stagnant water stood in the depressions, piles of refuse banked the walls. The fetid air hung motionless but sibilant with stealthy footsteps and whisperings.... Preferable to this seemed even the infinitely more dangerous and odorous Coolootollah purlieus into which they presently ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... bankrupt company. And so may a man be untrue to his troth,—and leave true love in pursuit of tinsel, and beauty, and false words, and a large income. But why should one tell the story of creatures so base? One does not willingly grovel in gutters, or breathe fetid atmospheres, or live upon garbage. If we are to deal with heroes and heroines, let us, at any rate, have heroes and heroines who are above such meanness as falsehood in love. This Frank Greystock must be little better than a mean villain, if he allows himself to be turned from his allegiance ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... straight and 37 fathoms broad for the good, and crooked and narrow as sword-edge for the bad, a nymph-like form will appear to the virtuous and say, "I am the personification of thy good deeds!" In Hell there will issue from a fetid gale a gloomy figure with head like a minaret, red eyeballs, hooked nose, teeth like pillars, spear-like fangs, snaky locks etc. and when asked who he is he will reply, "I am the personification of thine ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... custom proclaimed that "good society" in the town of X—, formerly considered the precincts of courts as unfit for ladies as the fetid air of morgues, or the surgical instruments on dissecting tables; but the vanguard of cosmopolitan freedom and progress had pitched tents in the old-fashioned place, and recruited rapidly from the ranks of the invaded; hence it came to pass, that on the second day of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... furlong of fetid, black fen, with gelid, green patches of pond, Lies dumb by the horns of the glen—at the gates of the horror beyond; And those who have looked on it tell of the terrible growths that are there— The ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... woman. As she comes closer he sees that she is clad in the cheap and soiled finery of her class. At once he knows her for what she is. He reads the dark story of her sinful life. He understands the whole fetid and filthy past through which she has journeyed as through the stenchful mud ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... the people think for a time that he had been spirited away, but later on a fetid odor was noticeable near the grove, and some shepherds, upon investigation, found the body of the old man in a badly decomposed condition hanging from the limb of a baliti tree. When alive the old man had terrorized many by his deep and ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... was the man whom he was now about to get into his power; the man who, besides, had on a former occasion bearded and insulted him to his teeth;—the skulking adventurer afraid to disclose his name—the low-born impostor, living by the rinsings of foul and fetid teeth—the base upstart—the thief—the man who robbed and absconded from his employer; and this wretch, this cipher, so low in the scale of society and life, was the individual who had left him what he then felt himself to be—a thing ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... logs, half hidden in the soil, lay mouldering away. Three or four meagre dogs, wasted and vexed with hunger; some long-legged pigs, wandering away into the woods in search of food; some children, nearly naked, gazing at him from the huts; were all the living things he saw. A fetid vapour, hot and sickening as the breath of an oven, rose up from the earth, and hung on everything around; and as his foot-prints sunk into the marshy ground, a black ooze started forth to ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... an egg-shaped veil (volva), having a gelatinous inner layer. Some are bright-colored, others are pure white, and the stems of one species look as if covered with lace work. The most familiar one, Phallus impudicus, "the fetid wood witch," we have placed in the list of fungi at the end of this book, ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... subdued form of laughter through the nose, in hopeless ridicule of a Frenchman's notions of an Englishman's occupations—presumed across Channel to allow of his breaking loose from shooting engagements at a minute's notice, to rush off to a fetid foreign city notorious for mud and mosquitoes, and commence capering and grimacing, pouring forth a jugful of ready-made extravagances, with 'mon fils! mon cher neveu! Dieu!' and similar fiddlededee. These were matters for women to do, if they chose: women and Frenchmen were much of a pattern. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... darkness had not yet gone; to have recalled it and related it briefly as I could once in my life is enough. Let me now go back to the simile of the lost wretch struggling for life in the mangrove swamp. The first sense of having set my foot on a firmer place in that slough of fetid slime, of a wholesome breath of air blown to me from outside the shadow of the black abhorred forest, was when I began to experience intervals of relief from physical pain, when these grew more and more frequent and would extend to entire days, then to weeks, and for a time I would ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... came, and with it the gurgling of the old woman. It was impossible and incredible, that mingling in the fetid air of those two sounds, as if the babble of clear spring water had suddenly broken into and merged with the turgid roll of a city sewer. Mick sat up. "But this ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... he had the opportunity of observing only once, are sometimes united in masses, and completely close the auditive canal. The surface is granulated and black, and there escapes from it an unctuous fetid discharge. On both sides the animal is exceedingly susceptible of pain, and the excrescences bleed if the slightest pressure is brought to ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... detail, we felt sick almost to fainting. We left Atoi, and again strolled towards the spot where this disgusting mess was cooking. Not a native was now near it: a hot, fetid steam kept occasionally bursting from the smothered mass; and the same dog we had seen with the head now crept from beneath the bushes, and sneaked towards the village. To add to the gloominess of the whole, a large hawk rose heavily from the very spot where the poor victim had been cut in pieces. ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... alley to the narrow opening that to the uninitiated was not an opening between the buildings at all, and slipped in the old way. He had thought it all out in the night. He was sure he knew just how far beyond Sal's house it was; on into the fetid air of the close dark place, the air that struck him in the face like a hot, wet blanket as he ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... for many weeks. At one time this substance was used for medicinal purposes. The mode of defence bestowed on the skunk is somewhat similar to that employed by the cuttle-fish, which emits a dark liquor when pursued. Those who have once smelt the horribly fetid odour of the skunk will not ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... enters the church, they pass through it in solemn march, they find themselves in a vaulted passage. The Swiss looks around. "Dig here!" said he. The masons labour, the floor is broken up—a horrible fetid odour arises.... ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... fans out eastward from the meeting of the Sierras and coastwise hills where the first swings across the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. The yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age, tipped with panicles of fetid, greenish bloom. After death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes the moonlight fearful. Before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a creamy ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... hast thou not fruitful Afric nigh? And has she not in sooth offended more Than Italy? yet her to scathe, that high, And noble, enterprize wilt thou give o'er. Alas! thou sleepest, drunken Italy, Of every vice and crime the fetid sewer! Nor grievest, as a hand-maid, to obey, In turn, the nations that have ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... heightened by the trefoil-shaped iron-work, the formidable hinges, the clumsy nail-heads. A miser, or a pamphleteer at strife with the world at large, must surely have invented these fortifications. A leaden sink, which received the waste water of the household, contributed its quota to the fetid atmosphere of the staircase, and the ceiling was covered with fantastic arabesques traced by candle-smoke—such arabesques! On pulling a greasy acorn tassel attached to the bell-rope, a little bell jangled feebly somewhere within, complaining of the fissure ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... suited neither General Otis nor the Imperialists! For their criminal intention it was better that the American commissioners should find war and desolation in the Philippines, perceiving from the day of their arrival the fetid stench emitted by the mingled corpses of Americans and Filipinos. For their purposes it was better that that gentleman, Mr. Schurman, President of the Commission, could not leave Manila, limiting himself to listen to the few Filipinos, ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... are perceived through our sense of smell are styled fragrant or fetid; if through our taste, sweet or bitter, full-flavored or insipid; if through our touch, hard or soft, rough ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... finger-nails and fingers, hollowness of the eyes, pain in the left scapula extending to the shoulder, pharyngeal catarrh with abundant and mucilaginous sputum and a tendency to lachrymation. If the sputum thrown upon the coals emits a fetid odor, it is a sign of confirmed ptisis, which is incurable. The disease when it occurs in youths and young persons rarely lasts longer than a year, often terminates in less time, and may sometimes, by the aid of medicine, ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... few miles broad. Towards the beach it rises into sandy ridges, from 50 to 80 ft. high, sloping inland and covered with a [v.03 p.0240] vegetation of low scrub jungle. Sluggish brackish streams creep along between banks of fetid black mud. The sandhills on the verge of the ocean are carpeted with creepers and the wild convolvulus. Inland, it spreads out into prairies of coarse long grass and scrub jungle, which harbour wild animals in plenty; but throughout this vast region there is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... with wine. I say most of them. It is not unfrequently the case, however, that some of them cannot get home. They have to stay behind until they have, in a measure, slept off the fumes of strong drink: and then, with bloodshot eyes, fetid breath, and staggering gait, they reach their homes. Such young men have received a new impetus in the way that leads to destruction, and such are the common fruits of ...
— Charles Duran - Or, The Career of a Bad Boy • The Author of The Waldos
... removed. All present could then see that d'Ache's "toe-nails were so grown over into his flesh that he walked on them." Foison also saw, and wishing to brave this corpse, more terrifying for him than for any one else, he stooped and opened the dead lips with the end of his cane. A wave of fetid air struck the assassin full in the face, and he fell backward ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... before him. It is edged on one side by a sheer drop to unimaginable depths, on the other the uprising crags overhang in horrible menace. The plateau is strewn with bleaching bones, and from beneath the overhanging rocks comes a fetid stench. Now the figure is lost again, and the dreadful straining eyes search vainly for the fair face and beckoning hand. His heart labours and great pain is in his chest. For he is high up in the mountain air, and every breath ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... the consciousness of God walking in the mountain-winds, the scent of camphor, lotos, sandal and wild-honey in His garments. A passion, indeed, grew within him to make his people see that real life has no concern with wrestlings in fetid valleys, but up, up the rising roads—poised with faith, and laughing with power—until through a rift in the mountains, they are struck by the light of God's face, and shine back—like the peaks ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... fatigue," Fere found that "there are periods during which the excitability increases before it disappears. As fatigue increases, the perception of the intercurrent excitation is retarded; an odor is perceived as exciting before it is perceived as a differentiated sensation; the most fetid odors arouse feelings of well-being before being perceived as odors, and their painful quality only appears afterward, or is not noticed at all." And after recording a series of results with the ergograph obtained under the stimulus of unpleasant odors he remarks: "We are thus struck ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... floors were stained with the crushed forms of butterflies. The wonderful flashing creatures had darted through the rooms at first with swift whirling circling wings. But in the hot fetid air one by one they had fallen to the floor crushed into shapeless masses. Hundreds of them had clung to the leaves of the lilacs, roses and ferns until they dropped exhausted. Some of them still hung in long graceful swaying streamers of ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... The weather at least was in their favour. The sunlight rolled over the great white sides of the booths, Aunt Sallies were being shied at, the pubs were all open, and a huge, rollicking population, fetid with the fermenting sweat of the factories, was disporting on whisky and fresh air. Never were the spirits of dejected strolling players buoyed up with a fairer ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... hastily the rest of my paper. Cursed be the crazy creature who torments me so much! Were it not for him, I could talk to you of more agreeable things: he is not greatly changed; and yet he has taken a great deal o f %t. But he has nearly killed me with the fetid smell of his breath; for now his is still worse than your cousin's: you guess that this is a fresh reason for my not approaching him; on the contrary, I go away as far as I can, and sit on a chair at ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... one day in his palace, he placed himself at a window whence he was sometimes pleased, by way of pastime, to watch the Seine flowing by. Some carts, as they passed, caused the mud with which the streets were filled to emit a fetid smell, quite unbearable. The king, shocked at what was as unhealthy as it was disgusting, sent for the burghers and provost of the city, and ordered that all the thoroughfares and streets of Paris should be paved with hard and solid stone, for this right Christian ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... "Lump ammoniacum," the other form in which the substance is met with, consists of aggregations of tears, frequently incorporating fragments of the plant itself, as well as other foreign bodies. Ammoniacum has a faintly fetid, unpleasant odour, which becomes more distinct on heating; externally it possesses a reddish-yellow appearance, and when the tears or lumps are freshly fractured they exhibit a waxy lustre. It is chiefly collected in central Persia, and comes to the European market by ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the heart of swamps, surrounded by chilling or fetid airs, a flower blossoms, tender and fragrant as any rose of sunny Tours: such a flower Margot had been. Thirty years; yet her face had lost to him not a single detail; for there are some faces which print themselves so indelibly upon the mind that they become ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... generally a burning scent just before one. So thought Mr. Watchorn, as he turned his feverish face up to the bright, blue sky, imbibing the fine fresh air of the wide-extending downs, instead of the stale tobacco smoke of the fetid beer-shop. As he trotted over the springy sward, up the gently rising ground, he rose in his stirrups; and, laying hold of his horse's mane, turned to survey the long-drawn, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... Not only has the desire for smoking been effectually squelched, but a perfect hatred of smoking has been developed on account of the offensiveness of the odor of tobacco. I frequently cross the street, or change my seat in a car to escape the puff of smoke, or the fetid breath of a smoker. 'Thanks be unto God who giveth us ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... this, though—I fancied I noticed about the room in the morning that strange, fetid odour. Though very faint, its mere suggestion is foul and nauseating. What in the world can it be, I wonder?... In future I ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... to West Canada is a change pleasing to imagine. From dusky lane and fetid alley to open, bright Canadian fields is, in the very thought, refreshing. A child is snatched from pinching hunger, fluttering rags, and all the squalor of gutter life; from a creeping existence in ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... red currant of the gardens, Ribes rubrum, which is a native of America. The fetid currant, Ribes prostratum, is also indigenous to this country. It has a pale red fruit, which gives forth a very disagreeable odor. Josselyn refers to the currant both in his Voyages and in his Rarities. Tuckerman found it growing wild ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... Eden, by daring foray oft defaced, Marauding fiends malignant raid pursue, Winging the turbid whirlwind's frantic haste, Pointing the levin's arrowy effluence, Over the mildewed harvest's hungry waste, Breathing the fetid breath of pestilence, And crying havoc to the dogs of war, Let slip on unresisting innocence? Why suffereth He that thus a rival mar His cherished work—through devastated fields Borne on triumphant in ensanguined car?— Him, who with power to rescue, tamely yields His helpless charge to persecuting ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... Nothing, he felt sure, could give him back the old sense of air in his lungs. Confinement had not deprived him of air. He had smiled grimly to himself once or twice, as he thought what the sisters' idea of his prison was likely to be. They probably had conjured up fetid dungeons. There were chains of a surety, certainly a clank or two. As he remembered it, there was a clanking in his mind, quite sufficient to fulfil the prison ideal. And then he thought, with a sudden desire for man's company, the ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... and propped his back against the wall; but presently he sank to the ground in his extremity of famine and fatigue. There he lay till dawn, his heart fluttering for want of food; and, owing to his sweating, the lice[FN126] coursed over his skin; his breath waxed fetid and his whole condition was changed. When the villagers came to pray the dawn prayer, they found him prostrate, ailing, hunger lean, yet showing evident signs of former affluence. As soon as prayers were over, they drew near him; and, understanding that ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... urinous matters; consequently, in places where these are, such herbs and such animalcules spring forth as are mentioned above; and in the torrid zone, like things of larger size, as serpents, basilisks, crocodiles, scorpions, rats, and so forth. Every one knows that swamps, stagnant ponds, dung, fetid bogs, are full of such things; also that noxious insects fill the atmosphere in clouds, and noxious vermin walk the earth in armies, and consume its herbs to the very roots. I once observed in my garden, that in the space of a half yard, nearly all the dust ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... creeks, near one of which they erected an adobe hut. This solitary house on a broad flat, an object of amazement to wandering hordes of cattle, was the ranch during a most interesting period, and its thatched roof and somewhat fetid walls became for the occupants overgrown with fine clusters of association. Within a few miles of its site the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... holidays; the work went on at top tension night and day amid a clangor of metal, a ceaseless roar of motors, a bedlam of hammers and saws and riveters. Men lived in greasy clothes, breathing dust and the odors of burnt gas mainly, eating poor food and drinking warm, fetid water when they were lucky enough ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... in the succeeding few weeks, carried off so many. All of us who had read sea-stories had read much of this disease and its horrors, but we had little conception of the dreadful reality. It usually manifested itself first in the mouth. The breath became unbearably fetid; the gums swelled until they protruded, livid and disgusting, beyond the lips. The teeth became so loose that they frequently fell out, and the sufferer would pick them up and set them back in their ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... and decayed section of stone grew fetid moss that quivered with the microscopic organisms that infest age-rotten places. Sections of the flooring and woodwork also reeked with mustiness. In one dark, webby corner of the room lay a pile of bleached bones, still tinted with the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... called by the Dutch the Stinkbungsen, or Stinking-Badger. This is of the size of an ordinary dog, but is shaped like a ferret. When pursued by man or beast, it retreats but slowly, and when its enemy draws near, discharges backwards a so intolerably fetid wind, that dogs tear up the ground and hide their noses in it, to avoid the smell. When killed, it stinks so abominably that there is no approaching the carcass, which is therefore left ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... excessively bad odour should excite retching or vomiting in some persons, quite as readily as the thought of revolting food does; and that, as a further consequence, a moderately offensive odour should cause the various expressive movements of disgust. The tendency to retch from a fetid odour is immediately strengthened in a curious manner by some degree of habit, though soon lost by longer familiarity with the cause of offence and by voluntary restraint. For instance, I wished to clean the skeleton of a bird, which had not been sufficiently macerated, and the smell made my servant ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... was no ostensible cause; but people in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath. These symptoms were followed by sneezing and hoarseness, after which the pain soon reached the chest, and produced a hard cough. When it fixed in the stomach, it upset it; and discharges of bile of every kind named by physicians ensued, accompanied by very great distress. In most cases also ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... of the fluid. Then the coronet spreads out afresh, the cup gapes and assumes the aspect of a tiny flower, with the white denticulations for petals and the two bright red dots, the stigmata at the bottom, for stamens. When the grubs, pressed one against the other, with their heads downwards in the fetid soup, make an unbroken shoal, the sight of those breathing cups incessantly opening and closing, with a little clack like a valve, almost makes one forget the horrors of the charnel yard. It suggests a carpet of ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... fishes and reptiles, who had their own grievances against humanity. They held a joint council and determined to make their victims dream of snakes twining about them in slimy folds and blowing their fetid breath in their faces, or to make them dream of eating raw or decaying fish, so that they would lose appetite, sicken, and die. Thus it is that snake and fish dreams are ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... want of passion and perhaps the want of partiality, but we cannot avoid seeing the ulterior intention, which is to undermine and belittle the reputation of the great figures of the Victorian Age. When the prodigious Signor Marinetti proposes to hurl the "leprous palaces" of his native city into her "fetid canals," and to build in their place warehouses and railway stations, he does not differ in essential attitude from Mr. Lytton Strachey, delicately "laying bare the facts of some cases." The only real difference consists ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... were pale and their matted fair hair hung loose over their shoulders. The children were almost naked and the few clothes that they did wear were but rags. In the alley were some pigs wallowing in the stagnant water from which a fetid odor arose. Our guide stopped. Evidently he had lost his way. But at this moment a policeman appeared. The clerk spoke to him and the officer told him he would show him the way.... We followed the policeman down more narrow streets. ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... towers, constructed of fine phrases, great thoughts and of jokes not common on the streets. Moreover 'tis not obscure private persons or women that he stages in his comedies; but, bold as Heracles, 'tis the very greatest whom he attacks, undeterred by the fetid stink of leather or the threats of hearts of mud. He has the right to say, "I am the first ever dared to go straight for that beast with the sharp teeth and the terrible eyes that flashed lambent fire like those of Cynna,[330] ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the shallows were almost choked with weeds. The countryside experienced a phenomenal period of drought, and for weeks the river seemed impure and almost fetid. Night after night, and steadily travelling westward, Lutra took short cuts across country from pool to pool. Late in July she reached the estuary of the river; and for the remaining months of summer fished in the bay, finding ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... cruel times, when no Lord Ashley had as yet arisen to open the door of the workman's prison-house and set the children free, this poor child had been shut up from six in the morning till six at night in the fetid atmosphere of a cotton-mill. God knows what the economic value of such a weakling's labour may have been! One would think that a South Carolina planter would have been wiser than to work his "stock" at such an age. ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... as his antagonist. The sight of its wide red jaws, from which the froth flew as it does from the lips of a mad dog, the gleaming yellow teeth, the capacious throat which seemed fairly to steam with the fetid breath expelled from the beast's lungs, almost overcame young Harding. For the moment he was enthralled by the terrifying appearance of the wolf, and his arms lacked the strength necessary to ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... the face-plate of his helmet, and lifted it. The air that struck his face was cool and clean. He breathed deeply, gratefully. And at first he did not notice the strange odor upon it: a curious, unpleasant scent, earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar. ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... one vessel, twenty-two died before they reached Jamaica, although the voyage was performed with unusual speed. The survivors when they arrived at their house of bondage were mere skeletons. During some weeks coarse biscuit and fetid water had been doled out to them in such scanty measure that any one of them could easily have consumed the ration which was assigned to five. They were, therefore, in such a state that the merchant to whom they had been consigned ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... through the endless circles in every direction, as a vulture, confined for the first time in a cage, exhausts itself in vain efforts. The Shade was free to do this; he could wander through the zones of Hell icy, fetid, or scorching without enduring their pangs; he glided into that vastness as a sunbeam makes its way into the ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... water-snake, which men Say dealeth ghastly wounds incurable, When the hot sun hath parched it as it crawls Over the sands; and so that mightiest man Lay faint and wasted with his cureless pain; And from the ulcerous wound aye streamed to earth Fetid corruption fouling all the floor Of that wide cave, a marvel to be heard Of men unborn. Beside his stony bed Lay a long quiver full of arrows, some For hunting, some to smite his foes withal; With deadly venom of that fell water-snake ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... passage, hot, fetid, and blacker than the wholesome night without, crooked about sharp corners, that bruised the wanderer's hands and arms. Suddenly he fell down a short flight of slimy steps, landing in noisome mud at the bottom of some crypt. ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... their reeling footsteps must have been palsied by the horrors of their situation. The air was cold and misty. The paving-stones, loosened from their beds, lay in wild disorder amid the tall, rank grass, which sprang up around the feet and ankles. Fallen houses choked up the streets. The most fetid and poisonous smells everywhere prevailed;—and by the aid of that ghastly light which, even at midnight, never fails to emanate from a vapory and pestilential at atmosphere, might be discerned lying in the by-paths and alleys, or rotting in the windowless ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... country, where, for miles, nothing meets the eye but the monotonous dark green of the level, interminable mangrove forest, with its fantastic, interlacing roots, whose function it appears to be to extend seaward, year by year, its dismal kingdom of black fetid mud, and to veil from the rude eye of the intruder the tropical charms of the country at its back. After some miles of this cheerless scenery, and at a point where the fresh water begins to mingle with the salt, the handsome and useful nipa palm, with leaves twenty to thirty feet in length, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... his byles; Where the cholera, the cyclone, and the crow Come and go; Where the merchant deals in indigo and tea, Hides and ghi; Where the Babu drops inflammatory hints In his prints; Stands a City—Charnock chose it—packed away Near a Bay— By the Sewage rendered fetid, by the sewer Made impure, By the Sunderbunds unwholesome, by the swamp Moist and damp; And the City and the Viceroy, ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... dregs of the people, in those large-headed, beady-eyed creatures with their bestial faces, their thick-set, squat bodies, those degenerate descendants of the most noble of all peoples, even in that thick, fetid muddiness there were strange phosphorescent gleams, like will-o'-the-wisps dancing over a swamp: marvelous glances, minds subtle and brilliant, a subtle electricity emanating from the ooze which fascinated and disturbed Christophe. He thought that hidden deep were fine ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... opened the door, a hot, close, foul smell rushed forth to meet her. Upon the kitchen stove a large pot of pig's food was boiling, and the steam and smell from the pot made the atmosphere of the room overpoweringly fetid. Off the kitchen or living-room were two small bedrooms, in one of which ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... realized the atmosphere was fetid and stifling. A great pressure bore on his lungs, making breathing labored and difficult. And then they were in a lift that dropped into the depths of its shaft with dizzying speed. Antazzo's grin; Tom's eyes, dull and lifeless, floating there in the ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... by being transported from Europe to America. Our senses had been changed from what they had been the night and day before, while listening to the hoarse sounds of the mariners, when the abyss of the sea was at our feet, and when we drank fetid water, and inhaled the stench of pitch. In the Prior's cell of the Convent of Vera Cruz, we listened to a melodious voice accompanied with an harmonious instrument, we saw treasures and riches, we ate exquisite confectioneries, we breathed amber and ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... to the landing-place, were butchers embowelling sheep in the open street; while the pavement was covered with bloody mire and smoking entrails, around which several score of hideous dogs, of a fallow colour, were growling and fighting. A fetid stench arose from the damp gutters, where neither air nor light have ever penetrated, where corruptions of all sorts amass, and where one is continually in danger of stepping upon a dead dog or rat. Such is without exaggeration the aspect of the greater part of the streets of Constantinople, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... skin, blistered in the grave, had burst open and left reddish glistening cracks, as if covered with a thin, glassy slime. And he had grown exceedingly stout. His body was horribly bloated and suggested the fetid, damp smell of putrefaction. But the cadaverous, heavy odour that clung to his burial garments and, as it seemed, to his very body, soon wore off, and after some time the blue of his hands and face softened, and ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... at almost every one: one day in my house he called Grote's 'History' "a fetid quagmire, with nothing spiritual about it." I always thought, until his 'Reminiscences' appeared, that his sneers were partly jokes, but this now seems rather doubtful. His expression was that of a depressed, almost despondent yet benevolent man; and it is notorious how heartily ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... and nearly uniting a brace of tremendous asinine ears. These altogether formed something like a 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 ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... ran back slowly. His despairing grief had changed suddenly into a cold hate and a resolve for vengeance. It was so easy for him to outstrip these lumbering monsters who were spouting their fetid, musky breath close upon his heels. He stumbled carefully at every other step. He let them feel that at the next stride they would transfix him. He led them on, the earth shaking beneath their tread, ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... 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
... still a maiden free to choose. Shame on her that she chooses so ignobly! Shame on her that she turns her eyes longingly to fetid pools, instead of upward to the breezy hills. What kind of nature is that which ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... for scepter, and ceasing to measure with it, we dip it in such unctuous and inflammable refuse as we can find, and make our soul's light into a tallow candle, and thenceforward take our guttering, sputtering, ill-smelling illumination about with us, holding it out in fetid fingers—encumbered with its lurid warmth of fungous wick, and drip of stalactitic grease—that we may see, when another man would have seen, or dreamed he saw, the flight of a divine Virgin—only the lamplight upon the hair of a costermonger's ass;—that, having to paint ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... purifying chem- istry of the whole. With what satisfaction I emptied it upon the ground while I held my nose and saw it filter into the turf, where I knew it was dying to go and where I knew every particle of the reeking, fetid fluid would soon be made sweet and wholesome again by ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... open, discharge black blood, and the trodden flowers lie prone upon the footways. . . . I noticed just in front of me one large bunch which had slipped off a neighbouring mound and was almost bathing in the gutter. I picked it up. Underneath, it was soiled with mud; the greasy, fetid sewer water had left black stains upon the flowers. And then, gazing at these exquisite daughters of our gardens and our woods, astray amidst all the filth of the city, I began to ponder. On what woman's bosom would those wretched flowerets ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... phenomena—to several of which attention has already been called—are very striking. The respiration becomes slow until just before death, when, as Chossat observes, there is often a quickening of the respiratory movements. The exhaled breath has a peculiarly sickening and fetid odor. The pulse loses in force ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... mark the spot near which a huge impulse died; but we need not linger in the fetid swamps—or only long enough to say a word of justice. Do not rail too bitterly against official painters, living or dead. They cannot harm art, because they have nothing to do with it: they are not artists. ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... advance in life, the more we advance in art, the more convinced we become that nothing is abrupt and isolated; that nature and society progress by evolution and not by chance, and that the event, flower joyous or sad, perfumed or fetid, beneficent or fatal, which unfolds itself to-day before our eyes, was sown in the past, and had its roots sometimes in days anterior to ours, even as it will bear its ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... fence surrounded the property on three sides, the fourth being bounded by a sluggish, disreputable creek whose fetid waters seemed to crawl onward even more slowly after receiving the noisome waste liquor from the tan-pits. At only one point, that nearest the village, did any of the buildings touch the encircling fence. There its sweep was broken by the facade of a squat two-story structure of ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... on many steps, I was surprised to see another shoal of imprisoned wenches, twice more detestable than they. Some had been changed into toads, some into dragons, some into serpents who were swimming and hissing, glavering and butting in a fetid, stagnant pool, much larger than Llyn Tegid. {84} "In the name of wonder," said I, "what sort of creatures may these be?" "There are here," said he, "four sorts of wenches, all notoriously bad. First, there are procuresses, with some of the principal lasses ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... Asphaltites is further remarkable for a species of limestone called the fetid, the smell of which, as its name imports, is extremely offensive. It is still manufactured in the East into amulets, and worn as a specific against the plague; and that a similar superstition existed in regard ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... returning from district school. Miss Mattie had taught at Clark's Crossing for seventeen years, had grown meek and meager and hopeless. Heavens! thought Una, would she have to be shut into the fetid barn of a small school unless she ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... flank of the cliff ridge a wedge of brush-dotted plain extended a quarter-mile or so to a dense high jungle bordering a small river. The first glance had shown his lordship that it was of no use to look beyond the river. The coast trended away northwards in another vast stretch of fetid swamps ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... and painful; and M. Cadet de Gassicourt deserves much commendation for the courage he displayed under these circumstances; for notwithstanding every precaution, and in spite of the strong disinfectants burned in the room, the odor of this corpse was so fetid, and the vapor from the sublimate so strong, that the distinguished ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... was made into the origin of the scourge, and by degrees various facts came out which excited public indignation in a high degree. The unhealthy nature of the site; the quantity and quality of the children's food; the brackish, fetid water used in its preparation; the pupils' wretched clothing and accommodations—all these things were discovered, and the discovery produced a result mortifying to Mr. Brocklehurst, but beneficial ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... assaults of men he knew to be capable of anything. He had told her to forget she was married and have a good time; he had refused her appeal for protection. She asked herself dazedly what sort of a creature he could be. Of a sudden the old life of the theater and the cafe seemed clean as opposed to the fetid existence behind her; even Jim, adventurer, crook, blackmailer that he was, appeared wholesome compared with men like Hayman and his brother-in-law. Although Lorelei, under ordinary circumstances, was even-tempered, her anger, once aroused, was tenacious. As ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... vitality, in which case all the symptoms of these complaints may really be attributed to the Varicocele. Pains in the Groin, Limbs and Back; a sense of weight or dragging; Neuralgia of the Testicles, Fetid Perspiration; Itching and peculiar sensations in the Skin of the Bag; Chafing in warm weather; easy tiring under rapid walking or running, are not uncommon. In some very bad cases, however, none of these symptoms, or only a few, are present. ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown |
