"Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remarkable stories in English literature, and is worthy to be ranked with the works of Edgar A. Poe. Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius. It is a ghastly and gruesome creation. Not one bright ray redeems it. It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience. But it fascinates. Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in fiction,—an ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... its ghastly noon, Pauses above the death-still wood—the moon; The night-sprite, sighing, through the dim air stirs; The clouds descend in rain; Mourning, the wan stars wane, Flickering like dying lamps in sepulchres! Haggard as spectres—vision-like and dumb, Dark with the pomp of Death, and moving ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... if I had brutally struck him; I shall never forget the long, slow, almost ghastly look of pain, ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... says that Linnaeus, in his natural arrangement, has placed tobacco in the class Luridae—which signifies, pale, ghastly, livid, dismal and fatal. "To the same ominous class," he adds, "belong fox-glove, hen-bane, deadly night-shade, lobelia, and another poisonous plant, bearing the tremendous name Atropa, one of the furies." He says, "When tobacco is taken into the stomach for the first time, it ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... opened his eyes, lifted his hand, upon which there was a ghastly sword-cut, to his forehead, as though to shade them from the light—ah! how well I recall that pathetic motion—and from beneath this screen stared at us a while. Then he rose from the chair, touched his throat to show that he could not speak, as I suppose, saluted Orme, turned and pointed ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... not utterly black, as he had expected. Light from the electric lamps without flickered through the stained-glass windows. Ghastly rays of yellow played over the painted faces on the walls and lit up the gilded features of the mummy by Mrs. Athelstone's desk. There were crimson spots, like blotches of blood, on the veil of Isis. And all about were moving ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... of Hadrian. He, in his earlier days, whilst yet only dreaming of the purple, had not found the Oracle superannuated or palsied. On the contrary, he found it but too clear- sighted; and it was no contempt in him, but too ghastly a fear and jealousy, which labored to seal up the grander ministrations of the Oracle for the future. What the Pythia had foreshown to himself, she might foreshow to others; and, when tempted by the same princely bribes, she might authorize and kindle the same aspiring views ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... there, half-way to the burn! It's like an English cottage! Those we saw as we came along were either like a piece of the earth, or so white as to look ghastly! This one looks neat and comfortable, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... Gray, as he stood on the balcony the following morning, and looked out over the white and ghastly picture of desolation, "I thought Labrador the most inappropriately named country upon the earth, but think of calling this picture of all ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... down and writhed under the wheels. She uttered a tragic cry, but little Silver cared for that. Rendered merciless with fear he sent the car right over her body, and then drove desperately down the hill to gain the hard road. Miss Greeby, with a broken back, lay on the ground and saw as in a ghastly dream her machine flash roaring along the highway driven by a man who could not manage it. Even in her pain a smile ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... she panted. "He will die if I touch him. Take away his hands." It was done, with set teeth, and the face of the football hero was bathed in sweat. He breathed through tense nostrils, and a sickly whiteness spread backward from his lips. Suddenly he loosed his burden. It fell, doubling in a ghastly heap, and he ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... own matter to allow him to care about outward things, and his words now showed what had occupied his thoughts. It was just after the mysterious knocking that he began the theme. "Since I have been away today, Eustacia, I have considered that something must be done to heal up this ghastly breach between my dear mother and ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... for, to her, Damocles confessed the ghastly, terrible, damning truth that he was a Coward. He said that he had hidden the fearful fact for all these years within his guilty bosom and that now it had emerged and convicted him. He lived in subconscious terror of the Snake, and in its presence—nay ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... change is absolutely necessary, try to imitate nature's own methods by using the glorious trees around you, instead of iron and tin shaped by man's hand; pause before you have murdered your natural loveliness by ghastly modernity, or you ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... was on his face, Soon hatred settled in its place: It rose not with the reddening flush Of transient anger's hasty blush, But pale as marble o'er the tomb, Whose ghastly whiteness ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... Arabs, and so shallow were these that from each of them there oozed a dark, dreadful stain. To add to the horrors of the scene, portions of mangled and putrefying corpses protruded from many of them—ghastly skulls, from the sockets of which the eyes had been picked by vultures and other obscene birds. Limbs of brave men upon which the hyena had already begun his dreadful work, and half-skeleton hands, with fingers spread and bent as if still ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... an Instance as eminent in History as the other; this was in Char. VI. of France, sirnamed, The Beloved; who riding over the Forest near Mans, a ghastly frightful Fellow (that is to say, the Devil so clothed in human Vizor) came up to his Horse, and taking hold of his Bridle, stop'd him, with the Addition of these Words, Stop King, whither go you? You are betray'd! and immediately disappear'd. ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... was extinct. He was drawn gently from the stream and laid on the shingle just as the foot men arrived with torches. It was a sad spectacle, this fine old man we all loved and respected so much, only a few hours before full of life and health, now a ghastly corpse, his hair and long white beard lying dank over his cold white face and glaring eyes. The scene was rendered all the more weird and awful by the surroundings, the still dark night, the rushing water, and overhanging cliffs under the red glare of the torches. His body was laid ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... the incident that in its ghastly, horrible absurdity made the rest of the people shout with laughter the next day. It was not funny then. For suddenly the eiderdown comfort began to slip. I heard no footstep, not the slightest sound approaching me, but ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... valley opens, that the villages get scantier, and that at last a great giant iceberg walls up the way in front, and we feast our eyes on the long-desired sight till after that the setting sun has tinged it purple (a sure sign of a fine day), its ghastly pallor shows us that the night is upon us. It is cold, and we are not sorry at half-past nine to find ourselves at Bourg d'Oisans, where there is a very fair inn kept by one Martin; we get a comfortable supper of eggs and go to ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... bird-beaked merchants of ready-made and second-hand clothing. The contents of the dingy shops seem to have revolted, and rushed pell-mell out of doors, and taken possession of the sidewalk. One could fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this point, and that those ghastly rows of complete suits strung up on either side of the doorways were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders. But as you approach these limp figures, each dangling and gyrating on its cord in a most suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the lapel ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... real crown of thorns was upon his head, which was bowed downward, as if in the death agony; and drops of blood were falling down his cheeks, and from his hands and feet and side. The face was haggard and ghastly beyond all expression; and wore a look of unutterable bodily anguish. The rude sculptor had given it this, but his art could go no farther. The sublimity of death in a dying Saviour, the expiring God-likeness of ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the nursery when the children were in bed, to talk to Jane Nettles, and look out of the window. Those gossips in the nursery were a great source of disturbance to Beth when she ought to have been composing herself to sleep. She recollected nothing of the conversations more corrupting than that ghastly account of how the girl was exhumed, so it is likely that the servants exercised some discretion when they dropped their voices to a whisper, as they often did; but these whispered colloquies made her restless and cross, and brought down upon her a smart ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a horrible stare, as if fixed by the magic power of some ghastly sight, while large drops of perspiration oozed from every pore, and stood in cold beads upon his brow! In fixed horror he thus remained for some moments, then fell back and covered his eyes with his hands, as if to shut out ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... was sufficiently ghastly, standing in the dark with her apron thrown over her head, and speaking behind it in a low, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... laid out, its wounded forehead covered with a bandage, and Eliza's rosary and crucifix on its breast; but it did not, as Marian had hoped, suggest peace or sleep. It was not Susanna, but a vacant thing that had always underlain her, and which, apart from her, was ghastly. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... led the pursuit in turn. The Spaniards fought with desperate courage, still suffering ghastly losses. But, do what they could to bear up against the English and the wind, they were forced to leeward of Dunkirk, and so out of touch with Parma. This was the result of the Battle of Gravelines, fought on Monday the 29th of July, 1588, just ten days ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... of Autolycus cured Ulysses, who had been injured while hunting the wild boar, by stanching the blood flowing from a wound in his leg, by means of a verbal charm. "With nicest care the skilful artists bound the brave, divine Ulysses' ghastly wound; and th' incantations stanch'd the gushing blood."[108:1] We have also the testimony of the Grecian lexicographer, Suidas, that various maladies were cured by the repetition of certain words, in the time of Minos, King ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... must look through her papers, get her clothes together, sort out the clutter of phials, bandages and innumerable things that sickness collects—jostle death about, in short. It was a ghastly thing to enter that attic, where the crumbs of bread from her last meal were still lying in the folds of the bedclothes. I threw the coverlid up over the bolster, like a sheet over the ghost of ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... clammy Louisbourg. When April brought the Gibraltar regiments from Virginia, Pepperrell sent in to Shirley his general report on the three thousand men with whom he had begun the autumn. Barely one thousand were fit for duty. Eleven hundred lay sick and suffering in the ghastly hospital. Eight hundred and ninety lay buried out on the dreary tongue of land between the lime-pit ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... bravely made its way with its crew, whose faces were so hollow and ghastly that they looked like a crew of spectres, sailing beneath the scorching sun that beat down from the pale blue of the cloudless sky upon a sea hardly less blue in its greater depths. Only the hope that they would soon reach Timor seemed to rouse them ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Old Bailey. The chief trade done by the coffee house was in the early morning. After market hours there were few customers save when there was to be an execution at Tyburn the next morning, and those eager to secure a good sight of the ghastly procession and perhaps take part in it, assembled opposite the prison door over night. Mrs. Fenton in the evenings thought no more of business, but betook herself to the theatre or one of the pleasure gardens in the outskirts ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... you know the sort of chap the average Kayite is. They'd keep me busy even if I were allowed a free hand. But I'm not. Whenever I try and keep order and stop things a bit, out springs the man Kay from nowhere, and takes the job out of my hands, makes a ghastly mess of everything, and retires purring. Once in every three times, or thereabouts, he slangs me in front of the kids for not keeping order. I'm glad this is the end of the term. I couldn't stand it much longer. Hullo, here come the chaps from ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... wherein sounded the clash of Bellona's armor, and the harsh stir of palm-boughs rustled by a hot wind of the desert, and vibrant with the dying clangor of gongs, and shouts of worshipping crowds reverberating through horrid temples of grinning and ghastly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... wait for an answer, but went on: "Mr. Warlock's all right, of course. I think he's such a fine-looking man, don't you? Of course he's old now, but his beard's rather attractive I think. He's a duck, but isn't that harmonium ghastly? I can't think why they don't buy an organ, they're most awfully rich I know, and do simply ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... her finery leering and mincing at Death, and playing off her youthful tricks upon him as if he had been the Major; but an alteration in her mind that ensued on the paralytic stroke was fraught with as much matter for reflection, and was quite as ghastly. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... in their grotesque attitudes and movements— reminded him of the painted clown whom he had seen last summer in the circus, and he laughed as he watched them. But on and ever on they crept, these maimed and bleeding men, as heedless as he of the dramatic contrast between his laughter and their own ghastly gravity. To him it was a merry spectacle. He had seen his father's negroes creep upon their hands and knees for his amusement—had ridden them so, "making believe" they were his horses. He now approached one of these crawling figures from behind and with an ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... That quivering response to the subtle nuances of thought! A profound change had come upon him, yet essentially he, the man, was unchanged. Except for those scars, the convoluted ridges of tissue, the livid patches and the ghastly hollows where once his cheeks and lips and forehead had been smooth and regular, he was as ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... detective caused a great sensation in the town next day, and it was not until many months after that we learned of the fate of the unfortunate man, not death, but mutilation worse than death—a ghastly wound below the heart ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... spouse he stood, There in the horrid shade he saw A giant passing nature's law: Vast as some mountain-peak in size, With mighty voice and sunken eyes, Huge, hideous, tall, with monstrous face, Most ghastly of his giant race. A tiger's hide the Rakshas wore Still reeking with the fat and gore: Huge-faced, like Him who rules the dead, All living things he struck with dread. Three lions, tigers four, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... afterwards, that his only object was, to detain me until the dreadful scene, about to take place in the prison, was over. For when I left him to go to my room, one of the servants came running, and with a ghastly countenance informed me, that all the white prisoners were carried away. I would not believe the report, but instantly went back to the governor, who said he had just heard of it, but did not wish to tell me. I hastily ran into the street, hoping to get a glimpse of them before ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... must feed our sea for a thousand years, For that is our doom and pride, As it was when they sailed with the Golden Hind Or the wreck that struck last tide— Or the wreck that lies on the spouting reef Where the ghastly blue-lights flare. If blood be the price of admiralty, If blood be the price of admiralty, If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... the headlong cavalier, O'er rough and smooth, in wild career, Seems racing with the wind; His sad companion,—ghastly pale, And darksome as a widow's veil, CARE—keeps ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... on the spot and ready to undertake any case on simple application. No! David went to the battle and stayed to fight, and won! Wise beyond his years, he had no use for Saul's armour. It cramped his freedom of action. He tried it on and took it off, quick sharp. And, besides, it made such a ghastly rattle, even when he walked, that he could not hear the still small voice of God, and would never have heard Him saying afterwards, "This is the way to the brook, David! and there are the five smooth stones! Trust only in ...
— The Chocolate Soldier - Heroism—The Lost Chord of Christianity • C. T. Studd
... remembered, too well, when those finely moulded features—now, so worn by sorrow, so marked by sickness, so ghastly in the hue of death—were rounded with young-woman health and tinted with rare loveliness. He recalled that day when he saw her a bride. He remembered the sweet, proud dignity of her young wifehood. He saw her, again, when her face shone ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... The Dryasdust Philosophisms and enlightened Scepticisms of the Eighteenth Century, historical and other, will have to survive for a while with the Physiologists, as a memorable Nightmare-Dream. All this haggard epoch, with its ghastly Doctrines, and death's-head Philosophies 'teaching by example' or otherwise, will one day have become, what to our Moslem friends their godless ages are, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... The full horror of what had happened to Dr. Marks was just having its effect. He found himself shivering as though with a severe chill. Marks was the victim of something ghastly. He seemed to be trying to make sense, as though there was still a glimmer of intelligence behind the blank stare. But his words were ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... put a teaspoonful of sugar on top and a few maraschino cherries. When ready to serve turn over each a scant teaspoonful of brandy and light just as the table is reached. The brandy will burn with a ghastly flame and melt the sugar and marshmallows. Whipped cream served in a bowl is ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various
... threw the light of the lantern upon his face, he had nearly let it fall from fright at what it revealed. Poor Matamore was dead, stiff and stark, with wide-open, sunken eyes staring out vaguely into the darkness, and his ghastly face wearing that pinched, indescribable expression which the mortal puts on when the spirit that dwelt within has fled. The three who had found him thus were inexpressibly shocked, and stood for a moment speechless and motionless, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... destruction come upon them unawares; let them go down a dark and slippery way to death; make them to be as blind and deaf adders that see not the foot of the destroyer! Yea, shake thy hand upon these Malignants and make them a spoil to their servants!" He turned his ghastly face and burning eyes upon Landless. "Curse them with me!" ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... what supply was there. A little water was visible, which I quickly baled into the canvas bags we had brought for the purpose. The bottom of the hole was filled in with dead sticks, leaves, the rotting bodies of birds and lizards, bones of rats and dingoes. Into this ghastly mass of filth I sunk up to my middle, and never shall I forget the awful odour that arose as my feet stirred up the mess. Nevertheless water was there, and thankful I was to find it, even to drink it as it was. After half an hour's work in this stinking pit, sick from ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... northeast of Schofield, and as he bent to his work he did not see a strange, level mass of gray that advanced slowly toward him. From a distance to the lay observer this mass would have looked like an ordinary cloud-bank, but the experienced eyes of a fisherman would have discerned its ghastly gray hue and ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... without seeing Chonita again. Valencia was in wildest delirium for a week; at the end of the second every hair on her head, her brows, and her eyelashes had fallen. She looked like a white mummy, a ghastly pitiful caricature of the beautiful woman whose arrows quivered in so many hearts. They rolled her in a blanket and took her home; and then I sought Chonita, who had barely left her room and never gone to Valencia's. I told her ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... It is an impulse with all murderers to conceal the traces of their guilt. They dig holes in the earth and bury it, they carry it into the wilderness and hide it, they sink it in the depths of the sea. But the earth will not contain it, the wilderness betrays the ghastly secret, the waves ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... not the murderer!' At the break of day he hastened, in strange agitation, to the cave; but it was empty, the stranger was gone. At night, as he strove in vain to sleep, the vision appeared once more, ghastly pale, but less stern of aspect than before. 'Farewell, Inverawe!' it said; 'farewell, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... all, in paper, protected by a tight case of the same, from which, with the help of a ribbon, you drew out the precious little green volume, with its gilt edges and lovely engravings—one of which in particular I remember—a castle in the distance, a wood, a ghastly man at the head of a rearing horse, and a white, mist-like, fleeting ghost, the cause of the consternation. These books had a large share in the witchery ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... died away in low gaspings and moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch, and permitted the door to be opened. Twenty-three ghastly figures staggered out of the charnel-house, one hundred and twenty-three bodies were hastily thrown into a pit and covered up, and the Black Hole of Calcutta has gone into history as a synonym for all that is dreadful and all that ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... how many professed pilgrims hast thou befooled and turned back! How often does she attack and affright many real pilgrims! I am sure she has often made my poor heart ache with her ghastly looks and terrifying speeches. O may we ever say to her, in our Lord's words, 'Get thee behind me, Satan; thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... small comfort as was possible on the cramped seats. Hope glanced toward the heretofore noisy group at the rear—the girl nearest her rested with unconscious head pillowed upon the shoulder of her man friend, and both were sleeping. How haggard and ghastly the woman's powdered face looked, with the light just above it, and all semblance of joy gone. It was as though a mask had been taken off. Out in the darkness the engine whistled sharply and then came to a bumping stop at some desert station. Through the black window ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... wide, the church is bare, Oh, horror, ghastly, sore! A gulf of death, with hideous stare, Yawns in the ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... from the western end of Alexandria. The place was still marked with all the horrors of last week's battle. Then, as usual, disease and famine followed upon war. Not a house was without a funeral. Death was everywhere to be seen in its most ghastly form. Bodies were left un-buried in the streets to be eaten by the dogs. Men ran away from their sickening friends in fear. As the sun set they felt in doubt whether they should be alive to see it rise in the morning. Cowards hid their alarms in noisy ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... sombrero, which had been pulled far forward, and this revealed her face fully, and her hair came tumbling down. The rider gazed, stupefied. Then a faint tinge of red colored his ghastly cheeks. ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... at him. Only those who have known Paris and loved her beauty can understand the thrill that came to us on that morning in September when we had expected to hear the roar of great guns around her, and to see the beginning of a ghastly destruction. Paris was still safe! By some kind of miracle the enemy had not yet touched her beauty nor tramped into her streets. How sharp and clear were all the buildings under that cloudless sky! Spears of light flashed from the brazen-winged horses above Alexander's ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... wailing chant—a hopeless prayer for mercy and deliverance. A guttering candle shed a ghastly light over ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... proclivities, of his pride, of his scientific vanity, of his human affections, of his lusts, of his innocent enjoyments. He tore himself clear of everything; so as to envisage the universe in its unmitigated horror, so as to look the emptiness of space straight between its ghastly lidless eyes. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... could "get properly going" with the brumbies, two travellers rode into the homestead, supporting between them a third rider, a man picked up off the track delirious with fever, and foodless; and at the sight of his ghastly face our hearts stood still with fear. But the man was one of the Scots another Mac of the race that loves a good fight, and his plucky heart stood by him so well that within twenty-four hours he was Iying contentedly in the shade of the Quarters, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... voice was heard singing that holy hymn, the flower-garlands about the boat broke into ghastly flames, and wreathed it with a dreadful burning; and the radiant figures were changed into dark shapes crowned with fire; and the song of longing and love became a wailing and gnashing of teeth. The island vanished away in rolling smoke; ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... trying criminals were as cruel as their punishments. On the Continent the presumption was held to be against the accused, and the rack and its ghastly retinue of instruments of pain were freely used to procure confession. Calvin's hard saying that when men felt the pain they spoke the truth merely {482} expressed the current delusion, for legislators ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... lies in the hands of the man who'd sell His hold on his life for an ice-bound hell. What care we for the fevered brain That's filled with ravings and thoughts insane, So long as we hold In our hands the gold?— The glistening, glittering, ghastly gold That comes at the end of the hunger and cold; That comes at the end of the awful thirst; That comes through the pain and torture accurst Of limbs that are racked and minds o'erthrown, The gold lies there and ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... turn. Turn straight to me. I want to persuade you to trust me," Goodwood repeated. And then he paused with his shining eyes. "Why should you go back—why should you go through that ghastly form?" ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... writing from Paris to Williamson (?) (June 19/29 1669), gave a terrible account of Marsilly's death. (For the letter, see Note V.) With a broken piece of glass (as we learn from another source), Marsilly, in prison, wounded himself in a ghastly manner, probably hoping to die by loss of blood. They seared him with a red-hot iron, and hurried on his execution. He was broken on the wheel, and was two hours in dying (June 22). Contrary to usage, a Protestant preacher was brought ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... most unpleasant physiognomy he had ever observed, but, at any rate, he glanced down the area and was a good deal astonished to see a man lying on the stones, his limbs all huddled together, and his face turned up. Our gentleman thought his face looked peculiarly ghastly, and so set off at a run in search of the nearest policeman. The constable was at first inclined to treat the matter lightly, suspecting common drunkenness; however, he came, and after looking at the man's face, changed his tone, quickly enough. The early bird, who had picked up this ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... bridegroom, and many and many more of them, with gaping wounds and deathly faces—all but the young King of the Isle of Wight and his shroud, his shroud, Cousin Lily, it was up to his breast; and the ladies' faces that were so blithe, they were all weeping, ghastly, and writhen; and they were whirling round a great sea of blood right in the middle of the hall, and I could—I could bear it ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that this ghastly phase of the business was true, but, inasmuch as there was no certainty of it, he was too considerate to bring additional grief to the heart of ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... soon be a scarcity of native labour. These were the circumstances in which the idea of importing black African labour to the New World was first conceived—a plan which was destined to have results so tremendous that we have probably not yet seen their full and ghastly development. There were a great number of African negro slaves at that time in Spain; a whole generation of them had been born in slavery in Spain itself; and this generation was bodily imported to Espanola to relieve and assist the ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... overhanging window in the choir. The Lady Chapel was a fringe-maker's shop. The smithy in the north transept had descended from father to son. The south transept, walled up to make a respectable dwelling, showed through its open door the ghastly marble tomb of a crusader which the thrifty London housewife had turned into a parlor table. His crossed feet and hands and upward staring countenance protruded ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... and panting, he desisted. I then tried the door myself, equally in vain. As I ceased from the effort, again that creep of horror came over me; but this time it was more cold and stubborn. I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... she passed on, setting the clock upon the stump and immediately drawing back to a suitable distance at the right, where she stood, wrapped in her long dark cloak. Her face shone ghastly white, even in its environment of snow-covered boughs, and noting this, Violet wished the minutes fewer between the present moment and the hour of five, at which time he was to ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... have been his countenance as he sat writing such words of himself under the ghastly light of his own small, solitary lamp? Had he written his letter at his office, in the day-time, with men coming in and out of his room, he could hardly have written of himself so plainly. He would have bethought ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... strained over the bones; the lips are shortened, the gums shrink from the teeth and lead to caries, and the nostrils are compressed. The strained skin and the emotionless features (relieved only by telangiectatic striae) give the countenance a ghastly, corpse-like aspect. The etiology and pathology of this disease are quite obscure. Happily the prognosis is good, as there is a tendency to spontaneous recovery, although the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... children and the adults were hardly clothed with a rag of that bark stuff, produced by certain trees, and called "mbouzon" in the country. Thus the state of this troop of human beings, women covered with wounds from the "havildars'" whips, children ghastly and meager, with bleeding feet, whom their mothers tried to carry in addition to their burdens, young men closely riveted to the fork, more torturing than the convict's chain, is the most lamentable ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... always wore on their regal brows, the effect was dazzling as it was refined. It was this peculiarity and their strong family resemblance which led their brother-in-law, the good-humored St. Addlegourd, to say that, "'Pon my soul, you know, the whole precious mob looked like a ghastly pack of court cards, you know." St. Addlegourd was a radical. Having a rent-roll of 15,000,000 pounds, and belonging to one of the oldest families in Britain, he could afford ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... brought to the fishermen served to bring men, women and children to the spot where John Trafton lay, ghastly with blood. ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... between the two men from Scotland Yard. Kerry stood awhile, chewing and staring at the ghastly ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... powder hour after hour and day after day and week after week at a foe who never sees you and whom you never see; to go at this dreary, heavy trade of war with the sober, uninspired earnestness of convicts building a prison wall about themselves—the ghastly unreality of the ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... provoked to fiendish outbursts of wrath. No wonder men of downright sense, like Dr Johnson, admit that under such circumstances children will not learn anything unless they are so cruelly beaten that they make desperate efforts to memorize words and phrases to escape flagellation. It is a ghastly business, quite beyond words, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... by his friends, and subjected, night after night, to the same ghastly annoyance, the young man found his health beginning to suffer, and decided ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... dark, and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There was not a line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines. Each stood apart in its own lot. Each opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it were a billiard- ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wake, then rise, then hurl away thy yoke, Then dye with crimson that pale livery, Whose ghastly white has been the jailer's cloak For years flung o'er thy shame ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... went. My life is all reminiscence and anticipation—if you can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak of ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... up to this he had not clearly seen the villainy of Rochester. The woman showed it. Rochester had picked up a stranger, because of the mutual likeness, and sent him home to play his part, hoping, no doubt, to have a ghastly hit at his family. What about his wife? He had either never thought of her, or he had ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... dark sky. The clouds Had heap'd themselves over the bare west in crowds Of misshapen, incongruous potents. A green Streak of dreary, cold, luminous ether, between The base of their black barricades, and the ridge Of the grim world, gleam'd ghastly, as under some bridge, Cyclop-sized, in a city of ruins o'erthrown By sieges forgotten, some river, unknown And unnamed, widens on into desolate lands. While he gazed, that cloud-city invisible hands Dismantled and rent; and ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... of that unseen eye, glaring in upon the felons, drives some of them half mad. The thought that poor Hagar found to be her only comfort in the wilderness—and so christened the well after it—'Thou God seest me,' must be the source of our purest joy; or it must be a ghastly dread. When He comes at last, some men will lift up their faces to the sunshine and have their faces irradiated by the light; and some will call on the rocks and the hills to cover them from His face, and prefer rather to be crushed than to be blasted by the brightness of His countenance. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... blot of ink he sits across the way, Upon the smiling terrace of the Cafe de la Paix; That little wizened Spanish man, his face is ghastly white, His eyes are staring, staring like a tiger's in the night. I know within his evil heart the fires of hate are fanned, I know his automatic's ready waiting to his hand. I know a tragedy is near. I dread, I ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... be shovelled on board from a collier by manual labour, whereas, in an oil-driven destroyer, one simply went alongside a jetty or an "oiler," connected up a hose, and went to bed while a pump did all the work. But Langdon never could endure "the ghastly stink" of crude petroleum, while coal, though dirty, was clean dirt. The Rapier might have old-fashioned engines, but with them one ran no chance of developing that affliction of turbine craft: water in the casing, the consequent stripping ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... were then lying in a shed near the spot. Hastening thither, they found five lying side by side. Among them were those of poor Ben Trench and the captain of the ship—the one strong, stalwart and still ruddy in the face, the other attenuated and ghastly, as might have been expected of one who had, as it were, died ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... exordium with extreme care, and I have sought diligently in the works of all the great modern orators, and of some of the ancient as well, for similar passages of higher merit. My quest has been in vain. Mr. Webster's description of the White murder, and of the ghastly haunting sense of guilt which pursued the assassin, has never been surpassed in dramatic force by any speaker, whether in debate or before a jury. Perhaps the most celebrated descriptive passage in the literature of modern eloquence is the picture drawn ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... sword, when "there flew a white cock toward the king, and cried: 'Pharaoh, if thou spill the blood of this child, thy daughters shall be more leprous than before.' Pharaoh cast a glance upon the princesses; and, as if from dread and fright, their faces were already suffused with a ghastly yellow, he desisted again from his bloody ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... resumed his rapid walk down the graveled footpath. Reaching the entrance to the grounds he paused, leaning for a moment against a stone pillar of the gateway; his hands were clenched until the nails left deep indentations in the flesh; his face was ghastly and covered with great drops of perspiration, and, whether the look that shone from his glittering dark eyes betokened rage, or despair, or both, an ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... There was a ghastly stricken silence round her. The order she had brought had just been glanced at, but no other thought was with the most callous there than the heroism of her act, than ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... he said, peering at her uncertainly. "You're here—in the flesh? You've been having just a ghastly sort of game with me all these years, have you? Hang it, I didn't deserve quite that! And so the little newspaper chap spoke the truth, ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... succession of passions flying over his face,—rage, disdain, suspicion,—the Landgrave looked round upon The Masque as he uttered these words, and, with pallid, ghastly consternation, beheld him raise to his lips a hunting-horn which depended from his neck. He blew a blast, which was immediately answered from within. Silence as of the grave ensued. All eyes were turned in the direction ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... house all grey, and doors and windows white, I went down to the summer-house and did that the same. But it turned out horrible to look at; the yellow underneath showed through and made it a ghastly colour. The flagstaff I took down and painted a clean white. Then I put in a spell of field-work with Nils and was haymaking for some days. ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... could not believe the dreadful news, and took it for one of those ghastly rumours which circulate with such rapidity during periods of civil strife; but we were not left long in uncertainty, for the details of the catastrophe arrived all ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... conquered, it was by sheer force. George glanced at the skeleton, and he was afraid. Something was very wrong with architecture. He agreed with Mr. Enwright's tiresomely reiterated axiom that it was the Cinderella of professions and the chosen field of ghastly injustice. He had embraced architecture; he had determined to follow exactly in the footsteps of Mr. Enwright; he had sworn to succeed. But could he succeed? Suppose he failed! Yes, his faith faltered. He was intensely, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... as fast as her agitated state would let her, and in another ten minutes two policemen were seen also coming out of Mrs Jupp's, between whom there shambled rather than walked our unhappy friend Ernest, with staring eyes, ghastly pale, and with despair branded upon ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... Darvil on the grass—still living, but a horrible and ghastly spectacle. One ball had pierced his breast, another had shot away his jaw. His eyes rolled fearfully, and he tore up the grass ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Suppose she had been a good daughter, to begin with; suppose she had even been an obedient daughter, and had kept her own counsel, as mamma had commanded and implored. Ah, how different would have been this ghastly summer!... ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... for which they pay me and laugh at me while I lecture. "Linley, the mad microscopist," is the name I go by. I suppose that I talk incoherently while I lecture. Who could talk sense when his brain is haunted by such ghastly memories, while ever and anon among the shapes of death I behold the radiant form of my ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... grow mutinous day by day; My men grow ghastly wan and weak." The stout mate thought of home; a spray Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek. "What shall I say, brave Admiral, say, If we sight naught but seas at dawn?" "Why you shall say at break of day, 'Sail on! sail on! sail on! ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... of Lords. There was a debate of some public interest, and a considerable crowd was collected round the Peers' entrance. The moment Lord Cadurcis was recognised, the multitude began hooting. He was agitated, and grinned a ghastly smile at the rabble. But he dismounted, without further annoyance, and took his seat. Not a single peer of his own party spoke to him. The leader of the Opposition, indeed, bowed to him, and, in the course of the evening, he received, from ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... boots of the Labour Members creak And a terrible ghastly pallor is On the Wee Free face as it tries to speak; But ah! what a change to each sunken cheek If you put a bit more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... great shouting, and in the semi-darkness a noisy battle raged. After some minutes the Lirongs drew off and rushed back to their boats as wildly as they had come; and, strange to say, no blood was flowing, no heads were rolling on the ground, no ghastly wounds were gaping, in fact no one seemed any the worse. For it seems that this attack was merely a well understood formality, a put-up job, so to say. When two tribes, between whom there is a blood-feud not formally settled, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... her, and the same feeling of bewilderment. The suddenness and the nature of the disclosures were dream-like and unreal, and the image of Dorcas remained impressed upon her sight; not like Dorcas, though the same, but something ghastly, wan, glittering, and terrible, like a ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... me altogether. The Rat fed me on cabbage soup and glasses of tea and caviare and biscuits. During those three days he never left me, and indeed tended me like a woman. He would sit by my bed and with his rough hand stroke my hair, while he poured into my ears ghastly stories of the many crimes that he had committed. I noticed that he was cleaner and more civilised. His beard was clipped and he smelt of cabbage and straw—a rather healthy smell. One morning he suddenly took the pail, filled it with water and washed himself ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... for there's nothing more ghastly in the world than poverty in London. It's scared me. By Jove, it put the fear into me! And one oughtn't to be ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... ghost!" cackled the old man. "Ha! Ha! you must have your joke! But don't let me have such a ghastly one again. I don't like"—in a lower tone—"jests about the spirits ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... here. There were evidences of him—evidences of a child rather than a man. Boyish forethought stared her in the face and staggered her by its ghastly incongruities with the things this premeditating youth had done. Here were provisions, not such as a man would have selected to stand a siege, but the taste of a schoolboy. She looked at the supplies spread here—tins ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... boat lay the body of a man. In the man's side was a great gaping wound, and his clothing and the boat were spattered and smeared with blood. The man was dead. In the fixed, cold stare of his wide-open eyes was a look of hopeless appeal, and the ghastly terror of one who ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... as ghastly in sunlight as they had done in the pale light of the moon. I could see too that this path was ancient, and nowhere could I find traces of its being used. As I had seen the night before, it led straight across the desert, ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... the earnest intention of carrying them into effect, seldom fail to restore a measure of peace to the troubled mind. It is only when a regular and ghastly see-saw of wrong-doing and repentance has been established, and when the mind can no longer deceive even itself as to the possibility of permanent uprightness of life, that good resolves cease to tranquillise. Such a see-saw must gradually lose its regularity; ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... eleventh day, "the biscuit is all gone." His face was ghastly. His eyes were hollow. His lips ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... tell you," was the meditative reply. "It's your extraordinary insouciance. It seems to me, as a budding diplomat, that you are running the most ghastly risks on earth." ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... having gone completely out of fashion in France. The papa of the farce (who was also the Jack Tar of the drama) reappears in the pantomime as Pierrot, the white-faced clown; and tremendously funny is he. There is a weird, elastic harlequin in a ghastly mask which he never lifts; and an amazing notary in an astounding nose, who proves to be Monsieur Goosequill. There is a humpback of hideous deformity and a Columbine of seraphic loveliness; and all Monsieur Goosequill's troubles come out of the fact that he endeavors to marry the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... a third degree fatality about the usually debonair Penny that exacted obedience. George unwillingly looked him in the eye, and had a ghastly feeling of having his suddenly realized ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... to you the heinousness of this crime: you have but to consult your own breasts. Who ever saw the ghastly corpse of the victim weltering in its blood, and did not feel his own blood run cold through his veins? Has the murderer fled? With what eagerness do we pursue! with what zeal apprehend! with what joy do we bring him to justice! Even the dreadful sentence of death ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... waste of life. The decks were loaded with corpses, Christian and Moslem lying promiscuously together in the embrace of death. Instances are given where every man on board was slain or wounded. It was a ghastly spectacle, where blood flowed in rivulets down the sides of the vessels, staining the waters of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... themselves." A board, it is insisted, rose out of the floor of its own accord and flung itself violently at a servant. Strange lights, "like corpse candles," floated about. The Squire's personal attendant John, "a stout fellow and of sober conversation," was one night confronted by a ghastly apparition in the form of "a great body with two red and glaring eyes." Frequently, too, when John was in bed he was treated as were the children, his coverings removed, his body struck, etc. But it was ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... and he struggled for self-command. He raised the pen, and succeeded in getting its point on the proper place. Then his dim eye lighted, and shot a reproachful glance at Tom; he smiled in a ghastly manner, looked towards the paper, passed a hand across his brow, closed his eyes, and fell back on the pillow, utterly unconscious of all that belonged to life, its interests, its duties, or its feelings. In ten ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... enfeebled because unheeded, will then be restored to its early sensitiveness and power, as if the labourer's horny palm were to be endowed again with the softness of the infant's little hand. If you will take and think about that, brother, there is enough—without any more talk, without any more ghastly, sensual external figures—there is enough to make the boldest tremble; a memory embracing all the past, a memory rapidly grasping and constantly bringing its burden, a judgment which admits of no mistakes, and a conscience which has done ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... head had been shaved in order to disgrace him, and he had been so dreadfully whipped that he could hardly walk. So horrible was the impression produced upon my mind by his heart-broken countenance and crippled person that I fainted away. The sad and ghastly countenance of one of their female mulatto slaves who used to sit on a low stool at her sewing in the piazza, is now fresh before me. She often told me, secretly, how cruelly she was whipped when they sent her to the work house. I had known so much of the terrible scourgings ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... was sitting with his back against a gnarled stump, which gave him some support. He had his hand to his chest, and as he breathed a ghastly whistling sound came from the wound, and spirts of blood rushed from his mouth. His glazed eyes were fixed upon the man who had shot him, and a curious smile played about ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this latter calamity, we hauled the boat farther up and held the cable in our hands. Occasional flashes of lightning shone with a ghastly glare through the watery curtains around us, and lent additional horror to the scene. Yet we longed for those dismal flashes, for they were less appalling than the thick blackness that succeeded them. Crashing peals of thunder seemed to tear the skies in twain, and ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... practical training in it, which alone could teach its right principles, makes, and in the nature of things is bound to make, great mistakes—mistakes easily avoidable. No such thing can possibly be right. Raphael himself designed for tapestry, and the cartoons are priceless, but the tapestry a ghastly failure. It could not have been otherwise under the conditions. Executant separated from designer by all the leagues that ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... have repeated forgotten gossip and revealed the places where crimes had been committed or treasure buried. More often, perhaps, ghosts have walked the night without any ostensible or useful purpose, apparently in obedience to some ghastly compulsion that crept over them in death, as if a hesitating sickle had left them still hanging to life by ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... cottage was sunsteeped and still; Vines honeysuckled the window; softly he peeped o'er the sill. The lilies dropped from his fingers; devils were choking his breath; Rigid with horror, he stiffened; ghastly his face was as death. Like a nun whose faith in the Virgin is met with a prurient jibe, He shrank—'twas the wife of his bosom in the arms of Philo, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... midst of a society more intellectually cultivated than certainly was that which produced Regulus or the Horatii. And the most learned eras in modern Italy were precisely those which brought the vices into the most ghastly refinement." ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... as ghastly dreadfull, as it seemes, Bold men, presuming life for gaine to sell, Dare tempt that gulf, and in those wandring stremes Seek waies unknowne, waies leading down to hell. For, as we stood there waiting on the strond, Behold! an huge great vessell to us came, Dauncing upon the ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... weakness to a companion thus: "Tim, I haven't cried this twenty year; but they were all good boys, and my countrymen." The next day when the roll was called, and they answered not, we thought of their ghastly faces as we laid them in the trench, and hearts beat quick. When we sat down to eat and missed a messmate, the query went round, "Will it be my turn next?" A comrade's faults were now forgotten, his good qualities magnified, and all said, "Peace to ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... prevent her fellow-sinner from associating with us on more than terms of equality. Should Grandma Clay become aware of what I knew, she certainly would bundle the girl out neck and crop, as she would be justified in doing. But the girl was in a ghastly predicament, and more sinned against than sinning, when one heard her grief and remembered the age of her betrayer, which should have made him the protector instead of ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... not a form of all that lie Thus ghastly, wild and bare, Tost, bleeding, in the stormy sky, Black in the burning air, But to his knee some infant clung, But on his ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... creatures in his pockets, and transferring them to his mother for immediate care. I have heard him speak admiringly of the skilful tenderness with which she took into her lap a lacerated cat, washed and sewed up its ghastly wound, and nursed it back to health. The great intimacy with the life and habits of animals which reveals itself in his works is readily ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... indeed lays it down, that "the meditation of death cools the heart not a little." But her more experienced companions know better. The worse side of this Renaissance peculiarity is told in the last tale, a rather ghastly story of monkish corruption; its lighter side appears in the story, already referred to, of the "Grand Prince" and his pious devotions on the way to not particularly pious occupation. But touches of the more poetical and romantic effects of it are all over the book. It ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Cabrieres being fortified was prepared to stand a siege; but on a promise of their lives and property the inhabitants opened the gates. Without a moment's hesitation the Baron gave orders to put them all to death. The soldiers refused to break plighted faith; but the mob had no scruples and the ghastly work began. 'A multitude of women and children had fled to the church: the furious horde rushed headlong among them and committed all the crimes of which hell could dream. Other women had hidden themselves in a barn. The Baron caused them to be shut up ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... snatching a lamp from a distant table, brought it near, and the increased light showed Elsie's little face, ghastly as that of a corpse, while a stream of blood was flowing from a wound in the temple, made by striking against some sharp corner of the ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... Syrian desert landscape, pale and ghastly, under the light of a great white moon, with one lonely Figure standing like a sentinel against a towering fang of rock. Lurking forms of fierce beasts of prey were dimly to be distinguished amongst ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... hours of the night the scenes of the last few hours, of the last few days, came back to him and burnt into his soul. The gulf yawned before him now plain enough, open at his feet—black, ghastly. He shuddered at it, wondering if he should even yet fall in, felt wildly about for strength to stand firm, to retrace his steps; but found it not. He found not yet the strength he was in search of, but in the grey morning he wrote a ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... nervous excitement had driven him close to the line where reason and his own will wavered in their decisions, and his irregular, tottering steps became the type of the whole man. His eyes were wild and bloodshot. A ghastly pallor gave his haggard face the look of death. A damp dullness pervaded the heavy air of the room, which in his unrest he had greatly disordered. The fire had died out, and he had not even tried to kindle it again. His broodings had been so deep and painful during the earlier part of the night ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... barn with its bill stuck fast in a crack of one of the large timbers, dead, of course, with wings extended, and as dry as a chip. The bird seems to have died, as it had lived, on the wing, and its last act was indeed a ghastly parody of its living career. Fancy this nimble, flashing sprite, whose life was passed probing the honeyed depths of flowers, at last thrusting its bill into a crack in a dry timber in a hay-loft, and, with spread wings, ending ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... rejoiced over the bare fact, briefly cabled without ghastly details, that the Philippine generalissimo had fallen prisoner, because it portended the peace which all desired. In deference to public opinion, the President promoted Colonel Funston of the volunteers to the rank of ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... find much mention of him in their Literary Histories and Catalogues. A man of ample learning, and also of strong cheerful human sense and human honesty; whom it is thrice-pleasant, to meet with in those ghastly solitudes, populous chiefly with doleful creatures.] which take ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... to violate all. Whoever trampled on that, showed that no relation had any sacredness in his eyes—that he was unfit to move among human relations who had violated one so sacred and tender.—Therefore, the Mosaic law uplifted his bleeding corpse, and brandished the ghastly terror around the parental relation to guard it ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... second lesson was being read the sun had shifted from Miss Mapp's face, and enabled her to see how ghastly dear Evie looked when focussed under the blue robe of Jonah, who was climbing out of the whale. She had had her disappointments to contend with, for the Contessa had never really grasped at all who she was. Sometimes she mistook her for Irene, sometimes she did not seem ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... developing in hideous outlines the phosphorescent colors of the skeletons and long, fuzzy, exaggerated lines of the accompanying worms. The effect was thrilling. Every sound save the soft swish of the ghastly robes and the delicate footfall of ghostly feet ceased. Not a whisper from a sap-headed youth or a yap from an aged degenerate or a giggle from a silly woman broke ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... it if, at such an hour as this, we are prone to magnify trifles, or that the most insignificant thing becomes an omen full of ghastly meaning and possibilities? The creak of a door in the silence, a rustle in the dark, become to us of infinitely greater moment than the crash ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... you mean by browbeating my nurse and forcing yourself in here!" exclaimed Doctor Ward hotly. "Good God! What have you done to Goddard!" He had caught sight of the latter's ghastly face. "Nurse, look to your patient! Now, sir, out with you." He pushed Baker in the direction of the door. "And you go, too, Symonds," as the man rose and stood uncertain whether or not to assist Colonel Baker in his efforts to remain ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... absurd manner with its nib stuck in the cane bottom of an overturned chair. He took it out and laid it on the table. He saw his hat in a corner, stooped for it, missed it several times, and then got hold of it, and put it on. There was a little glass over the mantelpiece. A ghastly face with a torn collar was watching him furtively through it. He turned fiercely on the spy and found the face was his own. He turned up his coat and buttoned it. Then he went to the ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... "justifiable homicide"), not entirely divested of that malice prepense which constitutes the crime of murder! Happy the victims in whom life is not completely extinguished, who recover their feet, bind up their wounds, and undeterred by a ghastly experience, hazard in more encounters a fresh assassination of the heart. Such fortitude would have afforded a remedy to Dick Stanmore. "Wanted—a lady!" should have been the motto emblazoned on his banner if ever he ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... Moonlight Pleasure Club" came straggling in by twos and threes. Some of the weary dancers had dropped to sleep, still wearing their ball-gowns and slippers and bangles and picture-hats, their faces showing ghastly white and drawn in the mote-ridden sunbeams that fell through the dirty windows. Others were busy doffing Cinderella garments, which rites were performed with astounding frankness in the open spaces ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson |
