"Rasping" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... juggled the politics of this country, I threw him over and took Garavel—Garavel! My God! What a mockery! But I won't let you—I won't let that girl spoil my work." Her voice trailed off in a kind of rasping whisper. She struggled a moment for composure, then went on: "It was I who promoted you to Runnels' position—he'll tell you that. It was I who put ideas of advancement into his head. I fostered this quarrel between Jolson ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... and boons in vain long sought! Now, careless, let us stray, or stop To see the partridge from the covey drop, Or, while the evening air's like yellow wine, From the pure stream take out The playful trout, That jerks with rasping check the struggled line; Or to the Farm, where, high on trampled stacks, The labourers stir themselves amain To feed with hasty sheaves of grain The deaf'ning engine's boisterous maw, And snatch again, From to-and-fro tormenting ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... cigarettes and taking her to see her special lions, who were boxed for the night. Diana had wandered up and down before the narrow cages, looking at the big brutes still restless from the show, rubbing her cheek on the soft little round head of the cub she was holding in her arms, smiling at its sleepy rasping purr. ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... for a few sesterces the amphora. It is the common drink of the carters at every wine-house on the country roads. I longed for a glass of my own rich Falernian or the mellow Coan that was bottled in the year that Titus took Jerusalem. Is it even now too late? Could we not wash this rasping ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in his clutches on the broad floor of a swinging fir-bough. His long sharp claws were caught in her clothing, he worried them sagaciously a little, then, finding that ineffectual to free them, he commenced licking her bare white arm with his rasping tongue and pouring over her the wide streams of his hot, fetid breath. So quick had this flashing action been that the woman had had no time for alarm; moreover, she was not of the screaming kind; but now, as she felt him endeavoring to disentangle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... the last to which I went. I had just had time to note that it was secured, when I thought I heard a noise outside. I stood perfectly silent, and listened. Yes! Now I could distinctly hear a sound of whispering, and something slithered over the panels, with a rasping, scratchy noise. Evidently, some of the brutes were feeling with their claw-hands, about the door, to discover whether there were any means ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... feet long, was coiled under the pillow of the sick woman. I see snakes in all withered twigs, and am ready to flee at "the sound of a shaken leaf." And besides snakes, the earth and air are alive and noisy with forms of insect life, large and small, stinging, humming, buzzing, striking, rasping, devouring! ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... don't stop mopin' out thar an' come along in, I'll clear off the dishes!" called his mother again in her rasping voice which sounded as if she were choking in a ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... was sitting opposite Wolf, continually gathering with his thick fingers his beard and mustache into his mouth, as soon as Be was through with his argument, stopped chewing his beard, and, in a loud, rasping voice, said that although the president of the stock company was a villain, he should favor a reversal if there were legal grounds to sustain it, but as there were none, he joined in the opinion of Ivan Semenovitch (Be), and he invariably ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... she said, in a voice which must naturally have been rasping, but which she had apparently learned to control like a violin—"Esther dear, if you could ever understand what offices have done for me! On the East Side—always it was work and work and watch all the pretty girls in our block get T. B. in garment-factories, or ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... It makes a sort of webbing. In the centre of this is a horny beak, usually of a brownish colour. It is just like a parrot's beak, only of thinner and lighter stuff. There are two parts to it, the top one curving down over the lower one. Behind this beaked mouth is a hard, rasping tongue. On each side of the head is a big, staring eye; and behind the ugly head is the ugly body, ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... the brass to his lips again. The tonal stairway which leads up to the chorus of Egypt rose in rasping wailfulness. It culminated in an excessive, unendurable, brazen shriek—and the Honorable William Linder experienced upon the undefended rear of his person the most violent kick of a lifetime not always ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... inventive answers that he had not gone to the manoeuvres, which put them in the best humor with themselves, and the girl said it was so cold and rough that she wished her father had not gone, either. The general appeared just before dinner and frankly avowed the same wish. He was rasping and wheezing from the dust which filled his lungs; he looked blown and red, and he was too angry with the company he had been in to have any comments on the manoeuvres. He referred to the military chiefly in relation to the Miss Stollers' ineffectual ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... contest as to which could drown the other's instrument, and the snapping time grew faster, until the dancers gasped, and men with long boots encouraged them with cries and stamped a staccato accompaniment upon the benches or on the floor. It was savage, rasping music, but one player infused into it the ebullient verve of France, and the other was from the misty land where the fiddler learns the witchery of the clanging reel and the swing of the Strathspey. It is doubtless not high art, but there is probably ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... would, would you?" said Morris, in a sarcastic, rasping tone; "I believe that, but you would take care not to get into anything of the kind yourself. I never knew a man who was more careful of his own precious carcase. Now, let me tell you, I believe that fellow would clean you both ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... The cellar door was fastened on the outside, with the iron hasp used to protect the store of vegetables from the weather. Jase must be gone. She was turning away when she heard him clear his throat with that peculiar little hacking, rasping noise which sounded exactly as one would expect a Jase to sound. Billy Louise puckered her eyebrows, pressed her lips together understandingly—and disapprovingly—and ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... the incident is given in the words of Lamon: "The judge never could whisper, but in this case he probably did his best. At all events, in attempting to whisper to Mr. Lincoln he trumpeted his rebuke in about these words, and in rasping tones that could be heard all over the court room: 'Lincoln, I have been watching you and Lamon. You are impoverishing this bar by your picayune charges of fees, and the lawyers have reason to complain of you. You are now almost as poor as Lazarus, and if you don't make people pay you more for ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... was the place so marked as by an indefinable oppressive atmosphere. The strong musk and edged perfumes, the races, distinct and subtly antagonistic or mingled and spoiled, the rasping instruments, combined in an unnatural irritating pressure; they produced an actual sensation of cold and staleness like that from the air of ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... thing to claim their attention was the ships themselves. These, being lashed together by means of the grapnels, were grinding and rasping each other's sides so alarmingly, as they rolled and plunged in the sea that was running, that they had already inflicted upon each other an appreciable amount of damage, and threatened to do a great ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... a smile of welcome and bade us enter. In a small courtyard a German N.C.O., with a loud rasping voice, ordered the prison guard to take us to our quarters. After much jangling of keys we were separated, to our amazement, and each one of the party locked in a cell by himself. Near the ceiling was one small window about two feet square. On examination this exit ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... Wang Tai was dead, and in this small grave were her fragile bones to rest for twenty-four months under three feet of Christian law. Interest tempered the fright which Romulus and Moses felt when from the forward carriage came the sound of rasping oboes, belly-less fiddles, brazen tom-toms, and harsh cymbals, playing a dirge for little Wang Tai; playing less for godly protection of her tiny soul than for its exemption from the ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... looked at each other, but the Indian fellow, who was our guard, emitted a harsh, rasping laugh. As for Godefroy, he was marching abreast of the braves gabbling a mumble-jumble of pleadings and threats, which, I know very well, ignored poor Jack. Godefroy would make a scapegoat of the weak to save his own neck, and small ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... a big needle, he sprang several feet in the air, and began frantically clutching at the tormenting substance. The second or third attempt secured the spark, which clung to his hand, burning his fingers to that extent that he emitted a rasping exclamation, bounded upward, and by a particularly vigorous flirt of his hand freed it of the spark, which ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... his heat-gun, fired once, saw the feathers burst into blue flame, saw it falling; then he rolled over and went back to sleep. Not even the thud of its heavy body on the sand disturbed him, but an hour later he heard another warning—a rasping sound—and through the stench of the ancient swamp he smelled a fetidness ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis
... The low rasping went past close at hand, then to the right, then back, and seemed going away. Rag felt he knew what he was about; he wasn't a baby; it was his duty to learn what it was. He slowly raised his rolypoly body on his short fluffy legs, lifted his little round ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... season yet," answered the other, with loud, rasping voice; "but the day of a rising is at hand, and shows with a laughing face how those whom she will destroy are rushing swiftly upon their ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... and have a good ear for it. When the Spaniards first came, they found no musical instruments among the Tarahumares except the short reed flute, so common to many Mexican tribes, the shaman's rattle, and the rasping stick. But they soon introduced the violin and even the guitar, and throughout Mexico the Indians now make these instruments themselves, using pine wood and other indigenous material in their construction, sometimes with remarkable skill and ingenuity, and for glue the juice ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... remember the name of every ship that Dad then pointed out to me. I can picture, too, the whole scene, with the tide at the flood and the sunshine shimmering on the water and the old Victory belching out a salute in sharp, rasping reports from the guns of her main deck battery, that darted out their fiery tongues, each in the midst of a round puff ball of smoke in quick succession, first on the port and then on the starboard side, until the proper number of rounds ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... LeConte, still on the gangway, had stopped also. Captain Crane and Koto were making weak, despairing signs at me from the entrance to the control room. Both of them looked as sick as cats. I heard a laugh, a shrill, rasping sort of laugh, from the forward end of the bright cruiser, and I looked ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... at No. 124 Constantine Road. As she did so, a high, rasping, and fretful voice screamed to her from an ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... the age, or rather was it that girl herself; and it was she who, with her pale, halfmocking features and rasping voice, came and sat with me at the end ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the uplifting of the smoke had been prearranged, the discovered troops burst into a rasping yell, and a hundred flames jetted toward the retreating band. A rolling gray cloud again interposed as the regiment doggedly replied. The youth had to depend again upon his misused ears, which were trembling and buzzing from the ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... out on the level prairie, where the species was abundant during the season of migration. As I was sauntering along a road, a peculiar croaking little trill greeted me from the hedge, sounding very much like the rasping call of certain kinds of grasshoppers when they are suddenly startled and take to wing. But no insect had ever emitted quite such a sound in my hearing. This could not be an insect. It was worth while to look and make sure of the identity ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... death. The charge is made at a gallop, the animal sometimes coming on silently, with the mouth shut, and sometimes with the jaws open, the lips drawn back and teeth showing, uttering at the same time a succession of roars or of savage rasping snarls. Certain bears charge without any bluster and perfectly straight; while others first threaten and bully, and even when charging stop to growl, shake the head and bite at a bush or knock holes in the ground with their fore-paws. Again, some ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... challenge was unanswerable. There was a lapse in their talk, Presley drumming on the arm of the seat, meditating on this injustice; Dyke looking off over the fields beyond the town, his frown lowering, his teeth rasping upon his pipestem. The station agent came to the door of the depot, stretching and yawning. On ahead of the engine, the empty rails of the track, reaching out toward the horizon, threw off visible layers of heat. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... hard by, met Brock in the hall, hollow-eyed and haggard, on the morning after their first night. He shouted lugubrious congratulations in Brock's ear, just as if Brock's ear had not been harassed a whole night long by shrieking wheels and rasping cables. ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... after this sentence was interrupted by a sharp, rasping sound of Big Jim clearing his throat and shuffling to his feet. He, too, looked the minister full in the face with a searching gaze, shook his head sadly, and walked leisurely down the aisle and out of the door. The minister paused again and ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... and shuffling, purposeless feet. A cloud of fluffy white hair, a red-veined nose, two thick tufts of eyebrow and a pair of dimly questioning, watery blue eyes—these were what met her gaze. He leaned forward upon a stick, while his shoulders rose and fell with his crackling, rasping breathing. ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... work lies primarily, not in tracts, nor in dogmas, nor in exhortations, but in the subtle attraction of a refined, benevolent spirit, breathing its very self into the lives of those who have hitherto known only the rasping, grasping selfishness of their fellow-men, and to whom this new gospel of brotherly kindness and deference is a marvelous revelation and inspiration. The result of such missionary work is a triumph of sanctified courtesy, a triumph not unworthy the disciples of ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... saucepan, and making a Saint Lawrence of himself by wasting his life on a series of gridirons. Ah, if I were only a man, I would do something better than that, and prove that heroes are not all dead yet. But, instead of that, I'm only a woman, and must sit rasping my temper with absurdities like this." And Di wrestled with her knitting as if it were Fate, and she were paying off the ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... leaving it hanging by the lashings, which were then cut adrift. The Webb passed up following the Queen. The latter, having gained sufficient distance, turned and charged down, but as the Indianola was turning up at the same moment the blow on the starboard bow glanced, the vessels rasping by each other; and as the Queen cleared the stern of her enemy, the latter planted two IX-inch shot successfully, killing 2 and wounding 4 of her crew and disabling two guns. During all this time the Indianola kept firing her guns whenever they could be made to bear, but, as the enemy had calculated, ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... reviles The almost whispered warble from the hedge, And takes a locust's rasping voice and files The silence ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... him doubtfully for a moment, then yielding to her impulse, came to his side. His first intimation of her presence was the scarcely heard tones of her voice mingling with the harsh rasping of the saw. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the neighborhood of the door had cut into the babble like a knife into butter; a rough, rasping voice, loud and compelling, which caused the conversation of the members of the ensemble to cease on the instant. Only Mr Saltzburg, now in a perfect frenzy of musicianly fervor, continued to assault the decrepit piano, unwitting of an unsympathetic ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... experience of a sage. He wore a blue flannel shirt, with loose trousers belted round his waist, and he crushed a soft felt hat between his hands; his hair was clipped close to his skull, and as he rubbed it now and then it gave out a pleasant rasping sound. ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... dark indistinct forms darted out like rats. The whistling stopped in the middle of a bar. A deep-chested oath rang out, and then a confused medley of sound, the rasping of feet, a growling almost canine, a sharp yelp, gasps, and over all the vast voice of Officer Keating ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... was baldly desultory, as it was bound to be, with an escaped lover, whose disappointment was still rasping him like a newly devised Nessus shirt, to sustain an undivided half of it. The hawk-faced one, who had boarded the train at Omaha and whose section was directly opposite Blount's, defined himself as a mine-owner ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... Henrietta, I hope not. No, no, I'm not going to believe that, 'and, temporarily united, the third person left behind though following closely, they returned to the lighted house. As they stood in the hall they could hear the rasping sound of Caroline's breathing. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... Ombos gave a strange rasping sound. Then, in a tone of weird intensity: 'See! See!' and he laid his hand on mine ... the curtain was no longer there, and some vague thing gathered—the statue was dim behind it—the form ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... and when the two, the long and the short, went out together, it was like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza setting forth in quest of adventures in the land of Strand. The short man indulged in none of the loud, rasping affectation of humour that was so maddening in the long; he was dry, hard, and sterile, and when he did join in the conversation it was like an empty nut between the teeth—dusty and bitter. He kept a pocket-book, in which he held an account of his reading. Holding the pocket-book between finger ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... many sounds of the restless Indian night, some far away, some near at hand, there is one which, when it commences, drowns all the rest. It is a harsh, metallic, rasping, shrill, unmusical sound. It might seem as if it had to do with some machinery, except that it is unlike the sound of any machine that you ever heard. It begins in the room where you are sitting reading, or else out in the verandah, where you are enjoying the cooler breeze of evening. ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... had seen no more of her father that day. She had hoped that Father White would come and see her, but he had not come; she had sat in her room alone, and after dinner her mother had scolded her because she did not talk to Lord Chiselhurst, an old man who had talked to her in a loud rasping voice. He was overpowering; her strength had given way, she had fainted, and she had been carried out of the room. When she opened her eyes St. Clare was standing by her.... She was glad it was he and not Lord Chiselhurst who had carried ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... landlady, who has good sense and experience, thinks G. will not get well. Sometimes, in awful moments, I think so too; but then I cheer up and get quite elated. Last night as I lay awake, too weary to sleep, I heard a harsh, rasping sound like a large saw. I thought some animal unknown to me must be making it, it was so regular and frequent. But after a time I found it was a dying young soldier who lives farther from this house than Miss H. does ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... spouse is the lightning. Imagine images as swift, vivid and daring as that, hurled and flashed out in language terse, sudden, lofty—and you may get an idea of what this eagle's bark was like. And the word that came rasping and resounding on it out of storm-skies high over Olympus, for Athens then and the world since ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... how you criticise your neighbors," spoke a rasping voice near by. "As a matter of fact you are rather ugly-looking creatures yourselves, and I'm sure mother has often told us we were the loveliest and prettiest ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... wife had laughed at his singing; and for twenty years the fibre ached. Nothing, again, was more notable than the formal chivalry of this unmannered man to the person on earth with whom he was the most familiar. He was conscious of his own innate and often rasping vivacity and roughness and he was never forgetful of his first visit to the Austins and the vow he had registered on his return. There was thus an artificial element in his punctilio that at times might almost raise a smile. But it stood on noble grounds; ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... year. Although not by any means a rare bird, with us jays are shy and wary. In Florida their southern cousins are as familiar as robins, without a trace of fear of mankind. What curious notes our blue jays have—a creaking, wheedling, rasping medley of sounds coming through the leafless branches. At this time of year they love acorns and nuts, but in the spring "their fancy turns to thoughts of" eggs and young nestlings, and they are accordingly hated by the small birds. Nevertheless ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... of the sleeping negroes penetrated the dividing wall. He thought he heard a rasping on the shingles outside which could not be accounted for by wind or water, and rose to his feet, that instant facing Dr. Dunlap ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... family affairs of the rhinoceros. Where had the mother gone? They looked about, but could see nothing to justify their fears. Only for a moment, though, did their sense of safety last; hardly had the echo of their shouting come back from the hillside than there was a splashing and rasping of bushes in the swamp and the rush of some huge animal toward the little ascent leading to the valley proper. There needed no word from either boy; the frightened couple bounded to the tree of refuge and had barely begun clambering up its trunk ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... acrobats, and one for singers, struck up the second air, and the People's Favorite appeared. She may have had by nature a sweet and tuneful voice; perhaps it was in order to please her friends, the people, that, she converted it into a harsh and rasping voice, that she delivered her words with even too much gesture, and that she uttered a kind of shriek at the beginning of every verse, which was not in the composer's original music, but was thrown ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... so that I can see and admire its tusks. Agelan would like nothing better than to show off all his pigs, and if I were a native I would pass them in review as we Europeans visit picture-galleries; but I refuse as politely as I can. We return to the cook-house, where the cocoa-nut rasping is finished; the man washes his hands in the water of a nut, splitting it open and squeezing the water in a little spray on to his hands. Mrs. Agelan knows a simpler way; she fills her mouth with water ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... had been directly denied. Mr. Canning, "exceedingly irritated," complained of the word "captious." Mr. Adams retaliated by reciting offensive language used by Mr. Canning, who in turn replied that he had been speaking only in self-defence. Mr. Canning found occasion to make again his peculiarly rasping remark that he should always strive to show towards Mr. Adams the deference due to his "more advanced years." After another very uncomfortable passage, Mr. Adams said that the behavior of Mr. Canning in making the observations of members of Congress ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... winter; but not frozen roads, nor drifting snows, nor lowering clouds, nor biting winds, could stay the people. Many men and women, old and young, were far on their way before the sun had softened the rasping air. They came on foot and on horses, in carriages and in wagons, through the valleys, over the mountains, along the highways and the lanes, pouring into the jubilant city from all directions as rivers of enthusiastic life. It has been estimated that sixty thousand came ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... some high-powered car traveling under full pressure of gas. The burros followed him, but William lifted his head and brayed tremulously three times in the dark. Casey had never heard him bray before, and the sudden rasping ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... to grip Bella. From behind the furnace were coming the most terrible sounds, rasping noises that fairly frayed the silk of my nerves. We stood petrified for an instant. Then Bella laughed. "They are not all gone," she said carefully. ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... became wild. Then it changed to great rasping hiccups. Too much that was unbelievable by old standards had happened around him. This was delayed reaction to space. He had heard of such a thing. But he had hardly thought that it could apply to ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... and that may perhaps be considered slight when they are anonymous. This anecdote, however, in the original Florentine diction, although it betrays a partiality for Lionardo, bears the aspect of truth to fact. Moreover, even Michelangelo's admirers are bound to acknowledge that he had a rasping tongue, and was not incapable of showing his bad temper by rudeness. From the period of his boyhood, when Torrigiano smashed his nose, down to the last years of his life in Rome, when he abused his nephew Lionardo and hurt the feelings of his best and oldest friends, he discovered ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... to one side of me, with eyes on the old hag's and my hand held between her two, Maga began chanting in English. The fact that her voice was musical and low where the bag's had been high-pitched and rasping heightened ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... bar, Burton brought all his weight to bear upon it. There was a dull, cracking sound and a sort of rasping. The door moved slightly. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... and its clock; and, a little higher, the village square, where a spring, fashioned into a fountain, gurgled from one basin into another, under a wide arched roof. I could hear from my window the chatter of the women washing their clothes, the strokes of their beaters, the rasping of the pots scoured with sand and vinegar. Sprinkled over the slopes are little houses with their garden patches in terraces banked up by tottering walls, which bulge under the thrust of the earth. Here and there are very steep lanes, with the ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... countenance cleared, and his imaginary cares fell from him; while his wife's very real ones were forgotten as she listened, and there was a blessed truce to trouble for a time. Unfortunately, however, as the reading proceeded, he came to a rasping bit of the story, which began to grate upon his nerves. The first part had been pleasurably exciting, but when he found the sensation slipping from him, he thought to stay it with a stimulant, and went to the sideboard for the purpose. Mrs. Caldwell's ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Robot was moving; coming forward; holding the light upon us. I thought I heard its voice—and a horrible, hollow, rasping laugh. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... boys for quite a distance, keeping well out of sight behind the timber. It had a shrill, rasping voice that was very aggravating. Jerry declared it to be a lynx or wolverine, and Hamp agreed with him. A little later something more serious occurred. Three hungry wolves stole out of the forest and down to the ice. They evidently scented the carcass of the deer. They ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... did not relish Craig's bellicose manner, nor the glare in his one eye that showed, nor the imputation of vindictive rebuke in his rasping tones. ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... touched on an important theological point. Demons, whose voices are as rasping as a cart wheel or a winepress screw, cannot imitate ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... face was ghastly with weariness and dirt and fury; and as he recognized the head of his family, he drew in a long rasping breath, and ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... light their pipes on a street crossing. When you give them the horn, they are seized with the belief that you are trying to play the prelude to "Lohengrin," and they run up and down in front of the car in extreme agitation. You frustrate their plans for a beautiful death by rasping your tires against the curb, together with your nerves. At Seventy-second Street two women are saying good-bye in the middle of the street. You swerve to one side and they pursue. You snap your spinal column as you shoot the car straight about, ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... Curious rasping stridulations came from them, sounds which seemed to serve as means of communication, and which ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... itself. It was something, at any rate, that she was out of the Chapel, away from Mr. Crashaw's piercing eyes, Mr. Thurston's rasping voice, Mr. Warlock's reproachful melancholy. She felt this evening as though by struggling with all her strength she could shut the gates upon new experiences that were fighting to enter into her soul, but must, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... edge of the table. In this gorgeous uniform, with his bull neck, his hooked nose flattened on the tip upon a blue-black, dyed moustache, he looked like a disguised and sinister vaquero. The drone of his voice had a strangely rasping, soulless ring. He floundered, lowering, through a few vague sentences; then suddenly raising his big head and his voice ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... what?" His voice was dry and rasping. "What can you ask me? To let him come here to see you? No, daughter. I can't permit that. And I don't intend to be cruel when I say this. I am sorry for him, God knows I deeply sympathize with him, but ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... for him and he accepted me as a pupil. I am free to admit that my tone, which people seem to be pleased to praise especially, I owe entirely to Leonard, for when I came to him I had the so-called 'German tone' (son allemand), of a harsh, rasping quality, which I tried to abandon absolutely. Leonard often would point to his ears while teaching and say: 'Ouvrez vos oreilles: ecoutez la beaute du son!' ('Open your ears, listen for beauty of sound!'). Most Joachim pupils you hear (unless they have reformed) attack a chord ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... she did not know. The other was here at Maubeuge. I helped hold his right arm steady while a surgeon took the bandages off his hand. When the wrapping came away a shattered finger came with it—it had rotted off, if you care to know that detail—and at the sight the victim uttered growling, rasping, animal-like sounds. Even so, I think it was the thing he saw more than the pain of it that overcame him; the pain he could have borne. He had been ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... you are under arrest," said Standish. "You are arrested for threatening the police, drunkenness, and assaulting a citizen with intent to kill—" The voice of the young man turned shrill and rasping. "And if the man ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... of voice is not of so great moment as distinctness of utterance, yet its cultivation is by no means to be neglected. Harsh, rasping sounds and nasal twangs are disagreeable to hear, and no speaker can afford to offend his audience in this way. An unpleasant voice may be the result of some physical defect; more often it is caused by sheer carelessness. In most ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... the sun shines on," they say, but the sun did not shine on Diana. The ninth of July dawned gray and blustering, with a queer rasping chill in the air like an autumn day slipped back in the calendar. I hated the thought of seeing Di married to Sidney Vandyke. It seemed like aiding and abetting the enemy, but unless I had another accident at the last minute, such as falling downstairs, I could see no way of stopping ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... "Cheer up! Cheer up!" and a little later big black vultures go wheeling through cloudland or hang there, like frozen splashes, searching the Limberlost and the surrounding country for food. The boom of the bittern resounds all day, and above it the rasping scream of the blue heron, as he strikes terror to the hearts of frogdom; while the occasional cries of a lost loon, strayed from its flock in northern migration, fill the ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... and his own hair he hated the clock most. It was forever rousing him of a morning when he longed to sleep. Also, the clock acted as a sort of vicar to Barber. Its round, flat, bald face stared hard at Johnnie as its rasping staccato warned him boldly. More than once he had gone up to the noisy timepiece, taken it from its place on the cupboard shelf, and given it a ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... each other, were still for a long moment, and then my gasping, rasping voice came ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... else in the world, don't you think?" I said, letting him feel the raw edge of the bitterness that was rasping at me. "In coming to me, as you have, you, yourself, are ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... the liberty to say so, and act accordingly. Are the superficial amenities, the soothing fictions, the smotherings of the burning heart,... really paramount in this world, and never to give way? and when a soul of power, unable to refrain, rubs off, though it be with rasping words, all the varnish from rottenness and lies, is he to be tried in our courts of compliment for a misdemeanor? Is there never a higher duty than that of either pitying or converting guilty men,—the duty of publicly exposing them? of awakening the popular conscience, and ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... child's play for so strong a man as Mr. Steele to shake off so futile a grasp, and he did so with a rasping laugh. But the next moment he was tottering, blanched and helpless, and while struggling to right himself and escape, yielded more and more to a sudden weakness sapping his life-vigor, till he fell prone and apparently lifeless on the lounge toward which, with ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... his rasping tongue or their own growing resentment at the impudence of the minor leaguers, the All-Americans broke ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... a rasping stir— And on the roof the carpenter Was perched, and prodding rusty leaves From out the choked and dripping eaves— And some one, hammering about, Was ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... us. Besides"—Stone's voice grated like steel rasping steel, every word distinct though very low—"I swore to pay off Luck Cullison, and by God! I'm going ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... by various names: "Brant Bird," "Bead-bird," "Horse-foot-Snipe," "Sand-runner," "Calico-back," "Chicaric" and "Chickling." The two latter names have reference to its rasping notes, "Calico-back," to the variegated ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... rasping order, "go to your rooms! Remain there until you hear from Colonel North, Major ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... rustling of moving bodies, the smooth rasping of wings on leathery wings, hands that fumbled for him, then closed about arms and legs and throat, while in his ears was a chattering of high-pitched squeals. Again he was lifted in air, held there in the grip of a score of lean, long-fingered hands. He was ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... Put ten drops in a glass half full of water, and give two teaspoonfuls every fifteen minutes in alteration with Spongia 3X trit. (tablet form) one at a dose. If there is no fever the Spongia can be used alone. Cough is hard, rasping, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... must have been dusting that heavy shelf high up on the wall with all the china on it, and the whole thing has given way. She must be badly hurt! But why doesn't her mistress come rushing upstairs? and what was that rasping noise ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... seconds there was a faint rasping sound, then a sharp crack, and the rustle of two half-nutshells through the leaves. One of them struck the side of the hazel-stump and bounded off like an elastic ball. Before the dormouse had collected his wits, a fine kernel was thrust through the nest and the squirrel ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... Cunningham himself, the Risaldar tongue-lashed the servant with harsh, tooth-rasping words that brought him up to attention. Whether he interpreted or not the exact meaning of what Cunningham had said, he at least produced the desired effect; the servant mumbled apologetic nothings and slunk off the veranda backward—to go away and hold his sides with laughter at the back of the ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy |
