"Racking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by Lord Minto's most kind and friendly communications, were succeeded by the most racking anxieties respecting Malta. Fresh orders had arrived for the recall of the Portuguese squadron; and Captain Ball could with difficulty keep the distressed islanders from joining the French. Lord Nelson, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... didn't. He stood still against a friendly wall, and suffered. He straightened his dress. He touched sore places with a tender solicitude. His head was racking. All his limbs ached and burned. He desired nothing but the cold sheets of his bed and a bottle of embrocation. He swore at the fog, with a fine relish for the colour of sounds. He swore at things that were in no way responsible ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... seemed long and arduous and hot and nerve-racking, in spite of the amenities of the gas stove. She was so anxious to have all perfect. Once more the table was decked, the rose shades were placed over the candles, the sitting-room fire was lighted, the coffee apparatus ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... and littered papers, and nerve-racking bustle seem indispensable to the sending of a telegram; but when the bush-folk "shake hands" with Outside all is sunshine and restfulness, soft beauty and leisurely peace. With the murmuring bush about us in the clear space ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... injured in the head and arm. The sun, which had aroused him from the apathetic exhaustion into which he had sunk from loss of blood and hunger, now warmed his stiffened limbs, and allayed somewhat the racking pain in his wounded right arm, and the bleeding gash in his forehead. He tried to extricate himself from under the carcass of his horse, that pressed heavily on him, and felt delighted as he succeeded in loosing his foot from the stirrup, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... commerciality by securing as her part in the superhuman conflict the simple and unadorned making of money through the dire necessities of the world? There was bitterness, there were sneers, there were vague hopes and scathing injustices born of torment and racking dread. Some few were patiently just, because they knew something of the country and its political and social workings and were by chance of those whose points of view included the powers and significances of things not readily to be seen upon the ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... henchman along the west trail, past Rodman's and up the canyon toward the first shoulder of Lost Chief Peak. The Moose did not approve of the trip. He showed his disapproval by plunging and side jumping with nerve-racking persistency. Ginger and Democrat gave him ample turning room, biting or kicking him if he drew too near them. Midway in the canyon Charleton left the trail and turned abruptly to the left, up the sheer shoulder ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... his mouth, racking, struggling; and when the convulsive agony had passed he smiled, and there in the shadow by the door the light that crossed his face was ghastly, like a dim smear of phosphorus. And now the Major's shoulders were not stiffened with resentment; ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... her interview with Pierre Dumaresq—seven days of horrible, nerve-racking suspense, of anguished foreboding, of ever-creeping, leaden-footed despair. And now at last, though the suspense still held her, she knew that the end had come. Only that evening, as her carriage had been turning in at the ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... as Mr. Kennemann. When I claim to be an invalid of hard work, he may perhaps claim the same. But his work was possibly healthier than mine, this being the difference between the farmer and the diplomat. The mode of life of the latter is less healthy and more nerve-racking. To begin with, then, I am grateful to you, gentlemen, and I should be even more grateful, if we were all to put on our hats. I have lost in the course of years nature's own protection, but I cannot well cover my head if you do ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... And Nevyrazimov, racking his brain for a means of escape from his hopeless position, stared at the rough copy he had written. The letter was written to a man whom he feared and hated with his whole soul, and from whom he had for the last ten years been trying to wring a post ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... moment's pause, as Folwell ran to join the others in their place of safety. Then from without there came a most nerve-racking and terrifying crash. It seemed as if the very mountain would ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... racking cross, than bed of down More dear, whereon to stretch Myself and sleep: So did I win a kingdom,—share my crown; A ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... animals show. These especially who are usually well and robust are a trial to the flesh and spirit of those about them. Moore was not the wonderful exception. His first few weeks in the hospital were not so bad; but when the actual racking pain was over, and nothing remained but that halting of the physical machinery to which we never give a thought during perfect action—the weakness hanging leaden weights to every limb, the unwonted nervousness and irritability, the apparently ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... considerably, but being still a trifle weak, they were strengthened by the substitution of 1-in. truss rods instead of the -in. rods used originally. The top platform and the cross-bracing were also stiffened a little and tightened up to prevent racking. ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Bergen Hill Tunnels. Paper No. 1154 • F. Lavis
... was alone. He had long wished for such an opportunity to declare his passion; and yet, now that it had arrived, he trembled to embrace it. To allow it to pass was, in all probability, to entail upon himself many more weeks or months of racking anxiety, uncertainty, and suspense; and yet to embrace it was, perhaps, to set the last seal to his despair. On such a subject he could have debated for weeks; but now, the least hesitation, and the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... of mine did not last long, for I soon understood what the matter with me was, and remained lying on the sofa with a racking headache and my limbs relaxed as I stared dully at the stamp on the package of tobacco, the Pipe-tube coiled on the floor, and the odds and ends of tobacco and confectioner's tartlets which were littered ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... a reporter's work is generally the most nerve-racking of his journalistic experience. Unacquainted with his associates, ignorant of his duties, embarrassed because of his ignorance, he wastes more time in useless effort, dissipates more energy in worry, and grows more despondent over his work and his career than during any ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... continued, "all the calamity which is now the portion of the man that stands before thee—all the struggles, the racking throes that torture this seared breast, arise from one solitary cause—the offspring of one crime, and of that crime the unhappy victim who suffers by it is innocent. The rites of religion never blessed my mother's bridal bed, and I was born a thing despised, looked ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... schoolboy who has lost a race. I have described what it had cost Scott and his four companions to get to the Pole, and what they had still to suffer in returning until death stopped them. Much of that risk and racking toil had been undertaken that men might learn what the world is like at the spot where the sun does not decline in the heavens, where a man loses his orbit and turns like a joint on a spit, and where his face, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... the landseekers were all a little awed at that moment. Even I, seeing the endless sweep of that sea of golden grass, forgot for the moment the dry crackling sound of it under wheel and foot, and the awful monotony of its endlessness which could be so nerve-racking. ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... It was in truth torture that awaited me here. You have guessed you would gain nothing racking my body—you keep your ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... they could not give him any good advice. So the three of them consulted together in care and trouble, but nothing feasible occurred to them. On the seventh day they had nothing left to eat, and they sat there sighing, rubbing their empty stomachs, and racking their brains with thought. At last a lucky idea ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... scene had to be taken over again—a costly and nerve-racking experience. Like Ruth herself, Helen and Jennie were glad now when the work was finished and they ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... you, whether you think that, when you come down to the realities of life—when you stand by the sick-bed, racking you brains for the principles which shall furnish you with the means of interpreting symptoms, and forming a rational theory of the condition of your patient, it will be satisfactory for you to find ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... anticipation. His eyes fixed themselves upon the place where the light was shining; all his soul awaited, in dreadful expectation, the appearance of the mysterious visitor, and as the stealthy step drew nearer and nearer, the excitement grew stronger, and more painful, and more racking. ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... girl's life has she a greater right to work out her own salvation in fear and trembling than during the period known among girls as "making up her mind." If she is the right kind of a girl, honest and delicate minded, it is nerve-racking to be talked about, and sacrilege to be talked to. Then the bloom is on the grape, which a rude touch ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... him,—let him have one long look into those deep, strange eyes of hers, and then he would be satisfied and quite reasonable after that. He thought it was becoming a sort of monomania with him, to want that long look from Maggie; and he was racking his invention continually to find out some means by which he could have it without its appearing singular and entailing subsequent embarrassment. As for Maggie, she had no distinct thought, only the sense of a presence like that of a closely hovering broad-winged ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... I was racking my brains with thinking how to tell her about Mr. Weston, for she must know he was coming to-morrow. However, I waited till the breakfast things were removed, and I was more calm and cool; and then, having sat down to my drawing, I began—'I met ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... of an old workman, offered to Jocquelet by Amedee, obtained only a grimace of displeasure from the actor. However, it ended by his being reconciled to the part, studying it, and, to use his own expression, "racking his brains over it," until one day he ran ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... from the city, and would detain him, probably, ten or fifteen days; and she parted with him, bestowing so affectionate, and apparently loving farewell, as almost to remove the bitter and heart-rending suspicions which were then racking the breast of the injured husband. But, resolved on carrying out his intent, he simulated departure; but instead of leaving the city he remained at the house of a trusty friend, deliberating upon and maturing plans for the carrying ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... on to the wheel." But I could hardly speak from emotion. The fatal moment had come. I held my breath. The tapping had stopped as unexpectedly as it had begun, and there was a renewed moment of intolerable suspense; something like an additional turn of the racking screw. I don't suppose I would have ever screamed, but I remember my conviction that there was nothing else for it but ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... see,' said he, trying to pretend to be racking his memory; 'the grape-vine pattern? It seems to me that I do recall something about a design with that name. Did you say we ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... of speeding London-wards on Monday, Miss Payne spent the weary hours in bed with a racking headache ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... head and pretended to be racking his memory; for it would have been quite easy to say that the party had left on Saturday, on their way to Bologna. That was the answer the gentleman expected, and the innkeeper generally found that it served best to tell people what they expected to hear. ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... patronage and countenance of a person of Mannering's wealth and consequence. He was aware, from his knowledge of mankind, that Mannering, though generous and benevolent, had the foible of expecting and exacting a minute compliance with his directions. He was therefore racking his recollection to discover if everything had been arranged to meet the Colonel's wishes and instructions, and, under this uncertainty of mind, he traversed the house more than once from the garret to the stables. Mrs. Mac-Morlan revolved ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... existence. Though Mrs. Fowler was rich beside Mrs. Carr, Gabriella soon found out that she was not nearly so rich as her neighbours were, not nearly so rich as her position in society exacted that she should be. She was still not rich enough to be spared the sordid, nerve-racking effort to make two ends meet without a visible break. Her small economies, to Gabriella's surprise, were as rigid as Mrs. Carr's; and though she lived in surroundings which appeared luxurious to the girl, there was almost as little ready money to spend as there had been in Mrs. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... dear, strange as it may appear, that very question has been racking my brain for the last ten minutes. Now, what would you do ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... God. He is conscious of guilt, and feels the need of its atonement. And now, upon the very edge of eternity and brink of doom, he proposes to make his own atonement, to be his own redeemer and save his own soul, by offering up to the eternal nemesis that was racking his conscience a few hours of finite suffering, instead of betaking himself to the infinite passion and agony of Calvary. This is a work; and, alas, a "dead work," as St. Paul so often denominates it. This is the method of justification by ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... room. It was dark inside, the corridor was black. Hidden in the gloom he listened. He heard Miriam sink in one of the big chairs, and from her movement, and the sound of her sobbing, he knew that she had buried her head in her arms on the table. He listened for minutes to the grief that seemed racking her soul. Then there was silence. A moment later he heard her, and she was so close to the door that he dared not move. She passed him, and turned into the ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... lively sense escapes my memory. But yet they are no more the same; they are dulled, and neither trouble nor disquiet me. I perceive all their severity without feeling it; or, if I feel it, it is only by representation, which turns a former smart and racking pain into a kind of sport and diversion, for the image of past sorrows rejoices me. It is the same with pleasures: a virtuous mind is afflicted by the memory of its disorderly unlawful enjoyments. They are present, for they appear with all their softest and most flattering attendants; ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... that night, if this is a real world, and not the shadow of a dream? Was it the colonel's gay world, or John's golden world, or Ward's harmonious world, or poor little Molly's world—all askew with miserable duties and racking heartaches, and grinning sneering fears, with the relentless image of the Larger Good always before her? Surely it was not all their worlds, for there is only one world. Then whose was it? God who made it and ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... on the road to Calcutta when Major-General Willoughby sent, posthaste, for Major Harry Hardwicke of the Corps of Engineers. The puzzled Commanding General was racking his brains to find out if his old friend Abercromby had committed any fatal error during his somewhat bacchanalian ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the door in a kind of fury. "Something must be done for that girl. I have had a perfectly nerve-racking time. We must get her out of that house before they drive ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... West Side Boys' Lodging-house ticked out the seconds of Christmas eve as slowly and methodically as if six fat turkeys were not sizzling in the basement kitchen against the morrow's spread, and as if two-score boys were not racking their brains to guess what kind of pies would go with them. Out on the avenue the shopkeepers were barring doors and windows, and shouting "Merry Christmas!" to one another across the street as they hurried to get home. The drays ran over the pavement with muffled ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... had become thin and unusually pale; he looked older than his years. Every spring he was prostrated with what was called "sunpain," an acute form of headache, nerve-racking and destroying to all persistent effort. Yet he did not retreat from his moral and intellectual standards, or lose the respect of that shiftless community. He was never intimidated by the rougher element, and his eyes were of a kind that would disconcert nine ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... dawn it is breaking; but lonesome and eerie Is the hour of my waking, afar from the glen.[50] Alas! that I ever came a wanderer hither, Where the tongue of the stranger is racking ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... work, whose home duties are not confining and who find themselves with a great deal of extra time on their hands. To these women the days are long and they endeavor to pass away the time by doing nerve racking fancy work or by "fussing" around the house. They are not happy and contented, chiefly because their minds are being neglected—are growing up to weeds like a neglected garden. For such a woman club work is a boon. She should take up some especial kind of work, and ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... share his opinion. "No doubt, no doubt," said he, "but one must have a natural disposition to remain a child. For my part, unhappily, I'm consumed by a desire to learn and know. It's deplorable, as I'm well aware, but I pass my days racking my brain over books.... I shall never know very much, that's certain; and perhaps that's the reason why I'm ever striving to learn a little more. You must at all events grant that work, like idleness, is a means of passing ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... caged beast finds a mocking imitation of liberty: long ago, her physical vigors had been drained under stress of anguish. Now, she was well-nigh incapable of any bodily activity. There came not even so much as the feeblest moan from her lips. The torment was far too racking for such futile fashion of lamentation. She merely sat there in a posture of collapse. To all outward seeming, nerveless, emotionless, an abject creature. Even the eyes, which held so fixedly their gaze on ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... his absence, Alaire ventured from her room, racking her brain to devise some means of escape. But soldiers were everywhere; they lolled around the servants' quarters; they dozed in the shade of the ranch buildings, recovering from the night's debauch; and an armed sentinel who paced the hacienda road gave evidence that, despite their apparent ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... the industry was altered. New and complicated machinery was introduced. The shortened work day was a hundred times more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances developed. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according to the piece system, declined, it is ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... some account of the Norman-French period. The second and shorter question was simply a sentence to be parsed. No one in the class had a good memory for derivations. Fourteen out of the fifteen members spent the half-hour racking their brains and biting the ends of their pens in vain endeavours to complete their answers to Question 1, so that when it was time to hand in their exercise books, they had written very little, and that little was mostly wrong. The exercises were corrected and returned ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... then put him by himself. I would not allow him companions to make merry with so as to make a pleasure of intoxication. I would then wait until next morning when he was sober, and leave him alone with a racking headache until the evening, when I would give him another dose, and so on, forcing him to get drunk until he hated ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... getting out, each of which appears as though it would work, but in the end does not, usually in a quite entertaining way. Eventually they do think of a way, which I will not divulge here, and they get out, but it had been a long nerve-racking ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... of a prisoner, would not run any risk in an affair of such consequence, and our hero was obliged to submit to the tortures of his own presaging fears. After he had waited five hours in the most racking impatience, he saw the attorney enter with all the marks of hurry, fatigue, and consternation, and heard him exclaim, "Good God, have you ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... silence, not daring to move, aware of the terrible undercurrent of thought which must be racking the mind of her sovereign, this man of sorrows, who stood upon the brink of the grave and peace, and yet who must still live and suffer until the curse of the Countess Karolyi should ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... a mile away. And the sun blazed, and the flies pestered and stung and buzzed and fought with each other for the drops of sweat streaming down your face. How long should we be here? When were we going into action?... The suspense was brain-racking. The diarrhoea increased: everyone went down with it. Some got the ague shivers and ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... states-general. "We would gladly have brought them together in full assembly," he said, "if the armed efforts of our enemies allowed of any longer delay in finding a remedy for the plague which is racking us so violently; our intent is, pending the coming of the said states, to put a stop to all these disorders in the best and quickest way possible." "The king, moreover," says Sully, "had no idea of imitating the kings his predecessors ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... pity. Scarcely more than twenty, he had seemingly spoiled his life utterly. It was torment to remember the past, and the future was still darker; for his outraged physical nature so bitterly resented its wrongs by racking pains that it now seemed to him that even a brief career of sensual gratification was impossible, or so counterbalanced with suffering as to be revolting. Though scarcely more than across the threshold of life, existence had become an unmitigated ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... that, under the circumstances, Egbert had chosen to pay. It must have been a nerve-racking session for him, that interview with the captain. Each minute might bring his bride-to-be to the parsonage door, and if she learned before marriage of Cordelia's bonds and the Kent-Phillips stock speculation, not to mention the threatened arrest and consequent ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... all my body, yet miserably sick still, and I remained so, now shivering and now burning, a racking pain in my chest. My couch was filled with fresh straw, but in no other wise was my condition altered from the first time I had entered this place. My new jailer was a man of no feeling that I could see, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... up the collar of her gray tweed coat, painfully climbed out—the muscles of her back racking—and examined the state of the rear wheels. They were buried to the axle; in front of them the mud bulked in solid, shiny blackness. She took out her jack and chains. It was too late. There was no room to get the jack under the axle. She remembered from the narratives of motoring friends that ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... border-land on the confines of gloomy insanity that would allow its owner to seriously wander through and behold any theological beauties in Bunyan. To the Jew there is none of the gloomy, weird, mystical, mind-racking, ungodly theology that some of our creeds torture the poor brains of their professors with. As the wild Indian of the plains runs sticks through his anatomy and capers wildly about to torture his ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... falling against the masonry round the grating, and we could hear the nerve-racking sound of a file working on the iron bars; and farther away, below the window, those awful yells of human beings transformed by hate and fury ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the man was intense. That endless, racking pursuit had brought out all the hardness the desert had engendered in him. Almost hate, instead of love, spoke in Slone's words. He hauled on the lasso, pulling the stallion's head down and down. The action ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... at the same time for the tender chivalry of the odd, beloved creature that was her husband. She armed herself with woman's weapons, and put on a brave face, though her heart thumped like some devilish machine, racking her mercilessly. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... secret not hitherto admitted even by himself—the secret that her eyes were not his eyes, her way of seeing things not his nor ever would be. He quickly muffled up his laughter. Antonia had dropped her gaze; her face regained its languor, but the bosom of her dress was heaving. Shelton watched her, racking his brains to find excuses for that fatal laugh; none could he find. It was a little piece of truth. He paddled slowly on, close to the bank, in the long silence of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... introduced, so the holes are left as open spaces, across which, when the pampa wind blows, a hide is stretched. No hole is left in the roof for the smoke of the fire to escape, for this to the native is no inconvenience whatever. When I have been compelled to fly with racking cough and splitting head, he has calmly asked the reason. Never could I bear the blinding smoke that issues from his fire of sheep or cow dung burning on the earthen floor, though he heeds it not as, sitting on a bullock's skull, he ravenously ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... on the agony by trying to tell what I suffered during this forenoon of nerve-racking torture and suspense. Let it be sufficient to say that the torments ended for me at Decatur, Illinois, when, at the train stop, I saw Cummings cross the platform to a street-car followed by a station porter carrying his ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... marked for sure and early death, laboring at literary work every day with the passion and intensity that come to few men. Think of Emily, the eldest, with fierce pride refusing help to climb the steep stairway of the parsonage home when her strength was almost spent and her racking cough struck cold on the hearts of her sisters. And think of Charlotte in her terrible grief turning to fiction as the only resource from unbearable woe and loneliness. It is one of the great ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... not often fine, is owing to its not being fermented. After it is got into the hogshead, the generality of people think they have acquitted themselves very well, and done all the necessary business, except racking it. But I can assure them, the more any liquor is rack'd, the more it is weaken'd. By often racking, it loseth its body, and so becomes acid for want ...
— The Cyder-Maker's Instructor, Sweet-Maker's Assistant, and Victualler's and Housekeeper's Director - In Three Parts • Thomas Chapman
... head. And, after again racking his brain in an effort to suggest a really appropriate name, the old man finally slapped his hand on ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... moment, but no sound came from the station. It was less nerve-racking to talk than to listen, so he ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... out into the night, With the wind bitter North East and the sea rough; You have a racking cough and your lungs are weak, But out, out into the night you go, So guide you and guard you ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... turns glossa into glotta, half robbing me of the tongue itself. Ay, you are a disease of the tongue in every sense, Tau.) But I return from that digression, to plead the cause of mankind and its wrongs. The prisoner's designs include the constraint, racking, and mutilation of their utterance. A man sees a beautiful thing, and wishes to describe it as kalon, but in comes Tau, and forces the man to say talon he must have precedence everywhere, of course. Another man has something ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... dolt I am. It's the very man, and I've been racking my brain to think where I met ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... watches showed, midday. Accordingly we seated ourselves in a circle, and were soon engaged in discussing our cold meat with such appetite as we could muster, which, in my case at any rate, was not much, as I felt sick and faint after my sufferings of the previous night, and had besides a racking headache. It was a curious meal. The gloom was so intense that we could scarcely see the way to cut our food and convey it to our mouths. Still we got on pretty well, till I happened to look behind me — my attention being attracted by a noise of something crawling ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... cameras and three-gram electroscopes or balances capable of measuring the pressure of electronic impacts. As a laboratory assistant he was unbeatable. If only he wouldn't answer every statement or question with that nerve-racking 'yeah'! ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... vests and neck-wear being spilled from their pullmans in San Antonio in the early morning following the fight. Which also partly accounts for the unhappy predicament in which "Cricket" McGuire found himself as he tumbled from his car and sat upon the depot platform, torn by a spasm of that hollow, racking cough so familiar to San Antonian ears. At that time, in the uncertain light of dawn, that way passed Curtis Raidler, the Nueces County cattleman—may his shadow never measure under six ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... drove the sad-eyed sorrel mare over to the Wegg farm again. He had been racking his brain for a way to get more money out of the nabob, for the idea had become a veritable passion with him and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... you ought to thank our chum here, Jack Rover, for bringing your car back to you, Mr. Bangs," remarked Gif. "If he hadn't jumped from his horse into the car the machine might be racking itself to pieces out on the prairie now. It was doing all sorts of stunts when he jumped aboard and shut ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... helplessness were a common result of these bright and jovial scenes; and by what perversion of language, or by what obliquity of sentiment, the notions of pleasure could be attached to scenes of such excess—to the nausea, the disgust of sated appetite, and the racking headache—it is not easy to explain. There were men of heads so hard, and of stomachs so insensible, that, like my friend Saunders Paul, they could stand anything in the way of drink. But to men in general, and to the more delicate constitutions, such ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... what had made Lassiter a gun-man. The desert had transformed Shefford. The elements had entered into his muscle and bone, into the very fiber of his heart. Sun, wind, sand, cold, storm, space, stone, the poison cactus, the racking toil, the terrible loneliness—the iron of the desert man, the cruelty of the desert savage, the wildness of the mustang, the ferocity of hawk and wolf, the bitter struggle of every surviving thing—these were as if they had been melted and merged together and now ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... his horses out of town, But there again! what an ungainly sight! A man lay on the road-side, weak and helpless, With trembling frame and feverish cramps. I shut mine eyes to so much racking pain, Still I could hear his groaning and his moaning. "Oh, Channa," said I to the charioteer: "Why does this happen? How deserves this man The wretchedness of his great agonies?" "How do I know?" said Channa, "for we all Are subject to distemper and disease. Sometimes the best are stricken—and ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... spring; a bright sun came for an hour or two in the morning, just to coax you forth without your cloak, and then came up a villanous, horrible wind, exactly like the worst east wind of Boston, breaking the heart, racking the brain, and turning hope and fancy to an irrevocable green and yellow hue, in lieu of their ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... endless, and was certainly nerve-racking. The Indians ate everything in the house, and from my seat in a dim corner I watched them while my sisters waited on them. I can still see the tableau they made in the firelit room and hear the unfamiliar ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... in a High School. A vast amount of study has to be mastered. There are nerve-racking examinations. It is a tremendously busy ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... kneeling camels and the stirring of the date palms. The Bedouins have spread their prayer-rugs, and behind them burns the west. Lescott caught in that, as he had caught in his mountain sketches, the broad spirit of the thing. To paint that canvas, he had endured days of racking camel -travel and burning heat and thirst. He had followed the lure of transitory beauty to remote sections of the world. The present trip was only one of many like it, which had brought him into touch with varying peoples and distinctive types of life. He told himself that never had he ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... his feet. His arm unconsciously tightened about her, and she gazed up with a momentary, questioning flicker of her wide-opened eyes. He repeated her name in a deep whisper, but her head fell forward loosely, and left him in racking doubt. ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... then Fryer's balsam and brandy with a clean linen bandage. Our usual allowance of corn to each horse per diem was four quarterns, but more if they required it, and from 14 lbs. to 16 lbs. of hay, eight of which were given at night, at racking-up time, about eight o'clock. Our hours of feeding were about five in the morning, a feed of corn, bruised, with a little hay chaff; the horse then went to exercise. At eight o'clock, 4 lbs. of hay; twelve o'clock, feed ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... facetiously compared himself to those quacks who, themselves plagued by a perpetual cough, offer to sell an infallible remedy for one. Sir THOMAS MORE, in his "Utopia," declares that no man ought to be punished for his religion; yet he became a fierce persecutor, flogging and racking men for his own "true faith." At the moment the poet ROUSSEAU was giving versions of the Psalms, full of unction, as our Catholic neighbours express it, he was profaning the same pen with infamous epigrams; and an erotic poet of our times has composed night-hymns in churchyards with the same ardour ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... of Life, in trust that they should be found again when he maketh up his jewels. Cheerful as was her temper, life's course had been too rough with her, for her to value it very much, when those lovely, promising buds, but half disclosed, were one after the other gathered. But she had escaped that racking agony of the loving, but too faithless mother—when all the sweets of nature in its abundance flow around her, and they are not ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... When a wooden cask is opened, after being kept a month or two, a quantity of carburetted and sulphuretted hydrogen escapes, and the water is so black and offensive as scarcely to be borne. Upon racking it off, however, into large earthen vessels, and exposing it to the air, it gradually deposits a quantity of black slimy mud, becomes clear as crystal, and remarkably ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... his medical career, in which for sixty years he led in the profession, it is briefly as follows: While practising in the valley of the Housatonic, he rode almost constantly on a racking horse, about sixteen hands high, and almost with the speed of the wind, and occasionally in a two wheeled vehicle, common in those days, called a chaise, or more often a "one horse shay." At such times one of his medical students rode beside him, ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... return from Gigha he passed many hours pacing the great hall of his castle, racking his brain to discover a means whereby he might protect the lives of the women and children who were under his care. He remembered how, on the day of his throning, those children had stood at the verge of ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... When they left the house the mourners laughed and lit cigarettes and pipes. If no new visitor came they fell to chatting and smoking, but the sight of a fresh and unharrowed person started them off again in their mechanical, though nerve-racking, cry. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... than that of the blacks. To alter radically, to remodel the whole social fabric of a great and numerous people, to shift the foundation stones, remove them, and place others in their palaces, without racking the edifice or tumbling it in a hideous ruin, is the work of ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman
... themselves in their relentless tension spoke what no words could. Fleda's trembling prayers were in vain, in vain. Poor nature at last sought a woman's relief in tears—but they were heart-breaking, not heart-relieving tears—racking both mind and body more than they ought to bear, but bringing no cure. Mrs. Rossitur seemed as unconscious of her niece's mute agony as she had been of her agony of words; and it was from Fleda's own self-recollection alone that she fought off pain and roused herself above weakness ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... and indeed a very touching and beautiful sight, for all present were inspired with a feeling like that of men who have passed a terrible, racking crisis. Nous avons vaincu! Yes, we had conquered. And the Revolution had marched sternly on through years of discontent unto the year of aggravation, Forty-Eight, when there was thunder all round in Europe—and after all, France at one desperate bound had again placed herself ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... was a long pause of nerve-racking effort as she strove to remember. "Who am I?" she cried hysterically. She sprang out of bed and ran to the mirror over the dressing table. The face that looked back at her was familiar, but she could not give it its name. A muffled scream escaped her lips, and she held her ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... but I never reached the grass. Came a blurr of flashing lights, a thunder in my ears, a darkness, a glimmering of dim light slowly dawning, a wrenching, racking pain beyond all describing, and then I heard the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... waste of it, the shocking toll of agony and loss which it inflicts—and if left to himself would as a rule have no hand in it. It is only occasionally—when ground down beyond endurance by the rent-racking classes above him, or threatened beyond endurance by an enemy from abroad, that he turns his reaping-hook into a sword and his muck-fork into a three-pronged bayonet, exchanges his fowling-piece for a rifle, and fights savagely for his home and his ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... know What miserie th' inabstinence of Eve Shall bring on men. Immediately a place Before his eyes appeard, sad, noysom, dark, A Lazar-house it seemd, wherein were laid Numbers of all diseas'd, all maladies 480 Of gastly Spasm, or racking torture, qualmes Of heart-sick Agonie, all feavorous kinds, Convulsions, Epilepsies, fierce Catarrhs, Intestin Stone and Ulcer, Colic pangs, Dropsies, and Asthma's, and Joint-racking Rheums. Dire was the tossing, deep the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... day showed Denver's face weary and drawn. Those moments in the bank, surrounded by danger, had been nerve-racking even to his experience. But to him it was a business, and to Terry it was a game. He felt a qualm of pity for Lewison—but, after all, the man was a wolf, selfish, accumulating money to no purpose, useless to the world. He shrugged ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... back to desolating driblets the following night. These gains were due to the work of the loyal Hugh as advertising agent, or to some desperate discount sale to a club on the part of Westervelt, who haunted the front of the house, a pale and flabby wraith of himself, racking his brain, swearing strange, German oaths, and perpetually conjuring up new advertising devices. His suffering approached ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Mrs. Atterson showed anger, Hiram went back to work in the field with a much deeper feeling racking his mind. If the option was all right—and of course it must be—this would settle their occupancy ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... fortuitous chance you happened to hit upon an article she thought she might happen to need, and it suited her, she would buy it. But it never occurred to her to thank you for your help, or to apologize for the nerve-racking strain to ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... bade the officer farewell, the relief from haunting fears and racking possibilities almost overcame her. She went back to Floyd, resolutely holding up under the strain. She told him that the stranger had gone; but that, as she had received no communication, she did not know the next steps ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... spadeful. Despite the numbing cold mud they knelt in, the men, stripped to shirts with rolled sleeves and open throats, streamed rivulets of sweat as they worked; for the air was close and thick and heavy, and the exertion in the cramped space was one long muscle-racking strain. ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... here," she said. "Stumpy, why don't you smoke? Ah, the music has stopped at last. It has been racking me all the evening. Yes, you love it, of course. That is natural. I loved it once. It is always sweet to those who dance. But to those who sit out—those who sit out—" Her voice sank, and she ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... cull and purvey news. And I had many friends engaged. A couple of miles back I found the 7th British Field Ambulance, to which my own chief, A.E. Knott, was attached. The sight here was far more nerve-racking than a battlefield. It was an open human shambles, with miserable men lying about, some waiting on tables to be operated on. Knott was about to help in amputating a leg. In the few words I had with him I ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... and the racking pains of his other injuries, Jean Debry climbed the knotty trunk; seizing a large branch, he raised himself from bough to bough. A few birds, aroused from their slumbers, arose from the foliage and flitted away. Jean Debry followed them with his eyes, and whispered, ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... dear, dear friends, now in the midst of your daily toil—for it is yet day with you—racking your brains that the holiday wanderer may revel as he is now doing. In the earnest hope that the day may not be far distant when to you may come similar enjoyment when he is the toiler, he goes at last ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... thousand ages to another, and so, adding age to age, and thousands to thousands, in pain, in wailing and lamenting, groaning and shrieking, and gnashing your teeth; with your souls full of dreadful grief and amazement, with your bodies and every member full of racking torture, without any possibility of getting ease; without any possibility of moving God to pity by your cries; without any possibility of hiding yourselves from him.... How dismal will it be, when you are under these racking torments, to know assuredly that ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... ran a very fairish country-bred, a long, racking high mare with the temper of a fiend, and the paces of an airy wandering seraph—a drifty, glidy stretch. The mare was, as a delicate tribute to Mrs. Reiver, called "The Lady Regula ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling |
