|
|
|
More "Clutch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tried to do; but his padded gloves were too clumsy to clutch so small an object, and he held the box toward the boy while Tip selected one of ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... could the first explorer know that the criminal clutch of Greed was soon to seize these mighty forests, guard them from the human race with bayonets, hangman's ropes and legal statutes; and use them, robber-baron like, to exact unimaginable tribute from the men and women of the world who need them. Little did ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... climbing a long hill. The road wound in and out among the trees, and at one place the grade was so steep that Dave had to throw the clutch into low gear. He and his uncle listened intently, and from a distance heard the chug-chug of the other ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... into the street. There, something in the air—the balm of advancing spring; a faint chill, the Parthian shot of retreating winter; some psychic apprehension of the rising sap; the slight northing of the sun; or some subconscious clutch at knowledge of minute alterations in the landscape—apprised Mr. Brassfield's strangely circumscribed mind of the maladjustment with time resulting from the reign of Amidon. But however bewildered Florian's mentality ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... only serve him as a source of notoriety—in short, as an advertisement? The answer probably is that, having early seized opportunity by the forelock, and having been obliged, after an extraordinary struggle, to leave his hold, he was obliged to clutch at some mode of keeping himself perpetually in the public eye. Hence, probably, his persistent assumption of feminine costume. If he could be distinguished in no other way, he could shine as a mystery; there was ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... saw that lady's long face lengthen; it was stricken and almost scared, as if her young friend really expected more of her than she had to give. The photograph was a possession that, direly denuded, she clung to, and there was a momentary struggle between her fond clutch of it and her capability of every sacrifice for her precarious pupil. With the acuteness of her years, however, Maisie saw that her own avidity would triumph, and she held out the picture to Miss Overmore as if she were quite proud of her mother. ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... serve her right if she fell and broke her leg," he thought severely; and the idea of such merited punishment was still in his mind when he heard a sharp gasp of surprise, and saw the girl slip, with a frantic clutch at the air, and fall at full length on the shining ground. When he sprang forward and bent over her, she rose quickly to her knees and held out what he thought at first was some queer ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... throat, her lungs seemed bursting, the blood was beating in her ears like the deafening roar of waves, and the room was darkening with the film that was creeping over her eyes. Her hands fell powerless to her sides and her knees gave way limply. He was holding her upright only by the clutch on her throat. The drumming in her ears grew louder, the tent was fading away into blackness. Dimly, with no kind of emotion, she realised that he was squeezing the life out of her and she heard his voice coming, as ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... In the excitement of the play, Hester had put forward two hands. Just as quickly she remembered and swung her right arm about Louise, while with her left hand, she tossed the ball straight into Renee's clutch. Renee, who knew the game and played it well, did not lose her presence of mind. Like a flash, she gave a forward leap and sent the ball to goal. But while it curved downward in the air, the whistle of the ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... has often failed to incarnate the divine ideas from which all its glories must flow, it must be attributed in part to the artists themselves; in part to the public for whom they labor, and whom they too often seek only to amuse. They clutch at the ephemeral bouquets of the passing passions of a day, not caring to wait for the unfading crowns of amaranth. If the artist will stoop to linger in the Circean hall of the senses, he must not be astonished if good and earnest men should reproach him with the triviality ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... clawing in through the door, Jack let in the clutch, slamming the gear-lever from low to high and skipping altogether the intermediate. The big car leaped forward and Hen bit his tongue so that it bled. ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... not yet played hard enough in the jolly blind man's buff—which others call the game of life. I wear the bandage still, and still my hands clutch at the empty air, and in my ears the world's sweet laughter rings——" He smiled, then shrugged. "The charm of Fortune's bag is not what you pull from it, but ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... so much energy into his action that as Phil's ankle glided through his hand, he failed to clutch the ratline beneath, swung round, and unable to get a fresh hold, began to fall from rope to yard, to rope again, and then came heavily on the fore yard, which partially broke his fall, but after a moment or two he came down heavily upon the deck, making his companions ...
— The Powder Monkey • George Manville Fenn
... he was going to strike Professor Flick. Some ran between, but they were not quick enough. Copping made one clutch at his breast, and then, with a touch that seemed as light as if he were merely throwing his hand into the air unpurposing, he made a push at the breast of Professor Flick, and Professor Flick went down as the bull goes down in the amphitheatre of Madrid or ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... but clutch the seat and shut his eyes. He dared not look down, lest he lose his balance and fall; he dared not look about him, for there were, in all parts of the heavens, the most terrifying animals—a great scorpion, a lion, two bears, a huge crab. [Footnote: These terrifying ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... looked triumphant and grim. Nick fairly writhed in that iron clutch, and his face had assumed a sickly sallow color; while his eyes reminded Hugh of those of a hunted wild animal at bay, fear and ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... got to my feet again the coach had stopped at the far end of the street. Two men were getting out of the carriage holding between them a slight struggling figure. For one instant the clear shrill cry of a woman was lifted into the night, then it was cut short abruptly by the clutch of a hand ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... their due rank as Forms of Thought; nay even, if thou wilt, to their quite undue rank of Realities: and consider, then, with thyself how their thin disguises hide from us the brightest God-effulgences! Thus, were it not miraculous, could I stretch forth my hand and clutch the Sun? Yet thou seest me daily stretch forth my hand and therewith clutch many a thing, and swing it hither and thither. Art thou a grown baby, then, to fancy that the Miracle lies in miles of distance, or in pounds avoirdupois ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... he shouted. "I'm coming!" And, picking up the last revolver, he ran up to the automobile and swung himself aboard, just as Hal, who had climbed into the driver's seat, threw in the clutch, and the machine ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... in the open—Once on and on, down a slope. He slipped. And made a violent clutch to save himself. The cold waters of the river closed over him. Shock and sudden pain—the penetrating pain ...
— Futurist Stories • Margery Verner Reed
... for discomforts for himself or his friends. He knew that out of every ten wrecks that took place on the coast within twenty miles of Chance Along, not more than one profited the people of his harbor. They never went afield in search of the gifts of the treacherous sea. They took what they could clutch of what was thrown at their very doors, even then letting much escape them, owing to lack of science and organization. The new skipper meant to alter this condition of things—and he knew that the waters in the immediate vicinity of Chance Along ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... looks as though it were clutched in a vast white owl's claw; and generally there is a wispy cloud caught on it like a white shirt on a poor man's Monday washpole. Or, huddled together in a nest formation like so many speckled eggs, you see the clutch of little mottled mountains for which nobody seems to have a name. If these mountains were in Scotland, Sir Walter Scott and Bobby Burns would have written about them and they would be world-famous, and tourists from America would come ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... reading-desk placed on the platform, adapted to his own very tall stature, so that when I came to get his manuscript it was almost above my head. Though rather disconcerted, I was determined not to go back without it, and so made a half jump, and a clutch at the book, when every leaf of it (they were not fastened together), came fluttering separately down about me. I hardly know what I did, but I think I must have gone nearly on all-fours, in my agony to gather up the scattered leaves, and retreating ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... the clutch lever and the propellers whirled. Jack gave the steering and controlling wheel an impulse and like a huge bird the Wondership shot up. But she rose slowly, for besides the unusual number of passengers, she was also carrying a ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... succeeded, the Southern Pacific would lose its early clutch on the throat of our commerce, an hundred thousand voters would escape from political bondage—its paralyzing grip would be weakened, if not broken. There was ...
— How Members of Congress Are Bribed • Joseph Moore
... She disentangled the one hand, but the other made the same clutch and was more difficult to manage. Then she rose to her knees that her head might be out of reach. Violet came down heavily and began to cry. Poor Marilla hardly knew what ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... companion's face. It had undergone a sudden change; the eyes, a moment since so full of fire and subtlety, were dull and expressionless. The face was vague to apathy, the mouth looked the incarnation of meekness or imbecility; even his hands had taken on a helpless feebleness in the clutch in which he held his worn-out hat. Before she could withdraw her gaze or open her lips in speech, he said ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... love a breath of beauty that would hold its purity even in a hovel, but she had not been prepared for the sordidness that seemed to envelop her as she crossed the threshold of the first home of her married life. Martin, held in the clutch of the strained embarrassment that invariably laid its icy fingers around his heart whenever he found himself confronted by emotion, had suggested that Rose go in while he put up the horse and fed ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... them she came at once, bracing herself to bear with dignity whatever might await her. A golden-haired young man beside her, his face haggard and stubbled with a beard of some growth, looked up in alarm as she was taken from his side. Then, with a groan, he made as if to clutch her, but a rod fell upon his raised ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... child may die; do not give to a false-hearted knave the simple exit common to the brave and true! Disgrace!—disgrace! Shame, confusion, and the curse of the country,—let these be your vengeance on the man who seeks to clutch the reins of government!—the man who would drive the people like ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... ma." Minty wriggled out of the excited clutch. "I don't care, they walk jest the way Jim an' Kitty did when they come out ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... but I want Will. I feel I'm going to die to-night, and I can't without him—I can't," and she burst into a flood of tears broken by short sobbing coughs. She had slipped to her knees and was holding Katrine's hands in a feverish clutch. The blanket had fallen from her head and shoulders, and showed to Katrine that she was still in her day dress; it did not seem as if she had been to bed at all. There was a dark, half-dried stain upon the ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... depths, when his ears were bursting and his eyes starting from their sockets, he found himself once more at the surface, breathing in great gulps of the blessed air, and alone. For a moment he could not believe it, but gazed wildly about him, expecting each instant to feel the awful clutch that should again drag him under. He was nearly exhausted, and so weak that had not a floating oar come within his reach he must quickly have sunk, ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... ez he said dat, he felt hisse'f slippin', an' dat made him clutch on ter Po' Nancy Jane O, an' down dey bof' went tergedder kersplash, right inter ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... Woe! woe! the eager dream is broken by mad war-whoops! Alas! to those fierce wild men, what is love, or loveliness? Pride, and passion, and the old accursed hunger for gold flame up in their savage breasts. Wrathful, loathsome fingers clutch the long, fair hair that even the fingers of love have caressed but with reverent half-touch,—and love, and hope, and life go out in one dread moment of horror and despair. Now, through the reverberations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... They quiver for ever in the currents; they billow in the swaying of tides; they toil in the wake of the junks; they shout in the plunging of breakers. 'Tis their white hands that toss in the leap of the surf; their clutch that clatters the shingle, or seizes the swimmer's feet in the pull of the undertow. And the seamen speak euphemistically of the O-'bake, the honourable ghosts, and fear them with ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... "your cylinders slipped, and your clutch missed fire, and your carbureter was full ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... we proceed. If you stop to consider whether it's judicious to reach out for the thing you want, you generally end by not getting it or anything else. Isn't it better to clutch with courage, even if you have to ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... rouse him by shaking, but in vain. Finally, one of them, losing all patience, pricked him with his bayonet on the lower part of the ribs exposed by the raising of the jacket as he fell. I was now near enough to act, and with a sudden clutch I pulled the guardsman away, whirled him around, and stood in his place. As I was stooping over the Turk he raised himself slowly, doubtless aroused by the pain of the puncture, and turned on me a most beseeching look, which changed at once into something like joy and surprise. Immediately ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... astonished eyes of the crowd of spectators stood Mr. Gustave Brellier, writhing and twisting in the clutch of the firm fingers and spitting forth fury in a Flemish patois that would have struck Cleek dead on the spot—if words ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... rushed the white-capped breakers, rising in fury as they reached the little craft, and flinging themselves wildly across it. Wanda paid no heed. Her voice rose once again, thrilling the air with its wild sweet melody, and then she sank, without even a convulsive clutch at the frail bark which overturned ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... had seemed. For several minutes it advanced, the tongues of flames towering in the air. A moment the livid wall paused as it reached the brink of the river, while jets of fire reached out as though striving to clutch the men who had escaped. Then seemingly bent on overtaking them, the flames leaped over the edge, devouring the brush and grass to the water's edge, where, loath to admit defeat, the flames flickered uncertainly and then died away, ...
— Comrades of the Saddle - The Young Rough Riders of the Plains • Frank V. Webster
... knees the huge hands of Joe Delesse clenched slowly, gripping in their imaginary clutch a hated thing. ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... though she was all alone. "How dare he forget the distance between us? Poor fellow! have not I at times forgotten it? I am worse than he. I lost my self-possession; I should have checked his folly; he knows nothing of les convenances. He has hurt my hand, he is so rough; I feel his clutch now; there, I thought so, it is all red—poor fellow! Nonsense! he is a sailor; he knows nothing of the world and its customs. Parting with a pleasant acquaintance forever made ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... and with passionate sincerity flung out a torrent of warning and exhortation to his congregation—a lava-stream of burning words that bit into their very souls. Dean, who had come to mock, listened with a clutch at his heart that made him first shiver and then turn burning hot and faint. He passed his handkerchief over his forehead nervously, gripped at the seat ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... to laugh as he listened to this description, he restrained himself when he observed the tears gathering in the old eyes. Observing and appreciating the look of sympathy, she tightened her clutch on the seaman's arm and said, looking wistfully up in ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... but not by them; invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentrated all my faculties in the single focus of resisting, stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow—above all, from those strange serpent ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... weight at the end. Another sea poured in; we hastily gathered in the slack of the rope, and when the water retreated, we found both Bramble and Bessy clinging to the rope. In a moment the men rushed down and hauled up the bodies. Bramble had hold of the rope by both hands—it was the clutch of death; Bessy had her arms round her father's neck; both were senseless. The boatmen carried them up to the cottage, and the usual methods of recovery were resorted to with success. Still we had to lament the death of two of our best ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... sensibilities. We must cultivate conscience until we have too much of it, and become monkish, savage and misanthropic. The asceticism of manhood is apparent from the studied air with which everybody is on his guard against his neighbor. In a crowded car, men instinctively clutch their pockets, and fancy a pickpocket in a benevolent-looking old gentleman opposite. When we see men so distrustful, we shun them. They then call us selfish when we feel only solitary. We protest against ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... to eagerly clutch this element of strength, but he suddenly jerked his hand away and cast a ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... or heaven-made, could carry on its wings three-quarters of a ton of armored, turreted airship. Swirling like a leaf, the plane broke through the clutch of the blast. Instantly it grew calm. Outside that vortex, hardly a breath of air was stirring. It was as if the whole fury of the air was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... is of colossal stature, like the gods; and sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch.—George Eliot. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... to handle it? All you need to do is to sit on the seat and let it go. Now shove this lever and throw in the clutch," suggested the agent, and off ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... Lambert, with marvelous agility and quick knowledge of a hand-to-hand fight, had shaken himself free of his opponent's trembling grasp. It was his turn now to have the upper hand, and in a trice he had, with a vigorous clutch, gripped his opponent by ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... remembrance, as of a dream, flit in some puzzled moment across your brain, and you shall feel that the potion which is to be given you shall not have done its work, and the memory of this existence which you are leaving endeavours vainly to return; we say in such a moment, when you clutch at the dream but it eludes your grasp, and you watch it, as Orpheus watched Eurydice, gliding back again into the twilight kingdom, fly—fly—if you can remember the advice—to the haven of your present and immediate duty, taking shelter incessantly in the work which you have in hand. This much you ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... it? The Koh-i-Noor' in his clutch (and a knowledge of its value) could not have given him more thrilling rapture. He was speechless with amazement; Maisie, thrilled too, realized that a word spoken would have rung false. The boy gloated over his treasure; but she ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... moment. She felt in the terror of her young heart an almost irresistible desire to clutch at Glynn's neck; but the well-known voice reassured her, and her natural tendency to place blind, implicit confidence in others, served her in this hour of need, for she obeyed his injunctions ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... man endowed with a much keener insight into the political condition of the world around him. To make a dash for power, as a dog might do, and keep it in his clutch as a dog would, was enough for Marius. Sulla could see something of future events. He could understand that, by reducing men around him to a low level, he could make fast his own power over them, and that he could best do this by cutting off the heads of all who ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... that I was looking at her, and devouring her with my gaze. Her eyes wandered over the water and toward the shore. I heard her quick breathing, and saw a sudden shudder pass through her, and her hands clutch one another more tightly in a nervous clasp, as she came to that place where she had fallen last. She looked at that spot on the dark water for a long tame, and in visible agitation. What had taken place after she had fallen she well knew, for I had told it all on my first visit to her ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... sight surprising is that small parcels of land, such as must have been assigned in these distributions, should have been so coveted. [Sidenote: Why small portions of land were so coveted.] The explanation is probably fourfold. Those who clamoured for them were wretched enough to clutch at any change; or did not realise to themselves the dangers and drawbacks of what they desired; or intended at once to sell their land to some richer neighbour; or, lastly, longed to keep a slave or two, just as the primary object of the 'mean white' in America used to ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... was stopped by Caspar's clutch at his arm. Maurice saw that his purpose—that of haranguing the men outside—had been divined and arrested. He turned to his friend and saw for the first time on Caspar's face that the shaft had gone home. He had shown scarcely any sign ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... bob-sleigh worked admirably, and if it happened to catch, there was always the banister to clutch at. Its popularity eclipsed even that of the soap-slide and the roller skates. The fun waxed fast and furious, not to say noisy. Bumpings and bursts of laughter began to echo downstairs on to the lower stories. ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... was too well-bred for the one part, and too wise for the other, to clutch prematurely at the prize she had willed should be hers. Her actions must be like her gestures, graceful, rhythmic, rather slow than hurried, and bearing the stamp of purpose and deliberation. When Edgar should make his offer, as she knew he would, she would ask for time to reflect ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... between the assistant coroner's eyes deepened; he took a firm clutch upon his beard. "Then the visit of last night was quite unusual—unique, ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... boy, And that's the long and (chiefly) the short of it, And the point of it and the wonderful sport of it; A two-year-old with a taste for a toy, And two chubby fists to clutch it and grasp it, And two fat arms to embrace it and clasp it; And a short stout couple of sturdy legs As hard and as smooth as ostrich eggs; And a jolly round head, so fairly round You could easily roll it, Or take it and bowl it With never a bump ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... caught a foot, a leg, a hand; thrice he brought a huge, panting body to the ground, but even then he was cheated of his victory. Long iron grapnels, wielded by unseen hands, dragged the mangled limbs and torn bodies roughly from his clutch, leaving behind them trails of torn flesh and streams of blood, which only helped to exasperate the beast ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... did not understand what it was that they meant, and pored over the cramped German writing, reading the long sentences over and over again, till something suddenly seemed to clutch at her heart. Was this possible? Was this actual truth? Was Uncle Joachim, who had so much objected to her longing for independence, giving it to her with both hands, and every blessing along with ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... exclaimed, heaving a sorrowful sigh, "had I but the moiety of that wealth!" And again in his mind's eye he saw the rouleaus streaming from the sack. Again he read the attractive inscription,—1000 DUCATS; again they were unrolled, he heard the chink of metal, saw it shine, burned to clutch it. But once more the blue paper was rolled around it; and there he sat, motionless and entranced, straining his eyes upon vacancy, powerless to divert their gaze from the imaginary treasure—like a child gazing with watering mouth at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... in search of experience, Socrates said, would be a mistake, because then you would so multiply impressions that none would be of any avail and your life would be burned out. To clutch life by the throat and demand that it shall stand and deliver is to place yourself so out of harmony with your environment that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Twinkleheels. When Johnnie Green began to walk towards him Twinkleheels waited until his young master reached out a hand to take hold of his mane. Then Twinkleheels wheeled like a flash and tore off across the pasture, leaving Johnnie to clutch ...
— The Tale of Pony Twinkleheels • Arthur Scott Bailey
... companion gave his arm a clutch and stopped their walk as if a sudden thought had ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... "It is like this. This is the clutch that controls the gears. When it wabbles like this it is in neutral and the car will not run. When you shove down with your left foot, and pull the clutch to the left and backward, it is in low gear, and ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... fulsome about it: Madame, in all things worldly, was in nothing weak; there was measure and sense in her hottest pursuit of self-interest, calm and considerateness in her closest clutch of gain; without, then, laying herself open to my contempt as a time-server and a toadie, she marked with tact that she was pleased people connected with her establishment should frequent such associates as must cultivate ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... ought to be with the tail of my shirt and a scarf I had on, got her head on my sound knee and my back against a trunk, and settled down to wait for morning. Uma was for neither use nor ornament, and could only clutch hold of me and shake and cry. I don’t suppose there was ever anybody worse scared, and, to do her justice, she had had a lively night of it. As for me, I was in a good bit of pain and fever, but not so bad ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Glasgow, had been chosen by the accused as his attorney and was acting within his rights in demanding to see the papers. The magistrates consulted in a whisper and his lordship remarked there could be no objection. The Sheriff, however, continued to clutch them. 'You ask him,' was the order of the stranger to Kerr, 'he dare not refuse you.' Reluctantly the Sheriff handed them to the stranger, who quickly glanced over them. 'Is this all?' he demanded. 'Yes, that is all,' snapped ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... the death of children, or at least had not marked the departure of his two stout little brothers. Scarlet-fever and croup and measles are such every-day, red-winged, mottled angels, that no one is appalled at their presence; they take off the little sufferer in such vigorous fashion, clutch him with so hearty a grip, that one is compelled to open the door, let them out, and feel relieved when the exit is made. It is only when some dim-eyed, white-robed shape, scarcely seen, scarcely felt, steps softly in and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... mattered little that Mary Whittaker was entirely innocent of her mother's desertion of him, or that Anne Learoyd, far away in America, would probably never hear of her daughter's shame. Inasmuch as the guilty wife was out of his clutch, he was content with the vicarious sacrifice that he could ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... thus the chief lodging-place of all that embodied British sovereignty in America. Naturally the material tokens of British rule radiated from the town, covering all of the island of Manhattan, most of Long Island, and all of Staten Island, and retaining a clutch here and there on the mainland of ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Clutch at the air several times with both hands. The motion greatly resembles those of danseuses playing ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... when it rose, I sent a bullet to its heart. It lurched sideways, reared straight up and fell backwards with Le Grand Diable under. The fall knocked battle-axe and club from his grasp; and when his horse rolled over in a final spasm, two men were instantly locked in a death clutch. The evil eyes of the Indian glared with a fixed look of uncowed hatred and the hands of the other tightened on the redman's throat. Diable was snatching at a knife in his belt, when the cries of my Indians rang out close at hand. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... limb—from shame and indignation, no doubt; my vision became obscure; it seemed as if my soul was leaving my body, and I fell forward fainting, and dragged her down to the bottom of the water in a mortal clutch. ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... there was a hush in the woods that Chad understood. On a sudden, a light wind scurried through the trees and showered the mistdrops down. The smoke from his fire shot through the low undergrowth, without rising, and the starting mists seemed to clutch with long, white fingers at the tree-tops, as though loath to leave the safe, warm earth for the upper air. A little later, he felt some great shadow behind him, and he turned his face to see black clouds marshalling on either flank ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... put in Larry, making a clutch into the water for the article just as it was about to float out of reach. He leaped into the bow once more, and began to work vigorously, and in a few seconds they ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... a sort of howl and, shivering, with her teeth set, flung herself at my feet and clasped my ankles with an iron clutch. I should have fallen, but, loosening her hold with great rapidity, she stood up and, facing me, held me by my shoulders. The door opened and the matron appeared, at which the woman sprang at her with ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... deeds Of violence and greed, of hate and ruth. His God, a God of wrath, a tyrant force To mete to helpless souls eternal doom; A Juggernaut, a hard unsentient power,— But yet less potent than the yellow gold Those crooked talons clutch, and for the which The miser Shylock fain would sell ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... to the extremity of the wing and was about to tie his first rope, when a fierce gust of wind threatened to tear him from the rigging and crash him to the ice, a dangerous distance below. With a quick clutch, he saved himself but lost the rope. It was with a grunt of disgust that he saw it wind and twirl toward the white surface below. Then it was, for the first time, that he saw the yellowish-white object huddled there on ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud: Beneath the bludgeonings of chance My ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... and raised his rifle. But it was too late for the eagle to stop. The heavy figure with the tearing beak and claws swooped downward, and there was silence and terror among the green leaves. But before the eagle could clutch or rend, Henry's rifle spoke with unerring aim, and the body fell to ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... wore a head-covering at all, it was a shawl gathered at the throat by the clutch of frost-bitten fingers. There was snow on the ground; ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... thought it discreet, they went back to the junction. Lena Vroom was still there. She was nibbling at some dry-looking sandwiches. Her glance forbade them to say anything personal to her, and Kate, with a clutch at the heart, passed her by as if she had been ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... be killed if he did not stop the machine, the lad threw off the clutch and applied the brakes. Then, in the center of a large force of Germans, who came rushing in upon them, the lad stood up in the machine, and, raising his ...
— The Boy Allies On the Firing Line - Or, Twelve Days Battle Along the Marne • Clair W. Hayes
... miles after leaving Varesnes it was retreat—rapid, undisguised, and yet with a plan. Thousands of men, scores of guns and transport vehicles, hundreds of civilians caught in the last rush, all struggling to evade the mighty pincers' clutch of the German masses who, day after day, were crushing our attempts to rally against their weight and fury. Unless collectedly, in order, and with intercommunications unbroken, we could pass behind the strong divisions hurrying ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... hardly contain himself and keep from creeping downwards to the water's edge, it seemed as if a cloud swept over him, and all was blank, for how long he could not tell, but his fingers closed sharply to clutch the twigs and grass amongst which he lay as he ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... deafening roar of the stream, and the crashing fall of the stones, which accompanied its course. Down, down went the poor wretches, now utterly overwhelmed by the torrent, now regaining their feet only to utter a scream, and then be swept off. Here a miserable struggler, whirled onward, would clutch at the banks and try to scramble forth, but the soft turf giving way beneath him, he was ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... little involuntary shuddering when he grasped the barrel and sought to draw the weapon from its resting-place. The inanimate warrior seemed to clutch it, as though unwilling to let it go, and the feeling that he was struggling with a dead man was anything but comfortable. Fred persevered, however, and speedily had the satisfaction of feeling that the ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... I know," she interrupted him with a fresh fit of weeping, "you are too good and honest to wish to throw me away, now when you have seen how my soul has hungered for the sight of you these many years, how even now I cling to you with a despairing clutch. But you can not disguise yourself, Ralph, and I saw from the first moment that you loved ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... she spoke, the report of a pistol shot came to their ears. As Alix stopped short, her hand outstretched to clutch the door knob, a ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... guide took advantage of the soft grassy track which leads out of Hilo, to go off at full gallop, a proceeding which made me at once conscious of the demerits of my novel way of riding. To guide the horse and to clutch the horn of the saddle with both hands were clearly incompatible, so I abandoned the first as being the least important. Then my feet either slipped too far into the stirrups and were cut, or they were jerked out; every corner was a new terror, for ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... of hoofs without. They thundered on the planks of the drawbridge and clattered on the stones of the courtyard. The thought of Cesare Borgia rose to my mind. But never did drowning man clutch at a more illusory straw. Cold reason quenched my hope at once. If the greatest imaginable success attended Mariani's journey, the Duke could not reach Cesena before midnight, and to that it wanted some ten ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... people out of their troubles was not helping the Days out of their particular Slough of Despond. So many difficulties seemed reaching out to clutch at Janice and Daddy! The girl thought it was like walking through a briar-patch. Every step they took, trouble ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... round and talked the usual hard luck. Been in the stock business thirty years and never had a good year yet. Nothing left of his cattle but the running gear; and his land so poor you couldn't even raise a row on it unless you went there mad; and why he keeps on struggling in the bitter clutch of misfortune he don't know. But I always know why he keeps on struggling. Money! Nothing but money. So when he got through mourning over his ruined fortunes, and feebly said something about taking ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... swept past. Shouts of merriment sounded forth upon the night air from the occupants of the car. The fright they had given the two by the side of the road evidently gave them much amusement. Their laughter caused the rescuer to straighten suddenly up, and clutch the old man fiercely by ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... swayed in the lawyer's grasp, Beryl saw the red "B. B." like a bloody brand. At that instant she felt that the death clutch fastened upon her throat; that fate had cast her adrift, on the black waves of despair. In her reeling brain kaleidoscopic images danced; her father's face, the lateen sail of fishing boats rocking on blue ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... element of character which enables a man to clutch his aim with an iron grip, and keep the needle of his purpose pointing to the star of his hope. Through sunshine and storm, through hurricane and tempest, through sleet and rain, with a leaky ship, with a crew in mutiny, it perseveres; in fact, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... where you are when the shells are bursting"—her voice rose in anguish—"I can't bear it! Mother, do you hear?" She threw her beautiful head back entreatingly, and the pulses in her white throat throbbed under Saxham's eyes, and her slight hands were desperate in their clutch upon the arms that held her. "I want my share of the risk, whatever it is. I will have it! It is my right. I have tried to be good and patient, but I can't, I can't, I can't stand this ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... for his flippant tone, by removing her hand from his arm. But at once the faint hiss of a snake as it glided into the swamp from somewhere just in front of them made her clutch his wet sleeve afresh. His hints as to the nature of the treasure had roused her inquisitiveness to a keen point. Yet, remembering what he had said about her praiseworthy dearth of feminine curiosity, she approached the subject ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... touch of aristocratic opulence. But the rather prominent eyes and the impulsive stammering manner, which seemed to indicate a torrent of ideas intermittently pressing for utterance and always checked in their course by a clutch of nervousness, drew no pity, as in the case of a more imposing personage, but a desire to laugh, which was, however, entirely lacking in malice. Mr. Rodney was evidently so painfully conscious of the oddity of his appearance, and his very redness and ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... moment longer, He taunts me with the past, His clutch is waxing stronger, 20 Hold me fast, hold me fast. He draws me from thy heart, And I cannot withhold: He bids my spirit depart With him into the cold:— Oh bitter ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... wish to tell you that I have a great weight on my mind; my conscience is quite uneasy as if I had committed, or was going to commit, a crime. It is not my private conscience, you must understand, but my landed-proprietor and lord-of-the-manor conscience. I have got into the clutch of an eagle with iron talons. I have fallen under a stern influence, which I scarcely approve, but cannot resist. Something will be done ere long, I fear, which it by no means pleases me to think of. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... sound of a door banged, and the two men started up in an agony of dread that the spoil for which they had toiled so patiently and long, never getting it within their clutch till now, was about to ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... might as well have hoped to catch the wind in a sixty-mile gale as overtake that speedy runner. It was as though Jack had reserved his best powers for this special occasion. He saw just where he meant to hurl himself over the line, and clutch that envied touchdown. Had a dozen followed he would have distanced them every one, such was his mettle just then. He seemed endowed with supernatural speed, many who stared and held their ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... Bill held the reins in one hand and attempted to take mine with the other, a proceeding which I checked, whereupon he was exceedingly confused. The whip fell from his clutch over the dasher, and in recovering it his hat fell off; shame kept him silent for the rest of ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... the man was the master of the house, who, coming home blind drunk from some distant inn, had fallen at his own threshold and got frozen to death. As they could not unclasp his fingers from the broken bottleneck they had to let him clutch it as a dead warrior clutches the hilt ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... closed over the ring with a frantic clutch; then slipping it on, she lay watching the stone sparkle in the last sunbeams. A colour had bloomed suddenly in her face, and her eyes shone with a light as brilliant as that of the jewel at ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... frame, E, provided with the roller, D, upon which the cloth is wound, in connection with the gearing, k u, clutch, o, driving pulley, m, and shaft, l, all arranged substantially as shown ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... thoughtfully, "while she was unconscious it took me ten minutes to pry open her fingers and disengage a rather heavy dog-whip from her clutch.... And there was some evidences of blood on the lash and on the ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Pablo spoke, the guaco, which had hopped down to the lowest branches of a neighbouring tree, swooped suddenly at the snake, evidently aiming to clutch it around the neck. The latter, however, had been too quick, and coiling itself, like a flash of lightning darted its head out towards the bird in a threatening manner. Its eyes sparkled with rage, and their fiery glitter could be seen even at many ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... he wakes, wakes sobbing and says, "Don' go away, nurse...." He holds my hand in a fierce clutch, then releases it to point in the air, crying "There's the pain!" as though the pain filled the air and rose to the rafters. As he wakes it centralizes, until at last comes the moment when he says, "Me arm aches cruel," and points to it. Then ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... Sesphra, I confess that through love men win to sick disgust and self-despising, and for that reason I will not love any more. Now breathlessly the tall lads run to clutch at stars, above the brink of a drab quagmire, and presently time trips them—Oh, Sesphra, wicked Sesphra of the Dreams, you have laid upon me a magic so strong that, horrified, I hear the truth come babbling ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... their sockets, the wind rose to greater furies, and died away only as the dawn broke through the storm clouds. A pale light stole into the room. Still the woman slept, and still her fingers seemed to keep their clutch upon his hand. Her breathing was all the time soft and regular. Her silky black eyelashes lay motionless upon her pale cheeks. Her mouth—a very perfectly shaped mouth—rested in quiet lines. Somehow ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... be a wholly different person. His face was all smiles, and there was a jaunty air about him as though he had received good news. His management of the car, too, left nothing to be desired. He started off swiftly, but with a smoothness that told of perfect mastery of the clutch and gears. He took chances, too, as he dashed through town, cutting corners, darting before this car, back of the other until, used as the colonel was to taxicabs in New York, he held his breath ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... of which is very well known to the reader, was one of the unhappiest of men. Besides the matter at his heart he lived hourly in mortal dread of bodily harm. In the dead of night he would waken, start suddenly from his bed and clutch at some garment hanging upon the wall, deeming the thing to be an assassin. Mr. Begg says that one day he went out to call upon one Charles Nolin, for the purpose of effecting a reconciliation. While he was sitting in the ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... fingers began to tighten in the grip of death; relax, tighten, each successive clutch growing longer, harder. The joy of his strength, the pleasure in the agony that spoke from his victim's face, gleamed for a moment in Carlson's eyes as he bent, gazing; then flickered like a light in the ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... slew the Hydra, the Lion, and many another noxious thing; as Theseus the Minotaur, as Bellerophon the Chimera, as Rama the Ogre Ravan, as David the Giant, as Perseus the Gorgon and Sea-monster, so St. George slays the Dragon and rescues from its insatiable clutch the hope and pride of humanity. This hero of so many names is the Higher Reason; the Reason that knows (gnosis) as distinguished from the Lower Reason of mere opinion (doxa). He is no earthly warrior. He carries celestial arms, and bears the ensigns of the God. Thus the commemoration ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... I had brought back the body; I had handed over the property. But how did that help me? It would only suggest that I had yielded to a sudden funk after killing my man, and had no nerve left to clutch at the fruits of the crime; it would suggest, perhaps, that I had not set out to kill but only to threaten, and that, when I found that I had done murder, the heart went out of me. Turn it which way I would, I could see no hope of escape ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... the man who would clutch the mane— There's no spell to help and no charm to save! Who rides him will never return again, Were he as strong, O were he as brave As Fin-mac-Coul, of whom they'll tell— He thrashed the devil ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... to fourscore years, and be found dancing among the idle virgins! to have had near a century of allotted time, and then be called away from the giddy notes of a Mayfair fiddle! To have to yield your roses too, and then drop out of the bony clutch of your old fingers a wreath that came from a Parisian bandbox! One fancies around some graves unseen troops of mourners waiting; many and many a poor pensioner trooping to the place; many weeping charities; many kind actions; many dear friends beloved and deplored, rising up at the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... wind, the wind and the rain— They are with us like a disease: They worry the heart, they work the brain, As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane, And savage ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... like a little wind. Under her arm she held a distaff of dark, ripe wood, just a straight stick with a clutch at the end, like a grasp of brown fingers full of a fluff of blackish, rusty fleece, held up near her shoulder. And her fingers were plucking spontaneously at the strands of wool drawn down from it. And hanging near her feet, spinning round upon a black thread, spinning ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... beside Tim, obediently silent. He was so tired that his feet stumbled, but he plodded on, keeping a tight clutch ...
— Sunny Boy in the Big City • Ramy Allison White
... the great confusion tried to flee; but while he did manage to duck under many of the hands outstretched to clutch him, it was only to dart into the arms of some one who pressed him ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... through his teeth, as he jabbed the key with frantic haste into the lock. "I'll fix you for this!" He made a clutch at her throat, as he swung ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... buzz bravely for possibly fifty feet; you slow down, slow down; your driving wheels begin to spin—that finishes you. Every revolution digs a deeper hole. It is useless to apply power. If you are wise you throw out your clutch the instant she stalls, and thus save digging yourself in unnecessarily. But if you are really wise you don't get in that fix at all. The next stage is that wherein you thrust beneath the hind wheels certain expedients such as robes, coats, and ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... Why turn away? Too long I've guessed at some dread mystery I may not hear: and in my restless dreams, Night after night, sweeps by a frantic rout Of grinning fiends, fierce horses, bodiless hands, Which clutch at one to whom my spirit yearns As to a mother. There's some fearful tie Between me and that spirit-world, which God Brands with his terrors on my troubled mind. Speak! tell me, nurse! is ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... was certain I should get one or two, if I could have a look at the pools this week. Jolly little dog! he was paddling and spinning about last night, and enjoying himself, 'ere age with creeping'—What is it?—'hath clawed him in his clutch.' That fellow's destiny is not a hopeful analogy for you, sir, who believe that we shall rise after we die into some ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... clutch at the table-cloth. My forehead struck the corner of the fender and the last thing I remembered was a crash of falling crockery. Then all became darkness. My parlour-maid found me lying face downwards on the hearth-rug ten minutes later. My cat was sitting ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... came the Orloffs, quite of their own accord. Gregory Orloff endeavored to force a corrosive poison into Peter's mouth. Peter, who was powerful of build and now quite desperate, hurled himself upon his enemies. Alexis Orloff seized him by the throat with a tremendous clutch and strangled him till the blood gushed from his ears. In a few moments ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the firemen penetrated only a short way into the mass before they were slowed almost to a standstill. From the sidelines it seemed as though they were wrestling with an invisible octopus. Feet were lifted high, but never free of the twining vegetation; the ladder was pulled angrily forward, but the clutch of the grass upon it became firmer with ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... with vengeance! The moment is now near, and at last I have it within my clutch;" and here he extended his hand, and literally made a clutch at some ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... four in company. But the colonel did not fail to frighten us nearly out of our lives. We were already half way up to the cave when he made a false step, staggered, lost hold of my hand, and rolled over the edge. We three, having to clutch the bushes and stones, were quite unable to help him. A unanimous cry of horror escaped us, but died away as we perceived that he had succeeded in clinging to the trunk of a small tree, which grew on the slope a few ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... brilliant philosophy, though I suppose you do not know what that is. It's holding to your ideal, the thing that seems most worth while, and forcing everything else into line with that. Now, you see I had a bad handicap—a clutch on me that made me a weak, sickly fellow, but through it all I ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... have friends here, who will be glad to hear news of you," she said, and she threw in the clutch and started the ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... spoke, the report of a pistol shot came to their ears. As Alix stopped short, her hand outstretched to clutch the door knob, a ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... will suit me, as I will swear that I am a citizen of no man's land. What I really need is not deportation, but solitary confinement, for the sake of my meditations. For even with my scant companionship I feel as if I were a circus animal. I still clutch convulsively to the idea that thought is the only reality and all expression of it merely a grading down of what was most high. If I am shut up I must cease talking and may think about real things, that is, ideal things. That would help me to put up with the world, which ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... own brave hero and true knight. Woe! woe! the eager dream is broken by mad war-whoops! Alas! to those fierce wild men, what is love, or loveliness? Pride, and passion, and the old accursed hunger for gold flame up in their savage breasts. Wrathful, loathsome fingers clutch the long, fair hair that even the fingers of love have caressed but with reverent half-touch,—and love, and hope, and life go out in one dread moment of horror and despair. Now, through the reverberations of more than fourscore years, through all the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... on his head. He dragged her as if she had been an empty sack. Like a beast he was seeking a dark place—a hole to hide her. She was strangling; a distorted sight made objects dim; and now she struggled instinctively. Suddenly the clutch at her neck loosened; gaspingly came the intake of air to her lungs; the dark-red veil left her eyes. She was still upon her knees. Cleve stood before her, like a gray-faced demon, holding his ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... there had been no one there, and forced myself to investigate. I saw nothing, heard nothing, and step by step advanced clear to the back window, and looked out. Then, without the slightest warning, something was thrown over my head, and I was utterly helpless in the vice-like clutch of an arm. I cannot explain how startled, how helpless I was. It occurred so suddenly I could not even cry out, could scarcely struggle. I was instantly stifled, and left weak as a child. I know I did make an effort to break away, but the cloth was clutched closer ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... him turn livid and clutch his throat with both hands, as if to stop a cry of agony, and then he turned to me with a ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... breast. She lay restlessly tossing from side to side, talking incessantly, clasping her rosary in her hands, and constantly mingling snatches of prayers with cries for Alessandro and Felipe; the only token of consciousness she gave was to clutch the rosary wildly, and sometimes hide it in her bosom, if they attempted to take it ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Electro-magnetic), C is the annular magnet receiving its current through the brushes, and pressed when braking action is required against the face of the moving wheel. The same arrangement, it can be seen, may apply to a clutch. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... oath, and I endeavored to grasp him, but missed my clutch. The force of his lurching body as he sprang forward upturned the table, the stakes jingling to the deck, but Kirby reached his feet in time to avoid the shock. His hand which had been hidden shot out suddenly, the fingers grasping a revolver, but he did not fire. Before ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... frowning and muttering in his choleric fashion, but the fierce glitter began to go out of his eyes and his hands ceased to tremble and clutch at the things before him. The girl was silent, because again there seemed to her to be nothing that she could say. She longed very much to plead her brother's cause, but she was sure that would only excite her grandfather, and he was growing quieter after his ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... introduced, no satisfactory method had been devised for altering the force of the blow. The plan generally adopted was to have either a tightening pulley acting on the driving belt, a friction driving clutch, or a simple brake on the driving pulley, put in action by the hand or foot of the workman. Heavy blows were produced by simply increasing the number of blows per minute (and therefore the velocity), ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... upward climb and fight to slip the clutch of the ship's suction, in the middle of a heavy sea he managed to get off his clothes, and set to swimming, whither he did not know, a toy on mountains ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... had rolled by since King Louis XV. had descended to a dishonored grave, and on the mighty current which was bearing France towards reform, whilst dragging her into the Revolution, King Louis XVI., honest and sincere, was still blindly seeking to clutch the helm which was slipping from his feeble hands. Every day his efforts were becoming weaker and more inconsistent, every day the pilot placed at the tiller was less and less deserving of public confidence. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... beside her at that, grasping the back of the sofa as if he wanted something to clutch and throttle. The veins swelled in his temples, and as he pushed back his tossed hair Mrs. Ansell noticed for the first time how gray it had grown ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... girl's face. The wife is starin' at him with her mouth and eyes as open as a crap tourney, like she figured he'd gone nutty—and me and Little Eva is runnin' neck and neck at tryin' to keep from laughin'. "They say a man that can make good in New York can make good anywhere," he goes on, throwin' the clutch into high again. "I say a man that can make good anywhere can make good in New York! What's the difference between New York and Goose Creek, Iowa?—New York's got more people in it, ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... a question to Alex, but even as he did so he felt John clutch him by the arm. Then as they all looked on ahead they saw the great bear rise once more on his hind legs high above the bushes. He was so close they could see his blocky head, his square nose, and even ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough
... an age of anxious watching and waiting for the Poor Thing. She never could get over her horror of the treacherous blue water. To her it was a great restless monster forever reaching out after some living thing to clutch and drag down into its cruel bosom. It was agony to her to see Olga swim and dive; hardly less agony to see her go off in a boat or canoe. Always Elizabeth was sure that this time she would not ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... air, Taking a thousand strange, fantastic forms; And every form is lit with burning eyes, Which pierce me through and through like fiery arrows! The dim walls grow unsteady, and I seem To stand upon a reeling deck! Hold, hold! A hundred crags are toppling overhead. I faint, I sink—now, let me clutch that limb— Oh, devil! It breaks to ashes in my grasp! What ghost is that which beckons through the mist? The duke! the duke! and bleeding at the breast! Whose ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... an instant's reflection he darted down the hill—as he approached the figure it disappeared. On into the woods Mellen followed the intruder, and before he could look around grasped his arm with a clutch so firm that there was no shaking ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... and not without several glances towards the skeleton hands, as if he mistrusted that a couple of them might spring forth and clutch the document, Wegg opened the hat-box and revealed the cash-box, opened the cash-box and revealed the will. He held a corner of it tight, while Venus, taking hold of another corner, searchingly and attentively ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... suddenly sprang and seized him, the elder hand Clutching the joint of his throat, the other snatching the brand Ere it had time to fall, and holding it steady and high. Strong was the fisher, brave, and swift of mind and of eye— Strongly he threw in the clutch; but Rahero resisted the strain, And jerked, and the spine of life snapped with a crack in twain, And the man came slack in his hands and tumbled a lump at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "I reached him but a finger, and he took my whole hand! No," sighed he, "the wickedness is in myself; it is also in this man, but he is not tormented by it; he walks with elevated brow, he has his enjoyment; I but clutch at the consolation of the church for my welfare! But if this is only consolation! If all here consists of beautiful thoughts and but resemble those which beguiled me in the world? Is it but a deception like unto the beauty of the red ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... turned away from us. His trembling hands seemed to be fighting something from his face. "Bushes," whispered Enoch Haver, and then added, "Now he's climbing up the bank of the ravine." And we saw the lean hands on the bed clutch up the wall, and then the voice broke forth: "Me first—first up—get away from here, Dock—I said first," and we could see his hands ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... once again the settlement at Sydney, whence had radiated the series of his valuable and unsparing researches; but on the next and final occasion he was "caught in the clutch of circumstance." His leave-taking in August, 1803, was essentially his farewell; and his general observations on the country he had served, and which does not forget the service, are, though brief, full of interest. He had seen the little town grow from a condition ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... that morning tide When they flee away from the dwindling lands Will feel the clutch of mother hands And the soul of ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... homage strain their gaze, If haply some rash votary, empty-urned, But light of foot, with all-adventuring hand, Break rank, fling past the people and the priest, Up the last step, on to the inmost shrine, And there, the sacred curtain in his clutch, Drop dead of seeing—while the others prayed! Yes, this we wait for, this renews us, this Incarnates us, pale people of your dreams, Who are but what you make us, wood or stone, Or cold chryselephantine hung with gems, Or else the beating ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... rushed on, chokingly; "it is coming just so; for I have just force enough left to win—just force enough to save you,—and then it will rend this frame of mine in two! It comes like a clutch at my heart—it blinds me, and the sky ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... her brain. She found herself on a great map of the world, with a voice calling to her, "Why are you frozen there, why don't you move? You are free as the air of this great globe." Then she began to walk, but at once she saw the earth open and long tentacles, like arms, emerge to clutch her. She recoiled quickly and started in another direction but the same phenomenon occurred again. After that she determined to climb on to a great plain that she saw ahead. She thought she was safe when all at once she saw arising on every side the frightful tentacles ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... given herself ten months. She had asked for ten months; not a day more. But she had not allowed for friction or disturbance from the outside. And the check—it was a clutch at the heart that brought her brain up staggering—came entirely from the outside, from the uttermost rim of her circle, from ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... soil demands his best from every man in return; for the scanty dollars it yields him, but the gamester had chosen his time well, and the men who had borne the dreary solitude of winter in outlying farms, and now only saw another adverse season opening before them, were for once in the mood to clutch at any excitement that would relieve the ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... promised that his wife should conform without a murmur to the ceremonies established for the coronation. Only this concession was made to their susceptibilities: that in the rules the phrase, bear the cloak was substituted for carry the train, "for," as Miot de Mlito says, "Vanity will clutch at ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... should die At the end miserably, I still shall seek In life itself my refuge: not in God That stands apart from life, on heights of peace. All my desires, my visions, my dreams, my unrest, My loathing and my longing will I clutch And cry: "With all its bitterness on my head, My Will be done, not ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... up the cliff! Creep, crawl, wriggle, slide, clamber, scramble, clutch, climb, here jumping—actually jumping, I!—over a crevice, then drawing myself round an insuperable jut by two honest sturdy weeds—many thanks to them!—which had the consideration to be there and to plant themselves firmly in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... mated tigers, which even in their raptures of affection, rend with the fang, and clutch with the unsheathed talon, until the blood and anguish testify the fury of their passion, than to beings ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... stared at him wonderingly. John Redpath threw in his clutch. "So long," he said. "I've a brother in Tucson, and I'm going to his ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... inevitable. I was what you call a labor leader. I went into a monastery for two purposes. I can confess to you. It is safe, as we will never meet again, and all ideas of justice will upend in the coming cataclysm. Listen I say," and he gripped my wrist with a vice-like clutch of his bony fingers. "I went into a monastery to escape the suspicion that I had removed one whom we felt would bring much unhappiness upon the earth. I went into a monastery to think. The turmoil of a ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... to side, gazing longingly into the distance. This was his place when he was not indoors, sitting over some book of adventure. But Pelle liked him to stand there, and as he slipped past he would hang his head shyly, for it often happened that the master would clutch his shoulder, so hard that it hurt, and shake him to and fro, and would say affectionately: "Oh, you limb of Satan!" This was the only endearment that life had vouchsafed Pelle, and he sunned himself ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... of the slope it stood still for what seemed an age. They saw the two in bow and stern struggle desperately again and again to wrest their craft from the clutch of the current. Then, almost with a leap, freed from the fierce resistance of the rapids, the canoe slid over the brink of the incline, into the deeper part of the ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... With it ideas and opinions run through the public mind as rapidly as the dispatches that carry them. "Mental touch is no longer bound up with physical proximity. With the telegraph to collect and transmit the expressions and signs of the ruling mood, and the fast mail to hurry to the eager clutch of waiting thousands the still damp sheets of the morning daily, remote people are brought as it were into one another's presence." ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... some little secret lamp, glows in every heart, hardly to be seen of our eyes when the world is at peace—love of the old, close things, the sights, sounds, scents we have known from birth; loyalty to our fathers' deeds and our fathers' hopes; the clutch of Motherland—this love sent our soldiers and sailors forth to the long endurance, to the doing of such deeds, and the bearing of so great and evil pain as can never be told. The countries for which they have dared and suffered have now to ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... conditions under which he came, with the signs of violence upon his face to remind them of the lords of life and death who dwelt at the Chateau up yonder. And such a reminder must fall upon them as does the reminder of some overhanging evil clutch suddenly at our hearts in happy moments of forgetfulness. To let them be happy that day, to leave their feasts free of a death's head, La Boulaye would have withdrawn had he not already been too late. Duhamel had espied him, and the little, wizened old man came hurrying forward, his horn-rimmed ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... as it were with a violent clutch of both her hands, as of one in horrible dark, clutching at means of light, to the thought that next week she was to be away at school—to be right away and in the safe middle of lots and lots of ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... deliberately answered Jennings; "I must stay: the time I find is come; I have not slept for weeks; I am exhausted utterly; I have lost my gold; I am haunted by her ghost; I can go no where but that face follows me—I can do nothing but her fingers clutch my throat. It is time to end this misery. In hope to lay her spirit, I would have offered up a victim: but—but she will not have him. Mine was ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... moment his volatile companion gave his arm a clutch and stopped their walk as if a sudden thought ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Sendivogius, who had wasted a good deal of his time and substance in the unprofitable pursuits of alchymy. He was touched with pity for the hard fate, and admiration for the intrepidity of Seton; and determined, if possible, to aid him in escaping from the clutch of his oppressor. He requested the Elector's permission to see the alchymist, and obtained it with some difficulty. He found him in a state of great wretchedness, — shut up from the light of day in a noisome dungeon, and with no better couch or fare than those allotted ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... how? Why turn away? Too long I've guessed at some dread mystery I may not hear: and in my restless dreams, Night after night, sweeps by a frantic rout Of grinning fiends, fierce horses, bodiless hands, Which clutch at one to whom my spirit yearns As to a mother. There's some fearful tie Between me and that spirit-world, which God Brands with his terrors on my troubled mind. Speak! tell me, nurse! is ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the rigid clutch of monster's tactile organs, which grew from the barrel's crown. It was like a powerful man struggling to uproot a rock, or a bear or an octopus crushing an enemy. It was dark-hole drama, like something from another galaxy. ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... man of few words in a case of emergency. He paused for only an instant to assure himself that the man was in earnest, then he slid open one of the side-doors of the express-car, and stretched forth a hand whose clutch was like the closing of a claw of steel. He seized the bejewelled stranger by the coat-collar, shook him for an instant, and dropped him,—dropped him into a soft snow-drift whose top was level with the car-floor. Whether the unfortunate worked a subterranean ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... self-torture of the anarchist. There is Shubin ("On the Eve"), hiding his misery in laughter, and Lavretsky ("A House of Gentlefolk"), hiding his misery in silence. It is not necessary to search for further examples. Turgenev put his hand upon the dark things. He perceived character, struggling in the "clutch of circumstances," the tragic moments, the horrible conflicts of personality. His figures have that capability of suffering which (as someone has said) is the true sign of life. They seem like real people, dazed and uncertain. No action of theirs ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... fragments of his broken images became unbearable. Tsiganok now felt like standing still, like spreading his legs and standing—but a whirling current of thoughts carried him away and there was nothing at which he could clutch—everything about him swam. And his sleep also became uneasy. Dreams even more violent than his thoughts appeared—new dreams, solid, heavy, like wooden painted blocks. And it was no longer like a current, but like an endless fall ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... saw the strong hands reach up and clutch the jutting facets. He even opened his mouth to offer a warning as he saw the heavily-booted feet mount to their first foothold. But he refrained. He realized it might be disconcerting. A few breathless ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... haste to vow the raising of a force of five thousand horse and fifty thousand foot for the expulsion of the Saracens from Jerusalem. Nor is this the only instance in which even the noble among men have sought to clutch the grand opening futures, and wreathe the beauty of their promise about the consecrated graves of the past. "Servants of Sepulchres" is a title which even now, not individuals alone, but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... handlers clutch them, Though none was in the room, Old players' dead fingers touch them, Shrunk in ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... his sleep; for a moment he wrestled and struggled to raise his head from the pillow and loosen the clutch of the night-hag who had suddenly seized him, and with choking throat and streaming brow he sat up in bed. Even then his dream was more real to him than the sight of his own familiar room, more real than the touch of sheet and blanket ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... she interrupted him with a fresh fit of weeping, "you are too good and honest to wish to throw me away, now when you have seen how my soul has hungered for the sight of you these many years, how even now I cling to you with a despairing clutch. But you cannot disguise yourself, Ralph, and I saw from the first moment that ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of surprise has imparted a momentary strength that soon passes; and his feebleness once more returning, he would fall back to the earth did he not clutch hold of the yucca, whose stiff blades ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... in the clutch, and drove on. She was not prepossessed in Fred Hicks's favor. She let him make all the remarks, and sat like a slim, straight, little offended goddess. But Fred Hicks was not disturbed in the least. He started in telling a story about a trip he took from ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... nearly a month away from Lee, and meanwhile Grant had not only kept Lee on the watch on both banks of the James, as well as for Richmond as for Petersburg, but had taken a fast hold on the Weldon railway. Unable to shake off Grant's clutch either on the James or on the Shenandoah, Lee greatly needed Anderson back with him. Accordingly, on the very day when Sheridan went back to Berryville, Anderson, seeking the shortest way to Richmond, ran into ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... the gas-works. A shoal of coal barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water below, and a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into mysterious blacknesses above, and dropping the empty clutch back to the barges. Just one or two minute black featureless figures of men toiled amidst these monster shapes. They did not seem to be controlling them but only moving about among them. These gas-works have a big chimney that belches a lurid flame into the night, a livid shivering ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... rose as they poured in; the dancers ceased to dance; the music ceased to play; and Margot, shutting a tight clutch on the loosened part of her half-unfastened bodice, swung away from Cleek's side, and flew in a ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately—with a more premeditated reaction, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl which, if you strike it, will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish—to clutch at one's heart. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... that small parcels of land, such as must have been assigned in these distributions, should have been so coveted. [Sidenote: Why small portions of land were so coveted.] The explanation is probably fourfold. Those who clamoured for them were wretched enough to clutch at any change; or did not realise to themselves the dangers and drawbacks of what they desired; or intended at once to sell their land to some richer neighbour; or, lastly, longed to keep a slave or two, just as the primary object of the 'mean white' in America used to be to keep his negro. ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... was rolling gently; he made a pass at me with a magazine he carried, and almost lost his balance. The women had risen, and were watching from the corner of the after house. I caught him and steadied him until he could clutch a chair. ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Between her narrow little breasts They have laid a cross of lead. Her tight pale lips are sunken. Her fleshless fingers clutch the pall. Why did she have to die like that, ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... clasped the arm frantically to her bosom with both her own. With vast relief, I loosed my cramped fingers—only to feel her silken garments begin to slide skyward against my cheek. It was more instinct than sense which made me clutch at her legs. God, had I not done that! As it was, I held both forms anchored with only a slight pull, waiting dumbly for the next move—quite non compos by ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... of Achilles Henderson. The giant had heard the boy's warning cry, and being near at hand, rushed to his aid. His arrival was most opportune. He seized the miner in his powerful grasp, and the ruffian, strong and muscular as he was, was like a child in his clutch. His knife fell from his hand, as he was shaken like a ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.
... another frightful spasm of pain came upon Merryon, racking his whole being, depriving him of all his powers, wresting from him every faculty save that of suffering. He went down into a darkness that swallowed him, soul and body, blotting out all finite things, loosening his frantic clutch on life, sucking him down as it were into a frightful emptiness, where his only certainty of existence lay in the excruciating agonies that tore and convulsed him like devils in some inferno ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... know is empty, but in which, you know not why, you have a dreadful consciousness that notwithstanding there is someone. You scold yourself; you know it is only your nerves — and yet, and yet... In a little while it is impossible to resist the terror that seizes you, and you are helpless in the clutch of an unseen horror. Yes; I confess I was not altogether sorry when I heard that those strange masterpieces ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... interested in the scene, not from any faintest hope that he would draw a prize, but purely from the novel atmosphere and color of the thing. While his eyes were busiest, and just as the child prepared to draw another ball, he felt a clutch upon his arm, and, glancing down, beheld the glowing black eyes of Senor Ramon Alfarez fixed ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... canivet—but fortunately I had practised crossing it when out one day trying a Napier, and we manoeuvred it pretty fairly. My relief on getting to hospital was tremendous. My back was aching, so was my knee (from constant clutch-slipping over the bumps and cobbles), and my eyes felt as if they were popping out of my head. In fact I had a pretty complete "stretcher face!" I had often ragged the others about their "stretcher faces," which was a special sort of strained expression I had ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... Life. As Hercules slew the Hydra, the Lion, and many another noxious thing; as Theseus the Minotaur, as Bellerophon the Chimera, as Rama the Ogre Ravan, as David the Giant, as Perseus the Gorgon and Sea-monster, so St. George slays the Dragon and rescues from its insatiable clutch the hope and pride of humanity. This hero of so many names is the Higher Reason; the Reason that knows (gnosis) as distinguished from the Lower Reason of mere opinion (doxa). He is no earthly warrior. He carries celestial arms, and bears the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... for some time back, especially since the late Kur-Baiern's illness, understood that Austria, always eager for a clutch at Baiern, had something of that kind in view; but his first positive news of it was a Letter from Duchess Clement (date, JANUARY 3d), which, by the detail of facts, unveiled to his quick eye the true outline, extent and nature of this ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... an appealing look. She could not lift the frail, tired hand that lay by her, its fingers uncurled, the hand of one who, dying, relinquishes gladly its grasp on life. The hands of the strong, torn from a world they love, clench and clutch at the last; it is an involuntary hold on earth. The doctor moved away. The whining sobs of the old man became more audible. I put my ear to her ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... forth and the North Sea pay a toll of populous ships. And when the universal music has led lovers into the path of dalliance, confident of Nature's sympathy, suddenly the air shifts into a minor, and death makes a clutch from his ambuscade below the bed of marriage. For death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... letter in her shoe," repeated Mr. Gryce, with his finest smile, "she had but to signify that the boots sent by Altman were a size too small, for her to retain her secret and keep the one article she traded upon from his envious clutch. You seem struck dumb by this, Miss Butterworth. Have I enlightened you on a point that has ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... red face became mottled with yellow; a thick-fingered, tottering hand made a clutch at the tell-tale ribbon. "Medal!" the man cried, wonderfully sobered. "I have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to escape," I once asked an exile at Sredni-Koylmsk, "and make your way across Bering Straits to America?" For I was aware that, once in the United States, a Russian "political" is safe from the clutch of the bear.[46] ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... made no reply, but his knuckles gleamed, so tightly did he clutch the knobs on the chair arms. Kerry's savagery would have awed any man, even though he had supposed it to be the idle threat of a passionate man. But Zani Chada knew all men, and he knew this one. When Daniel Kerry declared that in given circumstances ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... a throbbing of the motor, a grinding and shrieking as the clutch was thrown in, a trembling to the car as Fritsch advanced the spark and opened the gasolene throttle still wider and the automobile, bearing the German reporter, ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... started from their sockets. His head seemed on the point of bursting. He reeled, staggered, and then, together with his terrible assailant, fell heavily to the floor. As they did so, the old man's head struck on a sharp corner; he uttered a moan, and at last the deadly clutch on Peveril's ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... his hand above his head in a melodramatic way of denunciation, but the tragic effect was completely ruined when the porcelain basin began slipping across the hard-wood floor. He wildly threw out both hands to clutch at something for support, but the low chair he had occupied was not near the dressing table nor any other article ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... striking one of them she said, "You are the cause of it all." When food was offered her, she said, "I wonder people would not leave me alone sometimes." Again, when her bed was approached, she would clutch and hold the bed clothes in an apparently aimless way as if the impulse to resist never reached its goal. Retrospectively she could not account for her muscular rigidity on the basis of definite ideas, and could recall only that she felt stubborn. In ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... on to Ludgate Circus she had a momentary glimpse of a boy on a bicycle traversing the street before them at right angles. Archie ceased suddenly to swear. The reins that till then had been taut sagged down abruptly. He made a clutch at them and failed to catch them. They slipped away sideways and dragged ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... time to interfere, Carter thought. Swinging by his arms until his legs encircled the stone pillar he slid to the porch and, leaping to the ground, confronted the conspirators. Instinctively his first act was to clutch the papers, and as he did so he was struck from behind and fell unconscious to the ground. As his senses passed from him, he was dimly conscious of a surprise that neither man was Josef. A sleepy determination possessed him to hold grimly to the ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... hand so firmly that I simply couldn't pull it out of his clutch," Belle replied. "Then he took off my rings as easily and in as matter-of-fact way as though they were ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... fished up from underneath the hooves of his rearing charger, laid upon a dismounted door, covered with a cloak, and hurriedly conveyed away to his house. Madonna Vittoria, snatched just in time from the clutch of those cruel fingers, drew her breath in and out again; the blood that had suffused her swollen face flowed back into its proper channels; she quickened to existence clinging to her Griffo's breast. ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the waters of some inlet now Come lapping to the fringe of yonder wood, The storm-bent firs, and oaks along the cliff. The yellow leaves are glistening in the grass, The grassy slope I climb this autumn day. Ensnaring me, the brambles clutch my feet, As if constraining me to be a guest To the wild, silent populace they shield. It cannot say, nor I, why we are here. What is my recompense upon this soil, For other paths are mine if I go hence, Still must I make ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... Charles," began Winter firmly; but the other stayed him with a clutch of thin, nervous fingers on an arm strong ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... girl beside him, with Fred crouched, shivering, on the step, he threw in the clutch; the servants from the house waved the emptied buckets in salute, and the great car sprang forward into the awakening day toward the golden dome over the Boston Common. In the rear seat Peabody shivered and yawned, and ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... replied Margaret tersely. "He's the man to trample and crowd and clutch, and make everybody so uncomfortable that they'll gladly give him what he's snatching for." She laughed mockingly. "Yes, I shall get what I want"—then soberly—"if I ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... bears his touch, Her lips whose kisses pout to leave their nest, Bid man be valiant ere he merit such; Her glance how wildly beautiful—how much Hath Phoebus woo'd in vain to spoil her cheek, Which grows yet smoother from his amorous clutch, Who round the north for paler dames would seek? How poor their forms appear! how ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... awe-stricken forest; The hushed air is heavy with death; like the footsteps of death are the moments. "Arise!"—At the word, with a bound, to their feet spring the vigilant Frenchmen; And the dark, dismal forests resound to the crack and the roar of their rifles; And seven writhing forms on the ground clutch the earth. From the pine-tops the screech owl Screams and flaps his wide wings in affright, and plunges away through the shadows; And swift on the wings of the night flee the dim, phantom forms of the spirit. ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... being mounted directly on the shaft, without the intervention of a clutch, makes it necessary, while on the ground, for the propeller to be started by some one outside, while others hold the machine until ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form almost an infant's, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a bad old man's. A face rounded and smoothed by some half-dozen years, but pinched and twisted by the experiences of a life. Bright eyes, but not youthful. Naked feet, beautiful in their childish delicacy,—ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... ripping and tearing under the clutch of the great claws, and heard his chum utter a piercing scream as the wicked ...
— Boy Scouts on the Great Divide - or, The Ending of the Trail • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... His words rose triumphantly. "Yes, yes, I heard it with my own ears, the Voice. The crabbed tree, that is the main line, dying in me; the grafted tree is the Vaufontaine, the interloper and the mongrel; and the sapling from the same seed as the crabbed old tree"—he reached out as though to clutch Philip's arm, but drew back, sat erect in his chair, and said with ringing decision: "the sapling is Philip ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... one moment longer, He taunts me with the past, His clutch is waxing stronger, 20 Hold me fast, hold me fast. He draws me from thy heart, And I cannot withhold: He bids my spirit depart With him into the cold:— Oh bitter ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... a man endowed with a much keener insight into the political condition of the world around him. To make a dash for power, as a dog might do, and keep it in his clutch as a dog would, was enough for Marius. Sulla could see something of future events. He could understand that, by reducing men around him to a low level, he could make fast his own power over them, and that he could best do this by cutting off the heads of all who stood a little ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... on to that," said poor Poppy, "when my head's fairly reeling. I'll clutch on to it, and hold firm. Poppy, which means a tare, I am, to my own dear young ladies. Oh dear! oh dear! they're calling me—it's Sarah Matilda this time. Good-bye until ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... me, as it gave my mind complete occupation, and kept me from flagging. I could only go straight on, as I could not ascend, and was afraid to descend. My method of progression was more crawling than walking, as I had to drive my hands deep into the snow, and clutch at tufts of grass or heather, or any thing I could find beneath it, to hold on by. I must have gone forward in this way for an hour or two, when I found the ravine becoming less steep, and I heard the sound of running water very distinctly. Accordingly ...
— A Night in the Snow - or, A Struggle for Life • Rev. E. Donald Carr
... their old enemies in blue—these men in gray—to hold it on the hill around the four bronze statues that Crittenden's State was putting up to her sons who fought on one or the other side on that one battlefield, and Crittenden felt a clutch at his heart and his eyes filled when the tattered old flag of the stars and bars trembled toward him. Under its folds rode the spirit of gallant fraternity—a little, old man with a grizzled beard and with stars ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... piazza to the front of the house. In the street the head-lights of the roadster shot divergent rays through the darkness. They went out. The old Captain took a seat in the car beside the physician, while Peter stood on the running-board. A moment later, the clutch snarled, and the machine puttered down the street. Peter clung to the standards of the auto ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... with you. From out the chamber, where my wife but now Held talk with her encroaching friend, I heard (Not of set purpose heark'ning, but by chance) A voice of chiding, answer'd by a tone Of replication, such as the meek dove Makes, when the kite has clutch'd her. The high Widow Was loud and stormy. I distinctly heard One threat pronounced—"Your husband shall know all." I am no listener, sister; and I hold A secret, got by such unmanly shift, The pitiful'st of thefts; but what ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... up. I was carried along like a straw in a whirlpool. Then there was a crash that pretty nigh knocked the senses out of me. I do not know what happened afterwards. It was a confusion of white water rushing past and over me. Then for a moment I stopped, and at once made a clutch at the ground that I had been rolling over. There was a big strain, and I was hauled backwards as if a team of wild horses were pulling at me. Then there was a jerk, and I knew nothing more, till I woke up and found myself on the ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... that a drowning man will clutch at a straw; the truth of the remark applies to the half-informed in Fiddle connoisseurship. It is very amusing to note the pile of nothings that these persons heap up under the name of "guiding points" in relation to Fiddles. I will endeavour to call ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... side Adelaide was too well-bred for the one part, and too wise for the other, to clutch prematurely at the prize she had willed should be hers. Her actions must be like her gestures, graceful, rhythmic, rather slow than hurried, and bearing the stamp of purpose and deliberation. When Edgar should make his offer, as she knew ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Across the frail scaffolding—you can call it no more—that spans the torrent, it is clearly Dandy Jack's intention to hurl the coach, trusting to the impetus to get it over. We shut our eyes in utter despair of a safe issue, and hold on to our seats with the clutch of drowning men. It is ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... the dead tree. Nick's back was turned, and Aim-sa was intent upon her companion. She seemed to be hanging upon his every word. And Ralph's heart grew harder within him. His hand held his rifle in a nervous clutch and his finger-nails scored the stock. A shout from him would avert disaster; a shot would arrest that terrible advance. But the shout remained unborn; the trigger still waited the compressing hand. And the unconscious brother stood with death stealing ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... of the rope, and when the water retreated, we found both Bramble and Bessy clinging to the rope. In a moment the men rushed down and hauled up the bodies. Bramble had hold of the rope by both hands—it was the clutch of death; Bessy had her arms round her father's neck; both were senseless. The boatmen carried them up to the cottage, and the usual methods of recovery were resorted to with success. Still we had to lament the death of two of our best pilots, whose loss ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... is a challenge all must meet, And nobly must we dare; Its gold is tawdry when we cheat, Its fame a bitter snare If it be stolen from life's clutch; Men must be true ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... the time the ship struck, and which I had clung to firmly all the time I was in the water. Indeed it was with difficulty that Jack got it out of my grasp when I was lying insensible on the shore. I cannot understand why I kept such a firm hold of this telescope. They say that a drowning man will clutch at a straw. Perhaps it may have been some such feeling in me, for I did not know that it was in my hand at the time we were wrecked. However, we felt some pleasure in having it with us now, although ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... and pressing her hand to her heart, where an iron clutch seemed arresting the circulation. A glance at her face filled Clare with a terror which he had not felt before. Partly this, partly his own sensations, told him that the poison of the plant which they had shared between them was fatal—one of the swift and terrible ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... as you; I'll be your guide. But since you are not due At the Green Chapel till three nights from now, And since the way is short, I'll tell you how The interim may be disposed of best:— In short, let me propose a merry jest!" At this Sir Gawayne gave a sudden start, For some old memory seemed to clutch his heart, And in the baron's eyes he seemed to see A twinkling gleam of green benignity Not wholly strange; but like a flash 't was gone. Gawayne sank back, and his good host went on: "Two days you sojourn here, and while I take My daily hunting in the wood, you make My house and castle yours; ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... down his throat. A lamp burned low in the room. Whitey saw Mrs. Steele bending over him. Her face was ashen with fear. Her eyes, bulging from her head, looked to Whitey to be the size of saucers. Whitey struggled vainly in her clutch. ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... pliers, vice. paw, hand, finger, wrist, fist, neaf^, neif^. bird in hand; captive &c 754. V. retain, keep; hold fast one's own, hold tight one's own, hold fast one's ground, hold tight one's ground; clinch, clench, clutch, grasp, gripe, hug, have a firm hold of. secure, withhold, detain; hold back, keep back; keep close; husband &c (store) 636; reserve; have in stock, have on hand, keep in stock &c (possess) 777; entail, tie up, settle. Adj. retaining &c v.; retentive, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... arch, alive with vermin; gibbering cretins with the ghastly wens; lepers by the hundred, too shocking for mothers to gaze at, and therefore driven forth to curse and howl in the lazar-house outside the walls, there stretching out their bony hands to clutch the frightened almsgiver's dole, or, failing that, to pick up shreds of offal from the heaps of garbage—to these ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... and went, and still the West held him in its powerful clutch. Success smiled upon his pathway, and into his life entered the sweet, new joy of a woman's love and devotion, and into his home came the happy music of children's voices. When his eldest boy was eight years old, his district elected him to the State senate, and four ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... of guns and started in a hurry after the column. Sergeant Merchant's bicycle—our spare, a Rudge—burnt out its clutch, and we left it in exchange for some pears at a cottage with a delicious garden in Champbreton. Doue was a ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... the other; "I wash my hands of you. You're not in earnest, or you'd clutch at any straw. But let me give you one word of advice. Be careful how you get hold of the old lady; let her understand from the commencement that ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... his tie seemed to give him a touch of aristocratic opulence. But the rather prominent eyes and the impulsive stammering manner, which seemed to indicate a torrent of ideas intermittently pressing for utterance and always checked in their course by a clutch of nervousness, drew no pity, as in the case of a more imposing personage, but a desire to laugh, which was, however, entirely lacking in malice. Mr. Rodney was evidently so painfully conscious of ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... her disrelish for his flippant tone, by removing her hand from his arm. But at once the faint hiss of a snake as it glided into the swamp from somewhere just in front of them made her clutch his wet sleeve afresh. His hints as to the nature of the treasure had roused her inquisitiveness to a keen point. Yet, remembering what he had said about her praiseworthy dearth of feminine curiosity, she approached the ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... herself how the transformation had occurred, but in its place, high above her head, hung a huge gray spider. Its gigantic limbs extended over the whole firmament, and seemed striving to clutch and stifle the world beneath. The enormous monster was weaving its gray net over Tennis, and all the islands in the water, the Pelican Island, and she herself upon the seat of turf, and held them all ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... dwell. There above them towered the great white crucifix; there in the corner were piled the remains of the Portuguese. A skull with long hair still hanging to it grinned at her, a withered hand was thrust forward as though to clutch her. Oh, no wonder that in such a spot Jacob Meyer had seen ghosts! In front, too, was the yawning grave where they had found the monk; indeed, his bones wrapped in dark robes still lay within, for Jacob had tumbled them back again. Then ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... Care. There was no hint of happiness in his long narrow face, dull sunken eyes, and bloodless compressed lips. His expression was not that of one unable to tear himself away from the last glimpse of a loved wife fallen from his arms into the clutch of Death. It was the gaze of ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... MOORLEENA; Such sweet little souls to ensnare,— Why, no conduct could well have been meaner. But all things went well for a time; The parties they trusted made much of them; Little they fancied that crime Would ever attempt to get clutch of them. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... had no answer. He stood, in Ruth's sharp clutch, and hung his head without a word. The girl had ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... criminal brethren. His visionary edifice was Hollingsworth's one castle in the air; it was the material type in which his philanthropic dream strove to embody itself; and he made the scheme more definite, and caught hold of it the more strongly, and kept his clutch the more pertinaciously, by rendering it visible to the bodily eye. I have seen him, a hundred times, with a pencil and sheet of paper, sketching the facade, the side-view, or the rear of the structure, or planning the internal arrangements, as lovingly ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the sky, The white clouds scud before the storm; And naked in the howling night The red-eyed lighthouse lifts its form. The waves with slippery fingers clutch The massive tower, and climb and fall, And, muttering, growl with baffled rage Their curses on ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... his life; but when she finds he is not ready to receive her, she goes in at the door, and out through the window." Opportunity is coy. The careless, the slow, the unobservant, the lazy fail to see it, or clutch at it when it has gone. The sharp fellows detect it instantly, and catch it ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... usually goes raving mad for love. When Melba sings the mad scene from Lucia, and that beautiful voice descends by lingering half-notes from madness and nameless longing to love and prayer, the women in the house sob in sheer delight and clutch the hands of their companions in an ecstasy ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... strong and fearless, but she had not Andy's brute strength. With a clutch, now so fierce and desperate that she wondered her arm was not broken, the man, who was half a madman, dragged her deeper into the shade of ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... he would, he couldn't get a better grip on it. It slipped a wee bit more. Blacky started down towards the ground. But he wasn't quick enough. Striped Chipmunk, watching Blacky from the old stone wall, saw something white drop from Blacky's claws. He saw Blacky dash after it and clutch at it only to miss it. Then the white thing struck a branch of an old apple tree, bounced off and fell to the ground. Blacky ...
— Blacky the Crow • Thornton W. Burgess
... either mounted or hung on a vertical axis, and is lined with wire cloth. Having taken a proper portion of the melada into the centrifugal, the operator starts it to revolving, and by means of a friction clutch makes such connection with the engine as gives it about 1,500 revolutions per minute. The centrifugal force developed drives the liquid molasses through the meshes of the wire cloth, and out against the husk, from which it flows off into a tank. The ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... enough light came through the windows to make a moving object distinguishable. I looked about, terribly frightened, but for a moment I saw nothing. The noise I had heard at first continued. Then without the least warning, a hand seemed to clutch at the bedclothes, and I saw above me, bending over me, a terrible dark face, exactly like the grinning death's head on those ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... hand was fast growing benumbed with grasping the rock. He had almost resigned himself to his fate, and expected the next moment to be dashed to pieces on the field of ice beneath. Suddenly, however, he recollected his pocket-knife, and a new ray of hope dawned. Giving up the attempt to clutch at the furious bird, he drew the knife out of his pocket, and opened it with his teeth, and aiming two or three blows at the creature's breast, he found at last that he had been successful in reaching some mortal part. The fluttering of the wings ceased, and the dying ...
— Harper's Young People, November 18, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... I was more my own man, and made to wipe from my throat the slime left by the clutch of the monster: and afterwards I ran from fire to fire with weed, feeding them, and so a space passed, during which we had safety; for by that time we had fires all about the top of the hill, and the monsters were in mortal dread of fire, else had we been ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... harmonious Spanish tongue, and then two figures tumbled out into the light of the lanterns. One was the old woman; the other was a man clothed with a sumptuous and flashing splendour. The woman seemed to clutch and beseech from him something against his will. The man broke from her and struck her brutally back into the tent, where she lay, whimpering and invisible. Observing Tansey, he walked rapidly to the table where he sat. Tansey recognized him ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... means of a rope working on a surging head. The mill itself, as regards the roll, is much the same as those of other firms; but instead of an engine with a heavy fly-wheel, always working in one direction, and connected to the rolls by double clutch and gearing, the work is done by a pair of horizontal reversing engines, in connection with which there is a very simple, and at the same time extremely effectual, system of hydraulic reversing. On the usual method there is no necessity ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... about slowly, and at half past one were quite ready to sit still and not only eat our lunch but watch business mankind eat his. If any one wishes to feel the clutch and motive power of the Whirlpool let him go to the Mazarin any time between twelve-thirty and two o'clock. The streets themselves are surging with men, all hurrying first in one direction, then another, until it seems as if there either must be a ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... it looked in winter, with the ice gleaming in the moonlight, and of snow coming and the keen winds piling it in drifts. It's odd, isn't it? those memories we have that are not memories. The metempsychosis idea must have some substance. We have all been somebody else sometime, and we clutch at the shadows of our old selves, hardly believing they ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... Clapp'd on the outward eye of fickle France, Hath drawn him from his own determin'd aid, From a resolv'd and honourable war, To a most base and vile-concluded peace.— And why rail I on this commodity? But for because he hath not woo'd me yet: Not that I have the power to clutch my hand When his fair angels would salute my palm; But for my hand, as unattempted yet, Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich. Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail, And say, There is no sin but to be rich; And being rich, my virtue then shall be, To say, There is no vice ...
— King John • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... past fear," she said, dully. "I drown, Simon, in a sea of feathers. I can get no foothold, I clutch nothing that is steadfast, and I smother. I have been like this in dreams. I am very ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... I think I have ever seen. It looked like the skeleton of some antediluvian wigwam which a prehistoric roc had subsequently chosen for a nest. Four poles planted in the water inclined to one another at such an angle that they crossed three-quarters of the way up. The projecting quarters held in clutch a large wicker basket like the car of a balloon. Peering above the car was a man's head. As the occupant below slowly turned the head to keep an eye on us, it suggested, amid its web of poles, some mammoth spider lying in wait for ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... horror and astonishment, his convulsive clutch on the spring started a tiny bell ringing. Then, under his very nose, the empty tray slid aside revealing another tray underneath, set solidly with brilliants. A rainbow glitter streamed from the unset gems in the silken tray. Like an ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... Take me with you at once, my beloved,' she cried, pressing closer to me. 'But ah!—old Scratchichna, where is she? She will give the alarm, and clutch us with her claws, till some one comes ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... and spars, and planks, and other parts of the ship, were seen the forms of numerous human beings, some yet struggling, but struggling in vain, for life; others floating helplessly among the pieces of wreck, or clinging to them with a convulsive clutch, while many, already lifeless, were tossed to and fro in the boiling caldron, happier than those who were seen every now and then, as they were swept off, to throw up their arms, and then, with a fearful shriek of ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... opposing points, drew a choking breath, crouched lower, and, with the Dauphin's sword at the charge, he flung himself into the gap breast-forward, missed his thrust, splintered the blade against the wall, and with a wild clutch drew all within reach into his grip. For an instant they hung upon a stair-edge, then, in a writhing, floundering mass, breast to breast, breathless, half dead or dying, they rolled to the floor. From behind La Mothe heard Ursula de Vesc cry, "Oh God! pity him!" in a sob. But ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... Frank threw in the clutch, and the big machine very slowly and painfully plowed its way through the clinging mud of the road and turned its face toward the crossroads and, in ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests against ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... grasping his little gun in a rigid clutch. He forgot to implore aid from those he met as he rushed. Over the rough trail he sped like a deer. The fearful, ugly, swarming land-crabs scurried away from before him. "Colonel!" he sobbed, "fore de Lawd, Colonel, where is you? I'se ...
— A Little Dusky Hero • Harriet T. Comstock
... ask to see my dance order?" He made a defensive clutch at his pocket as if she had, and quick colour swept into his cheeks. She watched it, and watched it fade, leaving his face tired and sullen, and too old ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... a great clutch and hiss in the crowd. The boy still stood unmoved, holding by one hand behind him, looking down from above, from his dangerous elevation, in a sort ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... forboded that the aid she had given was not hidden from her father, and that quickly she would fill up the cup of woe. And she dreaded the guilty knowledge of her handmaids; her eyes were filled with fire and her ears rung with a terrible cry. Often did she clutch at her throat, and often did she drag out her hair by the roots and groan in wretched despair. There on that very day the maiden would have tasted the drugs and perished and so have made void the purposes of Hera, had not the ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... all. In our own country the British land shark has made his appearance. His vile clutch, which our forefathers unwrenched in the strength of their Colonial greatness, has again been fastened upon our throat. The following table will show the extent to which the parasite has insinuated himself into our vital parts. Let the good people of this country—who should know that monopoly ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... Abbe Susini glanced uneasily over his shoulder. These still, stony valleys were peopled by the noiseless, predatory Ishmaels of the macquis. They were, it is true, not numerous at this time, but those who had escaped the clutch of the imperial law were necessarily the most cunning ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... Chicago Wheat Pit the hand of the great indicator stood at seventy-five cents. Jadwin sold out his September wheat at this figure, and then in a single vast clutch bought three million ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... a branch and brought it home, thinking that perchance it might have come down to us from one planted by Marban's hand. Of blackthorns there are plenty. The adjective he uses is "dusky." Could he have chosen a more appropriate one? I thought, too, of "the clutch of eggs, the honey and the mast" that God sent him, of "the sweet apples and red whortleberries," and of his dish of "strawberries ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... he may, at this juncture, have wished to find his way out, escape was, in fact, out of the question; on the south and north was one continuous dead wall, which, even had he wished to scale, there was nothing which he could clutch and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... bursting and his eyes starting from their sockets, he found himself once more at the surface, breathing in great gulps of the blessed air, and alone. For a moment he could not believe it, but gazed wildly about him, expecting each instant to feel the awful clutch that should again drag him under. He was nearly exhausted, and so weak that had not a floating oar come within his reach he must quickly have sunk, to ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... away; it touched on all that is precious, mysterious, and holy on earth. It breathed of deathless sorrow and mounted dying away to the heavens. Lavretsky drew himself up, and rose cold and pale with ecstasy. This music seemed to clutch his very soul, so lately shaken by the rapture of love, the music was glowing with love too. "Again!" he whispered as the last chord sounded. The old man threw him an eagle glance, struck his hand on his chest and saying deliberately in his own tongue, ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... in his desert lair— Now half the world! Beholding with dismay That Human Freedom is the tiger's prey, A giant, down whose shoulders, broad and bare, The long, thick, crimson flow is Sampson's hair, Makes haste to clutch the beast. Oh, how the clay beneath their struggle, reddens, night and day, Till lies the beast, a ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... three successive attempts he kept prudently out of reach of these terrible weapons. His adversary held her fore-legs wide open, as though she was desirous of getting the other to rush between them, that she might clutch him, after the manner of the bears. This was exactly what she wanted, and in this consists the chief mode of defence adopted by these animals. The puma, however, seemed to ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... my wishes," replied she, relaxing her clutch of his arm. "Le Gardeur de Repentigny can speak for himself. I will not allow even my brother to suggest it; still less will I discuss such a subject with ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... method is the reverse of Dr. Van Dyke's. If he has held his hand anywhere the reader does not suspect it, for it seems, with its relentless power of realization, to be laid upon the whole political life of Kansas, which it keeps in a clutch so penetrating, so comprehensive, that the reader does not quite feel his own vitals free from it. Very likely, it does not grasp the whole situation; after all, it is a picture, not a map, that Mr. White has been making, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the stream, and a small boy was struggling to maintain his desperate clutch on the sloping side of the craft floating ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... flattered by your admiration, pardieu," says the Pretender, with a rueful grin down at the shabby clothes which were so tight upon him, and a clutch at ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... down in the valley, that the big brown owl did not get one or the other of them. He was asleep on a big dead branch as brown as himself, and looking so like a part of it that they were just going to alight, either upon him or within reach of his deadly clutch, when a red squirrel saw them and shrieked at them. Two great, round, glaring orange eyes opened upon them from that brown prong of the branch, so suddenly that they gave two startled squawks and nearly fell to the ground. ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... fact that never, never more would her destroyed visage lean in a real manner on that of Ramuntcho; then, in the doubt of having a mind which would fly, in the horror and the misery of annihilation, of becoming powder and nothing, she wanted again kisses from that son, and she clutched at him as clutch the wrecked who fall into the black ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... bondage to the fatal drug, and although he had not given her his promise—foreseeing even then the possibility of this black hour—he had meant, at the moment, to turn his back for ever on the seductive thing which whispers such sweet, such deliriously fatal promises to the man in the clutch of any agony he does not know ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... cloak and with a muffled lantern in his hand, went in and knelt by her side calling out, 'Mi reina! Mi reina!' and sometimes breaking through the formal etiquette that in Spain governs every separate action of life, and sets limits even to the sorrow of a King, he would clutch at the pale jewelled hands in a wild agony of grief, and try to wake by his mad kisses the cold ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... lean and quivering hands of Wilfred Bohun went up to his head and seemed to clutch his scanty yellow hair. After an instant they dropped, and he cried: "That was the word I wanted; you have ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... comparatively small and select part of humanity. Instinct and emotion are still forces of tremendous magnitude, against which Reason wages an upward struggle of incredible bravery. Only the strong can escape the clutch of the primitive, wherefore there can be no successful social order which does not conform in its essentials to the blind impulses of the natural man or man-ape. We are in danger of overestimating the ascendancy and stability of Reason, for it is in reality the most fragile and rudimentary element ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... use of it. A second later be gave a very good pretense of pain in his finger-ends as the thief burst free. The native made a dive at his bosom for the knife, but he frustrated that. Then he made a prodigious effort, just too late, to clutch the man again, and he did succeed in tearing loose a piece of shirt; but the fleeing robber must have wondered, as he bolted into the blacker shadows of the station building, why such an iron-fingered, ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... of my publishers to know that they have no ideas of their own about literature save what they can clutch at as believing it to be a straight tip from a business point of view. Heaven forbid that I should blame them for doing exactly what I should do myself in their place, but, things being as they are, they are no use to me. They have no confidence in me and they must have this or they ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... reached the fork and swung himself out on the branch with not a second to spare. The grizzly, frothing with rage and hate, had hurled himself against the tree and his up-reaching claw had torn the bark in a vain attempt to clutch the leg that he only ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... boy had thrown so much energy into his action that as Phil's ankle glided through his hand, he failed to clutch the ratline beneath, swung round, and unable to get a fresh hold, began to fall from rope to yard, to rope again, and then came heavily on the fore yard, which partially broke his fall, but after a moment or two he came down heavily upon the deck, making his companions there scatter and then ...
— The Powder Monkey • George Manville Fenn
... these sons of blood! As I came on, his face so madden'd me That ever and anon I clutch'd my dagger ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... his seat to get a look at her, then shifted the clutch and slowly started the car. The woman sat quiet. While bumping over the uneven road at a reckless speed the driver turned at times to cast stealthy glances at the person beside him. Finally he asked ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... and again; they would draw back so as to avoid those stinging strokes, sniff, growl and push upward, more eager than ever to clutch the poor fellow, who was compressing himself between the limb and the trunk, and raining his blows with the persistency ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... the strip of wool that the giants had threshed, and whirled it round and round until it had twisted it into hard thin thread. Then it would make a clutch with fingers of steel at the thread that it had gathered, and waddle away about five yards and ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... nightmare. I remember those trees especially, and my desperate running along under them, and how, every time I fell, roars of laughter went up from the other drunks. They thought I was merely antic drunk. They did not dream that John Barleycorn had me by the throat in a death-clutch. But I knew it. And I remember the fleeting bitterness that was mine as I realised that I was in a struggle with death, and that these others did not know. It was as if I were drowning before a crowd of spectators who ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Each tyrant rages 'gainst opposing foe In deadly fight—yet brings to light no friend: In travail sore hope comes not to the birth— Fear hydra-headed terror still begets;— All fancies grim I see, and straight embrace, At hope I clutch, who still eludes my grasp; Her rainbow hues adored are but a frame That serve by contrast to make fear more dark. Severus haunts me—oh, I know his love, Yet hopeless love must mate with jealousy,— While Polyeucte, who has won what he has lost, Can meet no rival with ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... upon one that must have been asleep. He did not see it till it shot up in his face from its rocky nook. He made a clutch as startled as was the rise of the ptarmigan, and there remained in his hand three tail-feathers. As he watched its flight he hated it, as though it had done him some terrible wrong. Then he returned and ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... letter, which is slowly crumpling under the clutch of his nervous fingers, is worthy of attention, for it is written on crested paper which is blue. And the ink is blue, too, and might reasonably indicate the tone of the blood of the sender, though hardly ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... Roy's bed. But where are you two going? You're not fit to be out of bed, Syd," as the latter reeled and made a quick clutch at the bannisters. ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... restraint of the fiddles everything must have been swept to the floor. There were one or two minor accidents. A steward, taken unawares, was thrown headlong on top of his laden tray. Others were compelled to clutch the backs of chairs and cling to pillars. One man involuntarily seized the hair of a lady who devoted an hour before each meal to her coiffure. The Sirdar, with a frenzied bound, tried to ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... me. It's been four years. And I'm so changed. This"—she gave herself a downward look—"this isn't the 'gel' he wants.... Probably by now he's given me up. Maybe he's found another. Everything that's bad and hateful can find me out here. Bad things can find you out and try to clutch after you anywheres. But when something wild and clean comes hunting for you, something out of the big lonely places—why, it would be scared to follow ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... had even seemed to smile her forgiveness when Mavis turned, with no good-by, to follow Jason. Hand in hand the two little mountaineers had crossed the threshold of a new world that day. Together they were going back into their own, but the clutch of the new was tight on both, and while neither could have explained, there was the same thought in each mind, the same nameless dissatisfaction in each heart, and both were in the throes of ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... these big men were generous, and were willing to give away what they had acquired. Though grasping, they were not avaricious. They grasped things with the strong prehensile grasp of the infant, rather than with the clutch of the miser. They took them because they were there, and not because they had any well-defined idea as to whether they belonged to ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... the side of the car, put his hands under her arms, lifted her like a kitten and deposited her on the seat beside him. Then throwing in the clutch, he drove at an ever increasing speed down the drive and out into the silent road. Strange creatures of the night came and went in the golden ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... the flute!" he cried, "the soother of sorrow, the orphan's comforter. Let me clutch you in my grasp. Oh, it brings ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... fight. I have never beheld anything that so closely and humiliatingly resembled the battle on the cambric square under the big sweeting. The wary advance after the recoil from the first encounter; the circling about at close quarters, each watching for his antagonist's weak point, the sudden clutch, embrace, and wrestle, which I, with umpiric instinct, interrupted, once and again, to prolong the combat,—none of these were wanting ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... true knight. Woe! woe! the eager dream is broken by mad war-whoops! Alas! to those fierce wild men, what is love, or loveliness? Pride, and passion, and the old accursed hunger for gold flame up in their savage breasts. Wrathful, loathsome fingers clutch the long, fair hair that even the fingers of love have caressed but with reverent half-touch,—and love, and hope, and life go out in one dread moment of horror and despair. Now, through the reverberations of more ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... business upon earth was done. Catherine was not condemned to absolute poverty—the poverty which grinds and gnaws, the poverty of rags and famine. She had still left nearly half of such portion of the little capital, realised by the sale of her trinkets, as had escaped the clutch of the law; and her brother had forced into her hands a note for L20. with an assurance that the same sum should be paid to her half-yearly. Alas! there was little chance of her needing it again! She ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... moment," said the prisoner, extending his arm as if to clutch at a still vague inspiration—"wait a moment. When I arrived in Paris I had with me a trunk containing my clothes. The linen is all marked with the first letter of my name, and besides some ordinary coats and trousers, there were a couple of costumes ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... carrying them out. For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his own interests except the retention of his snuff-box, concerning which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... knew to be little short of sixty feet, but in the dark night it appeared an abyss of horrible profundity. A cold sweat broke out upon him, and for one moment he felt an almost irresistible tendency to let go the umbrella and clutch the window-sill, but he was too late. Like lightning he shot down for a couple of yards; then the parachute expanded and checked him with such violence, as he swung round, that he nearly lost his hold and was thrown into a horizontal position—first on one side, ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... duty which we cannot escape. She was lying, not on the bottom, but in a niche of rock into which she had been thrown and wedged by the force of the current. One arm was free and was washing about; I tried to clutch this arm as I went down, but it eluded me. When I arose, the rush and swirl of the water was against me and I felt my senses going, but enough instinct was left for me to snatch again at the arm as I passed, and though ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... huge crowd which filled the square began to run in tumult to the neighbouring streets, where each one rushed to find shelter, and a few moments later the leaders of the Austrian party, with the mayor at their head, came to clutch at my hand and beg me to spare the town. I agreed on the condition that they would send immediately to tell the miners and workmen to go back to their homes. They hastened to comply, and the elegant young ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... relic broke down in a fit of coughing. No sooner had he recovered than he leaped into the air, making a frantic clutch at ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... blocked upright on the ground, Solomon backed his Moreland out of the way, carried a tray of tools to the engine and squatted in the dirt to work. First, the intake manifold came off and was bolted to the clutch housing so the carburetor mounting flange faced skyward. Solomon stopped for a minute to worry. "If it works," he thought, "when I get them nearer each other, it'll go up in my face." Scanning the yard he thought of ...
— Solomon's Orbit • William Carroll
... loyalty to the King. New York was thus the chief lodging-place of all that embodied British sovereignty in America. Naturally the material tokens of British rule radiated from the town, covering all of the island of Manhattan, most of Long Island, and all of Staten Island, and retaining a clutch here and there on the mainland ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... elder man was tiring, and the youngster must have shared that opinion. There was a leap to the right, a sudden flurry of dart and retreat, and then a net curled high and fell, enfolding flailing arms and kicking legs. When the clutch rope was jerked tight, the captured youth was thrown off balance. He rolled frenziedly, but there was no escaping the ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... of him—of my only son in the clutch of his bitter foe, and I thank you for reminding me of him, little as I have for these long years needed spur to my remembrance. Bring in ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... began suddenly, "have you decided what you will do? Your mine in the mountains—it will be foolish to return there while the hands of the Vigilantes are reaching out to clutch you; do you not think so? More of the tale I have heard from Valencia, who returned with Manuel. Those men who died at the hand of your friend—and died justly, I am convinced—had friends who would give much for ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... his rifle, Henry would have asked no other favor. Just that one little gift from fortune! The clutch of his fingers on the stock tightened, and the involuntary motion sent a new thought through him. The rifle lay unmoved across his shoulder, its muzzle pointing upward. Before him in the water the shadow still lay, unchanged, beside his own. He ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... life was Care. There was no hint of happiness in his long narrow face, dull sunken eyes, and bloodless compressed lips. His expression was not that of one unable to tear himself away from the last glimpse of a loved wife fallen from his arms into the clutch of Death. It was the gaze of one immersed ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... her eyes. She was silent. Then—"I should need no hired bravo to kill my lover if he forsook me!" she cried at last, and laughed, but the marvelously wrought gold comfit box in her fingers was crushed by her convulsive clutch. ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... of his many-sided experience of dissection-rooms, and morgues, and other ghastlinesses to which he had long since accustomed himself from principle, drew back at the sight—perhaps because he had come to this strange place to clutch the world-old mystery of the life-essence, and found himself, instead, confronted on its threshold by the equal mystery ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... careless touch; Endurance hardens with a word; She holds a trifle with a clutch So strangely, childishly absurd, That he who loves and ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... there are no vegetables, there is no food, and every man is robbing his neighbour. Men wish to walk, but they are unable to move; the young man drags along his limbs, the hearts of the aged are crushed with despair, their legs fail them, they sink to the ground, and they clutch their bodies with their hands in pain. The councillors are dumb, and nothing but wind comes out of the granaries when they are opened. Everything is in a state of ruin." A more graphic picture of the misery caused ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... Winter firmly; but the other stayed him with a clutch of thin, nervous fingers on an arm strong enough ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... saw her dash to the platform, seize Frank in a clutch of desperation. There was a violent wrench as if some monster were twisting at his vitals. He closed his eyes against the blinding light, then realized that utter silence had followed the erstwhile confusion. He sat ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... time to search for its owner. There were half a dozen different cars with which Van Buren was familiar. He ran to it, glanced at its levers, wheel, and clutch, recognized the one type he had coveted, and hurled ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... handle employed should be provided with a special fastening (e. g., a clutch similar to that employed for the free wheel of a bicycle), or should be readily detachable so that, on ceasing to turn, the handle should not, by its weight and air resistance, act as a brake and stop the machine ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... at once with a start, and, seeing the window shut, rose hurriedly to go and open it for the "Boy." He had done so before at night often when he chanced to forget it. But when he got to it now he had to clutch the frame to support himself, and he looked out stupidly for some seconds, wondering in a dazed way why the sun was shining when it should be dark. Then suddenly full consciousness returned, and he remembered. He should never open the window again ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... felt a touch Of Cockram's greedy clutch, Which though it was not much, Yet their stubbornness ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... suddenness of attack commonly kills the victim on the instant. The weapon of death is not the beak, but either the wing or the claws; a flap of the wing or a clutch of the talons is usually enough for the purpose. The eagle kills and eats birds that are smaller and weaker than himself, he lives upon the best of the game, and he drags the best of the fish out of the river or the sea. He carries off the farmer's poultry, and ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... the interior, from a reliable source, which indicates that the situation on the other side of the Rhine is anything but calm. More than ever now must we hang on, for the victory is almost within our clutch. ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... torn and stubborn jersey, or at finding lost shin-guards and nose masks, and so he found a seat out of the way, and, searching the room with his gaze, at length found Prince. That gentleman was having a nice, new pink elastic bandage put about his ankle. He was grinning sturdily, but at every clutch of the web his lips twitched and his brow puckered. Joel watching him wondered how much more he would stand, and whether his (Joel's) chance would come ere the fatal whistle piped the end of ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... not cry; but Macklewain saw his hands clutch the staves tightly, and the muscles of his naked ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... he gritted through his teeth, as he jabbed the key with frantic haste into the lock. "I'll fix you for this!" He made a clutch at her throat, as he swung ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... of the three courses. He held it with the nervous clutch of a weak nature until overmastered by two grim men who gradually hypnotized his will. The turning-point for Buchanan, and the last poor crisis in his inglorious career, came on Sunday, December 30th. Before that day arrived, his vacillation had moved his friends to pity and ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... reply, but allowed her to grasp my hand, which she did with a bony, nervous clutch, and endeavored with some difficulty to keep pace with the long strides—I might well call them bounds, for they seemed the springs of a wild animal rather than the paces of a young girl—with which she covered the ground. Not a word more was uttered until ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... and he came out before her barn. There was a hole in the barn-door and he went through that. And in the north-west corner of the barn, he saw Old Mother Hatchie sitting on a nest of straw and he knew that there was a clutch of eggs under her. She cackled when she saw the Fox on the floor of the barn but she never stirred off the nest. Rory left what was in his mouth on the ground. Old Mother Hatchie put her head on one side and looked at the Egg that was clear ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... gave his lectures standing, and had had a reading-desk placed on the platform, adapted to his own very tall stature, so that when I came to get his manuscript it was almost above my head. Though rather disconcerted, I was determined not to go back without it, and so made a half jump, and a clutch at the book, when every leaf of it (they were not fastened together), came fluttering separately down about me. I hardly know what I did, but I think I must have gone nearly on all-fours, in my agony to gather up the scattered leaves, and retreating ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... undertone. "You held the nose of the boat true enough, too, I guess, when I let the torpedo drive. But that infernal Jack Benson was on the watch, and he saw the thing coming. Of course he stopped his boat and put the reverse clutch on just in the nick of time. That young Benson always appears to be in the nick ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... Harry!" exclaimed my uncle, catching my disengaged hand in his, while by an effort I dragged the other away from Garcia's cold clutch, his eyes fixing mine the while, and seeming to say, "Be careful, or I'll have your life!"—mine, if they could speak a language that he could interpret, plainly saying, "You cowardly hound, ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... theirs who strove to win The blood-stained heathen to the Christian fold; To free from Satan's clutch the slaves of sin; These labors, too, with loving grace ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... get to Charing Cross in three minutes," he cried out, and the man, accepting the spirit of the thing, thrust in his clutch, eagerly. For a moment it seemed as though temporarily, at any rate, Richard would get clear away. In about fifty yards, however, there was a slight block. The door of the taxicab was wrenched open, and one of the men who were ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was the track,—she must go faster, it was getting dark. But was this the track after all,—it seemed to be fading out as the other had done? She put on the gas and bumped heavily into a hidden rut. Quickly she threw the clutch into low, and—more gas— What was that? The wheel did not grip, the engine would not pull,—the matchless Harmer Six was helpless. Again and again Connie tried to extricate herself, but it was useless. She got out and took her bearings. It was early evening, but darkness was coming fast. The ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... waiting men was very great when their companions arrived with the prisoner. Smiley told the story, laying stress on the warning cry which he had cut short with his throttling clutch. The general opinion was that Chippy had been posted there as a spy, and threats of vengeance ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... the groups of people scattered in little dusky pools against the snow, until they touched the very doors of the church.... I saw all this, was conscious that the stars and the church candles mingled... then suddenly I had to clutch the side of the booth behind me to prevent myself from falling. My head swam, my limbs were as water, and my old so well-remembered friend struck me in the middle of the spine as though he had cut me in two ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... George's stumbling rush, feeling a twinge of pity for the battered humanoid. It was no contest. Strong as he was, George didn't know the rudiments of hand-to-hand fighting. His reactions were those of an animal, to close, clutch, bite, and tear. Even if he were completely well, the results would have been the same. It would merely have taken longer. Kennon drove a vicious judo chop to the junction of the Lani's neck and shoulder. Brute strength was no match for the highly ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... was swift and strong, and, good swimmer as he was, it was no easy task which Alleyne had set himself. To clutch at Tranter and to seize him by the hair was the work of a few seconds, but to hold his head above water and to make their way out of the current was another matter. For a hundred strokes he did not seem to gain an inch. Then at last, amid a shout of joy and praise from ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... now noble Pompey? What, at the wheels of Csar? Art thou led in triumph? What is there none of Pigmalions Images newly made woman to bee had now, for putting the hand in the pocket, and extracting clutch'd? What reply? Ha? What saist thou to this Tune, Matter, and Method? Is't not drown'd i'th last raine? Ha? What saist thou Trot? Is the world as it was Man? Which is the way? Is it sad, and few words? Or how? The tricke of it? Duke. Still thus, and thus: still worse? Luc. How doth my ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... bring into a world, so filled with shadow, an increasing number of our species. What a supreme act of faith the continuance of the race is. ... Oh, the cunning of Nature—how empty the heart of man or woman who has not felt the clutch of a baby's hand, or drunk deep of the heaven- made perfume of a baby's breath. And the impulse that babies give to life, the challenge that they make to the father is always a noble one. It is ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... madame," replied Louis XIV., tearing the parchment which Mazarin had not yet ventured to clutch; "yes, I annihilate this deed, which despoiled a whole family. The wealth acquired by his eminence in my service is his own wealth ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... as I felt as if I was beginning to fly right off over the blue sea, and away into the fleecy clouds, and as I made an effort to get rid of the clutch upon my shoulder, he ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... to repent. "Say, Lord have mercy on my soul. Look up Unto the Lamb of God, for He can save Even to the uttermost." Slight heed obtain'd This adjuration, wild the glazing eye Fix'd on the wall,—and ever and anon The stiffening fingers clutch'd at things unseen, While from those spent lungs came a shuddering sound, "That's he! That's he! The old man! His grey hairs Dabbled with blood!" Then in a loud, long cry, Wrung out by torturing pain, "I struck the blow! I tell ye that I struck the blow, and scaped. Conrad ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... crushing him beneath its rough and ragged sides. All thoughts of self-murder vanished with the presence of actual peril, and uttering that despairing cry which had been faintly heard by Troke, he flung up his arms to clutch the monster that was pushing him down to death. The log passed completely over him, thrusting him beneath the water, but his hand, scraping along the splintered side, came in contact with the loop of hide rope that yet hung ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... "flivver" as it bounced and squeaked and rattled and splashed its way along. But Mr. Pulcifer himself was not sad, at least his appearance certainly was not. Swinging jauntily, if a trifle ponderously, with the roll of the little car, his clutch upon the steering wheel expressed serene confidence and his manner self-satisfaction quite as serene. His plaid cap was tilted carelessly down toward his right ear, the tilt being balanced by the ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... tongue and made it wag tauntingly. "You didn't get me the last time; that was a slip and police stools got me. All by yourself, Gavegan, you couldn't get anything. Your brain's got flat tires, and its motor doesn't fire, and its clutch is broken. The only thing about it that still works is the horn. You've got a hell of a horn, Gavegan, and ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... 'but I daren't drive. My left leg is so weak that I couldn't work the clutch. Springfield had to run us over here to-day. There's barely enough petrol to take us ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... cared for now was to get to Ellen and pour out her troubles, and she was quite silent while she jumped ashore, although the wavering boat made her clutch ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... to be Billie's day for bumping into people—for at the foot of the stairs she had to clutch the banister to keep from colliding with Miss Walters, the beautiful and much loved head of ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... from neighing.—If a troop of horsemen pass near your hiding-place, it may be necessary to clutch your steed's muzzle with both ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... and talked the usual hard luck. Been in the stock business thirty years and never had a good year yet. Nothing left of his cattle but the running gear; and his land so poor you couldn't even raise a row on it unless you went there mad; and why he keeps on struggling in the bitter clutch of misfortune he don't know. But I always know why he keeps on struggling. Money! Nothing but money. So when he got through mourning over his ruined fortunes, and feebly said something about taking some mules off my hands at a fair price, I shut him off ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... one, full of absorbing interests, and as she stood drinking in the perfume from a spray of lilac she had broken to choose the bit for the Deacon, she suddenly realized that not one minute had she found in which to let the horrible dread creep close and clutch at her throat. Helping along in the construction of a bucket of tea-cakes, the printing of four cakes of butter, the simmering of a large pan of horehound syrup and the excitement of pouring it into the family bottles that Mother ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... do when he realized how badly both master and servant were in the clutch of their beliefs and superstitions, was to wonder at it. But by the time Sancho had finished his words, the repast was being served ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... lies in other men's souls; we all have our secrecies and sanctuaries, rarely acknowledged even to ourselves. But no one can read Joyce Kilmer's poems without grasping his vigorous idealism, his keen sense of beauty, his devout and simple religion, his clutch on the preciousness of common things. He loved the precarious bustle on Grub Street; he was of that adventurous, buoyant stuff that rejects hum-drum security and a pelfed and padded life. He always insisted ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... Mr. Montagu. "I don't see through you! I don't!" But as he leaned forward to clutch at him in his terror, all that he could see before him was a closed door beyond a dozen tables, a disused entranceway diagonally opposite the one that had let them in. "I don't believe you!" he wailed. "Oh, my God, my God, my God, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... grow careless. Mr. Forster sprained his wrist the other day with a back-fire, which he ought to have avoided, and I heard of a horrible accident in Paris, when a chauffeur started his car with the clutch in gear, with the consequence that it dashed over a bridge into the Seine, and the occupants—a lady and two little children—were drowned before his eyes. There's no need to be nervous if you take proper care, but cars are not playthings to be ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... Chinaman's natural craving for as much of it as he can secure. At the same time, the abominable system of official extortion must go far to crush a spirit of enterprise which would otherwise most undoubtedly be rife. Everybody is so afraid of bringing himself within the clutch of the law, that innovation is quite ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... stood on the very point of the pier, where the strong stone-work divided the current, and held his hooked pole ready to make a clutch at the roof, whichever side it took. Jim Leonard saw him there, but although he had been holloing and yelling and crying all the time, now he was still. He wanted to say, "O Bob, save me!" but he could not make ...
— The Flight of Pony Baker - A Boy's Town Story • W. D. Howells
... wellnigh indescribable, and may be said, in general terms, to have been naught but the blind and desperate clutch of two great bodies of men, who could scarcely see each other when they were but a few feet apart, and who fired at random, rather by sound than sight. A Southern writer, describing the country ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... tormented him swimming, Flood-beasts no few with fierce-biting tusks did Break through his burnie, the brave one pursued they. The earl then discovered he was down in some cavern Where no water whatever anywise harmed him, And the clutch of the current could not come anear him, Since the roofed-hall prevented; brightness a-gleaming Fire-light he saw, flashing, resplendent. The good one saw then the sea-bottom's monster, The mighty mere-woman; he made a great onset With weapon-of-battle, his hand ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... lay by his side at night her arm stole about his, as if to clutch him, fearful lest in the empty reaches of sleep he might escape, lest his errant man's thoughts and desires might abandon her for the usual avenues of life. Long after he had fallen into the regular sleep of night, she lay awake by his side, her eyes glittering with passion and defeat. Even ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... mind, he stood by the window feeling awkward and embarrassed. The man who climbed the flag pole having put the rope through the ring at the top slid suddenly down the pole and thinking for the moment that he had fallen Sam made a quick clutch at the air with his hand. His gripping fingers closed over Sue ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... not a drowning man clutch the raft that floats by? And the lawless ones do not take his ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... his best efforts at self-control, Wilbur felt a slow, cold clutch at his heart. That sickening, uncanny lifting of the schooner out of the glassy water, at a time when there was not enough wind to so much as wrinkle the surface, sent a creep of something very like ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... of his own danger, Francesco gave him a push, and losing his balance the captain fell over the edge, a distance of sixty feet, upon the jagged rocks beneath. But not alone! Still retaining his fierce clutch upon the Italian's throat, the murderer, too, fell with him, and both were stretched in an instant, mangled and lifeless, at the bottom of ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... your spark and open the throttle—that speeds her up. This is the spark and this the gas, here. Then you shove your shifting lever—see, here it is—over to the next speed. Remember that, any time you shift the gears, you'll have to pull the clutch. The machine has to gain headway on one speed before it ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... "Here is the clutch of your Stronghold," said the old man urgently. "Break that and all goes down. Dare you ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... greater classic tradition), to evoke a variegated vision of the tragi-comedy of life in its height and its depth, its freedom, and its wide horizon. This drama has for the most part little to do with the operation of the Fate which works itself out when a man's soul is in the stern clutch of Necessity. We are far here from Euripides and from Ibsen. Life is always a pageant here, a tragi-comedy, which may lean sometimes more to comedy, and sometimes more to tragedy, but has in it always, even in Lear, an atmosphere of enlarging ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... I explain to this dear, misguided one that, even as those rollicking words were spoken, I felt the clutch of a cold foreboding that I ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... unless I could arrive in time to save him, armed with a reprieve or pardon—I didn't quite know which—that I had got from Washington. I waked up crying out, because a hand had been stretched forth through darkness to clutch my shoulder, and prevent me from getting to El Paso until too late. Even then, when I was wide awake, the dream had been so horribly vivid that I couldn't persuade myself it wasn't true. I had always laughed at superstitious people who believed in dreams, yet I couldn't ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... looked at the face. Ah, there was no imperial grandeur here! Only a feeble, sallow, tired, and sickly creature, whom a strong man could crush down with one blow of his fist. Rohan grew weak as he looked, and the long knife almost fell from his clutch. ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the outraged pioneers lay in the faraway camps of hostile tribes. George Girty had so sunk his individuality into the savage's that he was no longer a white man. Jim Girty stalked over the borderland with a bloody tomahawk, his long arm outstretched to clutch some unfortunate white woman, and with his hideous smile of death. Both of these men were far lower than the worst savages, and it was almost wholly to their deeds of darkness that Simon Girty owed his ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... but it's a-goin'!" Aunt Mary exclaimed, as the thing began to whiz and she felt suddenly impelled to clutch wildly at her flanking escorts. "Suppose we ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... to see once again the settlement at Sydney, whence had radiated the series of his valuable and unsparing researches; but on the next and final occasion he was "caught in the clutch of circumstance." His leave-taking in August, 1803, was essentially his farewell; and his general observations on the country he had served, and which does not forget the service, are, though brief, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... a last clutch at my resolution. "People who do that kind of thing always get into trouble. She might miss her train. She's almost certain to ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... whether it or you are going the faster, when suddenly there seems to be a hush, almost a lull, in the uproar. You look astern, and see a wall of water rising majestically higher and higher, at the same time drawing nearer and nearer. Instinctively you clutch at something firm, and hold your breath. Then that mighty green barrier leans forward, the ship's stern seems to settle at the same time, and, with a thundering noise as of an avalanche descending, it overwhelms you. Of course the ship's way is deadened; she seems like a living ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... to the number of eggs in laid clusters. We collected clutches of six, four, four and one; adding one more of three (Lowe, op. cit.) gives an average of 3.6 eggs per cluster; the average is 4.2 eggs if our clutch of one is discarded on ...
— Natural History of the Salamander, Aneides hardii • Richard F. Johnston
... the slope it stood still for what seemed an age. They saw the two in bow and stern struggle desperately again and again to wrest their craft from the clutch of the current. Then, almost with a leap, freed from the fierce resistance of the rapids, the canoe slid over the brink of the incline, into the deeper part ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... functions of the clutch, carburetor, valves, magneto, spark plug, differential cam shaft, and different speed gears, and be able to explain difference between ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... hind feet and rushed to meet poor Wunny, squeezing him in a terrible embrace that checked the Chinaman's yell instantly. Until a touch of Bruin's teeth upon his thinly clad shoulder and a bite of sharp teeth awoke it again. A clutch of his queue from the great paw brought forth greater shrieks and seemed to give the victim an extraordinary strength. By some means he wrenched himself free and escaped, the grizzly pursuing on all fours again—and both ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... forgetting any cause of dislike he might have to Dansowich, joined heart and hand in the plans formed by the pirates for the deliverance of their leader. Every man in Segna, whether young or old, all who could wield a cimeter or clutch a knife, hastily armed themselves, and crowded into the fleet of long light skiffs in which they were wont to make their predatory excursions. Then breaking furiously through the line of Venetian ships, stationed between Veglia and the mainland, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... stamping her little feet, and clenching her little hands, and swearing to herself by all her gods, that this wretched, timid lordling should not get out of her net. She did, in truth, despise him because he would not clutch the jewels. She looked upon him as mean and paltry because he was willing to submit to Mr. Camperdown. But still she was prompted to demand all that could be demanded from her engagement,—because she thought that she perceived ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... front of the hall had been reached, and she had gone up half a dozen steps into a small dressing-room. This was crowded to suffocation—by men who played the Game, she concluded, in one capacity or another. And here she lost Joe. But before the real personal fright could soundly clutch her, one of the young fellows said gruffly, "Come along with me, you," and as she wedged out at his heels she noticed that another one of ...
— The Game • Jack London
... the sounds, and then I saw something come up above the sill, and clutch at the broken window-frame. It caught a piece of the woodwork; and, now, I could make out that it was a hand and arm. A moment later, the face of one of the Swine-creatures rose into view. Then, before I could use my rifle, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... me!" It was the last fierce flicker of hope when hope seemed dead: the last clutch of the drowning at the straw that ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... 'A rispettarmi apprenda' (Learn to respect me) is a triumph for Carthagenova, who will express superbly the offended pride and the duplicity of a sovereign. The Throne will speak. He will withdraw the concessions that have been made, he arms himself in wrath. Pharaoh rises to his feet to clutch the prey ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... the mighty stranger. "And you will never get out of my clutch until you tell me the nearest way to the garden of ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... said) when the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch. Ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him; if, for instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim, or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from all sides. These things he ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... being ambitious. We can't blame them for wanting to better their condition in life, and we can't blame them for falling prey to the white slave monster, with its tentacles spread throughout the country ready at every possible chance to clutch them within its grasp. We can only warn them to be more cautious, to investigate carefully before going away from home with people they do not know. Fathers and mothers are too negligent in this regard, and through their laxity and carelessness they have allowed their daughters to ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... troop carried a rifle balanced across his saddle pommel; each was dressed in the garb of the range-rider; and the face of each, glimpsed by the light from some window or doorway, was grimly stern. The sight was one calculated to make Fear clutch like an ice-cold hand at the hearts of those with guilty consciences; a spectacle which induced such respectable men as saw it to arm themselves and fall in behind the advancing line. These knew without being told what this noiseless band of stern-eyed riders portended, and ever since the coming ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... The sudden clutch was wholly unexpected, and the knife dropped. With his other hand Jack picked it up. As he did so, the March Hare uttered a cry. It was neither loud nor long, but there was something so startling in it that the commotion of the fight ceased suddenly, and ...
— Jack of Both Sides - The Story of a School War • Florence Coombe
... stretched over the small bones. I stooped beside her, in answer to an appealing look. She could not lift the frail, tired hand that lay by her, its fingers uncurled, the hand of one who, dying, relinquishes gladly its grasp on life. The hands of the strong, torn from a world they love, clench and clutch at the last; it is an involuntary hold on earth. The doctor moved away. The whining sobs of the old man became more audible. I put my ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... in fury, until at the farther wall Gresh flung Vic from him against the jagged rock with a force that cut a gash across the boy's head. The blood splashed on both men's faces as they renewed the strife. Then with a quick twist Burleigh threw the outlaw to the floor and held him in a clutch that weighed him down like a ledge of rock; and it was pound ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... the muddy fields, the small barn and outbuildings. The clutch of fear made him shout their names, though he knew ...
— Now We Are Three • Joe L. Hensley
... spoke, the guaco, which had hopped down to the lowest branches of a neighbouring tree, swooped suddenly at the snake, evidently aiming to clutch it around the neck. The latter, however, had been too quick, and coiling itself, like a flash of lightning darted its head out towards the bird in a threatening manner. Its eyes sparkled with rage, and their fiery glitter could be seen ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... was instantaneous: the red face became mottled with yellow: a thick-fingered, tottering hand made a clutch at the tell- tale ribbon. 'Medal!' the man cried, wonderfully sobered. 'I have ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... touch, Her lips whose kisses pout to leave their nest, Bid man be valiant ere he merit such; Her glance how wildly beautiful—how much Hath Phoebus woo'd in vain to spoil her cheek, Which grows yet smoother from his amorous clutch, Who round the north for paler dames would seek? How poor their forms appear! how languid, ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... that chin which bears his touch: Her lips, whose kisses pout to leave their nest, Bid man be valiant ere he merit such: Her glance, how wildly beautiful! how much Hath Phoebus wooed in vain to spoil her cheek Which glows yet smoother from his amorous clutch! Who round the North for paler dames would seek? How poor their forms appear? ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... a divinely appointed instrument of vengeance. Something outside her obsession had its clutch upon her also, but it was new, and she did not guess that ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... replied Krag sternly. "His world is no joke. He has a strong clutch—but I have a stronger... Maskull was his, but Nightspore ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... this time lay at full length in the mud. The guardsmen tried to rouse him by shaking, but in vain. Finally, one of them, losing all patience, pricked him with his bayonet on the lower part of the ribs exposed by the raising of the jacket as he fell. I was now near enough to act, and with a sudden clutch I pulled the guardsman away, whirled him around, and stood in his place. As I was stooping over the Turk he raised himself slowly, doubtless aroused by the pain of the puncture, and turned on me a most beseeching look, which changed at once into something like joy ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... us," thought Denis, and a chill of despair seemed to clutch his heart, as he rose in his stirrups and, dagger in hand, strove, but in vain, to give some aid to his two defenders, who were growing breathless with their exertions and hampered and overpowered by ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... apples, honey of wild bees And after them of eggs a clutch, Haws, berries of the juniper; Who, King, could cast ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... whipped up his rifle Melissy sprang forward. She heard the sound of the explosion fill the draw, saw Bellamy clutch at the air and slowly sink to the ground. Before the echoes had died away she had flung herself toward ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... they were stupefied by this great flux of life which swept them on day after day to another day. Often unexpressed, this, but felt dumbly below the chatter and dry laughter. They waited, waited, circling about in a gray maelstrom until the grave sucked them in. He himself had been in the clutch of it. But that ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... blood was beating in her ears like the deafening roar of waves, and the room was darkening with the film that was creeping over her eyes. Her hands fell powerless to her sides and her knees gave way limply. He was holding her upright only by the clutch on her throat. The drumming in her ears grew louder, the tent was fading away into blackness. Dimly, with no kind of emotion, she realised that he was squeezing the life out of her and she heard his voice coming, ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... paw, hand, finger, wrist, fist, neaf^, neif^. bird in hand; captive &c 754. V. retain, keep; hold fast one's own, hold tight one's own, hold fast one's ground, hold tight one's ground; clinch, clench, clutch, grasp, gripe, hug, have a firm hold of. secure, withhold, detain; hold back, keep back; keep close; husband &c (store) 636; reserve; have in stock, have on hand, keep in stock &c (possess) 777; entail, tie up, settle. Adj. retaining &c v.; retentive, tenacious. unforfeited^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... lord cardinal; yes, madame," replied Louis XIV., tearing the parchment which Mazarin had not yet ventured to clutch; "yes, I annihilate this deed, which despoiled a whole family. The wealth acquired by his eminence in my service is his own wealth ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was what you call a labor leader. I went into a monastery for two purposes. I can confess to you. It is safe, as we will never meet again, and all ideas of justice will upend in the coming cataclysm. Listen I say," and he gripped my wrist with a vice-like clutch of his bony fingers. "I went into a monastery to escape the suspicion that I had removed one whom we felt would bring much unhappiness upon the earth. I went into a monastery to think. The turmoil of a busy worker's life gave little opportunity for serious thought. I felt the day was ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... arose among the young gentlemen of London aspiring to Ruffianism, and cultivating that much- encouraged social art, a facetious cry of 'I'll have this!' accompanied with a clutch at some article of a passing lady's dress. I have known a lady's veil to be thus humorously torn from her face and carried off in the open streets at noon; and I have had the honour of myself giving chase, on Westminster Bridge, to another young Ruffian, who, in full ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... an enormous sense of relief and warmth, in the passage. The passage was behaving like a dice-box, its disposition was evidently to rattle him about and then throw him out again. He hung on with the convulsive clutch of instinct until the passage lurched down ahead. Then he would make a short run cabin-ward, and clutch again as ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... something to save himself. But, as many know, the dying are haunted by an hallucination that leads them to snatch at things about them, like men eager to save their most precious possessions from a fire. Presently Pons released Schmucke to clutch at the bed-clothes, dragging them and huddling them about himself with a hasty, covetous movement significant and painful ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... fall off, the young hunter had grasped it; and with the dexterity of a packer, double-knotted it around the limb. The next moment, and just as the great claws of the bear were stretched forth to clutch him, he slipped off the branch, and glided ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... which followed is wellnigh indescribable, and may be said, in general terms, to have been naught but the blind and desperate clutch of two great bodies of men, who could scarcely see each other when they were but a few feet apart, and who fired at random, rather by sound than sight. A Southern writer, describing the country and the strange combat, says: "The country was sombre—a land of thicket, undergrowth, jungle, ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... in her shoe," repeated Mr. Gryce, with his finest smile, "she had but to signify that the boots sent by Altman were a size too small, for her to retain her secret and keep the one article she traded upon from his envious clutch. You seem struck dumb by this, Miss Butterworth. Have I enlightened you on a point that has ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... prepared it: the board spread over with a sheet and laid across the bath, above which only the head and shoulders emerged, livid and stained. One hand, the left, grasped the edge of the board with the last convulsive clutch of ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... mere fathering of slaves for his master. To him his slavery was deep night. What wonder, then, that he should dream, and that through the ivory gate should come to him the forbidden vision of freedom? To own himself, to be master of his hands, feet, of his whole body—something would clutch at his heart as he thought of it; and the breath would come hard between his lips. But he met his master with an impassive face, always silent, always docile; and Mr. Leckler congratulated himself that so valuable ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... to clutch at one of the stays for support, dazzled as I was by the light after my forty-eight ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... Steve, who was braced there for the expected strain. "Don't worry about us, for we'll back you up. Get a clutch on him, and the rest is going ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... gave herself a downward look—"this isn't the 'gel' he wants.... Probably by now he's given me up. Maybe he's found another. Everything that's bad and hateful can find me out here. Bad things can find you out and try to clutch after you anywheres. But when something wild and clean comes hunting for you, something out of the big lonely places—why, it would be scared to follow into ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... supplemental frame, E, provided with the roller, D, upon which the cloth is wound, in connection with the gearing, k u, clutch, o, driving pulley, m, and shaft, l, all arranged ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... Trust is a lot of sailors on a raft who keep their places by kicking off the drowning hands that clutch at it. Can you fancy a fellow like Tausig stooping down to help me tenderly on board to ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... dared not stay during its period of withdrawal; having entered a little into its life, I became subject to its laws; the Powers on its return would have dissolved my being utterly. I felt with a wild terror its clutch upon me, and I withdrew from the departing glory, from the greatness that was my ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... are other men," remarked the Berber dervish. "Well, I know that Allah has placed them in the clutch of our fingers, yet it may be that they with the big hats will stand firmer than the ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... still the labour-despot's spoil, Slaves of long hours and unrelaxing strain, Unstrengthened and unsolaced, soon again To tread the round, and lift the lengthening chain; Stand—till hysteria lays its hideous clutch On our girl-hearts, or epilepsy's touch Thrills through tired nerves and palsied brain. Again—again—again! How long? Till Death, upon its kindly quest, Gives a true ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various
... that, and how do you know?" Dave asked. In spite of his dislike of Len, and the knowledge that the bully was not noted for truth- telling, Dave could not repress a cold chill of fear that seemed to clutch his heart. ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... for me; for, perceiving me as we swung together, the fellow made a wild grab at me, and, slashing with his knife at the hand by which I clung to the mast, forced me to quit my hold, and clutch at him instead. Then, as I did so, the masts swung asunder, and, lo and behold, I was no longer on the Rata, but a prisoner of my ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... look on his face it seemed as though the boy half feared that these new friends would turn against him when they learned how McGee was his father. He was therefore considerably surprised to have Phil reach out, and grasp his hand in a warm clutch. ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... ground to stand and look like the rest—no more. Mere unit in that mass of panting humanity, hers was one of the thousands of upturned faces lurid in the light of the now blazing roof. She saw with thousands the hand break the window and clutch the frame; she gasped with the crowd at that terrible and piteous sight, and her bosom panted for her fellow-creature in sore peril. But what is this? The mob inside utter a great roar of hope; the crowd outside ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... paused suddenly in her excited walk, and, seizing the Captain by the arm with so strong a clutch that a thrill of pain shot through him, ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... movement, when she fully recovered her senses, was to clutch hold of Jan on the one side, of Mr. Bourne on ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... leg, was not hurt, and his right arm was free. He drew his revolver, and when the Arab stood over him he shot him in the breast. The man fell—but not dead—across Harry, with whom he grappled, seeking to clutch him with the left hand by the throat and sabre him with the right. But Harry caught his right wrist, and a struggle took place, in which each strained ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... this was their Law, supreme over all laws. He hoped once to see such a thing realized; and the Petition, Thy Kingdom come, no longer an empty word. He was sore grieved when he saw greedy, worldly Barons clutch hold of the Church's property; when he expostulated that it was not secular property, that it was spiritual property, and should be turned to true churchly uses, education, schools, worship; and the Regent Murray had to answer, with a shrug of the shoulders, "It is a devout imagination!" ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... was now in his clutch, Washington lost no time in tightening his hold, for de Grasse 10 declared that his orders would not allow him to tarry much longer in the Chesapeake, and the failure of the other attempts to work with the French warned him to take no risks ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... was read to the company; and, as all were in sympathy with America, it was received with great applause. Little, however, did any of them then imagine, how invincible was the animal the British government was about to clutch in its talons, supposing it to ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... death of children, or at least had not marked the departure of his two stout little brothers. Scarlet-fever and croup and measles are such every-day, red-winged, mottled angels, that no one is appalled at their presence; they take off the little sufferer in such vigorous fashion, clutch him with so hearty a grip, that one is compelled to open the door, let them out, and feel relieved when the exit is made. It is only when some dim-eyed, white-robed shape, scarcely seen, scarcely felt, steps softly in and steals away the little troublesome bundle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... out his clutch and pausing at the curb; and as I grabbed my suit-case and sprang to the seat beside him, he let the clutch in again and we were off. "No time to lose," he added, as he changed into high, ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... to fasten its benumbing clutch upon Springer. What if he could not stop Wyndham? Rackliff would hear that he had warned Eliot about the signals, and, seeking retaliation, would betray the fact that he had likewise wagered money that Wyndham would win. ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... quiet in a moment. She felt in the terror of her young heart an almost irresistible desire to clutch at Glynn's neck; but the well-known voice reassured her, and her natural tendency to place blind, implicit confidence in others, served her in this hour of need, for she obeyed his ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley's personal representative, had his retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz. There were a few rather overdressed persons from New Orleans brought up by Governor Warmouth, and a motely array of Southerners of every sort, who were ready to clutch at any straw that promised relief to intolerable conditions. The full contingent of Washington correspondents was there, of course, with sharpened eyes and pens to make the most of what they had already begun to christen ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... lame, but she is of colossal stature, like the gods; and sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... about him to clutch and tear at his face, but the flyer had an arm free, and one blow ended the battle. The man of Venus relaxed to a huddle of purple and yellow cloth from which a ghastly face protruded. McGuire leaped to his feet and sprang ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... a further persiflage of the old song. Its reading, too, is changed. It is said there that age, with his stealing steps, as clawed the lover in his clutch [76] and shipped him into the land as if he 'never ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... be waiting for something, for he peeped cautiously round a tree every now and then, bidding the dogs lie close. Then in a moment came a fearful crack from a gun he carried, and something gave a great roar and a wild snort, and I nearly lost my senses with the fright. It was all I could do to clutch on by the branch, my legs shook so with fear; and as for my companion, if it hadn't been for falling into a cleft in a branch, he would have gone straight down on to the man's wide-spreading hat. The cry ...
— The Cockatoo's Story • Mrs. George Cupples
... magenta cotton handkerchief, and that on his other arm was hanging Maryanne Brown, leaning quite as closely upon him as her sister did upon the support which was her own. For one moment George Robinson allowed himself to look down upon the scene, and he plainly saw that clutch of the hand upon the sleeve. "Big as he is," said Robinson to himself, "pistols would make us equal. But the huge ox ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... not sing tonight as she performed the customary ceremony, nor had she for many nights. Her throat seemed too tired, her arms dropped with the weight of her lamp, a dull little pain at the back of her neck gripped her with a pulling clutch. ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... from his convulsive clutch, I jumped into the tender, and paddled rapidly to the yacht. I gave Mr. Waterford a wide berth, and left him trying to obtain a better vision of the surroundings. I leaped upon the deck of the Marian, and fastened the painter of the tender at the taffrail. Miss Collingsby ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... disrelish for his flippant tone, by removing her hand from his arm. But at once the faint hiss of a snake as it glided into the swamp from somewhere just in front of them made her clutch his wet sleeve afresh. His hints as to the nature of the treasure had roused her inquisitiveness to a keen point. Yet, remembering what he had said about her praiseworthy dearth of feminine curiosity, she approached the ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... firmly all the time I was in the water; indeed, it was with difficulty that Jack got it out of my grasp when I was lying insensible on the shore. I cannot understand why I kept such a firm hold of this telescope. They say that a drowning man will clutch at a straw. Perhaps it may have been some such feeling in me, for I did not know that it was in my hand at the time we were wrecked. However, we felt some pleasure in having it with us now— although we did not see that it could be of much ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... my seat, and Christian Ann had come hurrying up, and we two women were standing about baby, both ready to clutch at her, when she blinked her blue eyes and looked at us, and then held out her arms ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... had, you see, wasted less breath. When he saw Hugh gasping in the penultimate throes of death, he mustered sufficient strength to clutch the bottle, and even to crawl over to his friend's side. Hugh saw him coming and shut his teeth. Arthur was too feeble to prize them open with his hands, but he had no difficulty in knocking out a couple with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... Gone at last!" staring at the shaking signature at the end of the letter that speaks so plainly of the coming icy clutch that should prevent the poor hand from forming ever again even such sadly erratic characters as these. "At least," glancing at the half-read letter on the cloth—"this tells me so. His solicitor's, I suppose. Though what Wynter could want with a solicitor——Poor old fellow! ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... hold of something, lad, and clutch it tight. It will begin with a heavy squall and, like enough, lay her pretty well over on her beam ends, when ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... Hattie was almost helpless; but the stranger was well handled; her huge paddle wheels, which up to this moment had hung motionless in the water, began to turn backward, and presently Marcy let go his desperate clutch upon the stay to which he was clinging, and drew a long breath of relief. Whatever else the cruiser might do to the Hattie she did not mean to send her to ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... me one moment longer, He taunts me with the past, His clutch is waxing stronger, Hold me fast, hold me fast. He draws me from thy heart, And I cannot withhold: He bids my spirit depart With him into the cold:— O bitter vows ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... everybody climbed aboard. The driver let in the clutch, there was a tearing sound from underneath, but the motor did not go. One of the drivers clambered down, and after examination said that it could not go on that day, and they immediately began to take it to pieces. The ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... that is, in having prehensile tails. With these they are enabled to suspend themselves from the branches of trees, or swing their bodies from one to the other; and this prehensile power is far greater than could be obtained by any clutch of the hand. So great is it, that even after the animal has died from the effect of a shot or other wound, its tail will still remain hooped around the branch; and if the body is not taken down by ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... water-storage tank 6 feet in diameter and 13-1/2 feet long, of a capacity of 3,000 gallons; an air tank of same dimensions as the water tank, holding air under 150 pounds pressure; a 10 horse-power gasoline engine, direct-connected, by means of friction clutch, with an air compressor and also with a triplex pump of 75 gallons ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... shape it, he had to embody it, to set it forth in images and symbols. And that meant a terrific labor, a feat of mental and emotional endurance quite indescribable. He must hold it, though it burned like fire; he must clutch it to his bosom, though it tore ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... raiment. So I loosed her fingers from the cloth, shuddering with horror the while, and drew myself away from her and stood a little aloof, wondering what should happen next. And indeed I scarce believed but she would presently rise up from the ground and clutch me in her hands, and begin the tormenting of me. But she moved no more, and the grass all about her was reddened with her blood; and at last I gathered heart to kneel down beside her, and found that she no more breathed than one of those conies or partridges which I ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... swimming, Flood-beasts no few with fierce-biting tusks did Break through his burnie, the brave one pursued they. The earl then discovered he was down in some cavern Where no water whatever anywise harmed him, And the clutch of the current could not come anear him, Since the roofed-hall prevented; brightness a-gleaming Fire-light he saw, flashing, resplendent. The good one saw then the sea-bottom's monster, The mighty mere-woman; he made a great onset With weapon-of-battle, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... prisoners in long files from the peoples of Qodi, that it may consume with its flame those who are in the marshes,** that it may cut off the heads of the Asiatics without one of them being able to escape from its clutch. I grant to thee that thy conquests may embrace all lands, that the urseus which shines upon my forehead may be thy vassal, so that in all the compass of the heaven there may not be one to rise against ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... her clutch and drove off. Surgeon-Major Thomson entered the War Office and made his way up many stairs and along many wide corridors to a large room on the top floor of the building. Two men were seated at desks, writing. He passed ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... writhed and mocked at me, struggling to free themselves from their bed of rock. The bull Nundi rose and tried to gore me; hundred-handed gods brandished quoits and sabres round my head; and Kali dropped the skull from her gore-dripping jaws, to clutch me for her prey. Then my mother came, and seizing the pillars of the portico, bent them like reeds: an earthquake shook the hills—great sheets of woodland slid roaring and crashing into the valleys—a tornado swept through the temple halls, which rocked and tossed like a vessel in a storm: ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... but a minute ere they were thundering over the Myannis bridge. A little further on Maitland slowed down and, jumping out, lighted the lamps. In the seat again,—no words had passed,—he threw in the high-speed clutch, and the world flung behind them, roaring. Thereafter, breathless, stunned by the frenzy of speed, perforce silent, they bored on through the night, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... showed signs of terror, but in vain he struggled. He was helpless in the clutch of the ...
— Frank Merriwell's Nobility - The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp • Burt L. Standish (AKA Gilbert Patten)
... stopped by Caspar's clutch at his arm. Maurice saw that his purpose—that of haranguing the men outside—had been divined and arrested. He turned to his friend and saw for the first time on Caspar's face that the shaft had gone home. He had shown scarcely any sign ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... something it was difficult to define. On one side of me the little, elfish creature with her frightened eyes and short, curly hair seemed standing; on the other, the girl to whom Harrie was engaged. I could not help them. Could not help Selwyn. Could help no one! If David Guard—at thought of him the clutch at my throat lessened. David Guard could help them. He had promised to come whenever I sent for him, and to him I could talk as to ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... felt past handlers clutch them, Though none was in the room, Old players' dead fingers touch them, Shrunk in ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... him—when the tall, long-faced A.D.C. took me into his room and left us. Yes, Sir John was certainly going. There was no mistake about it. It was written in every line of his drawn fever-worn face, and in his wide fever-lit eyes, and in the clutch of his long yellow hands upon his tussore silk dressing-gown. He looked a very sick bad old man as he lay there on his low couch, placed so as to court the air from without, cooled by its passage through damped grass screens, and to receive the full strength ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... had been nearly a month away from Lee, and meanwhile Grant had not only kept Lee on the watch on both banks of the James, as well as for Richmond as for Petersburg, but had taken a fast hold on the Weldon railway. Unable to shake off Grant's clutch either on the James or on the Shenandoah, Lee greatly needed Anderson back with him. Accordingly, on the very day when Sheridan went back to Berryville, Anderson, seeking the shortest way to Richmond, ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... scared, kid," he gasped, spluttering the water out of his throat; "keep cool and don't clutch me too tight." He might as well have spoken to the winds, for little Freddy, chilled through and terror-stricken, was clinging to him like an octopus, impeding his arm and leg action, and almost choking the ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You'll hurt the delicate thing you ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... had been deeply stirred at that moment, so that the union of the sudden shout, with the profundity of Bill's remark, had the effect of causing him to clutch at the tea-kettle with such haste that he upset it into ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... palsied bridegroom too, in youth's gay ensigns drest; A shroud were fitter garment far for him than bridal vest; I mark'd him when the ring was claim'd, 'twas hard to loose his hold, He held it with a miser's clutch—it was his darling gold. His shrivell'd hand was wet with tears she pour'd, alas! in vain, And it trembled like an autumn ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... 're in the garden." Tilda ran, so fast that at the head of the steps she had to clutch at ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... A powerful clutch closed upon his arm. He was whirled backwards into a chair. For a moment he was too dazed to grasp what had happened. He saw zu Pfeiffer's face. The sentries over his moustaches quivered like a row of fixed bayonets. The eyes seemed needle points. Then the fact of the assault ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... that so closely and humiliatingly resembled the battle on the cambric square under the big sweeting. The wary advance after the recoil from the first encounter; the circling about at close quarters, each watching for his antagonist's weak point, the sudden clutch, embrace, and wrestle, which I, with umpiric instinct, interrupted, once and again, to prolong the combat,—none of these ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... observed, and with a most unpromising stoop. He was feeling for his last four-pence; and found a hole in his pocket. Can't you read the whole story in the man's gait?—in the slow, sullen footfall—in the clutch of his fingers—in the stiffened elbow, and the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... to remember what father had said about fighting. "Don't clutch and don't paw. Strike out from the shoulder like a gentleman." So, while the boy was talking, I struck out from the shoulder right on the end of his nose with my ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... a twinkling. He could not defend himself, but he made a clutch to save himself, caught something, swung in, struck against the iron ladder, and went ...
— Frank Merriwell's Nobility - The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp • Burt L. Standish (AKA Gilbert Patten)
... loosened from the raft, was upon him, crushing him beneath its rough and ragged sides. All thoughts of self-murder vanished with the presence of actual peril, and uttering that despairing cry which had been faintly heard by Troke, he flung up his arms to clutch the monster that was pushing him down to death. The log passed completely over him, thrusting him beneath the water, but his hand, scraping along the splintered side, came in contact with the loop ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... relegated to my proper position, had sunken to my future place as a mere servant. Finally Mistress Dorothy arose to her feet, and, with a brief word of explanation to her uncle, started forward in the direction of the cabin. A sudden leap of the boat caused her to clutch the rail, and instantly Sanchez was at her side, proffering assistance. They crossed the dancing deck together, his hand upon her arm, and paused for a moment at the door to exchange a few sentences. When the Spaniard came back he pointed out to Fairfax the position of ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... men led to execution clutch mentally at every object that meets them on the way," flashed through his mind, but simply flashed, like lightning; he made haste to dismiss this thought.... And by now he was near; here was the house, here was the gate. Suddenly a clock somewhere struck ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... couldn't get a better grip on it. It slipped a wee bit more. Blacky started down towards the ground. But he wasn't quick enough. Striped Chipmunk, watching Blacky from the old stone wall, saw something white drop from Blacky's claws. He saw Blacky dash after it and clutch at it only to miss it. Then the white thing struck a branch of an old apple tree, bounced off and fell to ...
— Blacky the Crow • Thornton W. Burgess
... of their actions, All-wielding Ruler, No praise could they give the Guardian of Heaven, The Wielder of Glory. Woe will be his who Through furious hatred his spirit shall drive to 70 The clutch of the fire, no comfort shall look for, Wax no wiser; well for the man who, Living his life-days, his Lord may face And find defence in ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... time of its appearance. The like might befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him: if, for instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim; the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... he added slowly: "Fielding, fellows of that kind always flare up a bit according to Cavendish, just before the end. I've seen it once or twice before. It's the last clutch at the grass as they go slip—slip—slipping down. Take my word for it, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... him, then pausing only long enough to clutch some of the gleaming jewels from the inanimate form, he stealthily withdrew, and, skulking unobserved along the corridors, passed out into ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... cried Dick, as Arnold Baxter started to run. He made a clutch for the man, but Baxter was too quick for him and slipped through the crowd and out of the depot. Instantly Dick made ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield
... was the expiring tribute of allegiance to the chief he adored. The blood spouted in cataracts from his half-closed wounds, a convulsive spasm worked through his frame, his eyes rolled fearfully, as his outstretched hands seemed striving to clutch some object before them, and he was dead. Fresh arrivals of wounded continued to pour in; and now I thought I could detect at intervals the distant noise of a cannonade. The wind, however, was from the southward, and the sounds were too ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... forward, his fur a-bristle, his white teeth gleaming, and the next instant, taken by the suddenness of the attack, the sentry lay on his back half stunned by the fall, while Tumbu, on the top of him, checked even a cry by a clutch at his throat. A soft clutch so far; but one that would tear ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... hum of the mill. The miller threw in the clutch and the stones began to grind. They heard the corn poured into the hopper, and then the shriek of the kernels as they were ground between the stones. The whole building ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... once I stopped, suddenly oblivious of self as, louder than the buzzing torment of my wounded head, rose a distressful cry and the more hateful sound of desperate struggling. Round I turned and, peering, saw them locked in close grapple, and her slender body bent and swaying in his merciless clutch: at which sight my pain and sickness and selfish fear were all forgotten and in their stead sprang a passionate desire to kill and be done with this evil thing that defiled the earth in man's shape. So back again sped I, and with every step this ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... consisting of three bevel wheels, one a stud, one loose on the driving shaft, and another on a socket, with a pinion on the opposite end of the driving shaft running on the socket. The other end was the place for the driving pulley. A clutch box was placed between the two opposite wheels, which was made to slide on a feather, so that by means of another shaft containing levers and a tumbling ball, the box on reversing was carried from one bevel wheel to the opposite one." The same James Fox ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... thine hand, and I have but one. Give thine to me, and peace shall prevail between us!' But Judah refused to do his bidding, and Joseph beat him until he dropped ten rods, and only two remained in his clutch. Joseph now invited his brethren to abandon Judah and follow after him. They all did thus, except Benjamin, who stayed true to Judah. Levi was grieved over the desertion of Judah, and he descended from the sun. Toward the end of the day a storm broke out, and it scattered the brethren, so that no ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... Sally, urging her heavy horse against him and making a clutch at his cap. But he leaned as suddenly away, and shot a length ahead, out of her reach. Miss Deane's horse, a light, spirited animal, kept ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... they sailed along, following its graceful windings—sometimes touching bottom, and sometimes skimming smoothly over deep water, where Kitty could no longer clutch for the tall, bright grass that here and there had reared itself above the surface. Often Big Tom would sing out, "Lie low!" as some great bough, hanging over the stream, seemed stretching out its arms to catch them; and often they were nearly checked ...
— Po-No-Kah - An Indian Tale of Long Ago • Mary Mapes Dodge
... points, drew a choking breath, crouched lower, and, with the Dauphin's sword at the charge, he flung himself into the gap breast-forward, missed his thrust, splintered the blade against the wall, and with a wild clutch drew all within reach into his grip. For an instant they hung upon a stair-edge, then, in a writhing, floundering mass, breast to breast, breathless, half dead or dying, they rolled to the floor. From behind La Mothe heard ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... battle with redoubled fury burns; From every side the avenging cranes amain Throng, to o'erwhelm this terror of the plain. 160 When suddenly (for such the will of Jove) A fowl enormous, sousing from above, The gallant chieftain clutch'd, and, soaring high, (Sad chance of battle!) bore him up the sky. The cranes pursue, and, clustering in a ring, Chatter triumphant round the captive king. But, ah! what pangs each pigmy bosom wrung, When, now to cranes ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... broke with a screech and a massing of angry water. The boats had been under sail, and in a flash two of them were over-turned. Shavings saw all this with terror in his eyes and a cold clutch at his heart. He knew the men in those boats would never ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... effort at speed, That a keen eye might guess it was made—not for him, But some brawler more stalwart of stature and limb. That it irk'd him, in truth, you at times could divine, For when low was the music, and spilt was the wine, He would clutch at the garment, as though it oppress'd And stifled some impulse ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... and clutch his throat with both hands, as if to stop a cry of agony, and then he turned to me with a look ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... part in the drama of life was Care. There was no hint of happiness in his long narrow face, dull sunken eyes, and bloodless compressed lips. His expression was not that of one unable to tear himself away from the last glimpse of a loved wife fallen from his arms into the clutch of Death. It was the gaze of one ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... protracted. Nor was all the brutality by any means on one side; neither will I pretend that I was getting much more than my deserts in the defeat that threatened to end in my extinction. Not for an instant had my enemy loosened his deadly clutch, and now he had me penned against the banisters, and my one hope was that they would give way before our united weight, and precipitate us both into the room below. That would be better than being slowly ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... half-inch rope which he held looped on his arm made a circling whirl through the air, the end falling right across the gunwales of the boat, close to the after thwart, where sat the second of the castaways, who eagerly stretched out his hand to clutch ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... Tommy saw her dash to the platform, seize Frank in a clutch of desperation. There was a violent wrench as if some monster were twisting at his vitals. He closed his eyes against the blinding light, then realized that utter silence had followed the erstwhile confusion. He sat in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... sticking out like attentive ears. He crossed his legs and set on his knee an ankle clothed in a purple silk stocking. On account of his rotundity he was compelled to hold the ankle in place in the firm clutch of his hand. He settled his purple tie ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... in the mud. The guardsmen tried to rouse him by shaking, but in vain. Finally, one of them, losing all patience, pricked him with his bayonet on the lower part of the ribs exposed by the raising of the jacket as he fell. I was now near enough to act, and with a sudden clutch I pulled the guardsman away, whirled him around, and stood in his place. As I was stooping over the Turk he raised himself slowly, doubtless aroused by the pain of the puncture, and turned on me a most beseeching ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... sickly perverse old man. But to Maud it seemed as fair a lot to take care of a fellow-creature as it is to many another to be nursed and cherished; and it was the reward of her faithful care that she could keep the old man from the clutch of Death for full ten years longer. After his decease she was left a well-to-do widow; but instead of taking thought for herself she at once entered on a life of fresh care, for she undertook the duty of filling the place of mother ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... mad hope, but yet it was a hope; and I argued: Is it better to clutch at the veriest shadow of a chance, or to sit down and end my life amongst scoundrels and assassins? Unless the man "Four-Eyes" deliberately deceived me, Black would connive at the murder of fifty British seamen before another twenty-four hours had ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... affection with an overwhelming passion that sometimes surged into physically painful caresses. When her mother hugged her for any length of time she soon wept, rocking herself and her daughter to and fro, and her clutch became then so frantic that poor Mary Makebelieve found it difficult to draw her breath; but she would not for the world have disturbed the career of her mother's love. Indeed, she found some pleasure in the ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... juvenile elasticity. But I think that none of them had given him credit for such strength as he now displayed. The Marquis, in spite of what feeble efforts he made, was dragged up out of his chair and made to stand, or rather to totter, on his legs. He made a clutch at the bell-rope, which to aid his luxurious ease had been brought close to his hand as he sat, but failed, as the Dean shook him hither and thither. Then he was dragged on to the middle of the rug, feeling by this time that ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... head-lights of the roadster shot divergent rays through the darkness. They went out. The old Captain took a seat in the car beside the physician, while Peter stood on the running-board. A moment later, the clutch snarled, and the machine puttered down the street. Peter clung to the standards of the auto ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... enveloped in a dense volume of sound. Men and women stood on their chairs and waved frantically, madly, anything they could clutch hold of to wave. The whole Olympia appeared to have gone mad. Noble peers, grave judges, sedate generals and austere philosophers acted as if suddenly bereft of the restaining influences of ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... ashamed to say that my first movement was to clutch the cheque which he had left with me, and which I was determined to present the very moment the bank opened. I know the importance of these things, and that men CHANGE THEIR MIND sometimes. I sprang through the streets ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... plenty and here, somewhere on this island, it lieth waiting to be found. It needeth but for this fool Martin here, as some o' you will mind for Adam Penfeather's comrade, with a curse, it needeth but for him to speak, I say, and in that same hour each one o' you may fill your clutch wi' more treasure than ever came out o' Eldorado or Manoa—so speak he must and shall—eh ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... youth and maiden started over the course. They went so like the wind that they left not a footprint. The people cheered on Hippomenes, eager that such valor should win. But the course was long, and soon fatigue seemed to clutch at his throat, the light shook before his eyes, and, even as he pressed on, ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... had a shrivelled look, and the outline of the four fingers appeared more distinct than at the former time. Moreover, she fancied that they were imprinted in precisely the relative position of her clutch upon the arm in the trance; the first finger towards Gertrude's wrist, and ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... where my wife but now Held talk with her encroaching friend, I heard (Not of set purpose heark'ning, but by chance) A voice of chiding, answer'd by a tone Of replication, such as the meek dove Makes, when the kite has clutch'd her. The high Widow Was loud and stormy. I distinctly heard One threat pronounced—"Your husband shall know all." I am no listener, sister; and I hold A secret, got by such unmanly shift, The pitiful'st of thefts; but what mine ear, I not intending it, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... on the low chair, trembling, with her forehead between her hands. Laurent remained where he stood for a moment, looking stupid. Then, all at once, with the clutch of a wild beast, he grasped the head of Therese in his two great hands, and by force brought her lips to the bite he had received from Camille on his neck. For an instant he kept, he crushed, this head of a ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... allies turned fiercely to bay. On the evening of December 17th a young officer, who was destined once more to thwart Buonaparte's designs, led a small body of picked men into the dockyard to snatch from the rescuing clutch of the Jacobins the French warships that could not be carried off. Then was seen a weird sight. The galley slaves, now freed from their chains and clustering in angry groups, menaced the intruders. Yet the British seamen spread the combustibles and let loose the demon ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... body, and so prevented the spiritual portion of him from becoming detached from the material. When a Sea Dyak sorcerer or medicine-man is initiated, his fingers are supposed to be furnished with fish-hooks, with which he will thereafter clutch the human soul in the act of flying away, and restore it to the body of the sufferer. But hooks, it is plain, may be used to catch the souls of enemies as well as of friends. Acting on this principle head-hunters ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... from the summit so that at this distance it looks as though it were clutched in a vast white owl's claw; and generally there is a wispy cloud caught on it like a white shirt on a poor man's Monday washpole. Or, huddled together in a nest formation like so many speckled eggs, you see the clutch of little mottled mountains for which nobody seems to have a name. If these mountains were in Scotland, Sir Walter Scott and Bobby Burns would have written about them and they would be world-famous, and tourists from America ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... and the old lady rose to the surface, when, in an evil hour, intent upon avenging herself upon Pomp, she made a clutch for his collar. In doing so she lost her footing and fell back into the pit from which she had just emerged. Her spectacles dropped off and, falling beneath her, ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... manifestoes here. Every one looks at them with perplexity because they are frightened at the way things are put in them, but every one is convinced of their power even if they don't admit it to themselves. Everybody has been rolling downhill, and every one has known for ages that they have nothing to clutch at. I am persuaded of the success of this mysterious propaganda, if only because Russia is now pre-eminently the place in all the world where anything you like may happen without any opposition. I understand only too well why wealthy Russians all flock abroad, and more and more so every year. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud; Under the bludgeonings of chance My ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... has got one more privilege of these north woods into his clutch and is now handlin' the weather for the section," he said. "For if we ain't goin' to have a spell of the soft and moist that will put you out of business for a while, then I miss ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... seemed, to the sickening suspense of the two Delavies, a senseless Babel of tongues on all sides; but it ended in the friseur putting up his implements, the trades-folk leaving the selected goods unpaid for, and the poor poet bowing himself within reach of the monkey, who made a clutch at his MS., chattered over it, and tore it into fragments. There was a peal of mirth—loudest from Lady Aresfield—but Sir Amyas sprang forward with gentlemanly regrets, apologies, and excuses, finally opening the door and following the ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... second's delay he was gone. Hugh put out his whole strength in the endeavor to raise himself somewhat out of the ice-cold water. But the upturned boat sidled away from him like a skittish horse, and after grappling with it he only slipped back again exhausted, and had to clutch it as ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... another man steadied Billy, and on recognising him Mr. Blee forgot all about his former emotions and gasped in the clutch of a new one. It was Mr. Lezzard, evidently under some impulse of genial exhilaration. There hung an air of aggression about him, but, though he moved like a conqueror, his gait was unsteady and his progress slow. He had wit to guess Billy's errand, however, for he grinned, ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... hands held each other again, there seemed to be long retrospects of tried and tender intercourse in their very touch. Their eyes held a past in them as well as a future. There was no hurry of the emotions now, no reason for haste in the seeking and giving of tenderness, no need to snatch and clutch the good gifts of love as though there was but a short day for the giving. Their love had ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... bed in her father's house as she lay awake Rosalind's head grew light. She tried to clutch at something, ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... like the engagement and would break it off; and now she was stamping her little feet, and clenching her little hands, and swearing to herself by all her gods, that this wretched, timid lordling should not get out of her net. She did, in truth, despise him because he would not clutch the jewels. She looked upon him as mean and paltry because he was willing to submit to Mr. Camperdown. But still she was prompted to demand all that could be demanded from her engagement,—because she thought that she perceived a something in him which might produce in him a ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... one hand she carried a pair of embroidered silk stockings, with the other she raised a lorgnette. After a measured scrutiny her lips tightened, her nose lifted, she blew loudly like a porpoise, and, gathering her skirts closely, waddled away, as if fleeing from contagion. She continued to clutch the hosiery until a floor- walker, in answer to the clerk's frantic signal, intercepted her. Another crowd promptly gathered to listen to her indignant ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... Aennchen, pointing to a light that came through the folds of a curtain. Beppo kissed her fingers as they tugged unreluctantly in his clutch, and knew by a little pause that the case was hopeful for higher privileges. What to do? He had not an instant to spare; yet he dared not offend a woman's vanity. He gave an ecstatic pressure of her hand ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pattern with the jewels of sunset. Carmen did not see the beauty of the magic temple, though she was conscious of her own. She hated to think that Nick Hilliard should keep her waiting, and there was cruelty in the clutch she made at a cluster of orange blossoms as she passed a long row of trees in terra-cotta pots on the terrace. Under the bamboos she scattered a handful of creamy petals on the golden brown earth, ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Twice and again the stricken man paused for breath and ease from torture, though the sounds of array, now on two sides, threatened at every step to become the cry of onset. Presently he stopped once more, heaved, swayed and, despite her clutch, ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... man must have hidden the counter-deed under his pillow to keep it safe so long as life should last; and his wife must have guessed his thought; indeed, it might be read plainly in his last dying gesture, in the convulsive clutch of his claw-like hands. The pillow had been flung to the floor at the foot of the bed; I could see the print of her heel upon it. At her feet lay a paper with the Count's arms on the seals; I snatched it up, and saw that it was addressed to me. ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... wings of the dragon overshadowed the shrinking form of the girl, and the talons of its drooping feet caught in her dress. She made one desperate, but futile effort to free herself from its terrible clutch, and, screaming loudly for help, was borne away over the abyss of the valley as easily as a lamb ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... skepticism. It was necessarily slow, for beginners at a single-command monoplane school are permitted to fly only under the most favorable weather conditions. Even then, old Mother Earth, who is not kindly disposed toward those of her children who leave her so jauntily, would clutch us back to her bosom, whenever we gave her the slightest opportunity, with an embrace that was anything but tender. We were inclined to think rather highly of our own courage in defying her; and sometimes our vanity was increased by our moniteurs. After an ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... blueness about the lips, a coldness about the fingers, that told much. Marilda had at once sent for Dr. Brownlow as the nearest, and he was at home; but he could only look and do nothing, but attempt to revive circulation, all in vain; and with Marilda standing by, with one convulsive clutch of Angela's hand, the true mother of her orphaned life, little Lena sank to a peaceful rest from the tribulations ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... him beside himself. Oh, to sink his fingers deep into the white, fat throat of the man, to clutch like iron into the great puffed jowl of him, to wrench out the life, to batter it out, strangle it out, to pay him back for the long years of extortion and oppression, to square accounts for bribed jurors, bought ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... Manfred he had summoned to his aid Forbidden ministers—but unlike his— Of the earth, earthy, which did slowly clutch Upon his lofty faculties until They summoned him from the lone tow'r of thought And false philosophy wherein he dwelt. God pardon ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... slowly to himself, and suddenly closed his eyes. A momentary distortion passed across his face, and I saw one of his hands clutch up the bedclothes and squeeze them hard. I thought he was going to be ill again, and begged that there might be no more talking. He opened his eyes when I spoke, fixed them once more searchingly on Arthur, and said, slowly ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... the 'Dreadnought,' than they began to throw up defences and remove their valuables into the interior. It was in the highest degree irksome to Raleigh to wait thus inactive, while this handsome Spanish colony was slipping from his clutch, but he had been forbidden to move without orders. After three days' waiting for Essex, a council of war was held on board the 'War Sprite.' On the fourth Raleigh leaped into his barge at the head of a landing company, refusing the help of the Flemings who ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... Heads, and the clock in the car wanted a few minutes to twelve when we sailed over the bridge and up Moorabool-street. We cleared a stationary tram by inches, twisted in an S curve to avoid a farmer's waggon and then, with a heart-rending grind, Bryce threw over his clutch and slowed down to a snail-like crawl of ten ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... These fell Inquisitors, these sons of blood! As I came on, his face so madden'd me That ever and anon I clutch'd my dagger ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... wondering where you are when the shells are bursting"—her voice rose in anguish—"I can't bear it! Mother, do you hear?" She threw her beautiful head back entreatingly, and the pulses in her white throat throbbed under Saxham's eyes, and her slight hands were desperate in their clutch upon the arms that held her. "I want my share of the risk, whatever it is. I will have it! It is my right. I have tried to be good and patient, but I can't, I can't, I can't stand this ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... line, although of rawhide, was switching on the surface of the rapid current; it seemed easy enough to recover it and make a new fastening. Passing from the stern to the bow, he knelt down and dipped one hand in the water, ready to clutch the end ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... she sways to every breath of air. She smiles in passing by. O thou that dost alike accord With red and yellow and arrayed in each, alike art fair, Thou sportest with my wit in love, so that indeed meseems As if a sparrow in the clutch of ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... she was fulsome about it: Madame, in all things worldly, was in nothing weak; there was measure and sense in her hottest pursuit of self-interest, calm and considerateness in her closest clutch of gain; without, then, laying herself open to my contempt as a time-server and a toadie, she marked with tact that she was pleased people connected with her establishment should frequent such associates as must cultivate and elevate, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... vestajxo. Cloud nubo. Cloudy (not clear) malklara. Clove kariofilo. Clover trifolio. Clown sxercemulo. Cloy satigi. Club (thick stick) bastonego. Club (cards) trefo. Club (society) klubo. Clue postsigno. Clump (tuft) tufo. Clumsy mallerta. Cluster (of berries) beraro. Clutch kapti, ekkaptigi. Clyster klistero. Clyster-pipe tubeto. Coach veturilo. Coach-maker veturilfaristo. Coachman veturigisto. Coal karbo. Coalesce kunigxi. Coalition kunigxo. Coarse ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... than nebulous talk of the kind that I have been describing. If once we feel ourselves to be struggling in the black flood of that awful river, we shall want a firmer hold upon the bank than is given to us by some rootless tree or other. We must clutch something that will stand a pull, if we are to be drawn from the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in order to avoid crashing into Tommy's tail light, and at such times Miss Cameron and Barnes sustained unpleasant jars. Something seemed to be telling Peter that the law was stretching out its cruel hand to clutch him from behind; he was determined to ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... quivering hands of Wilfred Bohun went up to his head and seemed to clutch his scanty yellow hair. After an instant they dropped, and he cried: "That was the word I wanted; ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... itself. But even in that desperate strait the allies turned fiercely to bay. On the evening of December 17th a young officer, who was destined once more to thwart Buonaparte's designs, led a small body of picked men into the dockyard to snatch from the rescuing clutch of the Jacobins the French warships that could not be carried off. Then was seen a weird sight. The galley slaves, now freed from their chains and clustering in angry groups, menaced the intruders. Yet the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Dobb heard him. She came to the door and clasped the poodle to her bosom, saying, "Poor dear Trippee! Did the bad fellow hurt the dear little Trippee?" Then she looked savagely at Paul, and as she put out her hand to close the door, she seemed to clutch at Paul with her long, bony fingers, as if to get hold of him and give him ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... the truth as I hear it - That ever through good or ill, The will of the Ruling Spirit Is moving and ruling still. In the clutch of the blood-red terror That holds the world in its might, The Race is learning its error And will find its ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... seconds (it was no longer) the night that sealed my eyes seemed to clutch my soul. I was for the moment "down and out"; but I braced my spirits in the presence of this dominating man. I would show him how a Canadian soldier could bear misfortune. So I gathered myself together as best I could under the circumstances; swore just a little to ease my ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... upon the dead tree. Nick's back was turned, and Aim-sa was intent upon her companion. She seemed to be hanging upon his every word. And Ralph's heart grew harder within him. His hand held his rifle in a nervous clutch and his finger-nails scored the stock. A shout from him would avert disaster; a shot would arrest that terrible advance. But the shout remained unborn; the trigger still waited the compressing hand. And the unconscious brother stood with death stealing upon him from beyond ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... glimmering of the gold embroidery about the letter; and, putting up her little hand, she grasped at it, smiling, not doubtfully, but with a decided gleam, that gave her face the look of a much older child. Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively endeavoring to tear it away; so infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl's baby-hand. Again, as if her mother's agonized gesture were meant only to make sport for ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in his clutch and advanced slowly, the cavalry trotting on either side with lances in stirrup-boots and slanting backward ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... solid to grip hold of, than nebulous talk of the kind that I have been describing. If once we feel ourselves to be struggling in the black flood of that awful river, we shall want a firmer hold upon the bank than is given to us by some rootless tree or other. We must clutch something that will stand a pull, if we are to be drawn ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... at Father Cipriano. Jurissa thrust his right hand under his cloak, and seemed to clutch some weapon. Even the counsellor's dame for a moment turned her eyes from the jewels she was admiring to the anxious countenance of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... finished, she disengaged herself from Rosas's clutch by an extreme effort, and ran to the rascal and ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... carriage gave a violent lurch, as the express swung around a bend, and Diana, dropping everything she held, made a frantic clutch at the rack above her head, while her goods and chattels shot across the floor, her dressing-case sliding gaily along till its wild career was checked against the foot of the man ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... venture to say, through my poor words, and says, 'Come unto Me, and I will give you rest'; does that not draw? We are all in the bog. He stands on firm ground, and puts out a hand. If you like to clutch it, by the pledge of the nail-prints on the palm, He will lift you from 'the horrible pit and the miry clay, and set your feet upon a rock.' God grant that all of us may say, 'Draw us, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... every limb—from shame and indignation, no doubt; my vision became obscure; it seemed as if my soul was leaving my body, and I fell forward fainting, and dragged her down to the bottom of the water in a mortal clutch. ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... from fear, I'm certain, but from pain. He carried her in; I followed, grumbling execrations and vengeance. "What prey, Robert?" hallooed Linton from the entrance. "Skulker has caught a little girl, sir," he replied; "and there's a lad here," he added, making a clutch at me, "who looks an out-and-outer! Very like the robbers were for putting them through the window to open the doors to the gang after all were asleep, that they might murder us at their ease. Hold your tongue, you foul-mouthed thief, you! you shall go to the ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... Herbert upon whose capture Mabel's mind was set, and it was a disappointment that, instead of his arm she should clutch that of James Barlow. However, there was no help for it and she was obliged to blindfold in his turn the tall fellow who had to stoop to her shortness, while casting admiring glances upon the ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... badly "rattled"; I knew by the clutch of Sylvia's hand that she was too. But here I got a lesson in the nature of "social training." Some of the bright colour had faded from her face, but she spoke with the utmost coolness, the words coming naturally and simply: "We can't get through the crowd." And at ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... herself that question when she heard it—a padding, stealthy, creeping noise that made her clutch the bed clothes and draw them ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... "His world is no joke. He has a strong clutch—but I have a stronger... Maskull was his, but ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... Nor was all the brutality by any means on one side; neither will I pretend that I was getting much more than my deserts in the defeat that threatened to end in my extinction. Not for an instant had my enemy loosened his deadly clutch, and now he had me penned against the banisters, and my one hope was that they would give way before our united weight, and precipitate us both into the room below. That would be better than being slowly throttled, even if it were only a better death. Other chance there was none, and I ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... We must cultivate conscience until we have too much of it, and become monkish, savage and misanthropic. The asceticism of manhood is apparent from the studied air with which everybody is on his guard against his neighbor. In a crowded car, men instinctively clutch their pockets, and fancy a pickpocket in a benevolent-looking old gentleman opposite. When we see men so distrustful, we shun them. They then call us selfish when we feel only solitary. We protest ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... go, and at that moment Chloe Elliston saw a look of terror flash into his eyes. Saw his fingers clutch and grope uncertainly at the gay scarf at his throat. Saw the muscles of his face work painfully. Saw his colour fade from rich tan to sickly yellow. An inarticulate, gurgling sound escaped his lips, and his eyes stared in horror toward a point ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... players came dashing; but they might as well have hoped to catch the wind in a sixty-mile gale as overtake that speedy runner. It was as though Jack had reserved his best powers for this special occasion. He saw just where he meant to hurl himself over the line, and clutch that envied touchdown. Had a dozen followed he would have distanced them every one, such was his mettle just then. He seemed endowed with supernatural speed, many who stared and held their ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... my clutch and began to cry in her handkerchief. I disregarded her sorrow; I would rather see her miserable than not see her at all, never any more; for whether I escaped or stayed to die, there was for us no coming together, no future. And that being so, I had no pity to waste ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... do not give me such affront, I pray; And since he craves your grace, In pity of his case, Grant him his life, or take us both away; For he's my gossip, friend, and neighbour.' In vain the beetle's friendly labour; The eagle clutch'd her prey without reply, And as she flapp'd her vasty wings to fly, Struck down our orator and still'd him; The wonder is she hadn't kill'd him. The beetle soon, of sweet revenge in quest, Flew to the old, gnarl'd mountain oak, Which proudly ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... little gun in a rigid clutch. He forgot to implore aid from those he met as he rushed. Over the rough trail he sped like a deer. The fearful, ugly, swarming land-crabs scurried away from before him. "Colonel!" he sobbed, "fore de Lawd, Colonel, where is you? I'se ...
— A Little Dusky Hero • Harriet T. Comstock
... raised his rifle. But it was too late for the eagle to stop. The heavy figure with the tearing beak and claws swooped downward, and there was silence and terror among the green leaves. But before the eagle could clutch or rend, Henry's rifle spoke with unerring aim, and the body fell to the ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... assume the role of the despicable and execrated "masher." The refined and elegant appearance of his victim and the contiguity of the conscientious cop encouraged him to believe that he would soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon his arm that would insure his winter quarters on the right little, tight ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... held my knife but my arms were pinned down. Gervais raised himself a little to get a better clutch, and his fingers closed on my throat. One grip, and life seemed flowing from me. My arm was free now if I could but lift it. If I could not, nevermore should I lift it on this sunny earth. I did lift it, and drove the ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... in rapt and unreal fashion. He had realized his boyhood dream of returning to Nevada a rich and respected man with a fairy-princess sort of wife. The deadly anaesthesia of unreality which these get-rich-quick candidates of to-day indulge in at the outset of their struggle still had Steve in its clutch. He had not even stirred from out its influence. He had accomplished what he had set out to accomplish—and he was now about to realize that there is a distinct melancholy in the fact that everyone needs an Aladdin's window to finish. But under the influence of the anaesthesia he had proposed ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... mind enabled him to clutch the jagged sides of the rock desperately, so that in the wave's return he was not drawn with it into the sea depths. Stunned, strangled, half blinded, and impelled by a sudden horror of death in the cold, treacherous ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... presented me irresistibly in the light of a victim. Like all persons who achieve the miracle of changing their point of view when they are old she had been intensely converted; she had seized my hint with a desperate, tremulous clutch. ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... precision of troops on parade, is a magnificent spectacle. Old soldiers, hardened in the fires of battle, and not given to emotion, lean forward watching the advance of the Virginians with fiery eyes. You would say, from the fierce clutch of the gaunt hands on the muskets, that they wish to follow; and many ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... in return; for the scanty dollars it yields him, but the gamester had chosen his time well, and the men who had borne the dreary solitude of winter in outlying farms, and now only saw another adverse season opening before them, were for once in the mood to clutch at any excitement that would relieve the monotony of their ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... big piece ready to shove into his mouth in the other, I stole up close to him; and when he turned his back to me, I jumped upon him. Luckily, instead of carrying the musket on his shoulder, he had it under his arm, so that I was able to seize the lock with one hand, and clutch him by the throat with the other. I gripped pretty hard, and the man, in half a minute, slipped down to ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... the gate and disappeared behind the hedge. The knife would do not good on the ground there; it wouldn't vex Tom; and pride or resentment was a feeble passion in Bob's mind compared with the love of a pocket-knife. His very fingers sent entreating thrills that he would go and clutch that familiar rough buck's-horn handle, which they had so often grasped for mere affection, as it lay idle in his pocket. And there were two blades, and they had just been sharpened! What is life without a pocket-knife to him who has once tasted a higher existence? No; to throw the handle after ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... While pondering thus his honor's claims in search of just redress, He thought of an expedient his failing house to test; So summoning to his side his sons, excused all explanation, Silent began to clutch their hands in proper alternation, (Not by their tender palms to trace the chiromantic linings, For at that day no place was found in Spain for such divinings), But calling on his honor spent for strength and self-denial, He set aside parental love and ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... — I would do it. I have warned men away from here. I have done a little, times and again, to save them from a snare laid for them. But never once have I had power to rescue from his relentless clutch the victim he had once enclosed in his net, for never have I had help from without. But when I heard them speak of Raymond de Brocas — when I knew that it was he, thy brother, of whom some such things were spoken — then I felt that ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... in business matters is utterly impossible; you must be shrewd! In business, dear, on approaching a man you must hold honey in your left hand, and clutch a knife in your right. Everybody would like to buy five copecks' worth for ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... the earth. They reel back into their seats, or clutch the nearest support. They hear the falling of the shattered glass from ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... to face the house the remembrance of the unpaid hat bill laid a cold clutch on her heart. Until the first of next month she had exactly ten dollars at her credit, and that was Simeon's—not hers—given to her for a specific purpose. She determined to throw herself upon his indulgence, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... we view thee: O world intangible, we touch thee: O world unknowable, we know thee: Inapprehensible, we clutch thee! ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... how the heavy tapestry shivered under Correy's clutch. Had this been observed by anyone besides himself? If by chance some person wandering about the court had been looking up—but no, the few people gathered there stood too far forward to see what was going on in this part of the gallery; and relieved from all further anxiety on this score, he ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... Son of the Morning." The demon rabble of "Popular Tales" are merely the lubber fiends of heathen mythology, beings endowed with supernatural might, but scantily provided with mental power; all of terrific manual clutch, but of weak intellectual grasp. And so the hardy mortal who measures his powers against theirs, even in those cases in which his strength has not been intensified by miraculous agencies, easily overcomes or deludes the slow-witted monsters with ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... their families, the camp of waiting ones left behind in the woods? With no one to hunt for them, gaunt Famine held these in her clutch. Grandmothers' faces grew weary, the sharpened eyes of the little children peered daily across the snow waiting, watching, for the hunters who were to bring food. The fires were made in readiness, but no meat came to those hanging kettles. Old and feeble, young ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... and maiden started over the course. They went so like the wind that they left not a footprint. The people cheered on Hippomenes, eager that such valor should win. But the course was long, and soon fatigue seemed to clutch at his throat, the light shook before his eyes, and, even as he pressed on, the ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... single exception to this rule of honesty. The other councillors worked from a sense of duty, possibly urged by a worthy ambition. Councillor Garnett occasionally dipped his hand in the municipal purse, and brought from it as many golden guineas as he could clutch. Yet he had led the Council for many years, and was still regarded by the Conservative element as a worthy leader. In all probability he would have continued to rule the civic affairs of Grey Town had not Denis Quirk come to the town to ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... out of the house carried her, at first, toward the tree, and Little cried wildly to Coventry to save her. He awoke from his stupor of horror, and made an attempt to clutch her; but then the main force of the mighty water drove her away from him toward the house; her helpless body was whirled round and round three times, by the struggling eddies, and then hurried away like a feather by the ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... was appalling. Then came the deafening roar of a gun—the last fired then at the now distant schooner—and Mark sank down from the thwart and was turning away from the men to hide his drawn face, when he uttered a wild cry, flung himself half over the side of the boat, and made a desperate clutch at something which just rose above the water. Then hand grasped hand, the white holding the black in a desperate clutch, as the lieutenant dropped the rudder-lines, and saved Mark from going overboard by seizing him ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... of me the little, elfish creature with her frightened eyes and short, curly hair seemed standing; on the other, the girl to whom Harrie was engaged. I could not help them. Could not help Selwyn. Could help no one! If David Guard—at thought of him the clutch at my throat lessened. David Guard could help them. He had promised to come whenever I sent for him, and to him I could talk as to no one ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... highest of the range. It is not an easily accessible mountain, nor is it often climbed. There is deemed to be something uncanny about it. Its ascent is very dangerous, they say. Accidents have occurred there; a strange ill omen, it is believed, invests those ghostly snows; the death-clutch of the Balaitous holds many a brave mountaineer. As seen from here, it has an indefinably spectral, repellent look; there seems something almost hideous in its white and ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... of you fellows! What did you promise before we left Liberty Hall?" Hardy shouted frantically, as he writhed in Amos's clutch. ...
— Under the Liberty Tree - A Story of The 'Boston Massacre' • James Otis
... below. Now he was perched like an eagle over the dizzy gulf and his brain swam. Backward he feared to go, and forward he might not, for there was nothing but air. Beside him, growing from the face of the cliff, was a birch-bush. He grasped it to steady himself. It bent beneath his clutch, and then he saw, behind it, a hole in the rock through which a man could creep, and down this ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... through the extension of the classified service. This he urged at all times, and ten years later, when he was himself President, he added more than fifty thousand offices to the list of those which the spoilsmen could not clutch. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... spoke the boy threw in the descending clutch, and the big monoplane began to drop as swiftly as a buzzard that has espied ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... with his captive, nor with the herds Carson's men were driving back to the higher pastures. They were entirely for Judith, and they were filled with fear. She had been gone for three full days; she was somewhere in the clutch of Trevors or of one of his cutthroats. He thought of her, of Quinnion's red-rimmed, evil eyes, and as he had not prayed in all the years of his life ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... of animals was scarcely twenty-five yards away, and, with a clutch of horror at his heart, Bud recognized that they were not cattle as he had supposed, but ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... with an enormous sense of relief and warmth, in the passage. The passage was behaving like a dice-box, its disposition was evidently to rattle him about and then throw him out again. He hung on with the convulsive clutch of instinct until the passage lurched down ahead. Then he would make a short run cabin-ward, and clutch ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... that of eighty or a hundred persons stationed aloft, straining their eyes to keep sight of a poor fellow who is struggling for his life, and all eagerly extending their hands towards him, as if they could clutch him from the waves. To see these hands drop again is inexpressibly painful, from its indicating that the unfortunate man is no longer distinguishable. One by one the arms fall down, reluctantly, as if it were a signal that all hope was over. Presently the boat is observed to range about at random; ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... wall and crouched upon the floor. I tried to pray. I tried to call the name of my dear husband. Then I heard the door thrown open. There was an interval of unconsciousness, and when I revived I felt a strangling clutch upon my throat—felt my arms feebly beating against something that bore me backward—felt my tongue thrusting itself from between my teeth! And then I passed into ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... they began to throw up defences and remove their valuables into the interior. It was in the highest degree irksome to Raleigh to wait thus inactive, while this handsome Spanish colony was slipping from his clutch, but he had been forbidden to move without orders. After three days' waiting for Essex, a council of war was held on board the 'War Sprite.' On the fourth Raleigh leaped into his barge at the head of a landing company, refusing the help of the Flemings who were with him, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... native land as a beautiful mermaid, about whom the giant's cold, chilly arms were slowly creeping, and I feared that some day those arms would crush her. That day has come. The helpless mermaid lies prostrate in the clutch of the octopus. Not that the constitution of Finland has been annulled, as has been so often erroneously stated, and quite generally believed. The Russian Government has made only a few inroads upon it. The great grievance of the Finns is not with what has ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... She let in the clutch again as the party broke into laughter, and they darted across the tracks behind ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... in turning to speak with Omar, had unfortunately loosened his hold of one of the handles, and the sudden jolt at such a high speed was so violent that our faithful guide and friend was shot off backwards, and ere Omar could clutch him he had disappeared with a shriek of despair into the ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Uzcoques with unwonted courage and energy. Jurissa Caiduch himself, forgetting any cause of dislike he might have to Dansowich, joined heart and hand in the plans formed by the pirates for the deliverance of their leader. Every man in Segna, whether young or old, all who could wield a cimeter or clutch a knife, hastily armed themselves, and crowded into the fleet of long light skiffs in which they were wont to make their predatory excursions. Then breaking furiously through the line of Venetian ships, stationed between Veglia and the mainland, and which were totally unprepared for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... snorts, everybody climbed aboard. The driver let in the clutch, there was a tearing sound from underneath, but the motor did not go. One of the drivers clambered down, and after examination said that it could not go on that day, and they immediately began to take it to pieces. ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... due to the first glance you get at the hard, realistic England of to-day. You have noticed a machine clutch its raw material and twist and turn it through its relentless bowels. That is the way the habits of England seize you when you land, and begin to appropriate your personality. This is the first offence of England in the eyes of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... the first of the three courses. He held it with the nervous clutch of a weak nature until overmastered by two grim men who gradually hypnotized his will. The turning-point for Buchanan, and the last poor crisis in his inglorious career, came on Sunday, December 30th. ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... those of the swimmer, which had first attracted their own attention, had aroused the miller, who instantly, on hearing them, ran down with a rope to the water's side. He threw it skilfully; with a wild clutch Kennedy caught it, and in another moment, as from the very jaws of death, when they were almost touching the fatal wheel, they were drawn to shore, still carrying, or rather dragging, with them their ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... or his wife tried to oust me, I would clutch at the table and struggle sullenly until ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... scene had not been so tragic,—and his outstretched hand still held the mallet at the end of the blow. The carpenter's mouth was open in amazement. Neddie Benson, the first to move or break the silence, had spread his hands as if he were about to clutch at a butterfly or a beetle; dropping them to his side, he gasped huskily, "She said there'd be a light man and a dark ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... fight to slip the clutch of the ship's suction, in the middle of a heavy sea he managed to get off his clothes, and set to swimming, whither he did not know, a ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... resembled a triumphal procession, so great was the musical enthusiasm called out. When they returned Schumann's malady returned with double force, and on February 27, 1854, he attempted to end his misery by jumping into the Rhine. Madness had seized him with a clutch which was never to be released, except at short intervals. Every possible care was lavished on him by his heartbroken and devoted wife, and the assiduous attention of the friends who reverenced the genius now for ever quenched. The last two years ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... believed, were going well. Though they were not scrupulously just, these big men were generous, and were willing to give away what they had acquired. Though grasping, they were not avaricious. They grasped things with the strong prehensile grasp of the infant, rather than with the clutch of the miser. They took them because they were there, and not because they had any well-defined idea as to whether they belonged to them ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... making a desperate clutch at calmness, but losing his grip, "I'm going to make a clean breast of it this time, for sure! Then you can do ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... lied to me!" It was the last fierce flicker of hope when hope seemed dead: the last clutch of the drowning at the straw that ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... the dirtiest word one woman can launch at another, and on the instant made a grab at Mrs. Clerihew's brow. . . . It was a matter of notoriety in St. Hospital that Mrs. Clerihew wore a false "front." The thing came away in Mrs. Royle's clutch, and amid shrieks of laughter Mrs. Royle tossed it to Mrs. Ibbetson, who promptly clapped down a hot flat-iron upon it. The spectators rocked with helpless mirth as the poor woman strove to cover her bald brows, while the thing hissed and shrivelled to nothing, ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is far larger than when you were buried alive in a cell. Even though in some ways outlawed and suppressed, its potential power is tremendous. All it needs is the electric spark to cause the world-shaking explosion. All that keeps us from power now is the Iron Heel—that, and the clutch of the Air Trust already ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... which is slowly crumpling under the clutch of his nervous fingers, is worthy of attention, for it is written on crested paper which is blue. And the ink is blue, too, and might reasonably indicate the tone of the blood of the sender, though ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... waited to hear it turn to throw his full weight on the door, which opened outwards. He scarcely waited for the back-click to show that the door, which had no hasp or clutch beyond the key-service, was free on its hinges. Nevertheless, he was not so quick but that the man beyond was quicker, springing back sharp on the turn of his own hand. Cardwell stumbled as the door gave, unexpectedly easily, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... is Hercules!" roared the mighty stranger. "And you will never get out of my clutch until you tell me the nearest way to the garden ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... human history present us a form of heroism superior in kind or degree to that which this illustrious advocate exhibited during nearly two years, when he went forth daily, with his life in his hand, in the holy hope to snatch some human victim from the clutch of the destroyer thirsting for ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... from their sockets, he found himself once more at the surface, breathing in great gulps of the blessed air, and alone. For a moment he could not believe it, but gazed wildly about him, expecting each instant to feel the awful clutch that should again drag him under. He was nearly exhausted, and so weak that had not a floating oar come within his reach he must quickly have sunk, to ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... realize at once that it had been fooled by this human creature within its clutch, and with another growl, louder, fiercer and more startling than any yet, it prepared to spring ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... August 8, and hung to De Wet's right rear, Methuen hanging on to the left rear; but neither was able to do more than clutch vainly at the skirts of the elusive column. In front of De Wet, Smith-Dorrien was holding the Klerksdorp railway, but again he misled his pursuers, and instead of trekking north after he had crossed the Gatsrand, a movement which Smith-Dorrien ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... Belvidero looked at him with a feverish glitter in her eyes. She was silent. Then—"I should need no hired bravo to kill my lover if he forsook me!" she cried at last, and laughed, but the marvelously wrought gold comfit box in her fingers was crushed by her convulsive clutch. ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... dinner of herbs—in the liquid form of absinthe," said my master with a clutch at Paragot. "How does it go? Better a dinner of herbs ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Lavretsky ("A House of Gentlefolk"), hiding his misery in silence. It is not necessary to search for further examples. Turgenev put his hand upon the dark things. He perceived character, struggling in the "clutch of circumstances," the tragic moments, the horrible conflicts of personality. His figures have that capability of suffering which (as someone has said) is the true sign of life. They seem like real people, dazed and uncertain. No action of theirs ever surprises you, because in each of them he ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... lot of sailors on a raft who keep their places by kicking off the drowning hands that clutch at it. Can you fancy a fellow like Tausig stooping down to help me tenderly on board to ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... the withering Third in the bosom of sweetness; to be dragged through the past and find the fair Eden of it sulphurous; to be dragged to the gates of the future and glory to behold them blood: to adore the bitter creature trebly and with treble power to clutch her by the windpipe: it is to be cheated, derided, shamed, and abject and supplicating, and consciously demoniacal in treacherousness, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with nervous temper, Byrd laid down his napkin, and rose with an attempt at dignity somewhat marred by the viselike clutch of the swivel chair upon ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... would have hurt her. But as the torch flared in her face and lit up the shining heap of jewels, she threw up both hands and doubled back screaming. I believed that she called to me to hide. I put out a hand to catch her by the skirt, seeing that she ran madly; but the thin muslin tore in my clutch. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... the chief lodging-place of all that embodied British sovereignty in America. Naturally the material tokens of British rule radiated from the town, covering all of the island of Manhattan, most of Long Island, and all of Staten Island, and retaining a clutch here and there on ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... yo', honey, darlin', is yo' now? Don't you know dat I done chase dat ole debbil, an' made him drap you ter sabe heself? When I clutch him tight an' pinch he arms, he groan wif pain an' drap ye on de flo', slap me clean ober, and run fer his life. Open yer eyes now, deares', fer here comes Massa Love an' de ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... He was able to clutch the hatchet in his left hand as the power gave out in his right, and at that moment he arose to the surface and drew a succession of deep breaths before another of those terrible arms seized him by the leg and drew him ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... Continental, and not the Morse, code, and it was not quite the same as stooping over and listening to the crisp, incisive pulsations of a "sounder." But Frank heard and saw and pieced together enough of the message to clutch, in turn, at Durkin's arm, and wait with quickened breath for ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... happen again, though. Give me that book—" And, snatching Mell's treasure from her hands, Mrs. Davis flung it into the fire. It flamed, shrivelled: the White Cat, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast,—all, all were turned in one moment into a heap of unreadable ashes! Mell gave one clutch, one scream; then she stood quite still, with a hard, vindictive look on her face, which so provoked her step-mother that she gave her a slap as she hurried the children upstairs. Mrs. Davis did not often slap Mell. "I punish my own children," she would ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... sole protection which had hidden him from his enemies begin to move away his courage failed him, and he had not sufficient boldness to carry out the plan he had so neatly arranged. Instinctively he threw his arms up to clutch the rope again, but it was too late, it had already passed beyond his reach; there was nothing left to save him. Another moment and his hiding place would be discovered, when——, Sir Thomas missed his footing, and with a gesture of impatience he let the bundle ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... held each other again, there seemed to be long retrospects of tried and tender intercourse in their very touch. Their eyes held a past in them as well as a future. There was no hurry of the emotions now, no reason for haste in the seeking and giving of tenderness, no need to snatch and clutch the good gifts of love as though there was but a short day for the giving. Their love had ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... a clutch that seemed to crush the muscles, and she was flung back on to the chair. Terror would not let the scream pass her lips: she lay with open ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... on his feet again, and his first motion was to clutch the tomahawk, but Arundel catching his arm, compelled him to desist from his revenge. Holding the savage by the arm, Arundel passed out of the apartment, leaving the Assistant standing as if petrified ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... the scout must know first how to swim, to care for himself, and then to learn to carry another and to break the clutch, the "death grip," which we read so much about in the newspaper accounts of drowning accidents. By constant training, a boy, even though not a good swimmer, can be perfectly at home in the water, fully dressed, undressed, or carrying a boy of his own size or larger. In fact two boys of twelve ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... the worshipper's posture? Yes, and when Gower Woodseer's 'Malady of the Wealthy,' as he terms the pivotting of the whole marching and wheeling world upon the favoured of Fortune's habits and tastes, promises to quit its fell clutch on him? ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... surprising is that small parcels of land, such as must have been assigned in these distributions, should have been so coveted. [Sidenote: Why small portions of land were so coveted.] The explanation is probably fourfold. Those who clamoured for them were wretched enough to clutch at any change; or did not realise to themselves the dangers and drawbacks of what they desired; or intended at once to sell their land to some richer neighbour; or, lastly, longed to keep a slave or two, just as the primary object of the 'mean ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... it, he fired. Sometimes a dozen soldiers rushed upon the muzzle of the field-piece surrounding it. At such moments Davy Crockett's arms swept back and forth with smooth unhurried swiftness and his sinewy fingers relaxed from one walnut stock only to clutch another; his hands were never empty. Always a little red flame licked the smoke fog before him like the tongue of an angered snake. He was getting on in years but in all his full life his technic had never been so perfect, his ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... better," said he firmly. "I thought he was dead. His blood flows; then I will save him. Don't clutch me so, Josephine; don't cling to me like that. Now is the time to show your breed: not turn sick at the sight of a little blood, like that foolish creature, but help me ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... apart, but Jack never reached his man. Without a sign, without a sound, someone sprang upon him from behind, flung a cord over his head, and seized him in a strangling grip. Jack was as strong as a young bull, but in this awful, noiseless clutch he was helpless. He fought madly to throw off his unseen assailant, but he fought in vain. He felt a noose close upon his throat, and his eyeballs began to start out and his head to swim. In front of him stood the mysterious stranger, who had moved neither hand nor foot, and Jack's last conscious ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... it home, thinking that perchance it might have come down to us from one planted by Marban's hand. Of blackthorns there are plenty. The adjective he uses is "dusky." Could he have chosen a more appropriate one? I thought, too, of "the clutch of eggs, the honey and the mast" that God sent him, of "the sweet apples and red whortleberries," and of his dish of "strawberries ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... gay—until soon his awakened suspicion as to what she had been up to in his absence quieted her. There was little forcing or pretense in this gayety; it bubbled and sparkled from the strong swift current of her healthy passionate young life which, suspended in the icy clutch of fear when he was away from her, flowed as freely as the brooks in spring as soon as she realized that she ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... Dumbness to them means indifference. She was therefore astonished at the calmness with which Amelie received the message she was charged to deliver. She did not see in the dimness of the twilight that Amelie's face from being pale grew livid. She did not feel the deadly clutch which, like an iron wrench, had seized her heart. She did not know that as her mistress walked to the door an automatic stiffness was in her limbs. Nevertheless she followed her anxiously. But at the door ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... office, he felt blind for a moment and put his hand to his head. The wold of vivid green grew gray, and life rceded from him into illimitable distance. He had one dim fading glimpse of a shaggy-bearded face looking down at him, and felt the clutch of an iron-hard strong arm under him, and then he lost hold even on so ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... steadied Billy, and on recognising him Mr. Blee forgot all about his former emotions and gasped in the clutch of a new one. It was Mr. Lezzard, evidently under some impulse of genial exhilaration. There hung an air of aggression about him, but, though he moved like a conqueror, his gait was unsteady and his progress ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... big old Billungs I will say nothing at all;—this only, that they died out; and a certain Albert, 'Count of Ascanien and Ballenstadt' (say, of ANHALT, in modern terms), whose mother was one of their daughters, came in for the northern part of their inheritance. He made a clutch at the Southern too, but did not long retain that. Being a man very swift and very sharp, at once nimble and strong, in the huge scramble that there then was,—Uncle Billung dead without heirs, a SALIC line of emperors going or gone out, and a HOHENSTAUFFEN ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... hour of his journey picturing his meeting with the runaway girl, holding her, kissing her, sheltering her in his arms from the world. And afterwards? He refused to contemplate what was to happen afterwards, and how he was to shield her from the unsentimental clutch of the law which was also seeking her. He declined also to allow his thoughts to dwell upon his own position, which was invidious and threatening enough in all conscience for a man setting out to ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... bit, and suddenly there was Gramper at the roadside, breathless after his run across a corner of the east forty. Instantly he was in the clutch of a great fear; the loss had been ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... nineteenth century their lore and cult have traversed the whole world in the wake of the great emigrations. Whether they failed or succeeded in wresting the independence and ideals of Ireland for a while from the fell clutch of circumstance, they ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... lies in the realm of illusion and represents an eternal type of affection. It is the love of a poet—a Pygmalion who loves his own creation. It is the love that is lost, but the things we lose or give away are the things we keep. That for which we clutch we lose. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... existence. Constitution or no Constitution, the nation must not be destroyed. Who but a fool would question the right of a man to strike a dagger to the heart of the assassin whose grasp was on his throat, because there is a law against the private use of deadly weapons? The clutch of a parricidal rebellion is grappling at the national existence, and what shall we think of those men who would stay the arm of Government from stabbing at its vitals by interposing constitutional scruples? Even if the Constitution did stand in the way, who ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... into his face as she crouched by his knee. "You DO know it. I can see in your eyes that you know it. And why have you come back to me, if you don't know it! Why have you come back to me? Tell me!" Her arms gave him a sharp, compulsory little clutch round the waist. "Tell me! Tell me!" she murmured, with all her appeal ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... why rail I on this commodity? But for because he hath not woo'd me yet; Not that I have the power to clutch my hand, When his fair angels would salute my palm; But for my hand, as unattempted yet, Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich. Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail And say there is no sin but to be rich; And being rich, my virtue then shall be To say there is no vice but beggary. ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... was an opportunity to clutch some of the ornamental work surrounding the doorway, and thus we managed to stay our mad progress, and gradually to work out of the current until we found that the water, having now an abundance of room to spread, had fallen again ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... with Cicely, and she made her way less willingly than usual to the apartments of the Queen, who was being made ready for her bed. "Here comes our truant," she exclaimed as the maiden entered. "I sent to rescue thee from the western seafarer who had clawed thee in his tarry clutch. Thou didst act the sister's part passing well. I hear my Lord and all his meine have been sitting, open-mouthed, hearkening to his ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lost no time. Quick as a flash he had cleared the distance between the door-way and that other figure—which attempted to clutch at him in turn—and raising the knife he had caught up from the table of the room below, he buried it to the hilt in the swaying, writhing form. The next instant it fell heavily at his feet. A moan, that sounded wonderfully like a woman's, fell upon ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... sobbing and says, "Don' go away, nurse...." He holds my hand in a fierce clutch, then releases it to point in the air, crying "There's the pain!" as though the pain filled the air and rose to the rafters. As he wakes it centralizes, until at last comes the moment when he says, "Me arm aches cruel," and points to it. Then ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... need of haste in getting upon his feet, he scrambled erect. He had maintained that frenzied clutch upon his gun, as if believing that it was his best and only ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... (one-half of the lady passengers in public conveyances along the route gave, as their instruction and appeal to conductors, "Set me down as near as you can to Brown and Hodgkinson's!"), and there was purchased a blouse of white lace—costing so much that Gertie, on hearing the amount, had to clutch at one of the high chairs; and as Clarence paid readily with gold, the polite young woman on the other side of the counter assured him it was well worth the money. Gertie, at another establishment, bought a pair of slippers, saying to herself that they would ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... fall, as falls the bearded rye beneath the reaper's steel; And then arose a mighty shout that might have waked the dead,— "Hurrah! they run! the field is won! Hurrah! the foe is fled!" And every man hath dropped his gun to clutch a neighbor's hand, As his heart kept praying all the while for ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... empezar to begin. emplazar to set a time and place for meeting. emplear to employ. empleo employment. empolvar to cover with dust. emprender to undertake. empresa enterprise. empunadura hilt. empunar to clutch. en in. encadenar to chain. encaminar to guide; vr. to set out. encanecer to grow gray. encantador, -a enchanting, charming. encanto charm. encapotar to shroud. encarar vr. to face. encarecimiento urgency. encargar ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... one way and he another. He wanted to drop the gentleman and go down into the ranks, beginning on the lowest rung of the ladder, where no one would know of his disgrace or mind it if he did know; his father and mother on the other hand would wish him to clutch on to the fag-end of gentility at a starvation salary and with no prospect of advancement. Ernest had seen enough in Ashpit Place to know that a tailor, if he did not drink and attended to his business, could earn more money than a clerk or a curate, ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... making their nightly sittings in the door yard, if the house has one; a stray turkey, or two, running, from fear of the untutored dogs, into the nearest wood, in the spring, to make their rude nests, and bring out half a clutch of young, and creeping about the fields through the summer with a chicken or two, which the foxes, or other vermin, have spared, and then dogged down in the winter, to provide a half got-up Christmas-dinner; and the hens about the open buildings all the year, committing their nuisances in every possible ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... happy—as well she might be—for she had stumbled into the greatest triumph in her history. When bankers and merchants shook hands with the Hebrew speculator, they noticed—though they did not understand—an unusual warmth of pressure. It was not rejoicing with the nation; it was the imaginary clutch of six millions more of gold. Thus it is seen that the great wealth of the Rothschild was not always used to the best advantage of mankind as a Christian would argue; but a promise given by a Rothschild was as ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... she screamed. "I am not fit to die! Oh, forgive me, Maurice, as you hope for forgiveness yourself! Maurice! Maurice!" She strove to get towards him, to clutch at his wrist, at his sleeve, but he stood with his hand on his sword, gazing at her with a face which was all wreathed and contorted with merriment. At the sight of that dreadful mocking face the prayers froze upon her lips. As well pray for mercy to the dropping ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his forehead and shaded his small, twinkling eyes. At times, with a vague, nearly automatic gesture, he reached his hand forward, the fingers prehensile, and directed towards the horizon, as if he would clutch it and draw it nearer; and at intervals he muttered, "Hurry, hurry, hurry on, hurry on." For now at last McTeague ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
