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More "Gruesome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gathered up the skulls and bones of Incas that were strewn about and amused themselves by playing ten pins on the hard sand, sticking the bones up and rolling the skulls at them. Don Nicholas paid no attention to the gruesome sport; but stood calmly conversing with the ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... darling, to make you look so frightened. Only I have had a rather gruesome experience. I found a dead man, and ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... from the gruesome into the mawkish, were counteracted and balanced by more serious influences undergone at school at the hands of my teachers and schoolfellows. Even there, it was chiefly the weird that aroused my keenest ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... poetical qualities than to theatrical—unjustly; for even though we regard the play as but the scenic representation of the incidents of a night, the representation is of absorbing interest and is entirely free from the crudities which make Muellner's dramas more gruesome than dramatic. But Grillparzer nevertheless resolved that his next play should dispense with all adventitious aids and should take as simple a form and style as he could give it. A friend chanced to suggest to him that the story of Sappho would furnish a text for an opera. Grillparzer replied ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... him. I told him the whole gruesome story. He saw, he could not help but see what a deep impress the events of the night had made on me. He heard me to the end with every appearance of sympathy,—and then all at once I discovered that all the time papa had been concealed behind a large ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... no need to warn Sprudell again to "look where he was goin'," as he existed from that moment with his gaze alternating between the gruesome bundle and the gloomy face of his black-browed host. Incredulity and suspicion shone plainly in his eyes. Sprudell's imagination was a winged thing, and now it spread its startled pinions. Penned up with a murderer—what a tale to tell in Bartlesville, if by chance he returned ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... ignorant and terrified people, and asserted boldly that it would not attack the well-fed and prosperous classes; whilst others declared that the whole country would speedily be depopulated, and whispered gruesome tales of those scenes of death and horror which were shortly to become so common. Then the inhabitants of isolated houses like Woodcrych received visits from travelling peddlers and mountebanks of all sorts, many disguised in Oriental garb, who ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... know, in theory, how to make The matutinal tea and coffee, And, when at school, I used to bake A gruesome mess described as toffee; But these, which form my whole cuisine, Are scarce the kind of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... I was with a doctor, looking at a dead Turk who was a particularly gruesome sight, with blood still dripping from his nose. Suddenly appeared a merchant with a camera, who took this Turk's photo. Not satisfied with this, he proceeded to stage-manage the place. The ambulance was coming up to remove a wounded Turk. He ordered it back, then bade it run up smartly, ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... coming day the gruesome reality had to be faced, that one and all of my party had contracted fever of the desert in more or less violent form, even the kittens, who sneezed and trembled the whole day. Some of the camels, too, were unwell and lay with their long necks resting upon the ground and refused to eat. The ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... up two flights of bare, stone stairs, and down a long, whitewashed corridor. It was a gruesome place; rows and rows of heavy doors with little, barred windows. I noticed that each door had a combination knob, like a safe. My knees felt ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... Landseer and his school, she had struck out a line for herself, and had copied the Graphic and Illustrated London News Supplements of the stirring scenes from the South African War, such as "The Siege of Ladysmith," "The Death of the Prince Imperial" in all its gruesome local colouring, were worked on gigantic canvases. Her great chef d'oeuvre was, however, the memorial statue of Queen Victoria, copied from the Graphic Supplement in tones of black, white, and grey, ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... boy's acceptance, the captain turned to the sailor who had just finished the gruesome task of sewing up the corpse. "Johansen, do ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... his shoulder, and seizing his gun, G. W. tore on down the hill straight toward the gruesome place below, and right into it. No one noticed him. The surgeons were too busy to look up as he ran around the table scanning the faces upon the boards. The men carrying the helpless burdens, or ministering to their wants, had no time to question why a little black ...
— A Little Dusky Hero • Harriet T. Comstock
... wedged in at the bottom of Quill's Chimney, weighted down with stones and earth, alone served as an obstacle to the enterprise. He shrank from certain gruesome possibilities,—such as the dislodgment of stones at the bottom of the crevice and the consequent exposure of a thing that would haunt him forever. And even though the stones remained in place there would still remain the fact that almost within arm's length was ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... truth, a gruesome spectacle! A huge beast—maddened to fury by the sharp lashes of a stinging whip, blinded by the blows that had fallen thick and fast about his head and ears, goaded by the memory of years of cruelty and brutality—crushing to death in his hairy embrace his tormentor, as together they rolled ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... it will be asked at the outset, what possible connexion can there be between the practice of so fantastic and gruesome an art as the embalming of the dead and the building up of civilization? Is it conceivable that the course of the development of the arts and crafts, the customs and beliefs, and the social and political ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... cities was brought about in a very few years, whereas the gradual extension of our poverty-stricken classes has been going on for centuries. To us poverty, besides being a horror, was more or less of a mystery; but America exhibited the development of the gruesome monster with lurid distinctness. In the old countries the men who first were able to seize the land gradually sublet portions either for money or warlike service; the growth of manufactures occupied a thousand years before it reached its present extent; and ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... to enforce abandoning library copies of Keats and buying an edition of my own. And this, too, may have been not unconnected with the gracious influence of the other sex as exhibited in a neighbouring athenaeum; and was accompanied by a gruesome spate of florid lyrics: some (happily) secret, and some exposed with needless hardihood in a college magazine. The world, which has looked leniently upon many poetical minorities, regards such frenzies with tolerant charity and forgetfulness. But the wretch concerned ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... zeal that was truly magnificent. Dead, dying, wounded, were dotted all over the veldt. There, bearded old Boers, boys, Britons in their prime, were indiscriminately counted, collected, tended, the Field Hospital men and Indian stretcher-bearers working incessantly and ungrudgingly till dawn. Gruesome and heart-rending were the sights and scenes around the camp-fires when such wounded as could crawl dragged themselves towards their comrades. Pitiable the faces of the survivors as news came in of gallant hearts that had ceased to beat. ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... and shook with fear, and when the crocodile, in a gruesome growl, remarked that he was hungry and wanted a good meal, the wretched creature hadn't a word ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... accepted, that only now and then did some bold thinker dare openly to gainsay it. The idea that a conviction of personal immortality has a specially ennobling influence on the moral nature of man, is not confirmed by the gruesome history of mediaeval morals, and as little by ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... palpable fact that the American habit of lynching had so whetted the thirst for black blood that a negro suspected of crime had to face at least the possibility of a short shrift and a long rope, not to mention more gruesome horrors, without the intervention of judge or jury. Since to have a black face at such a time was to challenge suspicion, and since there was neither the martyr's glory nor the saint's renown in being killed for some one else's crime, ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... he had not been at the house at all and so had not discovered the crime when he did. That would give Aleck Douglas more time to get away. But there was Jean, due at any moment now. He could not go away and let Jean discover that gruesome thing on the kitchen floor. He could not take it up and hide it away somewhere; he could not do anything, it seemed ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... these years, found record in a novella of Boccaccio's followers. The Novelle answered in some respects to our newspaper reports of trials and the earlier Last Speech and Confession. But the example of Boccaccio raised these gruesome topics into the region of art. Often these tragedies are reported of the true actors; still more often under the disguise of fictitious names, that enabled the narrator to have more of the artist's freedom ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... twice does he make the attempt, and then, meeting with no response from me, he collapses. Nor does it relieve depression to be set down in a solemn courtyard, lighted by a solitary gas-lamp. This in itself would be quite sufficient to make a weary traveller melancholy, without the tolling of a gruesome bell to announce our arrival. This dispiriting sound seems to affect nobody in the house, except a lengthy young man in a desperate state of unwakefulness, who sleepily resents our arrival in the midst of his first slumber (he must have gone to bed at nine), ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... ways of least resistance; and life for them is a wallowing in the morbid and unwholesome. In them feeling is perverted, they seem to see life habitually through dark glasses; they passively attend to the sad, the distressing, sometimes the gruesome and the horrible with a sort of pallid joy in their own discolored images. The first group puts joy in all they see, because they are brimming full of joy themselves. These others find only the ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... but we admit to each other that the revilers have only erred on the side of timidity. The pall of the place is unmistakable and wraps us in completely; even a genial party and determined high spirits are slowly forced to succumb. There seems something gruesome about it; the curious burden is not to be shaken ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... steps lay a dead Marine, and beside him stood a French surgeon, who greeted them warmly. The wounded were in a cellar, and if they were not got out soon, it was obvious that they would be burned alive. Inside the hall were piles of bicycles, loaves of bread, and dead soldiers, all in gruesome confusion. In the cellar dead and wounded were lying together. The wounded had all to be carried on stretchers, for everyone who could crawl had fled from that ghastly inferno, and only those who have shifted ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... two weeks to-morrow since I dined with Judge Howe, the postmaster-general, going out to the table with him, and here he is dead! Poor Arthur, he will find the Presidency more gruesome with a favourite cabinet minister gone! If it were Folger now, I suppose he would not care, for they really do not know what to do with him."—Mrs. James G. Blaine, Letters, Vol. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the night Gard lay awake, living over the gruesome moments spent in the ill-omened house on Washington Square. The ghastly face of the dead man seemed to stare at him from every ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... persistent chilliness had come over her, and all at once she was seized by an immense discouragement. She felt that she was now being borne away to some terrible place. Those people called it Roaring River. Now that she thought of it the very name represented something that was gruesome and panicky. But then she lay back and reflected that its flood would be cleaner and its bed a better place to leap into, if her fears were realized, than the turbid waters of the Hudson. She knew that she ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... it, Joan?" he pleaded. "You saw how it was?" As she grew quieter, he talked. "I heard you scream like a person being tortured to death—twice—a gruesome enough sound, let me tell you, to hear in the dead of a white, still night. I didn't altogether want to break into your house. I've heard some ugly stories about men venturing to disturb the work of murderers. But, you see, Joan, I've a fear ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... taste, old Time, it is more agreeable to make this evening a season of gruesome brooding. Morosely I survey the faults and follies of my last year. I am grown too canny to pour the new wine of good resolution into the old bottles of my imperfect humors. But I get a certain grim satisfaction in thinking how we ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... their occupants one by one waving their arms about and tumbling from their funeral chairs as they shot into the spray veil and went out of sight under a faint rainbow that was arched over there, the symbol of peace and the only lovely thing in that gruesome region. Another minute and I must have gone with them. It was too late to think of getting out of the tangle then; the water behind was heavy with trailing silks and flowers. We were jammed together almost like one huge float and in that latter fact ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... into the strange brooding silence of the place. But, I must confess, this applies only to the space on the side of the bed next the fire. The bed itself—not to mention the shadowy region beyond it—on which the body of the pirate had lain, he could not regard without a sense of the awfully gruesome: itself looked scared at its own consciousness of the fact, and of the feeling ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... unskilled, and illiterate, shunning as profane the Christian churches of the land, and bowing in unknown rites as devotees of a system known, and by no means favorably known, only through polemic literature and history, and through the gruesome traditions of Puritan and Presbyterian and Huguenot, was an impression not far removed from horror; and this impression was deepened as the enormous proportions of this invasion disclosed themselves from ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... one of the trips their flagpole and staff, which was put up on a high point, called Observation Hill, was missing. Later on a gruesome skeleton was found on the seashore not far from Observation Hill, and the wrecked portions of a boat, and to this may be added the discovery of a lifeboat, similar to their own, among debris on South river, fully ten miles inland, which must have ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... we knew it would. I heard it all. It wasn't gruesome, as you might imagine. I spoke with Lynds the whole time. It was sort of a resigned horror. The initial countdown went off without a hitch and the hissing of the escape valves on the carrier rocket changed to a sound that hammered the sky apart as ...
— What Need of Man? • Harold Calin
... Jackal shivered and shook with fear, and when the Crocodile, in a gruesome growl, remarked that he was hungry and wanted a good meal, the wretched creature ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... his toes with delight, the tale being of that gruesome nature which appeals to him. It must have been tried on countless other children, for, despite Whinnie's autobiographical interjections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primitive Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked over in ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... half-hour, as told by Jake, would make your flesh creep. They did not dare to carry a lamp to light the gruesome task, and well as they knew the way, the possibilities of a stumble or a fall against some one of the many trees they had to pass filled them with constant terror. They did stumble once, and the low cry Jake uttered caused them new fears. Was that a window ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... notorious instance. But all blue diamonds are unlucky. I could tell you some gruesome stories connected with them. The previous wearer of the Heredith necklace—Philip's mother—died in giving birth to him. Incidentally, there is a curious legend attached to the moat-house in the form of a curse laid on it by the ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... will transform myself again, and you can give them to her." No sooner had she finished speaking than she mounted a cloud and disappeared in space. The two ministers reached the palace and presented to the Queen the gruesome remedy which they had brought from the temple. She, overcome with gratitude and emotion, wept copiously. "What Immortal," she asked, "can have been so charitable as to sacrifice a hand and eye for the King's benefit?" ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... mouth was a little to a side; one nostril nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his back, as people say, in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed hard under the gruesome burden. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Calvin had a charm for natures like Mistress Forrester, who, secure in her own salvation, could afford to look down on those outside the groove in which she walked; and with neither imagination nor any love of the beautiful, she felt a gruesome satisfaction in what was ugly in her own dress and appearance, and a contempt for others who had eyes to see the beauty to which she ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... a fine country, and here I should like to build myself a home," he said, little deeming in what gruesome manner his words were ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... conditions of war with all its paraphernalia for the first time. Up to this time we had been playing at war, so to speak, in a camp of instruction. Now we were entering upon the thing itself, with all its gruesome accessories. Everything here was business, and awful business, too. Here were parks of artillery quiet enough just now, but their throats will speak soon enough, and when they do it will not be the harmless booming of Fourth of July celebrations. Here we pass a bivouac ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... days, if he had ever had any, were long past, had gone down with a crash, and remained on the pavement, motionless. Fenn was conscious of an ignoble impulse to fly without stopping to chat about the matter. Then he was seized with a gruesome fear that he had injured the man seriously, which vanished when the stranger sat up. His first words were hardly of the sort that one would listen to from choice. His first printable expression, which did not ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... man runs after for the remainder of his life. A single kiss had been enough. Never had rendezvous been spent in a manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous divinity; for the mother had remained in Henri's imagination like some infernal, cowering thing, cadaverous, monstrous, savagely ferocious, which the imagination of poets and painters had not yet conceived. In effect, no rendezvous had ever irritated his senses ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... went, their spirits at the very highest pitch of exhilaration, and their nerves by so much the steadier, and such rapid progress did they make that ten minutes later saw them clustered together clinging to the rocky pinnacle before mentioned. And a gruesome-enough looking spot it was—a sharp projecting point of rock overhanging a sheer precipice some two hundred feet deep, with a narrow snow-bank immediately beneath, and then another frightful abyss of unknown depth beyond. And, to the right and left of it, an almost vertical face ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... to me at a tavern in Dantzig. I didna bide long there. I was landed wi' the smugglers at Fowey," says he, "and McNeilage put me ashore last night at the Point and was to leave word for ye. It was a thought gruesome here," says he, "wi' McAllan and the dog among the bones ben there—deid? Ay, deid twenty years, Hamish, by the look o' things. Tell me about Belle," said he, "Belle and the boy, Hamish. The lass that wrote had a great word o' the boy, ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... Wilhelmina's residence from without, looked at some of the famous paintings in the art gallery, then shuddered over the instruments of torture on exhibition in the "Torture Chamber" found in the old prison. There were some gruesome articles here. ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... perhaps the most conspicuous example of a whole people burdened throughout its history with a heritage of malignant gossip. In the town of Lincoln, in England, there exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous "Jew's House," associated with the gruesome legend of "the boy of Lincoln"—a child, it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their pastoral feasts. Such a wild belief in child-sacrifice by the Jews was widespread in the Middle Ages, and is largely responsible, I understand, even at the present day, for the ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... day the gruesome task of burying the dead began, and continued throughout the day, and by nightfall of May 3d the Battle of Bayan was over and passed, but I cannot say forgotten, for that can never be, for the memory of that battle will ever dwell ...
— The Battle of Bayan and Other Battles • James Edgar Allen
... right," answered the young man. "Things are not often so serious as they are supposed to be. It's like being in a house that's supposed to be haunted—on All Hallow E'en, for instance—it's awfully gruesome and creepy at night when the wind moans and the owls screech. And then, the next morning, one wonders how one could have been such an idiot. Other things are often like that. You think the world's coming ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... and redoubled his efforts to escape from the gruesome place. There still remained a small hole through which he must climb. But he negotiated it successfully, and in another moment he was aboveground ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... broke in Annie Mair, who had waked up while they were speaking. "I wuss ye wud gar him tell ye that story, for my man he's h'ard 'im tell 't, an' he says it's unco gruesome: I wad fain hear 't.—Wauk up, Lizzy," she went on, in her eagerness waiting for no answer: "Ma'colm's gauin' to tell 's the tale o' the auld castel o' Colonsay.—It's oot by yon'er, my leddy—no that far frae ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... with Etruscan works of art, themselves the result of a knowledge of Greek art and myth.[849] Early in the second century B.C. Plautus in the Captivi alluded to these paintings as familiar;[850] and we must not forget that the Etruscans habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for illustration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his work on the ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... P.M. De Boer flung on the mechanism of invisibility. The interior of the ship faded to its gruesome green darkness. My senses reeled as the current surged through me. Lashed in my chair, I sat straining my adjusting eyes, straining my hearing to cope with this gruesome unreality. And my heart was pounding. Would Jetta and I succeed? Or was our love—unspoken love, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... flying splinters, you get labour conditions removed to the utmost limit from ideal, and, to any but the men of the Sappers, well over the edge of the impossible. The work at any other time would have been gruesome and unnerving, because the gasping and groaning of the wounded hardly ceased from end to end of the captured trench, and in digging out the collapsed sections many dead Germans and some British were found blocking the vigorous thrust ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... when he came forth to start for the Platte was a gruesome sight. "He looked," said the unfeeling linesman, after he'd gone, "as though he'd seen ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... themselves, in an upper corner of the congregation, were four or five very old women, who were able to manifest their pious enthusiasm in no other way than by rocking their bodies backwards and forwards, and singing with their cracked voices a gruesome and monotonous chant. This rude song had something of a wild and uncivilized nature, as if it had come down to these old people from the savage rites of their African ancestors. They did not sing in ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... at the keenness of our appetites in the midst of the most gruesome surroundings. Dead men were lying about us, both in the trenches and outside of them. And yet our rissoles were not a whit the less enjoyable on ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... did not associate all this phantasmagoria of gloom with the death of the body—partly perhaps because they had a much more rational method of disposing of the body—a method which was not only infinitely better for the dead man and more healthy for the living, but was also free from the gruesome suggestions connected with slow decay. They knew much more about death in those days, and because they knew more ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... coating of fine sand, deposited from the eddying winds that could never reach the silent depths. The place was gruesome, horribly depressing. Jenks broke out into a clammy perspiration. He seemed to be looking at ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... evidently bales of tapa-cloth. The burden of one set of poles, heavier than the rest, however, was not so easily made out. My curiosity was whetted to know whether it was a roast pig or something of a gruesome nature, and I inquired about it. "I don't know," said Mrs. Stevenson, "whether this is a wedding or a funeral. Whatever it is, though, captain, our place seems to be at ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... place where the planes had been there had floated or crashed down a litter of non-ferrous wreckage. And now the cone of space-ships from the Buffalo base of Triplanetary was approaching Pittsburgh, hurling itself toward the Nevian plunderer and toward known, gruesome ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... It was a gruesome journey, never to be forgotten, and made more bearable by several little acts of kindness on the part of her fellow-travellers, as such journeys ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Hume was safe from discovery in his gruesome hiding-place, but he could not live without food, and the difficulty was to convey it ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... Greeks, there lay far to the west, in the ocean, a wonderful island where were kept, under the guard of a gruesome dragon, the beautiful golden apples which Gaea gave as a wedding present to Zeus. The Hesperides were the three daughters of Night, who ruled the guardian dragon. These golden apples, then, came to be known as the apples of Hesperides. When Hercules in his madness had slain ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... paper which he had thrown back to me and read the paragraph indicated. It was headed, "A Gruesome Packet." ...
— The Adventure of the Cardboard Box • Arthur Conan Doyle
... told of certain houses, in different parts of the country, many weird skull stories, the popular idea being that if any profane hand should be bold enough to remove, or in any way tamper with, such gruesome relics of the dead, misfortune will inevitably overtake the family. Hence, for years past, there have been carefully preserved in some of our country homes numerous skulls, all kinds of romantic traditions accounting for their present isolated and ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... sensation of the hour. The newspapers had "stunted" it, and the public, always eager for gruesome sensation, had welcomed it as if it had been ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... divided into unequal portions by the four wide, massive pillars that supported its arched roof. A smell of damp and mildew came from its walls and from its flags moistened by the water that trickled from without. Its appearance at any time must have been gruesome. But, at that moment, with the tall figures of Sebastiani and his sons, with the slanting gleams of light that fell between the pillars, with the vision of the captive chained down upon the truckle-bed, it assumed a ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... found the next day, grounded on the shoals off Hatteras. The sea was oily and calm. It lay like a gruesome shell, as though some fire had swept all its interior. Yet not fire either, for there were no embers, no ashes. Diseased, leprous, gruesomely weird with parts of its interior intact and other parts obliterated. And no living soul was upon it save one steward ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... contenerle cinendose a la suministracion de polvora, balas y efectos de treta con la cantata posible para no dar a los Americanos justos motivos de gueya."] There is an unconscious and somewhat gruesome humor in this official belief that the Americans could have "no just cause" for anger so long as the Spaniards' ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... after all the chances and changes of seven hundred years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of the office lay a charred, shapeless, unrecognisable mass. What was that gruesome odour in the room? Burned human flesh? I recoiled from what had once been the form of ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... repulsive figure of Jean Paul Marat. She knew nothing of his associates, Danton and Robespierre. It was in Marat alone that she saw the monster who sent innocent thousands to their graves, and who reveled like some arch-fiend in murder and gruesome death. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... The gruesome thought of those rats and of that long night drove me mad with fear. I rolled about on the floor, I struck out with my arms and legs, like one possessed, in violent, childish fury. Then, worn out, I let my arms and ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... suggestions. The great things of the science of Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, and Balfour remain mainly untold. In the book of nature there are written, for instance, the triumphs of survival, the tragedy of death and extinction, the tragi-comedy of degradation and inheritance, the gruesome lesson of parasitism, and the political satire of colonial organisms. Zoology is, indeed, a philosophy and a literature to those who can read its symbols. In the contemplation of beauty of form and of mechanical beauty, and in the intellectual delight of tracing and elucidating ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality; but he realized that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations. ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Leichardt's land civilisation. The telegraph master there lived in a hut made of sheets of corrugated zinc, raised on piles twenty feet high and fortified against the Blacks. The entrance to it was masked, spear-proof and had two men always on guard—there were four men at the post. McKeith told a gruesome story of an assault by the natives, and of rifles at work through ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... Hungerford side of Ramsbury, and to the south of the Kennet, is the famous Littlecote Manor, a magnificent and unexcelled sixteenth-century house. Built by the Darells it passed to the Pophams, one of whom was a leader of the Parliamentarians. A gruesome and probably true story is told of the last of the Darells—"Wild Dayrell." A midwife deposed that she had been fetched blindfold to attend a lady at dead of night. When her offices were over, a wild-looking man seized the infant and hurled it in a blazing fire. Afterwards ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... and ringing floors, all went to make up the vast grave in which she was to bury all hope of escape. Immense were the iron-bound doors that led from one room to another; huge the bolts and rusty the hinges; gruesome and icy the atmosphere; narrow the steps that led to regions deeper in the bowels of the earth. Dorothy's heart sank like lead as she surveyed the impregnable walls and listened to the mighty groans of long-sleeping doors ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... middle of it." When S. recovered consciousness, he found himself half covered with dirt and debris of all kinds, and when he crawled out and brushed himself off, he saw that of all his comrades he alone survived, and that they were mangled and mutilated in a most gruesome way. "Pieces of my friends everywhere," is his terse account. He lay in the trench, not daring to move for hours, the bitterest thoughts assailing him,—anger, hatred and disgust for war, the Germans, his own countrymen; and he even cursed God. When he did this he shuddered ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... furniture, worm-eaten and decaying; scaffoldings, which seemed to have been erected for the sake of making repairs and then left; the windows were curtainless, the floors bare, and rats ran hither and thither among the rubbish accumulated in the corners. Nothing could possibly look more desolate and gruesome. We saw no pictures; but as we did not explore every part of the rooms, they may have been there without our seeing them. We were further informed by the people of the town that in order to visit the rooms at ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... following the disaster that visited that city after the great cyclone. The first thing the Doctor did on our arrival was to get a carriage and drive through those sections of the city that had suffered the most. It was a gruesome sight, with so many bodies lying about the streets awaiting burial. But that was his grasp of life, his indomitable energy, always alert to see and hear the laws ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... the stove; a crow sat on a roost above our heads, in company with a matronly old hen; and on the clock shelf were a stuffed monkey and a grinning skull. We had heard that a sailor had given Peg the monkey. But where had she got the skull? And whose was it? I could not help puzzling over these gruesome questions. ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... far worse even than Max had expected; and the next few days were a nightmare. The resemblance between the girl and her mother—once his mother, whom he had as a boy adored—made the effect more gruesome. ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... him than to 'lothfully' consent to answer a request, at The Mite Society, some evening, for 'an appropriate selection,' and then, with an elaborate introduction of the same, and an exalted tribute to the refined genius of the author, proceed with a most gruesome rendition of 'Alonzo The Brave and The Fair Imogene,' in a way to coagulate the blood and curl the hair of his fair listeners with abject terror. Pale as a corpse, you know, and with that cadaverous face, lit with ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... gruesome things," the talker had said, "reminds me. I'm a doctor—not quite full fledged, I'll admit, but with the right to put M. D. after my name. Spent a couple of years as an interne in Bellstrand Hospital in New York. Big place. Any of you ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... of his hand, the long red tags escaping from between his white wasted fingers. A pulpit lamp came between Carmichael and the Rabbi's face, but he could see the straining hand, which did not relax till it was lifted in the last awful appeal, and the white and red had a gruesome fascination. It seemed as if one had clutched a cluster of full, rich, tender grapes and was pressing them in an agony till their life ran out in streams of blood, and dripped upon the heads of the choir sitting beneath, in their fresh, ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... a great lake, where water-lilies rocked on the water and dragon-flies hummed on their great stiff wings. Up on the surface the lake was clear as a mirror. But whether we wished it or not, we had to run right down by the bottom, where it was dark and gruesome. And this I could not endure. I longed for the sunbeams. I knew them so well from the time I used to run in the brook. There they used to peep down through the leaves and pass over me in fleeting gleams. I longed so much to see them again that I stole up to the surface, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... constables, clad in plain clothes and accompanied by Dollops, were holding in their hands long pitchforks which looked more as if they were ready for haymaking than for the gruesome task ahead of them all. Petrie carried upon his arm a roll of rope. They swung into step behind the detectives, across the ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... almost equally stalwart woman were both caught by one gigantic Quabo which had a tentacle around the throat of each. The man and woman were chopping at the viscous, gruesome head. One of the Thing's eyes was gashed across, giving it a fearsome, blind appearance. It heaved convulsively, and the three struggling figures toppled into the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... stronghold-city, where he had subjects and treasures and a borough. The son of Beanstan performed faithfully all that he had pledged himself to. So I expect for thee a worse fatality,—though thou hast everywhere prevailed in rush of battle,—gruesome war,—if thou darest await Grendel at close quarters for ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... them all good boys to be, And sailed away across the sea. At London Bridge that Bishop he Arrived one Tuesday night— And as that night he homeward strode To his Pan-Anglican abode, He passed along the Borough Road And saw a gruesome sight. ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... Dim with flick'ring candlelight, Lies a man on bed of sickness. Fiercely but a moment past Did he wage with Death the battle; Worn he sinks back into sleep. Save the clock's persistent ticking Not a sound invades the room, Where the gruesome quiet warns us Of the neighborhood of Death. O'er the pale, distended features Plays a melancholy smile. Is he dreaming at life's border Of ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... there might be in the story of the pawnbroker and his daughters, M. Zola much preferred the popular and gruesome legend of the little girl murdered in the scullery; and, some time later, when he consented to write a short story for 'The Star,' it was this legend which he took as his basis, building thereon the pathetic sketch ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... and as she played she was holding forth animatedly to a girl friend who had evidently dropped in from some store or office during the lunch hour. Now and again the fat man paused in his vocal efforts to reprimand her for her slackness. She paid no heed. There was something gruesome, uncanny, about the way her fingers went their own way over the defenseless keys. Her conversation with the frowzy ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... morning the North Wind woke her, and puffed himself up, and blew himself out, and made himself so stout and big, 'twas gruesome to look at him; and so off they went high up through the air, as if they would never stop till they got to the ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen
... was a young man of Combe Florey Who wrote such a gruesome short story, The English Review Found it rather too blue And MASEFIELD ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... thrall to ancient mystic faiths, A land of iron creeds and gruesome deeds, A land of superstitions vast and grim, And all the noisome growths that ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... to the other two. This one was lean, bent, and twisted like a gnarled tree that had been starved and warped in the forest. His dress was alike native, but the grotesque ornaments of animals' skulls, tails, dried monkeys' hands, and other gruesome relics gave the wearer an appearance that was repulsive to Saxon eyes. This freak of figure and dress was Thunder-maker, the great Medicine Man of the tribe. Without his presence no state conclave was complete; without his opinion no tribal law or ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... others the solution of the problem, although the task was a gruesome one and they would have gladly evaded it if they could. It made chills run down the spine to trudge along leading the horse with that huge figure towering behind them in the darkness, mocking at them because he had escaped to the silent land from ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... the little ospreys, I imagine. Well, it's a good death to die—serving some useful purpose, even if it's only to be eaten. Gad! I didn't expect to get on such a gruesome subject when we started out. By the way, speaking of killings, I expect to make a neat one ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... sat wriggling his toes with delight, the tale being of that gruesome nature which appeals to him. It must have been tried on countless other children, for, despite Whinnie's autobiographical interjections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primitive Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked over ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... survives them all. It attains, in addition, the crowning glory, coveted by Stevenson, of appearing typical. There may never have been a Christian child who was martyred by the Jews in the particularly gruesome way described—probably there never was; but, in listening to the Prioress, it does not enter into our heads to doubt her word—the picture which she leaves with us of how the Christian regarded the Jew in the Middle Ages is too vivid to allow any breathing-space for incredulity. ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... this panorama Passing slowly, dully by, With the sun's brass disc high gleaming From a white and cloudless sky, Sometimes drew fantastic pictures. Many a strange and gruesome sign— Phantom trees and fairy castles— Blurred the far horizon line. Then they'd vanish like the fancies Of a fever-smitten brain, And returning, changed in outline, Elsewhere on the mighty plain Would allure the eyesore trav'ler Till the very sky above Seemed to mock with ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... indicated, and out came the crest and initials exactly as Jack had described them. There was something horribly uncanny and gruesome in finding the tattoo marks of the dead man on the parchment of a Barotse tomtom two hundred miles north of the Zambesi, and for a moment I was too overcome with astonishment to grasp exactly what ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... chuckle over his gruesome suggestion, and lazily getting to his feet, selected another tune ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... response from me, he collapses. Nor does it relieve depression to be set down in a solemn courtyard, lighted by a solitary gas-lamp. This in itself would be quite sufficient to make a weary traveller melancholy, without the tolling of a gruesome bell to announce our arrival. This dispiriting sound seems to affect nobody in the house, except a lengthy young man in a desperate state of unwakefulness, who sleepily resents our arrival in the midst of his first slumber (he must have gone to bed at nine), and drowsily expresses a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... A gruesome statue on St. Sebald's in Nueremberg represents the puritanical idea of "the world," by exhibiting a good-looking young woman, whose back is that of a corpse; the shroud is open, and the half decomposed body is ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... in question have been laid out in a small artificial lake fed by a tiny streamlet which forms one of the numerous tributaries of the River Cray. Its depth is greater than is usual in watercress-beds, otherwise the gruesome relics could never have been concealed beneath its surface, and the flow of water through it, though continuous, is slow. The tributary streamlet meanders through a succession of pasture meadows, in one of which the beds themselves are situated, and here throughout most of the year the ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... It was gruesome. I sneaked away, and had already reached the foot of the hill, when, to my horror, I noticed the grey man approaching. He took off his hat, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... any sign, others must have been badly slashed. In other words, our party was, numerically, almost the equal of his. Considering the man from Boston as on our side, we were seven to their eight. The lantern that we now lighted revealed more of the gruesome spectacle, and it made me feel sick to see that both the man from Boston and I were covered from head to foot with the gore in which we had been rolling; but to the natives the sight was a stupendous triumph; and the cook, when I next saw him, was walking down the deck, looking at the face of one ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... waiting by the house of the Romanoffs, for their guide to open the door, and just then a batch of beggars passed, their wild hair and terribly ragged sheepskins making them a queer gruesome sight. They craved alms with the same patient smile with which they thanked when money was given. Misery seemed to stalk about ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... cause of complaint." [Footnote: Do., "sera necessaria la mayor precaucion, y mana para contenerle cinendose a la suministracion de polvora, balas y efectos de treta con la cantata posible para no dar a los Americanos justos motivos de gueya."] There is an unconscious and somewhat gruesome humor in this official belief that the Americans could have "no just cause" for anger so long as the Spaniards' treachery ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Gravitation nach dem Ungluecke. Schwab hat einmal von einem Wahnsinnigen sehr geistreich gesprochen.... Ein Analogon von solchem Daemon (des Wahnsinns) glaub' ich auch in mir zu beherbergen."[83] He is continually engaged in a gruesome self-diagnosis: "Dann ist mir zuweilen, als hielte der Teufel seine Jagd in dem Nervenwalde meines Unterleibes: ich hoere ein deutliches Hundegebell daselbst und ein dumpfes Halloh des Schwarzen. Ohne Scherz; es ist oft zum Verzweifeln."[84] ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... wolves and coyotes had left them, with scraps of clothing caught here and there upon the vines and bushes. Dr. Charles Brewer, the assistant army surgeon who was sent with a detail to bury the remains in May, 1859, says in his gruesome report:— ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... of Anne Alison, her barbarous dismissal of Anthony, her quite inexcusable failure to give any reason for such treatment, her subsequent enlightenment by Anne herself—there is the skeleton whose dry bones he and she are to pick over—a gruesome business which has already been dispatched ... upon the twentieth day of February, gentlemen, up in the Cotswold Hills. They both remember it perfectly. Yet Valerie must forget it, while Anthony must think it was a ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... solved it. I found the Rhamda and the Nervina. I had iron will and courage—also strength. The Rhamda was never able to control me. My life is gone but not my will. Now I have left him another. Do not surrender, Harry. It is a gruesome task; but hold on to the end. Help me up the steps. There now. Just wait a minute till I fetch ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... Northern railway station, the starting point for Belfast, where of course all traffic was suspended at that late hour and passing the backdoor of the morgue (a not very enticing locality, not to say gruesome to a degree, more especially at night) ultimately gained the Dock Tavern and in due course turned into Store street, famous for its C division police station. Between this point and the high at present unlit warehouses of Beresford ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... astonished at the absurd contradiction in terms involved in speaking of "Christian warfare." Few theologians or churchmen have dared to swim against the stream. In his admirable book La Guerre infernale,[58] Gustave Dupin has pilloried gruesome specimens of militarist Christianity. Nicolai gives other samples, which it would be a pity to leave unrecorded. In 1915, Professor Baumgarten, a Kiel theologian, placidly pointed out that there is opposition between the morality of bellicose nationalism ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... of him, and going down what he felt to be a terrible depth. He fought hard against one horrible thought which would trouble him: should he ever be pulled up again? And no sooner had he mastered this than another gruesome idea forced itself as it were out of the darkness in front, the words to his excited imagination seeming to be luminous: ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... ran through me that I almost fell back! Oh, no one who has not felt them can understand those gruesome and ridiculous terrors! The soul melts; your heart seems to stop; your whole body becomes limp as a sponge, and ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... sat them down awhile— On such gruesome night they had no thought for sleep. Powhatan now sent a present to the Captain, Bracelet to appease the fiery White Man's wrath; Soon some Indians came to bring them venison, Feast they much enjoyed despite their secret doubts. Scarce had natives left when ...
— Pocahontas. - A Poem • Virginia Carter Castleman
... as a near relation of the late lamented Mr. Job," said Bob Dashwood, with a wry face. "But never mind, keep on rubbing. I'm feeling more life in it already. But, I say, Den, this is a weird place we're in. These German fellows don't seem to take their gruel like our chaps. It's a gruesome thing ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... the afternoon he spent in trying to lower the army's confidence by telling all the gruesome stories of Indian warfare he could think of; but he frightened himself a great deal more than them, and at last had to abandon ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... He generally mutters His gruesome blasts and bans. But I, you need not doubt it, Prefer aloud to shout it, ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... among the saints, and no larger than they. Next to the silk-enveloped head of St. John the Great Sufferer, which still projects as in life, when he buried himself to the neck in the earth,—as though he were not sufficiently underground already,—in order to preserve his purity, the most gruesome sight which we beheld in those dim catacombs was a group of chrism-exuding skulls of unknown saints, under ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... agonies. Many victims are credibly reported to have been buried alive. History, from its earliest dawn down to the present day, has recorded nothing so profoundly revolting as the nameless cruelties in which these human fiends reveled. One gruesome picture of the less loathsome scenes enacted will live in history on a level with the noyades of Nantes. I have seen several moving descriptions of it in Russian journals. The following account is from the pen ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... to fetch it. I also brought out from the dresser a few raw eggs, to break into a tumbler and swallow whole; for Hilda and I needed food almost as sorely as the poor beast herself. There was something gruesome in thus rummaging about for bread and meat in the dead woman's cupboard, while she herself lay there on the floor; but one never realises how one will act in these great emergencies until they come upon one. Hilda, still calm with unearthly calmness, took a couple of loaves from my ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... truly that the gruesome, the disgusting, the repellent are not fit subjects for cabinet pictures. The "sacred subjects" to which he objects probably refer to the Crucifixion—the nails through the hands and feet, and the crown of thorns. But to jump from that fact to the assertion that ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... surely 'tis gruesome To gaze all around. When bloodred through heaven Drives cloudrack o'er head; Air soon shall be deep hued With dying men's blood When this our spaedom ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... I must be of a somewhat gruesome turn of mind. My sympathies are always with the melancholy side of life and nature. I love the chill October days, when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden underneath your feet, and a low sound as of stifled sobbing is heard in the damp woods—the evenings in late autumn time, ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... middle of the floor lay a skeleton, every vestige of flesh gone from the bones to which still clung the mildewed and moldered remnants of what had once been clothing. Upon the bed lay a similar gruesome thing, but smaller, while in a tiny cradle near-by was a third, a ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... suddenly arrested and thrown into prison. Here he was put to torture by the authorities, who suspected him of robbery, and at length he confessed that he had found a treasure, while to his wife he confided the gruesome details, all of which were ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... across his shoulder, and seizing his gun, G. W. tore on down the hill straight toward the gruesome place below, and right into it. No one noticed him. The surgeons were too busy to look up as he ran around the table scanning the faces upon the boards. The men carrying the helpless burdens, or ministering to their wants, had no time to question why a little black boy should ...
— A Little Dusky Hero • Harriet T. Comstock
... all the chances and changes of seven hundred years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... known as Hop Bitters is said to owe many of its supposed virtues to the bryony root, substituted for the mandrake which it is alleged to contain. The true mandrake is a gruesome herb, which was held in superstitious awe by the Greeks and the Romans. Its root was forked, and bears some resemblance to the legs of a man; for which reason the moneymakers [67] of the past increased the likeness, and attributed supernatural powers to the plant. It ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... and Kitty dropped on her knees in front of its riotous warmth and glow. Suddenly she sprang up and stared about her, sniffing and catching her breath. I had noticed it too; it fairly took one by the throat, the gruesome odor. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... important military centre of L—— at 1:30 A.M. and started to crawl toward the front with a mixed cargo of snoring field chaplains, soldiers rejoining their units, officers with iron crosses pinned to their breasts, ambulance men who talked gruesome shop, fresh meat, surgical supplies, mail bags, &c. Sometimes the train would spurt up to twelve miles an hour. There were long stops at every station, while unshaven Landsturm men on guard scanned the car windows in search of spies by the light of their electric flash ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... whereas the gradual extension of our poverty-stricken classes has been going on for centuries. To us poverty, besides being a horror, was more or less of a mystery; but America exhibited the development of the gruesome monster with lurid distinctness. In the old countries the men who first were able to seize the land gradually sublet portions either for money or warlike service; the growth of manufactures occupied a thousand years before it reached its present extent; and with the rising of manufacturing centres ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... in the struggle, his own hair was singed by the explosion, but he was free; the Arab rolled away from him, his head shattered—a gruesome spectacle. ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... we complained to the agent, whereupon she promptly inundated her griefs even more deeply than usual, and sat upon the stairs outside our door to denounce us. She declared that a widow's curse was upon us, and that we would never prosper. It sounded gruesome at the time, but we have wondered since whether a grass widow's is as effective, for we learned presently that her spouse, though absent, was ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... makes an impulsive step forward, and in doing so brushes against a small ricketty table, that totters feebly for an instant and then comes with a crash to the ground, flinging a whole heap of gruesome dry ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... sometimes apparently with jerks; but all the world might well be dead and cold and turned to ashes. Often the very air seems to hold its breath for sympathy; at other times a lull suddenly awakens into a strange wind, blowing with unnatural effect. Then out upon the darkness, gruesome but sublime, flashes the glory of the incomparable corona, a silvery, soft, unearthly light, with radiant streamers, stretching at times millions of uncomprehended miles into space, while the rosy, flaming protuberances skirt the black rim ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... "shop," ours is the most unsuitable for general conversation because of the morbid fascination it has for most people. Ladies especially will listen with avidity to medical matters, perceiving nothing gruesome in the details at the moment; but afterward developing nerves on the subject, and probably giving the young practitioner good reason to regret unwary confidences. I tried to stave off the topic, but the will-power of the majority was against me, and finally ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... were clean and comfortable, and the only drawback lay in the fact that one sometimes found it objectionable to have to look at these poor old creatures, dragging themselves around. They had nothing to do, it seemed, but to wait and die. One old man was a gruesome sight. He was about ninety years old and spent his days walking about the courtyard, wearing a cigarette tin hung around his neck, into which he used to cough with such terrible effort that it seemed as if he would die every time the spasm shook him. As a matter ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... island was packed with the loose cattle, which had followed the wagons, much of the time swimming. They were lowing meaningly, in terror—a gruesome thing to hear. ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... now I chance to know that the government has sent agents down here to make arrests, urged on by the women of Ashley, and before another day rolls around all of those rascals will be in the toils. You may be called on to give evidence against Dilks. But please forget all about this gruesome matter just now, my dear boy. There is something else of a vastly different nature that awaits you—some ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... Hospital, in all weathers and in every kind of cheap conveyance, was prominent. I have to confess that I preferred that a visit to her should not be immediately prefaced by one of these adventures among the "pore dear things" at the hospital, because that was sure to mean the recital of some gruesome operation she had heard of, or the details of some almost equally gruesome cure. She enjoyed the whole experience in a way which is blank to the professional humanitarian, but I suspect the "pore dear ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... and mournful—and a murmur went round among the eager watchers. It was her most famous dance—the dance of Death, the most gruesome spectacle, so it was said, that any dancer had ever conceived. She came on to the stage like the flash of an arrow, dressed in black that glittered and scintillated with every amazing movement. And then it began—that ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... discuss these gruesome possibilities, although this was not Drew's fault. I would not listen to him; and so he would be silent about them until convinced that the furtherance of our careers as airmen demanded additional unpleasant imaginings. There was ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... Hideous, gruesome carvings they were, resembling some futuristic sculpture of to-day, for the artist who had fashioned them had given hardly more than a hint of the finished representation. It was rather as if the masses of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... house," in which the Freshmen have their home with Dr. Mary Samuel, the Indian member of the staff, as their house mother. Just behind it is the thatched shed, carefully walled in, which serves as the dissecting room. To the uninitiated it is a place of gruesome smells and sights, for cadavers, whole or in fragments, litter the tables. The casual visitor sympathizes with the Hindu student who confides to you that during her first days of work in the dissecting room she could only sleep when firmly flanked ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... There was something gruesome about the long ascent. He thought of stories he had read of lonely turrets in which men were beheaded, and otherwise made away with. It seemed he would never come to the top, and when at last he did it was ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... together with impunity, are those who are rich enough, and sensible enough, to have two distinct establishments under the same roof. The ordinary eight or ten-roomed house, inhabited by decent middle-class folk, is a gruesome sight. What a huddlement of male and female! They are factories of quarrel and hate—those respectable, brass-curtain-rodded sties—they are full of things that won't bear mentioning. If our income never rises above that, we shall live to the end of ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... Quinby had paused to regale me with a lightning sketch of the first accident, and no one had contradicted his gruesome details. ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... II a 'wise' shepherd warns a youth against love, and draws a somewhat gruesome picture ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... minutes complete silence!" He was not left long in doubt. Some hours afterwards three black soldiers approached, carrying in a bloody cloth the head of General Gordon, which he identified. It is unnecessary to add the gruesome details which Slatin picked up as to his manner of death from the gossip of the camp. In this terrible tragedy ended that noble defence of Khartoum, which, wherever considered or discussed, and for all time, will excite the pity and admiration of ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... hand, the long red tags escaping from between his white wasted fingers. A pulpit lamp came between Carmichael and the Rabbi's face, but he could see the straining hand, which did not relax till it was lifted in the last awful appeal, and the white and red had a gruesome fascination. It seemed as if one had clutched a cluster of full, rich, tender grapes and was pressing them in an agony till their life ran out in streams of blood, and dripped upon the heads of the choir sitting beneath, in their ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... "She's got innards like a human, ain't she?" He instantly beheld a vision of the man in the front of the almanac whose envelope is neatly drawn back to reveal his complicated structure in behalf of the zodiacal symbols. "It's downright gruesome," he added. But his guest was viewing the neat complexities of metal with real pleasure and with what seemed to the car's owner a ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... Jemima—"was turning your room into a hospital-ward when I left, against the arrival of your mangled corpse. She had also ordered the wagon prepared like an ambulance, mattresses, chloroform, bandages—every gruesome detail complete. Our Jemima," she said, "is having the time of ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... the others the solution of the problem, although the task was a gruesome one and they would have gladly evaded it if they could. It made chills run down the spine to trudge along leading the horse with that huge figure towering behind them in the darkness, mocking at them because he had escaped ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... "It does look pretty gruesome," Sherri agreed. "I'm glad we've been ordered to keep our spacesuits on. I wouldn't want to be exposed to anything that ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... was always one of the most terrible spots in Ypres. People were killed there every day. To go past the Menin Gate was considered to be asking for it. So a terror of the Menin Gate was bred in me before I had ever seen the gruesome, stinking spot. And the Menin Gate had taken its ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... privacy of Gimp's quarters, the bundles were opened; the contents, some of them dried and gruesome, all of them rather wonderful, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... record of the titanic struggle five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... first beyond death's gloomy gate Shall fade away the mists that hide The gruesome and the nobly great, Borne ever on by time and tide. This from thy book of fate alone A liberated soul may tell thee: Perish thou shalt by deed thine own, And yet a stranger's hand shall ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... the passion, he certainly was, but his position in the world was a counselling spouse, jealous of his good name. He did not regret his proposal to take the leap; he would not have regretted it if taken. On the safe side of the abyss, however, it wore a gruesome look to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... abandoning library copies of Keats and buying an edition of my own. And this, too, may have been not unconnected with the gracious influence of the other sex as exhibited in a neighbouring athenaeum; and was accompanied by a gruesome spate of florid lyrics: some (happily) secret, and some exposed with needless hardihood in a college magazine. The world, which has looked leniently upon many poetical minorities, regards such frenzies with tolerant charity and forgetfulness. But the wretch concerned ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... back on me and walked out of the room. It was in a little hotel in the Island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave an almost gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come across. I said: ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... put them into glass boxes to watch them, they manage to corrode the glass so it ceases to be transparent. And they can bore their way out of any wood, or even metal, containers you try to keep them in. The termite seems destined to remain a gruesome, marvelous, possibly deadly mystery." ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... must be borne in mind that we are looking at the matter collectively; that is to say, without reckoning on individual idiosyncrasies of expression in speech. Of course we know that joy is apt to make us raise the voice and sadness to lower it. For instance, we have all heard gruesome stories, and have noticed how naturally the voice sinks in the telling. A ghost story told with an upward inflection might easily become humourous, so instinctively do we associate the upward inflection ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... In this gruesome tale of the realities of war, Andreev has given shocking physical details of torn and bleeding bodies, but true to the theme that animates all his books, he has concentrated the main interest on the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... this gruesome tale, the relevancy of which no one had as yet perceived. But Caius Nepos, having pledged his friends in a draught of ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... he began the service, which long practice had taught him to repeat by heart. When about half-way through the lesson he saw a glimmer of light, and Dick entered the church with a lantern, which he placed on the top of the coffin. It was a gruesome scene which the lantern brought into view. There was the coffin, and before it, in a seat, four figures of the navvy-bearers, and Dick himself covered with snow and as white as if he wore a surplice. They filed out into the churchyard, but the wind had blown the snow into the grave, and this had ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... we are right back at rest once more, and are being treated with a consideration, amounting almost to indulgence, which convinces us that we are being "fattened up"—to employ the gruesome but expressive phraseology of the moment—for some particularly strenuous enterprise in the ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... was to be seen as she made her way eastward, shaping her course for Princes street, and peering, with a gruesome fear of the school-board officer, round every corner. That early bird, however, was not so keenly on the alert as she gave him the credit of being, and she reached her goal unchallenged after coasting along in parallel lines with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... all be thinking with pity of the dead and dying above us, but when you're a hundred feet or so below, the shots and cries of battle are neither exciting nor gruesome." ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... warmly. The wounded were in a cellar, and if they were not got out soon, it was obvious that they would be burned alive. Inside the hall were piles of bicycles, loaves of bread, and dead soldiers, all in gruesome confusion. In the cellar dead and wounded were lying together. The wounded had all to be carried on stretchers, for everyone who could crawl had fled from that ghastly inferno, and only those who have shifted wounded on stretchers can appreciate the ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... sockets, and the animal has the power of protruding and withdrawing the head much more extensively developed than usual. The "death's head" staring from beneath the dome-shaped back gives to the animal a most gruesome aspect. These details are supplied by the master of a beche-de-mer schooner, to whom all the nooks and corners of the Great Barrier Reef and of the other Coral Sea beyond, from New Guinea to New Caledonia, are familiar. He says that the species, as far ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... months of young, sweet life up to the knees in water, in foul and ill-smelling trenches in order to kill others whom they had never seen except as specks on the sights of their rifles. Somewhere behind that gruesome business, as he knew, there stood the Cause, calm and serene, like some great statue, which made this insensate murdering necessary; but just for an hour to-day, as he waited till they had to be on the move again, he found himself ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole history of the telephone. To an uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been more ghastly or absurd. How could any one have interpreted the gruesome joy of this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stood earnestly singing, whispering, and shouting into a dead man's ear? What sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman? And in Salem, too, the home of ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... digging went on merrily enough. About three feet down a skull was found; then another; then various human bones. These gruesome discoveries checked the singing and laughter, and for a while the men worked in silence. But there was nothing to dull the spirits of the water-carriers, and they romped and skylarked like a party of schoolboys. ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... of the Old.—In the annals of savage life we find many gruesome tales of intentional disposal of the aged. The use of the old grandmother as a target for the training of young boys in the art of slaying one's enemy is an extreme example. The pathetic couple left behind when the tribe migrated, often with ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... up and contemplating the gruesome remnants of the skeleton. "Mortal queer it is. Can't make it out. How'd he come ter be fixed up thataway in the middle of the tree, dyin' thar all lonesome, like a poor critter caught in a trap? How'd it ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... saved. The terrible blow which had struck him down had not crushed the life from him. He was awakened. But when, after four weeks of gruesome fever and delirium, his mind had somewhat regained its equilibrium, his hair had turned white as snow, and his children beheld an ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... and then did some bold thinker dare openly to gainsay it. The idea that a conviction of personal immortality has a specially ennobling influence on the moral nature of man, is not confirmed by the gruesome history of mediaeval morals, and as little by the psychology of ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... so much," I said nastily. (When people presage a remark by saying that they only say it because they love you, you may lay long odds that it's going to be disagreeable!) "It certainly sounds a gruesome prospect. Not even a choice between bankruptcy and mania, but a certainty of both! And within a year, too! Such a short run for one's money! Aunt Eliza had some suggestion to make, then? And you evidently approved. Would ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... noble old hall, he could not have been a very happy one, and very little enjoyment could he have got out of his new possession, for, from the very hour he entered and took up his abode there, such unearthly and mysterious noises, such fearful screams and gruesome groans worried and haunted and dogged him, as made his hair stand on end, and nearly scared him out of his wits. A ghost, too, appeared in the park as soon as ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... sport, and her sporting friends, and when she found it was a disputed point, she determined to give the Hedgepig the benefit of the doubt. Then the taste for valerian, and the fox's method of capture, were drawn from facts, and the gruesome details as to who ate who in the Glass ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... of the dead. He did so, and found the money; but in nailing on the coffin lid again, a part of his soutane was fastened down with it. The priest turned to go, advanced a step, and, being suddenly held, dropped dead with fright. These gruesome stories were happily followed by an hour or two of song and pleasantry in Mr. McKenna's tent, ending in "Auld Lang Syne" and "God Save the Queen." It was a unique occasion in which to wind up so laborious a day; and our camp itself was unique—on a lofty bluff overlooking the confluence of the ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... placid way, like an elephant over egg-shells. Her household did her one service, at least, in return for their maintenance, and that was to provide the old lady with an audience. It was in no sense an unwilling service, for her imagination ran to the gruesome, and she never planted a precept but she drove it home with a case in point. As a result night was often shattered by a yell from some sleeper whose dreams had trespassed on devilish domains. The Vrouw Grobelaar believed most entirely in Kafir magic, in witchcraft ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... felonies, indeed, resulted directly from the pressure of slave circumstance. A gruesome instance occurred in 1864 in the same county as the foregoing. A young slave woman, Becky by name, had given pregnancy as the reason for a continued slackness in her work. Her master became skeptical and gave notice that she was to be examined and might expect the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... count them the next time you have one for dinner," the other remarked. As this was evidently meant for a joke, Tom had the tact to laugh, and a very gruesome and awe-inspiring ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pictures a monster, at Rome, on November 3, 1520, with the upper portion of a child apparently about five or six years old, and the lower part and ears of a fish-like animal. He also pictures a sea-devil in the same chapter, together with other gruesome examples of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for a moment misty and aboriginal time big with portent. There is a ridiculous Scotch story in which one gruesome touch lives. A clergyman's female servant was seated in the kitchen one Saturday night reading the Scriptures, when she was somewhat startled by hearing at the door the tap and voice of her sweetheart. Not expecting him, and the hour being somewhat ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... The gallows was already built on the edge of the camp at Bazoilles. I saw it on my afternoon trip and knew that the report was true. Being interested in the psychology of such a scene on the men present, I put aside my inward rebellion at so gruesome a sight and arranged my trip so as to be present. I reached the camp at nine forty-five and was the last man admitted. The gallows was built in the center of the semicircle facing two hills which came abruptly together, leaving a large grass plot at their base. This formed a natural amphitheater. ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... field the task seemed difficult. In the little clusters of bushes, behind trees, in gullies, and in every conceivable place that seemed to offer shelter, lay the dead. What a shudder thrills the whole frame when you stand and contemplate the gruesome faces of the battle's dead. In every posture and all positions, with every conceivable shade of countenance, the glaring, glassy eyes meet you. Some lay as they fell, stretched full length on the ground; others show a desperate struggle for the last few remaining ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... buffalo, wolf, and even rattle-snake. A favorite modern leather for purses and satchels, alligator-skin, has been also applied to the clothing of books. Many eccentric fancies have been exemplified in book-binding, but the acme of gruesome oddity has been reached by binding books in human skin, of which many examples are on record. It is perhaps three centuries old, but the first considerable instance of its use grew out of the horrors of ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... It was in the newspapers at the time that in more than one ship's log were entered strange reports of gruesome and wholly indefinable noises heard at night in certain latitudes. Some of the crews mutinied, and there was an instance on record of more than one hand, bursting with superstition, going mad and jumping overboard. ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... was correct. Gradually the cheerfulness faded from the speaker's voice, the humorous incidents were past. Gruesome, hideous, grew the anecdotes, The hall shivered. Necks were craned, and white faces twitched suspensively. He dwelt on the agonies of the Condemned, he recited crimes in detail, he mirrored the last ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... of vividness and still more horror that wretched human beings once lay there rotting in the dark. The dungeons of Villeneuve made a particular impression on me—greater than any except those of Loches, which must surely be the most gruesome in Europe. I hasten to add that every dark hole at Villeneuve is called a dungeon; and I believe it is well established that in this manner, in almost all old castles and towers, the sensibilities of the modern tourist are unscrupulously ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... not have been paid to this gruesome tale had it not been repeated to various people during the course of several months. The boy wrote letters reiterating these incidents. His stories always went on to include the most surprising amount of abuse. It seemed that everywhere he ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... the verge into the abyss, to go hurtling into the mist-wreathed depths.... No, Zeke must not come back. The hardness crept again into her face, as she went forward. She held her eyes averted from that gruesome cavern ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... loving daughter Meg when she heard this! What could she do? She could not suffer it to stay there, so she bribed two men and took a boat, and, going down the river, stole her own father's head, and, wrapping it in a cloth, returned with her gruesome burden to Chelsea, where she is said to have buried it in the church. Can you picture anything more awful than the ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... cold, but he suddenly felt a great drop of perspiration on his forehead. It was the sort of thing, this, which he had expected—had been prepared for, in fact—but it was none the less, in its way, gruesome. There was a further knock at the ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Dashwood, with a wry face. "But never mind, keep on rubbing. I'm feeling more life in it already. But, I say, Den, this is a weird place we're in. These German fellows don't seem to take their gruel like our chaps. It's a gruesome thing to hear ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... and was amazed at the character and standing of the latter. He had a number of those buyers who lived in adjacent cities, privately approached and interviewed, and ascertained that, save in two instances, they were all his readers, had seen the gruesome pictures he had presented, and then had deliberately purchased ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... for the same cause. The boys at Centralia were conspired against because they too stood "for the solidarity of labor." It is simply lying and camouflage to attempt to trace such persecutions to any other source. These are things America will be ashamed of when she comes to her senses. Such gruesome events are paralleled in no country save the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm or ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... hobbies," Heneage answered. "Take the Colonel, for instance, the most harmless, the most good-natured man who ever lived. Nothing in the world fascinates him so much as the details of a tragedy like this, however gruesome they may be. I have seen him handle a murderer's knife as though he loved it. His favourite museum is the professional Chamber of Horrors in Scotland Yard. My own interests run in a slightly different direction. I like to look at an affair of this sort as a chess problem, and to set myself ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his contemplation of the gruesome object by a sharp exclamation from Mary. Looking up, he saw Clare a quarter of a mile away, hastening to them along the ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... clear, sparkling, with a greenish cast, and it deposited a white crust on the margins. Nielsen, kicking around in the sand, unearthed a skull, bleached and yellow, yet evidently not so very old. Some thirsty wanderer had taken his last drink at that deceiving spring. The gruesome and the beautiful, the tragic and the sublime, go hand in hand down the naked ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... of infusing knowledge he has not unjustly satirised in his poem, entitled "Recollections of Auld Lang Syne." Norval was a model among the tyrant pedagogues of the past; and as an illustration of Scottish school life fifty years since, we present our author's reminiscences of the despot. "Gruesome in visage and deformed in body, his mind reflected the grim and tortuous aspects of his person. The recollection of his monstrous cruelties,—his cruel flagellations,—is still unaccountably depressing. One day of horrors I shall never cease to remember. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... his chair and watched his tea getting cold. The suggestion of something having happened to Bobby had changed his anger to sharp solicitude. Gruesome tales of brutality toward foreigners in Eastern ports came back ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... cutting up seals is a gruesome but very necessary business, and the provision of suitable implements is humane as well as economic in time and labour. The skin is first cut off with the blubber attached: the meat is then cut from the skeleton, the entrails cleaned out, the liver carefully excised. The whole is then ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... and whose religions and political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... at the gruesome results of his marksmanship, then he turned back to the body of his beloved mare. Ricardo noticed at length that he was crying; as the Ranger knelt beside the dead thoroughbred the old Mexican whispered ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... incongruous thoughts leaped through her brain. Perhaps they were this moment going down. Now she knew what it was like! This thing she had read of in newspapers! Now she was going down in mid-ocean, she, Betty Vanderpoel! And, as she sprang to clutch her fur coat, there flashed before her mental vision a gruesome picture of the headlines in the newspapers and the inevitable reference to the millions ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... think, of all "shop," ours is the most unsuitable for general conversation because of the morbid fascination it has for most people. Ladies especially will listen with avidity to medical matters, perceiving nothing gruesome in the details at the moment; but afterward developing nerves on the subject, and probably giving the young practitioner good reason to regret unwary confidences. I tried to stave off the topic, but the will-power of the majority was against me, and finally I found myself submitting, and ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... to find there I could not imagine. Whatever it had been he was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning perplexedly, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick which reminded me of gruesome things we had lived ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... comfortable, and the only drawback lay in the fact that one sometimes found it objectionable to have to look at these poor old creatures, dragging themselves around. They had nothing to do, it seemed, but to wait and die. One old man was a gruesome sight. He was about ninety years old and spent his days walking about the courtyard, wearing a cigarette tin hung around his neck, into which he used to cough with such terrible effort that it seemed as if he would die every time the spasm shook him. As a matter of fact, he and many ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... my self-control, I had looked upon many a gruesome sight during my somewhat chequered career, though scarcely one more hideous than this which ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... of Edward Crown wedged in at the bottom of Quill's Chimney, weighted down with stones and earth, alone served as an obstacle to the enterprise. He shrank from certain gruesome possibilities,—such as the dislodgment of stones at the bottom of the crevice and the consequent exposure of a thing that would haunt him forever. And even though the stones remained in place there would still remain the fact that almost within ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... tenderness and pathos, with men and women of such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... he greeted the little fellow; "you've got me a lawyer," and the pale features lighted with a smile of such radiance as seemed incongruous in this gruesome place. He held out his hand to the man who swung toward him, looming mountainous behind his brother's slight figure. "Thank you for coming," he said cordially, and in his tone was the same air of a grand seigneur as in the lad's. Suddenly ...
— The Perfect Tribute • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... justice, not expediency. Is there a man who would dare say that if Christianity—the Christianity of the Christ—had been actually in vogue, in practice in all the countries of Christendom during the last fifty years, during the last twenty-five years, that this colossal and gruesome war would ever have come about? No clear-thinking and honest man would or could say that it would. We need again the voice of the prophet, clear-seeing, high-purposed, and unafraid. We need again ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... half-hearted chuckle over his gruesome suggestion, and lazily getting to his feet, selected another tune for ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... debonair aristocrat of the race-courses and the boulevards. The shadows under his eyes were deeper, his cheeks more sunken. He had lost something of the sprightliness of his bearing. His attitude, indeed, was almost dejected. He was like a man who sees into the future and finds there strange and gruesome things. ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... room, divided into unequal portions by the four wide, massive pillars that supported its arched roof. A smell of damp and mildew came from its walls and from its flags moistened by the water that trickled from without. Its appearance at any time must have been gruesome. But, at that moment, with the tall figures of Sebastiani and his sons, with the slanting gleams of light that fell between the pillars, with the vision of the captive chained down upon the truckle-bed, it assumed a ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... escort were pelted with stones and, on arriving in the Piazza, he beheld the gruesome human decoration of the Campanile. Without a moment's hesitation, spurring his horse, he rode swiftly towards the Porta della Croce, and set off into the ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... lay a dead Marine, and beside him stood a French surgeon, who greeted them warmly. The wounded were in a cellar, and if they were not got out soon, it was obvious that they would be burned alive. Inside the hall were piles of bicycles, loaves of bread, and dead soldiers, all in gruesome confusion. In the cellar dead and wounded were lying together. The wounded had all to be carried on stretchers, for everyone who could crawl had fled from that ghastly inferno, and only those who have shifted wounded on stretchers ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... had remained perfectly quiet in the room crouching at Jacqueline's feet and beside the bed. It had not attempted to molest me, as I had feared might be the case during the course of my gruesome work. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... the young man. "Things are not often so serious as they are supposed to be. It's like being in a house that's supposed to be haunted—on All Hallow E'en, for instance—it's awfully gruesome and creepy at night when the wind moans and the owls screech. And then, the next morning, one wonders how one could have been such an idiot. Other things are often like that. You think the world's coming to an end—and ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... '64 and '66, came strains of 'The Watch on the Rhine.' Every now and then my mother would lean back in her chair and close her eyes, and I knew intuitively she was thinking of me. Mein Gott! If she had only known the truth. These tableaux faded away, and the gruesome awfulness of my surroundings thrust themselves upon me. A damp, foetid smell, suggestive of the rottenness of decay, assailed my nostrils and made me sneeze. I choked; the saliva streamed in torrents down my chin ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... so that she could hear what every one was saying. The dinner indeed had been prepared amid much merriment; it had been both good and abundant, for they had sacrificed many victims; but the supper was yet to come, and nothing can be conceived more gruesome than the meal which a goddess and a brave man were soon to lay before them—for they had brought their doom ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... horrible and excruciating shriek I had ever heard in my life. If anyone by a refinement of cruelty were to compound a torture for the ears, I do not think he could produce anything half so piercing, gruesome, and discordant. ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... chapels of St. Faith and St. Blaise, in the south transept. The latter was taken down long ago, but in Scott's time the frame, which still had some skin adhering to it, was extant, but it was then carried off by the Abbey master-mason and has been since entirely lost sight {130} of. The gruesome relics on the south transept door were traditionally supposed to be the skins of the Danes, but the one here was said to be that of a man flayed alive for robbing the royal treasury in the time of Edward I., which was fixed upon the treasury entrance as a warning to the monks, who were implicated ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... balancing myself with a khudstick. The men came prancing over as if they were on a good high-road, the careless ease with which they made the passage bordering on impertinence! I reflected, however, that sheep, and such like beasts of humble brain, can stroll upon the brink of gruesome precipices without any fear of falling, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... at my eyes—been snow-blind twice; look where my foot's half gone; And that gruesome scar on my left cheek where the frost-fiend bit to the bone. Each one a brand of this devil's land, where I've played and I've lost the game, A broken wreck with a craze for 'hooch,' and never a ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... that this space was literally covered with the Confederate dead, and one could have walked all over it on their bodies. Gen. Grant, in substance, makes the same statement in his Memoirs. It was a fearful sight. But not far from the Peach Orchard field, in a westerly direction, was a still more gruesome spectacle. Some of our forces were in line on an old, grass-grown country road that ran through thick woods. The wheels of wagons, running for many years right in the same ruts, had cut through the turf, so that the surface of the road was somewhat ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... was nearly full of rain water, which they were likely to need, since their only supply of fresh water was contained in a five-gallon can, which would hold about two days' requirements. The rain water was good and would have been better but for Ned's gruesome inquiry: ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... blamed if my suddenly aroused and somewhat bemused senses played tricks with me, and my startled imagination began to conjure up the gruesome stories I had heard of weird visitants, and ghostly beings, heard but seldom seen, on the East Anglian meres and broads? Then again came the remembrance of the shriek or cry I had fancied I heard earlier in the night, and with a shudder I thought: "How ghastly if it should be ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... awoke in his heart the passionate longing to help her; he saw now her whole story in the most pathetic light, from the little child deserted by her mother, to the woman scorned and suffering, left by the same mother in such a gruesome temptation. The greatness of the sin provoked the passionate longing to save her. The man who had given up Groombridge Castle and all it entailed had not one harsh thought for the woman who had fallen into crime to avoid the poverty he had chosen ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... over her left shoulder and as she played she was holding forth animatedly to a girl friend who had evidently dropped in from some store or office during the lunch hour. Now and again the fat man paused in his vocal efforts to reprimand her for her slackness. She paid no heed. There was something gruesome, uncanny, about the way her fingers went their own way over the defenseless keys. Her conversation with the frowzy little ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... The barge which so often carried its owner to pleasure or business lay moored on the river ready to carry him that last sad journey to the Tower; and sadder still, to bring back the devoted daughter when the execution was accomplished, and later also when she bore her gruesome burden of a father's head, said to have been buried with ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... poverty. The fearful state of things in American cities was brought about in a very few years, whereas the gradual extension of our poverty-stricken classes has been going on for centuries. To us poverty, besides being a horror, was more or less of a mystery; but America exhibited the development of the gruesome monster with lurid distinctness. In the old countries the men who first were able to seize the land gradually sublet portions either for money or warlike service; the growth of manufactures occupied a thousand years before it reached its present extent; and ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... up the paper which he had thrown back to me, and read the paragraph indicated. It was headed, "A Gruesome Packet." ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... effects. For instance, nothing more delights him than to 'lothfully' consent to answer a request, at The Mite Society, some evening, for 'an appropriate selection,' and then, with an elaborate introduction of the same, and an exalted tribute to the refined genius of the author, proceed with a most gruesome rendition of 'Alonzo The Brave and The Fair Imogene,' in a way to coagulate the blood and curl the hair of his fair listeners with abject terror. Pale as a corpse, you know, and with that cadaverous face, lit with those malignant-looking eyes, his slender figure, ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... and Emmeline Lestrange, stranded on a remote island with a beautiful lagoon. As children, they are cared for by Paddy Button, a portly sailor who drinks himself to death after only two and a half years in paradise. Frightened and confused by the man's gruesome corpse, the children flee to another part of Palm Tree Island. Over a period of five years, they grow up and eventually fall in love. Sex and birth are as mysterious to them as death, but they manage to copulate instinctively and conceive a child. The birth is especially remarkable: ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... original version of a book by Paracelsus. I have not read it yet, for the writing is most difficult to decipher, but one point caught my eye on turning over the pages. That is the gruesome fact that Paracelsus fed the homunculi he manufactured on human blood. One wonders how he ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... of a somewhat gruesome turn of mind. My sympathies are always with the melancholy side of life and nature. I love the chill October days, when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden underneath your feet, and a low sound as of stifled sobbing is heard in the damp woods—the evenings in late autumn time, ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... another of the lower jaw series at Teddington, which is also, in all probability, the only instance of a man's nightcap figuring in such gruesome circumstances. ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... then I sat down on the broad top of the ladder and forgot everything. It was a savage history of ferocious hate and barbarous reprisals. It had been a feud waged between two clans for three generations. The story of Dark Malcolm and Ian Red Hand was only part of it, but it was a gruesome thing. Pages told of the bloody deeds they wrought on each other's houses. The one human passion of Dark Malcolm's life was his love for his little daughter. She had brown eyes and brown hair, and those ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... seven hundred years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... that gruesome land of swamps and sand, which, when we at last escaped from it, we learned was Florida, I must not write here. It was months before such of us as were left crawled through into civilisation, and it is not ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... 24th September. It was a matter of regret to me that I was unable to pay a last tribute of respect to my loved and honoured friend and Commander by following his body to the grave, but I could not leave the column. That march through Delhi in the early morning light was a gruesome proceeding. Our way from the Lahore gate by the Chandni Chauk led through a veritable city of the dead; not a sound was to be heard but the falling of our own footsteps; not a living creature was to be seen. Dead bodies were strewn ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the polluted stream and held in their finger-like drooping branches human bodies in all shapes and attitudes with a semblance of naturalness which made an everlasting picture on my distraught mind. Of this pitiful gruesome company I ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... I preen my faith in sea-bogles an' the like, though there's a mony as claims to ha' seen a' that and waur. I'm no easy feared, but maybe your ain bluid would run a bit cauld, mun, if instead o' speerin' aboot it in daylicht ye were wi' me last night, an' seed an awfu' like shape, white an' gruesome, whiles here, whiles there, an' it greetin' and ca'ing in the darkness like a bit lambie that hae lost its mither. Ye would na' be sae ready to put it a' doon to auld wives' clavers then, I'm thinkin'." I saw it was hopeless to reason with him, so contented myself with begging him as a personal ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... only about two minutes, because his spirit came upon him, and he fell down upon one knee, unable to rise. I never saw a more gruesome spectacle. A bright unnatural light gleamed in his eyes, his countenance became livid, the eyeballs protruded, a copious perspiration streamed from his body, the muscles of his face twitched, and his whole frame shook more and more vehemently as the intensity ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... poor honest soldier of the Fatherland; but thou canst face him as boldly as thou hast faced the foe, with the help of the little book of which thy frost-chilled fingers have never lost the grip. The gruesome bird falls back as ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... of ruler perfectly exemplified by Duke Karl of Wuerttemberg, up to about the year 1770; 'In a Battle', a powerful description of the rage of combat, with all its sickening and inspiring details; 'The Pestilence', a gruesome tribute to the power of God as manifested in the horrors of the plague, and 'Count Eberhard the Quarreler', a patriotic battle-ballad in honor of a locally renowned Suabian fighter. Better than ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... struggle five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along miles ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... was the same gruesome story. The sufferings of the pressed man went for nothing so long as the pressed man was kept. Provided only the bars were dependable and the bolts staunch, anything would do to "clap him up in." The town "cage" ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... exertion of the rowers reached a position from which it could drift to leeward of the point and its deadly maelstrom. With rowers bailing and the white-faced woman seated, fastening the child in the life-buoy, the boat, gunwale-deep, and the gruesome guard of sharks drifted out of sight behind the point. The boy had not understood; but he had seen his kind, and from association of ideas appreciated again his loneliness—crying and wailing for a week; but not for his mother: he had ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... met her, and beat against her face like a black wing that brushed it. It had a mouldy smell. Holding up the lantern, Hildegarde crept as best she could through the narrow opening. A gruesome place it was in which she found herself. Grim enough by daylight, it was now doubly so; for the blackness seemed like something tangible, some shapeless monster which was gathering itself together, and shrinking back, inch by inch, as the little spark of light moved forward. The ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... fetch it. I also brought out from the dresser a few raw eggs, to break into a tumbler and swallow whole; for Hilda and I needed food almost as sorely as the poor beast herself. There was something gruesome in thus rummaging about for bread and meat in the dead woman's cupboard, while she herself lay there on the floor; but one never realises how one will act in these great emergencies until they come upon one. Hilda, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... entanglement of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for a moment misty and aboriginal time big with portent. There is a ridiculous Scotch story in which one gruesome touch lives. A clergyman's female servant was seated in the kitchen one Saturday night reading the Scriptures, when she was somewhat startled by hearing at the door the tap and voice of her sweetheart. Not expecting him, and the hour ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... formed is punished as a crime? In connection with this, we also recalled the mediaeval controversy about the moment of time at which the soul is really lodged in the foetus, since the concept of murder becomes admissible only from that point on. Doubtless you also know the gruesome poem by Lenau, which puts infanticide and the prevention of children on the same plane." "Strangely enough, I had happened to think of Lenau during the afternoon." "Another echo of your dream. And now I shall demonstrate to you another ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... on der tip-toes, en dey'll set dar en run over de ole times wid one er n'er, en crack der jokes same ez dey useter. En den ag'in," continued the old man, shutting his eyes and giving to his voice a gruesome intonation quite impossible to describe,—"en den ag'in hit look lak dat Brer Rabbit'll gin de wink all 'roun', en den dey'll tu'n in en git up a reg'lar juberlee. Brer Rabbit, he'll retch up en take down de trivet, en Brer Fox, he'll snatch ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... most terrible spots in Ypres. People were killed there every day. To go past the Menin Gate was considered to be asking for it. So a terror of the Menin Gate was bred in me before I had ever seen the gruesome, stinking spot. And the Menin Gate had taken its ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... fondness for the morbid and the abnormal. This is revealed in 'Le Horla,' the appalling story in which he took for his own Fitzjames O'Brien's uncanny monster, invisible, and yet tangible. In the hands of the clever Irish-American this tale had been gruesome enough; but the Frenchman was able to give it an added touch of terror by making the unfortunate victim discover that the creature he feared had a stronger will than his own and that he was being hypnotized to his doom by a being whom he could not see, but whose presence he could ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... buffaloes were killed near Fort Dodge in three months. During the summer of 1874, an expedition composed of sixteen hunters killed 2,800 buffaloes, and during that same season one young trapper boasted of having killed 3,000 animals. The sight of such a slaughter scene was gruesome to behold. Colonel Dodge writes of it: "During the fall of 1873 I rode across the prairie, where a year ago I had hunted several herds. At the time we enjoyed the aspect of a myriad of buffaloes, which were grazing peacefully over the prairies. Now we rode past myriads of ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... murders in Newf'un'land. They shock us. They're never forgotten. An' there was a deal made o' that one, an' 'twas still the latest murder—news o' the trial at St. John's spread broadcast over the three coasts; an' talk o' the black cap an' the black flag, an' gruesome tales o' the gallows an' the last prayer, an' whispers o' the quicklime that ended it all. Sammy Scull could go nowhere in Newf'un'land an' escape the shadow an' shame o' that rope. Let the lad grow ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... could see the fields strewn with the bodies of dead cattle. Here and there, at the doors of farmhouses, the inmates could be seen, lying together in gruesome heaps, caught and killed instantaneously as they attempted flight. Here, too, were figures on the roads. But they were figures of dead ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... a dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows. Long streamers of garments fluttered from ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... on, till at last we ran into a great lake, where water-lilies rocked on the water and dragon-flies hummed on their great stiff wings. Up on the surface the lake was clear as a mirror. But whether we wished it or not, we had to run right down by the bottom, where it was dark and gruesome. And this I could not endure. I longed for the sunbeams. I knew them so well from the time I used to run in the brook. There they used to peep down through the leaves and pass over me in fleeting gleams. I longed so much to see them again that I stole up to the surface, and lay ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... but it was late before he had it skinned and dressed. When the carcase was hoisted to the gallows—and it seemed gruesome enough as it hung there in the pallid light of the moon, with the night birds dismally wailing like mourners from the lonely trees—we ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... clank. The bad burn waits with his head unbandaged. My neighbour chokes in the clutch of chloral . . . O, a gruesome world! ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... some reverence for a corpse, but none whatever for a ghost. His mind had undergone a change concerning the dead the moment he had heard him move, and he looked upon his charge now as equally despicable and gruesome. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... handle was burnt. He groped about near it and uncovered, one after another, a gold-washing dish, a pick-head, a couple of wedges, and a hammer. The sand had drifted over them and made a mound. Then he laid bare a truly gruesome sight—charred embers of wood and half-burnt ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... Poe, as a personal discovery, four and a half centuries later; it survives them all. It attains, in addition, the crowning glory, coveted by Stevenson, of appearing typical. There may never have been a Christian child who was martyred by the Jews in the particularly gruesome way described—probably there never was; but, in listening to the Prioress, it does not enter into our heads to doubt her word—the picture which she leaves with us of how the Christian regarded the ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... There are six subjects, the most remarkable being the huge dragon with a long curly tail in the act of swallowing St. Margaret, whose skirts and feet are shown inside the capacious jaws, while the head is beginning to appear somewhere behind the dragon's neck. To the right is shown a gruesome representation of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence, and then follow Adam and Eve by the Tree of Life (a twisted piece of foliage), the martyrdom of St. Andrew, and what seems to be ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... back on me and walked out of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... causeway, and where Dickens placed that amphibious creature, "as slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark too", who exhibited a bloated pair of shoes "as interesting relics that he had taken from the feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore". This type of the gruesome long-shoremen whom Dickens had encountered in his waterside rambles, as he collected the materials for Great Expectations, was afterwards elaborated in the Rogue Riderhood ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... He described in his own fashion the finding of Archibald McBride's body. Then a few skilful questions by Moxlow brought out the fact of his having met John North on the Square immediately before his own gruesome discovery. The little lamplighter was excused, and Colonel Harbison took his: place. He, in his turn, quickly made way for Andy Gilmore. Moxlow next interrogated Atkinson, Langham's client, who explained ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... of high-explosive shells, and the drone and whirr of flying splinters, you get labour conditions removed to the utmost limit from ideal, and, to any but the men of the Sappers, well over the edge of the impossible. The work at any other time would have been gruesome and unnerving, because the gasping and groaning of the wounded hardly ceased from end to end of the captured trench, and in digging out the collapsed sections many dead Germans and some British were found blocking the ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... by cigars, Simms having begun to smoke of late years to discourage a tendency to stoutness. Then all would join in the diversions of the afternoon, which sometimes led to the "Edge of the Swamp," a gruesome place which the poet of Woodlands had celebrated in his ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... clumsy, slouching, rickety; gawky; lumping, lumpish^; lumbering; hulky^, hulking; unwieldy. squalid, haggard; grim, grim faced, grim visaged; grisly, ghastly; ghost like, death like; cadaverous, grewsome^, gruesome. frightful, hideous, odious, uncanny, forbidding; repellant, repulsive, repugnant, grotesque, bizarre; grody [Coll.], grody to the max [Coll.]; horrid, horrible; shocking &c (painful) 830. foul &c (dirty) 653; dingy &c (colorless) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... evening: up he bounded, grasped firm his foe, whose fingers cracked. The fiend made off, but the earl close followed. The monster meant — if he might at all — to fling himself free, and far away fly to the fens, — knew his fingers' power in the gripe of the grim one. Gruesome march to Heorot this monster of harm had made! Din filled the room; the Danes were bereft, castle-dwellers and clansmen all, earls, of their ale. Angry were both those savage hall-guards: the house resounded. Wonder it was the wine-hall ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... of the Mannings in 1849, his going so often to the Morgue in Paris, his visit to America to 'the exact site where Professor Webster did that amazing murder', may seem legitimate for one who had to study crime among the other departments of life; but at times he revels in gruesome details in a way which jars on our feeling, and betrays too theatrical a love of sensation. However, no one could say that Dickens is generally morbid, in view of the sound and hearty appreciation which he had for all that is wholesome and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... from here, I suppose, until your gruesome visit is accomplished. What makes you think that I would give up Sheila ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... help it, Joan?" he pleaded. "You saw how it was?" As she grew quieter, he talked. "I heard you scream like a person being tortured to death—twice—a gruesome enough sound, let me tell you, to hear in the dead of a white, still night. I didn't altogether want to break into your house. I've heard some ugly stories about men venturing to disturb the work of murderers. But, you see, Joan, I've a fear of myself. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Bill's failings might have been, he was no faint heart, and despite the shock of the gruesome discovery he continued his investigation of the silent ship. Apparently some attempt had been made when first the Buena Ventura was caught in the deadly embrace of the Sargasso to convey her treasure to the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... son, he has a sneer and a spite such as never his father had. He is never a one to sit still and let things gang their gate; but he has as little pity or compassion as his father, and if King Charles will not stir a finger to hinder a gruesome deed, Dauphin Louis will not spare to do it so that he can gain by it, and I trow verily that to give pain and sting with that bitter tongue of his is joy ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... space on the side of the bed next the fire. The bed itself—not to mention the shadowy region beyond it—on which the body of the pirate had lain, he could not regard without a sense of the awfully gruesome: itself looked scared at its own consciousness of the fact, and of the feeling it ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... cringed to their prophetess, Magdalen Brant. Perhaps it was there that this man had met his match in the lithe young animal whelped by the Toad-Woman—this slim, lawless, depraved child, who had led the False Faces in their gruesome rites and sacrifice! ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... way we knew it would. I heard it all. It wasn't gruesome, as you might imagine. I spoke with Lynds the whole time. It was sort of a resigned horror. The initial countdown went off without a hitch and the hissing of the escape valves on the carrier ...
— What Need of Man? • Harold Calin
... delicate health at the time, I need hardly say that I knew nothing of these gruesome details until afterwards. Henry (that is my husband), after entering my room with a robust and sunburned appearance that did my heart good, merely observed—as soon as we had exchanged greetings—that he had ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... ride of Richard Bullen! Sing, O Muse, of chivalrous men! the sacred quest, the doughty deeds, the battery of low churls, the fearsome ride and gruesome perils of the Flower of Simpson's Bar! Alack! she is dainty, this Muse! She will have none of this bucking brute and swaggering, ragged rider, and I must fain follow him ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... the gruesome sight until he had impressed its every detail on his memory, he turned to his assistant. "Get ahead with your flashlight, Kirby," he ordered. "Take views from all the angles you can. The constable will give you a hand. Meantime, sergeant, give me an idea of ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... "Well, but that sense of duty is hardly gruesome; it would have been horridly gruesome to have left ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... New York to live, I had explored the Eden Musee. One of the most gruesome of the spectacles which I had seen in its famed Chamber of Horrors was a representation of a gorilla, holding in its arms the gory body of a woman. It was that impression which now revived in my mind. But by a process strictly ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... the fin now and involuntarily a shiver passed over most of those on the little boat. The great black fin sailed easily and steadily along, just cutting the top of the water. Gruesome and forbidding it looked and straightway recalled to the minds of the four boys the stories they had so often heard of the hordes of man-eating sharks that infested the waters of ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing for the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the dramatis personae of the gruesome scene—extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must ever ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... almost before the old gentleman was cold in his grave! It was contemptible. In no little dread he wondered if his uncle would come back to haunt him. There was, at any rate, no getting away from the gruesome conviction, ludicrous as it may seem, that he would be responsible for the brisk turning over of ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... or tights, they too must have an application of liquid white. To look right, any flesh that is exposed must be made up, because the lights bleach the exposed flesh, making it appear bloodless and giving one a gruesome, corpse-like color. ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... through pity, and a few through a vague sense of loss; for, henceforth, the Vier Marchi would lack a familiar interest; but mostly the people of Mattingley's world were wakeful through curiosity. Morbid expectation of the hanging had for them a gruesome diversion. The thing itself would break the daily monotony of life and provide hushed gossip for vraic gatherings and veilles for a long time to come. Thus Elie Mattingley would not die ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the same moment Manisty was beside her again, and the gruesome sounds above were ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and made very presentable pancakes. John Harris, too, was a great forager—he knew exactly where to put his hand on decent biscuits, and the smile with which he landed his booty made the goods toothsome in the extreme. Harris had a gruesome experience. One day he was seated on a hill, talking to a friend, when a shell took the friend's head off and scattered his brains ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... Man with the Broken Ear)—the story of a mummy resuscitated to a world of new conditions after many years of apparent death—shows his freakish delight in oddity. So does 'Le Nez du Notaire' (The Notary's Nose), a gruesome tale of the tribulations of a handsome society man, whose nose is struck off in a duel by a revengeful Turk. The victim buys a bit of living skin from a poor water-carrier, and obtains a new nose by successful grafting. But he can nevermore get rid of the uncongenial Aquarius, who ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... do?" she queried weakly. "Don't tell me anything gruesome, please, aunt, because I feel so low-spirited this morning that I ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... may say so, I think the picture of Catherine is the gem of the book. She reminds me of her namesake of Siena—and would as little have failed in any duty, however gruesome. You ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... lady sweet, whose lord lay slain, The robbers into gruesome durance drew. Swift should her hero come, like lightning's blue! She prayed for him, as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... near by while he harnessed the dogs; he accompanied every step the woodsman took—wild horses could not have dragged him away in his present frame of mind—and finally, when they set out back toward the Canadian Line, he shambled along ahead of the team with head down and eyes averted from the gruesome bundle that lay in the sled. His punishment had overtaken him and he ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
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