|
|
|
More "Ordeal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to have me come to visit you tomorrow?" suggested Elizabeth, who dreaded the ordeal almost ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... life's severest lessons have been learnt. Thus the young, who have just left the negative faith and innocence of the nursery behind them and stand inexperienced on the threshold of life, are not normally religious; whereas we naturally expect those who have passed through the ordeal, and been disillusioned, to begin to think about their souls, since there is nothing else left ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... awarded a bronze medal. He was extremely nervous and extremely jealous of other tenors and he covered his nervous jealousy with an ebullient friendliness. It was his humour to have people know what an ordeal a concert was to him. Therefore when he saw Mr. Duggan he went ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... is sent for to discover the criminal. He pretends to be possessed by a spirit and in this state he names the wretch who has caused the death by sorcery. The accused has to submit to the poison ordeal by drinking a decoction of the red bark of the Erythrophloeum guiniense. If he vomits up the poison, he is innocent; but if he fails to do so, the infuriated crowd rushes on him and despatches him with knives and clubs. The family of the supposed culprit has moreover to pay an indemnity ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... her, he walked along the streets, thinking not of the court, but of his conversations with the prosecutor and the inspectors. That he was seeking an interview with her, and told the prosecutor of his intention, and visited two prisons preparing for the ordeal, had so excited him that he could not calm down. On returning home he immediately brought forth his unused diary, read some parts and made the following entry: "For two years I have kept no diary, and thought that I should never again return to this childishness. ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... asked if he might see Mistress Corbet. No, that too was impossible; she was gone upstairs with the Queen's Grace and might not be disturbed. Anthony, in despair, not however unmixed with relief at escaping a further ordeal, was about to turn away, leaving the officious young gentleman swaggering on the stairs like a peacock, when down came Mistress Corbet herself, sailing down in her splendour, to see what was become of the gentleman ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... nerve-destroying practice, akin to suicide. Trevor had got his scholarship in the previous November. He was due at the headmaster's private house at six o'clock on the present Tuesday. He was looking forward to the ordeal not without apprehension. The essay subject this week had been "One man's meat is another man's poison", and Clowes, whose idea of English Essay was that it should be a medium for intempestive frivolity, had insisted on ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... Lucia had been thrilled and delighted to know that Olga so much wanted to come in after dinner and see the tableaux, so he found it quite easy to induce Lucia to nerve herself up to an ordeal so passionately desired. Indeed he himself was hardly less excited at the thought of ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... Weissesaal, where the members of the Diplomatic Corps defiled before the throne and made our courtesy—one only—before the Emperor. All the suites and court gentlemen stood massed together opposite the throne. It was quite an ordeal to walk under the fire of so many eyes, as the parquet was without any carpet and very slippery, and the length of ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... troops would be marched back to their post; then, after a little while, a stretcher would be brought out with a body in civilian clothes, a cloth over the face. Some of the prisoners were women, and there were screams before the shots were fired. It must have been a dreadful ordeal to go through. ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... passed through a very trying ordeal," he said, "and no man could have done his duty better; but forces beyond your control have proved too strong for you. I am ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... another man of the theft. This other man was a Mr. John Temple, who had once had an opportunity of examining the papers of the late Mr. Whately. Temple immediately challenged his accuser; a duel was fought, and as far as ordeal of battle went, Temple made good his innocence, for he wounded William Whately. At {156} this moment Franklin came forward. He admitted that the letters had come into his hands, and that he had despatched them to America. He declined to say how they did come into ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... good you are," Evadne cried, feeling fully for the first time how much she had in heart been dreading the ordeal of having perhaps to enter the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... eyes that centred on each speaker's face in turn had little of hope or animation in them. The conference began after the evening meal, and extended far into the night. All seemed to realize the hopelessness of pursuing the quest any farther, yet none cared to face the ordeal of turning the boats seaward again. They compromised the matter. A last attempt should be made to acquire guides and information. If the attempt failed, ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... mean some dignitary of high rank connected with the imperial family. With this impression they had received us when we arrived, and had, poor fellows, done their very best to show us proper honour and respect. It had been a severe ordeal to us, but it had proved in the most unmistakable manner the loyalty of the Kamchadal inhabitants of Milkova to the ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... him, and was the only mounted officer on the Canadian side, so that he was at a disadvantage. Moreover, he had never previously manoeuvred a brigade, even on parade, and to handle one in battle was a trying ordeal to an inexperienced officer who had never before been ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... map assured me that at length we had struck the main road from Malaga, and there seemed every reason to believe that the ordeal just over would be our last. Flying along at a good fifty miles an hour, under a tired moon that sought the west, presently a town rose grandly up before us, throned on rocks in a wide valley, and pallid in the strange light ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... from it. At the same moment a swarm of horribly grotesque, swart objects, looking like imps, appeared amid the branches of the tree, and grinned and gesticulated at Wyat, whose courage remained unshaken during the fearful ordeal. Not so his steed. After rearing and plunging violently, the affrighted animal broke its hold and darted off into the swamp, where it floundered and ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... alone with the dead. She looked on the heaps of sea-weeds, and then along the line of breakers, that seemed even now gathering strength for a return movement. It was a trying ordeal for a child of ten, but the terrible novelty of the situation seemed to give her courage. She advanced towards the body, which she now saw was that of a woman dressed in black. She lay upon her back, the face only hidden by the tangled hair and sea-weed. Elsie noticed as she ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... her tired eyes and pressed her hand heavily upon the stone coping of the parapet. It was the supreme effort, and when she looked down at Inez again she knew that she should live to the end of the ordeal without wavering. ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... not argue with him. At such times people do not want arguments or good counsel or correction. They want somebody to stand by in mute fellowship to watch and listen and suffer, too. So Mamise helped Davidge through that ordeal. He turned from rage at the Germans ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... as it was, was derived from such obsolete and antique commentators as a Lapide, Maldonatus, Estius, and the Triplex; and I was ashamed to produce such fossilized literature to the advanced thinkers of the present day. I did not like to face this ordeal:— ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... arrangement both Lady Westborough and Lady Flora were compelled, though with very different feelings, to be satisfied; and an agreement was established between them, to the effect that if Linden's name passed unblemished through the appointed ordeal Lady Flora was to be left to, and favoured in, her own election; while, on the contrary, if Lord Ulswater succeeded in the proof he had spoken of, his former footing in the family was to be fully re-established and our unfortunate adventurer ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said Rochester, a trifle unsteadily. "It has been a terrible ordeal; God help her to forget!" His voice failed and he swept his hand across his eyes as he held open the door into the corridor and followed McIntyre and his ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... end? To save his daughter from what, had he voluntarily renounced her, giving her into another's care, forswearing his paternal title to her love, refusing himself even the cold comfort of seeing her attain to the flower of her womanly beauty as another's child? What—finally—was the ordeal of the Gateway of Swords, and what could it be that made the Gateway of Death seem ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... and out towards the cloakrooms. Every one seized his own wraps with a practised snatch, and passed on, still in line, over the dusty wooden floors of the hall, down the ill-built, resounding stairs, out to the playground—out to Sylvia's ordeal. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... her colour rose. Filippo, quite at his ease, leisurely, openly observant of her, whistled "Lucia" softly to himself. Roses, roses all the way, and all for him, he thought amusedly. And yet she bore the ordeal well, betraying no restlessness, keeping her eyes unswervingly fixed on the two lions of the advertisement of Chinina Migone pasted on the glass over his head. At the Ripetta bridge she got out. He followed, saw her go into a house farther down the street, and paused ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... next forty-eight hours this awful possibility darkened her delight. For it was a possibility. Grown people did such monstrous unaccountable things, there was no saying what they might not be up to next. And here, for once, was an ordeal Clem could not share with her. He was blind. Alone, if it must be, she ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... achievement. Enormous difficulties were faced with stout hearts, and the Royal Flying Corps spirit surmounted them. It was one long test of courage, endurance, and efficiency, and so triumphantly did the airmen come through the ordeal that General Allenby's Army may truthfully be said to have secured as complete a mastery of the air as it did of the plains and hills of Southern Palestine. Those of us who watched the airmen 'carrying on,' from the time when their aeroplanes ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... hands and knees I crawled farther in, and, to my great delight, shortly found myself in a high-ceiled cavern, safe from the storm, a place in which one might starve comfortably, if so be one had to pass through that trying ordeal. ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... Philip Christian's ordeal: for Kitty discovers that she loves him and not Pete, and he that he loves Kitty madly. On the other hand there is the imperative duty to keep faith with his absent friend; and more than this. His future is full of high hope; ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and was thrown out for sale or destruction. Some of the college libraries did not suffer severely. Most of Grey's books survived in Balliol, although the miniatures were cut out. Queen's, All Souls, and Merton came through the ordeal nearly unscathed. But Lincoln lost the books given by Gascoigne and the Italian importations of Flemming; Exeter College was purged. The University library itself was entirely dispersed. One of the commissioners, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... The poison ordeal is a necessary corollary to witchcraft. The plant most used by the Oganga (medicine man) is a small red rooted shrub, not unlike a hazel bush, and called Ikazya or Ikaja. Mr. Wilson (p. 225) writes "Nkazya:" Battel ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... thou; and to a doom so fell Thou walkest, that thy name from South to North Shall shine, a sign for ever!—Reach thou forth Thine arms, Agave, now, and ye dark-browed Cadmeian sisters! Greet this prince so proud To the high ordeal, where save God and me, None walks unscathed!—The rest this day shall see. [Exit DIONYSUS ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... auburn head, though her dimples were obscured, and a pinkness of complexion for which she had not paid betrayed the fact that her amour propre was writhing under this ordeal. Poor little woman, I really pitied her, for even with my slight knowledge of her character, I guessed that she had dreamed of the sensation the departure en automobile of a party so distinguished would create at the hotel. She had confidingly judged the charms ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... After we had been compelled to endure this stifling atmosphere for four or five minutes, the windows and doors were once more opened. A person of a consumptive habit could scarcely have survived this inhuman ordeal. ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... The next ordeal through which I was to pass, was going into the dining-room and using knives and forks, but I avoided all humiliation by simply watching. I have made it a rule of my life to never be the first to try new things, nor the last to lay ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... why that spontaneous testimonial was welcome at the moment, for a curious and unaccustomed ordeal was impending for his claims as an art critic. On his return from Venice after months of intercourse with the great Old Masters, he found the Grosvenor Gallery just opened for the first time, with its memorable exhibition of the different extra-academical schools. ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... its close. London lay sweltering under a heat-wave which had robbed the trees in the Park of their fresh June greenness and converted the progress of foot-passengers along its sultry pavements into something which called to mind the mediaeval ordeal ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... history condemned criminals were put to death by being deprived of sleep, and the same method has been employed in China. Enforced sleeplessness, in fact, has been used as a form of torture by the Chinese, being more feared than any other. The men subjected to this frightful ordeal always die raving maniacs. ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... closed from the very beginning. The question now occurred to me, Would I not be justified by the law of nations in breaking the blockade? It was now or never. If they once commenced dressing, farewell to hope! Well, I did it. Heaven only knows how I got through the terrible ordeal. I only remember that desperation gave strength and speed to my limbs, and I ran with incredible velocity. A moment of terrible confusion ensued as I grasped at my scattered habiliments. There came a scream of ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Day of Judgment. And each is his own judge. Now all his and her past life and inborn nature is being put to the test in a fierce ordeal—and the fiery ordeal of love is more searching even than the ordeal of war. Every smallest blot and blemish, every slightest impurity is shown up in startling clearness. Every flaw at once betrays itself. ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... through the same ordeal as liberty in every other form. It can only dictate laws, after having first taken thorough possession of men's minds. If, then, it be true that a reform, to be firmly established, must be generally understood, it follows ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... honoured with a request so cordial, signed by five-and-twenty names, so distinguished in science, in literature, and in administrative position, that I at once resolved to respond to it by braving not only the disquieting oscillations of the Atlantic, but the far more disquieting ordeal of appearing in person before the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... Royal circle should be the object of such an attempt; the second that more care had not been taken by those responsible for his safety in travelling; and the third was admiration for the perfect coolness and obvious bravery which he showed during and after the ordeal. Everywhere tributes of sympathy were tendered in language of unstinted appreciation of the Heir Apparent's public services and character. Speaking at Acton, on the same evening, Lord George Hamilton, M.P., said: "What could have induced any foreigner to raise his hand against ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... mark for Lady Rythdale's eyes and tongue. She sat drooping a little with indignation and shame, when Mr. Carlisle came up. He had seen from a distance the tint of his lady's cheeks, and judged that she was going through some sort of an ordeal. But though he came to protect, he stood still to enjoy. The picture was so very pretty. The mother ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... the blood of mortality. Now we can know the two sides of things. We understand the good, because we have been in contact with the evil. Our joy is perfect, because we have experienced pain and sorrow. We know what life is, eternal life, because we have passed through the ordeal of death." ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... spoke to her, and the presentation was then effected without a scene. This animal, which was a well-bred Australian, was a stranger to me, and had never carried a lady before that day. Nevertheless, she passed successfully through a terribly trying ordeal, and I am certain that she would not have made the great efforts she did in jumping, if I had not soothed and encouraged her with my voice. She was only 14-2 in height, and was competing against big horses, ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... and face brought back to the Indian lad with a rush the memory of the recent ordeal he had been through. He gave one glance at the unconscious form on the other couch and his hand darted to the hunting-knife at his hip as he staggered, dizzily, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... exceedingly primitive. Very kind too, and a fine old-fashioned place; but, oh, so dull! All their ideas are of the seventeenth century. It will be a severe ordeal for poor Theodora, but if Lady Fotheringham, good old soul, is pleased with her, I shall ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to meet, these rosy lips to kiss, Who would not hazard all to win such bliss? My senses reel, my veins are all afire! Good Barak, help me to my heart's desire. Her stern ordeal I'll undergo—to solve Her problems or to die, is ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... we find the command to practise the brutal and superstitious custom of the ordeal, the endorsement of the whole ordeal system of the Middle Ages. Deuteronomy xiii. is entirely devoted to commands of murder, and is the indulgence given beforehand to every persecuting priest. The prophet ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... the heroism of a hundred of our naval men who volunteered for the purpose at the risk of life, the Medical Authorities in desperation were enabled to try every possible method of infection with the alleged Influenza Germs, our boys submitting to inoculation and even to the repulsive ordeal of introduction into the nose and throat of diseased mucous from and close contact with coughing and spitting bed patients in the severest forms of the disease. The experiments were made simultaneously at San Francisco and Boston under the direction of Surgeons McCoy and Goldberger ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... many manuscript pieces with which he might have swelled the volume to a much greater size; but as this is his first attempt at authorship, in the shape of a volume, he offers it, tremblingly, at the ordeal of public opinion, merely as a sample ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... second meeting; their parting was formal, in the family circle. Mr. Athel displayed even more than his usual urbanity; Mrs. Rossall was genuinely gracious; the twins made many promises to write from Switzerland. Emily was self-possessed, but Wilfrid read in her face that she was going through an ordeal. He felt the folly of his first proposal, that she should play a part before Mrs. Rossall through the winter months. He decided, moreover, that no time should be lost in making the necessary disclosure ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... with many soft words, and then said, 'O king, thou hast completely subjugated the five organs of action and the five organs of knowledge with the mind as their sixth. Thou hast for this come out unscathed from the fiery ordeal I had prepared for thee. I have been properly honoured and adored, O son, by thee, O foremost of all persons possessed of speech. Thou hast no sin, not even a minute one, in thee! Give me leave, O king, for I shall now proceed to the place ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... past experience with other children what to expect: fretfulness and tears, if nothing worse. To my unbounded amazement she greeted me with a smile and said she was glad to see me; and, if you'll believe it, there was never so much as a whimper from her lips through the whole ordeal, though I knew ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... through long usage was inured to this violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world. But all the time her heart was crying, as if in the midst of some ordeal: 'I want to go back, I want to go away, I want not to know it, not to know that this exists.' Yet she must ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Monte-Leone and increased his excitement. He crossed the church, went down the nave, and approached a lateral chapel where a taper was burning with a flickering light. The Count entered the chapel. Those who had seen him amid the brilliant society of Naples, or amid the awful judicial ordeal to which he had just been subjected, and which he had undergone with such coolness and audacity, would not have recognized the humble and trembling man, who knelt before a sarcophagus of black marble surmounted with the coronet and arms of the Monte-Leoni. The Count knelt at the tomb of his ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... wondering suitor, the independent reflection was beginning to do that for which he himself had come. In other words, there was a proposal going on there in the glass, and Jingleberry enjoyed the novel sensation of seeing how he himself would look when passing through a similar ordeal. Altogether, however, it was not as pleasing as most novelties are, for there were distinct signs in the face of the mirrored Marian that the mirrored Jingleberry's words were distasteful to her, and that the proposition he was making was not ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... to retire. The ordeal had strained his patience and had left his brain feeling the stress of unaccustomed exercise. Therefore, allowing Melvina to drive him before her much as she would have driven a docile Jersey from a cabbage patch, he made his way downstairs, ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... this goblet contained a vile poison, one drop of which on her tongue would cause death; so she hesitated, trembling and shrinking from the ordeal. ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... felt this influence very soon, and her second letter to Aunt Barbara was filled with praise of Clifton, where she had made so many friends, in spite of her evident desire to avoid society and stay by herself. She had passed through the usual ordeal attending the advent of every new face, especially if that face be a little out of the common order of faces. She had been inspected in the dining room, and bathroom, and chapel, both when she went in and when she went out. She had been talked up and criticised ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... with the Custom House officers here," laughed Ishmael, as he gave his arm to Judge Merlin and went on shore, leaving all the passengers who had not been shipwrecked, and lost their luggage, to pass the ordeal he ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... that bold reformer who had assailed his throne. And it seems that a change took place in Florence itself in popular sentiment. The Medicean party obtained the ascendency in the government. The people—the fickle people—began to desert Savonarola; and especially when he refused to undergo the ordeal of fire,—one of the relics of Mediaeval superstition,—the people felt that they had been cheated out of their amusement, for they had waited impatiently the whole day in the public square to see the spectacle. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... and she may work him a little present; but it is all lifeless, passionless, and business-like. Among the peasantry there is more of the picturesque, and many quaint customs still survive. Marriage-brokers do a good trade, and get a percentage on each pair that they see through the ordeal of a wedding. In Frascati, parents with marriageable sons and daughters assemble on Sunday afternoons in the chief piazza. The men sit on one side and the women on the other. In the intervening space the candidates for matrimony ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... is blue, but to my eyes it is shrunk to the size of a bachelor's-button!" Miss Cooper was very reluctant in consenting to the amputation which prolonged her life for several years. Even after the surgeons stood ready in the operating-room she for a time declined to submit to the ordeal. There was a prolonged discussion which resulted at last, on the advice of friends, in obtaining her consent. The chief surgeon entering the room approached the bedside rubbing his hands and, grasping at something to say to reassure the patient, remarked in silken tones, "Well, Miss Cooper, I'm ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... like son," and I knew that she was thoroughly determined to make both of them pay dearly for their pleasant interlude. Breakfast the next morning was a rather trying ordeal. Grandfather once more resorted to his game leg with renewed vigor, referring several times to the defense of the Alamo, so I knew he was pretty low in his mind. Father withdrew at the sight of bacon. Mother laughed scornfully as he departed. My friend ate a hearty ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... all military, for we had a judge among us. I know it is equally easy and invidious to ridicule the peculiarities of appearance and manner in people of a different nation from ourselves; we may, too, at the same moment, be undergoing the same ordeal in their estimation; and, moreover, I am by no means disposed to consider whatever is new to me as therefore objectionable; but, nevertheless, it was impossible not to feel repugnance to many of the novelties ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... in the ceremony were also taking leave. Mr. Langhope, somewhat pale and nervous after the ordeal, had been helped into the Gaines landau with Mrs. Ansell and Cicely; Mrs. Amherst had accepted a seat in the Dressel victoria; and Westy Gaines, with an empressement slightly tinged by condescension, was in the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... very moment that Chia Se felt unable, along with a company of actresses, to bear the ordeal of waiting on the ground floor of the two-storied building, he caught sight of a eunuch come running at a flying pace. "The composition of verses is over," he said, "so quick give me the programme;" whereupon Chia Se hastened to present the programme as well as a ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the hurried and condensed manner in which the sketch of 1842 is written; the style of the later Essay (1844) is more finished. It has, however, the air of an uncorrected MS. rather than of a book which has gone through the ordeal of proof sheets. It has not all the force and conciseness of the Origin, but it has a certain freshness which gives it a character of its own. It must be remembered that the Origin was an abstract or condensation of a much bigger book, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... not all, however," her friend said; "you have an ordeal before you which you will not find pleasant. You are going to think about your life, and all that was imperfect in it, and which might have been ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... scarcely believe was his. It was already bleached to a chalky gray. His lips were colorless, his fine teeth looked yellowish. He glanced at Alexandra sullenly, blinked as if he had come from a dark place, and one eyebrow twitched continually. She felt at once that this interview was a terrible ordeal to him. His shaved head, showing the conformation of his skull, gave him a criminal look which he had ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... to the ordeal from which I suffered. You shall follow my three friends into the room. According to Sinclair's description, the ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... Clavering's forehead; but it was not the man's contemptuous brusqueness which brought it there, though that was not without its effect. It was evident that the most he could hope for was Larry's clemency, and that would be difficult to tolerate. But there was another ordeal before him. Hetty was also coming back, and would see him a prisoner in the hands of the men he had looked down upon with ironical contempt. Had the contempt been assumed, his position would have been less intolerable; ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... a desire to make somebody else's hands as tired as his own. But one glance at his glowing, kindly face dispelling that idea, Barbara concentrated all her attention on the best way to free herself, and avoid going through a similar ordeal with all the others, which, she began to fear, might ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... the ordeal had been severe, and for the thirty hours following the robbery she had kept her bed. Berry had contracted a slight cold, and I was not one penny the worse. Jill was overcome to learn what she had missed, and the reflection ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... it was, and a serious condition of affairs confronted Skipper Ed. He gave up his fishing and devoted his whole attention to his four patients, and he thanked the Lord that he himself had passed through the ordeal as a child, ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... ever bore up under it is more than I can now tell," said Mrs. Darlington, with an involuntary shudder. "And the toil, and suffering, and danger through which we have come! I cannot be sufficiently thankful that we are safe from the dreadful ordeal, and with so few marks of the fire ...
— Woman's Trials - or, Tales and Sketches from the Life around Us. • T. S. Arthur
... due time, heard what had happened, and helped Sophie to collect her various small belongings. The other teachers had already dispersed, so the ordeal ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... perfectly to the time and the scene, as a little daughter of Daniel Boone. As it was, she felt no less foreign than she looked, for the strangeness of the land and of the people still possessed her so that her native shyness had sunk to depths that were painful. She had a new ordeal before her now, for in her sinewy little hands were a paper bag, a first reader, and a spelling-book, and she was on her way to school. Beneath her the white turnpike wound around the hill and down into a little ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... of the embarrassments of the marriage proposal. To all who are not borne along by an impetuous impulse it is a trying ordeal. Barwood was too self-conscious ever to be transported ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... growled the major. "Haven't done anything. Bless my soul, Chief, take my word for it, haven't done a thing to be thanked for. Here's your hotel. Get some coffee to brace your nerves up with, for I can assure you, boy, a wedding is a trying ordeal, even if there is but a handful of folks to see it through. Be a good boy, now—good-bye until eleven—St. Swithin's, remember, and God bless you!" and the big-hearted, blustering major was whisked away in his carriage, leaving the young Indian ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... saying that in this world gentle methods have effected more than harsh, and added this beautiful thought: "In the ordeal by laundry the ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... that, in a representative government, there is no absurdity or contradiction, nor any arraying of the people against themselves, in requiring that the statutes or enactments of the government shall pass the ordeal of any number of separate tribunals, before it shall be determined that they are to have the force of laws. Our American constitutions have provided five of these separate tribunals, to wit, representatives, senate, executive,[2] ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... imagine that if Filmer had seen fit at this stage to define just what he was feeling, and to take a definite line in the matter of his ascent, he might have escaped that painful ordeal quite easily. If he had had it clearly in his mind he could have done endless things. He would surely have found no difficulty with a specialist to demonstrate a weak heart, or something gastric or pulmonary, to stand in his way—that is the line I am astonished he did not take,—or ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... was conscious of being justly condemned. How many men must be sitting yonder in those cells who lacked the moral consolations that I had! The thought sharpened my perception of the horror of all imprisonment, but at the same time stiffened my fortitude; for if these men could live through their ordeal, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... had washed him horribly, and had taken him into the big, red school-house, so familiar from the outside, but so full of unknown terrors within. After his dusty little shoes had stumbled over the threshold he had passed from ordeal to ordeal until at last he was torn in mute and white-faced ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... Gudrun in the English edition, has a simple plot. The subject is the calumny which was brought against Gudrun by Herkja, the cast-off mistress of Attila (that "she had seen Gudrun and Theodoric together") and the ordeal of water by which Gudrun proved her innocence, while the falsehood was brought home to Herkja, the bondwoman. The theme is slighter than all the rest, and this poem, at least, might be reckoned not unfit to be taken up as a single scene in a ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... we are "for it." It is that heavy hour between five and six when the vitality is all too low for the ordeal that awaits us. On either side the far-flung battle line of clustering figures stretches away into the gloom. It is an inspiring sight, this tense silent crowd of men of every class and vocation, united by a common purpose, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various
... an empty truck in which was a bench with a green cloth, emblematic of Ireland. This was better than convulsively clinging to the engine while she madly careered along narrow and dizzy precipices, every kick threatening to be your last, and emerging from the fiery ordeal, begrimed and swarthy, your knees half cooked by the engine fire. All this happened on my journey from Westport to Newport, but now the truck promised Sybaritic luxury, and if the rail should again give way, if the bog-hole, "still gaping to devour me, opened wide," ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... he never had expected to be there. In all his visits to the house Rosalie never had been met on any other day than Saturday. This dinner was on the Monday, and arriving to face and carry through his ordeal, he was startled, he was utterly shaken to see her there. ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... silence, but drank a good deal of champagne to keep his courage up for the coming ordeal, which he knew he must go through. Vandeloup, on the other hand, ate and drank very little, as he talked gaily all the time about theatres, racing, boating, in fact of everything except the thing the ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... does George Meredith (1828-1909) belong to our own day that it is difficult to think of him as one of the Victorian novelists. His first notable work, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was published in 1859, the same year as George Eliot's Adam Bede; but it was not till the publication of Diana of the Crossways in 1885, that his power as a novelist was widely recognized. He resembles Browning not only in his condensed ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... that morning, but had carried in his subconsciousness all day this visit to the footman's child. In one manner or another that inconvenient locality had been compassed in his circuit for the past three weeks. From it he passed to his daily ordeal, another rich patient, a nervous wreck, whose primary ailment—the lack of anything to do—had passed into the advanced stages of an inability to do anything, with its sad Nemesis of melancholia—the registered protest of the dying soul. It was a case which took more out ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... elections, served on committees, opposed tooth and nail all projects of university reform, and talked jovially over his glass of port of the ruin to be anticipated by the Church and of the sacrilege daily committed by the Whigs. The ordeal through which he had gone in resisting the blandishments of the lady of Rome had certainly done much towards the strengthening of his character. Although in small and outward matters he was self-confident enough, nevertheless in things affecting the inner man he aimed at a humility of ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Keith noted with appreciation that she became perceptibly cooler as the moment of departure approached. With cheeks aflame and eyes sparkling, yet speaking with a voice revealing no falter, she pressed his arm and declared herself prepared for the ordeal. The face under the shadow of the mantilla was so arch and piquant, Keith could ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... over at last. Case had acquitted himself well, and Ransom tolerably. Bart was mortified and disgusted. This was the extent then of the ordeal; all his labor, hard study, and anxiety, ended ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... handkerchief. Several French officers dashed towards them at full speed, and reached them in time to save them from the clutches of the Indians, whose camps were near at hand. They were kindly treated, recovered from the effects of their frightful ordeal, and were afterwards exchanged. Pringle lived to old age, and died in 1800, senior major-general of ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... under the Ordeal by General was more sustaining to her, and made her more grateful than to a less devoted and affectionate spirit, not habituated to her struggles and sacrifices, might appear quite reasonable; and, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... survives the ordeal and lives it bears the same relation to the herd as the maverick and has no lawful owner until it is branded. If an unbranded calf has left or lost its mother it has lost its identity as well and finds it again only after being branded, although it may have swapped owners ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... leaving her alone in Paris, with a few pounds to pay for her journey home, if she should have courage to go back to the friends who had sheltered her. In this hour of abandonment and shame, she chose death rather than such an ordeal, and ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... regrets, and was strangely calm, strangely uplifted. He could look back without shame, and forward without fear. Now he was thankful that in these days of his ordeal he had been true to himself and to his trust. He had done his best. There was little more to do. That little should be done as became the son of ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... to buoy herself up by a hope of the still-expected great arrival—for she knew that the hero would show himself only at a very late hour if it were to be her good fortune that he showed himself at all—Mr. Sowerby walked up the stairs. He had schooled himself to go through this ordeal with all the cool effrontery which was at his command; but it was clearly to be seen that all his effrontery did not stand him in sufficient stead, and that the interview would have been embarrassing had it not been for the genuine good-humour of the lady. "Here is my brother," said Mrs. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... really asleep. Yet as things are I dare not treat him as if he were either. To-morrow he must do a little scouting for us. He shall feel for the enemy, and if they fire upon him—well and good, then he has not brought the enemy down upon us. But because of his past, he must undergo the ordeal by fire ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... "We had the ordeal of the custom-house to pass again; but once passed, and told that we were free to go on, it was like going into a clear atmosphere from a fog. We crossed the custom-house threshold into another room, and we found ourselves in Russia, and in an ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... great Nebuchadnezzar through Daniel's message. Now He wants to speak again in a way that will compel attention. He needs these three young men. They consent to be His messengers. It meant going through a terrible ordeal. They simply remained true in their personal devotion to God. This was the thing God needed, and used. Everything of use to God roots down in the life. The personal plea of the great king, and the prospect of a horrible death fail alike ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... mother is responsible for the existing school system, nor could she alter it, if she wanted to. Even if she has a little pinch of the heart at the thought of subjecting her sensitive boy to such an ordeal, how can she dare to do otherwise? Among people of all classes, it is considered proper and necessary, for children ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... gone through this solemn function. So it is that the ministers, some of them nearly eighty years of age, march around the room perhaps a score of times; and it is very easy to understand that Bismarck preferred to avoid such an ordeal. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... late employer, Mr. Clinch, found that I had some knowledge of arithmetic and accounts, he used to set me at work on his bills, to see if they were cast up correctly. This experience had prepared me for precisely the ordeal I was at present undergoing. I wrote the bill as handsomely as I could, though without straining over it, and figured up the prices, extending them and adding them. The examiner seemed to be very much pleased, and wanted to know where I had learned so much about the lumber business. ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... was poisoned through an ordeal of her life when it should have run at its purest and sweetest. That the man who had promised to marry her, had exhausted the vocabulary of love for her, should thus cast her off, struck her into a frantic calenture which, for a season, threatened her existence. The surprise of his ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... a hurry to get the ordeal over. Instead of hanging back she walked briskly out of the cloak-room before those who had entered ahead of her finished patting their hair or putting powder ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... had been to try the climate of Colorado, but the long overland journey seemed too great an ordeal in his condition, and, hearing of Saranac in the Adirondacks, then just coming into prominence as a resort for consumptives, they decided to make a trial of it. While Louis and his mother paid a visit to the Fairchilds at Newport, his wife and stepson went ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... effect of the jar upon the steam pipes, glands, and feed connections remains a matter of speculation. So far as the consequences of the burst upon the structure of the hull itself is concerned, every care was taken to make the ordeal as complete and instructive as possible. The wing passage, which has a maximum diameter of 3 ft. diminishing to a point, was left empty, although at the former experiments the lower portions were filled with coal. But behind this, and at a distance of 8 ft. from the bulkhead, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... Goodwin with an unblinking and remorseless aloofness. It was not hard to imagine him, when the Etna, with her crew seduced or drugged to man her, should be clear of soundings and the business of the voyage put in shape, when every watch on deck would be a quaking ordeal of fear and pain, and every watch below an interval ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... waste a good hour of the painter's time. I told him of my artistic sympathies, what pictures I had seen of his in London, and how much pleased I was with those then in his studio. He went through the ordeal without flinching. He said he would be glad to ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... cheerfully submits to this ordeal, it seems impossible to devise a mode of verification of their theories which does not rouse resentment in theological minds. Is it that, while the pleasure of the scientific man culminates in the demonstrated harmony ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... busy preparing for the great ordeal. The first task was to break the boom across the river. This boom was placed so as to hold the ships under the fire of the forts; and the four-knot spring current was so strong that the eight-knot ships could not make way enough against it ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... same opinion; but though there were a few attempts at jocularity, the mirth was forced, and all knew that they were trying to hide the deep feelings of thankfulness in their hearts for their safety, after passing through as terrible an ordeal as could fall ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... and ordeal by flame. You promised true. In joy we trembled lest We should be found unworthy when it came; But—oh—we never guessed The ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... have shown, have been severely dealt with by Nature in this respect: she has forced them, at a time of life when their minds are ill compacted, their ideas chaotic, and their wills untrained, to face an ordeal which demands above all things reverence based on knowledge and resolution sustained by high affections. An enormously large proportion flounder blindly into the mire before they know what it is, not necessarily, but very often into the defilement of evil habit, but, still more often, ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... give a great feast if I return to Algiers, in celebration of the miracle. Had it not been for my cousin's wish that I should go with thee, I should not have felt that the hour had come when I might face the ordeal of such a journey to the far south. But the prayer of Si Maieddine, who, after his father, is the last man left of his line, has kindled in my veins a fire which I thought had burnt out forever. Have no fear, daughter. I shall be ready ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... nearer its mother put it to me. The third and youngest wife, who was really very pretty, appeared enchantingly bashful, but what was her bashfulness compared to mine, when compelled for mere form's sake to enfold in my arms a beautiful and naked young woman? It was really a distressing ordeal. She showed her appreciation of our company by the glances of her black and flashing eyes, and the exposure of two rows of beautifully even and ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... as if he were going to the guillotine when he starts for the barber's, but she will not stand for a beard of more than a week's growth. He always stops at my door on his way back to let his wife kiss his clean old face, all wreathed with smiles—the ordeal is over for another week. He never needs a sou except for that shave. He drinks nothing but his own cider: he eats his own vegetables, his own rabbits; he never goes anywhere except to the fields,—does not want to—unless it is to play the violin for a dance or a fete. He just works, eats, ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... to go through such an ordeal, my dearest. I know that we could have all these grand things, and for that reason, if for no better one, I'm perfectly willing to go without them. No, Alice, we will be married here in this room. We will deck it with flowers," continued Quincy. "Leopold will go to Boston to-morrow ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... woman, a girl of seventeen, in whose warm nature passion and imagination so largely predominated over intellect, was but too liable to have her reason shaken from its seat by the ordeal through which ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... who took part in the massacre of St. Bartholomew were under twenty-two years of age. But though Members listened and laughed they refused, for the most part, to vote with him. The Bill came almost unscathed through the first day of its ordeal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... of the team were badly shaken, until C.S.M. Gorse and Corpl. B. Staniforth came along and helped to reorganize the post with a few new men. The trench contained no real cover, and the bombardment lasted for about half an hour; a severe ordeal for men who had already had a stiff fight followed by a night of bombing. Many of the telephone lines were broken, and L.-Corpl. Fisher, who had done such gallant work the previous day, was killed entering our ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... the afternoon, striving desperately to nerve herself for the ordeal. But strive as she might, the fact remained that she was horribly, painfully frightened. There was something about this man which it seemed futile to resist, something that dominated her, something against which it hurt ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... not been beforehand with him. The spirit of contradiction and the affectation of superiority, however, led him to reproach his rival with pusillanimity, and he went so far that at length he found himself committed to undergo the ordeal: merely stipulating that, in consideration of his being a foreigner, he should be permitted to elevate the ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... heathen sage's insight into the nature of mankind, when compared with the Saviour's; for hard, indeed, would it be to men, whether high or low, rich or poor, if science and learning, or contemplative philosophy, were the sole avenues to peace and redemption; since, in this state of ordeal, requiring active duties, very few, in any age, whether they be high or low, rich or poor, ever are or can be devoted to pursuits merely mental. Christ does not represent heaven as a college for the learned. Therefore the rules of the Celestial ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... slowly through the great hall and into the library. He knew Dorothy would be waiting for him, and he did not feel equal to the ordeal of meeting ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... the afternoon the husband and wife sallied forth. Letty felt that she was being taken through an ordeal, and that George was rather foolish to wish it. However, she did her best to be cheerful, and to please George she still wore the pretty Paris frock of the morning, though it seemed to her absurd to be trailing it through a village ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... him so diabolical a character. Denis walked by his side, with his countenance strained to inflation;—a miserable parody of that sullen effrontery which marked the unshrinking miscreant beside him. He had not heard of the ordeal, owing to the caution of Anthony: but, notwithstanding his effort at indifference, a keen eye might have observed the latent anxiety of a man who was habitually villanous, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... reader will comprehend that to have reached him in the form of a printed book, this brief narrative must have gone through some struggles—which indeed it has. And after all, its worst struggle and strongest ordeal is yet to come but it takes comfort—subdues fear—leans on the staff of a moderate expectation—and mutters under its breath, while lifting its eye to that ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... three days Sunday will be here;" taking with them at service time this so-called sermon, strong with the smell of books and of midnight oil; speaking it in pain of utterance, and delighted when the ordeal is over, with a delight most certainly shared by many who neither came to scoff nor remained to pray. Heaven help the man whom fate in the shape of foolish friends, or parents, or mistaken church-officials has sentenced to hard labour ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... any faith in it, he consented to the operation, although so certain was he of a fatal ending that he had his house swept and garnished, ready for the funeral. To comfort and cheer him through the ordeal, both Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson went to his house and remained with him until all was done. The result was most happy, and the grateful man, now proudly holding up his head among his fellows, composed in honour of the event "The Song of ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... soft words, and then said, 'O king, thou hast completely subjugated the five organs of action and the five organs of knowledge with the mind as their sixth. Thou hast for this come out unscathed from the fiery ordeal I had prepared for thee. I have been properly honoured and adored, O son, by thee, O foremost of all persons possessed of speech. Thou hast no sin, not even a minute one, in thee! Give me leave, O king, for ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... into that nerve racking ordeal known to the civilian public as "nothing to report"—the type of warfare recognised by all who have any experience of modern active service life as calling for all that is highest in regimental efficiency and ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... moment when Aunt Emma and Mr. Winslow asked him questions about the development of the Touricar. But before he could determine whether he was being deliberately inspected by the family the ordeal ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... at Doctor Dick saw that his handsome face was very pale, his eyes had a haggard look, and his teeth were firmly set. They knew that he had passed through some dread ordeal, and a silence fell upon all, ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... the peculiar suavity of his manners. Mounting a flight of stairs, they found the Baron at one end of a handsome room, more like a drawing-room than an office, with a number of persons seated round it, all waiting to undergo the ordeal of his friendly inquiries. Nearly all civilised nations were there represented,—English, Germans, French, and Spaniards. Among them they recognised some of their fellow-passengers. The simple, round, ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... interval of more than ten years, with a trembling hand, with a confused and horrible recollection of certain occurrences and situations, in the ordeal through which I was unconsciously passing; though with a vivid and very sharp remembrance of the main ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... tell her to-night, so I may 's well make up my mind to it," she said firmly; and then, after drawing up a chair by making a hook out of one of her feet, she sat down and sought strength for the ordeal in a more than ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... resolved to hold our Christmas some other day, and in a better place. The women seem ill-regulated here—Kavimba's brother had words with his spouse, and at the end of every burst of vociferation on both sides called out, "Bring the Muavi! bring the Muavi!" or ordeal. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... coming until a week later," she said. "Do you know, I think if I had actually passed my fiftieth birthday, I might feel somehow more solid and fortified. It's really an ordeal for an old-fashioned woman like myself to encounter the modern girl of sixteen. Fifty might pull through, but oh, ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... have somewhat to say. Once you condemned the Queen without judgment, and that was wrong; now you acquit her without judgment, and that is wrong. She is not quit by trial, and the barons of your land blame you both. Counsel her, then, to claim the ordeal in God's judgment, for since she is innocent, she may swear on the relics of the saints and hot iron will not hurt her. For so custom runs, and in this easy ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... and Buchanan. Are we to recognise its counterpart in the middle of the nineteenth century, in a scheme at least three-fourths of whose teachers are paid with yearly salaries of from L10 to L13, 13s. 4d.—about half ploughman's wages—and of whom not a fourth have passed the ordeal of a Government examination, pitched at the scale of the lowest rate of attainment? The scheme of the noble Knox! Say rather a many-ringed film-spinning grub, that has come creeping out of the old crackling parchment, in which the sagacious ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... brought back to the Indian lad with a rush the memory of the recent ordeal he had been through. He gave one glance at the unconscious form on the other couch and his hand darted to the hunting-knife at his hip as he staggered, dizzily, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... very effective to leave the impression of their happiness with the audience, so that they might have strength to get on their rubbers and wraps after the tremendous ordeal ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... descended to us. Of necessity, the dramatist was nerved to keenest endeavor by the knowledge that his play had to withstand a comparison with other plays presenting the same characters in the same situations, and by the certainty that his personal contribution would stand out sharply. A similar ordeal was undergone by the great painters of the Italian Renascence, who tried their hands, almost all of them, on the Madonna with the Holy Child, on the Descent from the Cross, and on every other of the score ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... river was only the beginning. Animal strength carried him through that ordeal. But he emerged from the river as an animal; a wounded animal, crawling through the brush and arroyo outside the ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... if I had him alone, but he must be put with a crew who will make it their object to bully him out of his superiority, and the more I do for him, the worse it will be for him, poor little fellow; and he looks too delicate to stand the ordeal. It is sheer cruelty ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Executive. The treaty which had thus been negotiated had failed to receive the ratification of the Senate. One of the chief objections which was urged against it was found to consist in the fact that the question of annexation had not been submitted to the ordeal of public opinion in the United States. However untenable such an objection was esteemed to be, in view of the unquestionable power of the Executive to negotiate the treaty and the great and lasting ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... mothers have their infants laid away under the bushes with only a shawl between them and the cold ground. In their ball plays also each young man, before going into the game, is subjected to an ordeal of dancing, bleeding, and cold plunge baths, without food or sleep, which must unquestionably waste his ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... had he escaped through the awful ordeal of war with only one bad wound, while many of his friends and comrades—the best and bravest, the most happily young, had fallen round him—but he had come back to find himself transformed from a penniless adventurer into a very rich man. An old Brisbane millionaire, into whose ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... depended on the accusation of the husband, the woman could clear herself by swearing her own innocence; if, however, the accusation was not brought by the husband himself, but by others, the woman could clear herself by submitting to the ordeal by water; that is to say, she would plunge into the Euphrates; if the river carried her away and she were drowned, it was regarded as proof that the accusation was well founded; if, on the contrary, she survived and got safely to the bank, she was considered ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... was performed successfully, and Varley had issued from the operating-room with the look of a man who had gone through an ordeal which had taxed his nerve to the utmost, to find Valerie Meydon waiting, with a piteous, dazed look in her eyes. But this look passed when she heard ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... then an institution of grave importance to the community, as the practice of obligatory inoculation prevailed, and all the young people of the colony had to go up in classes to the hospital and pass the ordeal. Her mother's death left her the matron of the hospital and caretaker of her sister and brothers, and the stories of her life at that time, which she told me now and then, showed that, with the position, she assumed the effective authority, and ruled her brothers ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... boys, he would examine them again publicly, and as extensively as before; when he was convinced they would shew, that the whole was as fresh on their memories as when they at first received it. In short, that they would be able to undergo the most searching ordeal, with equal, if not greater ease, ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... the hideous, sticky liquid, till the tablespoon was full and crowning over the brim of it all around. Why, even to this day, as the picture rises in memory, I feel my stomach roll and see the hard, wild grin on the face of Halstead as he watched the ordeal approach me. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... to the other side of the terrace and maliciously watched the embarrassment of the other boys. Joe and Harry Corwin carried things off rather well, but the others were fairly speechless. Perry chuckled as he saw the growing bewilderment on the face of the hostess. But finally the ordeal was over and Perry led the way back to the festivities. Ossie groaned when they were ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... creations of Old Mortality, the Bride of Lammermoor, and others of these narratives. But I, nevertheless, threw the manuscripts into my drawer, resolving not to think of committing them to the Ballantynian ordeal, until I could either obtain the assistance of some capable person to supply deficiencies, and correct errors, so as they might face the public with credit, or perhaps numerous and more serious avocations might permit me to dedicate my own time ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Ella, "and Philistia was always given to ordeal by champions. She thinks the attack made upon you by two missionaries in their newspaper organ quite disgraceful. It doesn't seem ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted with the alternatives of reading "Paradise Lost" and going round Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would choose the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... of the key was regarded as evidence that some unseen dread power was present, and so overpowering occasionally was the impression produced that the young woman who was chief actor in the scene fainted. The parties holding the key and Bible were generally old women, whose faith in the ordeal was perfect, and who, removed by their age from the intenser sympathies of youth, could therefore hold their hands with steadier nerve. It is only when firm hands hold it that the turning takes place, for this phenomenon depends upon the regular and steady pulsations ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... gone the round of the house, bidding dreary farewells to all the servants; an unpleasant ordeal which he would gladly have dispensed with, if possible, and which did not serve to raise ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... Wherever he looked there was blackness, lightened once or twice, and for an instant only, by a sudden passing memory of a little child. It would be too much to say that the memory comforted him. Nothing could do that, yet. All he dared hope for was for the strength to go through his ordeal with something approaching manliness and dignity. The visits of his friends were a strain to him, as well as to them, and it was sadly easy to see how the sense of his hopeless case depressed them. He could imagine the long breath they drew as they left his tent and found themselves ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... criticism of George Meredith existed, where in it would The Shaving of Shagpat find its place? There is fear that in competition with the series of analytical studies of modern life that stretches from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to One of our Conquerors, it might chance to be pushed away with a few lines of praise. Now, I would not seem so paradoxical as to say that when an extravaganza is held up to me in one hand, and a masterpiece ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... been obscured by the size of the offering, but she carried as much of it as her strength permitted, and laid the fragrant bouquet on the piano as she passed it. (A poem had come with it, but Tommy did not dare read it until the ordeal was over, for no one had ever written her a poem before. It had three long verses, and was signed "F.A."—that was all she had ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... understood to be a man of mark. She was all impatience to see him, and had shown it outwardly much more plainly than Elizabeth. How quiet Elizabeth had been these last days! moving about the house so silently, with vaguely smiling eyes, like one husbanding her strength before an ordeal. ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... too ready to retire. The ordeal had strained his patience and had left his brain feeling the stress of unaccustomed exercise. Therefore, allowing Melvina to drive him before her much as she would have driven a docile Jersey ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... to the turn of Aubrey Spencer May. The long waiting, after his nerves had been wound up, had been a severe ordeal, and his delicacy of constitution and home breeding had rendered him peculiarly susceptible. With his resemblance to his father in form and expression, it was like seeing the Doctor denuded of that shell of endurance with which he had contrived to conceal his ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... early period it is scarcely possible to convey any adequate idea. To one of a sensitive nature, the horrors, atrocities, and misery connected with war were a terrible ordeal. The embarrassment also of the times was considerable. With an income of only eighty pounds a year, I was compelled, upon moving into the Settlement, to give one hundred and twenty for rent, and sublet half the house; and though the Committee of the Chinese Evangelisation Society increased ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... ridiculous to look to heredity for an explanation of the fact. Nor would any one venture to suggest the words or example of my masters. Of scientific education, the fruit of college training, I had none whatever. I never set foot in a lecture hall except to undergo the ordeal of examinations. Without masters, without guides, often without books, in spite of poverty, that terrible extinguisher, I went ahead, persisted, facing my difficulties, until the indomitable bump ended by shedding its scanty contents. Yes, they were very scanty, yet possibly of ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... test, in modern times, of individual endowment in sculpture, by virtue of her unequalled treasures and select proficients in Art,—Munich affords the second ordeal in Europe, because of the cultivated taste and superior foundries for which that capital is renowned; and it is remarkable that both the great statues there cast from Crawford's models by Mueller inspired those impromptu festivals which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... by voting for it. When the roll was being called, Van Buren, so Benton tells us, was out of the chair, walking behind the colonnade at the rear of the Vice President's seat. Calhoun, fearful lest he might escape the ordeal, eagerly asked where he was, and told the sergeant-at-arms to look for him. But Van Buren was ready, and at once stepped to his chair and voted for the bill. His close friend, Silas Wright of New York, also voted for it. Benton says he deemed both the votes to be political and given from policy. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... perfectly useless. He now proceeded, however, with an interest that began to quicken as circumstances rendered its indulgence less unsuitable, to seek his captive, in order to bring him before the searching ordeal of his ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... knight accused the other of crime or dishonour, the latter might challenge him to fight with swords or lances; and, according to the superstition of the times, the victor was considered to be the one who spoke the truth. But this ordeal combat was far removed ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... them by their employers, and thus diminished in numbers, half-stripped of provisions, and enfeebled by the exhausting atmosphere of the tropics, the survivors were ill prepared to confront the antarctic ordeal which they were approaching. Five months longer the fleet, under command of Admiral de Cordes, who had succeeded to the command, struggled in those straits, where, as if in the home of Eolus, all the winds ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... knife. She finally consented to that terrific method, but was in no condition of strength to bear the operation. It was decided to postpone it till the 22d of June. Twelve doctors were invited to be present. Meanwhile a diet nurse sent from New York, remained with her, to prepare her system for the ordeal. ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... snowfields, and approached it, waving a white handkerchief. Several French officers dashed towards them at full speed, and reached them in time to save them from the clutches of the Indians, whose camps were near at hand. They were kindly treated, recovered from the effects of their frightful ordeal, and were afterwards exchanged. Pringle lived to old age, and died in 1800, senior major-general of the ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... energetic, so full of life, so ready for all emergencies, so clever at devices, so able to manage not only for himself but for his friends, he was, as it were, paralysed and unmanned. He sat from morning to night looking at the empty fire-grate, and hardly ventured to speak of the ordeal that he had ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... being dressed in her best, and loaded with gold ornaments, borrowed from many miles around, which had served to deck every bride in the district ever since any one could remember, was left seated on the geta, or raised sleeping platform, in the dimly lighted inner apartments, there to await the ordeal known to Malay cruelty as sanding. The ceremony that bears this name, is the one at which the bride and bridegroom are brought together for the first time. They are officially supposed never to have seen one another before, though no Malay who respects himself ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... his part, was almost silent. This was due to some extent, no doubt, to the reaction from his severe ordeal of the day before, but it may have been caused somewhat by the feeling that he had gone too far in taking them fully into his confidence. His secret was no longer his, and while he was strongly drawn toward these wholesome young fellows who were of his own age, ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... which, for all he can tell," said the Professor, genially, "may prove fallacious. On the contrary, if his affection is sincere, he will incur as little expense as possible, put by every penny he can save, rather than subject the girl he professes to love to the ordeal of a long engagement. In other words, the truest lover ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... men had a more cruel ordeal yet in store for them: when the Assyrian army re-entered Nineveh, Assur-bani-pal placed them on the route along which the cortege had to pass, and made them realise to the full the humiliation of their country. Dunanu walked at the head of the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... duty that it fell to our lot to perform, was one of humanity. We had scarcely reached Governor Russwurm's house, when, observing a crowd of people about a mile off, on the beach, we learned that a man was undergoing the ordeal of drinking sassy-wood. The Commodore, with most of the officers, hastened immediately to the rescue. On approaching the spot, we saw a woman with an infant on her back, walking to and fro, wailing bitterly, and throwing up her arms in agony. Further on, we met four children, from eight to ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... few minutes afterwards, when her drunken husband came home, he found his miserable family, grouped as they were in their misery, worshipping God in their own simple and touching manner. His entrance disturbed them, for Margaret knew she must go through the usual ordeal to which his nightly return was certain to ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... rose, each found himself gently held by a pair of cadet midshipmen. It was a more or less polite hint that the ordeal was not yet over. Mr. Merriam turned to whisper to one of the cadets, who darted inside the barracks building. He was back, promptly, carrying a folded ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... the presentation was then effected without a scene. This animal, which was a well-bred Australian, was a stranger to me, and had never carried a lady before that day. Nevertheless, she passed successfully through a terribly trying ordeal, and I am certain that she would not have made the great efforts she did in jumping, if I had not soothed and encouraged her with my voice. She was only 14-2 in height, and was competing against big horses, some of which ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... of wattle work is mentioned by Lafitau. He states that the young men, when going through the ordeal of initiation on attaining their majority, ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes
... two months, usurped the place of the English, and so obstinately maintained its ground, that I still can occasionally detect its lingering remains. I did not spend my time unpleasantly at this school, though, first of all, I had to pass through an ordeal. ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... this from you, who've shared With me the ordeal of most trying times, I sometimes feel a hot shame flushing up, To think that there are those among my sex Who are so cursed with small-souled selfishness That they do give to noble wives like you, For love—that first and final flower ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... and to make his claim surer he refused to have any explanation of his composition published in the concert programme, as the other composers in the festival had done; he wished it, therefore, to be judged from a strictly musical point of view. It was a dangerous ordeal ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... company there came a surprised and sympathetic hush. Herrick straightened awkwardly, but never flinched in his loyalty or fondness—what an ordeal for a lover!—while Penelope paused as if ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... scene of horror to complete his task; and what an impression it made on her we know from that sentence uttered in her sleep, 'Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' She had now, further, gone through the ordeal of the discovery. Is it not quite natural that the reaction should come, and that it should come just when Macbeth's description recalls the scene which had cost her the greatest effort? Is it not likely, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... answered that he guessed he did. There was something in the girl's voice and manner and in her beaming countenance, telling of her happiness in the possession of her new finery—though she had feared the ordeal of wearing it to school, perhaps because of the contrast it made to her usual garment—that he felt a queer feeling in his throat. But relief was at hand for him in his embarrassment, for the path that led down to the camp was in sight, and ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to be a ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was accustomed to dread experiences which came in the inevitable order of nature, she did think of the last day and night in the old house as something of an ordeal. People felt that the human meant very little to Dilly; but that was not true. It was only true that she held herself remote from personal intimacies; but all the fine, invisible bonds of race and family took hold of her like irresistible factors, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... had sent off her letter to the bank she went out for a stroll; she knew it would be no use trying to get rest before dinner. That ordeal, too, had to be gone through. She found herself unconsciously going in the direction of the grove; but when she became aware of it a great revulsion overcame ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... swamp with an eagerness that could not be restrained, struggling as in a race to see who could first reach the log that led into the fiery mouth of the fort. A Salem villager, John Raymond, was the winner. He passed through, survived the ordeal, and came unharmed out of the terrible fight. He was twenty-seven years of age. He signed his name to a petition to the General Court, in 1685, as having gone in the expedition from Salem Village, and as then living there. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... under it is more than I can now tell," said Mrs. Darlington, with an involuntary shudder. "And the toil, and suffering, and danger through which we have come! I cannot be sufficiently thankful that we are safe from the dreadful ordeal, and with so few marks ...
— Woman's Trials - or, Tales and Sketches from the Life around Us. • T. S. Arthur
... skin, and the length of my hair were the occasion of much comment. By request I would take off my shirt or pull up a leg of my much tattered trousers. Farther than this modesty prevented my going. Sometimes a similar ordeal would have to be gone through several times in the course of ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... the frank and radiant girl who was now preparing again to meet the emperor. She knew not why, and yet her heart was full of trepidation and nervous fright, the cause of which she could not guess, yet which made her task a severe ordeal. She dressed herself in white satin, with no adornment save a wreath of ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... money back in her purse, and her colour rose. Filippo, quite at his ease, leisurely, openly observant of her, whistled "Lucia" softly to himself. Roses, roses all the way, and all for him, he thought amusedly. And yet she bore the ordeal well, betraying no restlessness, keeping her eyes unswervingly fixed on the two lions of the advertisement of Chinina Migone pasted on the glass over his head. At the Ripetta bridge she got out. He followed, saw her go into a house farther down the street, ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... year when I entered the University fell late in April, so that the examinations were fixed for St. Thomas's Week, [Easter week.] and I had to spend Good Friday in fasting and finally getting myself ready for the ordeal. ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... "Nothing flash or frivolous, though everything refinedly elegant. No minister, be he ever so strict a disciplinarian, can find fault with me. I suppose the critics of all the religious papers will be there. Well, let them draw my portrait; I am ready for the ordeal." ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... and verse, Langhorne repaired to London, and obtained, in 1764, the curacy and lectureship of St John's, Clerkenwell. He soon afterwards became assistant-preacher in Lincoln's Inn Chapel, where he had a very intellectual audience to address, and bore a somewhat trying ordeal with complete success. He continued for a number of years in London, maintaining his reputation both as a preacher and writer. His most popular works were the 'Letters of Theodosius and Constantia,' and a translation of Plutarch's Lives, which Wrangham afterwards ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... gods were once graciously good to me. One wondrous evening before hope died utterly I survived the ordeal of walking home with ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... and we have only a few certain facts to go upon. For the first few months of his imprisonment, Kosciuszko was Kept in the fortress as a rebel, not as a vanquished enemy. "Rebel" was the term by which he was officially styled. Before December was out, he was subjected to the usual ordeal of the Russian prison: the inquisition. A paper was handed in to him, with a long string of questions, which he was ordered to answer in his own handwriting, on the relations of the Rising with foreign powers, the sources of its finances, and so on. It ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... this injured husband made another point in his favour. Much pity was felt for Bertrande, as being the victim of an audacious deception; but everybody agreed that thus it beseemed the real Martin Guerre to have spoken. After the ordeal gone through by the wife had been also essayed by the sisters and other relatives, who one and all followed Bertrande's example and accepted the new-comer, the court, having fully deliberated, passed the following sentence, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... this ordeal we put up at an excellent khan, the best we had seen in Servia, being a mixture of the German Wirthshaus, and the Italian osteria, kept by a Dalmatian, who had lived twelve years at Scutari in Albania. His upper room was very neatly furnished and ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... Courtenay Comber, using almost the identical words Mr. Jacobs had attributed to him, had congratulated Derrick and informed him that he left the Court "without a stain on his character." Notwithstanding its satisfactory conclusion, the ordeal had been a trying one for father and son, and Derrick looked pale and somewhat worn as he grasped the hand of Reggie, who had been in Court, and had hurried ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... shot and shell tore its way through the still advancing ranks. It became an ordeal of fire too great for even the bravest to face. The lines at length wavered, they broke, and the men were scattered in flight. Thousands lay dead and dying on the field, many surrendered and were taken prisoner, and of the fifteen thousand gallant soldiers who had set forth ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... the morning was radiant, he was on one of the finest horses of the country, and he was as light of heart as a boy should be who has received a hint from fortune that he is one of the favorites. He looked forward to the social ordeal without apprehension, for by this time he had all the native American's sense of independence, he had barely heard the word "gentleman" since his arrival in the new country, his education was all that could be desired, he was a landed proprietor, and intended to be a rich and successful ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... of the public, the ceremonial character of the proceedings, and the conviction that the invisible powers were on the side of truth and justice that gave the trial by ordeal and the trial by battle a significance that neither the duello nor any other form of private vengeance ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... arrested in New York. She concluded that the Company had determined on the plan of suddenly confronting him and charging him with the crime, hoping that if guilty he would break down and make a confession. He had passed through the trying ordeal unscathed and most likely would be liberated in the morning. She little thought they had been separated never more to ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... verification, probation, experimentum crucis[Lat], proof, (demonstration) 478; criterion, diagnostic, test, probe, crucial test, acid test, litmus test. crucible, reagent, check, touchstone, pix[obs3]; assay, ordeal; ring; litmus paper, curcuma paper[obs3], turmeric paper; test tube; analytical instruments &c. 633. empiricism, rule of thumb. feeler; trial balloon, pilot balloon, messenger balloon; pilot engine; scout; straw to show the wind. speculation, random shot, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... no trouble with the Custom House officers here," laughed Ishmael, as he gave his arm to Judge Merlin and went on shore, leaving all the passengers who had not been shipwrecked, and lost their luggage, to pass the ordeal he and his ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... himself could not have made of this journey to the embassy a more trying ordeal. A ring was slipped upon the fourth finger of her left hand. A short prayer followed, and an earnest "God bless you, my children," which left her feeling suffocated. She thought Monte would never finish talking with him—would never ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... remain with the surveyor and study in the evening under Mr. Carson's direction; but he knew from former experience what a scene Tabitha usually created before she could be persuaded to begin school each year, and dreaded the ordeal almost as much as ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... more anon—you may not, by Village convention, go home to bed. You must go to breakfast with the rest of the Villagers. And you must be prepared to face the cold, grey dawn of "the morning after" while still in your war paint and draggled finery. It is an awful ordeal. But "it's being done in ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... sat down opposite to him. At that moment she was devoutly thankful that she had never had any other proposal to refuse. It was a dreadful ordeal. If he would only help her out! But he did not speak and every moment of silence made ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... her arm as her feet touched the unprotected path, but the girl, though unnerved by the ordeal, shook off his big claw, and with her hands clasping mine I led her across the short but dangerous ledge of rock that led to the opening in the wall. I felt strong enough to fight a dozen devils like Leith at that moment. The trusting ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... which lasted some days, and that it would prove repugnant to enumerate, the fakir declared himself ready to undergo the ordeal. The Maharajah, the Sikhs chiefs, and Gen. Ventura, assembled near a masonry tomb that had been constructed expressly to receive him. Before their eyes, the fakir closed with wax all the apertures ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... swiftly in Paris, and after one quiet day, during which Judge Hauteville was drawing together the threads of the mystery, Kittredge found himself, on Tuesday morning, facing an ordeal worse than the solitude of a prison cell. The seventh of July! What a date for the American! How little he realized what was before him as he bumped along in a prison van breathing the sweet air of a delicious summer morning! He had been summoned for the double test put upon suspected assassins ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... losing his life, owing to the vindictive jealousy of the Portuguese slave-merchants, who denounced him to the king as a spy sent by the English government. The consequence was, that it was resolved by the chief men to subject him to the ordeal of drinking a fetish. "If you come to do bad," they said, "it will kill you; but if not, it cannot hurt you." There was no alternative or escape. Poor Lander swallowed the contents of the bowl, and then walked hastily out of the hut through the armed men who ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... he secretly despised many of her views and actions, as, indeed, he did those of most women. Her present mission was undertaken for the love she bore Mabel and her sister. It was not kind to send the girl to tell her own story. It was neither kind nor fair to subject their guest to the ordeal of an unheralded disclosure of his sentiments and aspirations, with the puissant lord of Ridgeley ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... thanks when dinner was over. It had been a trying ordeal on top of an agonizing day. Cloistered in her room with only her sad thoughts for company, she had been relieved to find that Miss Kiametia Grey had been prevailed upon by Mrs. Whitney to prolong ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... a similar ordeal, and when I was well enough to go and look for him, I found him scraping away at a beef bone, from which he had just removed the last particle ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... went to a fate more terrible than to have gone down with their stout ship. Adrift on a trackless sea, 1000 miles from land, in open boats, with scant provision of food or water, they faced a frightful ordeal. After twenty-eight days they found an island, but it proved a desert. After leaving it the boats became separated—one being never again heard of. In the others men died fast, and at last the living were driven by hunger actually ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... excitement. He crossed the church, went down the nave, and approached a lateral chapel where a taper was burning with a flickering light. The Count entered the chapel. Those who had seen him amid the brilliant society of Naples, or amid the awful judicial ordeal to which he had just been subjected, and which he had undergone with such coolness and audacity, would not have recognized the humble and trembling man, who knelt before a sarcophagus of black marble surmounted with the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... and she awoke next morning oppressed with the thought of the ordeal that awaited her. She dressed herself even more carefully than usual, despite the trembling of her hands; and when the ringing of the little silver bell summoned her to the dining-room, her heart seemed to ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... assault. Yet the direct attack proved a failure, and, on the twentieth of March, the siege was changed to a blockade. Forts were erected in the most advantageous spots, and a wide trench was dug around the entire city.[1296] Sancerre was to be tried by the severe ordeal of hunger; and certainly the most frightful among ancient sieges can scarcely be said to have surpassed in horror that of this ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... came you to forget what I have told you over and over again about a proper reserve?" The energetic whisper reached the gentleman's ear, and he expected to be annihilated with a look when his offence was revealed; but he was spared that ordeal, for the young voice ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... to Joe Newbolt now, like a window-pane with frost upon it, where all had been so clear in his calculations but a day before. In his heart he feared the ordeal for Isom Chase was ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... spacious structure. It was surrounded with two moats, and with double walls, and was strongly fortified. It contained numerous and spacious apartments, and it had especially one large hall which was well adapted to the purposes of this great trial. The preparations for the solemn ordeal through which Mary was now to pass, brought her forth from the obscurity in which she had so long been lost to the eyes of mankind, and made her the universal object of interest and attention in England, Scotland, and ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... with my wife we heard not many comments, a word here and there about Henderson's wonderful success, a remark about Margaret's beauty, some sympathy for her in such a wearisome ordeal—the world is full of kindness—the house duly admired, and the ordinary compliments paid; the people assembled were, as usual, absorbed in their own affairs. From all we could gather, all those present were used to living in a palace, and took all the splendor quite as a matter of course. Was there ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... his best blue coat and white waistcoat, and suffering under an attack of gout is going through the ordeal of his public examination before the judge. In front of this functionary is the bankrupt's schedule, on which we read ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... the same correspondent, in describing the defensive operations at Kalafat, says: 'I was struck with the admirable conduct at this time of the Roumanian gunners, who never flinched in the slightest degree under the trying ordeal.'[181] After their defeats before Plevna and elsewhere, the Russians, too, began to estimate their allies at something nearer ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... annoyed," he cried; "and shall not submit to this ordeal. Besides, she has relapsed ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... knew his preaching would not please his father or his people, and he shrank from the ordeal. It seemed like setting them all at defiance and attempting to enforce his ideas over their own. Then a perception of his cowardice struck him, and he threw off the feeling that was possessing him. He looked up to find his father watching him keenly, and he remembered that he had ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... considerate, and unlooked-for as scarcely believed to be possible. None of that exposure to the gaze and exultation of a victorious foe, such as we had seen pictured in our school-books, or as practised by conquering nations in all times. We had felt it as not improbable that, after an ordeal of mortifying exposure for the gratification of the military, we would be paraded through Northern cities for the benefit of jeering crowds. So, when we learned that we should be paroled, and go to our homes ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... trials of this early period it is scarcely possible to convey any adequate idea. To one of a sensitive nature, the horrors, atrocities, and misery connected with war were a terrible ordeal. The embarrassment also of the times was considerable. With an income of only eighty pounds a year, I was compelled, upon moving into the Settlement, to give one hundred and twenty for rent, and sublet ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... an ordeal one has with girls," said Juffrouw Pieterse. "Take another piece, don't wait to be insisted upon; it's a cake from your ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... expression vaguely suggestive of admiration shadowed through the slightly flushed countenance, and the next instant it returned to its customary apathy, from which it was not again disturbed during the bitter ordeal to which the helpless ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... they were inflated beyond measure with pride in Joan, but nearly dumb, as to speech, they not being able to think out any way to account for her managing to carry herself through this imposing ordeal without ever a mistake or an awkwardness of any kind to mar the grace and credit of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the middle of the second century; that they were therefore an account of what was going on, by an onlooker, couched in these phrases of vision and prophecy. The people of Israel were passing through a terrible ordeal; they needed to be heartened and nerved for resistance and endurance. Their heroic leader, Judas Maccabeus, was urging them on to prodigies of valor in their conflict with the vile Antiochus; such a ringing manifesto as this, put forth ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... gladly escaped the ordeal of dining in the great salle-a-manger that night, but she could muster no excuse for so doing. At any other time it would have been an immense treat, and she dared not let Jack think that it was otherwise ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... that the Serbs know how to treat an Englishman well when he passes through their country. Salutations therefore, and thanks! They fought like lions, and they suffered as none others suffered in Europe's terrible ordeal. A Serbian spark at Sarajevo fired the arsenal of European militarism, and a common ungenerous thought sometimes blames the spark instead of blaming the recklessness of those who allowed Europe to be enkindled. And there used to be some who could not forget Serbia's dynastic ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... the presence of the public, the ceremonial character of the proceedings, and the conviction that the invisible powers were on the side of truth and justice that gave the trial by ordeal and the trial by battle a significance that neither the duello nor any other form of private vengeance ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... twice, and that in the presence of others. On these occasions he had bowed low, and passed on. But once she had caught his eyes on her, and had glowed for hours at what she saw in them. It braced her somewhat for the impending ordeal of a visit ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... region of the earth ever feels. Such heat would have been twenty-four times more than enough to melt rock-crystal. The overburdened sense experiences a feeling of relief in the mere knowledge, that the comet passed this fiery ordeal as the lightning's flash might have done. In two short hours, it had shifted its place from one side to the other of the solar sphere. In sixty little minutes, it had moved from a region in which the heat was forty thousand times ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... finally into a side passage to see something else, leaving your wife or your sister behind in one of the main galleries. You are gone only a minute or two, but returning you find her furiously, helplessly angry and embarrassed; and on inquiry you learn she has been enduring the ordeal of being ogled by a small, wormy-looking creature who has gone without shaving for two or three years in a desperate endeavor ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... a blind impulse. We have carefully counted the cost of this warfare, and are prepared to meet its consequences. It will subject us to reproach, persecution, infamy—it will prove a fiery ordeal to all who shall pass through it—it may cost us our lives. We shall be ridiculed as fools, scorned as visionaries, branded as disorganizers, reviled as madmen, threatened and perhaps punished as traitors. But we shall bide our time. Whether safety or peril, whether victory or ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... manner, and the process would in various ways be salutary. It is a nice question how many of the opinions formed on the first visit—and especially the most convinced and positive opinions—would survive the ordeal ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... new ordeal with the long-suffering patience which had become habitual to him by this time. The final issue was still involved in slight doubt, but he felt himself safe in the firm ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... imposed upon me by the Constitution I have thus submitted to the representatives of the States and of the people such information of our domestic and foreign affairs as the public interests seem to require. Our Government is now undergoing its most trying ordeal, and my earnest prayer is that the peril may be successfully and finally passed without impairing its original strength and symmetry. The interests of the nation are best to be promoted by the revival of fraternal relations, the complete ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... Breakfast was another ordeal, but not so bad as the tea of the night before; after breakfast came prayers, and then the class-room. Peggy found herself seated at a desk, beside one of her classmates, Rose Barclay, a pretty brunette, with rosy cheeks and bright dark eyes. In the brief pause before study-time, ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... easier, it would seem that time makes it increasingly difficult for any but distinct successes to survive the ordeal by ballroom. Years ago a debutante was supposed to flutter into society in the shadow of mamma's protecting amplitude; to-day she is packed off by herself and with nothing to relieve her dependence upon whoever may come near her. To liken a charming young girl in the prettiest ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... preceding this eventful anniversary. There was so much to hope—so much to fear. "If I should fail," was repeated again and again; and their hearts throbbed wildly as the signal-bell was heard, which called them to pass the dread ordeal. Such a display of beauty—genuine, unadorned beauty—rarely greets the eye of man. More than a hundred young girls, from timid fifteen to more assured one-and-twenty, robed in pure white, with tresses untortured by the prevailing mode, decorated only by wreaths ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... few days of waiting and uncertainty were a severer ordeal to Mrs. Jocelyn and Mildred than ever. Mr. Jocelyn, bent on gaining time, kept putting them off. His new duties upon which he had entered, he wrote, left him only the evening hours for his quest of rooms, and he had not succeeded in finding any that were suitable. Thus ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... just-married girl this would have been an ordeal, a nerve-wrecking event. But you've been as cool as a fish—I've been watching you. You might have been brought up in a vice-regal lodge and hobnobbed all your life with ambassadors. How do ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... looking very well. Your father wasn't there. I saw Philippa, by the way; but I suppose she didn't remember me. That was her husband with her, I take it. Stiff old boy." So he went on, letting bygones be bygones. It was after luncheon that her ordeal came. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... summer days grew shorter, and the hour of Anna's ordeal grew near, Mrs. Moore had but one prayer in her heart, and that was that her life might be spared till her child's troubles were over. Since Anna's illness in the early spring, she had utterly disregarded ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... When one of the neighbors spoke to him, asking him if he felt no grief, he cursed and stormed out of the house. Later, after the neighbors departed, his father came upon him in the stable and beat him unmercifully. He came, dry-eyed, through the ordeal, raging inwardly, but silent. And that night, after his father had gone to bed, he stole stealthily out of the house, threw a saddle and bridle on his favorite pony and rode away. Such had ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... myself placed in a most cruel dilemma if I refused to submit my case to the proposed ordeal, I stood an impostor confessed. If I consented to see these strangers, it was probable they would not recognise me, and possible that they might deny me in terms calculated to make my position even worse, if that might be. I hesitated ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... crowd; at the various corps de garde bodies of troops came out and presented arms; and on our arrival at the palace there was a presentation of arms and beating of drums which, for the moment, somewhat abashed me. It was an ordeal more picturesque than agreeable. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... popular prodding and goading, or perhaps to be severely and experimentally knocked about the head by his Privy Council, or perhaps to be dipped in a river full of crocodiles, or perhaps to drink immense quantities of something nasty out of a calabash—at all events, to undergo some purifying ordeal in presence ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... I can feel Each hour I live, While passing through death's stern ordeal, Wilt Thou Thy mercy still reveal, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... the sentimental, the self-confident, it was a welcome and uplifting exercise. To the timid and self-distrustful it was a terrible ordeal. To the intellectual it was a perpetual challenge to skepticism. Even Bunyan puts as his first and worst temptation, "to question the being of God and the truth of his gospel." To the prosaic and practical minds ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... hope for this man of strength. He could not humble himself to the brutal ordeal of being beaten ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... was necessary in the east, he had then taken the final and most hazardous step of going to Farnham's home. It was hardly remarkable, therefore, that he had seized the opportunity of escaping so trying an ordeal at once. It seemed to me impossible that he should intend returning to Denver, where, in the light of day, and among old business and domestic associates, he could not long hope to escape detection, perfect as the likeness seemed to be. What, then, would he do, ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... to this ordeal, it seems impossible to devise a mode of verification of their theories which does not rouse resentment in theological minds. Is it that, while the pleasure of the scientific man culminates in the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... make any statement, except in writing—in what you in England call an affidavit. You do not realise, although you doubtless know, what our legal procedure is like. Not even in order to secure the guillotine for Madame Wachner and her Fritz would I expose Mrs. Bailey to the ordeal of our ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... makes even the neighboring treetops invisible, while the mothers have their infants laid away under the bushes with only a shawl between them and the cold ground. In their ball plays also each young man, before going into the game, is subjected to an ordeal of dancing, bleeding, and cold plunge baths, without food or sleep, which must ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... who so proudly issued from the Boston barracks at sunrise for the suppression of pretentious rebellion. Knapsacks were thrown aside. British veterans stripped for fight. Not a single regiment of those engaged had passed such a fearful ordeal in its whole history as a single hour had witnessed. The power of discipline, the energy of experienced commanders, and the pressure of honored antecedents, combined to make the movement as trying ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... unsuspicious of the least danger. If any of us had thought of the matter at all, we probably imagined we were in the safest part of the ocean. But, at three o'clock, here we were, having undergone the trying ordeal of shell-fire in the interval, drifting helplessly in lifeboats in mid-ocean, all our personal belongings left behind in what we imagined to be a sinking ship, not knowing what fate was in store for us, but naturally, ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... reached Cairo at the end of September, and their substance was at once telegraphed to England. They showed that, while his success had made him think that after all there might be some satisfactory issue of the siege, he foresaw that the real ordeal was yet to come. "In four months (that is end of November) river begins to fall; before that time you must settle the Soudan question." So wrote the heroic defender of Khartoum in words that could not be misunderstood, and those words were ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... see the darkest horrors and yet remain flesh and blood. Those who believe in life and love, whose religion—or at least whose indomitable clinging to the beauty they have once descried—has taught them sufficient courage in dwelling upon these things, may come unscathed through any such ordeal. But for that, the story is one of sheer pagan terror. It came out of the old, dark pre-Olympian mythology (for the Gorgons are the daughters of Hades), and it embodied the ancient truth that the sorrow of the world worketh death. It is a tragic world, and the earth-bound, looking ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... in the extreme, for the boat was now entering the Strait. The heavy seas that roll under the lash of a south-west gale in that quarter do not make for the felicity of those who face them on a well-found modern steamer. For the seven Englishmen in an open boat, groping along a strange coast, the ordeal was severe. But no doubt they wished each other a merry Christmas, in quite the traditional English way, and with hearty good ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... down the nave, and approached a lateral chapel where a taper was burning with a flickering light. The Count entered the chapel. Those who had seen him amid the brilliant society of Naples, or amid the awful judicial ordeal to which he had just been subjected, and which he had undergone with such coolness and audacity, would not have recognized the humble and trembling man, who knelt before a sarcophagus of black marble surmounted with the coronet and ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal—a degradation of funny grimaces in the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... to the obedience of the pious. This belief that justice and judgment were simply the will of God, to be ascertained, not by reason but by other means, was so general and deep that such crude devices as trials by ordeal and battle were often resorted to for determining guilt or innocence and other questions of fact. Indeed, resort to such expedients for determining questions of law, as well as questions of fact, was not unknown. In the tenth century ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... saw the brown walls of the cathedral not far away, and then went back to bed. A sudden and overpowering weakness came upon him which made the bed agreeable. Here he was to receive such friends as would call upon him that day. Anne Dillon looked somewhat anxious over the ordeal, and his own interest grew sharper each moment, until the street-door at last opened with decision, and his ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... healthy, bed-ridden under the following amazing circumstances. He accidentally discovered that his tailor, who had clothed him since boyhood, was an anarchist. After this he was afraid to have any further dealings with the man, while, on the other hand, he lacked sufficient courage to face the ordeal of being fitted by a fresh tailor. For some time he used to sit up at night and secretly sew patches into his trousers. Naturally this could not go on for ever, and at last, when his garments were dropping to pieces, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... began again; this time it was desperate. For we have no time to lose. Every hour of delay exhausts our man further. A few days more, and there will be no choice open to him: only death, after a long ordeal.... ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... report, will have the advantage of real substantial personal knowledge. I esteem him highly, and regard him as a man of the most upright principles, who is not, and will not be swayed in his duty by any considerations whatever. I am glad we are to stand the ordeal of such ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... came the process of greasing him from head to foot and decorating his face with pigments, after which he was clad in breech-clout and moccasins. This done, he was seated upon the bank for a no less severe ordeal. ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... you who stand gazing down in sorrowful reproach upon what you regard as my unpardonable impiety, little dream of the fiery ordeal that consumed my childlike, beautiful faith, as flames crisp and blacken chaff. I am alone, and must ever be, while in the flesh; and I hoard my pain, sparing the world my moans and tears, my wry faces and desperate struggles. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... trunk and head of the little boy fall with a profusion of blood upon the ground at the foot of the rope. By means of an incantation these resume their natural positions, and the little boy gets up and walks off, apparently none the worse for his most trying ordeal. ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... of the daily townward tide—clerks, shop-girls, and stenographers, for the most part intent upon bread and butter in futuro. The jostling and crowding was like an old story to me; I went through the ordeal each morning with an indifference and ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... strong, but our economy is troubled. For too many of our fellow citizens—farmers, steel and auto workers, lumbermen, black teenagers, working mothers—this is a painful period. We must all do everything in our power to bring their ordeal to an end. It has fallen to us, in our time, to undo damage that was a long time in the making, and to begin the hard but necessary task of building a better future ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Frosticos, the Lady Fragrantia, and a prodigious crowd of nobility, and placed sitting upon the summit of the whale's bones at the palace; and having remained in this situation for three days and three nights, as a trial ordeal, and a specimen of my perseverance and resolution, the third hour after midnight they seated me in the chariot of Queen Mab. It was a prodigious dimension, large enough to contain more stowage than the tun of Heidelberg, and globular like a hazel-nut: in fact, it seemed to be ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... to a similar effect, and one of the gentlemen came out of the ordeal somewhat less shamefully than the first, the other worse, for he blubbered and wanted to kiss her. It is questionable whether many young ladies have made such a profound impression in a ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... ship than the merchant (who may be a usurer!) who only gives his money. Well, that is the view which was all but universal well into the period of what, for want of a better word, we call civilisation. Not only was it the basis of all such institutions as the ordeal and duel; not only did it justify (and in the opinion of some still justifies) the wars of religion and the use of force in religious matters generally; not only was it the accepted national polity of such ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... ordeal for her, after the hope that had excited her, and this time it was real tears that flowed down her cheeks. The sound of the sobs roused Philippe from his dream. He listened to it sadly and then began to pace the room. Moved though ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... the breakfast table discussed the matter of the horse-thief pretty thoroughly. It was a hard ordeal for poor Ann, who could not take easily to deception. She had unexpected trouble too with Nabby. Nabby had ...
— The Adventures of Ann - Stories of Colonial Times • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the reason for this night sail. It is easy to seek danger, to ride at it with a shout, the pulses leaping—but to wait for it, to wait motionless in the still dark for an attack that may be delivered one knows not when nor from whence—that is the great ordeal. Garth clenched the stem of his pipe hard between his teeth; and with a resolute effort of his will, put down the hysteria that will at such a time ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... earliest days, to be performed, with picturesque simplicity, in the sea on the Oddicombe beach, but to this there were, even in those quiet years, extreme objections. A jeering crowd could scarcely be avoided, and women, in particular, shrank from the ordeal. This used to be a practical difficulty, and my Father, when communicants confessed that they had not yet been baptized, would shake his head and say gravely, 'Ah! ah! you shun the Cross of Christ!' But that baptism ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... perhaps, be supposed that the snow-walls melted under this ordeal; nothing of the sort. Their tendency to do so was checked effectually, not only by a sharp frost, but by the solid backing of snow behind them; and the little that did give way in close proximity to the fire ran unobtrusively ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... fully determined to fight, and yet, in spite of all his mental effort, in spite of the exertion of all his will power, he felt that he could not even preserve the strength necessary to carry him through the ordeal. He tried to conjure up a picture of the duel, his own attitude, and ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... proposed antagonist, and a single glance into his eyes, aglow with pride and resolution, convinced me that whatever hope I might have cherished regarding Mapela's supposed desire for my escape from the ordeal to which I was about to be subjected had been utterly misplaced. His cupidity in respect of possible gifts, if indeed he had been animated by any such feeling, had evidently been swamped by his sense of duty ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... the "Beagle," who saw him daily for five years on that memorable trip, wrote: "A protracted sea-voyage is a most severe test of friendship, and Darwin was the only man on our ship, or that I ever heard of, who stood the ordeal. He never lost his temper or made an ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... on fire is a sublime spectacle, which those who have had the good fortune to see, in a place of safety, will not soon forget. But a horrible ordeal it is for those who are overtaken by the raging flame; for, if the grass is dry, with a slight breeze to fan the flame, it travels with ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... already of the coming ordeal. A letter from Armadale to Midwinter, which Midwinter has just sent in to me. ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... expect: fretfulness and tears, if nothing worse. To my unbounded amazement she greeted me with a smile and said she was glad to see me; and, if you'll believe it, there was never so much as a whimper from her lips through the whole ordeal, though I knew I was ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... Service in the general room of the Club to a congregation consisting mostly of ladies, while Jack Darling, usually flushed and breathless after tennis and a lightning change, went through the ordeal of reading ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... their rank and dates of commission as possible; but I was to do nothing until I heard further from him on the subject, as he explained that he would have to consult the Secretary of War before making final orders. General Buell and his officers had been subjected to a long ordeal by a court of inquiry, touching their conduct of the campaign in Tennessee and Kentucky, that resulted in the battle of Perryville, or Chaplin's Hills, October 8,1862, and they had been substantially acquitted; ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... lover, Richard, and asks her if she can resist his entreaties. The trial is very sore, as she gazes on that beloved form, seeming, by its passionate gestures, to implore her to assent, but she is firm, and the vision disappears. The ordeal is now over. Alizon has triumphed over all their arts. The spirit in my likeness resumes its fiendish shape, and, with a dreadful menace against the poor girl, vanishes ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... modern fashionable code of honour, when a man has seduced or carried off his friend's wife, the next thing he has to do is to fight the man whom he has injured and betrayed. By thus appealing to the ordeal of the duel, he may not only clear himself from guilt; but, if it be done with proper spirit, he may acquire celebrity and glory in the annals of gallantry, and in the eyes of the fair and innocent. In our ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... course, the killing him there and then, which wasn't so good, on account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had—for my sins, I suppose—to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it—I heard it. I saw the inconceivable ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... body, and ordered that everyone present should successively approach and touch it, declaring at the same time each his innocence of the foul murder. The cottar, who had retained his effrontery until now, shrank from the ordeal, and declined to touch the body, running at once out of the hall, through Bakewell village, in the direction of Ashford. Sir George, coming, as he well might, to the conclusion that the suspicions which had pointed to this man had been well founded, ordered his men to ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... would seize me, and in their insane glee practise upon me some savage torture. Would they never cease? For nearly thirty minutes I sat still as death, where they had flung me. Safety lay in not attracting their attention; but a dreadful ordeal was in ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... flattering. We could hardly have been more asked to meet each other than before; but now there were entertainments in special recognition of our betrothal, which Eveleth said could not be altogether refused, though she found the ordeal as irksome as I did. In America, however, you get used to many things. I do not know why it should have been done, but in the society columns of several of the great newspapers our likenesses were printed, from photographs procured I cannot guess how, with descriptions ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... gives me the shivers," she had said. "I never can forget the ordeal I went through the day that Aunt Heppy died. I gave the house to 'Zekiel because I never could have lived in it. Maude and I are going ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... them in the least. Yet the result is, he is already an influence. People who have braved the ordeal, and emerged successfully, go about with ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... as she departed, indicated such an air of irrepressible relief at having passed through a trying ordeal that all Merrington's ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... retreat. He had no staff to assist him, and was the only mounted officer on the Canadian side, so that he was at a disadvantage. Moreover, he had never previously manoeuvred a brigade, even on parade, and to handle one in battle was a trying ordeal to an inexperienced officer who had never before been ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... his stand in the street, with a roll of papers under his arm, supplied by the generosity of his new acquaintance. It was rather a trying ordeal for a country boy, new to the city and its ways. But Ben was not bashful. He was not a timid boy, but was fully able to push his way. So, glancing at the telegraphic headings, he began to call out the news in a business-like way. He ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... waited, it seems to me, till they came to a particularly bad-looking place to take his departure. At any rate, that was a long night for Powell, and whatever the main cause of Howland's leaving was, it was a trying ordeal for the leader. Howland's obligation certainly was to go on as if he were an enlisted soldier, and he evidently failed in this duty. When daylight finally came a solemn breakfast was prepared and eaten. No one had much ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... stay here was short. A bridge near the house made it possible to obtain a good view of the master, and it soon got to be the custom for people to station themselves on it and watch for his appearance. He stood the ordeal for three weeks, and then fled to his beloved Baden, where he appears to have been safe from ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... of cramping their daughters' feet: his reply was, "Very bad custom." On my inquiring further, whether he had any daughters, and whether their feet were treated in the same way, he answered in the affirmative, but asserted, that they had been subjected to the cruel ordeal by their mother, against his will. He added, that, in a China-man's house, where there were young girls, no peace could be had, night or day, for their cries, which lasted till they were six years old. He gave us a reason for the mother's insisting on her daughter's submitting ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... a terrible ordeal. Miss Prunty, anxious to divert the current of her friend's ideas, suggested that the girl should sing. Signor Graziano and madame insisted; they would take ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... before God. Self- scrutiny in the light of truth can do no harm to any one, least of all to the reformer and philanthropist. The spiritual warrior, like the young candidate for knighthood, may be none the worse for his preparatory ordeal of watching all night by ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... He walked to the window, but even the sunlight seemed to mock him—there was no light for him, no rift in the cloud darkening his path, and with a heavy sigh he turned away. The struggle was not yet over; this was to be a day of battle with himself, and he nerved himself for the coming ordeal. ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... and breathlessly tried to remove the great drops which clung to him, feeling, to his surprise, anything but cold, and, by the time he was half dressed, that it was not such a terrible ordeal he had ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... consequence of the approaching event for which we are assembled at the Hall, that I confess I find my thoughts singularly exercised on the subject. Indeed, all the bachelors of the establishment seem to be passing through a kind of fiery ordeal; for Lady Lillycraft is one of those tender, romance-read dames of the old school, whose mind is filled with flames and darts, and who breathe nothing but constancy and wedlock. She is for ever immersed in the concerns of the heart; and, to ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... that ordeal was passed. The smoke lifted. It rolled away. There was air again for them to breathe. Frank roused himself before the smoke had all passed, and lifting Bob in his arms, carried him swiftly downward. He reached the place where Uncle Moses was standing, gasping for breath; and ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... in time had another. Being checked over for radiation burns which would mean that he'd die quite comfortably within three or four days, and then learning that no burns existed, was something of an ordeal. And Sally—of course her feelings shouldn't have been as vivid as his own, but the fact that she'd been scared for him held some significance. When, on top of all the rest, he went into the Space Platform for the first time, Joe was definitely ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... 1st to 4th century; against Yemishi; prime minister; great duke of the Presence; in conquest of Korea; succession to Jingo; ordeal for treason; grand-daughter, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... out, "Why, fellers, thet's the chap what's been workin' fer Hiram Tinch." This announcement was enough to make Archie an even greater object of interest than before, for the boys seemed to think that any person who could work for Farmer Tinch, and come out of the ordeal none the worse for wear, must be something wonderful. Archie was soon on good terms with them all, however, and told them of his plan of going to New York. The boys were all attention, and soon he was the hero of the occasion. When the bell rung for the afternoon service he was still telling them ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison
... not this Bill! Reject this Bill! He staggers through the ordeal: let him go, Strew no fresh fire before him! Plead for us! When Strafford spoke, your ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... without exception Unionist papers refrained from any attempt to identify Nationalist Ireland generally with the rising: they did full justice to the valour and the sufferings of Irish troops—who, indeed, at that very moment were passing through a cruel ordeal. In that Easter week the Sixteenth Division was subjected to two attacks with poison gas of a concentration and violence till then unknown, and under weather conditions which prolonged the ordeal beyond endurance. The ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... person to call expert witnesses, who give the court long lectures upon the significance of children's evidence, and upon the import of evidence in general. In our own experience one accused of such offences rarely escapes conviction. He is hardly ever spared the terrible ordeal of examination and cross-examination. On all hands we hear the loud complaints of such persons, declaring that they have been wrongfully condemned." My own experience in the law courts leads me to accept these statements without reserve, and I regard as one of ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... of revenge, and a desire to make somebody else's hands as tired as his own. But one glance at his glowing, kindly face dispelling that idea, Barbara concentrated all her attention on the best way to free herself, and avoid going through a similar ordeal with all the others, which, she began to fear, might be ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... to state that to have passed the ordeal of so severe a cross-examination scatheless, needed no small amount of courage, intelligence, and ready shrewdness on the part of the witness. Nicholas Wood, who was present on the occasion, has since stated that the point on which Stephenson was hardest pressed ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... a hole in the bulkhead and sees a row of heads with sad, patient eyes come swinging up together from the starboard side, whilst those on the port swing back; then up come the port heads, whilst the starboard recede. It seems a terrible ordeal for these poor beasts to stand this day after day for weeks together, and indeed though they continue to feed well the strain quickly drags down their weight and condition; but nevertheless the trial cannot be gauged from human standards. There are horses which never lie down, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... a voice of great sadness, "had he but listened to Mejnour,—had he but delayed the last and most perilous ordeal of daring wisdom until the requisite training and initiation had been completed,—your ancestor would have stood with me upon an eminence which the waters of Death itself wash everlastingly, but cannot overflow. Your grandsire resisted my fervent prayers, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... embarrassments of war, this was expected, and for a long time the result justified the expectation, extraordinary as it must appear when viewed by comparison with other people who have been subjected to a like ordeal. Much of our success was due to the much-abused institution of African servitude, for it enabled the white men to go into the army, and leave the cultivation of their fields and the care of their flocks, as well as of their ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... was dressing for the minister's party. She was laying out the prettiest of her pretty things and sighing as she did it. For what two months before would have seemed a joyous occasion was now nothing but a painful, trying ordeal, an ordeal that must, however, be ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
