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More "Shrill" Quotes from Famous Books



... built up against the city, and the strange race who lived in its streets. Suddenly there burst out from the stillness the clear and piercing music of the reveille, calling, recalling, iterated, reiterated, and ending with one long high fierce shrill note with which the steep hills rang. Perhaps a boy in the school band was practicing on his bugle, but for Lucian it was magic. For him it was the note of the Roman trumpet, tuba mirum spargens sonum, filling all the hollow valley with its command, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... laden, scaled the rocky ledge immediately below the one which flanked the entrance of the den, a shrill cry of mortal anguish fell upon his ears, and thrilled him to the very marrow. The cry came from the inside of the den above him, and he knew it for the cry of one of his children in extremity. That gave Finn the most piercing thrill of ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... night, for it is too late to go round to Kangwe and ask Mme. Jacot, of the Mission Evangelique, if she will take me in. The air is stiff with mosquitoes, and saying a few suitable words to them, I dash under the mosquito bar and sleep, lulled by their shrill yells of ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... Mr. Maltravers? So glad to see you," said the quick, shrill voice of Mrs. Hare. "Beautiful ball! Nobody does things like Lord Raby; don't ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book V • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... like of it!" exclaimed Mr. Crewe. "You say, eighty-two ounces of gold? You say it came from within fifty miles of Timber Town? Why, sir, the matter must be looked into." The old gentleman's voice rose to a shrill treble. ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace

... Philip, with a voice so shrill in its agony, that it smote the hearts of those in the adjoining chamber like the shriek of some despairing soul. They looked at each other, but not one had the courage to ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... Jill promptly responded with the loan of a tiny black kitten, who emerged spitting and scratching, to Jack's great delight; and he was cudgelling his brains as to how a fat white rabbit could be transported, when a shrill whistle from without saved Jill from that ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... pier at the Bush Terminal at Brooklyn," explained Tom. "Look out there; don't get in the way of the ropes," and he pushed the crowd back from the imaginary ropes, and whistled a shrill ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith

... biting, ironic, scornful fans—pealed up a howl of delight. It lasted for a full minute. Then, as quiet ensued, some boy blew a blast of one of those infernal little instruments of pipe and rubber balloon, and over the field wailed out a shrill, high-keyed cry, an excellent imitation of a baby. Whereupon the whole audience roared, and in discomfiture Reddy Clammer went in ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey

... and the dog less bold. The most perfect friendship was at length established between them. When the hour of dinner arrived, the partridge invariably flew on his mistress's shoulder, calling with that shrill note which is so well known to sportsmen; and the spaniel leapt about with equal ardour. One dish of bread and milk was placed on the floor, out of which the spaniel and bird fed together. After their social meal, the dog would retire to a corner to sleep, ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse

... head into the cow's side, hangs on by a teat, and dozes, while the bucket, mechanically gripped between his knees, sinks lower and lower till it rests on the ground. Likely as not he'll doze on until his mother's shrill voice startles him with an inquiry as to whether he intends to get that milking done to-day; other times he is roused by the plunging of the cow, or knocked over by a calf which has broken through a defective ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... often heard.] This for certain I can affirm, That oftentimes the Devil doth cry with an audible Voice in the Night; 'tis very shrill almost like the barking of a Dog. This I have often heard my self; but never heard that he did any body any harm. Only this observation the Inhabitants of the Land have made of this Voice, and I have made it also, that either just ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox

... the Brother together, in tones so respectively shrill and deep that Catherine had to cram her fist into her mouth ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... penitently. "But he has such a funny voice." She imitated amusingly the shrill falsetto of the said Clarence Parker. "And he's so solemn about ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... We shall see!" she answered, in a hoarse, shrill voice. "I will prove it. See, I will prove it and hang you yet. Beware! I do not charge you with witchcraft, but with murder. Either take the place you made vacant by the death of Samuel ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick

... other recovering from his attack. But he could see or hear nothing to indicate that the man was within a dozen miles. He called, and his voice sounded puny and hollow against the vastness of the sky. He heard no hails in answer, except the long, shrill one which the coyotes gave from a neighboring ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan

... adjoining dining-room (where was a dingy vision of a feast and pewter pots upon a darkling tablecloth), could that lean, scraggy, old, beetle-browed yellow face, who cried, "Ou es tu donc, maman?" with such a shrill nasal voice—could that elderly vixen be that blooming and divine Saltarelli? Clive drew her picture as she was, and a likeness of Madame Rogomme, her mamma; a Mosaic youth, profusely jewelled, and scented at once with tobacco and eau-de-cologne, occupied Clive's stall on Mademoiselle Saltarelli's ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and piercing as they were formerly. The vocal cords have become larger, and can no longer produce such high tones. The screaming sounds of discontent, which continue to be repeated sometimes till hoarseness appears, but rarely in the night, have, on the contrary, as is the case with the shrill sounds of pain, scarcely changed their character, hae-e, hae-ae-ae-[)e], [)e]. They are strongest in the bath, during the pouring on ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... fancy came to him vividly while he stood waiting—a vision of heat simmering in little pale red flames. On the thick reeds some large, slow, dusky flies were still feeding, and now and then a moorhen a few yards away splashed a little, or uttered a sharp, shrill note. When she came—if she did come!—they would not stay here, in this dark earthy backwater; he would take her over to the other side, away to the woods! But the minutes passed, and his heart sank. Then it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... village lay White in the morning light, and holding up Its modest steeples in the crystal air. A moment, and the picture changed no more, But wore a serious constancy and showed Its bare-boughed trees immovable. I rose, And stepping from the train, it glided on, Sweeping around the hill; the whistle shrill Rang through the stricken air. A moment more It rolled along the iron ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke

... A shrill whistle broke in upon this little love feast and the three girls looked up. David was hurrying down the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower

... The shrill cry of a human heart in agony was heard above the bellowing of the winds and the rush of the waves, and without waiting for a question, without heeding even the miracle that the dumb had spoken, Captain Durbin hastened below, followed by his agitated summoner. As quickly ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh

... you?" cried a shrill feminine voice that seemed to clutch the very heart of Michael Phelan ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie

... up in the shadow of the overhanging roof. Every now and then came a wild, shrill cry from the lower end of the village. Some one was beating a frightful, cracked drum which they had got from a trader. The tumult was certainly increasing. Trent swore softly, and then looked irresolutely over his shoulder to where ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... of slang against the unoffending couple. "Now then, stoopid! Don't keep the ground if you can't dance, old Slow Coach!" the young surgeon roared out (using, at the same time, other expressions far more emphatic), and was joined in his abuse by the shrill language and laughter of his partner; to the interruption of the ball, the terror of poor little Fanny, and the immense indignation ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... he answered thus, Lalla turned by chance from her engravings, towards them, when her eyes resting upon those of Aphiz, she rose, staggered a few steps towards him, and uttered a scream so shrill and piercing that even the imperturbable Turk sprang to his feet in ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray

... a long ray of yellow light, gilding the house-tops, gilding the mast-heads of the vessels in the harbour; and then, as though in answer to a signal, came a muffled roar from the anchored battleship. There was an instant's silence, then the shrill voices of sentries sounding the alarm, the whirring ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... little Mary, when long gone to bed, Shrill cries and loud shriekings were heard; "I'm on fire, O mamma, come up or I'm dead!" Mamma she believ'd not a word. "Sleep, sleep, naughty child," she call'd out from below, "How often have I been deceived? You're ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... and old John Potter found it necessary to assume the part of peace-maker, in which, being himself a keen debater, he failed, and there is no saying what might have been the result of it if old Martha had not brought the action to a summary close by telling her visitors in shrill tones to "hold their noise." This they did after laughing heartily at the old ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne

... the wife that the venom had at once been removed by her own lips as more than mere feminine folly, and Dame Idonea's real experience of knights thus saved, and on the other hand of the fatal consequences of rude surgery in such a climate, were disregarded as an old woman's babble. Her voice waxed shrill and angry, and her antagonists' replies in Lingua Franca, mixed with Arabic, Latin, and Greek, rang through the tent, till the Prince could bear it ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of the waves was gloomy and fearsome. Here is the harbor. . . From behind its stone wall, comes the sound of human voices, the plashing of water, singing and shrill whistling." ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky

... street from the Browers' that little Mrs. Matthews poured coffee for herself and husband, while Mollie, the cook, stood on the side-piazza and sang in a loud, shrill, and yet appreciative tone, "There is rest for the weary." Little Mrs. Matthews had glowing cheeks, though she had done nothing more serious than exchange her silken dress for a wrapper, and lie on the sofa and finish the closing chapters of ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston

... that exists between us. You are my creatures. I am your Master. What I originate, you accept. I act, you endorse. Do I," he continued, his voice rising to a shrill, piping treble, "do I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various

... yee list to exercise your Vayne, Or in the Sock, or in the Buskin'd Strayne, 50 Let Art and Nature goe One with the other; Yet so, that Art may show Nature her Mother; The thick-brayn'd Audience liuely to awake, Till with shrill Claps ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... comfort. His name should be called Yonec. He would prove a valiant knight, and would avenge both her and him by slaying their enemy. The knight could stay no longer, for he was bleeding to death from his hurt. In great dolour of mind and body he flew from the chamber. The lady pursued the bird with many shrill cries. In her desire to follow him she sprang forth from the window. Marvellous it was that she was not killed outright, for the window was fully twenty feet from the ground. When the lady made her perilous ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France

... but from the edge of the sheep-pasture floated a shrill, kite-like trill. A child tending cattle had picked it up from a brother or sister on the far side of the slope that ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... old woman hobble out of a house supported by her two sons. Just before they could reach shelter a narrow stone bridge over a pond had to be crossed. The old woman limped pitifully to the middle, when a shrill ping rang out. A sharpshooter's bullet struck her; she toppled over into the water, while the men took to their heels and fled back into the smoke ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon

... Mrs. Best and Magdalen; and in the first pause, when the first course had just been distributed, she looked up with a great pair of grey eyes, and asked, in a shrill, clear little voice, "Sister, ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... burning power, Wood with the smart, with shouts and shrieking shrill, He sought his ease in river, field, and bower; But, for the time, his grief went ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney

... sharp and chill,— My soul to meanness pined and shrank, Forth went my cry in accent shrill, "My Lord, have I no grace to thank?" Its echo dying, lingered, sank, "My Lord, have ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie

... the rampart. La Vigne, the officer of the guard, had just gone to his quarters, but a trumpeter, who chanced to remain, saw, through sheets of rain, the black swarm of assailants sweeping down the hill. He blew the alarm, and at his shrill summons a few half-naked soldiers ran wildly out of the barracks. It was too late. Through the breaches, over the ramparts, the Spaniards came ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... and on the instant disappeared beneath the surface with the shrill laugh of the crazy sailor ...
— The Golden Canyon - Contents: The Golden Canyon; The Stone Chest • G. A. Henty

... who kept incessantly shouting, "Soldo, soldo!" I do not know why these sea-urchins are so far more irrepressible than their land brethren. But it is always thus in Italy. They take an imperturbable delight in noise and mere annoyance. I shall never forget the sea-roar of Porto Venere, with that shrill obbligato, "Soldo, soldo, soldo!" rattling like a dropping fire ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... and stepped into the passage. The whetstone sang shrill on the sword edge as it kissed the steel behind me, and the sound was good to hear as I went into darkness ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler

... sprang to the floor on bandaged feet, a shrill scream burst out of the ruddy darkness — unearthly, horrible; and there came a thunderous ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers

... senses were steeped in oblivion, she could not tell. But she was awakened by shrill screams, and started to ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... the angry crab closed his nippers on the bare big toe of Dick Lee, and his shrill note of discomfort rang across the inlet, the shrill whistle of the engine announced the arrival of the morning train at the little ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various

... of the rocking in the saddle of horsemen borne over billowing expanses—glorious with the glory of the hosts which fancy sees among the crimson and gold banners of the sunset. The eight are at last arrived; their war-cries, their hard laughter, and the shrill neighing of the battle-steeds mingle in harsh harmony. The shrieks of an autumn gale, exulting in its freedom to drive the waves mountain-high and scatter all the leaves of the forest, have the same quality of wildness and force and glee. The steel-corseleted figures clustered on the peak make ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall

... is," cries a little, shrill voice from the background. It comes from Tommy, and from that part of the room where Tommy and Mabel and little Bertie are having a game behind the window curtains. Blocks, dolls, kitchens, farm yards, ninepins—all ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

... accepting the Serb military chiefs' guidance and domination." He was much impressed by the silence and controlled power of the Serbian General Staff. There was in Europe a general war-weariness; but not in Yugoslavia. There was a hush in this part of Europe, broken only by the shrill screams of Italian propagandists and outbursts of suppressed passion ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein

... strawberries nor for flowers, made such good speed that he had presently reached the grandmother's cottage. Thump, thump, went the wolf against the door. "Who is there?" cried the grandam from within. "Only your grandchild, Little Red Riding Hood," cried the wolf, imitating the little girl's shrill infantine voice as best he might. "I have come to bring you a cake and a pot of butter that mother sends you." The grandmother, being ill, was in bed, so she called out: "Lift the latch, and the bolt will fall." The wolf did ...
— Bo-Peep Story Books • Anonymous

... race with span of seventy lusty summers. But these smells do not prevail within the chandlery. At first you see nothing but rope. Besides clothesline and other such familiar and domestic twistings, there are great cordages scarce kinsmen to them, which will later put to sea and will whistle with shrill enjoyment at their release. There are such hooks, swivels, blocks and tackles, such confusion of ships' devices as would be enough for the building of a sea tale. It may be fancied that here is Treasure Island itself, shuffled and laid apart in bits like a puzzle-picture. ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... far above his men that he disdained to take part in their meetings. Meanwhile he waited for the return of the messenger as an accused murderer waits for his jury. Silence filled the room. Through the windows came the voices of the cheerful katydids and the shrill tree-toads. A sudden sense of the sweetness of life ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner

... shrill whistle of a steamer echoed over the island. The sound came from up the river, and I was satisfied that it was the boat in which Ella had been a passenger, returning ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic

... the trenches and swept like the gale, Till the rapid-fire guns got us fell on the flank And the murderin' bullets came swishin' like hail: Till a' that were left o' us faltered and broke; Till it seemed for a moment a panicky rout, When shrill through the fume and the flash and the smoke The wee valiant voice o' a whistle piped out. 'The Campbells are Comin'': Then into the fray We bounded wi' bayonets reekin' and raw, And oh we fair revelled in glory that day, Jist thanks to ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service

... and showing in his red eye that if he could get rid of the yoke he would show them what a circus was. All the Black Boys tailed on to the wheels and the back of the cart, stood there getting their spirits up, and then of a sudden set to shooing and singing out. It was these outbursts of shrill cries that it was so curious to hear in the distance. One such stuck cart I came up to and asked what was the worry. "Old fool bullamacow stop same place," was the reply. I never saw any of the overseers near ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... revoir." Her eyes closed. They turned to find a high-busted woman entering the room, accompanied by two young girls. As they departed a breath-like echo floated after them, "Oh, really, Mrs. Van Sittart—still those corsets? I can do nothing for you, you know." Tones of shrill excuse penetrated to the lift door. At the curb below stood a dyspeptically stuffed limousine, guarded by two men in ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... glowing like a great rose. Then I saw figures pass between me and the moon, one by one, in a long line, each bent double, with great packs upon their shoulders. One of them was singing, and then in the middle of the song I heard a horrible shrill laugh, in the thin cracked voice of a very old woman, and they disappeared into the shadow of the trees. I suppose they were people going to work, or coming from work in the gardens; but how like it was ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen

... cracked bellows in a corner, which he placed under his arm, and applying his mouth to the pipe, and working his elbows to and fro, pretended that he was playing upon the bagpipes, every now and then letting the wind escape in a shrill ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... [Footnote 3] Thou dartedst thy huge head from high, Night wav'd her banners o'er the sky, And, brooding, gave her shapeless shadows birth. Rocking on the billowy air, Ha! what withering phantoms glare! As blows the blast with many a sudden swell, At each dead pause, what shrill-ton'd voices yell! The sheeted spectre, rising from the tomb, Points at the murderer's stab, and shudders by; In every grove is felt a heavier gloom, That veils its genius from the vulgar eye: The spirit of the ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers

... and delighted her. She rose to the waves of sound as a swimmer rises in the sea, her heart beat fast, and she was so eagerly engaged in looking about her, in staring at the hurrying people, in locating the shrill screams of the engines, in determining not to jump when the carriages jolted together, that her little black bag opened unexpectedly once more and spilled a handkerchief, a hand-mirror, a paper packet of sweets, a small pair of scissors, and a shabby brown purse upon the station-floor. ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... Shrill and distinct above the roar of the storm, which at the moment had somewhat lulled, there rose a prolonged wail, or rather shriek, as of many human voices rising slowly in one passionate appeal to the mercy of ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... part of the building—probably in the front of the house—one of the upper windows was thrown violently open. Then a woman's voice, raised in shrill tones of fear or pain, rang out between the fitful gusts of wind ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... had been waiting on the steps for the appearance of a cab from the rank round the corner in response to the shrill blast which the sergeant had blown on his whistle. The sergeant went to the door of the station leading into the yard ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson

... hill-side by a zigzag path, and reached the plain below, they obtained a nearer view of the eminently joyful scene, the sound of the wild-fowl became more shrill, and the laughter of the children more boisterous. A number of the latter who had observed the approaching party were seen hurrying towards them with eager haste, led by a little lad, who bounded and leaped as if wild ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne

... on while she tossed her pretty head and picked at potted shrimps. The room was too crowded for any one to notice me; and I sat quietly in a corner eating my sandwiches and smoking my cigarette. The frosted- glass double doors swung to and fro and the shrill voices of children asking for drinks and carrying them away in their mugs made me feel profoundly unhappy. I followed one little girl through the doors out into the street and saw her give the mug to a cabman and run off delighted with his tip. When I returned I was deafened by a ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... With a shrill squeal, a blot shadow detached from the slope immediately below them. A vile, musky scent, now mingled with the stench of ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton

... spines; the dense, sweet fume Of nutty, acrid scent like poison stealing Through his hot blood; the bristling yellow glare Spiking his eyes with fire, till he went reeling, Stifled and blinded, on—and did not care Though he were taken—wandering round and round, 'Jerusalem the Golden' quavering shrill, Changing his tune to 'Tommy Tiddler's Ground': Till, just a lost child on that dazzling hill, Bewildered in a glittering golden maze Of stinging scented fire, he dropped, quite done, A shrivelling wisp within a world ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)

... in high favour at Plumfield; and the river where the old punt used to wabble about with a cargo of small boys, or echo to the shrill screams of little girls trying to get lilies, now was alive with boats of all kinds, from the slender wherry to the trim pleasure-craft, gay with cushions, awnings, and fluttering pennons. Everyone ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... a light broke in upon her understanding; a thought whirled into her brain and a moment later a shrill, angry, hysterical laugh came ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... sat on the rock and watched the long North Country twilight steal up like a gray cloud from the east. Two loons called to each other, now in the shrill maniac laughter, now with the long, mournful cry. It needed just that one touch to finish the picture. We were looking, had we but known it, on a lake no white man had ever visited before. Clement ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... The reply came to me in a shrill falsetto. So grotesque was the effect of this treble from a bulk so squat and broad and hairy as the silhouette before me that ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... hearing the shrill call from his brother, Don turned in the direction of the apple orchard. As the two lads ran up, ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... glass—white under parts, slightly tinged with yellow, back and rump olive green, top and sides of head delicate bluish-ash; no eye-ring, no wing-bars. There is no other warbler marked quite like that. And yet its song is its most conspicuous mark, so to speak, for it is a loud, shrill, and very rapidly repeated run, which might be spelled out in this way: "Chippy, chippy, chippy, chippity-chippity-chippity." The whole song is emitted at a galloping pace, giving you the impression that the bird is in a desperate hurry. Important ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser

... years all these divergences should have come about, and none of us need care. There they are. As a matter of fact, both England and America are mottled with varying accents literate and illiterate; equally true it is that each nation has its notion of the other's way of speaking—we're known by our shrill nasal twang, they by their broad vowels and hesitation; and quite as true is it that not all Americans and not all English do in their enunciation conform ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister

... dolls opened the door for Fido, he went running across the lawn, barking in a loud shrill voice. He ran down behind the shed and through the garden, and then back ...
— Raggedy Andy Stories • Johnny Gruelle

... was sent to finish a sketch of the front of an ancient temple, amongst the ruins of Herculaneum. He had just reached the pit, and the men were about to let him down with cords, in the usual manner, when his attention was caught by the shrill sound of a scolding woman's voice. He looked, and saw at some paces distant this female fury, who stood guarding the windlass of a well, to which, with threatening gestures and most voluble menaces, she ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth

... into the Rota," [Footnote: The Rota was a revolving box in which foundlings were formerly placed. The box turned round and the infant was taken inside and cared for. It stands at the gate of the Santo Spirito Hospital, and is still visible, though no longer in use.] cried a shrill- voiced washerwoman. "She got the child in and was running away, when the place blew up, and the devil carried her off. And serve her right, for throwing away her baby, poor ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford

... lonely it was upon this Wigtown coast. A man might walk many a weary mile and never see a living thing except the white, heavy-flapping kittiwakes, which screamed and cried to each other with their shrill, sad voices. ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle

... fury, till the waters seemed to boil in the midst of them, and the whole host were enshrined in a thick muddy medium that prevented the divers from seeing an inch before them. The sound, meanwhile, was like that of thunder—snorting, lashing, and shrill cries, produced by some action of their breathing organs, were mixed together; and the confusion into which they were thrown precipitated many of them on the sides of the bell, which being at the time suspended from within five feet of the ground, swung from side to side in such a manner ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... the future establishment of the Demoiselles Denis, the chevalier was not thinking of uniting the three thousand livres which this generous mother gave to her daughters to the thousand crowns a year which the Abbe Brigaud had bestowed on him. The shrill treble of Mademoiselle Emilie, the contralto of Mademoiselle Athenais, the accompaniment of both, had recalled to his recollection the pure and flexible voice and the distinguished execution of his neighbor. ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... stupidity struts in trousers. But, class for class, woman does her share of the world's work. Among the poor, of the two it is she who labours the longer. There is a many- versed ballad popular in country districts. Often I have heard it sung in shrill, piping voice at harvest supper or barn dance. The chorus ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome

... blushed and hung their heads. It was nothing to have taken the garden, but it daunted them to have to acknowledge the fault. Before they had said a word, however, a shrill little voice cried ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow

... as I am informed by Mr. Dixon, in almost every breed. The Malays[426] have a loud, deep, somewhat prolonged crow, but with considerable individual differences. Colonel Sykes remarks that the domestic Kulm cock in India has not the shrill clear pipe of the English bird, and "his scale of notes appears more limited." Dr. Hooker was struck with the "prolonged howling screech" of the cocks in Sikhim.[427] The crow of the Cochin is notoriously and ludicrously different from that of the common cock. The disposition of the different ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... a figure lying on its face in the shadow by the house, as Ralph came up the path, and a small dog, that seemed to be trying to dig the head out from the hands in which it was buried, ceased his excavations and set up a shrill barking. The figure rolled over, and sat up; the pleasant brown face was all creased with laughter; small pieces of grass were clinging to the long hair, and Ralph, to his amazement, recognised the ex-Lord Chancellor ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson

... trees just about daybreak, and have a morning concert, that could be heard half a mile away. And there were also whippoorwills, and mocking birds, and, during the pleasant season of the year, myriads of insects that would keep sounding their shrill little notes the greater part of the night. And the only time one sees a flying squirrel, (unless you happen to cut down the tree in whose hollow he is sleeping,) is in the night time. They are ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell

... sing some song of the deeds of old!" The bard mournfully strove to sweep the harp, but the chords were broken, and the note came discordant and shrill as the sigh of ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... his gold canoe, The spirits [18] walk in the realms of air With their glowing faces and flaming hair, And the shrill, chill winds o'er the prairies blow. In the Tee [19] of the Council the Virgins light The Virgin-fire [20] for the feast to-night; For the Sons of Heyka will celebrate The sacred dance to the giant great. The kettle boils on the blazing fire, ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon

... would leave on the night-train to Hama this time, and thence set forth towards Palmyra. I myself did not know what had happened, and so I approved of his plan. But alas! as we were coming down the main Street to Najma's house, we heard the sound of tomtoms in the distance and the shrill ulluluing of women. We continued apace until we reached the by-way through which we had to pass, and lo, we find it choked by the zeffah (wedding procession) of none but she and the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... cock is opened full, and afterward partly closed. The blows follow in such rapid succession that a kind of uniform sound with louder intervals is produced, but not of the same shrill character as by a steam whistle. The same kind of bell is used on the shunting engines in goods yards, where roadways have to be crossed on which lurries and handtrucks circulate, and the results as far as prevention of accidents is concerned are stated to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various

... of building a wood-fire, until the yellow serpents of flame crept, red-tongued through the interstices of the lower logs, and the larger and upper began to sing the low, drowsy tune, more suggestive of home-cheer and fireside comfort than the shrill, monotonous chirp of the famous cricket on the hearth. The pipe-clayed bricks on which the andirons rested were next swept clean; the hearth-brush hung up on its nail, and the architect of the edifice stepped back ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... Beyond them stood or sat the drummers, and beyond them again the audience was crowded on the beach, the women standing furthest from the mummy and nearest to the sea. The drummers now struck up, chanting at the same time to the beat of the drums. This was the overture. Then a shrill whistle in the forest announced the approach of a ghost. The subdued excitement among the spectators, especially among the women, was intense. Meantime the chorus, holding each other's hands, advanced sidelong towards the mummy with strange gestures, the hollow thud of their feet as they stamped ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... whereupon Sophia Jane grew so excited and angry, and spoke in such a shrill voice that Buskin came in from the next room to see ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton

... of newspaper boys grows louder and their cries, passionately vehement, clash into each other and obscure each word. His head goes up to listen; her hand tightens within his arm—she too is listening. The cries come nearer, hoarser, more shrill and clamorous; the empty moonlight outside seems suddenly crowded with figures, footsteps, voices, and a fierce distant cheering. "Great victory—great victory! Official! British! 'Eavy defeat of the 'Uns! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... in a ring Before his palace gates do make The water with their echoes quake, Like the great thunder sounding: The sea-nymphs chant their accents shrill, And the sirens, taught to kill With their sweet voice, Make ev'ry echoing rock reply Unto their gentle murmuring noise The praise ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood

... a discharge of musketry was heard. Monte-Cristo hastened in the direction of the sound, followed by Coucou and about fifty men. The camp appeared to be surrounded, yet, at a shrill cry, which seemed to be a signal, the horsemen suddenly wheeled about and ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere

... waved his hand and hastened forward. The same solitude and misery met his view as he walked on; the same ducks, hens, sows, and tumbling children; with now and then the shrill treble of a scolding woman, or the melancholy ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... and rode with his fellows for a mile or two, and called them unseemly names in a facetious tone; and the men of the Wishbone answered his taunts with shrill yells of derision when he swung out of the trail and jogged away to the south, and finally passed out of sight in the haze which still hung depressingly ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower

... was found for him in Scott's novel of "Red Gauntlet." The episode selected for illustration is the frightful adventure of Hutcheon and Dougal MacCallum. "When midnight came, and the house was quiet as the grave, the silver whistle sounded as sharp and shrill as if Sir Robert was blowing it, and up got the two old serving-men and tottered into the room where the dead man lay. Hutcheon saw enough at the first glance; for there were torches in the room, which showed him the foul fiend in his ain shape, sitting on the laird's coffin! ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... the fields. He had seen trains a long way off, moving towards him and sending up puffs of thick white smoke that trailed into thin strips of blown cloud, and had waited until the silence of the distant engine, broken once or twice by a shrill, sharp whistle, had become a stupendous noise, and the great machine, masterfully hauling its carriages behind it, had galloped past him, roaring and cheering and sending the debris swirling tempestuously about it! ... The sight of a train going at a great ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine

... shoulders and hands and feet,— Whose eyes soever the sight would greet, How the Saracens all disfigured lie, Corpse upon corpse, each other by, Would think upon gallant deeds; nor yet Doth he the war-cry of Karl forget— "Montjoie!" he shouted, shrill and clear; Then called he Roland, his friend and peer, "Sir, my comrade, anear me ride; This day of dolor ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various

... with a shrill, far-carrying, long-drawn call that sounded much like a "whoop." Evidently he heard her, for he started, looked over his shoulder, and then set off with redoubled speed, as though anxious to ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... am cursed. Oh," Joan suddenly gave a shrill laugh that was painful to hear. "Every man that has ever told me—what you have told me—has met ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... by, dizzy from the constant turning in the darkness. At last she thought she had got to the end, and groping with her hands she found a worsted string and pulled it, and a cracked little bell jangled and beat against the wood inside. She heard a pattering of feet, and a shrill, nasal child's voice called out the customary question, inquiring who was there. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford

... beneath a little arbour of bamboos, fried our charqui (or dried slips of beef), took our mate, and were quite comfortable. There is an inexpressible charm in thus living in the open air. The evening was calm and still; — the shrill noise of the mountain bizcacha, and the faint cry of a goatsucker, were occasionally to be heard. Besides these, few birds, or even insects, frequent these dry, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... thou hard of heart: They who go forth to battle, are led on With sprightly trumpets and shrill clam'rous clarions! The drum doth roll its double notes along, Echoing the horses' tramp; and the sweet fife Runs through the yielding air in dulcet measure, That makes the heart leap in its case of steel; Thou—shalt be knell'd unto thy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various

... known how to transport these most important questions of his time, away from the shrill contact with contemporary disputes, into the harmonious domain of the Muses. He, and his friends and patrons, did not look upon the subjects discussed in this tragedy with the passionless, indifferent eyes of our century. Many men, no doubt, ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... into the dusky sky, spreading far and wide even as the light was spreading on the opposite side of the heavens—a sound as of multitudinous twanging, girding, and clashing instruments, mingled with shrill piercing voices that were not like the voices of earthly beings. They were not human nor angelic, but passionless, and it was as if the whole visible world, the dim grassy plain and the vast pale sky sprinkled with paling stars, moonlit and dawnlit, had found a voice to express the mystery and glory ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... and liquid, were a little inflamed. Still laughing, he glanced toward the wagon. The boys were boisterous. Kate could hear Bradley's voice in shrill protest: "What'd I be goin' to town f'r, if I had a bottle?" he was demanding angrily. But, while she looked and listened, Van Horn slipped quickly from his saddle and caught her bridle rein: "Come on," he said, at her horse's head, "let's walk down to the creek, ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman

... on the platform had increased momently, until now, when, from the snorting of the engine, it seemed likely that the train might start at any minute, the crowd's excitement was extreme. Shrill cries echoed down the platform. Lost sheep, singly and in companies, rushed to and fro, peering eagerly into carriages in the search for seats. Piercing cries ordered unknown "Tommies" and "Ernies" to "keep by aunty, now." ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse

... monotonous roar of the storm he caught a scarcely audible thin and jingling monotone like the shrill note of a gnat when it wants to settle on one's cheek and is angry at ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... vigorous direct attack over the carts. Dividing his troop into two portions, Diggle put himself at the head of the one, Sunman at the head of the other. Arranged in a semicircle concentric with the breastwork, at the word of command all the men with firearms discharged their pieces; then, with shrill cries from the natives, and a hoarse cheer from the crew of the Good Intent, they charged in a close line up ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang

... wheels. Pheasants, startled from sleep by the noise of our wheels, soared above our heads. From the depths of the forest mysterious voices met our ears: the woodcock's hoarse call, the roebuck's deep bellow, the wild boar's grunt, the squirrel's chatter, and the shrill cries which announce the presence of the wild peacock. What a difference between this lordly forest and my small twenty-acre park! Red squirrels, gray squirrels, gambolling among the boughs, playing with acorns ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai

... Carl Feuerstein," she cried, her face red and her voice shrill with anger and excitement. "And I want you to stop flirting with ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips

... not allow him to proceed. He took up his silver whistle, and with its shrill call overpowered the sound of the burger's words. The door of the outer chamber opened immediately, and the lackey appeared upon the threshold; on the outside, beside the door, were to be seen two of the Electoral lifeguardsmen, standing ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach

... stick jigged in the form of a three-legged object among the rest; and in half a minute all that could be seen on Rainbarrow was a whirling of dark shapes amid a boiling confusion of sparks, which leapt around the dancers as high as their waists. The chief noises were women's shrill cries, men's laughter, Susan's stays and pattens, Olly Dowden's "heu-heu-heu!" and the strumming of the wind upon the furze-bushes, which formed a kind of tune to the demoniac measure they trod. Christian alone stood aloof, uneasily ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... not pretty? Can you not hear the cuckoo call, even though the lamps may be lit and the winter wind be shrill without? ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... tomahawk, rifle or revolver, about the still writhing group rolling upon the wooden floor,—McPhail and his assailants. Into the midst of this mad mellay sprang the cavalryman, turning loose his horse, which animal, urged by shrill yells and slyly administered lashings, went tearing away over the prairie. Right at the lieutenant's back, almost as he had fought his way with him, nozzle in hand, into the ruck of the rioting crowd at Bluff ...
— Under Fire • Charles King

... too great to be dependent on any nation have now spread till they are themselves too great for a single nationality. No one now thinks that that daughter should have remained longer subject to her mother. But the severance was not made in amity, and the shrill notes of the old family quarrel are still ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... slenderly veiled fierceness. Leslie was not weak, but she was undisciplined; and she who had been the young Hotspur of the most orderly and pacific of families, learnt to tremble at the sound of Bridget's crutch in the lobbies, and her shrill voice rating the servants who flew ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... fairly upon him now. Two revolvers exploded into the air, accompanied by the long shrill yell of the plainsmen. But just when it seemed that the lad must go down under the rush of beating hoofs, Tad all but lifted his pony from the ground, turned the little animal and headed him in the direction in which ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin

... men had taken hold of Morrison. At the signal of a shrill whistle two other men came ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose

... they filled the audience with rapt delight. When the song was finished the sobs and cheers that burst from the soldier-hearts formed an encore not to be denied, and again that battle-cry thrilled out upon the air. The moment of silence that followed was broken by the high, shrill, quavering, penetrating ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... for Dolly to be going to bed, he thought, and old Oliver was sure to be with her in the inner room; but just as he came into the revealing glare of the greengrocer's stall, his ears rang and his heart throbbed violently at the sound of a shrill little scream of gladness, and the next moment he felt himself caught by Dolly's arms, and dragged into ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton

... the same with your candle, Bevis dear, and this the bat told me, for he once saw it happen, looking in at a window as he flew by, and he shrieked as loud as he could, but his voice is so very shrill that it is not everybody can hear him, and all his efforts were in vain. For a lady had gone to sleep in bed and left her candle burning on the dressing-table, just where she had left it fifty times before, and found it burnt down to the socket in the morning, and ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies

... (turning as they bear her out) Fire suffuses only her cloudy brain: The flare she walks in is on the other side Of her shot eyes. We heard a passionate voice, A shrill unwomanish voice that must be Mord, With "Let us burn him—burn him house and all." And then a grave and trembling voice replied, "Although my life hung on it, it shall not be." Again the cunning fanatic voice ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various

... But, sweet Ned,—to sweeten which name of Ned, I give thee this pennyworth of sugar, clapp'd even now into my hand by an under-skinker; one that never spake other English in his life than Eight shillings and sixpence, and You are welcome; with this shrill addition, Anon, anon, sir! Score a pint of bastard in the Half-moon,—or so. But, Ned, to drive away the time till Falstaff come, I pr'ythee, do thou stand in some by-room, while I question my puny drawer to what end he gave me the sugar; and do thou never leave calling Francis! ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]

... His shrill and frantic cries seem to precipitate the inevitable climax. The tumult has become absolutely delirious. The soldiers on the ramparts tumble over one another in a mad rush for the gate, which they try to break open with ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... dance-hall. It was crowded, mostly with men. But here and there, like so many faces peering forth from living graves, he saw the Little Sisters of Tete Jaune Cache. Outnumbered ten to one, their voices rang out in shrill banter and delirious laughter above the rumble of men. At the far end, a fiddle, a piano, and a clarinet were squealing forth music. The place smelled strongly of whisky. It always smelled of that, for most of the men who sought amusement here got their whisky in spite of the law. There were rock-hogs ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... Leyden University appointed Conrad Vorstius to be professor of theology in place of Arminius. The selection filled to the brim the cup of bitterness, for no man was more audaciously latitudinarian than he. He was even suspected of Socinianism. There came a shriek from King James, fierce and shrill enough to rouse Arminius from his grave. James foamed to the mouth at the insolence of the overseers in appointing such a monster of infidelity to the professorship. He ordered his books to be publicly burned in St. Paul's Churchyard and at both Universities, and would have ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... meaning of Czar's behavior. "O," she said, "are you his master?" Her manner was as natural and unrestrained as a child's—her voice, musically sweet and low, as one unaccustomed to the speech of noisy, crowded cities or shrill chattering crowds. ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... and while she pauses it may be observed—not that she was marvellously loquacious and marvellously deferential to Madame Mantalini, since these are facts which require no comment; but that every now and then, she was accustomed, in the torrent of her discourse, to introduce a loud, shrill, clear 'hem!' the import and meaning of which, was variously interpreted by her acquaintance; some holding that Miss Knag dealt in exaggeration, and introduced the monosyllable when any fresh invention was in course of coinage in her brain; others, that when she wanted a word, she threw it in ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... I did not speak through my nose, and talk too much, and too vivaciously, in a shrill voice," Betty said afterwards, in talking the interview over with Rosy. "I like to convince myself that is not one's sole national characteristic. Also it was not exactly Mrs. Brent's place to kindly encourage me with the information ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... male bird, is the excubitor to house- martins, and other little birds, announcing the approach of birds of prey. For as soon as an hawk appears, with a shrill alarming note he calls all the swallows and martins about him; who pursue in a body, and buffet and strike their enemy till they have driven him from the village, darting down from above on his back, and rising in a perpendicular line in perfect security. This bird also will sound the ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... angular, mannish sort of woman, raw-boned, shrill, got up in about the center of the audience, and said, "You've been honest I take it, in what you said this far. But you don't dast to be honest, I'll bet, if I ask you a plain out and out ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton

... the chimney-piece struck twelve in its shrill steel tones. Josephine started at the sound, and passed one hand over her eyes as though to rouse herself, and at the same time a deep blush spread over her delicate cheek. For with the voice of midnight there was also the voice of a man ringing in her ears, and she heard ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... by Steve Edwards's shrill voice in wild appeal. Steve was wellnigh beside himself now. Peters was growling like a bear in a cage. Then again the plunge, hard and quick, the whole Claflin backfield behind it! Don felt an intolerable pain as he pushed and struggled. Despair seized him for an instant, ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour

... disturbed by feeling a man's hand upon her shoulder. She jumped from her chair and faced him,—not screaming, for it was especially within her power to control herself, and to make no utterance except with forethought. Perhaps it might have been better for her had she screamed, and sent a shrill shriek down the shore of that inland sea. She was silent, however, and with awe- struck face and outstretched hands gazed into the face of him who still held her by the shoulder. The night was dark; but her eyes were now accustomed to the darkness, and she could see indistinctly something of ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope

... was a slight noise, as if some one was moving quietly toward the door behind me, by which I had just entered. Then came another voice, which I had not before heard—a thin, shrill, strident, imperious voice—a voice that it seemed to me I should recognize again among a million. It ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... moment the Emperor and the Archduke, having returned from their battue, entered the room, whereupon the Archduchess, her voice shrill with indignation, poured out to her husband the story of von Tirpitz's proposal. The Archduke, always noted for the violence of his temper, promptly sided with his wife, angrily accusing the Kaiser of intriguing behind his back against the independence of Austria. Ensued a violent ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell

... forward in search of the place likely to be chosen for their midday halt, and making frequent use of their water-bottles, there were the preliminary taps on the big bass, a few vigorous rolls on the kettledrums, and the fifes began to shrill out their sharp notes in a merry air, which brightened every face at once. Some of the lads began to whistle the tune as they stepped out more briskly, and Judkins, of Captain Roberts's rear company, ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn

... jingling, as she calls "Hi Strawberry and Blossom, hither Cows;" While slung against the upland with his team The ploughman dimly like a phantom glides: What time that noisy spot of life, the lark, Climbs, shrill with ecstasy, the trembling air; And "Cuckoo, Cuckoo," baffling whence it comes, Shouts the blithe egotist who cries himself; And every hedge and coppice sings: What time The lover, restless, through his waking ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner

... had reached the castle, a shrill blast rang at the outer gate. The portcullis was raised; the young Duke of Clarence, with a bridegroom's impatience, spurred alone through the gloomy arch, and Isabel, catching sight of his countenance lifted towards the ramparts, uttered a cry, and waved her hand. Clarence ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... mine ashes dar'st to press thy feet, And, uncontented with a fall so dread, Draw'st bloodstained weapons on my darkened head, Beware! for nature, pitying, guards the tomb, And ghosts avenge th' invaders of their gloom, Hear, Envy, hear the gods proclaim a truth, Which my shrill ghost repeats to move thy ruth, WRETCHES ARE SACRED THINGS,—thy hands refrain: E'en sacrilegious hands ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... down beside Tiny Armstrong on the end of a log. As she seated herself Jo Severance rose and came forward demurely. Jo was an accomplished elocutionist, and a born mimic. Assuming a timid, shrinking demeanor, and speaking in a high, shrill voice, she piped, ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey

... aided by a gentle shake from Rose's hand. Harry was on his feet in a moment. A passing instant was necessary to clear his faculties, and to recover the tenor of his thoughts. During that instant, the mate heard Jack Tier's shrill cry of "Hard a-lee—get in that foresail—bear a-hand—in ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper

... the Union Jack at the stern. And so it was with every ship in port. A great silence lay upon the harbour; even the hydraulic cranes were still, and the winches of the trawlers had ceased their screaming. Not a sound was to be heard save the shrill poignant cry of the gulls and the hissing of an exhaust pipe. As the colonel looked across the still waters of the harbour basin he saw a bier, covered with a Union Jack, being slowly carried across the gangway of the leave-boat; a little group of officers followed it. In a few moments the leave-boat, ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... Till I myself shall raise!' Yet said it not— The same oracular word—'who lifts the veil Shall see the truth?' Behind, be what there may, I dare the hazard—I will lift the veil—" Loud rang his shouting voice—"and I will see!" "SEE!" A lengthen'd echo, mocking, shrill'd again! He spoke and rais'd the veil! And ask'st thou what Unto the sacrilegious gaze lay bare? I know not—pale and senseless, stretch'd before The statue of the great Egyptian queen, The priests beheld ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... Close on his track, With hair unbraided and down her back, Loud-voiced and shrill, She followed, until No one said "Jack" without ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates

... bare but tranquil; and Flint was possessed by its dreary charm. The dim quiet of the twilight suited him; and it struck him jarringly, like a false note in an orchestra, when there fell on his ear a high, shrill voice, exclaiming,— ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin

... coin of the realm into beer and whisky as speedily as possibly. The night was calm and comparatively cool with the spreading darkness, and the majority of the inhabitants were seated outside their doors gossiping and taking the air. Children were playing in the street, their shrill voices at times interrupting the continuous chatter of the women; and The Derby Winner, flaring with gas, was stuffed as full as it could hold with artizans, workmen, Irish harvesters and stablemen, all more or less exhilarated with alcohol. It was by no means ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume

... the cliffs; but the mother bird flew towards me with such piteous cries that even in my danger I could not be so cruel, so I removed the little ones to a crevice close at hand and seated myself upon their nest, thankful of the refuge it afforded. And now I heard a shrill whistle from Robbie Rosson, by which I understood that, seeing my comparative safety, he was going to find some place where he could get down to the beach, there to wait until I should bring the ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton

... cage on his finger. It hopped up his arm till it reached his cheek, where it began to peck at his whiskers, crying all the while in its shrill, lonely tones,—"Blind, blind, blind!" ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche

... epitome of humanity. Grandmamma, bald under her cap, was seated by the stove dandling grandchild, bald under its cap. Each was highly entertained with the other. Grandpapa was sandy with grandboy's gingerbread-crumbs. The intervening ages were well represented by wiry men and shrill women. The house, also, without being tavern or shop, was an amateur bazaar of vivers and goods. Anything one was likely to want could be had there,—even a melodeon and those inevitable Patent-Office Reports. Here we descended, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... (For o'er Liguria's large and populous towns He reign'd) had then relinquish'd. With his plaints, The Po's wide stream was fill'd; and fill'd the banks With his lamentings; ev'n the woods, whose shade The sister poplars thicken'd. Soon he feels His utterance shrill and weak: his streaming locks Soft snowy plumes displace: high from his chest, His lengthen'd neck extends: a filmy web Unites his ruddy toes: his sides are cloth'd With quills and feathers: where his mouth was seen Expanded, now a blunted beak ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... to time the shrill wail of the shriek-owl, and the flapping of its wings against the diamond-paned windows of the church, added to the awful ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... had risen. I saw two figures standing in the porch of Graves's house. I was about to call to them and warn Graves that Bo was loose and dangerous—when a scream—shrill and frightful—rang in my ears. I saw Graves turn to his bride and ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... joined, one end of the boat answering the other. They sang through their noses, and high up in the falsetto. By shutting one's eyes one could imagine a great ox waggon drawn uphill by four bullocks and one of the wheels ungreased. Yet it was not unpleasing, this queer shrill, recurrent rhythm, the monotonous creak and splash of the oars, the mystery of feeling one's way in the blue gloom, through reed and water-lily beds, up this cliff-bound river, and far away the faint twitter—also ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon

... attention is arrested—her fears aroused—her peace disturbed, and her independence endangered—when in the dread and momentous hour, the tap of the drum, the roll of the reveille, the shrill sound of the bugler's trumpet, or the thunders of the cannon's roar, summons the warrior on to the pending conflict—upon whom then do the citizens place their dependence, and in whom the country her trust? Upon him who braves the consequences, and fights his country's battles ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany

... this dampest, darkest, and most Arctic of all terminals about the time the morning codfish begins to warm his bosom on the gridirons of the sacred city. Another, a terrible nocturnal prowler, slips darkly away from Albany about 1 A. M., and rambles disconsolately and with shrill wailings along the West Shore line. Below the grim Palisades of the Hudson it wakes painful echoes. Its first six units, as far as one can see in the dark, are blind express cars, containing milk cans and coffins. We once boarded it at Kingston, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... Fatty Hicks, the shrill and puffy son of Nat, flapped his hand at the beautiful stranger and jeered, "How's the kid? All dolled up like a ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... body in its torment rose clear of the red and gray waves till we saw a pair of quivering shoulders streaked with weed and rough with shells, but as white in the clear spaces as the hairless, maneless, blind, toothless head. Afterwards, came a dot on the horizon and the sound of a shrill scream, and it was as though a shuttle shot all across the sea in one breath, and a second head and neck tore through the levels, driving a whispering wall of water to right and left. The two Things met—the one untouched and the other in its death-throe—male and female, we said, the female ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling

... was mild, and the streets shrill with the careless cries of children playing games controlled by mysterious rhythms and phrases. Their elders held the doorways and steps with leisurely pipe and gossip. Paradoxically, the fire-escapes supported lovers ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... and she took fresh heart. Pausing, she clapped her hand to her mouth repeatedly, uttering a shrill, long call. It was the Indian whoop, which her father had taught her in their ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards

... spears are all agleam, And I can see their eyes with blood-lust shine; Their snarling voices shrill into a scream, And, mad to slay, they quiver for the sign. Deny my God! yes, I could do it well; Yet if I did, what of my race, my name? How they would spit on me, these dogs of hell! Spurn me, and put on me the brand of shame. ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... human life is concerned. There are dogs basking on doorsteps, larger dogs rambling with idleness in the slow sway of their tails, and overhead black swifts (whose nests are in the roofs of the higher houses) dash to and fro, uttering their shrill screech. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... siren broke out again in its long, shrill greeting of the land which lay above the rim of the sea, and Frank, catapulting Jimmie against the wall at the back of the bunk, hastened to the open port and ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson

... but most of my outings are on the electric cars. I might as well be on them, since I have to hear their buzz and clang both day and night from our rooms here in the hotel. The other morning, as I was returning from a ride across the river to Council Bluffs, I heard the shrill notes of a calliope that reminded me that Forepaugh's circus was to be in town that day, and that I had promised to go to the afternoon performance with a party of friends. But soon there were other sounds and other thoughts. Above the noise of the ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... fellow about twenty, with a white turban cleaner than the rest—who contrived to cast wonderful glances from the masthead over the barrier at Rosette, who actually smiled in return at ce pauvre garcon, and smiled the more for Mademoiselle Julienne's indignation. Suddenly, however, a shrill shout made him descend hastily, and the old Turk's voice might be heard in its highest key, no doubt shrieking out maledictions on all the ancestry of the son of a dog who durst defile his eyes with gazing at the shameless daughters ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge

... lay upon the polished table I saw the Hindu put a short double-reed pipe to his mouth, and next instant the room was filled with weird, shrill music, while at the same moment he unfastened the side of the little box and let down ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux

... stone of it, but paying regular rent, as if here to-day and gone to-morrow, like the tenants of a city flat. The grandfather of the present occupants brought his bride here and here raised a numerous family. Of that family no representatives now live save two grand-daughters, the shrill and strident spinsters who made us so often forego our more impressive title to call ourselves after the flourishing institution made immortal by the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... beat and the shrill scream of the fife startled all hearts into a fiercer life. The notes, with no tremor of fear, rang out sonorous, triumphant. For centuries such notes had led Britons to victory, and to-day British soldiers will do or die. Four thousand grenadiers, under Lord Howe, march down ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot

... the Bow-legs just the spur to concerted action that they were needing. They rightly judged there were more of those desirable beings in the crowd behind that tall, contemptuous chief. Those on the ground scrambled eagerly to their feet, and with shrill, bestial yells the whole horde charged up ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... streets. Mounted orderlies galloped to and fro, bearing returns, requisitions, and despatches. The old flag was hoisted in every direction at sunrise, and lowered when the evening gun was fired, while the music of bands and the shrill notes of drums and fifes rang forth the "music of ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... the time announced for the ceremony, I elbowed my way through the expectant throng of men, women, and children that already besieged the smith's door. Shrill demands of "Toss, toss!" rent the air every time Jess' head showed on the window-blind, and Andra hoped, as I pushed open the door, "that I hadna forgotten my bawbees." Weddings were celebrated among the Auld Lichts by showers of ha'pence, and the guests on their way to the bride's ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie

... sexual longing in music is identical with that of religious longing. It is quite true, again, that a soft and gentle voice seems to every normal man as to Lear "an excellent thing in woman," and that a harsh or shrill voice may seem to deaden or even destroy altogether the attraction of a beautiful face. But the voice is not usually in itself an adequate or powerful method of evoking sexual emotion in a man. Even in its supreme vocal manifestations the sexual fascination exerted by a great singer, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... in the house, he would arrange it with great apparent care. In the meantime, Nancy's wrath generally evaporated with the smoke of the pipe—a circumstance which Ned well knew; for after she had sucked it until it emitted a shrill, bubbling sound, like that from a reed, her brows, which wore at other times an habitual frown, would gradually relax into a more benevolent expression—the parenthetical curves on each side of her mouth, formed by the irascible pursing of her lips, would become less marked—the dog ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... his voice sort of shrill and quivery. "I have one of the logs loose. Now pry here with your picks, everybody. Together, now! It's coming! Once more! There! Now the next one above. Oh, put your weight on it, Mr. Ellins. Get a fresh hold. Try her now. ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford

... the clouds, and for a long time the heavens seemed to be "a sheet of flame." He also spake by his servant, and the response from the people was in tears and sobs, groans and shouts; and at the conclusion of nearly every sweep of the preacher's wonderful flights could be heard above the whole a shrill shout from the hostess, followed by a tornado of amens! When the sermon closed the storm ceased, and the "slain of the Lord were many." Memorable night! The people found neither slumber nor weariness, and when the morning dawned very few had not ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er

... to the eye, as tones of sound to the ear. Must not light also sing? The lowest tone we can hear is made by 16.5 vibrations of air per second; the highest, so shrill and "fine that nothing lives 'twixt it and silence," is made by 38,000 vibrations per second. Between these extremes lie eleven octaves; C of the G clef having 258-7/8 vibrations to the second, and its octave above 517-1/2. Not that sound vibrations ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren

... circumstances so touchingly described by him can scarcely be imagined. The thoughts of a veteran who had served his country during many long years of war and strife, must have wandered back to past scenes and by-gone days, while he stood in that solitary wilderness; and when the wild shrill cry of savage grief came floating upon his ears, he must have felt most deeply those strange sensations which ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... and at the same moment a huge blackbird flew out of the shrubberies behind them, and flashed across the open space toward the orchard on the other side. It whistled a long, shrill scream of warning. It was bigger by far ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood

... uproar was terrific. Howls, shrill yelps, thumps and crashes. Then came a crash louder than any preceding it, a splash of water across the sill, and from the doorway leaped, or flew, an object steaming and dripping, fluttering with fly paper, ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln

... employs more polished and elegant language?" In his youth, he seems to have chosen Strabo Caesar for his model; from whose oration in behalf of the Sardinians he has transcribed some passages literally into his Divination. In his delivery he is said to have had a shrill voice, and his action was animated, but not ungraceful. He has left behind him some speeches, among which are ranked a few that are not genuine, such as that on behalf of Quintus Metellus. These Augustus supposes, with reason, to be rather the production of blundering short-hand ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... unbarr'd, We rode within the busy yard, Well scatter'd o'er with many a pack; For on that wild, romantic track, The long and heavy-laden trains Toil seaward from the valley's plains. And often on its silence swells The distant tinkle of the bells, While muleteers' shrill, angry cries From the dim road before you rise; And such were group'd in circles round Playing at monte on the ground; Each swarthy face that met my eye To thought of honesty gave lie. In each fierce orb there was a spark That few would care to see by dark— And many a sash I saw ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope

... a comfortably furnished apartment, there sat two people, a husband and wife, middle-aged people, who were engaged in a miserable dispute about some very trivial matter. The wife was shrill and provocative, the husband curt and contemptuous. They were obviously not really concerned about the subject they were discussing—it only formed a ground for disagreeable personalities. Presently the man went out, saying harshly that it was very pleasant to ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... sociable affair. Mrs. Gladman spoke occasionally in a shrill whisper to Mr. Gladman, who replied with grunts. Both employed the remainder of their time in scowling at Clodd. Mr. Pincer, a stout, heavy gentleman connected with the House of Commons, maintained a ministerial reserve. The undertaker's foreman expressed himself as thankful when it was over. ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome

... ever know people lost on these hills?" asked the girl, looking into the blackness ahead of them. Her shrill, slight voice rang out in sharp contrast to the broad gutturals ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... which the blood drops trickled slowly, and fell on the dewy sward. "'Tis the blood of my dearest, oldest friend—of my brother; and shed by my hand!" he muttered at length, flinging away the guilty blade. His only answer was the groans of his victim, and the shrill whistle of the weapon as it ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton

... in their direction, one whom the shrill winds of life have lashed and bled; here and there ragged graces still cling to her, and unruly passion smoulders, but she, once a dear, fierce rebel, with eyes of storm, is now first of all a whimperer. She and they ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie

... impressive, very beautiful, and still, except for the drone of insects or soft note of the songbird. Perhaps the silence may be broken by a herd of wild elephants crashing heavily through the canes, or the shrill cry of the squirrel startles the forest and warns its fellows of ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly

... last, putting down the piece of toast. There was a return to something of her usual tone in the words. She spoke gently and softly; no longer in the shrill, hoarse voice she had used at first. Mr Benson sat ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... in fact, none of us were able to think or imagine what it could be. It came through the woods as swift as lightning and its shrill and piercing voice was more startling than thunder. It echoed and re-echoed across our clearing, from woods to woods and died swiftly away in the distance. What on earth could it be? Could it be the ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin

... distrust—has chosen to go alone; so, too, they are all helmeted but him. As they approach, the spectators stand upon the benches, and there is a sensible deepening of the clamor, in which a sharp listener may detect the shrill piping of women and children; at the same time, the things roseate flying from the balcony thicken into a storm, and, striking the men, drop into the chariot-beds, which are threatened with filling to the tops. Even the horses have a share in the ovation; ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... sharply forward, his lithe frame tense. A long drawn, quivering shriek came down-wind to him. It was repeated. Then short and sharp, piercing note on piercing note, sounded the shrill, clamant voice. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... see. I asked him what it was, upon which he pulled me by the sleeve, and said, with a low voice, "I will tell you, but we must not frighten the ladies," who, by this time, screamed most fearfully. Voiture began his Oremus, and prayed heartily. You, I suppose, knew Madame de Choisy's shrill tone; Mademoiselle de Vendome was counting her beads; Madame de Vendome would fain have confessed her sins to the Bishop of Lisieux, who said to her, "Daughter, be of good cheer; you are in the hands of God." At the same instant, the Comte do Brion and all the lackeys were upon their knees ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... low bottom of long grass, sedge and tangled dry plants, more than six feet high; and when a rushing wind urges on the fiery ruin, flashing like the lightning and roaring like the thunder; the appearance is not beautiful, but terrible. I have heard the shrill war-whoop, and the clash of contending tomahawks in the fight, when no quarter has been given. I have witnessed the wild burst where Niagara, a river of waters, flings itself headlong down the Horseshoe Fall; and I have been exposed to the fury of the hurricane. ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge

... from Egypt was 'in haste' (Deut. xvi. 3); but this shall be a triumphal exodus, without conflict or alarms. All nature shall participate in the joy. Mountains and hills shall raise the shrill note of rejoicing, and the trees wave their branches, as if clapping hands in delight. This is more than mere poetic rhetoric. A redeemed humanity implies a glorified world. Nature has been involved in the consequences of sin, and will share in the results of redemption, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... wounded heart Hope, alas, to heal; Seeking, to allay its smart, Things that cannot feel. Better should my pain Bitterly complain, Crying shrill, To thee who dost constrain My spirit to ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... look rather brown and plain by contrast. Totty never cared to spend much on clothes, a singular feature of her character. When the three were passing at a distance of twenty yards, Nelly cried out with shrill voice: ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... morning when a weary man, sprinkled white with powdery snow, came limping into Thurston's camp, which was then pitched in the canyon. A pitiless wind swept down from the range side across the thrashing pines, and filled the deep rift with its shrill moaning which sounded above the diapason of the shrunken river. A haze of frost-dried snow infinitesimally fine, which stung the unprotected skin like the prick of hot needles, whirled before the wind and then thinned, leaving bare the ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss

... when the Disciples were preaching the new religion, which is as old as the hills to us now—and went dreaming among the trees that grow over acres and acres of its still buried streets and squares, till a shrill whistle and the cry of "All aboard—last train for Naples!" woke me up and reminded me that I belonged in the nineteenth century, and was not a dusty mummy, caked with ashes and cinders, eighteen hundred years old. The transition ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... child, the sirens whoop Shrill invitations to the Fair, The yellow swing-boats soar and swoop, The Gavioli organs blare; Bull-throated show-men, bracken-brown, Compete to shout each ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various

... Two or three eggs of a brown or greenish-brown colour with darker spots or blotches are laid about the end of October, and, from this time till the chicks are reared, the parent exhibits much annoyance at the presence of any person in the vicinity. They utter shrill cries and swoop down continuously in an attempt to strike the invader with their wings. Several of our party received black eyes as a ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... Midnight was garlanding her head With many a shining star in shining skies, And, of her grace, a slumber on mine eyes, And, after sorrow, quietness was shed. Far in dim fields cicalas jargoned A thin shrill clamour of complaints and cries; And all the woods were pallid, in strange wise, With pallor of the ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang

... scythe blades, or followed the teams of red and brindled oxen that bowed their heads to the heavy yoke. Through all this, past all this, the Pequot train flew on towards Pattaquasset; sending whole lines of white smoke to scour the country, despatching the shrill echoes of its ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... virgin nymph; for she Seems with the flowers a flower to be. And think so still! though not compare With breath so sweet, or cheek so fair! Well shot, ye firemen! Oh, how sweet And round your equal fires do meet, Whose shrill report no ear can tell, But echoes to the eye and smell! See how the flowers, as at parade, Under their colours stand displayed; Each regiment in order grows, That of the tulip, pink and rose. But when the vigilant patrol Of stars walk round about the pole, Their leaves, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell

... see it yet?" He has been starting up from his bed, in his eagerness. Kurwenal has struggled with him to keep him down. While he hesitates as before between obedience and fear to leave his patient, the servant realises that the shepherd's pipe has changed its tune,—has changed it for a shrill, lively, tripping air. He listens with all his soul for a second, then with a shout of triumph dashes to the battlements and sends his eyes sweeping the sea. "Ha! The ship!... I see it nearing from the north!"—"Did ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall

... him now. Two revolvers exploded into the air, accompanied by the long shrill yell of the plainsmen. But just when it seemed that the lad must go down under the rush of beating hoofs, Tad all but lifted his pony from the ground, turned the little animal and headed him in the direction in which ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin

... the tireless fireflies danced in the blackness of the wood. The river gurgled faintly in the wind-stirred reeds. From out the gloom of the thicket came the weird coco-coco of the horned owl. From the starlit sky above fell the shrill cry of the mosquito hawk, "peepeegeeceese, peepeegeeceese!" From an isolated bark tepee came the subdued incantation of the Indian medicine-man, while above the singing of the tree-tops and over all, clear and with clock-like regularity, ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey

... to the group with shrill cries showing a little live crab in her small palm. A faint breeze is blowing off the sea, the west grows golden, and Aunt Hetty rises from her ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... purple of hawthorn hedges and grey-brown filigree of leafless trees.—This did her good, she asking to be strengthened and stimulated rather than merely soothed. To feel the harsh, untainted wind break against her, hear it shrill through the dry, shivering grasses of the roadside and sturdy spires of heath, to see it toss the dark crests and tufted branches of the outstanding firs at the edge of the plantation, brought up her morale. Brought ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... There was a shrill squeal as the remaining infant reptile fled from the pouch where it had hidden. Sssuri hurled his knife, and the blade caught the small devil above the shoulder line, half cutting, half snapping its tender neck, so that ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton

... little longer with Gilbert, helping him to find Carl's clothes, when suddenly a shrill voice was heard ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger

... terra-cotta-coloured track was fenced in with a human wall near the judges' stand. The famous Suburban was to be run, and people flocked from every direction to see one of the greatest horse-races of the year. While the band played gaily, and the shrill cries of programme venders punctuated the hum of the voices of the multitude, and while the stable boys walked their aristocratic charges, shrouded in blankets, exercising them sedately—in the midst of all this movement, ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday

... there was such plashing of the waters that those people dancing upon the fair green holm became 'ware of Harold's presence, and were afeared, so that, ceasing from their sport, they made haste down to the shore and did on the skins and dived into the waters with shrill cries. But there was one of them that could not do so, because Harold bore off that skin wherewith she was wont to begird herself, and when she found it not she wailed and wept and besought Harold to give her that skin again,—and, ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field

... melancholy strain of music,—melancholy enough to make one shiver,—and shrill, shrill as the song of the grasshoppers, began to make itself heard, very softly at first, then growing louder and rising in the silence of the noonday like the diminutive wail of some poor Japanese soul in pain and anguish; it was Chrysantheme ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... a little way up the creek," he answered, "or at least he should be." Putting his fingers to his lips he blew a shrill whistle, which echoed and re-echoed from shore to shore along the river, and was answered by a loud neigh from somewhere in the ravine through which Fall Creek reaches the larger stream. Again the boy whistled, and a black pony came trotting out of the brush, the bridle hanging from ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright

... the moor under the cold blue of the darkening sky—the long, mysterious-looking Stretches of darkness with here and there a big rock standing up grim and gaunt in the silence, the vastness in which they seemed but specks, the shrill, sweet voices of the birds calling to each other, and the busy, persistent voice of the river, added to the weirdness and loneliness of the experience. The only lifelike sounds were their own footsteps, and it was only here and there, when they got on to ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... the scene. Meanwhile the birds on this wooded slope are asking us to use our ears as well as our eyes. Such a mingling of bird voices! The "spring o' th' year" of the meadow larks and the mingled squeaks and music of the robins are brought up by the wind from the river bottom, and the shrill clear "phe-be" of the chickadee is one of the prettiest sounds now, just as it was in February. Pretty soon a bevy of them come flitting and talking along, like a girl botany class on the search. Before they have passed out of sight the loud ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... the shrill blast of bugles. This undoubtedly told the French soldiers that victory had fallen to their portion, and that the winning of the Marne ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow

... I hear the clarion shrill Winding up the icy hill, And aloud the bugle horn Proclaims another year is born. Merry voices in the train, Loudly sound it o'er the plain, And the joyful notes I hear, Are wishes for a ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna

... The sight had a most cruel fascination; and while one of the horror-seekers stood helplessly conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown dread,—the shrinking, shrieking woman dragged to the block, the wild, shrill, horrible screech following the blow that drove in the spike, the merciful swoon after the mutilation,—his companion, with a sudden pallor, demanded to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... revealed? Would he be regarded as a fit incumbent of the office he holds? Wouldn't he be dismissed, kicked out as incompetent—as unscrupulous, I mean," Henry amended quickly. His voice had risen in a shrill and ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay

... easily to be distinguished. His companion was Laura Tinley. The Greek moved at rapid strides, and coming near upon Emilia, raised his hands as in exclamation. At once he disencumbered his shoulders of the enormous wrapper, held it aloft imperiously, and by main force extinguished Emilia. Laura's shrill laugh resounded. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... sealed. We were in a narrow path surrounded by the enemy, without the possibility of escape. How shall I describe what followed. The women wrung their hands and sobbed piteously in their despair. The children, terrified, uttered shrill and piercing cries, while the men, goaded to madness, vented their rage in hurried exclamations, and were determined to sell their lives as ...
— Acadian Reminiscences - The True Story of Evangeline • Felix Voorhies

... anew, by turns shrill, stifled, bleating, stammering, yelling, fearsome. It uttered ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc

... great mixed with small, and followed gambolling along the watery paths. And as when in the track of the shepherd, their master, countless sheep follow to the fold that have fed to the full of grass, and he goes before gaily piping a shepherd's strain on Iris shrill reed; so these fishes followed; and a chasing breeze ever bore the ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... noted great anxiety and incessant movement in the one, and complete passiveness in the other. She who sat in the outer seat was watchful, busy, and ready to press the other's arm at the least provocation, but if either spoke it was always the other. It was not till the quick rush and shrill whistle of a passing train made one start and not the other, that he got the idea that one of them was deaf. As this was the one by the window, he felt that their peculiar actions were now accounted for, and indeed thus far it all tallied with what we might expect from Georgian ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... was on the rampart. La Vigne, the officer of the guard, had just gone to his quarters, but a trumpeter, who chanced to remain, saw, through sheets of rain, the black swarm of assailants sweeping down the hill. He blew the alarm, and at his shrill summons a few half-naked soldiers ran wildly out of the barracks. It was too late. Through the breaches, over the ramparts, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... the nautical blue flannel of his shirt, got up from where he had been sitting, on one side of the stove, and stood infirmly on his feet, in token of receiving the visitor. The woman who sat on the other side did not rise, but began a shrill, defiant apology. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... well endure!" he cried. "All day the thought of what I've lost was like a constant sword-thrust in my heart. Instead of deference and respect that once was mine from high and low, 'twas laugh and jibe and pointing finger. And, too," (his voice grew shrill and querulous) "I saw young lovers straying in the lanes together. How can I endure that sight day after day when my arms must remain for ever empty? And little children prattled by their father's side no matter where I turned. ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston

... laughter,—that of running about the rooms, and trying to catch each other. The dogs, too, ran about and barked; and the canaries which hung up in cages before the windows, straining their throats in rivalry, heightened the general uproar by the piercing accents of their shrill singing. Just as this deafening amusement had reached its climax, a tarantass, all splashed with mud, drew up at the front gate, and a man about forty-five years old, wearing a travelling dress, got out of it and remained ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... menaces did the fury of Wild burst forth and terrify the whole gate. Long time did rage render his voice inarticulate to the hearer; as when, at a visiting day, fifteen or sixteen or perhaps twice as many females, of delicate but shrill pipes, ejaculate all at once on different subjects, all is sound only, the harmony entirely melodious indeed, but conveys no idea to our ears; but at length, when reason began to get the better of his passion, which latter, being deserted by his breath, began a little to retreat, ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding

... group of calves crowding under the shady side of hedges regarded Joan with youthful interest; sometimes, in a distant coomb-bottom, where blackberries grew, little sunbonnets bobbed above the fern and a child's shrill voice came clear to her upon the wind. But the loneliness grew, and, anon, turning from her way a while, the traveler sat on the gray crown of Trengwainton Carn to rest and look at the ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... instant such a ringing cheer burst out as wells spontaneously from the throats and hearts of men, in the first ecstatic moments of victory—a cheer to which our saddened hearts and enfeebled lungs had long been strangers. It was the genuine, honest, manly Northern cheer, as different from the shrill Rebel yell as the honest mastiff's deep-voiced welcome is from the howl of the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... soapsuds, and fired away from her window as from the embrasure of a fortress; while the screams of children nestled and cradled in every procreant chamber of this hive, waking with the noise, set up their shrill pipes to swell the general concert." [Footnote: Tales of ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... up and down. This continued for a moment, in which we all were very still and bitter cold—the air cut like steel—and then my heart gave a great leap, for suddenly there stepped into the yard Doltaire. Action seemed suspended in me, but I know I listened with singular curiosity to the shrill creaking of his boots on the frosty earth, and I noticed that the fur collar of the coat he wore was all white with the frozen moisture of his breath, also that tiny icicles hung from his eyelashes. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... mock'ry she receives The toss'd-up heaps from the brown gaping youth, Who flaring at her, takes his aim awry, Whilst half the load comes tumbling on himself. Loud is her laugh, her voice is heard afar; Each mower, busied in the distant field, The carter, trudging on his distant way, The shrill found know, cad up their hats in air, And roar across the fields to catch her notice: She waves her arm, and shakes her head at them, And then renews her work with double spirit. Thus do they jest, and laugh away their toil, ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie

... monotony. Sometimes it injects laughter, sometimes horror, into tragedy. It will bring Romeo face to face with the apothecary, Macbeth with the witches, Hamlet with the grave-diggers. Sometimes it may, without discord, as in the scene between King Lear and his jester, mingle its shrill voice with the most sublime, the most dismal, the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... which they were passing. Behind them the six little negroes walked primly in single file, Mary Jo in the lead and a chocolate-coloured atom of two toddling at the tail of the procession. From time to time shrill squeaks went up from the rear when a startled partridge whirred over the pasture or a bare brown foot came down on a ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... rushed on with a short-sword in his hand. Axe and sword clashed together for a moment of time, and then both the men rolled over on the grass together, and Face-of-god as he fell deemed that he heard the shrill cry of a woman. Now Face-of-god found that he was the nethermost, for if he was strong, yet was his foe stronger; the axe had flown out of his hand also, while the strange man still kept a hold of his short-sword; and presently, ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris

... often the unlucky Van was forced to blush and falter that he would have to look it up; and when he did so he frequently learned something himself. For Tim never forgot. No sooner would Van be inside the gate than the shrill little voice would pipe: "And did you find out how far away ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett

... good old wife of the legend-teller has made her poor home as warm and pleasant as may be, in expectation of their guests. She is proud of her husband's honorable position as the village teacher, and makes all the children welcome, as they arrive, with her shrill-voiced, cheerful greeting: ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman

... dark figures boiled across the open. Arrows whistled and bow- thongs sang. The shrill-tongued rifles answered back. A spear, and a mighty cast, transfixed the Teslin woman as she hovered above the child. A spent arrow, diving between the logs, lodged ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London

... cry of joy—a cry as shrill as that of the mother bird that sees a hawk in the air, or suspects its presence. We looked where he was looking, and saw, as it were, a sapphire, floating high up in the abysses of light. The glowing star fell with the swiftness of a sunbeam when ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac

... just beyond that last steep rise, was the sea. She could hear its roar now, like a deep voice drowning the clearer pipe of the winging birds and the shrill of the little grass creatures. Often she went down to its edge, but at this hour she liked best to lie in the grass and dream her dreams to ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott

... of sounds at the pavilion entrance, where a litter was set down on marble pavement and a eunuch's shrill voice criticized the slow ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy

... rattling noise like the sound of clattering timber was heard, and with it a sharp, shrill cry of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... peasants celebrate their holidays. A dozen or so of small peasant girls, pupils of the count's daughter, who had invited themselves to swing on the Giant Steps on the lawn opposite the count's study windows, abandoned their amusement and accompanied us down the avenue, fairly howling an endless song in shrill voices ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... not long before Zack returned. A violent bang of the street-door announced his entry into the passage—a confused clattering and stumbling marked his progress up stairs—a shrill crash, a heavy thump, and a shout of laughter indicated his arrival on the landing. Mat ran out directly, and found him prostrate on the floor, with the yellow pie-dish in halves at the bottom of the stairs, and dozens of oyster.-shells scattered ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... had been warmly asleep some Hours, (more by Token I had read the ninety-first Psalm before getting into Bed), when Anne, clinging to me, woke me up with a shrill Cry. I whispered fearfullie, "What is't?—a Thief under ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning

... heard the cry. It rose, piercing and shrill, above the storm, above the riving and rending of the bridge, above the downward crashing of the logs and loosened stones. I hear it as I listen now. It is cleaving its way upward from the depths below. It is wailing through the room as ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome

... and flash of the fusee, and Smith's gesture to lay it close to the eye-piece, they turned and fled yelling once more into the houses on either side, from which now came an addition to the noise, in the shrill howls and shrieks of women, who were evidently resenting the invasion of all ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn

... repeatedly,—shrill, imperative blasts. The man in the rowboat smiled. The air was very still. Sounds carry over quiet water as if telephoned. He could not help hearing ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... wispy hair, a tallowy skin, and big, sweaty hands, who used to be spouting Carlyle on the 'reading evenings' at Shelldrake's? Yes, to be sure; and there was Hollins, with his clerical face and infidel talk,—and Pauline Ringtop, who used to say, 'The Beautiful is the Good.' I can still hear her shrill voice singing, 'Would that I were beautiful, would that I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... scratch—scratch—scratch—from sunrise till sunset,—save when she took a turn across the floor to get rid of an ugly pain in her shoulders, from constant stooping. Floy was weary of counting the bricks on the opposite wall,—weary of seeing the milkman stop at seven o'clock, and the baker at nine,—weary of hearing the shrill voice of Mrs. Walker, (below stairs,) of whom mamma hired her room. Still Floy never complained; but sometimes when she could bear the monotonous, dull stillness no longer, she would slide her little hand round her mamma's waist, and say, "Please, ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern

... trampling had been heard in the court, and a shrill voice, well known to Richard and Susan, was heard demanding, "Come home, is she—Master Diccon too? More shame for you, you sluttish queans and lazy lubbers, never to have let me know; but none of ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... with some difficulty that he found the way to his own house, which he approached with silent awe, expecting every moment to bear the shrill voice of Dame Van Winkle. He found the house gone to decay—the roof fallen in, the windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges. A half-starved dog that looked like Wolf was skulking about it. Rip called him by name, but the cur snarled, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... not barter," said the Caliph, as he put a little silver whistle to his mouth, and blew a shrill blast, when horses and carriage suddenly stood still by ...
— Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... the performance this delightful sense of joyous woodland life was sustained, and even when the scene was left empty for the shepherd to drive his flock across the sward, or for Rosalind to school Orlando in love-making, far away we could hear the shrill halloo of the hunter, and catch now and then the faint music of some distant horn. One distinct dramatic advantage was gained by the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... not answer; he turned away. The old man caught at his feet. 'You are not going,' he cried in a shrill voice, '—you are not going? Leave me to die,—that is well; the sun will come and burn me, thirst will come and madden me, these wounds will torture me, and all is no more than I deserve. But Silver? If I die, she dies. If you forsake ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... the rumbling of thunder. And she had heard the middle voice of the Middle Bear, but it was only as if she had heard some one speaking in a dream. But when she heard the little, small, wee voice of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, it was so sharp and so shrill that it awakened her at once. Up she started; and when she saw the Three Bears on one side of the bed, she tumbled herself out at the other and ran to the window. Now the window was open, because the Bears, like good, tidy Bears as they were, always opened their bed-chamber window when ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... comfortably furnished apartment, there sat two people, a husband and wife, middle-aged people, who were engaged in a miserable dispute about some very trivial matter. The wife was shrill and provocative, the husband curt and contemptuous. They were obviously not really concerned about the subject they were discussing—it only formed a ground for disagreeable personalities. Presently the man ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... there. I have something else to say to you," she added in a shrill whisper, pushing the girl ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey

... the northern wagoner had set His sevenfold teme behind the steadfast starre, That was in ocean waves yet never wet, But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre To all that in the wild deep wandering are: And chearful chanticleer with his note shrill Had warned once that Phoebus' fiery carre In haste was climbing up the easterne hill, Full envious that night so long his ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... divine musician grew dimmer to his sight. Now only the stars threw their faint light about her, but still she played on, and on, and on. The music swelled, it told of dead and ancient wars, "where all day long the noise of battle rolled"; it rose shrill and high, and in it rang the scream of the Valkyries preparing the feast of Odin. It was low, and sad, and tender, the voice of women mourning for their dead. It changed; it grew unearthly, spiritualised, such music as those might use who welcome ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard

... goes so far as to state that the expression of sexual longing in music is identical with that of religious longing. It is quite true, again, that a soft and gentle voice seems to every normal man as to Lear "an excellent thing in woman," and that a harsh or shrill voice may seem to deaden or even destroy altogether the attraction of a beautiful face. But the voice is not usually in itself an adequate or powerful method of evoking sexual emotion in a man. Even in its supreme vocal manifestations the sexual fascination exerted ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... the messengers of Jesus Christ also come in with a shrill and terrible note against thy soul, when thou standest at the bar of God's justice, saying, Nay, thou ungodly one, how often hast thou been forewarned of this day? Did we not sound an alarm in thine ears, by the trumpet of God's ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... rich voice floats down the glade, In soft, unwonted tones Like gentle winds through pine-tree cones; He sings the Warrior's Serenade; While at the end of every strain— With more effect his cause to plead— He plays a wild and shrill refrain Upon a ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various

... own door, she heard sounds of splashing and screaming in a shrill piping voice; and on entering, saw Terli struggling violently in the tub of Church water, the little bowl of butter-milk lying spilt upon ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry

... about an hour, and whispered the bridegroom, who extricated himself from the dancers, and vanished from the apartment. The instruments now played their loudest strains; the dancers pursued their exercise with all the enthusiasm inspired by youth, mirth, and high spirits, when a cry was heard so shrill and piercing as at once to arrest the dance and the music. All stood motionless; but when the yell was again repeated, Colonel Ashton snatched a torch from the sconce, and demanding the key of the bridal-chamber from Henry, to whom, as bride's-man, it had been entrusted, rushed ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... filled with naked savages, tearing everything to pieces, and carrying away whatever they could lay their hands upon. The fierce raging of the flames, the heat from the fire, the yells of the men, and the shrill cries of the women, formed, altogether, a horrible combination; added to all this was the mortification of seeing all our property carried off in different directions, without the least possibility of our preventing ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle

... Sounds of a horn, shrill and impatient, suddenly called the soldiers back to their ranks beside Master Carfax. Robin spied this worthy now; and saw that he bestrode a black horse clumsily—as if armored indeed. Simeon evidently had withdrawn his men from a ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick

... up his ears as two shrill hoots came from the river. He sprang to the window and saw the dim light of a ship going ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild

... voice sort of shrill and quivery. "I have one of the logs loose. Now pry here with your picks, everybody. Together, now! It's coming! Once more! There! Now the next one above. Oh, put your weight on it, Mr. Ellins. Get a fresh hold. Try her now. It's giving! Again. ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford

... outside, a mob of men, too. He was not alarmed; but she went to the door and took her babe in her arms, and when the women observed the lady holding her own little one, their looks were softened. At a hint of explanation from Edwards, the guttural gabble rattled up to the shrill vowels. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... hung beside the door and blew the pioneer's long call of danger. Its shrill note rang through the woods against the hills in cadences that seemed half muffled ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon

... exclaimed the Marquis. The words had hardly left his lips when the woman rose and extended her arms. Her features contracted; her large eyes seemed to start from her head; she placed her hand upon her heart, uttered a shrill cry and fell back upon the bed. It was the work of an instant. Coursegol and the Marquis both sprang forward, lifted her, and endeavored to restore her, but in vain. The unfortunate Tiepoletta was dead. Her heart had broken ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet

... Timlin speaks, his voice so shrill and loud Fills with amazement all the list'ning crowd; But soon the wonder ceases, when 'tis found That empty vessels make ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 6, 1841, • Various

... up to fifteen, when the stave was concluded with a shrill "Spell, oh!" and the gang relieved streaming with perspiration. When the saltpetre was well mashed, they rolled ton waterbutts on it, till the floor was like a billiard table. A fleet of chop boats then began to arrive, so many per day, with the tea chests. Mr. ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... thought of depositing it in the court below until he had secured a cab in the Rue et Place de l'Ecole de Medecine; but he saw an open voiture passing along the elevated horizon of the Rue de Monsieur le Prince and gave a shrill whistle. ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray

... how the founders of New England are soldiers of Christ enlisted in a holy war, and how they must "march manfully on till all opposers of Christ's kingly power be abolished." "And as for you who are called to sound forth his silver trumpets, blow loud and shrill to this chiefest treble tune—for the armies of the great Jehovah are at hand." "He standeth not as an idle spectator beholding his people's ruth and their enemies' rage, but as an actor in all actions, to bring to naught the desires ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... a tone so shrill, so piercing, that the wild shriek which it formed rung for many and many a day in the ears of the Queen. And as the word passed her lips she started to her feet, stood for a second erect, gazing madly on her royal mistress, ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... thus in the castle of Avenel, when a winded bugle sent its shrill and prolonged notes from the shore of the lake, and was replied to cheerily by the signal of the warder. The Lady of Avenel knew the sounds of her husband, and rushed to the window of the apartment in which she was sitting. A band of about thirty spearmen, with a pennon displayed before ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... preserves a religious silence. His voice has a quality so strange as to be startling. To see that broad chest, that robust and muscular frame, one would expect to hear rolling waves of sound, roarings as of thunder. But not so. The voice is shrill and sibilant, yet with a sonority so powerful that it vibrates on the eardrums and penetrates to the farthest ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of Heaven, In the broad daylight Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... to sound in Abel Keeling's ears, and, as if something in the mechanism of his brain had slipped, another picture rose in his fancy—the scene when the Mary of the Tower had put out, to a bravery of swinging bells and shrill fifes and valiant trumpets. She had not been a leper-white galleon then. The scroll-work on her prow had twinkled with gilding; her belfry and stern-galleries and elaborate lanterns had flashed in the sun with gold; ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions

... on a hill-side. On the lower ground I could see the palace, and beyond it, a small space of white sea which had the awful appearance of being higher than the land. Down the hill-side I staggered, driven by the impulse to fly somewhither, but about half way down was startled afresh by a shrill pattering like musical hail, and the next moment saw the entire palace rush with the jangling clatter of a thousand bells ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... breakfast within the specified time, though not without protest. Once upstairs, however, the usual Sunday morning drama of despatching him to Sunday-school in presentable condition was enacted. At every moment his voice could be heard uplifted in shrill expostulation and debate. No, his hands were clean enough, and he didn't see why he had to wear that little old pink tie; and, oh! his new shoes were too tight and hurt his sore toe; and he wouldn't, he wouldn't—no, not if he were killed for it, change his shirt. Not for a moment did Travis ...
— Blix • Frank Norris

... such people. From nervousness, and other causes which I have not been able to trace, girls are apt to pitch their voices too high, as though they thought to be better able to speak distinctly. A gruff, mannish voice is worse than a piping, shrill tone in a woman; but fulness of tone prevents no melody, and this comes from a medium pitch. In the very modulations of the voice are detected excellence and refinement. The human voice, in its sounds and accents, is a record ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder

... circle. The recognition was simultaneous, and with a cry of joy I sprang towards him, but was instantly grasped by a savage and thrown violently back among my companions. The Apache chief put a small whistle to his lips, and blowing a shrill blast, soon assembled his party. I struggled to free myself from my tormentors and rush to my husband, but my efforts were of no avail. Half fainting, and wild with the agony of this rude parting, I was taken out on the plain, where the bulk of the party were making ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman

... and common sense, there they hung between the tombs; and beyond them I could see through open windows into miserable rooms where whole families were born and fed, and slept and died. At one a girl sat singing merrily with her back to the graveyard; and from another came the shrill tones of a scolding woman. Every here and there was a town garden full of sickly flowers, or a pile of crockery inside upon the window-seat. But you do not grasp the full connection between these houses of the dead and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... men, the figure in the door and Tite, stood for several minutes gazing in silence, but with a look of astonishment, at each other. The animals and fowls had gathered in a group about the old man, alarmed at the sight of a stranger. At length a thin, shrill voice broke the silence by enquiring: "Who is it that comes ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams

... blowing through his hair, and the cradling motion of the wide swell of the waves. Early in the morning they arrived at Pittenloch. There was the brown pier, and the blue water, and the spaces of yellow sand, and the sea-weed and tangle all populous with birds whose shrill cries filled the air. There were the white cottages, and the men strolling off to the boats and the women in the ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr

... a doctor," I told him, a little shrill-voiced with indignation. "It's the child who ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... watched Natalie while Leyden's rattish characteristics were under discussion. She showed no agitation; no sign of personal shame at having ever fallen to such a spell; but at that instant a shrill whistle sounded upstream, quite near, and she paled, then flushed hotly, and at last recovered her balance but with ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle

... close to the hive, and listening attentively five minutes, you will hear a distinct piping noise, like the word peep, peep, uttered several times in succession, and then an interval of silence; two or more may be often heard at the same time; that of one will be shrill and fine, of another hoarse, short and quick. This piping is easily heard by any one not actually deaf, and not the least danger of its being taken for any humming; in fact, it is not to be mistaken for anything ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby

... establishment of the Demoiselles Denis, the chevalier was not thinking of uniting the three thousand livres which this generous mother gave to her daughters to the thousand crowns a year which the Abbe Brigaud had bestowed on him. The shrill treble of Mademoiselle Emilie, the contralto of Mademoiselle Athenais, the accompaniment of both, had recalled to his recollection the pure and flexible voice and the distinguished execution of his neighbor. Thanks to that singular ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... blown all clear of clouds and the wind piped shrill behind them, and the great waves rose and fell about them, and the sun glittered on them in many colours. Fast flew the boat before the wind as though it would never stop, and the day was waning, and ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris

... save where the weak-eyed bat With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... the flames behind them glaring, The deadly wall before them, in close array they come; Still onward, upward toiling, like a dragon's fold uncoiling— Like the rattlesnake's shrill ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)

... dreary woman, with "boarders" written all over her sour face and faded figure. Butcher's bills and house rent seemed to fill her eyes with sleepless anxiety; thriftless cooks and saucy housemaids to sharpen the tones of her shrill voice; and an incapable husband to burden her shoulders like a modern ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott

... Then by some secret shrine I ride; I hear a voice but none are there; The stalls are void, the doors are wide, The tapers burning fair. Fair gleams the snowy altar-cloth, The silver vessels sparkle clean, The shrill bell rings, the censer swings, And ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... uniformity of vibration rate. The ear's sensibility to pitch extends over about seven octaves. The seven-octave piano goes down to 27-1/2 vibrations and reaches up to 3,500 vibrations. Notes of nearly 50,000 vibrations can be heard by an average ear, however, though these are too painfully shrill to be musical. Taking into account this upper limit, the range of the ear is about eleven octaves. The ear, having given us loudness of tones, which depends on the amplitude of the vibrations, pitch, which depends on the rapidity of the vibrations, and timbre, ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts

... street he could recall, from the square about the "depot" to the outskirts, and through them all the dusty heat, the rockers, gigglers, the rustle of a shirt-sleeved father's newspaper, and the shrill coo-ees of the younger children. Finally, the piano—for he looked back farther than the all-conquering phonograph. He heard "Nita, Juanita;" he ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... something did happen. There was a shrill whistle, a puff of white smoke in the distance, and another train ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... thin, 50 And to the stack, or the Barn dore, Stoutly struts his Dames before, Oft list'ning how the Hounds and horn Chearly rouse the slumbring morn, From the side of som Hoar Hill, Through the high wood echoing shrill. Som time walking not unseen By Hedge-row Elms, on Hillocks green, Right against the Eastern gate, Wher the great Sun begins his state, 60 Rob'd in flames, and Amber light, The clouds in thousand Liveries dight. While the Plowman neer ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... severe countenance to mirth, and the most cheerful heart to sadness; it seemed impossible that such messengers could bring less than a defiance. The men, without any circumstance of duty or good manners, in a pert, shrill, undismayed accent, said that they brought an answer from the godly city of Gloucester; and extremely ready were they, according to the historian, to give insolent and seditious replies to any question; as if their ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... a half o' misery," piped the shrill voice of Billy promptly, as he thrust his head in at the fo'c'sle. "You can't go to church in ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs

... marble nymph. Altogether, with her snowy raiment and white flesh and passionless face, she seems rather a beautiful living statue than a Japanese maiden. And all the while the weird flutes sob and shrill, and the muttering of the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn

... confined to the cabin, where they amused themselves by running races round the table, and shouting at the top of their shrill voices. In all their pranks, they were encouraged and abetted by Hector, who, regardless of the entreaties of the invalids, and the maledictions of the exasperated stewardess, did his very best to increase the uproar and confusion. ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... spouting Carlyle on the 'reading evenings' at Shelldrake's? Yes, to be sure; and there was Hollins, with his clerical face and infidel talk,—and Pauline Ringtop, who used to say, 'The Beautiful is the Good.' I can still hear her shrill voice, singing, 'Would that I were beautiful, would that I ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor

... to two hundred of them may be extracted from one kiln load. Needless to say, one man cannot move the filled barrel and replace it with an empty one, so, whenever such a change becomes necessary, by means of a shrill whistle he summons a companion to his aid; at other times he sits alone and watches for ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... swelled the tumult, until, when the uproar appeared to have reached its height, there was a pause—a silence as profound as it was sudden and appalling. Then there rang through the wide deserted halls and chambers a shrill despairing shriek, whilst far and near, above, below, around, rose mocking and insulting laughter. Dauntless as Anna was, and firm as was her reliance on the protection of Heaven, it would perhaps be too much to ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various

... light from the tripod, which, as he said, shone as far as Parnassus through the bosom of Themis, but though he desired to see it he could not for its brightness, but as he passed by he heard the shrill voice of a woman speaking in verse several things, among others, he thought, telling the time of his death. That, said the genius, was the voice of the Sibyl, who sang about the future as she was being borne about in the Orb ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... breath is not back"—Jane fach's voice was shrill. "Did I not muster on reading the death letter? Witness the mud sprinkled on ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans

... richly carpeted—a thing in those days quite unusual save in very magnificent houses. Doors stood open, and there were traces of confusion in some of the rooms; but Dorcas was already hurrying her companions up the stairs, and the silence of the house was broken by the sound of a shrill voice demanding in imperious tones who were coming and ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green

... and Saivya and Sugriva, having cased them in golden mail of the splendour of the sun and fire, and thyself putting on thy armour, stay on it carefully. Upon hearing the loud and terrible blast of my conch Panchajanya emitting the shrill Rishava note,[132] thou wilt come quickly to me. In course of a single day, O Daruka, I shall dispel the wrath and the diverse woes of my cousin, the son of my paternal aunt. By every means shall I strive so that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... chance that on this subject Master Porson will get stung through his coffin, before he is many years deader.' What scholarlike badinage! Political heretics fare little better. Fox's eloquence was 'ditch-water,' with a shrill effervescence of 'imaginary gas.' Burnet was a 'gossiper, slanderer, and notorious falsifier of facts.' That one of his sermons was burnt is 'the most consolatory fact in his whole worldly career;' and he asks, 'would there have been much ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... Duerer, this is perhaps not less strange. But the loudness and universality of the howl which the common critics of the press have raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help or encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do neither the one nor the other—these are strangest of all—unimaginable unless ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... shot? what have you shot?" cried a shrill and somewhat weak voice in the distance. In another moment the owner of the voice appeared, running eagerly towards the ...
— Away in the Wilderness • R.M. Ballantyne

... heard the cry for which she had been tensely but unconsciously awaiting. Another cry like that had rung out in another mob across the seas more than a century before. "Ala Bastille!" became "To the Chippering!" Some man shouted it out in shrill English, hundreds repeated it; the Sicilian leaped from the trolley car, and his path could be followed by the agitated progress of the alien banner he bore. "To the Chippering!" It rang in Janet's ears like a call to battle. Was she shouting it, too? A galvanic ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... had their breakfast, and the row would be a long one. The old sailor, Jenks, with his pop eyes, and face like the slack of a bellows, scowled sourly. At this moment our third officer came on deck and to the lady's side. I was just about to ask her to wait and go in my boat when I heard the shrill tones ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains

... stirring; with the beat of horses' hoofs, the clatter of harness, the rumble of wheels tearing along over the ground, the flash of a sabre now and then, the ringing words of command, and the soft, shrill echoing bugle which repeated them. I only wanted to understand it all; and in the evening I plied Preston with questions. He explained ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell

... signal came across the city from the river, once, twice, thrice; and presently the sparrows began their twittering in the bushes near the verandah, an unexpected unanimous bird talk that died as suddenly and as irrelevantly away. A conservancy cart lumbered past, creaking, the far shrill whistle of an awakening factory cut the air from Howrah, the first solitary foot smote through the dawn upon the nearest pavement. The light showed grey beyond the scanty curtains. A noise of something being ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... whooping anon, anon," etc., etc., is in the same exquisite measure. This appears to us neither more nor less than an imitation of such minstrelsy as soothed our cries in the cradle, with the shrill ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero

... the peasant talked, the time of his suffering came upon him. His eyes began to see it again in front of him. They became fixed and wild, the white of them visible. His voice was shrill and broken with sobs. There was a helpless unresisting agony in his tone and the look ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason

... the vision changes, the winds are loud and shrill, The falling flakes are shrouding the mountain and the hill, But safe within our snug cabane with comrades gathered near, We set the rafters ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond

... to the carriage window to talk to her, and there was a loud explosion of mirth and laughter in the midst of the village people, and the children with their baskets of flowers who were already gathered. Lady Mariamne's voice burst out so shrill that it overmastered the church bells. "Here I am," she cried, "out in the wilderness. And Algy has come with me to take care of me. And how are you, dear boys; and how is poor Phil?" "Phil is all ready to be turned off, with the halter round his neck," said Dick Bolsover; and Harry Compton ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant

... one morning (Year 1232) upon insolent Fritzlar; burns the environs; but on looking practically at the ramparts of the place, thinks they are too high, and turns to go home again. Whereupon the idle women of Fritzlar, who are upon the ramparts gazing in fear and hope, burst into shrill universal jubilation of voice,—and even into gestures, and liberties with their dress, which are not describable in History! Conrad, suddenly once more all flame, whirls round; storms the ramparts, slays what he meets, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle

... sing, but who can better sing Than thou thy self, thine own selfs valiance? That while thou livedst thou madest the Forests ring, And Fields resound, and Flocks to leap and dance, And Shepherds leave their Lambs unto mischance, To run thy shrill Arcadian Pipe to hear, O happy were those ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley

... power, Wood with the smart, with shouts and shrieking shrill, He sought his ease in river, field, and bower; But, for the time, his grief went ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney

... of a wedge, and the farther side dropped, a steep sand-bank, to the stream which flowed at its foot. When we were hardly more than half-way up, there was the sound of a shot and a funny, little shrill cry from Job. Bruin had been climbing the sand-bank, and was nearly at the top when Job fired. The bullet evidently struck him for, doubling up, his head between his legs, he rolled over and over to the foot of the bank. When I reached the top of the hill he was on his legs ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)

... content that the truth can very well spare me, and have itself spoken by another without leaving it or me the worse. Enough if we have learned that music exists, that it is proper to us, and that we cannot go forth of it. Our pipes, however shrill and squeaking, certify this our faith in Tune, and the eternal Amelioration may one day reach our ears and instruments. It is a poor ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... like a defiant child, but threw up her hands with the worlds and wailed. It frightened her to hear the sound of her own voice—such a pitiful, shrill voice—in the lonely place. She broke into her great leaps again, and so ran up and down the slope, and felt the wind in her face. It drank her breath away from her after a while; it was a keen, chilly wind. She sat down on a stone in the middle of the field, and it came over her that it ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... struck his wand on the ground, and, in a shrill voice, proclaimed: "The great Confu is silent for ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... was opened Chilcote passed his handkerchief from one hand to the other in the tension of hope and fear; then, as the sound of his own name in the shrill tones of a telegraph-boy reached his ears, he let the handkerchief drop to ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... nothing by staying longer, but should only expose myself to fresh insults, I turned on my heel, with rudeness equal to her own, and, without taking leave of her, flung the door open and went out. I heard her throw herself back with a shrill laugh of triumph. But as, the moment the door fell to behind me, my thoughts began to cast about for another way of escape—this failing—I took little heed of her, and less of the derisive looks to which the household, quickly taking the cue, treated me as ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman

... just finished lunch—I was sitting alone by the window thinking of my uncle's release—outside there was the steam and glitter of an April thaw—when all at once my aunt, Pelageya Petrovna, walked into the room. She was at all times restless and fidgetty, she spoke in a shrill voice and was always waving her arms about; on this occasion she simply ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... Goderville there was a crowd, a medley of men and beasts. The horns of the cattle, the high hats, with a long, hairy nap, of the wealthy peasants, and the head dresses of the peasant women, appeared on the surface of the throng. And the sharp, shrill, high-pitched voices formed an incessant, uncivilized uproar, over which soared at times a roar of laughter from the powerful chest of a sturdy yokel, or the prolonged bellow of a cow fastened to the wall ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... applied, when she would drop her work, dive among the pink innocents, and hold one up by its unhappy leg, undisturbed by its doleful cries, while she settled its price with a blue-gowned, white-capped neighbor, as sharp-witted and shrill-tongued as herself. If the bargain was struck, they slapped their hands together in a peculiar way, and the new owner clapped her purchase into a meal-bag, slung it over her shoulder, and departed with her squirming, squealing ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... expected such a tremendous upheaval as followed. The man, believing that possibly the "devil-bird" had broken out of its cage and was about to carry him off in its gigantic beak, gave a shrill scream of terror, and bouncing up, broke the slender hold Frank had ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy

... Jiro, his voice becoming shrill with excitement and fear. "He was my fliend. He is a Samurai of Japan. We met in Okasaki, and again in London. I came to England long after the clime you talk of. He told me these Flazel people were bad people, ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy

... five, not quite in one voice but with well-rehearsed vehemence, albeit two tiny ones, in rapt contemplation of things beyond, quite neglected their duty until severely nudged by Melissa, whereupon they said it in a shrill treble at least six times ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon

... World. They advanced in three divisions—the regulars in the centre, commanded by the gallant Lord Howe, and a blue column of provincials on either flank. To the martial music of their bands or the shrill notes of the bagpipe they gaily marched through the midsummer woods, the Forty-Second Highlanders in ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... it all there were odors of wines and flowers, clouds of smoke, shouts of laughter, music of shrill gay voices. ...
— Bebee • Ouida

... rest of Miss Snooks, so much was I taken up with this godlike feature. She was tall, thin, wrinkled, fiery-eyed, with a blue silk gown on; and a cap, stiff-starched, and overgrown with a mountain of frills, and indigo-coloured ribbons. Her voice was shrill, almost squeaking; and—with reverence be it spoken—she had a leetle bit of a beard—only a few odd hairs growing from her chin and upper lip. Her age, I suppose, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various

... back, but presently he heard Tom's shrill whistle, and then a cry from Sam and Dick. The three Rover boys came down the path pell-mell, and their father and the captain were, ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)

... dog-tired when, a little before dawn, the boatswain sounded his pipe, and the crew began to man the capstan bars. I might have been twice as weary, yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new and interesting to me—the brief commands, the shrill notes of the whistle, the men bustling to their places in the glimmer ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson

... be shining in the sky In the deep flowery meadow-grass I lie: To listen to the shrill melodious tune Of crickets, thrilled to ecstasy ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... seemingly inexhaustible depths of his baggy white pants—a flute with a string and a bent pin attached to it—and, secretly affixing the pin in the tail of the cross ringmaster's coat, was thereafter enabled to toot sharp shrill blasts at frequent intervals, much to the chagrin of the ringmaster, who seemed utterly unable to discover the whereabouts of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... they were a very pious people, descended in a large measure from the old Scotch Covenanters, and our men too were resting from the toils and labors of six weeks of as hard marching as ever fell to the lot of soldiers. Shortly after noon was heard in the distance the shrill whistle of a steamboat, which came nearer and nearer, and soon a shout, long and continuous, was raised down by the river, which spread farther and farther, and we all felt that it meant a messenger from home. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... words used; but the same conviction possessed us as to its cause. It was Macer at prayer. We moved nearer, so that, without disturbing the family, we might still make ourselves of the number of hearers. His voice, loud and shrill, echoed among the ruins and conveyed to us, though at some distance, every word that he uttered. But for the noise of carriages and passengers it would have penetrated even to the streets. The words we caught were such ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... Ned,—to sweeten which name of Ned, I give thee this pennyworth of sugar, clapp'd even now into my hand by an under-skinker; one that never spake other English in his life than Eight shillings and sixpence, and You are welcome; with this shrill addition, Anon, anon, sir! Score a pint of bastard in the Half-moon,—or so. But, Ned, to drive away the time till Falstaff come, I pr'ythee, do thou stand in some by-room, while I question my puny drawer to what end he gave me the sugar; and do thou never leave calling Francis! that his tale to ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]

... was decidedly too small for it, but, clasped to William's bosom inside his coat, it could be partly supported by his arm outside. He descended the stairs cautiously. He tip-toed lightly past the dining-room door (which was slightly ajar), from which came the shrill, noisy, meaningless, conversation of the grown-ups. He was just about to open the front door when there came the sound of a key ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton

... emotion underwent a sudden change. Spitefulness leaped into his eyes; the wail of misery left his voice and in its place came shrill blasphemy. After he had cursed Dick and David Jenison to his heart's content he came to a standstill in front of his unhappy brother. Sticking out his ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... creature, to see it shut its legs against its body and pretend to be dead. The birds were fairly rioting by this time. A catbird, the Northern mocker, lit in a tree over Tom's head, and trilled out her imitations of her neighbors in a rapture of enjoyment; then a shrill jay swept down, a flash of blue flame, and stopped on a twig almost within the boy's reach, cocked his head to one side and eyed the strangers with a consuming curiosity; a gray squirrel and a big fellow of the "fox" kind came skurrying along, sitting up at intervals to inspect and chatter ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... with a sardonic smile, while I felt his grasp tighten on my shoulder, "the villains have been balked of their prey, have they? We shall see, we shall see. Now, you whelp, look yonder." As he spoke, the pirate uttered a shrill whistle. In a second or two it was answered, and the pirate boat rowed round the point at the Water Garden, and came rapidly towards us. "Now, go, make a fire on that point; and hark'ee, youngster, if you try to run ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne

... bow, and had found it to be in good plight, like as a harper in tuning of his harp draws out a string, with such ease or much more did Ulysses draw to the head the string of his own tough bow, and in letting of it go, it twanged with such a shrill noise as a swallow makes when it sings through the air: which so much amazed the suitors, that their colours came and went, and the skies gave out a noise of thunder, which at heart cheered Ulysses, for he knew that now his long labours by the disposal of the fates drew to an end. Then ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... is here; Winds whistle shrill, Icy and chill, Little care we; Little we fear Weather without, Shelter'd ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz

... little father,' said the peasant, with a still more violent shaking of the reins. 'There's a mile and a half farther to go, not more.... Come! there! look about you.... I'll teach you,' he added in a shrill voice, setting to work to whip ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev

... motion of no less celerity Than that of thought. Suppose that you have seen The well-appointed king at Hampton Pier Embark his royalty, and his brave fleet With silken streamers the young Phoebus fanning: Play with your fancies, and in them behold Upon the hempen tackle ship-boys climbing; Hear the shrill whistle which doth order give To sounds confused; behold the threaden sails, Borne with the invisible and creeping wind Draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea Breasting the lofty surge. O, do but think You stand upon the rivage and behold A city on the inconstant ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various

... or later they always stopped running, stopped laughing, and remembered why they were wandering the wood alone. Then they would call for Helma. Ivra's voice was shrill and sweet, and rang through the bare woods like a birdsong. Eric's wavered a little uncertainly, as though he doubted whether Helma knew it well enough to answer. "Helma, ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot

... Kalis laughed and whined and screamed as they fed. Even above their feeding-song and the screams of their victims came the shrill, triumphant cry ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam

... side of the square another orator was haranguing the crowd. A young Quaker woman had got up upon some steps, moved in spirit, as she declared, to denounce the wickedness of war, and to urge the townsmen to peaceful methods. Her shrill voice rose high and piercing, and she invoked Heaven to bless the work of those who would endure all things rather than ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... spouted foam and spray high in the air. The knees of these rocks, seen between the surges, were black with mussels. On their tops sprawled huge sea-lions tawny-wet and roaring in the sun, while overhead, uttering shrill cries, darted and wheeled a multitude ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... must the | trumpet's note. Savage | and shrill, For requi'm | o'er thee float, Thou fair ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... Moon looked on and laughed With a shrill and sneering jibe; Her soul grew fat to see them chaffed, This mad and elfish tribe. The big black caldron boiled so high With food for these queer mites, That it lit the world throughout the sky, And down came all ...
— The Goblins' Christmas • Elizabeth Anderson

... great canyons and the giant cliffs, the dark river with its mystic thunder of waters, the pine-fringed plateaus, the endless stretch of horizon, with its lofty, isolated, noble monuments, and the bold ramparts with their beckoning beyond! Hers always the desert seasons: the shrill, icy blast, the intense cold, the steely skies, the fading snows; the gray old sage and the bleached grass under the pall of the spring sand-storms; the hot furnace breath of summer, with its magnificent cloud pageants in the sky, with the black tempests ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey

... Englishman, and my wife there is an Englishwoman—when I am gone oh, gentlemen, what is to become of her? If I were but sure that she would be cared for, and enabled to return to her friends, the bitterness of death would be past." Here the poor woman threw herself round her husband's neck, and gave a shrill sharp cry, and relaxing her hold, fell down across his knees, with her head hanging back, and her face towards the roof, in a dead faint. For a minute or two, the husband's sole concern seemed to be ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... over the fence in an instant, and his little legs soon place him before her, and then what are her horns, her threatening countenance, and her great body to his shrill voice and brandished stick? Admitting his superior power, she soon gallops back to the herd, with whack after whack ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... wished that some prescience of danger had made him throttle her then and there, so she could not have raised her shrill, alarming voice! But he had no warning. All he saw was a woman in a washed-out blue calico dress and a fresh white apron, raising incurious eyes ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... room veiled, and of course was not known by the crowd, as pains had been taken to keep the public in ignorance of the fact, that she was to be brought on to bear witness. So that, at the conclusion of the second witness on the part of the defense, "Jane Johnson" was called for, in a shrill voice. Deliberately, Jane arose and answered, in a lady-like manner to her name, and was then the observed of all observers. Never before had such a scene been witnessed in Philadelphia. It was indescribable. Substantially, her ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... At this moment a shrill whistle was heard by every one in the vault, and then the sound of shouts outside, and the tramping of feet.—"The game's up!" cried one of the men with the blackened faces; "every one for himself!" and a rush was made for the steps. But it was too late: a strong ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson

... and Siena, I never could find a woman to go mad about, either among the ladies, chattering bad French, or among the lower classes, as 'cute and cold as money-lenders; so I steer clear of Italian womankind, its shrill voice and gaudy toilettes. I am wedded to history, to the Past, to women like Lucrezia Borgia, Vittoria Accoramboni, or that Medea da Carpi, for the present; some day I shall perhaps find a grand passion, a woman to play the Don Quixote about, like the Pole ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... from our four-footed companion woke us up with a start. We seized our arms. The dog, with his ears laid back, his tail between his legs, turned his nose to the wind with an anxious glance, and set up a fresh howl, which was answered by the shrill prolonged cries of the coyotas, or jackal ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart

... expression of sexual longing in music is identical with that of religious longing. It is quite true, again, that a soft and gentle voice seems to every normal man as to Lear "an excellent thing in woman," and that a harsh or shrill voice may seem to deaden or even destroy altogether the attraction of a beautiful face. But the voice is not usually in itself an adequate or powerful method of evoking sexual emotion in a man. Even in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... doctrine of Indifferency, and am certain and content that the truth can very well spare me, and have itself spoken by another without leaving it or me the worse. Enough if we have learned that music exists, that it is proper to us, and that we cannot go forth of it. Our pipes, however shrill and squeaking, certify this our faith in Tune, and the eternal Amelioration may one day reach our ears and instruments. It is a poor second ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... chiefs' guidance and domination." He was much impressed by the silence and controlled power of the Serbian General Staff. There was in Europe a general war-weariness; but not in Yugoslavia. There was a hush in this part of Europe, broken only by the shrill screams of Italian propagandists and outbursts of suppressed passion on the ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein

... going on merrily when presently the shrill whistle of the factory announced that it was noon, and pretty soon crowds of men, women, boys and girls trooped down the road toward a group of small houses further along. It was a noisy, jostling ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard

... had swooned by reason of his pain. She kneeled hastily at his side, and put the enchanted brewage to his lips, but he could neither drink nor speak, for he was dead, as I have told you. She bewailed his evil lot, with many shrill cries, and flung the useless flacket far away. The precious potion bestrewed the ground, making a garden of that desolate place. For many saving herbs have been found there since that day by the simple folk of that country, ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France

... have been possessed by evil spirits, and to have been carried off by them, a man is hired, if no relation is willing to do it, to ring a hand-bell for several consecutive days, near the house which the late unfortunate had occupied, the shrill sound being supposed to have the power of showing the unwelcome guests, that their presence has been noticed, and that they had better retire and leave the house to its rightful owners. I need hardly remark that a few hours of this noise is quite enough to turn the best of good ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... convinced that they were in some way connected, and that some especial destiny had governed his voyage. He lay gazing on the portrait with almost as much awe as he had gazed on the ghostly original, until the shrill house-clock warned him of the lateness of the hour. He put out the light; but remained for a long time turning over these curious circumstances and coincidences in his mind, until he fell asleep. His dreams partook of the nature of his waking thoughts. He fancied ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... spoke the little steamer scraped against the dock that was almost invisible to those on deck, then came to a full stop. The shrill whistle which Roy contemptuously characterized as a joke, broke the misty stillness with a shriek, that echoed and re-echoed, thrown back upon itself by some distant cave or ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope

... to the bearer of his feather-bed, rode away in spite of shrill protests from his French companions, who speedily consoled themselves with those of his comrades who seemed to have most to give. Nigel's party was soon clear of the column of archers and riding hard in the direction of the Prince's army. They passed ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... dropped below the range, leaving the street dark, save where the lights from the windows of the all-night eating-houses and saloons lay out upon the walk, and, while she stood peering out, the sound of rancorous howling and shrill whooping came to her ears with such suggestion ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland

... thro' the Woods The nimble Deer to take, And with their Cries the Hills and Dales An Eccho shrill did make. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... and whispered something to Pat, and he threw back his head, half shut his eyes, and gave vent to a succession of shrill howls that were the best music his voice was capable of, while his master whistled the air of "Killarney" as ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis

... clutch the bars and wait; The corridors are empty, tense and still; A silver mist has dimmed the distant hill; The guards have gathered at the prison gate. Then suddenly the "wildcat" blares its hate Like some mad Moloch screaming for the kill, Shattering the air with terror loud and shrill, The dim, ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin

... has accomplished it. He showed in his Lettre sur la musique francaise that there was no connection between the inflections of French speech, "whose accents are so harmonious and simple," and "the shrill and noisy intonations" of the recitative of French opera. And he concluded by saying that the kind of recitative that would best suit us should "wander between little intervals, and neither raise nor lower the voice very much; and should have little ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... her shrill little yap to the bull-terrier's despairing cry, and I was annoyed, for I knew that a man who cares for dogs is one thing, but a man who loves one dog is quite another. Dogs are at the best no more than verminous vagrants, self-scratchers, foul feeders, and unclean by the law of Moses ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... are all deserted and the derricks all are still, And the wind across the anchorage comes singing sad and shrill, And the lighted lanthorns gleaming where the ships at anchor ride Cast their quivering long reflections down the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various

... trick pony came out, who really could dance, and he looked as if he laughed, too. He did a number of amusing things, and the audience stopped going out. Then the monkeys set up such a shrill chatter that the people began to laugh. The lion started to roar; and it seemed as if the tigers joined the chorus. For a few moments it was a ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas

... "Gate."—Suppose we visit one of the "gates." It is early morning. Everything is noise and confusion. Here are merchants peddling their wheat, or dates, or honey, their wool or their flax. Customers are haggling over prices. Each one is shouting with a shrill voice and with many gestures that the price asked is an outrage. Besides the merchants there are judges. Here sits one of the city elders with a long white beard. Before him are two farmers disputing over a boundary line—also ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting

... the melodies of early morn. Hark!—'t is the distant roar of iron wheels, First sound of busy life, and the shrill neigh Of vapor-steed, the vale of Brighton threading, Region of lowing kine and perfumed breeze. Echoes the shore of blue meandering Charles. Straightway the chorus of glad chanticleers Proclaims the dawn. First comes ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various

... was necessary that some should show that there was a God in heaven, and that divine worship was due alone to him (Dan 3:10-12). But they run the hazard of being turned to ashes, in a burning fiery furnace, for so doing. But necessity has a loud voice, and shrill in the ears of a tender conscience: this voice will awake jealousy and kindle a burning fire within, for the name, and cause, and way, and people, of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... measles. He halves nothing whatever with our more earnest-minded juniors who—perennially discovering that all religions thus far put to the test of nominal practice have, whatever their paradisial entree, resulted in a deplorable earthly hash—perennially run yelping into the shrill agnosticism which believes only that one's neighbors should not be permitted ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France

... and waved her hands in front of her face, as if to ward off a swarm of bees. "My healin' won't do you much good, you nasty old man!" she said in a shrill voice. "You'll git a pain, sich a pain," she insisted, pressing her hand to her heart. "It will like to kill you, and it ...
— The Right Time • Walter Bupp

... other of the disputants, and brandished her arms dripping with soapsuds, and fired away from her window as from the embrazure of a fortress; while the swarms of children nestled and cradled in every procreant chamber of this hive, waking with the noise, set up their shrill pipes to swell ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... their job, for the lines went up uncomfortably close to the front line, and a good deal of noise accompanied the arrival and departure of the trains, unloading of stores, and loading of empties for the return journey, the guard or man in charge usually helping matters with a few shrill blasts of his whistle, quite in ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman

... every one of her charms and suggesting the roundness and softness and whiteness her drapery concealed. She was one of those rare beings whose every pose is instinct with grace. And her voice—It was small, rather high, at times almost shrill. But in every note of its register there sounded a mysterious, melancholy-sweet call to the responding nerves ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... started up once more; he raised his head from the sand with one final convulsive movement, and his voice was high and shrill. ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin

... that even to the death he would serve her, swallowed up every other feeling. As they went over a vise-like grip caught his arm, and amid all the infernal confusion he somehow connected that despairing clutch with a succession of shrill and piercing shrieks which rang in his ear, seeming to be close to him. He remembered that in the chair behind his had been a young girl, and he felt a pity for her that choked him like a hand at his throat. Then as they went down he instinctively but ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates

... answered in shrill, piping voices: "Ben to Watervliet? Nay, they'd ben driving round the country, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... flung off restraint and gave all her pent-up nerves play. They faced each other like furies, he red and grim, she shaken and shrill. ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton

... Another is the graceful variegated ypicaha, fond of social gatherings, where the birds perform a dance and make the desolate marshes resound with their insane humanlike voices. A smaller kind, Porphyriops melanops, has a night-cry like a burst of shrill hysterical laughter, which has won for it the name of "witch;" while another, Rallus rythyrhynchus, is called "little donkey" from its braying cries. Strange eerie voices have all these birds. Of the remaining aquatic species, the most important is the spur-winged crested screamer; a noble bird ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... but he makes up by the details of knowledge, and by a scrupulous correctness of statement for what he wants in originality of thought, or impetuous declamation. The tones of Mr. Coleridge's voice are eloquence: those of Mr. Southey are meagre, shrill, and dry. Mr. Coleridge's forte is conversation, and he is conscious of this: Mr. Southey evidently considers writing as his strong-hold, and if gravelled in an argument, or at a loss for an explanation, refers to something he has written ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... to shake him off, unable to get at him with his trunk—and, above all, surprised and terrified by this novel mode of attack—uttered a shrill scream, and with tail erect and trunk high in air, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... scarce half-way, when the peccary running up the fresh trail almost trod upon him; and, seeing the object of her pursuit, she suddenly stopped, erected her long bristles, and uttered a shrill grunt. The snake, finding that he was overtaken, threw himself into a coil, and prepared to give battle; while his antagonist, now looking more like a great porcupine than a pig, drew back, as if to take the advantage of a run; and then ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... wild howl of dismay and kept it up till her ears seemed on the point of splitting. But now the clatter of wheels had begun again and she could see a milk cart rounding the corner of the street. She gave a long, shrill whistle and leaped down and ran frantically out into the road, straight for the ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann

... cheek, a light Breathed from the sea, and all the air seemed warm As at the touch of spring, a violet streak, A pale leaf green, a golden, and a rose Broke in the sky, and morning was revealed. With a shrill cry, young Kuma raised his hand And pointed where with dip and shriek and wheel A flock of sea birds hovered; all the rest Echoed the call and bending to the paddle Shot o'er the waves, for now the fish were gained. Uhila grasped his rod, and ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay

... every school must be considerable, should overcome the virtue of the jury: but our fears have been uniformly relieved, and the hopes of the offender crushed, by the voice of the foreman pronouncing, in a shrill but steady tone, the awful word—Guilty!' Some persons, who hate all innovations, will pronounce all this 'mummery,' which is a very compendious piece of criticism. For ourselves, though we cannot altogether agree with the Experimentalist, who seems to build too much on an assumption that ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... forest people lifted their voices in wild celebration, forgetting, in this one holiday of the year, the silence that they would carry back into the solitudes with them. Numbers gave them courage of voice, and in its manifestation there was the savagery of the forests that hemmed them in. Shrill voices rose in meaningless cries above the roaring of the fire. Caribou whips snapped fiercely. Chippewayans, Crees, Eskimos, and breeds crowded in the red glare. The factor's men shouted and sang like mad, for this ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... the painful grasp he had undergone. But no sooner was his hand released, than, crouching for one moment as a wild cat crouches, you might see his hair bristle on his head and beard, and with a fierce and shrill yell he sprang on the throat of the giant, with an impetus that threw him, vast and sturdy as he was, from his balance—and down, with the crash of a falling rock, he fell—while over him fell ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... Presently a shrill whistle was followed by the faint rumbling of the train as it resumed its way. "See?" yelled Whitey. "The train's just starting. We won't be very late, and the men's tracks will be plain. Gee! ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart

... in a low, confidential tone, "Mr. St. Vincent was extremely anxious to have her married. He actually sounded Mr. Wilmarth," and she gives a shrill little laugh of disdain, "and then he offered her ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... companions, the ninth buffalo wreaking its revenge for the death of the other eight in a peculiarly ghastly manner. Precisely how the tragedy happened none of us knew, for it chanced that our attention was concentrated elsewhere at the moment; but a sharp, shrill scream of mortal agony sounding out on the hot air apprised us that something untoward was happening. Glancing quickly in the direction from which the sound proceeded, I was horrified to see that one unfortunate warrior had somehow failed to avoid ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood

... While that genial shrill and tinkle of many bells meant refreshment and most gregarious frivolity for the chattering, loitering, laughing and ever-spectacular groups so far below him—and how he hated their outlandish gibberish and their arrogant ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... clutched at his sleeve and pulled him down, and before he knew what she was doing had shrunk close to him, and laid her head on his shoulder. She went on talking desperately in her weak voice—strained shrill ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... like the old Erard piano, upon which Louise, an accomplished performer, now was playing a set of Beethoven's waltzes and Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words." This poor old servant now had only the shrill, trembling tones of ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee

... me to give orders for a quicker advance. And what a concert was going on all the time! Whilst the horses' hoofs were beating out low and muffled notes, the bullets flew above us and around us, with shrill cracklings and whistlings which were anything but harmonious. Happily the firing was distant and disgracefully bad, for at the pace we were travelling we must have offered a very convenient mark. Another 20 yards! Ten more! At last we were safely ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont

... Dionysus, as he leaps into the midst of these gracious appearances, drunk with the young wine of nature, surly with the old wisdom of Silenus, brings the real, excessive, disturbing truth of things suddenly into the illusion; and is gone again, with a shrill laugh, without forcing on us more of his presence than we ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... Now hardly moves an inch an hour. The jack and chimney, near allied, Had never left each other's side: The chimney to a steeple grown, The jack would not be left alone; But up against the steeple reared, Became a clock, and still adhered; And still its love to household cares, By a shrill voice at noon declares, Warning the cook-maid not to burn That roast ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... scampered up the hill among the trees, which were so thick as soon to conceal them from our view. Boongaree called to them in vain; and it was not until they had reached some distance that they answered his call in loud shrill voices. After some time spent in a parley, in which Boongaree was spokesman on our part, sometimes in his own language, and at others in broken English, which he always resorted to when his own failed in being understood, they withdrew altogether, and we neither ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King

... away; evening comes; and all sorts of strange shadows begin to shape themselves about my bed-curtains, forming and dissolving by turns. And other shadows—ghosts—throng by before me; and through them I can see distinctively the impassive face of my faithful servant. And suddenly a cry, a shrill cry, a great cry of distress, rends my ears. Was it you who called ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... ask any more questions a shrill voice, at its highest pitch of excitement, called her away. Zo had just discovered the most amusing bird in the Gardens—the low comedian of the feathered race—otherwise ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins

... for Eustace to come back to the office. He heard Mrs. Burke's voice sounding shrill outside, but not clear enough for him to distinguish what she was saying. Then the buggy started ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott

... in one clean-shaven cheek, and his hands, which were covered with rings of no great apparent value, were very dirty, and the nails uncared for. He bowed with a great flourish of politeness, spat copiously in the fire, and bade the count good-day in a thin and shrill-pitched voice, so out of keeping with his monstrous size that I had to cough and turn away to disguise ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray

... through. For lack of these others, when the time came to turn and advance upon our prey he caused fires to be lighted here and there where the gaps were widest, so that we forged onwards not only to the accompaniment of the shrill cries of the mahouts and the noise of plunging and overwhelming elephants, but to the fierce roar and crackle ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas

... wonder. That is, everybody wondered except Henrietta Hen. She began talking in a shrill voice about her visit to the county fair. And she said spitefully to Snowball, "You'd better get out of the way before old dog Spot comes ...
— The Tale of Snowball Lamb • Arthur Bailey

... Does the poet address the ear or the eye in this description? Only the sound of the bagpipes is described, though it may suggest a picture of the Highland regiments. What words describe the music? "Wild and high", "war-note", "thrills savage and shrill". Why does the poet mention proper names—"Lochiel", "Evan", "Donald"? The bagpipes recall stirring memories of these men, which inspire the clansmen to prove worthy of their ancestors. What is the "Cameron's gathering"? The war-song ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education

... awe-inspiring, and indeed depressing effect. The almost solid green walls on either side of the narrow track; the awful stillness which prevails, only occasionally broken, or rendered more intense, by the shrill note of a bird, the cry, or rather pitiful wail, of a monkey, the crashing of some larger creature through the dense undergrowth, as well as the profound solitude, will easily account for these feelings. Having overcome my first sensation of nervousness, caused by constant slips and ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... upon the chimney-piece struck twelve in its shrill steel tones. Josephine started at the sound, and passed one hand over her eyes as though to rouse herself, and at the same time a deep blush spread over her delicate cheek. For with the voice of midnight there was also the voice of a man ringing in her ears, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... more; She lives to tell thee thou art more unconstant, Than all ill women ever were together. Thy faith is firm as raging over-flowes, That no bank can command; as lasting As boyes gay bubbles, blown i'th' Air and broken: The wind is fixt to thee: and sooner shall The beaten Mariner with his shrill whistle Calm the loud murmur of the troubled main, And strike it smooth again; than thy soul fall To have peace in love with any: Thou art all That all good men must hate; and if thy story Shall tell succeeding ages what thou wert, O let it spare me in it, lest true lovers In pity of my wrong, ...
— A King, and No King • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... waiting on the steps for the appearance of a cab from the rank round the corner in response to the shrill blast which the sergeant had blown on his whistle. The sergeant went to the door of the station leading into ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson

... girls?" asked she, in a giggling whisper. "Little Waylands? Then it is true," she cried, with a peal of shrill laughter. "There are three of them, only Lady Belamour shuts them up like kittens—I wonder she did not. Oh, what sport! Won't I tease her now that ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... them, as I was afterward told, were hurt with the falls they got by leaping from my sides upon the ground. However, they soon returned; and one of them, who ventured so far as to get a full sight of my face, lifting up his hands and eyes by way of admiration, cried out, in a shrill but distinct voice, "Hekinah degul." The others repeated the same words several times; but I then knew not what they meant. I lay all this while, as the reader ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... a bow from the veiled Hortense, shrill thanks from Kitty, and the car, turning, again left us in ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister

... long train behind her, following her quick movements and swaying from side to side to get out of the reach of the furious fox, was sometimes in the shape of the letter C, and sometimes in that of the letter S, and sometimes looked like a long snake with a curling tail. Loud was the laughter, shrill the shrieks, as the fox drove them hither and thither, and seemed to be in all parts of the room at once. He was a cunning fox that, as well as a bold one. Sometimes, when they thought him quite safe, held at bay by the goose, ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner

... perishing of many professors asserted, and confirmed by Christ's own mouth. This consideration carrieth great awakening in it; but into such a fast sleep are many now-a-days fallen, that nothing will awaken them but that shrill and terrible cry, "Behold, the Bridegroom cometh; go ye out ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... around were seen, White cots on the meadows green. Open to the sky and breeze, Or peeping through the sheltering trees, On a light gate, loosely hung, Laughing children gaily swung; Oft their glad shouts, shrill and clear, Came upon the startled ear. Blended with the tremulous bleat, Of truant lambs, or voices sweet, Of birds, that take us by surprise, And mock the ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... a Zeppelin did come. About three o'clock we were roused by the shrill police whistles giving the alarm. The telephone notified us that a Zeppelin had crossed the Danube, and all the church bells began to peal. Suddenly darkness and silence reigned, and the whole town, like some great angry animal, sullen ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... came so quickly that it startled him, not one voice, but two—three—and one of them the shrill agonized cry of a woman. They came toward him as he continued to shout, until a few feet away he could make out a gray blur moving through the gloom. He went to it, staggering under the weight ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... perhaps more appalled by my silence than she would have been by my reproach. Her voice grew shrill in ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... little fellow had just dropped into a grateful morning doze, that I have listened and waited, dreading the arrival of the Providence morning express. Because I knew that, a mile and a half out of Boston, the engine would begin to blow its shrill whistle, for the purpose, I believe, of calling the Boston station-men to their duty. Three or four minutes of that skre-e-e-e must there be, as that train swept by our end of the town. And hoping and wishing never did any good; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... the propeller, the whistling, squalling and howling of the wind, which laid the vessel on her side, all this combined to produce extreme discomfort in the travellers. Again and again, as if uncertain what course to pursue, the boat stopped and emitted its shrill whistle, which was so stifled in the wild commotion of the waters that it seemed nothing but the helpless breathing of a hoarse throat—stopped and went backwards—stopped and went forwards, until again it came to an uncertain halt, twisting and turning in the whirling waters, carried aloft, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... the blue sky. He had forgotten London; his thoughts were with another place under a sky of stronger blue, in the White House of a white square in a white town. He seemed to hear the rattle of rifle shots, shrill trumpet calls, angry party cries, the clatter of desperate charges across the open space, the angry despair of repulses, the piteous pageant of civil war. Knightsbridge knew nothing of all that. Danes may have fought there, the chivalry of the White Rose ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy

... any overture or hope of peace, he would be more erecte, and vigorous, and exceedingly sollicitous to presse any thinge which he thought might promote it, and sittinge amongst his frends often after a deepe silence, and frequent sighes, would with a shrill and sadd Accent ingeminate the word, Peace, Peace, and would passyonately professe that the very Agony of the Warr, and the view of the calamityes, and desolation the kingdome did and must indure, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... the hat upon the glass floor, made a pass with his hand, and then removed the hat, displaying a little white piglet no bigger than a mouse, which began to run around here and there and to grunt and squeal in a tiny, shrill voice. ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... doing. He began going down the stairs, supporting himself with his right hand against the wall. He fancied that a porter pushed past him on his way upstairs to the police office, that a dog in the lower storey kept up a shrill barking and that a woman flung a rolling-pin at it and shouted. He went down and out into the yard. There, not far from the entrance, stood Sonia, pale and horror-stricken. She looked wildly at him. He stood still before her. There was a look of poignant agony, of despair, in her face. She clasped ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... a few moments since and all were silently gazing at the centre of attraction, the scaffold. Lo, a messenger, breathless with haste, shouting "INNOCENT! INNOCENT! INNOCENT!" and a passage is made for him to approach, whilst thousands inquire the news. He answers not, save by that shrill shout, "INNOCENT!" and pressing forward touches the gallows just as Castello is about to be launched forth. The stranger ascends the steps and begs that the execution may be deferred, at least until he can relate some recent ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... to practising scales herself, for we had only known the technical part of her calling. In short, we feared that we should be do-re-mi-ou'd past endurance. Instead of which, scraps of the gayest of ballads float over the knoll in the evening, and the Infant's little shrill pipe is being inoculated with real music, via Mother Goose melodies sung in a ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright

... At the woman's shrill words a white-haired man, dressed in black, clerical garb, who had been sitting in the rear of the room close to the door, rose hastily, then slowly sat down again. At his feet reposed a satchel, bearing several foreign labels. Evidently he had but ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... with innumerable colored lamps, where the people danced their country dances in a choking cloud of dry saw-dust. Conjurors and gymnastic performers were showing off on conspicuous platforms, and a continual sound of drums, cymbals and shrill trumpets called the attention of the crowd to some "Wonderful Exhibition"—some infant phenomenon, giant, or three-headed pig. A great part of the crowd belonged evidently to the very worst part of society, but the watchfulness ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor

... star glimmered faintly above the tree-tops. A thrush sang his vesper from the bare branch of an oak near by, and a blackbird, startled by the sight of a strange form squatting beside the brambles, sounded his shrill alarm and dipped across the clearing towards a clump of blackthorn bushes. As soon as she heard the blackbird's warning, the vixen vanished; but, presently reappearing, she trotted across the open space and sat beneath the thorns. For ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees

... air was mild, and the streets shrill with the careless cries of children playing games controlled by mysterious rhythms and phrases. Their elders held the doorways and steps with leisurely pipe and gossip. Paradoxically, the fire-escapes supported lovers in couples who made no attempt to fly the mounting conflagration ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... That is why all vehemence, the cry of Nature, all suffering, thoughtless familiarity, and every frank sign of love shock this delicate medium like a bombshell; they shatter this collective fabric, this palace of clouds, this enchanted architecture, just as shrill cockcrow scatters the fairies into hiding. These fine receptions are unconsciously a work of art, a kind of poetry, by which cultivated society reconstructs an idyll that is age-long dead. They are confused ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... thought, was success. Here were the successful men. The man who had failed looked at them. Eve roused him by a shrill cry, "There they are. There's May and the girls. Let me out ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet

... a wonderful intuition of its friends. The children looked up at the face of their grown-up companion, giggled, and then burst into a shrill fit of laughter. He felt that it was the first one they had really indulged in for many days. Nevertheless he said, "Hush!" confidentially; why he scarcely knew, except to intimate to them that he had taken ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte

... met us at the door of the drawing-room, and greeted us most kindly,—a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate, only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice. Really, I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... soft and peaceful summer day. There was scarce a sound to break the stillness, save the shrill note of the locust, and the perpetual click-click of the stone-cutters, at work upon the granite headstones of the soldiers' cemetery. There was nothing to indicate to a stranger that so tranquil a spot ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... and forgot to close the door, for at that moment a shrill whistle was excruciatingly blown. He found himself in the very cab of the Pullman with the glass door before him, through which could be seen a sudden bustle. Subalterns hastened forward from the more or ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable

... to go through the ceremony of breaking a tester between them before a shrill call of "Emlyn" resounded down the garden. Mrs. Sloggett thought quite time enough had been wasted over the young man, and summoned the girl back to ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Peals of laughter. A breathless pianola. The tripping of dancing-feet. Voices husked with drink and voices soft with love. The shrill accents of vulgarity. Hustling waiters. Shop-girls. Bourgeois couples. Tired families of four and upward. Sleeping children. A boy selling candy. The crying ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck

... up and furnished with beds in the European manner, with glazed sash windows, and with fire grates suitable for burning coals. On our arrival here we found a company of comedians hard at work, in the middle of a piece, which it seemed had begun at sun-rise; but their squalling and their shrill and harsh music were so dreadful, that they were prevailed upon, with difficulty, to break off during dinner, which was served up in a ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... familiar facts. The habitual sufferer utters his complaints in a voice raised considerably above the natural key; and agonising pain vents itself in either shrieks or groans—in very high or very low notes. Beginning at his talking pitch, the cry of the disappointed urchin grows more shrill as it grows louder. The "Oh!" of astonishment or delight, begins several notes below the middle voice, and descends still lower. Anger expresses itself in high tones, or else in "curses not loud but deep." Deep tones, too, are always used in ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... a shrill voice, and looking up he saw before him the bent form of Hagar Warren, at whose door Maggie had paused for a moment while she told of the accident and ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes

... eagle's, the neck extremely thick and sinewy. His complexion was pale. His beard and mustache were kept carefully shaved. His hair was short and naturally scanty, falling off toward the end of his life and leaving him partially bald. His voice, especially when he spoke in public, was high and shrill. His health was uniformly strong until his last year, when he became subject to epileptic fits. He was a great bather, and scrupulously clean in all his habits, abstemious in his food, and careless in what it consisted, rarely or never touching wine, and noting sobriety ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... squander it on their pet cats, tame dogs, and our good cousins the Pandavas. I shall never envy them. Fear is the tribute I claim for my royal throne. Father, only too leniently you lent your ear to those who slandered your sons: but if you intend still to allow those pious friends of yours to revel in shrill denunciation at the expense of your children, let us exchange our kingdom for the exile of our cousins, and go to the wilderness, where happily friends are ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore

... in review, there came, in its turn, the First Maryland Regiment headed by its drum corps of thirty drums rolling in martial time. Next came the First Virginia Regiment with its superb band playing the "Mocking-Bird," the shrill strains of the cornet, high above the volume of the music, pouring forth in exquisite clearness the notes of the bird. Scarcely had this melody passed out of hearing when there came marching by, in gallant style, the four batteries of the Washington ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore

... fighter," said Davis in his shrill, piercing tones, "it's a pity that you became an ordinary sailor, you would have been a splendid pirate. ...
— The Corsair King • Mor Jokai

... Priscilla who discovered the cookies and sent a squeal of delight across the meadow. But even then the workers did not pause. Priscilla had to dance out across the mown grass and squeal again and wave both hands, a cooky in one, a cup in the other, and add a shrill little yelp, "Come on! Come on, peoples! You don't know what we've got here," before they straggled over to what ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist

... on the end of a log. As she seated herself Jo Severance rose and came forward demurely. Jo was an accomplished elocutionist, and a born mimic. Assuming a timid, shrinking demeanor, and speaking in a high, shrill voice, she piped, ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey

... his great arms over his head, and twice there rolled out of his chest deep peals of strange laughter. They had been traveling more than two hours when he gave voice to a sudden command that stopped the pack, and at a second command—a staccato of shrill Eskimo accompanied by the lash of his whip—the panting wolves sank upon their bellies ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood

... "Hue-e-e!" a shrill woman's voice laughed. "Hit's Rasba, the Riveh Prophet Rasba! Did yo' all git to catch Nelia ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears

... voices, and even then the sounds were rendered almost indistinct by the riotous uproar. Sigurd, however, who knew all the ins and outs of the place, sprang lightly on a jutting crag, and, putting both hands to his mouth, uttered a peculiar, shrill, and far-reaching cry. Clear above the turmoil of the restless waters, that cry was echoed back eight distinct times from the surrounding rocks and hills. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... dishevelled black hair, and hands so scarred, so deformed by labour and neglect, as to be scarcely human. She had the darkest and fiercest eyes I ever saw. Between her and her mistress went on an unceasing quarrel: they quarrelled in my room, in the corridor, and, as I knew by their shrill voices, in places remote; yet I am sure they did not dislike each other, and probably neither of them ever thought of parting. Unexpectedly, one evening, this woman entered, stood by the bedside, and began to talk with such fierce energy, ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... a bugle to his mouth, And blew so loud and shrill, The trees in greenwood shook thereat, Sae loud rang ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton

... a dream; the telegram, the hurried preparations for departure, the swift journey to the station with Nyoda and the return to Carver House without her. Sahwah was still piecing together the events of the night before when the shrill ring sounded through the house again. It was the front doorbell. Sahwah jumped up and threw on her bathrobe ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey

... into the most dismal bray ever heard—a long-drawn misery-haunted appeal for help, which was prolonged in the most astounding way till it seemed to be a shrill cry. ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... top and sides of head delicate bluish-ash; no eye-ring, no wing-bars. There is no other warbler marked quite like that. And yet its song is its most conspicuous mark, so to speak, for it is a loud, shrill, and very rapidly repeated run, which might be spelled out in this way: "Chippy, chippy, chippy, chippity-chippity-chippity." The whole song is emitted at a galloping pace, giving you the impression that the bird is in a desperate hurry. Important business on hand, ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser

... hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd bat, With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... you a fresh one," he said, and he took a new and shining one from the box. Freddie blew it, making a shrill sound. ...
— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope

... to one bank, sometimes to the other, we could hear the cooing of pigeons, the shrill call of peahens, and the notes of many song birds; above which rose the chattering of troops of monkeys, while parrots and other gaily-coloured birds flew from bough to bough. The monkeys occasionally showed themselves, leaping along the branches, ...
— The Mate of the Lily - Notes from Harry Musgrave's Log Book • W. H. G. Kingston

... well as our eyes. Such a mingling of bird voices! The "spring o' th' year" of the meadow larks and the mingled squeaks and music of the robins are brought up by the wind from the river bottom, and the shrill clear "phe-be" of the chickadee is one of the prettiest sounds now, just as it was in February. Pretty soon a bevy of them come flitting and talking along, like a girl botany class on the search. Before they have passed out of sight the loud and prolonged "O-wick-o-wick-o-wick-o-wick" ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... not happen, however. Ellen's sleep was much too deep to be easily disturbed. The tea-bell itself, loud and shrill as it was, did not even make her eyelids tremble. After Mrs. and Miss Dunscombe were gone down, Timmins employed herself a little while in putting all things about the room to rights; and then sat down to take her rest, dividing her ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... eyes, their utmost merit is not squinting—for her teeth, where there is one of ivory, its neighbour is pure ebony, black and white alternately, just like the keys of a harpsichord. Then, as to her singing, and heavenly voice—by this hand, she has a shrill, cracked pipe, that sounds for all the world like ...
— The Duenna • Richard Brinsley Sheridan

... are not the great, stagnant, bull-paddocks, fat and coarse-noted like Parson, but clear-water frogs, green, lively, and sweet-voiced. I passed their orchestra going home the other evening, with a small lad, and they were at it, all parts, ten thousand peeps, shrill, ear-piercing, and incessant, coming up from every quarter, accompanied by a second, from some larger swimmer with his trombone, and broken in upon, every now and then, but not discordantly, with the loud, quick hallo, that resembles the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... mirth, thou pretty bird, rejoice Thy Maker's praise enhanced; Lift up thy shrill and pleasant voice, Thy God is high advanced! Thy food before He did provide, And gives it in a fitting side, Wherewith be thou sufficed! Why shouldst thou now unpleasant be, Thy wrath against God venting, That He a little bird made thee, Thy silly head tormenting, Because He made thee not a man? ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather

... it was full of trees covered with blossoms, the soil overgrown with the softest and greenest grass, extending for many miles around, and echoing with the sweet notes of winged warblers. And it resounded with the notes of the male Kokila and of the shrill cicala. And it was full of magnificent trees with outstretched branches forming a shady canopy overhead. And the bees hovered over flowery creepers all around. And there were beautiful bowers in every place. And there was no tree without fruits, none that had prickles on it, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)

... the sky blown all clear of clouds and the wind piped shrill behind them, and the great waves rose and fell about them, and the sun glittered on them in many colours. Fast flew the boat before the wind as though it would never stop, and the day was waning, and the wind still rising; and now the Isle of Ransom uphove huge before ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris

... I never saw this woman before, Which hither with him this gentleman brought, Yet nevertheless I have tokens in store, To judge of a woman that is forward and naught. The tip of her nose is as sharp as mine, Her tongue and her tune[321] is very shrill; I warrant her she comes of an ungracious kin, And loveth too much her pleasure and will: What though she be now so neat and so nice, And speaketh as gentle as ever I heard: Yet young men, which be both witty and wise, Such looks and ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley

... that I've had me fill," declared Jimmie, getting to his feet to step over to the boat; but he had not gone five paces than Jack heard him give a shrill yell, as though he had stepped on a rattlesnake or been jumped on by some hungry wildcat that had been concealed among the dense branches of the live oak tree under ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel

... life is concerned. There are dogs basking on doorsteps, larger dogs rambling with idleness in the slow sway of their tails, and overhead black swifts (whose nests are in the roofs of the higher houses) dash to and fro, uttering their shrill screech. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... a startled murmur from the grandstand. Buster snorted and turned. Without moving, Judith gave a shrill whistle. Buster wheeled and came back to his first position, where he stood trembling. On came Sioux, his hoofs rocking the echoes, and with every apparent intention of goring his mistress. But ten feet from Judith he pulled up with a jerk and with stiffened ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie

... ringing gaily into the sunshine. From a long way off, he discerned the brazen tones of a band, the chanting of priests and townspeople, shrill voices of women. The pageant came in sight—winding its way through the multitudes under the beflagged arches of greenery, while a rain of flowers descended from windows and balconies overhead. Clusters of children went ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... him. "Jus' you stay h'yar one little minute," she said, hurriedly. "I got one word to say to you, sah." And she stood up before him as erect as she could, fixing her great spectacles directly upon him. "You look out, sah, fur ole miss," she said, in a voice, naturally shrill, but now heavily handicapped by age and emotion, "ole Miss Keswick, I means. She boun' to do you harm, sah. She tole me ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton

... Russia, hail! Steeds as tempests flying, Howling of the distant wolves, Eagles high, shrill crying! Hail, my Russia, hail! Hail high! Hail thy green forests proud, Hail thy silvery nightingales, Hail Steppes and wind ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi

... above, the sharp challenge and reply of the guard, the shrill reveille of the bugle, and the quick throbbing of the drums calling to arms is heard. The men turn out with alacrity, and are soon seen, in the grey dawn, running from their several billets to headquarters, ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow

... the farmer's boy from round the hill Whistles a snatch that seeks his soul unsought, And fills some time with tune, howbeit shrill; The cricket tells straight on his simple thought — Nay, 'tis the cricket's way of being still; The peddler bee drones in, and gossips naught; Far down the wood, a one-desiring dove Times me the beating of the heart of love: And these be all ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... the electric cars. I might as well be on them, since I have to hear their buzz and clang both day and night from our rooms here in the hotel. The other morning, as I was returning from a ride across the river to Council Bluffs, I heard the shrill notes of a calliope that reminded me that Forepaugh's circus was to be in town that day, and that I had promised to go to the afternoon performance with a party of friends. But soon there were other sounds and other thoughts. Above the noise of the car I heard a brass ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... and honoured friend. In Praeterita, in his diaries and letters, in his familiar and unconsidered utterances, he is perfectly delightful, conscious of his own waywardness and whimsicality; but when he lectures and dictates, he is like a man blowing wild blasts upon a shrill trumpet. Then Carlyle—his big books, his great tawdry, smoky pictures of scenes, his loud and clumsy moralisations, his perpetual thrusting of himself into the foreground, like some obstreperous showman; he wearies and dizzies my brain with his raucous clamour, his uncouth convolutions. ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... as the eye could reach, a thin stream of white and pink and blue, a tumbling river of curls and caps and bare legs, were the children. A babble of shrill cries, of chattering laughter, of fretful screams, an undercurrent of remonstrance, of soothing patience, of angry threatening, marked their slow progress up and down the walk; in the clear spaces of the little park they trotted freely after hoops and balls, rolled and ran over the green, and ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... entirely passed away, that the shrill trumpet was mild in the distance, and the tail of the last horse was hopelessly round the corner, the people who had come out of the church to stare at it, went back again. But one old lady, kneeling on the pavement within, near ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... recoiled and against which he continued to protest. On his passage through the turbulence of his time he reminds us of one of those fatal shells which rend the air as they shoot, distinct even through the roar of battle by their swift, shrill anguish and effecting ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... to be a thunderous cloud of dust, from the midst of which came strange, shrill sounds, punctuated with sharp cries, that did not appear ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster

... the front of her brood, and in the face of circumstances, succeeds, by her courage, in putting her enemy to flight; in like manner you will always, I think, find your wife (if that lady be good for twopence) shrill, eager, and ill-humored, before, and during a great family move of this nature. Well, the swindling hackney-coachmen are paid, the mother leading on her regiment of little ones, and supported by her auxiliary nurse-maids, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... wonder to see with what kind of colour it will appear again. For the Husband catechizes his Wife with such a loud voice, that it is generally heard through the whole neighbourhood; and the Wife, to vindicate her innocency, lets fly at him again with such a shrill note, as if she had gone to school to learn it in Drury Lane, or Turnball street. And it is a wonder that the first Chyrurgian is not sent for to cure this Woman of her ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh

... which the other, with loud conviction: "Yes, and always will be, thank Gawd!" This ended the talk. But the last speaker, turning round, saw her two-year-old daughter asprawl in the garden, and with sudden change from satisfied drawl to shrill exasperation, "Git up out of all that muck, you dirty little devil," she said. For she was a cleanly woman, proud of her children, and disliking to ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... ranks closed in on her; a shrill roar rose from them, but the soldiers and sailors, cheering and laughing, broke into the enraged ranks, tearing off red rosettes, cuffing and kicking the infuriated Terrorists, seizing every seditious banner, flag, emblem and ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... shouted out a shrill small voice from the card-table. "Oh, grandmamma, do have one of my lives. Look! I've got ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope

... churlishness we are trying to temper by an ostentation of confidence. Ridiculous as this spectacle is at all seasons, it is never more so than in that bleak interval between sunset and dark, when the shrill scream of the factory whistle seems to have concentrated all the hard, unsympathetic quality of the climate into one vocal expression. Add to this the appearance of one or two pedestrians, manifestly too late for their dinners, and tasting in the shrewish air a bitter premonition ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte

... thus Quaking with dread resum'd, "or Tuscan spirits Or Lombard, I will cause them to appear. Meantime let these ill talons bate their fury, So that no vengeance they may fear from them, And I, remaining in this self-same place, Will for myself but one, make sev'n appear, When my shrill whistle shall be heard; for so Our custom is to ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... the tone with which one speaks. For, in speaking, the voice of every man is sometimes more grave in the sound, and at other times more acute or shrill."—Beattie's Moral Science, p. 25. "Accent is the tone of the voice with which a syllable is pronounced."—Dr. Adam's Latin and English ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... echoed Mrs. Chatterton, in shrill disdain. "Stuff and nonsense," and she put her head back for an unpleasant cackle; it could hardly be called a laugh. "What an idiot the man is to have the wool pulled over his eyes in this fashion. I'll tell you, Polly"—and she raised herself up on her elbow, the soft lace ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney

... scoundrel that had wrecked her life? Where was he? Dumfounded, I managed to bow politely enough, but my stupefaction was covered by Judith rushing across the room and uttering a strange sound which resolved itself into a shrill, hysterical laugh as she reached the door which she opened and slammed behind her. I heard her scream hysterically in the passage; then the slam of another door; and the silence told me that she had shut herself ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... scarcely a wreck to be seen," went straight home to the people of the North. It gave eloquent expression to the strong but undefined feeling in the popular mind. It found its way into every house and was read everywhere; it took its place in the school books, to be repeated by shrill boy voices, and became part of the literature and of the intellectual life of the country. In those solemn sentences men read the description of what the United States had come to be under the Constitution, and what American ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... amongst the hill shadows upon the other side of the river there had risen a high shrill whimpering, rising and swelling, to end ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... say all? No, one little frog failed to hear his mother's voice and, piping in his little shrill tone: "Who's afraid! Who's afraid! Who's afraid!" he swam straight on. Suddenly one of his hind legs got tangled among the weeds at the bottom of the pond; and, though he pulled and jerked with all his little might, he could not free himself. At last, after a long ...
— A Kindergarten Story Book • Jane L. Hoxie

... of the latter, and exploiting everything for our sake. They are counterfeits of animate beings, capable of giving inert substances a regular functioning. Their skeleton of iron, organs of steel, muscles of leather, soul of fire, panting or smoking breath, rhythm of movement—sometimes even the shrill or plaintive cries expressing effort or simulating pain:—all that contributes to give them a fantastic likeness to life—a specter and dream ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... sniggered Mrs. Royle, her voice rising shrill above the din. "Oh, save us if we didn't all ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... reigned throughout the little kingdom. Silence brooded over all, save now and then when some vocal nose, informed by murky visions of the night, brayed out its stertorous tale to the unheeding air. At times a shrill, sharp pipe, screaming with gusts of horror, split my unexpectant ear. With this wrangled fitfully the cracked clarionet of some peevish brother. Ever and anon some vast nostril, punctually thundering, hurled forth the relentless growl ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... these men that slay consuls and destroy armies?" piped the shrill voice of an aged cripple who had struggled up from where he sat upon the steps of Castor, and was shaking the stump of a wrist toward ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne

... such as infuriated her visitor, so that vulgarity and violence were under no restraint, and whether all self-command was lost in passion, or whether there was an idea that bullying might gain the day, Mrs. Morton's voice rose into a shrill scream as she denounced the nasty, mean-spirited ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge

... heaven's cold axletree. Aurora, whither slid'st thou? down again! And birds for[204] Memnon yearly shall be slain. Now in her tender arms I sweetly bide, If ever, now well lies she by my side. The air is cold, and sleep is sweetest now, And birds send forth shrill notes from every bough. Whither runn'st thou, that men and women love not? Hold in thy rosy horses that they move not. 10 Ere thou rise, stars teach seamen where to sail, But when thou com'st, they of ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... himself by teasing her, to see how she 'd stand it, and caused Polly much anguish of spirit, for she never knew where he would take her next. He bounced out at her from behind doors, booed at her in dark entries, clutched her feet as she went up stairs, startled her by shrill whistles right in her ear, or sudden tweaks of the hair as he passed her in the street; and as sure as there was company to dinner, he fixed his round eyes on her, and never took them off till she was reduced to a piteous state of confusion and distress. She used ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott

... can scarcely be imagined. The thoughts of a veteran who had served his country during many long years of war and strife, must have wandered back to past scenes and by-gone days, while he stood in that solitary wilderness; and when the wild shrill cry of savage grief came floating upon his ears, he must have felt most deeply those ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... one. She recognised it as belonging to Charley Jarvis, a friend of her sister. The next instant she heard a window thrown up, and a shrill whistle sounded out on the snowy air. Peering cautiously out of the window where she stood watching for the carriage, she saw another acquaintance, Phil Bently, look up and wave his hand in response to the whistle. ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston

... that paper stuck to the fingers like feathers, and the nails tingled with frost. The white earth creaked under foot, and when a sled went by the snow cried out in shrill long resistance, a spirit complaining of being trampled. Explosions came from the river, and elm limbs and timbers of the house startled us. White fur clothed the inner key holes. Tree trunks were black as ink against a background of snow. The oaks alone kept their dried foliage, which rattled ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... whole stage glitters with the array of warriors and the pomp of arms. The ancient city of Cordova was the place appointed by the sovereigns for the assemblage of the troops; and early in the spring of 1486 the fair valley of the Guadalquivir resounded with the shrill blast of trumpet and the impatient neighing of the war-horse. In this splendid era of Spanish chivalry there was a rivalship among the nobles who most should distinguish himself by the splendor of his appearance and the number and equipments of his feudal followers. Every day beheld some cavalier ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving

... in and only about a couple of inches remained visible above the surface; and then Ram Lal thought of coming back. He was kneeling still. He tried to stand up, gave out a shrill cry for help ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji

... was so—Tragedy was ill at ease. She had called in low comedy and rant to please the foolish, only to find herself infected and degraded by their company. Moreover, the bustle of incident, the abrupt changes from grave to gay and to grave again, jangled her sad majestic harmonies with shrill interrupting discords. It had not been so in Greece. It had not been so even in Italy, where Roman Seneca, fearing the least decline to a lower plane of dignity and impressiveness, had disciplined tragedy by an imposition of artificial but not unskilful restraints. In place of the strong ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... seems to have chosen Strabo Caesar for his model; from whose oration in behalf of the Sardinians he has transcribed some passages literally into his Divination. In his delivery he is said to have had a shrill voice, and his action was animated, but not ungraceful. He has left behind him some speeches, among which are ranked a few that are not genuine, such as that on behalf of Quintus Metellus. These Augustus supposes, with reason, to be rather the production ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... watch, they would have been dashed upon a ledge of rock had it not been for a cricket which a soldier had brought on board. When the little insect scented the land, it broke its long silence by a shrill note, and thus warned ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... to always sit with beaks upturned, so that the upper part of the neck keeps the hole covered. The Chataka is incapable of slaking its thirst in a lake or river, for it cannot bend its neck down. Rain water is what it must drink. Its cry is shrill and sharp but not without sweetness. 'Phate-e-ek-jal' is supposed to be the cry uttered by it. When the Chataka cries, the hearers expect rain. Eager expectation with respect to anything is always compared to the Chataka's expectation of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... to their men-folk, their shrill accents mingling with the rougher ones. Some of them clutched small children to their breasts, others dragged older ones at their skirts, and it was terrible to hear the cries of frightened children through the shouts of vengeance ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... the little panes at the sides of the roof, he could see that they were women; and by and by he saw that two of them were the saucy girls who had driven him from his seat in the Common that day, and laughed so at him. They knew him too, and one of them set up a shrill laugh. "Hello, Johnny! That you? You don't say so? What you up for this time? Going down to the Island? Well, give us a call there! Do be sociable! Ward 11's the address." The other one laughed, and then swore at the first for trying to push her ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... stealing downward, and Nature was roused from her midday lethargy. It was the vibrant, active hour when odors are freshest and spirits rise. The forest was noisy with the cry of birds, and flocks of shrill-voiced paroquets raised an uproar in the tallest trees. The dense canopy of green overhead was alive with fluttering wings; the groves echoed to the cries of all the loud-voiced thicket denizens. The pastured cattle, which had sauntered forth from shaded nooks, ceased their grazing to stare ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach

... population, which overflows from the adjacent Spanish provinces and swarms in the crooked streets. It lounges all day in the public places, sprawls upon the curbstones, clings to the face of the cliffs, and vociferates continually in a shrill, strange tongue, which has no discoverable affinity with any other. The Basques look like the hardier and thriftier Neapolitan lazzaroni; if the superficial resemblance is striking, the difference is very much in their favor. Although those specimens which I observed at Biarritz ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... tattered monad, called a poet; And with shrill voice ecstatic thus he sang: "Oh, the little female monad's lips! Oh, the little female monad's eyes! Ah, the ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers

... and the nearness of the high downs standing over it on either side, with, at some points, the memorials of antiquity carved on their smooth surfaces, the barrows and lynchetts or terraces, and the vast green earth-works crowning their summit. Up here on the turf, even with the lark singing his shrill music in the blue heavens, you are with the prehistoric dead, yourself for the time one of that innumerable, unsubstantial multitude, invisible in the sun, so that the sheep travelling as they graze, and the shepherd following them, pass through their ranks without suspecting ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson

... her father's comfort. As a matter of fact, she was just the opposite, and Simon often wished that his daughter had departed to a better world in company with her mother. Thin, tight-laced, with a shrill voice and an acidulated temper, Miss Twexby was still a spinster, and not even the fact of her being an heiress could tempt any of the Ballarat youth to lead her to the altar. Consequently Miss Twexby's temper was not a golden one, and she ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume

... they seized the little winds, That sounded over the hill, And each put a horn into his mouth, And blew so sharp and shrill! ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester

... as a dove, full of piety and innocence and pure thoughts, my Soul brooded unaffectedly within me—I was only half listening to that shrill conversation. And I began to wonder, as more than once in little moments like this of self-esteem I have wondered, whether I might not claim to be something more, after all, than a mere echo or compilation—might not claim in fact to ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith

... officer carried a large umbrella of green and yellow silks in alternate stripes. He was accompanied by the officers of his palace, and his guard, beautifully mounted, and followed by the native population of Sennaar, both men and women, who uttered shrill cries, which were now and then interrupted by the sound of a most lugubrious trumpet which preceded the Sultan, and which was blown by a musician who, judging from the tones he produced, seemed to be afflicted ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English

... Obedient all, lean'd trembling to that part Where first the holy mountain casts his shade, Yet were not so disordered, but that still Upon their top the feathered quiristers Applied their wonted art, and with full joy Welcomed those hours of prime, and warbled shrill Amid the leaves that to their jocund lays Kept tenour; even as from branch to branch Along the piny forests on the shore Of Chiassi rolls the gathering melody When Eolus hath from his cavern loosed ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton

... in expression; his walk was heavy and unmajestic; his person greatly neglected; his hair, whatever might be the skill of his hairdresser, was soon in disorder. His voice, without being harsh, was not agreeable; if he grew animated in speaking he often got above his natural pitch, and became shrill. The Abbe de Radonvilliers, his preceptor, one of the Forty of the French Academy, a learned and amiable man, had given him and Monsieur a taste for study. The King had continued to instruct himself; ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan

... forward at the same pace. It was a characteristic of the railway now and later, to appear in all sorts of unlikely places, and it was quite a common experience to be awakened two or three days after our arrival in some remote spot, by the shrill whistle of a locomotive. ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... which has been lurking growling about then sits down in the forest and bursts, wrapping us up in a lively kind of fog, with its thunder, lightning, and rain. It was impossible to hear, or make one's self heard at the distance of even a few paces, because of the shrill squeal of the wind, the roar of the thunder, and the rush of the rain on the trees round us. It was not like having a storm burst over you in the least; you felt you were in the middle of its engine-room when it had broken ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... they press: None for the virgin nymph; for she Seems with the flowers a flower to be. And think so still! though not compare With breath so sweet, or cheek so fair! Well shot, ye firemen! Oh, how sweet And round your equal fires do meet, Whose shrill report no ear can tell, But echoes to the eye and smell! See how the flowers, as at parade, Under their colours stand displayed; Each regiment in order grows, That of the tulip, pink and rose. But when the vigilant patrol Of stars walk round ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell

... Arches to Rose Town— Rose Town on the top of the hill; For the Summer wind blows and music goes, And the violins sound shrill. ...
— Marigold Garden • Kate Greenaway

... family, namely the Acridiidae or grasshoppers, the stridulation is produced in a very different manner, and according to Dr. Scudder, is not so shrill as in the preceding Families. The inner surface of the femur (Fig. 14, r) is furnished with a longitudinal row of minute, elegant, lancet-shaped, elastic teeth, from 85 to 93 in number (40. Landois, ibid. s. 113.); and ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... wind swayed the branches; the sound of women's voices came from behind a clump of evergreens; they were raised in surprise or excitement, and sounded shrill and jarring. In the distance a nurse pushed a basket-carriage carelessly; she was talking to a workman who slouched beside her, and the child was crying. Two sparrows near at hand, quarreled and fought over a bit ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... says Killam, his voice sort of shrill and quivery. "I have one of the logs loose. Now pry here with your picks, everybody. Together, now! It's coming! Once more! There! Now the next one above. Oh, put your weight on it, Mr. Ellins. Get a fresh hold. Try her now. It's giving! Again. Harder. Look out for your toes! ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford

... tired, and thirsty, but still determined to make the prize his own. At length night, and darkness with it, came; the stag could be seen no more, the dogs, too, were at fault, and the scent was lost. Disappointed, and spent with the labour of the chase, the huntsman blew a shrill blast on his horn to call the dogs to him, and faced for home across the hills. But there was a voice that, loud and clear, called upon him—"O'Sullivan, O'Sullivan, turn back!" Brave and fearless, like his ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger

... the Boers instantly (they were very weak) and saved both time and lives. Instead of this, however, it is thought more advisable to keep every one standing still in order to afford a more satisfactory test of Boer marksmanship. It is very irksome. The air seems full of the little shrill-voiced messengers. Our ponies wince and shiver; they know perfectly well what the sound means. At last the fact that the hills are held is revealed to the sagacity of our commanders, and we are moved aside and the guns once ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps

... practise drew nigh, and Sydney gave his attention to it. Reardon, the second eleven quarter, sang his signals in a queer, shrill voice that was irresistibly funny. In front of Sydney he raised himself, wiped his palms on his stained trousers, grimaced at one of the halves, and ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour

... said Marcella, patiently mopping. It was three o'clock: the shrill hum of mosquitoes made them afraid to put out the light, since they had no mosquito nets. After a while they stood by the window watching the water running along the street as ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... somewhat shrill voice of Frau Kastenmayr, who felt jealous in her brother's behalf at hearing Barbara whispering with the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... him by his voice so hoarse, By his paws so hairy and black and coarse." And the goslings piped up, clear and shrill, "We'll take great care, ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various

... Some of the women turned pale and clung to each other. Helga arose, her beautiful face shining like a star, and left their ranks and came over and seated herself on Leif's foot-stool, though the voice of Thorhild rose high and shrill in scolding. Leif's men straightened themselves alertly, and fixed upon their master the eyes of expectant dogs. Thorwald hurried to his brother, and laid hands on his shoulders, and endeavored to argue ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... desire to rush upon him in a body, so that he had to keep a sharp look out all round him. When, therefore, Dick entered the tent Crusoe endeavoured to do so along with him, but he was met by a blow on the nose from an old squaw, who scolded him in a shrill voice and ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne

... for days without securing his game. When the troop is grazing, a sentinel is always appointed, who stands on the watch sniffing the air. At the least approach of danger the careful sentinel gives a shrill whistling signal of warning, and instantly the troop is filing off between the rocks and along the chasms, where no human foot could follow, all whistling together as they march. The only chance of the hunter to escape detection by these watchful creatures is to approach ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... trophies the boys reluctantly started for home. They stood in the road in front of The Chief's gate, and the moon shone down on seven happy, manly boys. The three cheers to The Chief arose clear and shrill on the still evening air. As it died away the boys seemed to melt into the shadows ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw

... diamonds to throw them from me, but I couldn't—I just couldn't! I jumped the fence where the gate was low, and with that whistle flying shrill and shriller after me I ran ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson

... a chatterbox you're getting to be, Unc," remarked the Magician, who was pleased with the compliment. But just then there came a scratching at the back door and a shrill voice cried: ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... way into a church already so packed with people that a pin could scarcely drop, and about a pie which turned out to be no other than this same superintendent himself. The old people laughed till the tears rolled down their cheeks. They had exactly the same shrill laugh and both went red in the face from the effort. Paklin noticed that people of the Subotchev type usually went into fits of laughter over quotations from Gogol, but as his object at the present moment was not so much in amusing them as in showing ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev

... my horror were still strong enough to give a shrill and piercing tone to my voice. The chasm and the rocks loudened and reverberated my accents ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown

... school," as the mountaineers characterize a school in which the pupils study aloud, and the droning chorus as shrill as locust cries ceased suddenly when Chad came in, and every eye was turned on him with a sexless gaze of curiosity that made his face redden and his heart throb. But he forgot them when the school-master pierced ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox

... Sing, birds, in every furrow; And from each hill, let music shrill Give my fair Love good-morrow! Blackbird and thrush in every bush, Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow, You pretty elves, amongst yourselves Sing my fair Love good-morrow; To give my Love good-morrow Sing, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... XXXIV They, neighing shrill, down narrow paths repair, With lusty leaps; and lighting on the plain, Uplift the croup, like coursers as they are, Some bay, some roan, and some of dapple stain. The crowds that waiting in the valleys were, Layed hands on them, and seized them by the rein. Thus in a ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... hands so scarred, so deformed by labour and neglect, as to be scarcely human. She had the darkest and fiercest eyes I ever saw. Between her and her mistress went on an unceasing quarrel: they quarrelled in my room, in the corridor, and, as I knew by their shrill voices, in places remote; yet I am sure they did not dislike each other, and probably neither of them ever thought of parting. Unexpectedly, one evening, this woman entered, stood by the bedside, and began to talk with such fierce energy, with such flashing of her black eyes, ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... I had it before I knew that a hand was up. I should have fancied that I had run athwart a tree, but for the recollection, as I was reeling to the ground, of a hulk of a fellow suddenly fronting me, and he did not hesitate with his fist. I went over and over into a heathery hollow. The wind sang shrill through the furzes; nothing was visible but black clumps, black cloud. Astonished though I was, and shaken, it flashed through me that this was not the attack of a highwayman. He calls upon you to stand and deliver: it is a foe that hits without warning. The blow took me on the forehead, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... hesitating, the creature gave another of its alarming growls. Hardly thinking what he was doing, Billy, startled by a shrill caterwaul, which followed the growl, flung his lighted torch full at the eyes, and heard a screech that sounded as if his blazing missile had ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton

... he spoke of my grandfather, grew suddenly shrill and discordant, while his eyes blazed up in furious wrath. In a second or two, however, he calmed himself again and went on ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... prominent in the republican party until a later administration, being elected representative in 1799. He was a descendant of Pocahontas, of which fact he often boasted, and was noted for his keen retorts, reckless wit, and skill in debate. His tall, slender, and cadaverous form, his shrill and piping voice, and his long, skinny fingers—pointing toward the object of his invective—made him a conspicuous speaker. For thirty years, says Benton, he was the "political meteor" ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.

... hardly moves an inch an hour. The jack and chimney, near allied, Had never left each other's side: The chimney to a steeple grown, The jack would not be left alone; But up against the steeple reared, Became a clock, and still adhered; And still its love to household cares By a shrill voice at noon declares, Warning the cook-maid not to burn That roast meat which it cannot turn; The groaning chair began to crawl, Like a huge snail, along the wall; There stuck aloft in public view, And with small change, a pulpit grew. A bedstead ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... diminishing to any extent. As we advanced, the sounds we had at first heard so indistinctly increased; and Kanimapo told us that they were produced by birds, which had taken up their abode in the cavern in thousands. The shrill and piercing cries of these denizens of the cavern, striking on the vaulted rock, were repeated by the subterranean echoes till they created such a wild din as is difficult to describe. Well might an ignorant native, entering for the first time, have supposed that they were the shrieks ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston

... flutes in rapid succession, now produced yet a fourth from the seemingly inexhaustible depths of his baggy white pants—a flute with a string and a bent pin affixed to it—and, secretly hooking the pin in the tail of the cross ringmaster's coat, was thereafter enabled to toot sharp shrill blasts at frequent intervals, much to the chagrin of the ringmaster, who seemed utterly unable to discover the whereabouts of the instrument ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... and declaring that Babie would be convinced that fairies came out on Sunday, then crossed the river and were beginning to ascend the path when a volley of sounds broke on them, a shrill yap giving the alarm, louder notes joining in, and the bass being supplied by a formidable deep-mouthed bark, as out of the farmyard- gate dashed little terrier, curly spaniel, slim greyhounds, surly sheep-dog of the old tailless sort, and big and mighty Newfoundland, and there they stood in ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... settled in 1620. 620 will indicate it. We find these figures in "{Ch}a{n}{c}e," which by Concurrence describes the risk they ran. The Telephone was invented in 1877. Whoever has listened to the telephone to identify a speaker, and heard others talking in the shrill tones that strike upon the ear, is apt to think of the cackling of hens, and "{C}a{ck}le" ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)

... friend," exclaimed the archduke, in a loud, shrill voice; "he deceived me most shamefully. All the army contracts had been intrusted to him, and he assured me he had filled them in the most conscientious manner. I believed him, and it is only now that I find out that he has shamefully deceived me and his emperor. All his bills for the supplies ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach

... had been arranged, and both sides had been ordered to suspend hostilities till instructions came from the governments. The truce, it may be added, was only an excuse to enable both sides to complete preparations for the war. In a few weeks ball and bomb were again singing their shrill ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... a loud shout from Scroope, who was looking for me, reinforced by a shrill cry uttered by Miss Manners, banished every pigeon within half a mile, a fact of which I was not sorry, since who knows whether I should have it all, or any, of the ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard

... this became even more marked. My thoughts had recoiled from the present to the past. Vague pictures of the days that had gone by seemed floating before my eyes. I saw myself in the convent garden, with all my little world enclosed in those four walls, and I heard the shrill laughter of the girls with whom I was walking, and I even fancied that I could catch the perfume of the lilac trees which drooped over the smoothly kept lawn. And then the picture faded away, and from the vessel's side I saw Cruta, a purple-topped ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... in every brake, Where forests teem with deer, Where glide the fish through every lake, One chase from year to year! With spirits now he feasts above; All left us, to revere The deeds we cherish with our love, The rest we bury here. Here bring the last gifts, loud and shrill Wail death-dirge of the brave What pleased him most in life may still Give pleasure in the grave. We lay the axe beneath his head He swung when strength was strong, The bear on which his hunger fed— The way from earth is long! And here, new-sharpened, place the knife Which severed from the ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow

... writes:—"Richard Lalor Shiel forms one of the many examples history presents of splendid oratorical powers clogged by insuperable natural defects. His person was diminutive and wholly devoid of dignity. His voice shrill, harsh, and often rising to a positive shriek. His action, when most natural, violent, without gracefulness, and ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan

... their dinner when some commotion was heard in the narrow street outside. Then with much tooting of horns and the shrill shouting of directions from the bystanders, two heavily laden touring cars turned slowly into the cobbled courtyard, and drew up within a few feet of the semicircular line of tables. Mannering's little party watched the ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Comp. Odyssey, iv. 566: "The deathless gods will convey thee to the Elysian plain and the world's end ... where life is easiest for men. No snow is there, nor yet great storm, nor any rain; but always ocean sendeth forth the breeze of the shrill west to blow cool on men": see also l. 14. 'Clime,' radically the same as climate, is still used in its literal sense a region of the earth; while 'climate' has the secondary meaning of 'atmospheric conditions.' ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... circles, first narrow, then wide, and wider extending, till at last they soared far above the tallest tree-tops and launching out in the high regions of the air, uttered from time to time a wild shrill scream, or hollow booming sound, as they suddenly descended to pounce with wide-extended throat upon some hapless moth or insect, that sported all unheeding in mid air, happily unconscious of the approach of so ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... comradeship, the quick beat of the hearts that remember, the tenderness of those who think upon old sorrows,—all these make the day a lovelier and a sadder festival. So men's hearts were stirred, they knew not why, when they heard the shrill fife and the incessant drum along the quiet Barlow road, and saw the handful of old soldiers marching by. Nobody thought of them as familiar men and neighbors alone,—they were a part of that army which ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... the slow, sweeping bows, and retreats and advances, To curtsies brushing the waxen floor as the Court dances. Long and peaceful like warm Summer nights When stars shine in the quiet river. And against the lights Blundering insects knock, And the 'Rathaus' clock Booms twice, through the shrill sounds Of flutes and horns in the lamplit grounds. Pressed against him in the mazy wavering Of a country dance, with her short breath quavering She leans upon the beating, throbbing Music. Laughing, sobbing, Feet gliding after sliding feet; His—hers— The ballroom blurs— She ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell

... and more clearly, that I had always been aware of the Gods and conscious of their omnipresence. It seemed plain to me that Zeus, whose haunt is dark Dodona, lorded it over the English skies and was to be heard in the thunder crashing over the elms of Middlesex. I knew Athene in the shrill wind which battled through the vanes and chimneys of our schoolhouse. Artemis was Lady of my country. By Apollo's light might I too come to be led. Poseidon of the dark locks girdled my native seas. I had had ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... all the dangers, the ebb-tide very soon carried us out of the river into Hanover Bay. In passing the easternmost of the outer isles, the shrill voices of natives were heard calling to us, and Bundell returned their shout, but it was some time before we could discern them on account of the very rugged nature of the island: at last three Indians were ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... this before Mr. Pearce gave a shrill whistle, which caused Jack to return to his side, wondering ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood

... the hunter reply. He strode on and on and they watched him climbing up and up the mountainside till he was lost to view. At last he gained the rim of the nest and looked in. The old birds were away, but the fierce young eagles greeted him with shrill cries and fiery, flashing eyes. The hunter's heart was full of anger and he quickly bent his bow, loosing the war arrows one after another till the last one of the hateful birds lay ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss

... couldn't I have been the one to fall and hurt my back?" wailed the shrill voice from the open window. "'Twouldn't have made so much difference then, but Peace!—O, Grandpa, I can't bear to think of her lying there all the ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown

... ringing of this shrill bell Rose shuddered like a maniac, and grovelled on her knees to Raynal, and seized his very knees and implored ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade

... corners of her nose and her shoulders drooped a little. When the summer returned for the sixth time, she was taking iron. In the seventh she went to a watering-place. In the eighth she suffered from tooth-ache and her nerves were out of order. Her hair had lost its gloss, her voice had grown shrill, her nose was covered with little black specks; she had lost her figure, dragged her feet, and her cheeks were hollow. In the winter she had an attack of nervous fever, and her hair had to be cut off. When it ...
— Married • August Strindberg

... are exhausted, and then the regular beating of their feet on the floor can be heard at a considerable distance, with a dull, monotonous sound, varied only by the hum of voices or noise of laughter or the shrill notes of the musical instruments. These are the banjo and accordion, the former being the favorite, perhaps because it is more intimately associated with the social traditions of the negroes. Their best performers play very skilfully on both, and indulge in as much ecstatic by-play as musicians ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... between Mrs. Best and Magdalen; and in the first pause, when the first course had just been distributed, she looked up with a great pair of grey eyes, and asked, in a shrill, clear little voice, "Sister, ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... and it did not do the least good. She could not scold him out of that feeling, which was all mixed up in her retrospect with the sense of the weather and the season, the leaves just beginning to show the autumn, the wild asters coming to crowd the goldenrod, the crickets shrill in the grass, and the birds silent in the trees, the smell of the rowan in the meadows, and the odor of the old logs and fresh chips in the woods. She was not a woman to notice such things much, but he talked of them all and made her notice them. His nature took hold upon what we call nature, ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells

... sky was brilliantly lighted up, and the sound of many voices was borne on the night wind. The red flare came from the Syke; the mill was afire. Showers of sparks and sheets of flame were leaping and streaming into the sky. Men and women were hurrying to and fro, and the women's shrill cries mingled with the men's shouts. At intervals the brightness of the glare faded, and then a column of choking smoke poured out and was borne away on the wind. Dick, the miller, was there, with the scorching heat reddening his wrathful face. John Proudfoot had raised ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... There came a shrill about from over where the women were packing up, and everybody turned to look, Gregor Jhaere included. As hard as the gray stallion could take her in a bee line toward Will the daughter of the dawn with flashing teeth and blazing eyes was ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... through which the apparition had peered. She could see yet her own face there, grown old and worn. The dog wagged his tail and pressed against her, looking up and claiming her notice. Once more he stretched himself elastically and yawned widely, with shrill variations of tone. The calf was frisking about in awkward bovine elation, and now and then the cow affectionately licked its coat with the air of making its toilet. An assertive chanticleer was proclaiming the dawn within the henhouse, whence came too an impatient clamor, for the door, which served ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... a Highlander of the Isles, sat upon a barrel-head sawing at a fiddle, and the shrill scream of it filled the barn. Tone he did not aspire to, but he played with Caledonian verve and swing, and kept the snapping time. It was mad, harsh music of the kind that sets the blood tingling and the feet to move in rhythm, though the exhilarating effect of it was rather spoiled by the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... groups. Boone smokes the war-pipe when it is passed to him. Drinks and eats freely with the others. Through it all, now soft, now loud, sounds the drone of the war-drum. Now and again a young buck yells jubilantly, or ejaculates a shrill "E-yah!" of pleasure. They rise from feasting to dance in a war-circle about the drum, right. Boone does a few steps with them, and then retreats to left of stage. More dances. Speeches with short guttural words ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay

... his silvan dress, leaned, like a second Benaiah, on the quarter-staff that had done the King good service in its day, and his wife, a buxom matron as she had been a pretty maiden, laughed at her own consequence; and ever and anon joined her shrill notes to the stentorian halloo which her husband added to ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... Having irreverently detached the false front from the keys of the melodeon, Mr. Perkins was playing a sad, funereal composition of his own, with all the power of the instrument turned loose on it. Upstairs, Dick was whistling, with shrill and maddening persistence, and Dorothy, quite helpless, sat miserably on the porch with her ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed

... sound of voices just then, as I wrote, many voices, coming nearer, shrill women's voices, cutting through one's thoughts, and I went out to ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... the train began to move; her clear "Good-bye!" sounded shrill and hard above the rumble of the wheels. He saw her raise her hand, an umbrella waving, and last of all, vivid still amongst receding shapes, the red spot of her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... our joy-killer," grunted Prescott, as the umpire's shrill whistle sounded in. "Dave, we'll be in the Navy's dressing ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock

... Marie had gone down town late in April to do some shopping. While she was standing in the door of the old postoffice on the Escolta, she heard the shrill voice of a Filipino lad piping out: "Papers! Papers! All about the war with the United States. Dewey's comin'!" He had a bundle of newspapers under his right arm and was waving one in his left hand. Everybody rushed out of the bazaars and offices along the Escolta where they were ...
— The Woman with a Stone Heart - A Romance of the Philippine War • Oscar William Coursey

... colour in a woman choler shows, Naught are they, peevish, proud, malicious; But worst of all, red, shrill, and jealous." ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... were audible, when Griffith and the pilot had ascended to the gangway of the frigate, were produced by the sullen dashing of the sea against the massive bows of the ship, and the shrill whistle of the boatswain's mate as he recalled the side-boys, who were placed on either side of the gangway to do honor to the entrance of the first ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper

... by way of reply, it uttered a few shrill and prolonged cries, accompanied by the rattling of its two horny mandibles. After which, acting the great nobleman, cutting short the audience he has deigned to grant, the toucan is silent, turns its head, proudly raises one ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine

... gay, capricious Spring, Piercing her showery clouds with crystal light, And with their hues reflected streaking bright Her radiant bow, bids all her Warblers sing; The Lark, shrill caroling on soaring wing; The lonely Thrush, in brake, with blossoms white, That tunes his pipe so loud; while, from the sight Coy bending their dropt heads, young Cowslips fling Rich perfume o'er the fields.—It is the ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward

... from her closed eyes, as she listened to his departing steps; and the roll of the carriage carrying him away forever, seemed to roll over her shrinking heart. She cried out feebly—a pitiful little shrill cry, that she hushed with a sob still more full of anguish. Then she began to cast over her suffering soul the balm of prayer, and prostrate with closed eyes, and hands feebly hanging down, Doctor Roslyn found her. He did not need to ask a question, he had long known the brave self-sacrifice ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr

... on him her beady eyes and laughed her shrill chuckle. "There, didn't I tell you, you knew all the time? I guess you'll own up that it's the wife who's got the right to kill a husband, ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford

... her; or perhaps he binds the wild flowers she has brought into a little nosegay for her new gingham dress, or—but we see it all, and so, too, does the soldier, and so does Nellie, and they hear the blackbird's twitter and the quail's shrill call and the cricket's faint echo, and all about them is the sweet, subtle, holy ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field

... of her remonstrance, the stirring strains continued, till suddenly through the clamour a tiny shrill voice made ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth

... of the artillery fire whether it was from friend or foe. Artillery makes three different noises; first, the sharp report followed by detonations like thunder, when the shell first leaves the gun; second, the rushing sound of the shell passing high overhead; third, the shrill whistle, followed by the crash when it finally explodes. In the Labyrinth the detonations which usually indicated the French fire might be from the German batteries stationed quite near us, but where they could not get the range on us, and firing at a section of the French lines some miles away. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... hour after this that, as Mother Bunker was beginning to think about supper, she heard, from the direction of the barn, a shrill yell for help. ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandpa Ford's • Laura Lee Hope

... women, jumping, singing, and hand-shaking. Out from the centre of them came the stentorian shout: "De wheel ob time is a turnin' roun'!" From all parts of the church rose snatches of hymns, exultant shouts, groans, and prayers; and, in the corner, the shrill chants of the old women were fitfully heard through the storm of ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton

... dark heads—washed, with a fine impartiality, soiled linen and vegetables in an iron trough, grated for a third of its length, before a fountain of debased and flamboyant design. Their voices were alternately shrill and gutteral. It was perhaps as well not to understand too clearly all which they said. On the left came a break in the high, painted house-fronts, off which in places the plaster scaled, and from the windows of which protruded miscellaneous samples of wearing ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... where cattle, and horses, and hogs were allowed to roam at pleasure. As the cock crowed from the midst of his attendant party of hens and chickens, the ex-governor in passing would smile sadly, his thoughts reverting to the time when its predecessor raised its shrill notes on the naked rocks ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper

... from one of the hangars down the line spoke up from the back of the crowd in a shrill, piping voice. "You have been awarded the Brooks ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve

... armoured train was seen approaching from Middelburg, whistling a friendly warning to us. It came full speed as before, but only got to the spot where the mine had been laid for it. There was a loud explosion; something went up in the air and then the shrill whistle ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen

... I shall add one or two remarks. The first is; that the beautiful in music will not hear that loudness and strength of sounds, which may be used to raise other passions; nor notes which are shrill, or harsh, or deep; it agrees best with such as are clear, even, smooth, and weak. The second is; that great variety, and quick transitions from one measure or tone to another, are contrary to the genius of the beautiful in music. Such[28] transitions often excite mirth, or other sudden ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... longing in music is identical with that of religious longing. It is quite true, again, that a soft and gentle voice seems to every normal man as to Lear "an excellent thing in woman," and that a harsh or shrill voice may seem to deaden or even destroy altogether the attraction of a beautiful face. But the voice is not usually in itself an adequate or powerful method of evoking sexual emotion in a man. Even ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... from the grandstand. Buster snorted and turned. Without moving, Judith gave a shrill whistle. Buster wheeled and came back to his first position, where he stood trembling. On came Sioux, his hoofs rocking the echoes, and with every apparent intention of goring his mistress. But ten ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie

... he had, and wished to show the advantage of his new idea. But Master Tobias struck his hand aside, and shrill ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor

... is it?" she exclaimed, in shrill tones. "An' Farmer Jocelyn's dead!—who'd a' thought it! But I'd 'ave 'ad a bone to pick with 'im this mornin', if he'd been livin'—that I would!—givin' sack to Ned Landon without a ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli

... shown him, and where plenty of fodder had been stored a few days before. After this we waited a little longer till night fell, and then I bade Tupac do what I had bidden him the day before. His voice rose shrill and plaintive in the silence, chanting a song that you may have heard the Indians singing in Peru when returning from their labours, and presently, from among the rocks on the plain, and from the shadowy lines of the Fortress, ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith

... thy nest, Robin-redbreast! Sing, birds, in every furrow; And from each hill, let music shrill Give my fair Love good-morrow! Blackbird and thrush in every bush, Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow! You pretty elves, amongst yourselves Sing my fair Love good-morrow; To give my Love good-morrow Sing birds, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... him with cries so shrill that at first he did not hear Carterette's voice calling up to him. At last, however, remembering, he leaned over the cliff and saw her standing in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... stream, And fling, as its ripples gently flow, A burnished length of wavy beam In an eel-like, spiral line below; The winds are whist, and the owl is still, The bat in the shelvy rock is hid, And nought is heard on the lonely hill But the cricket's chirp, and the answer shrill Of the gauze-winged katy-did; And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will, Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings, Ever a note of wail and wo, Till morning spreads her rosy wings, And earth and sky in ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake

... sands on one side, and on the other was the shadow of the woods all riven with great golden rifts of sunshine. A little faint talk of waves upon the beach; the wild strange crying of seagulls over the sea; and the hoarse wood-pigeons and shrill, sweet robins full of their autumn love-making among the trees, made up a delectable concerto of peaceful noises. I spent the whole afternoon among these sights and sounds with Simpson. And we came home from Queensferry ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... constant urging to move at all. Compared to the one I was riding, Bubud was a race-horse! Cootes, Strong, and I kept together, the others having ridden on. As the day grew darker and darker, the myriad notes of countless insects melted into one mighty, continuous shrill note high overhead, before us, behind us, in which not one break or intermission could be detected. Anything faster than a walk would now have been unsafe, even if it had been possible, for at times the ground sloped off sharply ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... a leading boy, which in every school must be considerable, should overcome the virtue of the jury: but our fears have been uniformly relieved, and the hopes of the offender crushed, by the voice of the foreman pronouncing, in a shrill but steady tone, the awful word—Guilty!' Some persons, who hate all innovations, will pronounce all this 'mummery,' which is a very compendious piece of criticism. For ourselves, though we cannot altogether ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... but meditated in silence. At that moment they reached the Pasig and the banka began to ascend the current. Over the Bridge of Spain a horseman galloped rapidly, while a shrill, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... Leila uttered a shrill laugh. "What have they to do with each other? Did you never hear of passion, Edward? Oh! Don't look at me like that. Do you think a woman can't feel passion at my age? As much as ever, more than ever, because it's all ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... storm approaches, the white-winged birds come flying inland with shrill cries of warning to the mariners whose ships they ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... on, and never mind the young scamp," said Coggan. "'Tis a very catching ballet. Now then again—the next bar; I'll help ye to flourish up the shrill notes where yer ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... the captain of the ship, and his crew. There was but little time for words, so the compliments passed were brief. The ample plates in the sides of the Finance, inspiring confidence in American thoroughness and build, we had hardly time to scan, when her shrill whistle said "good-bye," and moving proudly on, the great ship was soon out of sight, while the little boat, filling away on the starboard tack, sailed on toward home, perfumed with the interchange of a friendly greeting, tinged though with a palpable lonesomeness. Two days after ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum

... maiden. No doubt she liked me; she smiled upon me most sweetly when I never wearied plucking flowers for her in Herr Holzschuer's garden and weaving them into wreaths, but——" "Oh! then all hope is not yet lost," cried Reinhold suddenly, and so vehemently and in such a disagreeably shrill voice that Frederick was almost terrified. At the same time he leapt to his feet, his sword rattling against his side, and as he stood upright at his full stature the deep shadows of the night fell upon ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... hills; A Tyrian light the village fills; A wider sunrise in the dawn; A deeper twilight on the lawn; A print of a vermilion foot; A purple finger on the slope; A flippant fly upon the pane; A spider at his trade again; An added strut in chanticleer; A flower expected everywhere; An axe shrill singing in the woods; Fern-odors on untravelled roads, — All this, and more I cannot tell, A furtive look you know as well, And Nicodemus' ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson

... the darkness came the sound of a shrill cry, and the thud of a fall in some room down ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... thought Philip very young for this, and her heart went out to the motherless child; but her attempts to gain his affection were awkward, and the boy, feeling shy, received her demonstrations with so much sullenness that she was mortified. Sometimes she heard his shrill voice raised in laughter in the kitchen, but when she went in, he grew suddenly silent, and he flushed darkly when Mary Ann explained the joke. Mrs. Carey could not see anything amusing in what she heard, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... this, we immediately hallooed with all our might. The wind again began to chafe, and swell, and seemed to mock at our distress. Still we repeated our efforts, whenever the wind paused: but, instead of voices intending to answer our calls, we heard shrill whistlings; which certainly ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... melancholy lute, Were night-owl's hoot To my low-whispered coo - Were I thy bride! The skylark's trill Were but discordance shrill To the soft thrill Of wooing as I'd woo - ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... scorching and the winter bleak, where a "lean cypress" is the most conspicuous object in the foreground, and hills "smoked over" with "faint grey olive trees" fill in the back; where on hot days the silence is only broken by the shrill chirp of the cicala, and the whining of bees around some adjacent firs. But the other side of the picture, though sympathetically drawn, is a perfect parody of what it is meant to convey. For the speaker's ideal "city" might be a big village, with its primitive customs, and its life all ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... of the Demoiselles Denis, the chevalier was not thinking of uniting the three thousand livres which this generous mother gave to her daughters to the thousand crowns a year which the Abbe Brigaud had bestowed on him. The shrill treble of Mademoiselle Emilie, the contralto of Mademoiselle Athenais, the accompaniment of both, had recalled to his recollection the pure and flexible voice and the distinguished execution of his neighbor. Thanks to that singular power which a great preoccupation gives us over exterior ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... ran under a culvert and a sharp turn on the other side made it impossible to see what was on the road ahead. The Captain made the turn very neatly and Jim was about to follow the leading car, when several shrill cries from the girls ahead caused him to put on ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... English people, the voice of the working classes, begins to be heard. The people re-echo the key-note struck by a J. S. Mills, by a Bright, a Cobden, and others of like pure mind and noble heart. The voice of the genuine English people resounds altogether differently from the shrill falsetto with which turf hunters, rent-roll devourers, lords, lordlings, and all the like shams and whelps try to intimidate the patriotic North, and comfort ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... no let a poddy sleep, and be d—d till ye?" again screamed the shrill voice of Angus Mohr; "hoo mony mair o' ye southron prutes is coming yammering ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various

... advances if the swain is slow to take the initiative, or fails to perceive the desire which she has conceived for him. In the matter of fighting, however, the women—who are as often as not the cause—act usually as mere spectators, taking no active part themselves, though they join in a shrill chorus of applause when a shrewd blow is given, and delight greatly in the brave doings of their men. Nevertheless, the warlike atmosphere, with which she is surrounded all the days of her life, sometimes infects a young Malay Princess, and urges her to do some daring deed which shall ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... crying: "Let me in, my dear! I have spun thy linen; now will I bleach it." But the woman would not listen to her, so Wednesday went on knocking at the door until cock-crow. As soon as the cocks crew, she uttered a shrill cry and disappeared. But the linen remained where ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... Five weeks of Pirna, can be made intelligible in small compass. But how the world argued of them then and afterwards, and rang with hot Gazetteer and Diplomatic logic from side to side, no reader will now ever know. A world-tornado extinct, gone:—think of the sounds uttered from human windpipes, shrill with rage some of them, hoarse others with ditto; of the vituperations, execrations, printed and vocal,—grating harsh thunder upon Friedrich and this new course of his. Huge melody of Discords, shrieking, droning, grinding on that topic, through the afflicted Universe in general, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle

... to his mouth, he gave a shrill imitation of the call to cease firing, and then lost his balance and fell over the chair with ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss

... me!" Such was the cry that Bill now heard. It was the shrill and pitiful voice of the dead stock-tender's wife, and it came from a window of the house. She had heard the exchange of shots, and knew that Wild Bill ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody

... of the finches rises and sinks like the tinkle of a waterfall. The greenfinches have been by me all the while. A bullfinch pipes now and then further up the hedge where the brambles and thorns are thickest. Boldest of birds to look at, he is always in hiding. The shrill tone of a goldfinch came just now from the ash branches, but he has gone on. Every four or five minutes a chaffinch sings close by, and another fills the interval near the gateway. There are linnets somewhere, but I cannot from the old apple ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... on, pulled aside a second curtain hanging over the further door, rapped upon that, too, and without even waiting for an answer this time, beyond the shrill barking of dogs within, opened it and passed in. Mr. Bourgoign followed; and Robin came last. The ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... the game!" he said aloud, and instantly strode across the room, as Cato sprang up and barked furiously at the box. Simultaneously the top of the box flew up, and uttering a shrill whistle, the man sprang to a sitting posture, while through the wide-flung door the other two ruffians appeared with pistols cocked, At once there began a deadly struggle. The dog had leaped upon the box and knocked the ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... factitious sunlight of wealth; he saluted with a "good-morning, boys," the powdered Swiss with the broad gilt baldric and the footmen in short clothes and blue and gold livery, all of whom had risen in his honor, touched lightly with his finger the great cage of monkeys capering about with shrill cries, and darted whistling up the white marble stairs covered with a carpet soft and dense as a lawn, to the duke's apartments. Although he had been coming to the hotel de Mora for six months, the good doctor had ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... come out of a particularly favourable stretch. That is part of the glorious uncertainty of it all. The boat of to-day, for example, accounted yesterday for one solitary kelt, though it had shared our experience of futile pulls and visible rises in the afternoon. Now if—— Ah! The shrill tongue of Tom Thumb's reel gave a welcome view holloa (half-past eleven) and the sentence I was pencilling remains unfinished. I have forgotten what it would have been. By this time the motions of a kelt had become familiar, and ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... to her from above, from behind, from right, from left. The rocks flung her words to each other, bandied them to and fro, turned them into ridicule, turned them into thundering sounds of terror, turned them into shrill shrieks. The frightened pigeons flew from their rocky perches; their wings set new echoes going. Una swam forward, and, reckless with fright now, shouted again. She heard some one rushing down to meet her from the remote depths of the cave. The great stones rolled and ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham

... stretched behind us like a ribbon of twilight,—nothing to be seen but it and the ebony mass of bush and tree lining it on either side. We hastened on. A minute later and we heard behind us a sound like the winding of a small horn, clear, shrill, and sweet. Sparrow and I wheeled—and saw nothing. The trees ran down to the very edge of the wharf, upon whose rotten, loosened, and noisy boards we now trod. Suddenly the clouds above us broke, and the moon shone forth, whitening the mountainous clouds, ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston

... men are many chiefly addicted to fattening themselves up by gluttony, who, following the scent of any delicate food, and the shrill voices of the women who, from cockcrow, cry out with a shrill scream, like so many peacocks, and gliding over the ground on tiptoe, get an entrance into the halls, biting their nails while the dishes are getting cool. Others fix their eyes intently on the ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... care!" sobbed Sharley, like a defiant child, but threw up her hands with the worlds and wailed. It frightened her to hear the sound of her own voice—such a pitiful, shrill voice—in the lonely place. She broke into her great leaps again, and so ran up and down the slope, and felt the wind in her face. It drank her breath away from her after a while; it was a keen, chilly wind. She sat down on a stone ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... to the bed. From the rooms below came shrill laughter and the rattle of glasses. They cared little down there whether this poor creature lived or died. She was dying, of this Sanselme felt sure. He began to walk up and down the room, occasionally stopping at the side of the bed, ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina

... a clear, shrill whistle sounded far ahead, which was the preconcerted signal announcing that the scouts had come into touch with an opposing body of some description, and Dick immediately gave the order for the bodyguard to ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood

... scene before him with wondering eyes. In front was a circular barricade, composed of trunks of trees, boughs, and matted twigs, behind which the Iroquois stood like tigers at bay. In the edge of the forest around were clustered their yelling foes, screaming shrill defiance, yet afraid to attack, for they had already been driven back with severe loss. Their hope now lay in their white allies, and when they saw Champlain and his men a yell arose that rent the air, and a cloud of winged ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... deepen, and the gloomy shadows lie darkly all through the long afternoons, a small party of hideously painted savages skulked silently in ambush. Suddenly to their strained ears was borne the sound of horses' hoofs; and then, all at once, a woman's voice rang out in a single shrill, startled cry. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish

... after this conversation that I woke out of deep sleep and heard sounds of screaming. The voice was really horrible, breaking the peace and silence with its shrill clamour. In less than ten seconds I was half dressed and out of my tent. The screaming had stopped abruptly, but I knew the general direction, and ran as fast as the darkness would allow over to the women's quarters, and on getting close I heard sounds of suppressed weeping. It was ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... as though swept on by a human sea. Again and again I fired blindly into the yelping mob; I heard the crack of Tim's rifle echoing mine, and the chug of lead from without striking the solid logs. Bullets ploughed crashing through the door panels and Elsie's shrill screams of fright rang out above the unearthly din. A slug tore through my loophole, drawing blood from my shoulder in its passage, and imbedded itself in the opposite wall. In front of me savages fell, staggering, screams of anger and agony mingling as the astonished ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish

... the face of day To yonder bench, leaf-shelter'd, let us stray, Till blended objects fail the swimming sight, And all the fading landscape sinks in night; To hear the drowsy dor come brushing by With buzzing wing, or the shrill**** cricket cry; To see the feeding bat glance through the wood; To catch the distant falling of the flood; While o'er the cliff th' awakened churn-owl hung Through the still gloom protracts his chattering song; While high in air, and pois'd ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... comprehend—its meaningless days and nights, its dragging hours—and the strange people around her immersed in their sordid pleasures—this woman—her husband's sister, thin-lipped, hard-featured, drinking, smoking, gambling, shrill in disputes, merciless of speech, venomously curious concerning all that she held locked in the privacy of ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... the London of the moment it could not, however, be said with any truth that it was merry, but merely that its inhabitants made desperate endeavour not to appear crushed under their catastrophe. Surrounded as he was now with a babble of tongues and shrill mechanical repartee, Yeovil's mind went back to the book and its account of a theatre audience in the Turkish days of Bulgaria, with its light and laughing crowd of critics and spectators. Bulgaria! The thought of that determined little nation came to him with a sharp sense ...
— When William Came • Saki

... a little silver whistle that was attached to his chain, and placing it to his lips he blew upon it a shrill ear-piercing scream. ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn

... meet his foe; but the man had the hill on his side as he rushed on with a short-sword in his hand. Axe and sword clashed together for a moment of time, and then both the men rolled over on the grass together, and Face-of-god as he fell deemed that he heard the shrill cry of a woman. Now Face-of-god found that he was the nethermost, for if he was strong, yet was his foe stronger; the axe had flown out of his hand also, while the strange man still kept a hold of his short-sword; and presently, though he still struggled all he could, ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris

... reached them again, louder, still high-pitched and shrill, but nearer. Away down the trail a figure in black ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum

... crackled, but its volume was dying. Louder rose the fierce, whining yell, and its note was full of ferocity and triumph, while the hoarser cries of the white men became fewer and lower. Now Dick really saw dusky figures leaping about between him and the train. Something uttering a shrill, unearthly cry of pain crashed heavily through the bushes near him and quickly passed on. It was a wounded horse, ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler

... matter how trivial it may be; while on the thinker its effect is woeful and disastrous, cutting his thoughts asunder, much as the executioner's axe severs the head from the body. No sound, be it ever so shrill, cuts so sharply into the brain as this cursed cracking of whips; you feel the sting of the lash right inside your head; and it affects the brain in the same way as touch affects a sensitive plant, and for the same length ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer

... stuffs were flung; the startled doves of St. Mark perched upon the cornices, or fluttered uneasily to and fro above the crowd. The baton of the band leader descended with a crash of martial music, the priests chanted, the charity-boys sang shrill, a vast noise of shuffling feet arose, mixed with the foliage-like rustling of the sheets of tinsel attached to the banners and candles in the procession: the whole strange, gorgeous picture came ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells

... drank a little and then sank back upon his pillow. He gazed fixedly at Hannah for a few moments, and then suddenly threw his arms around her neck, as she stooped over him, and cried out in a voice piercing shrill with anguish: ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... shields, to men bowed and blinded as they are by such labour of dragging and such a hailstorm of death. They may have heard through all the racket of nameless noises the high minaret cries of Moslem triumph rising shriller like a wind in shrill pipes, and known little else of what was happening above or beyond them. It was most likely that they laboured and strove in that lower darkness, not knowing that high over their heads, and up above the cloud of battle, the tower of timber and the tower of stone had touched and met ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... My thoughts had recoiled from the present to the past. Vague pictures of the days that had gone by seemed floating before my eyes. I saw myself in the convent garden, with all my little world enclosed in those four walls, and I heard the shrill laughter of the girls with whom I was walking, and I even fancied that I could catch the perfume of the lilac trees which drooped over the smoothly kept lawn. And then the picture faded away, and from the vessel's side I saw Cruta, a purple-topped island ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... enough. Five minutes later number seven was steaming away into the distant desert. Flatray gave a sharp, shrill whistle; and from behind some sand dunes emerged ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine

... the country squire, straight from his cow-sheds and his hunting dogs; a young blond German giant, 32 years old, in the very prime of his massive strength and endurance; plentiful hair cropped short, ruddy face, blond beard, bright blue eyes, big fists; high, shrill voice, strangely out of keeping with his physical bulk. For years afterward, this peculiar voice became the stock in trade of newspaper writers. However, it ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... the microphone. Instants later his voice boomed in the stillness outside the ship, cutting through the thin shrill ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster

... of the summit. It then became terrible work. Tearing and struggling through masses of briars and thorns, cut about the feet by sharp rocks, and having literally to pull ourselves upwards by tree trunks and branches, on we went, until a shrill yell from L. gave us a happy excuse for a halt. He had been bitten by a "sumut api," or fire-ant, the pain of whose bite is intense, and strongly resembles the running of a red-hot needle into the flesh. "Never mind," said H., "you won't feel it in a minute." We resume the climb, and I ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt

... alley which was like a fiord of peace running in from the shrill storm of the Brown Borough. Here little cottages shrank together, passive resisters of the twentieth century. Low crooked windows blinked through a mask of dirty creepers. Each little front garden contained a shrub, and was guarded by a low railing, although there would have ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson

... twinkling rays fell unheeded, impotent to pierce the sable clouds of grief. She sat looking out into the night, with strained eyes that seemed fastened upon a corpse. An hour passed thus, and, as the clang of the town clock died away the shrill voice of the watchman ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... himself. They appealed to him now with a significance which he had not understood at first. He was sure that in that cry there had been real terror; almost, he fancied, as he lay with his eyes shut tight, that he could still hear the shrill note of despair in the voice. The more he tried to reason the situation, the more inexplicable grew the mystery of it all. If the girl had calmly led him into the ambush, why, in the last moment, when success seemed about to crown her duplicity, had she cried out in ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood

... gold canoe, The spirits[18] walk in the realms of air With their glowing faces and flaming hair, And the shrill, chill winds o'er the prairies blow. In the Tee[19] of the Council the Virgins light The Virgin-fire[20] for the feast to-night; For the Sons of Heyoka will celebrate The sacred dance to the giant great. ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... part of the course even the shrill whistles of the yachts and the cries and cheers that greeted the ears of the Go Ahead boys appeared to take on a sharper edge. The face of every boy was set and drawn. That silver cup in the eyes of all four now appeared to be the most valuable ...
— Go Ahead Boys and the Racing Motorboat • Ross Kay

... usual quick efficiency, cut the throttle. Quickly the motor slowed to idling speed; the vibration stopped. A last cough of the engine, and there was no sound save the shrill screaming of the wind in the gloomy twilight of this unknown land ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... of control; and, in the efforts made by Hendrik to restrain him, the girth of his saddle got loose and was broken. As he dismounted for the purpose of repairing it, the horse broke away from him and galloped back towards the pool, uttering its shrill neigh, as if a signal ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid

... Excellent! . . ." He looked into the schoolmaster's eyes as though he wanted to share his bliss with him. At last he could restrain himself no longer; he leapt up, and, overpowering all the other voices with his shrill ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... trim, and pronounce us slow, and old fogies. With all the rashness of youth, they attack the luncheon-table. So boisterous a popping of corks was never heard in all our boisterous passage;—there is a chorus, too, of merry tongues and shrill laughter. But we get fairly out to sea, where the wind, an adverse one, is waiting for us, and at that gay table there is silence, followed by a rush and disappearance. The worst cases are hurried out of sight, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... the truth, yet too much incensed to enter, even when the hum of united voices ceased, the rushing sound of rising was over, and measured footsteps pattered to the classes, where the manly interrogations sounded alternately with the shrill little answers. ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to be no place in the service for me; I cannot decide what rating to select. To be a quartermaster one must know how to signal, and signaling always tires my arms. One must know how to blow a horrid shrill little whistle in order to become a boatswain mate, and my ears could never stand this. To be a yeoman, it is necessary to know how to rattle papers in an important manner and disseminate misinformation with a straight face, and this I could never do. I fear the only thing left for me is to try ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.

... rested still, As musing on that message we had heard, And brooding on that 'End it when you will,' Perchance awaiting yet some other word; When keen as lightning through a muffled sky Sprang forth a shrill ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... a boy's shrill voice. Down to the ground dropped the owner of the voice. "What is ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.

... enemy. In a brief space of time she went to pieces. There I stood in safety; and there were my fellow-creatures, battling, now hopelessly, with annihilation. Methought I saw them struggling—too truly did I hear their shrieks, conquering the barking surges in their shrill agony. The dark breakers threw hither and thither the fragments of the wreck; soon it disappeared. I had been fascinated to gaze till the end: at last I sank on my knees—I covered my face with my hands: I again looked up; something was floating on the billows towards the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... little church the engine, attended by two white-bearded men, churned along, from time to time sending forth a shrill whistle. Women with bandana handkerchiefs tied down closely about their heads, unloaded the carts, and lifting the heavy sheaves in their brawny arms, would carry them to the machine, where others, relieving them, would spread them out and ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard

... he said regretfully and his little mouth went down as for a cry, when everybody's attention was distracted by the sudden appearance of a huge furry black dog which came bounding down the hill side, its big white teeth gleaming as it uttered shrill, ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel

... reach thine ear, Armor's clang, or war-steed champing, Trump nor pibroch summon here, Mustering clan, or squadron tramping. Yet the lark's shrill fife may come, At the ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various

... him so, your excellency," said the woman, sinking her shrill voice into an awe-struck tone, "because he came from the water, and belongs to the water. He floated down the Rhine in the great flood, four years ago come spring, a mere baby, that could barely tell his name, perched on the roof of a little chalet, in the night, ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood

... Skip Riley lift a large tin box into the basket from the ground. As he was getting ready to start there was a shrill cry, and the midget came waddling through the crowd and climbed over the side of the car and up Riley's body until it clung to his shoulder like a monkey. A great many of the thoughtless laughed at this. They did not understand the significance of ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor

... pony to her mettle to escape the cloud of angry birds which, arising in countless numbers, dent his weather-beaten tarpaulin with their sharp bills, and snap his pony's ears, and confuse him with their sharp, shrill cries. Ten minutes more, and he is holding hard to count the seals. There they lie, old ocean flocks, resting their wave-tossed limbs—great ocean bulls, and cows, and calves. He marks them all. The wary old male turns his ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens

... us," he said, in that shrill, clarion tone of his which has made to quake the hearts of so many hostile witnesses, "that we have not accounted for the fourth man who drove up in his car ten minutes after Merrill had entered the house, and disappeared, but I am going to tell you my theory ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace

... has elapsed it has become more and more clear that his output was sharply divided into two parts by his visit to New York, and that the second half is inferior in quantity, in quality, in everything, to the first. It has been too plain now for years that he is against progress, that he is the shrill champion of things that are rightly doomed, that his vogue among the hordes of the respectable was due to political reasons, and that he retains his authority over the said hordes because he is the bard of their prejudices and of their clayey ideals. A democrat of ten times Kipling's gift ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett

... receives The toss'd-up heaps from the brown gaping youth, Who flaring at her, takes his aim awry, Whilst half the load comes tumbling on himself. Loud is her laugh, her voice is heard afar; Each mower, busied in the distant field, The carter, trudging on his distant way, The shrill found know, cad up their hats in air, And roar across the fields to catch her notice: She waves her arm, and shakes her head at them, And then renews her work with double spirit. Thus do they jest, and laugh away their toil, Till the bright sun, full in his middle course, Shoots down his fiercest ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie

... ladies related a precious bit of scandal then running through the town. She had scarcely finished her narration, when a shrill exclamation,— ...
— Minnie's Pet Parrot • Madeline Leslie

... the Oneidas had subtly changed their timbre so that ever amid the shrill yelling I marked the guttural snarls of baffled rage. The Mohican lay on his belly behind a tree, silent, but his eyes were like ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers









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