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More "Torture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... am fully persuaded that, were she to promise to keep my secret, nothing on earth would tempt her to betray me; but I know she has so much the habit of speaking of every thing to her mother, that I am in torture till this promise is obtained. Your influence I must depend upon. Speak to her, I conjure you, the moment breakfast is over; and assure yourself of my ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... can trust you, my lad," said the captain. "I would not willingly have my name go out as one who would maim and torture a brave lad. My desperation is my excuse for my expedient of last evening. I want you to promise to keep that scene a secret. You may perchance some day have your own sins to cover. I have been reckoned brave and honorable, and I would not have my fair ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... ran fast, as down a hill From some high spring a slender rill; Ah, piteous it was on the brae to behold How the guileless youth lay in his torture untold. ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... "Don't torture me, good people," said the cat. "I am a human being like yourselves, and have been changed into the shape of a cat by witchcraft, though it was a just return for my wickedness. I was the housekeeper in the palace of a great king a long way from here, ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... throbbed and screamed its notes of passion in the desert, seemed to be beating in Max's brain. A horrible irritation possessed him like a devil. He could have yelled as a man might yell in the extremity of physical torture. If only ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... am glad, girl, that you have spoken the truth; besides it is useless to torture a witch, since then the spirit in ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... stuff hungrily. Everything is grist which comes to a small boy's digestive mill, anyway, and the food wasn't really distasteful. Then he lay back and, for the first time in his active life, realized what a refined torture complete ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... bonus less than one cent. In a word, the more rubber the agent collected the more he personally benefited, and if he obtained it "cheaply" or for nothing—that is, by taking hostages, making prisoners, by the whip of hippopotamus hide, by torture—so much greater his fortune, ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... he was reduced to his old Schooner, aboard of which there went about an hundred as bold rogues as ever was hanged, and sailed to the West-Indies, where they took a rich Portugueze ship bound Home from Bahia, putting to the torture several of the men, who confest the Captain flung into the sea a bag of 11000 Moidores. This made Lowe swear a thousand oaths; and after cutting off his lips, he murdered him and all his Crew, being ...
— Pirates • Anonymous
... have always feigned not to comprehend the meaning of his words, and have striven to hide from him all that was passing in my soul; but can I always control myself when I must see him every moment? Ah! how painful will be the effort!... What torture ever to repress the best feelings of one's soul! To refuse expression to my thoughts, when my thoughts are all personified in him.... Notwithstanding my efforts, I fear lest my heart should be in my eyes, in my voice, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to confront the wilderness in guarded symmetry, but rather bring the stars shooting from their spheres, and draw wild things captive to a voice. To them Society and Law seem dull phantoms, by the light cast from a flaming soul. They dwell apart, and torture their lives in the effort to attain to self-expression. All means and modes offered them by language they seize on greedily, and shape them to this one end; they ransack the vocabulary of new sciences, and appropriate or invent strange jargons. ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... George Neville, and others; and, above all, had announced that Griffith would be back for good in a few days. So now his continued absence exposed her to sly questions from her own sex, to the interchange of glances between female visitors, as well as to the internal torture of doubt ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... understand, now, what was meant by the words high treason. I saw all the majesty of the English Navy, all the law, all the noble polity of England, arrayed to judge a boy to death, for a five minutes' prank. They would drag me on a hurdle to Tyburn, as soon as torture had made me ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... but here a no less fearful trial awaited him. The carriage turned out of the high road into a narrow, unfrequented path—a path which led to the gibbet, and alongside which, by command of the prince, he was borne at a slow pace. After he had suffered all the torture of anticipated execution the carriage turned off into the public road. Exposed to the sultry summer-heat, without refreshment or human consolation, he passed seven dreadful hours in journeying to the place of destination—a ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the side of the left cheek from jaw to ear. Now, another man in my place, Lieutenant, knowing the store you set by the parson, might very well use him to drive a bargain with you. He is no friend of ours, and the use upon him of a little torture might induce you to think better of the ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... very difficult for him to believe in a world where wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain, where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of suffering, where the art of torture is the only science cultivated, and the capacity for being tormented is the only faculty which remains to the children of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity has often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently repudiated ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... by the signiorial rights, and who could not make wills even on free soil, found themselves everywhere enfranchised from this harsh law. Louis XVI. abolished the droit de suite (henchman-law), as well as the use of the preparatory question or preliminary torture applied to defendants. The regimen of prisons was at the same time ameliorated, the dark dungeons of old times restored to daylight the wretches who were ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... her act In this way to her kin? Was her poor frame with torture racked, Or was it consciousness she lacked, ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... right. If he had told him to go into some cave and stay there a year or two, he would have done it and thought it was all right. If he had told him that it was necessary to have some surgical operation performed, and that he had to go through all the torture incident to it, that would have suited him. Men like to have something to do about their salvation; they don't like to give up the idea that they can't do anything; that God must do it all. If you tell them to take bitter herbs ...
— Men of the Bible • Dwight Moody
... Carew knew that without Pollyanna the house would be empty; but that without the lad, Jamie, it would be worse than that. To her pride this knowledge was not pleasing. To her heart it was torture—since the boy had twice said that he would not come. For a time, during those last few days of Pollyanna's stay, the struggle was a bitter one, though pride always kept the ascendancy. Then, on what Mrs. Carew knew would be Jamie's last visit, her heart triumphed, and once more ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... not know if I have ever seen such swarms of bees and butterflies as I saw at that place. They seemed to swoop down upon us in myriads from all sides. Taking the solar observations with the sextant and artificial horizon, I endured positive torture with the hundreds of bees which settled on my forehead, nose and hands; while thousands of mosquitoes and ants stung my legs, arms and face in those spots where it was not possible to wrap myself ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Anne Mie's pathetic little face as she brought her food and delicacies and various little comforts, was positive torture to the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... prison be not enough for you, I will teach you a lesson in the art of torture which I learned from our chaplain, or one of his substitutes.—'Make your cells round and smooth; let there be no prominent point for the eye to rest upon, so that it must necessarily turn inward, and I will warrant that you will soon have the pleasure of seeing ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... fell his pride, that he let drop The instrument of torture at his feet, And to the rest exclaim'd: "We have no power To strike him." Then to me my guide: "O thou! Who on the bridge among the crags dost sit Low crouching, safely now to ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... scalding, roasting, frying, scorching, blazing, burning, but ever-consuming hell, sir, I say, in full operation—the whole dark and penal machinery in full play—open it up—there they are—the yell, the scream, the blasphemy, the shout, the torture, the laughter of despair—with the pleasing consciousness that all this is to be eternal; hark ye, sir, open me up a view of this aforesaid spectacle upon the very brow of perdition, and having allowed me time to console myself by a contemplation of it, fling me, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... sweetness of his existence. Sir Richard was at rest. And since he had been discovered, that shot was, indeed, the most merciful end that could have been measured out to him. The alternative might have been the gibbet and the gaping crowd, and a moral torture to precede the end. Better—a thousand times better—as ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... hands; all of them trembled like aspen-leaves; the chief looked up full in our faces, kneeling on the ground; light seemed to flash from his dark rolling eyes, his body was convulsed all over, as though he were enduring the utmost torture, and with a timorous, yet undefinable expression of countenance, in which all the passions of our nature were strangely blended, he drooped his head, eagerly grasped our proffered hands, and burst into tears. This was a sign of friendship; ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... morning I sprang from my bed to find the contents of my jug just a little over or under the tepid mark. There was no question of re-heating the water on the gas stove, for I never allowed myself more than the very minimum of time for dressing, swallowing my breakfast and catching my train. It was torture. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... about her. And, besides, she had the Spanish ideas of morality, which would make the actions of which he was accused seem doubly shocking. The more he speculated upon the cause of her silence, the wilder grew his fancies, until it became a positive torture to think of her at all. Instead, his thoughts turned to Edith Cortlandt in a curiously uninterested way. Her attitude was a problem. Perhaps she would leave him to his fate. Reviewing the circumstances coldly, he could ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... taken out of this brig all the valuables they could find, they hatched down all hands to the hold, except a black man, who was allowed to remain on deck for the special purpose of affording in his torture an amusing exhibition to Soto and his gang. They set fire to the brig, then lay to, to observe the progress of the flames; and as the miserable African bounded from rope to rope, now climbing to the mast head—now ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... at her ease. But the doctors she could not tolerate, and she suffered torture when they came to argue with her. Although these theologians showed her great consideration, their eternal questions wearied her; their slowness and heaviness exasperated her. She bore them a grudge for not believing in her straightway, without proof, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... interminable inoculations and physical examinations, and with the preliminary drilling. The days left him desperately tired. He had been issued the wrong size shoes by a popular, easy-going supply-sergeant, and in consequence his feet were so swollen that the last hours of the afternoon were an acute torture. For the first time in his life he could throw himself down on his cot between dinner and afternoon drill-call, and seeming to sink with each moment deeper into a bottomless bed, drop off immediately to sleep, while the noise and laughter around him faded to a pleasant drone of drowsy ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... strata of hardness in his nature, the adamantine will that wrought torture to its possessor because it could not bend. Even the concessions he had thus far made, had, she recognized, cost him a vital struggle. On the day of her aunt's seizure had she not witnessed the warfare between pity ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... frightful consequences to women and children, than anything else. To think of our wives, our little ones, our tender maidens, our loving matrons, and our poor helpless babes, being exposed to murder, rapine, torture, and all the numerous and unnameable horrors of war, for the sake of some false, some fanciful, some utterly ridiculous and contemptible idea, such as the connection of one or two provinces of a land with this nation or with that, or the "integrity of a foreign empire," has always ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... take the loose end of the rope in your hand, and you have the persuader or bit completed. By pulling on the end which you now hold, you draw his mouth up towards his throat, and can thereby inflict the most excruciating torture that is possible for a horse to undergo, and the beauty of it is, without the least injury to the animal. One pull on this persuader is more dreaded by the horse than a whole day's flogging with raw-hide. In fact he cannot stand it; no matter how ugly his tricks may be, such as kicking, ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... painful gasps. From the right came a curious gasping choke, and looking, he saw the man next to him throw up his arms and pitch forward on his face. Suddenly he became aware of a peculiar wailing above him, as if the air itself was in torture. Again a long line of fire flashed out ahead of him and again came the wailing sound. A Boche machine-gun loosed a few belts of cartridges in the spasmodic style of her kind. There was no mistake about it this time—massed infantry were sweeping the ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... their first experience of the green ants. Standing under a tree, whilst taking some observations, they found themselves covered, and nothing but undressing, at least tearing off their clothes, relieved them of the torture. The name of Ant Cliffs records this visit on the south shore ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... interrupted one while for an instant by Squeers screaming out, "Sit down, you—beggar!" and followed at its close by the last and crowning outrage, consequent on a violent outbreak of wrath on the part of Squeers, who spat at him and struck him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture: when Nicholas, springing upon him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat—don't we all exult in the remembrance of it?—"beat the ruffian till he roared ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... betrayed itself through the heavy folds of drapery in which it was wrapped. His thoughts recurred to his unfinished marble, as offering the one mode in which he could find a silent outlet to the feelings and thoughts which it was torture to keep imprisoned in his soul. The cold stone would tell them, but without passion; and having got the image which possessed him out of himself into a lifeless form, it seemed as if he might be delivered from a presence which, lovely as it was, stood between him and all that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... The first thing I noticed was that the walls were covered with sculptures in bas-relief, of a sort, pictorially speaking, similar to those that I have described upon the vases;—love-scenes principally, then hunting pictures, pictures of executions, and the torture of criminals by the placing of a, presumably, red-hot pot upon the head, showing whence our hosts had derived this pleasant practice. There were very few battle-pieces, though many of duels, and men running ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... human race, and was making exertions to dissuade them from taking either side in the war, the enemy has not scrupled to call to his aid their ruthless ferocity, armed with the horrors of those instruments of carnage and torture which are known to spare neither age nor sex. In this outrage against the laws of honorable war and against the feelings sacred to humanity the British commanders can not resort to a plea of retaliation, for it is committed ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson
... are to your Agatha. I knew you would not torture me with a request that I should marry a man I did not love. I grieve that I interfere with your plans; but I will live with you, and be your old maid sister, and nurse and love your children, and they shall ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... out of the common run; and these "go in" for shower-baths, "a discretion"—though, without discretion, would, perhaps, be a truer description. You may not be informed, also, that the "institution" is frequently used in lunatic asylums and penal establishments as an instrument of torture and correction, being known to operate most efficaciously on obstreperous and hardened criminals, when all other means ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... of the fullness that characterized the Elizabethans: but somehow or other our dramatists hesitate to cross that threshold. It cannot be that their powers are lacking: it can only be some timidity or self-torture which it is the business of the plain ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... country, and this publicity Olive found very hard to bear. It was even worse than the deed she was forced to do, and which gave rise to all this disagreeable publicity. That deed was done in the twinkling of an eye, and was the only thing that could be done; but all this was prolonged torture. Of course, the newspapers were not responsible for this. The transaction was a public one in as public a place as could possibly be selected, and it was clearly their duty to give the public full information ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... They were between two lines of fire. There was no escape. Some of the wounded had a mercifully quick end, others suffered the consciousness of being hit again and again; the dead were bored through with bullet holes. In torture, the survivors prayed for death; for all had to die except Peterkin, the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... lip, and giving expression to a feeling that looked very like one of contempt or ridicule. "You come from the land of melancholy and bile—where your holidays are fasts, and your day of rest is one of unmitigated toil. You would be sorry to forego, no doubt, the prospect of everlasting torture and eternal condemnation. Mr Z—— is too far advanced ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... commission to establish in the city the Holy office of the Inquisition, but he was discouraged and shipped back to Cadiz. Miss King tells us that when, half a century later, the calaboose was demolished, secret dungeons containing instruments of torture were discovered. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... having secured the sorceress, burned her alive at the stake. And thus in a single crime and its punishment we have curiously combined a world-old Oriental offense, an European Middle-Age penalty for witchcraft, and the fierce torture of the red Indians. ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... corresponding to verse fabliaux, of which the Cent Nouvelles are exact prose counterparts, and perhaps prose versions), and examples of what has been called "the humour of the stick," which sometimes trenches hard upon the humour of the gallows and the torture-chamber. These characteristics have made the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles no great favourites of late, but their unpopularity is somewhat undeserved. For all their coarseness, there is much genuine comedy in them, and if the prettiness of romantic ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... better fun to know he was a prince and torture him by pretending you did n't care for him," replied Janice. ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... words pierced through all Mrs. Lee's armour as though they were pointed with the most ingenious cruelty, and designed to torture her. She felt hard and small before him. Life for life, his had been, and was now, far less bright than hers, yet he was her superior. He sat there, a true man, carrying his burden calmly, quietly, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... those who remained after the last battle in the Hall of Thrones to enter the Room of Pleasant Death that the Black Ones might not torture them for their beastly pleasures. Thran himself remained behind to close the door, ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... ghastly, gruesome the nights, pallid and desolate the days. Out of the world was he, dreary and heartsick, while at his feet stretched life and joy and love in their rarest habiliments. How he endured the suspense, the torture of uncertainty, the craving for the life that others were enjoying, he could not understand. Big, strong and full of vigor, his inactivity was maddening; this virtual captivity grew more and more intolerable with each succeeding day. Would ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... artificially till it has become a condition of disease. All that he needed was now contained within himself; he was at-ease; and, literally, that unrest which men miscall delight could touch him not nor torture him again. ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... girl rushed up to her room, where she threw herself on her bed and gave way to some of the bitterest tears she had ever shed. All her indifference to Annie, all her real unkindness, all her ever-increasing dislike came back now to torture and harass her. She began to believe with the girls that Annie would be successful; she began dimly to acknowledge in her heart the strange power which this child possessed; she guessed that Annie would heap coals of fire on her ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... trees are bent sideways, the crumbling castle turrets shivering like bleached skeletons in the dry ungenial air. Yet inside the town, all is not so dreary. The Papal palace, with its terrible Glaciere, its chapel painted by Simone Memmi, its endless corridors and staircases, its torture-chamber, funnel-shaped to drown and suffocate—so runs tradition—the shrieks of wretches on the rack, is now a barrack, filled with lively little French soldiers, whose politeness, though sorely taxed, is never ruffled by the introduction of inquisitive visitors into their dormitories, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... him out from individuals. Then will Satan and all his devilry, along with the wicked whom they have seduced to their destruction, be hurled into the abyss of unquenchable fire—there to endure continual torture, without a hope of winning pardon from the merciful God, their Father; or of moving the glorified Messiah to one more act of pitiful intercession; or even of interrupting, by a momentary sympathy with their wretchedness, the harmonious psalmody of their brother angels and men, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... crab or a starfish; before him rolls the tumultuous expanse of desolation, surging forward to take his life; behind him are the rickety steps of the bathing-machine, which, but now a chamber of torture, has become his sole haven of refuge. Buffeted by the billows, he makes shift at last frantically to clamber back into it; he snatches the small, damp towels, and attempts to dry his shivering limbs; his clothes have fallen on the wet floor; he cannot force his blue toes ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... strong, confident in the years stretching peacefully out before him; the next he lay wounded, bleeding, helpless, doomed to weary weeks of torture, to silence and ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... six-shooter from under his leg and raising and lowering the hammer with one hand, keeping the muzzle pointed toward the steward's head all the while, the latter grew as white as a sheet and trembled in every limb. After he thought he had inflicted sufficient torture upon the timid fellow, the Confederate put up his weapon ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... to traverse a country disturbed by civil war, and there was every chance of his failing to accomplish his mission. This doubt also added to the torture she was undergoing. ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... these localities, were forced to meet secretly, and at the risk of their lives, for the purpose of worship. Those caught transgressing the law were thrown into prison, subjected to crushing fines, and even punished with torture and death. ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... James II., and there are suits that were worn by several famous kings and warriors. Above, in Queen Elizabeth's Armory, is more armor, and also trophies of Waterloo and other battles, and a collection of every kind of weapon in the Tower. There are also specimens of instruments of torture and many other curiosities ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... inform himself as to the character of the Christian sect. To do this he questioned such as had for many years been separated from the Christian community, but though apostates rarely speak well of the society to which they formerly belonged, he could find out nothing. He then applied torture to two female-slaves, deaconesses, to extort from them the truth. After all, he could learn only that the {74} Christians were in the habit of meeting together on a certain day; that they then united in a hymn of praise to their God, Christ; ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... life, once these men left the mission house of Notre Dame des Anges, that was without the slightest social intercourse, that was beyond the prizes of any earthly ambition, that was frequently in imminence of torture and death, and that was usually in physical discomfort if not in pain. Obscure and constant toil for tender hands, solitude, suffering, privation, death—these made up the portion of the messengers ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... three subjective principles of morals,—sympathy, benevolence, self-love. But sympathy seems to rest morality on feelings which differ widely even in good men; benevolence and self-love torture one half of our virtuous actions into the likeness of the other. The greatest happiness principle, which includes both, has the advantage over all these in comprehensiveness, but the advantage is purchased ...
— Philebus • Plato
... demand. But, oh, will he be saved by that? Oh, vain, foolish hope. They will mock me, I know it. O cursed synagogue, thou hast tempted me through thy messengers, thou hast hidden from me thy bloody designs until thou hadst him in thy clutches. I will torture thee with bitter reproaches, ye unjust judges. I will have nothing to do with your devilish decision. I will have no share in the blood of this innocent. Oh, what tortures, what pains of hell, tear my inmost soul!" So saying ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... continued for several weeks to prepare the few brief notes I was obliged to write. My signature at this period I regard with some curiosity and more pride. It is certainly better than that of Guido Faux, affixed to his examination after torture, though it is hardly equal to the signature of Stephen Hopkins to the Declaration ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... to her as if she must kill herself. Hot air coming out from a steam laundry. Hot, stifling air. Bernice didn't work in the laundry but she wished that she did so that the hot air would kill her. She wanted to be stifled. She needed torture to be happy. She also needed a good swift clout on the side of ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... day they came again to the palace, and they said, "Shoot not at us any more, unless thou desirest such hurt and harm and torture as thou now hast, and even more." Said Kilwich, "Give me thy daughter; and if thou wilt not give her, thou shalt receive thy death because of her." "Where is he that seeks my daughter? Come hither where I may see thee." And they placed ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... an effort Ross found torture to endure. The red haze in his head filled all the world. Pain—he strove to flee the pain but was held captive in it. And always the pressure on him kept ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... audacity on the part of Toledo, in basing arguments on the alleged cruelty and tyranny of the Incas, when the man was actually red-handed with the blood of an innocent youth, and engaged in the tyrannical persecution of his relations and the hideous torture of his followers. His arguments made no impression on the mind of Philip II. The King even showed some favour to the children of Tupac Amaru by putting them in the succession to the Marquisate of Oropesa. In the Inca pedigrees Toledo is called "el execrable regicidio." When he presented himself ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... answered the quack graciously. "But nature also provides it with the great door from which your answer has come. Your teeth are a bungling piece of workmanship. They appear with pain, decay with time, and so long as they last torture those who do not industriously attend to them. But art will correct nature. See this box—" and he now began to praise the tooth-powder and cure for toothache he had invented. Next he passed to the head, and described in vivid colors, its various pains. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Ireland; life peerages; civil service appointments; the use of torture in India; law reform; difficulties in the execution of the treaty of Paris; the questions connected with the Isle of Serpents and Bulgrad, on the new Russo-Bessarabian frontier; the disposal of the Aland Islands conquered by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the return to the cold window, with the constant rain and the beating of the white surge on the black rocks. The imprisonment became torture—became maddening. What if he were suddenly to murder this old man and stop forever his insufferable prosing about Bernada Siena and Andrea Mantegna? It seemed so strange to hear him talk of the unearthly calm of Raphael's "St. Michael"—of ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... procure whom the father and mother were shot. No reproach is inherited by the mistress who, day after day, tied up her female servant in an agonising posture, and had her beaten until there was no sound part in her body, securing her in the stocks during the intervals of torture. That man did not lose caste who tied up another woman and had her thrashed until she brought forth at the whipping-post. These are merely examples of thousands of cases which could be proved were an Imperial Commission to sit, and could the wretched victims of a prolonged ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... to keep his human consignment in good health, whilst, through revolutionary fanaticism, the crew of the Aix vessel detests its cargo of "black-frocks" and would gladly send them to the bottom.—According to this system, which, up to Thermidor 9, grows worse and worse, imprisonment becomes a torture, oftentimes mortal, slower and more painful than the guillotine, and to such an extent that, to escape it, Champfort opens his veins and Condorcet swallows poison.[4121]The third expedient consists of murder, with or without trial.—178 tribunals, of which 40 are ambulatory, pronounce in ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... adventure. The horror of revealing the truth to Aunt Constance, as I was bound to do—of telling her that I had lied, and that I had left my maiden's modesty behind in my bedroom, gripped me at intervals like some appalling and exquisite instrument of torture. And yet, ere Diaz had touched the piano with his broad white hand, I was content, I was rewarded, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... hand, no ingenuity can torture "language" into being a fit word to use in connection with either sounds or any other symbols that have not been intended to convey a meaning, or again in connection with either sounds or symbols in respect of ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... and fortitude, combating love, happiness and inclination,—each conquering alternately, and alternately each vanquished,—I could endure it no longer, I resolved by one effort to finish the strife, and to undergo an instant of even exquisite torture, in preference to a continuance of ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... Geoffrey; "a clumsy, unfeeling brute!" He kissed her little white wrinkled hand; then, still holding it, paused to listen. The voice came up again from the place of torture. ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... spectres of the slain, with ghastly, gory wounds, stalking about his bed; and demons of hideous aspect, and with weapons of torture in their hands, with horrid and derisive malice, were impatiently waiting to seize his soul the moment it should pass ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... patient, steady plodding in the work required to gain our freedom from self-consciousness. It is when we are aware of our bondage that our opportunity to gain our freedom from it really begins. This bondage brings very real suffering, and we may often, without exaggeration, call it torture. It is sometimes even extreme torture, but may have to be endured for a lifetime unless the sufferer has the clear light by which to find his freedom; and, unfortunately, many who might have the light will not ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... proverb—"The misfortune of many is the consolation of fools." "Where we are is hell, and where hell is there must we ever be," Mephistopheles continues, to which Faust answers that he thinks hell's a fable and asks him who made the world. And finally this tragic Doctor, tortured with our torture, meets Helen, who, although no doubt Marlowe never suspected it, is none other than renascent Culture. And in Marlowe's Faust there is a scene that is worth the whole of the second part of the Faust of Goethe. Faust says ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... exclaimed Isidore, raising his head, "you do not know what you are saying, or how you torture me. She is not dead—at least, for aught I know—but she is ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... cracking drought, that chaps the hard earth, and shrinks the streamlets, and burns to brown powder the tender herbage (Ps. xxxii.). Body and mind seem both to be included in this wonderful description, in which obstinate dumbness, constant torture, dread of God, and not one softening drop of penitence fill the dry and dusty heart, while "bones waxing old," or, as the word might be rendered, "rotting," sleepless nights, and perhaps the burning heat of disease, are hinted at as ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... be like an Indian under torture had sustained him in the teacher's cruel beating and in his home punishments, but this was too much. He fled to a far and quiet corner and there flung himself down and sobbed in grief and rage—he would have killed them if he could. After an hour or two he came trembling ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... prosperous citizen of the town, hearing him play the organ at church on Sundays, and never having him leave her. She regarded her son as though he were still twelve years old. She would have liked him never to be more than that. Innocently she inflicted torture on the unhappy man who was ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... the river had lost shape and faded into the violet darkness. His conversation with Von Ragastein had unsettled him. Without knowing definitely why, he wanted him back again. Memories that had long since ceased to torture were finding their way once more into his brain. On the first day he had striven to rid himself of them in ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... interested in you, Miss Standish. It amuses me to see him torture the corners of his eyes to look at you. I have thought it would be only charity and good-will ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... the broken foreleg more carefully. Gentle as was his touch, yet Link knew it must cause infinite torture. But the dog did not flinch. He seemed to understand that Ferris meant kindly, for he moved his magnificent head far enough to lick the man's hand softly and ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... principle, but also into a warm accusation against me, as having attacked the system of domestic slavery now existing in the Southern States. For all this, there was not the slightest foundation, in any thing said or intimated by me. I did not utter a single word which any ingenuity could torture into an attack on the slavery of the South. I said, only, that it was highly wise and useful, in legislating for the Northwestern country while it was yet a wilderness, to prohibit the introduction of slaves; and I added, that ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... influence must necessarily be deadly in nervous organizations with excitable temperaments, especially where there is any tendency toward rheumatic affections. Bless you I saw in a moment what was the matter with us, and says I, out goes your fires!—no more slow torture and certain death for me, sir. What you want is the appearance of heat, not the heat itself—that's the idea. Well how to do it was the next thing. I just put my head, to work, pegged away, a couple of days, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... many a fearful story of the wrongs and cruelties practiced by the Inquisitors in Mexico. Tales came across the wide ocean of rackings and tormentings and burnings, of men given over to slavery, wearing their San-benitos for many a weary year, and perhaps dying of torture in the end. We would do something to escape a fate like that, God ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... visage had appeared in his bachelor den, and declaring herself a nurse sent by friends, had proceeded to make him more comfortable than he had believed possible, with those aching members touching up every nerve to torture. ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... and he was crying out 'Extolled be the perfection of my Lord, who hath appointed me this severe affliction and painful torture until the ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... now to torture himself by refraining from his water-bottle. He seized and drained it, and then falling on his knees he thanked Heaven for this deliverance. For though, when considered calmly at a distance, he had recognised the perils which would attend his adventure in entering the place, which was ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... when I say that it was with an odd sense of relief that I finally took my departure from her flat. To long for the right to comfort a woman as only a lover may do, and to suspect that this sweet privilege might have been his for the asking, is a torture which ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... in the hands of camp-followers, horse-holders, cooks, bottle-washers, and thieves.. .. We have passed out from the hands of the brave soldiers who overcame us, and are turned over to the tender mercies of squaws for torture.... I see Negro police—great black fellows—leading white girls around the streets of Montgomery, and locking them up ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... one of two courses. Either they deny that Genesis was meant to teach scientific truth, and thus save the veracity of the record at the expense of its authority; or they expend their energies in devising the cruel ingenuities of the reconciler, and torture texts in the vain hope of making them confess the creed of Science. But when the peine forte et dure is over, the antique sincerity of the venerable sufferer always reasserts itself. Genesis is honest to the core, and professes ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... he may not pass, secret treasures that he may not see, dreams that he may not guess. There are dark corners where there has been torture, of which he will never know. There are shadows and ghostly shapes which Penelope has hidden with the fairest fabrics of her loom. There are doors, tightly locked, which he has no key to open; rooms which have contained costly vessels, empty ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... brother at Eltham, as they were keeping their Christmas festivities there, and that this attempt failed through the Court receiving intimation of the design and suddenly removing to Westminster."[26] Lord Cobham was put to death by cruel torture in St. Giles's Fields, London, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... be.—I wish there were a few more like him, though your beastly diseases do put money into my pocket.—That offered us a bare chance, and we were bound to act on that chance"—his loose lips worked into a bitterly humorous smile—"and torture him. Well, I've seen a good many men under the knife before now, and I tell you I never saw one who bore himself better. Men and horses alike, it's breeding that tells when it comes to the push. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... of futility, a week of inaction, thanks to that flesh wound in his leg. Futility seemed to haunt, yes, and torture him! Even his rehabilitation of Larry the Bat, with all its attendant risk and danger, had been futile as far as she was concerned. And he had counted so much on that! And that had failed, and ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... the character of the Indian, and one that highly amazed the young people. As for Howe, though he did sometimes open his eyes with wonder, it did not interest him, and he never spoke to them of the "by play" that was every day growing more interesting to the younger ones, and becoming a great torture to the young mother. Jane, who was daily becoming more and more attached to her guests, used every art in her power to inspire her with more confidence, and at the same time assure her of the kindness ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... doing. The very simplicity of the plan was its passport to success. All that was required was the unsuspected sifting of snuff on the hair of the person whose head was to be put in the beast's mouth. The lion's smile was not, properly speaking, a smile at all, chevalier; it was the torture which came of snuff getting into its nostrils, and when the beast made that uncanny noise and snapped its jaws together, it was simply the outcome of a sneeze. The thing would be farcical if it were not that tragedy hangs ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... another, then each part of life will do for us what was intended. People talk of the hardships of military service, of the miseries that we undergo fighting for our country. I have undergone my share, I believe,—hard toil in the wilderness, hunger, extreme weariness, pinching cold, the torture of a wound, peril of death; and really I have been as happy through it as ever I was at my mother's cosey fireside of a winter's evening. If I had died, I doubt not my last moments would have been ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Kosmou, which the Latins called phallus and fascinum,[FN409] the French godemiche and the Italians passatempo and diletto (whence our "dildo"), every kind abounds, varying from a stuffed "French letter" to a cone of ribbed horn which looks like an instrument of torture. For the use of men they have the "merkin,"[FN410] a heart-shaped article of thin skin stuffed with cotton and slit with an artificial vagina: two tapes at the top and one below lash it to the back of a chair. The erotic literature ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... work, I will compare it to an attack of herpes. I scratch myself while I cry. It is both a pleasure and a torture at the same time. And I am doing nothing that I want to! For one does not choose one's subjects, they force themselves on one. Shall I ever find mine? Will an idea fall from Heaven suitable to my temperament? Can I write a book to which I shall give myself heart and soul? ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... intellectual faculties. A sense of responsibility for his every action rested heavily on every person. Men shut themselves in dungeons, scourged their flesh, lacerated their bodies, inflicted all manner of torture on their frames, that they might purge away every evil desire, every wrong propensity, and conquer their material elements into submission to the spiritual. Deeds of lofty self-abnegation, rarely if ever known to modern days, were then common. Stern virtue, as virtue was then understood, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... extreme than this will readily suggest themselves, in which a hankering which cannot be fulfilled may prove itself a torture. A more ordinary case is that of a man who has no particular vices, such as drink or sensuality, but yet has been attached entirely to things of the physical world, and has lived a life devoted to business or to aimless social functions. For him the astral world is ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... her. Marian usually wore a very valuable watch; probably, also, she had money about her person—enough to have tempted the cupidity of some lawless wretch. He shrank in horror from pursuing conjecture—it was worse than torture, worse than madness to him. Oh, blindness and frenzy; why had he not thought of these dangers so likely to beset her solitary path? Why had he so recklessly exposed her to them? Vain questions, alas! vain as was his self-reproach, his ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... and her heart with anguish; the little one, hungry and pale, beheld that breast and cried and agonized; the executioner said to the woman, a mother and a nurse, 'Abjure!' giving her her choice between the death of her infant and the death of her conscience. What say you to that torture of Tantalus as applied to a mother? Bear this well in mind sir: the French Revolution had its reasons for existence; its wrath will be absolved by the future; its result is the world made better. From its most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the human race. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... carried away in a flood of new emotion; she tried once or twice to be discreetly angry with herself for admitting so unreservedly the pleasure she felt in Pierre's admiration; she placed her soul on a rack of self-questioning torture, and every inquisition she made of her heart returned the self-same answer: she ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... followed; she did not understand what Mrs. Dusautoy was aiming at, in the close questioning, which to her amazement did not seem to offend, but rather to be gratifying by the curious divination of all sensations. It made Albinia feel as if she had been carrying on a deliberate system of torture, when she heard of a pain in the back, hardly ever ceasing, aggravated by sitting upright, growing severe with the least fatigue, and unless favoured by day, becoming so bad at night as to take ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of torture that I can bear," said Hugh, after a pause. "I have had harsh words and cold looks for a long time, and you have slighted me on every possible occasion; but it has made no difference in my love for you. It has grown until it has taken possession of me, ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... always dare to say what he really thought, nor publicly to worship as he believed was right. Many of the Christians were not ashamed to conceal their real belief from the heathen Romans, who were everywhere seeking with hatred for the followers of Christ, to torture and slay them. ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... frame must be added the torture of the heart arising from a difference with his father, who, as a Catholic, was disturbed by the skeptical tendencies of his son, and the perpetual irritation of a conflict with the large majority of even philosophical ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... water which I could drink was now becoming terrible. When I thought of it, my head began to turn; my brain seemed to be on fire; and the public basins of Caneville, where only the lowest curs used to quench their thirst, danced before me to add to my torture; for I thought, though I despised them once, how I could give treasures of gold for one good draught at the ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... capable of warm and active friendship, and, of course, was not a little astounded and hurt when the young lady replied—"Surely, Miss Harewood, you cannot be ignorant that all our great medical practitioners torture and kill animals, for the purpose of ascertaining the nature of diseases, and, in many cases, undoubtedly for the purpose of learning how much suffering bodies of a certain size and texture are capable of enduring? Now I don't doubt, Miss Hanson, being so wise in other ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... interesting women with a barbarity that would make savages (so called) blush. It was at Carlisle that two female pilgrims, Dorothy Waugh and Ann Robinson, were dragged through the streets, with each an iron instrument of torture, called a bridle, upon their heads; and were treated ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... upon a little child thrusting food between the iron bars to its father. In the darkness the soldiers sleeping in the corridors heard the rustling garments of some maiden or mother who loved life itself less than husband or friend. These tides of sympathy made men strong against torture; old men lifted joyful eyes toward those above them. Loving and beloved, the disciples shared their burdens, and those in the prison and those out of it together went ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... of being deserted by friend after friend, of enduring the taunts of an inhospitable press, and, finally, of having his place taken by one, who, in his opinion, had proven most faithless, was like the torture of an unquenchable fire. Lord Randolph Churchill, after his historic resignation as chancellor of the exchequer, declared that he would not live it over again for a million a year. It is likewise ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... elect spirits even in this life, as to Enoch, Elijah, Stephen, and Jerome. But there was a converse to the Beatific Vision in the Visio malefica, or presentation of absolute Evil, which was to be the chief torture of the damned, and which, like the Beatific Vision, had been made visible in life to certain desperate men. It visited Esau, as was said, when he found no place for repentance, and Judas, whom it drove to suicide. Cain saw it when he murdered his brother, and legend relates ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... fast, the gallants ride, in some safe nook to hide Their coward heads, predestined to rot on Temple Bar; And he—he turns, he flies:—shame on those cruel eyes That bore to look on torture, and dare ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thought of it would altogether spoil the children's dinner. When they had to play the Voyage en Chine of Bazin, or their pieces of Weber as a duet, they gave each other confidence, and were not very much afraid. But it was torture to them to have to play alone. Antoinette, as usual, was the braver of the two. Although it bored her dreadfully,—as she knew that there was no way out of it, she would go through with it, sit at the piano with a determined ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... from it being possible for me to undertake singlehanded an expedition for the rescue of Nell, I was liable at any moment to blunder upon a war party of savages and either be slain by them forthwith, or, still worse, be carried off a captive, to suffer death by torture; indeed, the wonder was that something of this kind had not already happened to me, as doubtless it had to many another unsuspecting traveller. No, to attempt alone to rescue Nell would be worse than useless, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... picture of one of the Christian martyrs whose torture was inflicted on her by a man armed with steel pincers to pluck off her flesh from her shuddering soul bit by bit. It seemed to him that his sainted Charity was condemned to like atrocity. Her hands were bound by the thongs of the law, her body ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... past, in all countries and among all nations, woman has been proving this true. Since the dark day when "there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother," and there came to that mother's heart the agony of bereavement, the human disappointment and pangs, whose torture only the Father God could understand,—from that day till the present, disappointment, trial and sorrow have entered largely into the life and experience of women. But of all clouds that have darkened their lives and among all sharp ...
— Why and how: a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada • Addie Chisholm
... new-made gardens, drooping and festering under a cruel sun in a scorched and unclean soil:—the place repelled and outraged every sense. Was it here that little Cecile had passed from a life of pain to a death of torture? ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... own! Delightful possibilities loomed before her through all her dressing. No more dreading of stormy days when she would be shut in the house; no more fears to torture her in the wakeful hours of the night. Help and protection would be hers at call!—And she could talk with Polly! She wanted to dance for very joy. And only two days ago her heart was aching! She felt as if ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... are Symonds's; let him speak still further: "Bruno burned, Vanini burned, Carnescchi burned, Paleario burned, Bonfadio burned; Campanella banished after a quarter of a century's imprisonment with torture; the leaders of free religious thought in exile, scattered over northern Europe. Tasso, worn out with misery and madness, rested at length in his tomb on the Janiculan; Scarpi survived the stylus of the Roman curia with calm inscrutability at St. Fosca; Galileo meditated ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... extent, but have preserved in a marvellous way their individuality as a race. They have the narrow eyes and the thick nose base of the pure Oriental; also much of his cunning. One of their special weaknesses seems to be the invention of the most hideous forms of torture, which they apply remorselessly to ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ran a swift stream almost knee-deep. Our way led across this stream, and there was only one means of getting over. That was to plunge in and splash through. Tired as we all were, after getting thoroughly wet our feet felt like lead, and marching was perfect torture. Still ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... another proof of the sturdiness and devotion which has filled so many pages of history and romance with their praise that as a class the Covenanters remained at home to establish their faith with torture, martyrdom, and death. ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... strange looking being who fanned her in such an amazing fashion was the young friend of the real Travers Gladwin who had appeared on the scene from time to time during that fateful afternoon, for his features were far from being in repose. Positive torture was written on his clean-cut boyish face as he wielded that fast fan in his handcuffed hands as if it were a task imposed upon ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... Ganges; to offer up human sacrifice; to murder children, either by throwing them into the Ganges, or by the Rajpoot secret method of infanticide; to encourage men to throw away their lives under temple cars and in other ways of religious devotion; to encourage various forms of voluntary self-torture and self-mutilation; to outrage girls under ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... heaven! is this not torture? I get it on both sides. [Turning to Nato:] Be still, ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... certain Vedius Pollio, who, in the presence of Augustus, would have given a slave as food to his fish for having broken a glass. With the Romans, the regular method of taking the evidence of their slaves was under torture. Here it has been thought better never to resort to their evidence. When a master was murdered, all his slaves, in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death. Here punishment falls on the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... book of school-boy's eloquence bend to the monstrous idea of a Son of God, begotten by a ghost on the body of a virgin, there is no imposition we are not justified in suspecting them of. Every phrase and circumstance are marked with the barbarous hand of superstitious torture, and forced into meanings it was impossible they could have. The head of every chapter, and the top of every page, are blazoned with the names of Christ and the Church, that the unwary reader might suck in the error before he began ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... were needed in the shop; business which he had left at a moment's warning awaited him, unfinished; but at this time he could not bear the torture of giving explanations, and alleging reasons to the languid intelligence and slow sympathies ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Monks of Camaldoli. By reason of all these works he made so long a stay in the Borgo that he almost adopted it as his home. He was a sorry fellow in matters of art, labouring with the greatest difficulty, and toiling with such pains at the execution of a work, that it was a torture to him. ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... brothers by brothers. The smoke rises in the valley, and the home is blotted out. All that makes life worth living goes, then life itself. What sterner test can a nation be put to than this? It is a torture long and slow; the agony and bloody sweat. I know well that if my own country were invaded I should, or hope I should, behave exactly as these men are doing; and as I should call it patriotism in my own case, ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... feel a sort of satisfaction that mine is going to the press first, though there is little danger that we should think on any subject alike, or stumble on any one character in the same track." De Quincey spoke of the hidden torture shown in Landor's play to be ever present in the mind of Count Julian, the betrayer of his country, as greater than the tortures inflicted in old Rome on generals who had committed treason. De Quincey's admiration of this play ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... impossibility to have his eyes on both passes at once, the old gentleman soon found that turning his head every few seconds from one side to the other became irksome. Then it became painful. At last it became torture, and then he gave up this plan in despair, resolving to devote a minute at a time to each pass, although feeling that by so doing his chances ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... incredible the torture to which they will sometimes put their prisoners; and the adult captives will endure it without a tear or a groan. In spite of all their sufferings, which the love of cruelty and revenge can invent and inflict upon them, they continue ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... the depths of his own soul another name. His years, his life, had been wasted, just as this man Prebol's life was wasted, just as Slip's life was being wasted. Buck gave himself over to the exquisite torture of memories and reflections. He wondered what had become of the woman for love of whom he had let go all holds and degenerated to this ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... and skipping is but the hypocrisy of bleeding vanity—haeret lateri—they are just the flush, wriggle, and hysterics of suppressed torture. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... life, sir, this is infamous. You put upon me that I would mishandle my own son as he lies wounded and near death! I shall murder him, I suppose. You had that against me before. Shall I rob him too, or torture him maybe? This is raving. Carry it where you will, I'll none of it. ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs, as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions." We have but to add:—if only the coming forth from the creative hand of God, the creation in his own image, the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... pedantry, or pretension—with wit, conversational talents, and love of good society, without that desire of exhibition, that devouring diseased appetite for admiration, which preys upon the mind insatiably, to its torture—to its destruction; without that undefineable, untranslateable French love of succes de societe, which substitutes a precarious; factitious, intoxicated existence in public, for the safe self-approbation, the sober, the permanent happiness ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... And Maevius[16] reigns o'er Kentish town: Tigellius[17] placed in Phooebus' car From Ludgate shines to Temple-bar: Harmonious Cibber entertains The court with annual birth-day strains; Whence Gay was banish'd in disgrace;[18] Where Pope will never show his face; Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves or lose his pension.[19] But these are not a thousandth part Of jobbers in the poet's art, Attending each his proper station, And all in due subordination, Through every alley to be found, In garrets high, or under ground; And when they ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... had acknowledged with one accord that all hope of finding a means to render operations painless must be utterly abandoned—that the surgeon's knife must ever remain a synonym for slow and indescribable torture. By an odd coincidence it chanced that Sir Benjamin Brodie, the acknowledged leader of English surgeons, had publicly expressed this as his deliberate though regretted opinion at a time when the quest which he considered futile had already led to the most brilliant success in ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... persevered in making what they considered their escape from certain death, for, as I have said, the children had been taught, by the tales they had heard, to regard all strange Indians as ministers of torture, and of horrors worse than death. Exhausted with pain and fatigue, the poor little girl at length declared she ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... as a physician someone had heard and he was called in to treat the dislocated ankle of King Darius. The wily Greek, longing for his home, feared that if he confessed to a knowledge of medicine there would be no chance of escape, but under threat of torture he undertook a treatment which proved successful. Then Herodotus tells his story—how, ill treated at home in Crotona, Democedes went to AEgina, where he set up as a physician and in the second year the State of AEgina hired his services ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... the commandant writhed as we hoped in the torture of supreme insult, or slept as was likely from the after-effect of too much bottled beer with dinner—there were others who certainly did hear, and made no ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... as much right to fight for their principles as we have for ours, but I don't think they've the right to torture horses,' she rejoined. Her sympathy with oppressed shearers and dispossessed natives struck always a jarring note between them. His long upper lip closed tightly on the lower one, and he ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... how brave! What a noble lover for any woman! So tall and delicate and fair with all his strength! He never knew why you left him—he thought it was to wear the king's purple, to thrust a bit of gold in your hair! He must have suffered—you have suffered too—such delicious torture, I have often soothed myself to sleep with the thought of it. It is very sweet for me to see you lying there with my wound in your heart. It will rankle long; you cannot get it out—you are married to the king now, and Zoroaster has turned priest for love of you. I think even the king ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... rigid rule, The dull restraint, the chiding frown, The weary torture of the school; The taming of wild nature down. Her only lore, the legends told Around the soldiers' fire; at night Stars rose and set, and seasons rolled; Flowers bloomed, and snowflakes ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... is the pitilessness common to both extremes that shows most strongly in an old, wrinkled visage. He had laid his hand upon her. Every word was a stab ill the girl's heart, and so dreadful became her torture, so intolerable the sense of being drawn by a fierce will away from all she desired, that at length a cry escaped her lips. She fell on her knees by him, and pleaded in a ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... abroad that another deserter had been seen in that neighborhood, but the colored man would not reveal the whereabouts of Louis. His master beat him severely, but he would let neither threats nor torture wring the ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... prejudice will strike us as barbarian. Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have long since died out in the mind of men. That is why the doctors act as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded that every minute gained amidst the most intolerable sufferings is snatched from the incomparably more dreadful sufferings which the mysteries of the hereafter ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... except in Reykjavik, horse furniture is of the most miserable description, and the constant breakages cause many delays, while there are actually no side-saddles, except in the capital, and a chair is an instrument of torture only to be recommended to ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... accomplice, the "neighbour" who had put them up to the crime, were caught. The "neighbour," as soon as he arrived in the village, was given twenty-five lashes, and for two hours was subjected to the agonizing torture of having his head and his feet in the stocks at the same time. Next day he was given ten lashes, and the following day five, and eight days later they took him to Durango. His two Indian associates, father and son, were also put in the stocks, and for two weeks each ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... a favourite Irish form of physically insinuating to a man that he is not exactly popular. It consists of a wooden board with nails in it being drawn down the naked flesh of a man's face and body. This foul torture was often heard of, and it has been whispered that women and even girls have been the ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... house. He gave orders for himself not to be disturbed, and he went to bed; but in vain he tried to sleep. What rack exceeds the torture of an excited brain and an exhausted body? His hands and feet were like ice, his brow like fire; his ears rung with supernatural roaring; a nausea had seized upon him, and death he would have welcomed. In vain, in vain he courted repose; in ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... he woke. Some sound was threatening him. It was London, coming to get him and torture him. The light in his room was dusty, mottled, gray, lifeless. He saw his door, half ajar, and for some moments lay motionless, watching stark and bodiless heads thrust themselves through the opening and withdraw with sinister alertness ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... she put on one of her prettiest gowns, and waited with that wild torture of waiting which involves uncertainty and concealment, and Jerome did not come. Lucina began to believe that Jerome did not love her; she tried to call her maidenly pride to her aid, and succeeded ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... returns. Surrenders. The warriors march into the village. Liberating the captured Brabos. Ralph and Tom visit the large hut where they were confined. Blakely showing the Chief the maneuvers of the warriors. The Chief proposes to torture the Medicine men. John interferes. Asks that they be turned over to him. The Professor and the colony. The insulting message from the Illyas. The messenger to John. Building chairs and tables. Two-and three-room ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay
... or could it be that he—a being with heart and nerves like hers, had no conception of the rack on which she waa stretched—no suspicion that every one of his deliberate sentences was a turn of the screw that redoubled her torture? The Ayletts were a strong-willed race, and she repressed all sign of suffering save intense pallor; made this less palpable by screening her eyes from the lamp-light with a paper she took from the table, and thereby throwing ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... happy-go-lucky creative force, what would we think of the world then, poor thing? A poor woman with nothing to live for walks the streets that she may live; a rich woman with much to live for dies slowly and in great torture, of cancer. If we accept the Great Design we shouldn't even feel pity for these two women, we should say of them merely, 'How right! How beautiful!' But we do feel pity for them, and by that mere feeling ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... downfall of the tyrant. He escaped as you have just described. But the many whose lives he had ruined, whose nearest and dearest had suffered torture and death at his hands, would not let the matter rest. They banded themselves into a society which should never be dissolved until the work was done. It was my part after we had discovered in the transformed Henderson the fallen despot, ...
— The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge • Arthur Conan Doyle
... officer, smarting under insult—they are the result of deep and calm reflection. We have arrived to that grade, that, although we have the power to inflict, we are too high to receive insult, but we have not forgotten how our young blood has boiled when wanton, reckless, and cruel torture has been heaped upon our feelings, merely because, as a junior officer, we were not in a position to retaliate, or even to reply. And another evil is, that this great error is disseminated. In observing on it, in one of our works, called "Peter Simple," we have put the following ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... was no other than Rabbi Aser Abarbanel, a Jew of Arragon, who—accused of usury and pitiless scorn for the poor—had been daily subjected to torture for more than a year. Yet "his blindness was as dense as his hide," and he had refused to abjure ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... but she undoubtedly felt that she took her life in her hands (so to speak), and it did not give her courage. She returned to her post and cried no less than before. We were not heartless; we could not bear to torture the timid creatures, and therefore ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... Their boat had by this time been towed alongside of the frigate, and poor Tam was hoisted on board, and the surgeon was instantly at hand; but he said at once that the poor fellow was fast dying, and that it would be useless torture to carry him below ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... about your bag," I cried. "And I don't care a hang if I've lost my pyjamas and my best shoes and my only razor. And I've been through an hour's torture for nothing, and I don't mind that. But oh!—to think that you aren't going ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... horrors of the scene. While one of the hags sprinkles her hell-drops through the adjoining house, another is casting up earth from a pit, in which the boy is presently imbedded to the chin, and killed by a frightful process of slow torture, in order that a love philtre of irresistible power may be concocted from his liver and spleen. The time, the place, the actors are brought before us with singular dramatic power. Canidia's burst of wonder and rage that the ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... extract from Kemaleddin's History of Aleppo in Wilken, preface to vol. ii. p. 36. Phirouz, or Azzerrad, the breastplate maker, had been pillaged and put to the torture by Bagi Sejan, the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... dread disorder rise, Track the mute foe and scour the howling wood, Loud as a storm, ungovern'd as a flood; Or deep in groves the silent ambush lay, Lead the false flight, decoy and seize their prey, Their captives torture, butcher and devour, Drink the warm blood and paint ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... side) and some observances of the ascetics (such as pulling out the hair instead of shaving the head) are severe, but as a community the Jains lead sane and serious lives, hardly practising and certainly not parading the extravagances of self-torture which they theoretically commend. Mahavira is said to have taught that place, time and occasion should be taken into consideration and his successors adapted their precepts to the age in which they lived. Such monks as I have met[285] maintained that extreme forms ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... when the poor child was no longer upheld by moral force, and the body was about to break down. The priest calculated the time with the hideous practical sagacity formerly shown by executioners in the art of torture. He found his protegee in the garden, sitting on a bench under a trellis on which the April sun fell gently; she seemed to be cold and trying to warm herself; her companions looked with interest at her pallor as of a folded plant, her eyes like those of a dying gazelle, her ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... be a coincidence about the convent," Mary told herself. Why should Miss Bland wish to torture Angelo's wife, even if she knew anything? And she could not know. It was impossible that she should know. But suddenly the girl remembered Marie's hints about a long-ago flirtation between the cousins. And Idina's manner had been odd when she begged ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... now brought back to the camp. He had still a supply of biscuit and dates with him; but eating only aggravates the torture of thirst. Moist food is fitter to carry on such occasions. We found rum very useful in restoring ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... No need now to torture himself by refraining from his water-bottle. He seized and drained it, and then falling on his knees he thanked Heaven for this deliverance. For though, when considered calmly at a distance, he had recognised the perils which would attend his adventure in entering the ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... I looked into her eyes, but saw no tear. There was something which seemed strangely haughty in her air, and yet it was the air of woe. A Spanish and an Indian grief, which would not visibly lament. Pride's height in vain abased to proneness on the rack; nature's pride subduing nature's torture. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... braver they esteem themselves. It is a positive fact, as we may gather from all their poems and songs, that the Scandinavians alone, probably, of all pagan nations, have had no measure of bravery and military glory beyond the infliction of the most exquisite torture and ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... word of the Hebrew which might be intelligible to him. He wondered much what sort of a man this Jew might be, actuated by what motives, impelled by what impulses to his lonely task. All the sorrow of a hope deferred through ages, and a long torture patiently borne, seemed gathered in the cadence; but the man—surely the man was no refined embodiment of the high sentiment of his psalm! And still the soft rich voice chanted the unknown language, and the daylight grew ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... to defend herself Lucie would become a heroine, and the door of my room being open, I might have been exposed to shame and to a very useless repentance. This rather frightened me. Yet, to put an end to my torture, I did not know what to decide. I could no longer resist the effect made upon my senses by this beautiful girl, who, at the break of day and scarcely dressed, ran gaily into my room, came to my bed enquiring how I had slept, bent familiarly ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... instruments of torture in the shape of paving-stones of which the Captain complained, and justly, he and Bob just managed to reach the Archimedes before she cast-off from the jetty alongside of which she had been coaling, the two only having time to jump on board as the gangway connecting ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... to have been a sort of compromise between the claims of the lake and the claims of the town. It was not too far from the town and not too far from the lake. Perhaps it had been built within sight of the lake so that the West Ketchem student body could see it while at their lessons. A kind of slow torture. ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... give to each nation its own language. For this purpose he placed a caldron of water on the fire, and commanded the different races to approach it in order, and to select for themselves the sounds which were uttered by the singing of the water in its confinement and torture.'" ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... these Spanish boats, was that "they had compelled our men by torture to confess where his frigate and ships were." To the disheartened folk about him it seemed that all hope of returning home was now gone, for they made no doubt that the ships were by this time destroyed. Some of them flung down their gold in despair, while all ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... carrying him away; and on finding that entreaties were of no use, he has struck at the provost, and, as he thinks, killed him. A crowd which he imagines to be composed of the Provost's attendants has followed him from the palace. Torture stares him in the face; and his physical sensitiveness has the upper hand again. For a moment Chiappino becomes a hero; he is shamed into nobleness. He flings his own cloak over Luitolfo, gives him ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... had made one, was drowned in the crashing of glass. Better that she should be startled, even to the point of swooning, rather than endure for another second the torture that that ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... edge] Everything we can say is useless, and it'll only torture and humiliate us. We must end ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... kill eels instantly, without the horrid torture of cutting and skinning them alive, pierce the spinal marrow, close to the back part of the skull, with a sharp-pointed skewer: if this be done in the right place, all motion will instantly cease. The humane executioner does certain criminals the favour to hang them ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... dying, of a sovereign who longs to labour for the welfare of his people, but who is racked by the thought that in giving his mind to temporal duties and domestic affections while such spiritual difficulties are still unsolved, he may be preparing for himself an eternity of torture such as that—" and he pointed to an old and blackened picture of the Last Judgment that hung ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... other hand, the torture which Prada experienced now became intense. Whilst the sovereigns continued conversing, the Queen with the ladies who came to pay her their respects, the King with the officers, diplomatists, and other important personages who approached him, Prada saw none but Benedetta—Benedetta ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Frederick immediate suspicion who was in the coach with her, and turning his head quickly, he met the stern eye of Dorriforth; upon which, without the smallest salutation, he turned from him again abruptly and rudely. Miss Milner was confused, and Miss Woodley in torture, at this palpable affront, to which ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... with bandaged eyes and bits in their mouths. From other towns as well as Bristol came forth plunderers, with humble gait and courteous discourse; who, when they met with a lonely man having the appearance of being wealthy, would bear him off to starvation and torture, till they had mulcted him to the last farthing. These and other indications of an unsettled government took place before the landing of Matilda to assert her claims. An invasion of England, by the Scottish King, without regard to the previous pacification, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... their leader, a man of low stature, with gray locks, but a fierce countenance, "where is the murderer? Where is Sir William Wallace? Speak, or the torture shall force you." ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... But the vigour of his intellect was too strenuous, and his curiosity and interest in every object of knowledge too inextinguishable. 'After all,' he said, 'the only thing to do is to put on a good face, and to march to the place of torture with a few friends to console you on the way. This is the charming image under which I picture my present situation. Mark you,' he added, 'I always count ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... charge, much to the sorrow and dismay of all. He disposed of all the elegant furnishings of the parsonage, and with haste left the spot that had been the scene of an exquisite torture. No defined plans were before him, save to get far away from any who could have had the least knowledge of him previously. No fugitive from justice ever felt more nervous haste. He pushed on, never pausing till he reached the very verge of civilisation in the far south-west. Not ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... bottom of his soul which he could not bear to speak of,—nay, which, as often as it reared itself through the dark waves of unworded consciousness into the breathing air of thought, he trod down as the ruined angels tread down a lost soul, trying to come up out of the seething sea of torture. Only this one daughter! No! God never would have ordained such a thing. There was nothing ever heard of like it; it could not be; she was ill,—she would outgrow all these singularities; he had had an aunt who was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the presidency of Sharp, exercised a cruelty bred of terror. The prisoners were defended by George Mackenzie: it has been strangely stated that he was Lord Advocate, and persecuted them! Fifteen rebels were hanged: the use of torture to extract information was a return, under Fletcher, the King's Advocate, to a practice of Scottish law which had been almost in abeyance since 1638—except, of course, in the case of witches. Turner vainly tried to save from the Boot {208} ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... administered, and slowly did its work. It abode in his mind to torture him with the doubts that were its very essence. No reason, however well founded, that she might have urged for Sakr-el-Bahr's strange conduct could have been half so insidious as her suggestion that there was a reason. It gave him something vague and intangible to consider. ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... sick man between his teeth, and writhing impatiently in his bed. 'Isn't this mattress hard enough, and the room dull enough, and pain bad enough, but THEY must torture ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... fooles to purchase mocking so. That same Berowne ile torture ere I goe. O that I knew he were but in by th' weeke, How I would make him fawne, and begge, and seeke, And wait the season, and obserue the times, And spend his prodigall wits in booteles rimes, And shape his seruice wholly to my deuice, And make him ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... for all, was enough to embitter anybody's existence. He found it hard to accept the well-meant condolences of casual acquaintances, and still harder to do the right thing and congratulate Drake on his victory, a refinement of self-torture which is by custom expected of the vanquished in every branch of work or sport. But he managed it somehow, and he also managed to appear reasonably gratified when he went up to take his prize for the half-mile. Tony and the others, ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... be compelled to disgorge his secret. You saw that she would not have shrunk from a regimen of racks and thumbscrews. But there were no racks or thumbscrews on the island. Of course we could have invented various instruments of torture—I felt I could have developed some ingenuity that way myself—but too fatally well Mr. Tubbs knew the civilized prejudices of those with whom he had to deal. With perfect impunity he could strut about the camp, sure that no weapons worse than words would ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... every day, no attempt whatever being made to remedy this evil; on the contrary, their pitiless drivers urge them on by prodding the raw sores with sharpened sticks, and by belaboring them unceasingly with an instrument of torture in the shape of whips with six inches of ordinary trace-chain for a lash. As if the noble army of Persian donkey drivers were not satisfied with the refinement of physical cruelty to which they have attained, they add insult to injury by talking ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... Vere Carter slunk away realistically, and the sight of it brought momentary delight to William's weary soul. Otherwise the rehearsals were not far removed from torture to him. The thought of being a wolf had at first attracted him, but actually a wolf character who had to repeat Mrs. de Vere Carter's meaningless couplets and be worsted at every turn by the smiling Cuthbert, who was forced to watch from ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... watched the war with abated breath,— Skeleton Boy against skeleton Death. Months of torture, how many such? Weary weeks of the stick and crutch; And still a glint of the steel-blue eye Told of a spirit ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... it was now a sweeter one, more womanly, faint lines beginning to mark its satin smoothness with impress of sorrow. To my thought a new, higher womanhood had found birth within, during weary days and nights of suspense and suffering. It was yet torture to me constantly beholding these two together, but, as I observed her then, I thanked the good God who had permitted me to be near her in time of trial. In patience I would serve, even though I must suffer. Tears were clinging to her long lashes, and occasionally one ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... precautions are taken, still some 10,000 sheep had an ominous large S on them. These poor sufferers are dragged down a plank into a great pit filled with hot water, tobacco, and sulphur, and soused over head and ears two or three times. This torture ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... dilated eyes staring at the sky—and among them, the happy, the enviable! how many living, groaning, bleeding men, writhing with pain, unable to raise their mutilated bodies from the gory bed of torture and death! ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... match back there. He's only a few years older. The French say that a woman should be half a man's age plus seven years. That would make her only a few years too young, and she can wait." Chad was scarlet under the girl's mischievous torture, but a cry from the house saved him. Dan ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... it is rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world. Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods—Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... tell you," she said, "how comforting your words are. If you, a stranger, can estimate the truth so nearly, why should I torture myself because my husband is outrageously unjust? I will follow your counsel, Mr. Brett. If possible, Nellie and I will leave here to-morrow. Perhaps Mrs. Eastham may be able to come with us to town. Will you order my carriage? A drive will do me good. Come ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... scene that Ogilvie appeared. During his voyage home he had gone through almost every imaginable torture, and, as he reached Silverbel, he felt that the limit of his patience was almost reached. He knew, because she had sent him a cable to that effect, that his wife was staying in a country place, a place on the banks of the Thames. She had told him further that the nearest station to ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... returned, it was accompanied by a sensation of almost unendurable agony from my numerous smarting, inflamed, and stiffening wounds; and to this was added the torture of a ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... nothing of the effort, for the hand lay all but motionless. He saw nothing of the fading softness that glowed in the big, loving eyes, for his own eyes were blinded by a hot film. And the woman saw nothing of the hot film, so torture was saved them both. But suddenly the woman quivered, and Cummins heard ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... death-like stupor was broken by agonies of torture which racked the wasted frame for many hours. There was no respite for a prayer, or for a thought of the eternity into which his poor soul was hastening. The witch doctor fled in haste, unable to endure ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... Van Berg; "I have had a greater escape than the child. In being 'at hand' as you express it, Miss Burton, I am beginning to feel that you have saved me from death by torture." ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... be one! There should be one. And there's the bitterness Of this unending torture-place for men, For the proud soul that craves a perfectness That might outwear the rotting of all things Rooted in earth. [Footnote: Josephine Preston ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... striking. On the 23rd they cruised about in search of the Pandora until the afternoon when, having drunk their last drop of water, they gave her up, and made sail for Namuka, the appointed rendezvous. The torture they suffered from thirst on the passage was such that poor Renouard, the midshipman, became delirious, and continued so for many weeks. Their leeway and the easterly current combined to set them to the westward ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... even Muscovites would chuse to have some pretence for what they do; and sure the first favourite and generalissimo of a prince, who boasts an inclination to civilize his barbarous subjects, will not, without any cause, torture them whom chance alone has put into his power, and who have never done him any personal injury.—By heaven, pursued he, turning to the prince, we all are innocent of any part of those crimes laid to our charge:—time, perhaps, if our declarations are ineffectual, will convince ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... and the dining-room in perfect order. Meantime Zany concluded that she had better tell Miss Lou. Her young mistress might blame her severely if she did not, and keeping such a secret over night would also be a species of torture. ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... glory. It is sublime in its ample outline, and exquisitely tender in its details. It is charged with many precious lessons, which flow freely at the gentlest touch; and it is cruel to put it to the torture to compel it to give meanings which it ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... theology of the pagan Hawaiians than of our Christian ancestors a few centuries ago if looked at from an ethical or practical point of view. At the worst, the Hawaiian sacrificed the enemy he took in battle on the altar of his gods; the Christian put to death with exquisite torture those who disagreed with him in points of doctrine. And when it comes to morals, have not the heathen time and again demonstrated their ability to give lessons in self-restraint to ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... had, was, of the cruel usage we should meet with from them, if we fell into their hands: then the story of Amboyna came into my head, and how the Dutch might, perhaps, torture us, as they did our countrymen there; and make some of our men, by extremity of torture, confess those crimes they never were guilty of; own themselves, and all of us, to be pirates; and so they would put us to death, with a formal ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... such a contemplation. There was a Jesus Christ crucified, by the same, very fine. One gets tired, indeed, whatever may be the conception and execution of it, of seeing that monotonous and agonised form for ever exhibited in one prescriptive attitude of torture. But the Magdalen, clinging to the cross with the look of passive and gentle despair beaming from beneath her bright flaxen hair, and the figure of St. John, with his looks uplifted in passionate ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... proximity. A few days later he came to those of the Faleme; and, in spite of the repugnance and fear of his guide, he made his way into Timbo, the capital of Fouta. The absence of the king and most of the inhabitants probably spared him from a long captivity abbreviated only by torture. Fouta is a fortified town, the king owns houses, with mud walls between three and four feet thick ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... facts of experience seem too strong for us. A hundred thousand Armenians butchered at the will of an inhuman despot, a whole city buried under a volcano's fiery hail, countless multitudes suffering the slow torture of death by famine—can such things be and God really care? Nor is it only great world tragedies like these which challenge our faith. The question is pressed upon us, often with sickening keenness, by the commonplace ills of our own commonplace lives: the cruel wrong of another's ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... production in China as we have found it in India and the islands; and it is used for all the purposes here, and more in addition than have been mentioned to you before. The bastinado of the magistrate and the schoolmaster's instrument of torture ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... might knock men on the head, will refrain from having his force take the form of butchering women and disembowelling children. Not so the Turk. His attempt at Government will take the form of the obscene torture of children, of a bestial ferocity which is not a matter of dispute or exaggeration, but a thing to which scores, hundreds, thousands even of credible European, witnesses have testified. "The finest gentleman, sir, that ever butchered a woman ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... love with a woman in the valley of Sorek, named Delilah. Then the rulers of the Philistines came to her and said, "Find out by teasing him how it is that his strength is so great and how we may overpower and bind him that we may torture him. Then we will each one of us give you eleven hundred pieces of silver." So Delilah said to Samson, "Tell me how it is that your strength is so great and how you might be bound to torture you?" Samson said to her, "If they ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman
... useless striving for recognition, and sink into some humble position which would supply the necessities for a quiet obscure existence—shared with this woman. The weeks, months, years, passed now, wasted, in a dull torture, in a low fever, filled with long, dragging hopes, expectations, possibilities, and no realities. Better sweep all these away and settle into a level, solid existence, contented with the simple ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... very own! Delightful possibilities loomed before her through all her dressing. No more dreading of stormy days when she would be shut in the house; no more fears to torture her in the wakeful hours of the night. Help and protection would be hers at call!—And she could talk with Polly! She wanted to dance for very joy. And only two days ago her heart was aching! She felt as if it would never ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... ambitious of more, not fancying himself capable of more.'[19] Of all men living or dead, this is the one whom it is most impossible to think of as acquiescing in such an easy relation to those around him, or even as attempting so to acquiesce—at least without inward self-question and torture. We must remember that Knox had undoubtedly before this time embraced the doctrinal system of the Reformation, no doubt in the form taught by Wishart. And a catechism of that doctrine, perhaps founded upon or identical with that which Wishart brought from Basel, he gave to ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... figure of many a fireside story and Elphi's mother was almost equally famous. The most tragic story in which they both play their leading parts is that of Golpha the bad Baron of Lastingham and his wicked wife. The mother helped in hiding some one Golpha wished to torture. In his rage he seized the mother, and sentenced her to be burnt ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... that he was too highly cultivated to be religious. He was exceedingly emotional and intellectual; and the procrustean bed of a creed would have been intolerable torture to him. Life throbbed around him in an aurora of skittles. The world of morality only raised a languid smile, or tickled an appetite pleased with novelty. An archdeacon, or a book of sermons delighted him. He would play with them and ponder ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... torture was brought. It was constantly used to extract confession from the poor Covenanters during the long years of persecution of that black period of Scottish history. Peter's thumbs were placed in it and the screw was turned. The monsters increased the pressure ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... entirely or never see you again. You know that very well. Why do you extend your hand to me with derisive phrases? Whether you wished it or not, you have made me desperately in love with you. You have become my evil, my suffering, my torture, and you ask me to be an agreeable friend. Now you are coquettish and cruel. If you can not love me, let me go; I will go, I do not know where, to forget and hate you. For I have against you a latent feeling of hatred and anger. Oh, I ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... stories are told of his adventures in this period of peril. The high rewards offered did not suffice to wean from him the attachment of the people, and more than once he owed his safety to their loyalty. Some of them submitted to torture, and even to loss of life, rather than betray his place of retreat to his enemies. Even many of the soldiers were his friends, and once, when hotly pursued, he took refuge among a small party of these, ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... guess that was the first time Ellabelle had really let go of herself since she was four years old or thereabouts. Talk about the empress of stormy emotion! For ten minutes the room sounded like a torture chamber of the dark Middle Ages. But the doctor reached there at last in a swift car, and him and the two maids managed to get her laid out all comfortable and moaning, though still with outbreaks about every twenty minutes ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... government. Despite the awful under-tow in the immorality of the sailor, the adventurer and the gain-greedy foreigner, the tide of Christianity began steadily to rise. Notwithstanding the outbursts of the flames of persecution, the torture and imprisonment of Christian captives and exiles, and the slow worrying to death of the missionary's native teachers, inquirers came and converts were made. In 1868, after revolution and restoration, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... patch of grey sea beyond the hole in which their oar worked. The sweat poured off their chests and backs in streams, until their waist-bands clung to the flesh like soaked sponges. Some began to moan and sob; others to entreat Heaven for a respite, as if God were directing their torture and taking delight in it; others again broke out into frightful imprecations, cursing their Maker and the hour of their birth. And while the oars swung and the chains clashed and the cries redoubled their volume, the three ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the shadow of our night: Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain, Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn With sparkless ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... nature. The hawk eats the sparrow; the fox devours the young rabbit; the cat leaps from under a bush and kills the mother robin while the young are left to starve in the nest. There is neither right nor wrong among the brutes because they have no moral sense. They do not kill for revenge nor torture for the love of cruelty, as Comrade Bannerman would in praying that the train be wrecked and the rich men burned to death in the ruin. The beasts can feel no pity, no sympathy, no regret, for nature gave them no conscience. But man differs ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... said quietly, "I shall share them with you. Your kindness has saved me from what at best might have been imprisonment for life, and not improbably would have been torture and death at the hands of the Inquisition, and I am certainly not going to withdraw myself from you now when you are entering upon what is undoubtedly a very dangerous adventure. If we escape from Spain we escape together; if not, ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... with which ignorance invests the unknown, and add to this, again, that selling to the south is set before the negro from childhood as the last severity of punishment. The threat that terrifies more than whipping or torture of any kind, is the threat ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... a gentleman, and I should have been loth to stand idly by when the torture was talked of for a free-born Englishman, let alone a scholar. And where is your fair daughter, Master Warner? I suppose you see but little of her now she is the great ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in fire-wood, we inquired into the use of the building; but all the answer we could get was, that it was a "pigeon-house." The Baptist minister from Maine asked a negro, who was helping to bring wood on board; and from him he learned the real truth,—that it was a place of punishment and torture for the oppressed slave. We have since ascertained that such buildings are very common, and generally pass under the euphemistic name ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... the Encyclopaedia as the gospel of negation and denial is to omit four-fifths of its contents. Men may certainly, if they please, describe it as merely negative work, for example, to denounce such institutions as examination and punishment by Torture (See Question, Peine), but if so, what gospel of affirmation can bring better blessings?[159] If the metaphysic of these writers had been a thousandfold more superficial than it was, what mattered that, so long ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... therefore, agree with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that the extravagance of thought and diction which characterizes much of our modern poetry is traceable to the influence of Shakspeare. We see in it only the futile effort of misguided persons to torture out of language the secret of that inspiration which should be in themselves. We do not find the extravagances in Shakspeare himself. We never saw a line in any modern poet that reminded us of him, and will venture to assert that it is only poets of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... more I give him to do the better he likes it. His cronies, who in raiment, manners, and tastes differ from him no more than a row of pins differs from a stray brother, regard a writing-chair as a mediaeval instrument of torture, and faint at the sight of ink. They will put themselves to all kinds of physical and pecuniary inconvenience in order to avoid regular employment. They are the tramps of the fashionable world. But in vain do they sing to Dale of the joys of silk-hatted and patent-leather-booted vagabondage and ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... got as much right to fight for their principles as we have for ours, but I don't think they've the right to torture horses,' she rejoined. Her sympathy with oppressed shearers and dispossessed natives struck always a jarring note between them. His long upper lip closed tightly on the lower one, and he hunched ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... world was the result of some blind, happy-go-lucky creative force, what would we think of the world then, poor thing? A poor woman with nothing to live for walks the streets that she may live; a rich woman with much to live for dies slowly and in great torture, of cancer. If we accept the Great Design we shouldn't even feel pity for these two women, we should say of them merely, 'How right! How beautiful!' But we do feel pity for them, and by that mere feeling of pity deny automatically ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... on the fire, having consumed everything to the east and south, moved on deliberately into the west and north. But the sharp, acrid smoke of trees left smouldering behind still kept them in exquisite, blinded torture. ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... almost always amongst them that heroic and disinterested devotion may still be found—the children of the people, led by an honorable conviction, because it is courageous and sincere, go to all parts of the world, to try and propagate their faith, and brave both torture and death ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... In society there was a constant war going on between law and crime. Extirpation—not reform—was the end aimed at; the prison officials of that time looked upon a criminal as a helpless wretch, presenting fair game for plunder, torture and tyranny. The records in Howard's journals, and the annals of Mrs. Fry's labors, amply enlighten us as to the result of ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... highest philosophy. It is the divine voice which speaks in our hearts, though it has caught some accretion of human passion and superstition. The popular versions are false and debased; the old versions of the Atonement, for example, monstrous; and the belief in the everlasting torture of sinners, a hideous and groundless caricature. With much that such men have said I could, of course, agree heartily; for, indeed, it expresses the strongest feelings which have caused religious revolt. But would ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... dread of being defeated than by the clear intention of winning the game. The manifestation of such a spirit ought only to encourage her enemies; they are the sure signs of a future breakdown. In the meantime, they must cause infinite torture to the unfortunate populations which are not yet ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... notwithstanding he could behold the roasting of his own subjects with infinite self-applause and sang-froid. The stone marks the spot, in this area, on which those cruel exhibitions were executed. Here our martyr Latimer preached patience to friar Forest, agonizing under the torture of a slow fire, for denying the king's supremacy; and to this place our martyr Cranmer compelled the amiable Edward, by forcing his reluctant hand to the warrant, to send Joan Bocher, a silly woman, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... morning," she said, "and immediately after breakfast. My sister has put the servants through the gantlet of inquiry. They knew what she wanted to know, and if inclination had been wanting, the fear of the stocks and torture would have compelled them to tell it to her. She has heard all she wished, to her heart's content. She was in my chamber until midnight, and, as usual, we have quarrelled. They have told her that I was constantly with you, and that I was in love with you, and a thousand things less true than this. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... knights utter bitter accusations against the Queen, who gives them in place of iron chains the golden chains about her neck, whereupon the knights gallantly declare their hearts are won forever. The doors open at the back and we see the papal court. Bertrand des Baux gives a hideous account of the torture and death of those who had a hand in the death of Andrea. The Queen makes a long speech, expressing her deep grief at the calumnies and slander that beset her. The court and people resolve themselves into a kind of opera chorus, expressing ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... the river, wide, very red and almost dry. Beyond the river rose the bold hills of the Kiowa country, a white line chiseled across the face of each, as if Time had entertained some thought of their destruction, but finding each a huge block of living rock, had passed on to torture and shift and alter the bed ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... a gesture of assent reply to him. He had no doubt there was an understanding between Gaetano and Aminta. He knew their rendezvous. From that time Maulear did not lose sight of them, and he suffered every torture jealousy can inflict. The shock he received at the discovery was so great, that he was unable even to reflect. He did not become offended at the perfidy of Aminta, but was rather distressed by suffering, which was as great in the physical point of view as ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... was carried through rigorously. Vanini, seeing that there was no chance of pardon, declared himself, when at the point of death, for what he was, an atheist; and there was nothing very extraordinary in that. But supposing there were an atheist who gave himself up for torture, vanity might be in his case a strong enough motive, as in that of the Gymnosophist, Calanus, and of the Sophist who, according to Lucian's account, was burnt to death of his own will. But the author thinks that that very vanity, that ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... he will always be afraid that some of them did. That fear will be torture to him, for he has been a harsh master to them. In his dreams he will imagine them chopping his tree down. That will make his days uncomfortable—I have already arranged ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... main subject in this story and its companion—the trial, to a point of utter torture, of knightly faith, and several passages in the conduct of both, more especially the exaggerated scenes in the House of Baldringham, and hermitage of Engedi, are signs of the gradual decline in force ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... is something truly hysterical; and yet one wonders why ultimate peace should seem so intolerable to people who not so many years ago found a stern religious satisfaction in consigning almost the whole human race to perpetual torture, the Creator, as Saint Augustine tells us, having in his infinite wisdom and justice devised a special kind of material fire that might avail to burn resurrected bodies for ever without consuming them. A very real truth might be read into this savage symbol, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... can be proved of direct use to mankind from discoveries made by doctors and scientists after operating on animals. "What sort of tenderness for man can we expect from surgeons who can thus teach by torture, or from students who can endure to listen?" Here Francis Newman puts his finger on a very significant factor in the case—that of the barbarizing, the deteriorating of the mind that cannot touch the black pitch of torture and not ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... derision: "I cross out my account." Then cutting a joint from a finger, one would say: "Will your fist weigh a pound now?" This in allusion to his having sometimes used his fist as a pound weight in buying and selling. And so they proceeded to torture him to death with every refinement of savage cruelty, after which they burned the garrison post ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... as it was, for the simple reason that he knew in his heart she was acting rightly and even nobly. But, oh, the thought of it made him mad. It is probable that to a man of imagination and deep feeling hell itself can invent no more hideous torture than he must undergo in the position in which Harold Quaritch found himself. To truly love some good woman or some woman whom he thinks good—for it comes to the same thing—to love her more than life, to hold her dearer even ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... la lettre de M. de Beauharnois du —— Oct. 1737.] The Assinniboins and Cristineaux, mortal foes of that fierce people, offered to join the French and avenge the butchery; but a war with the Sioux would have ruined La Verendrye's plans of discovery, and exposed to torture and death the French traders in their country. Therefore he restrained himself and declined the proffered aid, at the risk of incurring the contempt of ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... two kingdoms before mentioned, of Balnibarbi and Japan, he observed that every man desired to put off death some time longer, let it approach ever so late: and he rarely heard of any man who died willingly, except he were incited by the extremity of grief or torture. And he appealed to me, whether in those countries I had travelled, as well as my own, I had not ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... foremost among the many causes of the army's disruption was its losses in prisoners. Not less than 5,000 men were at that moment dying by slow torture in the foul prisons or pestilential floating dungeons of New York. Turn from it as we may, there is no escaping the conviction that if not done with the actual sanction of Sir William Howe, these atrocities were at least committed with his guilty knowledge.[1] The calculated ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... at the woman's face; her cup had been full before; she had drunk her fill of grief; and this new horror, her husband struggling like a mouse in the bitter cold water, could not add a pang to her torture. All that I have described happened, of course, in a few seconds; the man had barely gone under before one of the ship's butchers, in his white clothes, was in after him. Let no one belittle the race of butchers. The life-taker knew how to save life, and Master Butcher ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... strict and rigorous inquisition into the property of his subjects, for the purpose of a general taxation, both on their lands and on their persons. A very minute survey appears to have been taken of their real estates; and wherever there was the slightest suspicion of concealment, torture was very freely employed to obtain a sincere declaration of their personal wealth. [21] The privileges which had exalted Italy above the rank of the provinces were no longer regarded: [211] and the officers of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... at all, nor can we, except what is manifest and open sin. And even this the soul enamoured of God and lost to itself does not assume to judge, except in displeasure for the sin and wrong done to God; and with great compassion for the soul of him who sins, eagerly willing to give itself to any torture for the salvation ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... a wild creature in her cage. She would not speak when Louis entered the room. She had a horrible fear of his blandishments. There were days and nights,—how many she did not know for there was the torture of hundreds comprised in them. Then she wept and prayed. There was the great Manitou Touchas and many of the Indian women believed in; there was the good God the schoolmaster had talked about, and the minister at the chapel, who had sent his Son to save all who called upon him, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... a comrade scout at Crown Point, at the imminent peril of his own life. He came out of one encounter with fourteen bullet-holes in his blanket. In 1756, a party of Indians took him prisoner, bound him to a stake, and made ready to torture him with fire. The flames were already scorching his limbs, and death seemed certain, when a French officer burst through the crowd and saved his life. At Fort Edward, when all others fled, he alone fought back the fire ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... the fact, and trying to torture it into some connection with Mr. Huddlestone's danger, when a man entered the tavern and asked for some bread and cheese with a ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... all flourishing and sending yearly to Salt Lake as many as they can find means to transport. The history of this people will probably never be fully written, but they endured hardships, privations, sufferings, torture and death. Their settlement of Utah was one of extreme peril and anxiety, and for years it was a question whether they would survive or perish. Had they been actuated by conscience, by pure religious zeal, by patriotism, by any of the nobler sentiments, they would have ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... given the Almighty five minutes to strike him dead; listen to the grotesque libels on every leading Freethinker which are solemnly circulated by Christian malice; and you will behold the last fruit of a very old tree, which is slowly but surely perishing. It once bore scaffolds, stakes, prisons and torture rooms; it now bears but ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... squarely in the eye. Solomon Hyde, who was not shiftless at all, had a dauntless soul, and he was not afraid now in the face of death preceded by long torture. ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to master the fierce emotion in his breast. His eyes were mostly fixed on me with a savage scowl, and for a moment or so I fancied that he must have saved my life so as to take it himself in some way which would add torture and throw dismay amongst ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... strong as an ostrich's; the stone will digest. You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob. For the whole remnant of your life, if you survive the test—some, it is said, die under it—you will be stronger, wiser, less sensitive. This you are not aware ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... parted—when you struggled feebly in my arms with a premonition of your almost mortal weakness, and then sank back white and deathlike. If you had not made so wise and brave an effort you might have lingered on in torture like this poor girl. You stood in just that peril, ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... dread of beginning to talk to them of an impenetrable mystery destined. . . . He was becoming scientifically afraid of insanity lying in wait for him amongst these lines. "To hang for ever over." It was an obsession, a torture. He had lately failed to keep several of these appointments, whose note used to be an unbounded trustfulness in the language of sentiment and manly tenderness. The confiding disposition of various classes of women satisfied the needs of his self-love, and put ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... For a moment the road agent regarded him darkly, pointing his weapon meditatively at different parts of the salesman's person. He suggested a butcher designating certain choice cuts. The drummer's muscles jerked under the torture as though his anatomy were ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... Miss Duncan—as she called herself—entered that household her torture began. It was bad enough to be told by Captain Frazier of her would-be lover's lack of constancy; but to witness it with her ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... his teeth, and his eyes were filled with hateful fires. He left the Ochori with bad grace, and was lucky to leave it at all, for certain men of the country, whom he had put to torture (having captured them fishing in unauthorized waters), would have rushed him but ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... crucifixion. It would be difficult to exaggerate the cruelty and torture of crucifixion. "It was the most cruel and shameful of all punishments." The disciples, however, dwell most of all upon the shame of it. Such a death in the eyes of a Jew was the sign of the curse of God. Several things are of importance and should be remembered. ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... of yours is an impostor, His wounds are sham wounds, His pain is all a farce! It is I that have the right to your heart! Padre, there is no torture you have not put me to; if you could only know what my life has been! And yet I would not die! I have endured it all, and have possessed my soul in patience, because I would come back and fight this God of yours. I have ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... the two passes the deer would choose. As it was a physical impossibility to have his eyes on both passes at once, the old gentleman soon found that turning his head every few seconds from one side to the other became irksome. Then it became painful. At last it became torture, and then he gave up this plan in despair, resolving to devote a minute at a time to each pass, although feeling that by so doing his ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... cried Marianne; "leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me! but do not torture me so. Oh! how easy for those, who have no sorrow of their own to talk of exertion! Happy, happy Elinor, you cannot have an idea of ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... experiences of the cruelties of slavery, was his witnessing the infliction of ten lashes upon the bare back of his mother, for being a few minutes behind her time at the field—a punishment inflicted with one of those peculiar whips in the construction of which, so as to produce the greatest amount of torture, those whom Lord Carlisle has designated "the chivalry of the South" ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... superior, Or skill and prowess in the arduous fight, Preserv'd alive: ... fainting he looks around; Fearing pursuit, nor caring to pursue. The supplicating voice of bitterest moans, Contortions of excruciating pain, The shriek of torture and the groan of death, Surround him; and as Night her mantle spreads, To veil the horrors of the mourning Field, With cautious step shaping his devious way, He seeks a covert where to hide and rest: At every leaf that rustles in the breeze Starting, ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... effect of these harsh measures was to rouse the insurrections which are the most notable feature of the reign. In 1666 the Covenanters were defeated at the battle of Pentland, or Rullion Green, and those who were suspected of a share in the rising were subjected to examination under torture, which now became one of the normal features of Charles's brutal government. Prisoners were hanged or sent as slaves to the plantations. In 1669, an Indulgence was passed, permitting Presbyterian services under certain conditions, ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... and tympanums be rent, The noise may torture sufferers with sickness well-nigh spent; But these be merely trifles. Your anguish may assist The tow-row, tow-row, tow-row of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... for one dish. You don't know what to do next; you know there is no use in apologizing, there is no way of dropping through the floor, or waking yourself up. You have collected the smartest and the most critical people around your table to put them to torture such as they will never forget. Never! You have to bite your lips to keep from crying. Whatever possessed you to ask these people to ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... had been trouble between the French and the Iroquois. In spite of this bad beginning, the French had later done their best to make friends with the powerful confederacy. They had sent to them devoted missionaries, many of whom met the martyr's reward of torture and massacre. But the opposing influence of the English, with whom the Iroquois chiefly traded, ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... A cold, methodical cruelty, a thousand times worse than the fanatic savagery of the Inquisition, devoured human creatures, giving them nothing more than the exact amount of sustenance necessary to prolong their torture.... No. This was another world, where his jealousy and his fury could find no vent. And he would have to lose Luna without a cry of protest, without a gesture of manly rebellion!...Now, upon beholding himself parted from her, he felt for the first time the genuine importance of his love; ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... being a fool as well. Now get out, all of you, unless you can think of worse to do to me. In which case, by all means remain. I invite you heartily to remain, if you think in your feeble imaginings that you have devised fresh torture for me." ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... he was met by bands of armed men who declared that they would sooner die than consent to give up their old faith in Odin and Thor, and then the king enforced his doctrines at the point of the sword, or even by torture. When moved to anger he was guilty of committing cruelties which in his calmer moments he sorely regretted, but it is to be supposed that he never took to violent measures unless when very severely provoked. For the most part he generally found that wise words were a better ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... staggers and sinks under blows quite as cruel and effectual; where, with old wounds yet unhealed, which she strives to hide under a smiling face from the world, she has to bear up and to be stricken down and to rise to her feet again, under fresh daily strokes of torture; where the husband, fond and faithful, has to suffer slights, coldness, insult, desertion, his children sneered away from their love for him, his friends driven from his door by jealousy, his happiness strangled, his whole life embittered, poisoned, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which young girls of twenty are wont to profess; they hold to these fixed doctrines like all who have little experience of life and no personal knowledge of how great social forces modify, impair, and bring to nought such grand and noble ideas. The mere thought of being jilted by the colonel was torture to Sylvie's brain. She lay in her bed going over and over her own desires, Pierrette's conduct, and the song which had awakened her with the word "marriage." Like the fool she was, instead of looking through the blinds to see the lover, she opened her window without reflecting that Pierrette ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... an example, what shall we say? If the Lord of glory shrunk not from ignominy and scorn, untold agony, exquisite torture and the most cruel death, can any one possess much of his spirit, and yet consider it too much to forego some of the comforts and delights of this fleeting life, and to labor and toil with perseverance and self-denial on a foreign shore, to instruct ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... was calculated to harden the distressed inhabitants of the metropolis who witnessed his execution, and thousands felt and exclaimed that it was much better and easier to encounter death in such a way than to endure the lingering torture of being starved to death. The multitude did not fail to shower down their deepest execrations against all those who were concerned in this affair, and the public were so exasperated at what was justly called the murder of this ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... yet most miserably real. Miserablest flebile ludibrium of a Pickleherring Tragedy! It sweeps along there, in most ungorgeous pall, through many streets, in the dusty summer evening; gets itself at length wriggled out of sight; vanishing in the Tuileries Palace—towards its doom, of slow torture, peine ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... see. The doctor then stood on a chair and having soaked a sponge in warm sweetened wine, he allowed it to fall, drop by drop into the hole he had made in my foot. The pain was intolerable! Nevertheless I had to endure for a week this fearful torture, but ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... meters, stating a ghibli was raging at a higher altitude. Five hours later Tripoli and the whole desert country south, suddenly and without warning, became a blast furnace of heat and a place of dust and torture. ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... wolf? But this is not all, unfortunate citizens of Charleston; your disposition has been even still more outraged than your climate. Your mildness, humanity, and benevolence, are no more; cruelty, barbarity, a sanguinary love of torture, are now your distinguishing characteristics; the scream, the yell of the miserable, unresisting African, bleeding under the scourge of relentless power, affords music to your ears! Ah! from what unfriendly cause does this arise? Has the God of heaven, in anger, here ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... there, the adherents and partisans of the House of Stuart were captured on their return or on their passage; and that your Government never seized the commanders of these vessels, to confine them as State criminals, much less to torture or murder them in the Tower. If I am not mistaken, the whole squadron which, in 1745, carried the Pretender and his suite to Scotland, was taken by your cruisers; and the officers and men experienced no worse or different treatment than their fellow prisoners of war; ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... completely miserable. Constantly craving praise was little Jim, and the loss of it was torture to him. The widow glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. She saw it was time to ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger
... for it. Eleanor's doubts, however, had revived when Hinde, who dined with them on the evening of the day on which the agreement had been signed, declared with extraordinary emphasis that Mr. Jannissary was a common robber and would, if he had his way, be enduring torture in gaol. ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... Ever desiring the saints' happiness, and yet always envying their felicity. They would have it, because it is easy and comfortable; yet cannot abide to think of it, because they have lost it for ever. Ever laden with the delight of sin; and yet that is the greatest torture; always desiring to put it out of their mind, and yet assuredly know they must for ever abide the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... of the fact that their prey was compelled to swerve to the left, began to close in, bringing themselves in such close proximity that Bart could see the fierce, vindictive faces, the flashing eyes, and eager clutching hands, ready to torture ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... time she lay thinking, planning, hoping, praying; alike unavailingly. Toward morning, utterly exhausted by the violence of her emotions, the scene she had gone through—and it had been a torture to stand and receive the townspeople after the departure of Marteau—she fell at last into ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... in such circumstances as these, especially when she came up to her, put her arm into hers, and looked into her face with all the sweetness that could sometimes reside in those brown features of hers, saying, "My poor Henrietta, I am afraid we have been putting you to torture all this time, but you know that it is quite nonsense to be afraid of ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the abyss. But she had felt herself near to something that she hated even more than she feared it. And she had returned to the hotel full of a shrinking delicacy, not to be explained, intense as snow, which had made the meeting with her mother and Artois a torture to her, which had sealed her lips to silence that night, which had made her half apology to Gaspare in the morning a secret agony, which had even set a flush on her face when she looked at San Francesco. The abrupt change in Monsieur Emile's demeanor ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... explained, "I started my weekly observance of a day of silence as a means for gaining time to look after my correspondence. But now those twenty-four hours have become a vital spiritual need. A periodical decree of silence is not a torture but a blessing." ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... three neared the bottom of the ladder, a scream, muffled and choked but full of agony, sounded close to them. The boys recognized that thin, boyish tone, even in its torture. They felt their hair rise on their scalps ...
— The Boy Scouts on a Submarine • Captain John Blaine
... mother, indeed, paid the violinist Sipp (who was still playing in the Leipzig orchestra in 1865) eight thalers for a violin (I do not know what became of it), with which for quite three months I must have inflicted unutterable torture upon my mother and sister by practising in my tiny little room. I got so far as to play certain Variations in F sharp by Mayseder, but only reached the second or third. After that I have no further recollections of this practising, in which my family fortunately ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... eyes were fixed upon the empty chair and, since he had not understood in the past, he could not express himself now. He was suffering the torture that all feel when, too late, revealment makes clear what never ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... a flood of new emotion; she tried once or twice to be discreetly angry with herself for admitting so unreservedly the pleasure she felt in Pierre's admiration; she placed her soul on a rack of self-questioning torture, and every inquisition she made of her heart returned the self-same answer: she ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... said, 'he was born to torture me! O what a fall, what a humiliation! Such a scheme to wreck upon so small a trifle! ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said good-night and departed, Hilland accompanying his friend, that he might pour out the long-delayed confidence. Graham shivered as he thought of the ordeal, as a man might tremble who was on his way to the torture-chamber, but ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... a converted Calvinist, and who had secretly become his wife (1685) encouraged him in this design and suggested to him the cruel scheme of tearing away children from their parents, to bring them up in the Roman Catholic faith. The vexatious confiscations, the galleys, the torture of the wheel, the gibbet,—all were successively but unsuccessfully resorted to as a means to convert them. The unhappy Protestants' sole aim was to escape from the band which tortured them, in vain were they prohibited from quitting the kingdom, and those who aided them in their ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... associating ideas of pleasure and enjoyment with those of blood and destruction; as, for example, it happened in the games of the circus under the Roman emperors; nay, some have even looked upon homicide and torture as religious duties, and a part of the worship due to the Divine Being! Fanaticism naturally engenders that sacrilegious alliance, and man, under its irresistible influence, becomes more frightful in his hatred, more cruel in his hostilities, ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... lords," replied De Chemerant, "a council will be formed; they will interrogate this rascal; if he does not answer, we shall have plenty of means to force him to it; there is more than one kind of torture." ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... true love or true jealousy as his excuse. After the engagement the sense of monopoly and the consciousness of plighted troth enter into the lover's feelings, and intruders are properly warded off with indignation. In romantic jealousy the leading role is played by the imagination; it loves to torture its victim by conjuring visions of the beloved smiling on a rival, encircled by his arm, returning his kisses. Everything feeds his suspicions; he is "dwelling in a continual 'larum of jealousy." Oft his jealousy "shapes faults that are not" and he taints his heart and brain ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the victory! It is true, the strength of Spain is shattered, her ships are sunk or fled, the sea has swallowed her soldiers and her sailors by hundreds and by thousands, and England breathes again. They came to conquer, to bring us to the torture and the stake—to do to us free Englishmen as Cortes did by the Indians of Anahuac. Our manhood to the slave bench, our daughters to dishonour, our souls to the loving-kindness of the priest, our wealth to the Emperor and the Pope! God has answered them with his winds, ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... required was the unsuspected sifting of snuff on the hair of the person whose head was to be put in the beast's mouth. The lion's smile was not, properly speaking, a smile at all, chevalier; it was the torture which came of snuff getting into its nostrils, and when the beast made that uncanny noise and snapped its jaws together, it was simply the outcome of a sneeze. The thing would be farcical if it were not that tragedy hangs on the thread of it, and that a life, a useful ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... knowledge that she would have suffered many inconveniences, accidental and intentional jostling, insolence and ribald jest. The Cantonese, excepting in the shops where he expects profit, always resents the intrusion of the fan-quei—foreign devil. The chair was torture. It hung from the centre of a stout pole, each end of which rested upon the calloused shoulder of a coolie; an ordinary Occidental chair with a foot-rest. The coolies proceeded at a swinging, mincing trot, ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... Elmham, to which we have already briefly referred, and which are confirmed by other early writers, are so express with reference to these points, that they seem to require something more than a mere reference in this place. "When his father was suffering under the torture of a grievous sickness, the Prince endeavoured with filial devotedness to meet his wishes in every possible way; and notwithstanding the biting detraction and manifold accusations of some, which (according to ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... ammunition, and all—from the motives of benevolence. Does a man set fire to an house, for the purpose of rescuing the inhabitants from the flames? But if they are only purchased, to deliver them from death; why, when they are delivered into your hands, as protectors, do you torture them with hunger? Why do you kill them with fatigue? Why does the whip deform their bodies, or the knife their limbs? Why do you sentence them to death? to a death, infinitely more excruciating than ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... thinking to recommend himself to us by expatiating on the superiority of the criminal jurisprudence of this country over that of Holland, he inveighed against the barbarity of putting an accused person to the torture, in order to force a confession[1371]. But Johnson was as ready for this, as for the Inquisition. 'Why, Sir, you do not, I find, understand the law of your own country. The torture in Holland is considered as a favour to an accused person; for no man is put ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... your neighbour in your hearing, his talents, his performances, his character, his motives, or something else that belongs to your neighbour. Some one does that in your hearing who either does not know you, or who wishes to torture and expose you, and you fall straight into the snare thus set for you, and begin at once to belittle, depreciate, detract from, and run down your neighbour, who has been too much praised for your peace of mind and your self-control. ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... preserved by dint of antidotes; the other two died in the utmost agonies of pain, and convulsions of frenzy. One of them was found in the woods sticking by the head in a softish ground, into which he had driven it, probably in the excess of his torture. Such a vegetable must afford matter of curious examination to a naturalist; for as it does so much harm, it may also be capable of great good, if sought into by ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... English into disgrace. Their warehouses at Surat were seized, and the president and factors were placed in irons, in which condition they remained seven months. This grievance was the greater, as it happened at the time that the cruel torture and execution of Captain Towerson and his crew by the Dutch took place at Amboyna. It was bad enough to be made responsible for the doings of their own countrymen, but to be punished for the misdeeds ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... him, there were other touches. His fine face was so emaciated, that Syme thought it must be wasted with some disease; yet somehow the very distress of his dark eyes denied this. It was no physical ill that troubled him. His eyes were alive with intellectual torture, as ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... the Mufti's only daughter, and a virgin! This is the time and place that she appointed in her letter, yet she comes not. Why, thou sweet delicious creature, why torture me with thy delay! Dar'st thou be false to thy assignation? What, in the cool and silence of the night, and to a new lover?—Pox on the hypocrite, thy father, for instructing thee so little in the sweetest point of his religion.—Hark, I hear the rustling of her silk mantle. Now she ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... no longer believed in a physical Hell, that its more advanced clergy had entered into a conspiracy of silence on the subject was no answer. The great mass of the people were not educated. Official Christendom in every country still preached the everlasting torture of the majority of the human race as a well thought out part of the Creator's scheme. No leader had been bold enough to come forward and denounce it as an insult to his God. As one grew older, kindly mother Nature, ever ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... bodies as by fangs of beasts devoured, Sounds that hell would hear not, sights no thought could shape, Limbs that feel as flame the ravenous grasp of rape, Filth of raging crime and shame that crime enjoys, Age made one with youth in torture, girls with boys, These, and worse if aught be worse than these things are, Prove thee regent, Russia—praise thy ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... crammed; and, though it rained, every window was open. However, at night I went to bed; but at two I waked with such exquisite pain in my, rheumatic right shoulder, that I think I scarce ever felt greater torture from ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Precept and example are of great power and he recalled again much that he had heard of his famous ancestor, Paul Cotter. He had been compelled to fight often for his life and again to flee for it from an enemy who reserved torture and death for the captured. Dick felt that he must do as well, and the feeling increased his ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... high family, who had for several years rendered himself peculiarly obnoxious to the King and his ministers, and whose atrocious barbarities caused him to fall unpitied. This wretched man, after having been put to the torture, was, by the sentence pronounced against him by the council, broken alive upon the wheel, where he suffered the greatest agony during an hour and a half. His lieutenant was condemned to the gallows for having been the ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... warfare and actual bodily torture between various sects all calling themselves Christian, thus extended over three centuries. These may be divided into four periods. The first is one of fierce dispute but little actual warfare, during which the revolt spread over Europe with Germany as its centre. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... they should be cast to the dogs, to be devoured, &c., was mentioned. A rev gentleman could not understand the conduct of Government; could not see that there was any impropriety in torturing men's souls; seemed to think that a good deal might be said in favour of bodily torture as well! These are your teachers, O Israel! Imagine what the pupils ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... which either creates or intensifies all the evils under which the people writhe in despair. Once it becomes the instrument of a regenerate humanity, that is to say, when men have become compassionate, loving, and devoted, then the social question will cease to exist, and the old instrument of torture will become a ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... was yet day. Fierce was the pain of my wound, But I saw it was death to stir, For fifty paces away Their trenches were. In torture I prayed for the dark And the stealthy step of my friend Who, stanch to the very end, Would creep to the danger zone And offer his life as a mark To save ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... there are absurdities in the works of the inventors of Utopias; nevertheless they deserve our sympathy. The hideousness of the world tormented them, and, in order to make it beautiful, they endured everything. Recall to mind More decapitated, Campanella put seven times to the torture, Buonarotti with a chain round his neck, Saint-Simon dying of want; many others. They might have lived in peace; but no! they marched on their way with their heads towards ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... chastisement of man.* (* "Estos mosquitos que llaman zancudos gritones los parece cria la naturaleza para castigo y tormento de los hombres." "Those mosquitos which are called buzzing zancudos, Nature seems to have created for the especial punishment and torture of man." Fray Pedro Simon.) These strange punishments have not always been confined to the lay-brothers. There happened in 1788 one of those monastic revolutions, of which it is difficult to form a conception in Europe, according to the ideas that prevail of the peaceful state of the Christian ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... never had time to come. The cause of most of his trouble, however, was clothes; seatless trousers, elbowless coats, brimless hats, constituted a series of daily mortifications which were little short of torture. ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... Billingsgate. I may say, from intimate knowledge, that we should have lost the services of the greatest character of our country, had he been assailed with the degree of abandoned licentiousness now practised. The torture he felt under rare and slight attacks, proved that under those of which the federal bands have shown themselves capable, he would have thrown up the helm in a burst of indignation. Yet this effect of sensibility must not be yielded to. If we suffer ourselves to be frightened ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... his people took him up and set out with him to visit the Devotee and crave her prayers, and Destiny brought them altogether by the way. So they fared forward in a body till they came to the city wherein the man dwelt for whom she had paid the thousand dirhams to deliver him from torture, and found him about to travel to her by reason of a malady which had betided him. Accordingly, they all journeyed on together, unknowing that the holy woman was she whom they had so foully wronged, and ceased not going till they came to her city and foregathered at the gates of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Modesty is very early taught to little girls by their mothers, and with extreme jealousy, one might say, by esprit de corps. They are watching in advance over the happiness of the future lover. To a timid and tender woman there ought to be no greater torture than to allow herself in the presence of a man something which she thinks she ought to blush at. I am convinced that a proud woman would prefer a thousand deaths. A slight liberty taken on the tender side by the man she loves gives a woman a moment ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the rest halts becoming more and more frequent, and with no break in the monotony of mud and islands. As evening approached they stopped and prepared for the night. Higgins now was all but a wreck. His weight was beginning to tell upon him and his thirst had become torture. With his knife Payne cut armfuls of branches from the nearest island and piled them high upon the mats ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... curvature of the spine; then it is burned off in chunks and triangles and squares; it is yanked out by the handfuls, it is wadded and twisted and tugged at and built up into an Eiffel tower, and—after a few hours of such torture—the little woman takes out the sixty odd hairpins, shakes it loose, gets every hair into a three-ply tangle of its own, and then hops into bed! When she gets up in the morning she pulls out and combs out more hair than she can make grow in ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... an old man, who watched her with solicitude and the most devoted affection; and when arriving alongside, the young lady was requested to come on board, and she complied readily with our entreaty, the despair that shaded the countenance of the old man delineated the torture of his heart. This peculiar appearance of the patriarchal face was not lost upon R——, who was as observant, as he is full of fun, and turning to me, he said, "Let's take her for a sail, and leave ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Sancho!" here exclaimed Don Quixote; "sixty thousand devils fly away with thee and thy proverbs! For the last hour thou hast been stringing them together and inflicting the pangs of torture on me with every one of them. Those proverbs will bring thee to the gallows one day, I promise thee; thy subjects will take the government from thee, or there will be revolts among them. Tell me, where dost thou pick them up, thou booby? ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... stand it," he said recklessly. "There are certain forms of torture that drive a man crazy. Bear with ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... cannot live, he can at least die, for his country. Do not deny him this supreme consolation. Consider! Every indignity, every torture which Carthage shall heap on his dying hours, will be better than a trumpet's call to your armies. They will remember only Regulus, their fellow-soldier and their leader. They will forget his defeats. They will regard only his services to the Republic. ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... stand for him and yet keep herself clean without complaint made the man worse. He tried to break her spirit in a thousand ways, tried to make her the same as he was, tried to make her a bad woman, like the others he had known. It appeared like the one pleasure he got was to torture her." ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... Lanier that Nemesis has found the most susceptible joint in his conscious being, and with relentless persistence is testing its capacity for torture. ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... brought cooling to Bonbright's head. He had made a fool of himself. He was ashamed, humiliated, and to be humiliated is no minor torture to a young man. ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... awake to attend the fire and guard the camp. Little Mabel Ashbridge slept on in blissful ignorance of the awful fate impending over her childish head. Only the good man himself suffered a torture beyond the power of ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... to think of the follies of the early part of the war, as illustrated by the outfits of the volunteers. They were so heavily clad, and so burdened with all manner of things, that a march was torture, and the wagon trains were so immense in proportion to the number of troops, that it would have been impossible to guard them in an enemy's country. Subordinate officers thought themselves entitled to transportation for trunks, mattresses, and folding bedsteads, and the privates were as ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... the power of speech. It was indeed agony to watch the clear water rippling and washing above my head, yet feel no solace of it on my limbs: as though I had been a senseless brazen image lying at the bottom of a well. But the image, if it felt no refreshment, would have suffered no torture; whereas every inch of my skin throbbed with thirst, and every vein was a mouth of Dives praying for a drop of water. Oh, Father, how shall I tell you the grievous pains that I endured? Sometimes I so feared ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... She had been hunted and caught like a wild animal; and she was soon to find that the walls of her enclosure, which at first seemed so wide that she perceived them not, were closing in upon her day by day as in a mediaeval torture chamber, forcing her step by step towards the ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... will endure to the ever-delayed end! Job, on the other hand, is the more troubled because it is He who is at the head and the heart, who is the beginning and the end of things, that has laid his hand upon him with such a heavy torture that he takes his flesh in his teeth for pain. He cannot, will not believe him a tyrant; but, while he pleads against his dealing with himself, loves him, and looks to him as the source of life, the power and gladness of being. He dares not think God unjust, but not ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... youth have known the torture of apprehension will be able to judge of the poor child's agony when, after four months of a life amid the warmth of sympathy, one of the Jesuit fathers who directed the college announced to him, thinking it would afford him pleasure, the expected arrival of an American, ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... his savage disposition. His attempt to escape was of the boldest kind, and was spoken of with astonishment by those who witnessed it, but so desperate an act only proved how much more these people value liberty than life. I am sure that bold savage would have submitted to torture without a groan; he was the most repulsive native in aspect that I ever saw, and had a most ferocious countenance. The thick lip and white teeth, the lowering brow, and deep set but sharp eye, with the rapidly retiring forehead all betrayed the ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... and I could hear his hard breathing, and see how he was striving to master the fierce emotion in his breast. His eyes were mostly fixed on me with a savage scowl, and for a moment or so I fancied that he must have saved my life so as to take it himself in some way which would add torture and throw dismay ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... convulsions that accompanied its dying now began to torture the vast frame of the Roman Empire, and even the Christians were caught up in the whirlpool of selfish warring interests. We still find scattered references to special knowledge imparted to the leaders and teachers ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... haughty king was seated, In lands and conquests great; Pale and awful was his countenance, As on his throne he sate; For what he thinks, is terror, And what he looks, is wrath, And what he speaks, is torture, And what he writes, is death. And 'gainst a marble pillar He shiver'd it in twain; And thus his curse he shouted, Till ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the satisfaction of assuring ourselves that the fathers of our liberty had two legs apiece, and crossed them in concert with the utmost regularity. One might think, at first, that these narrow boots were as uncomfortable to the calesero as the Scottish instrument of torture of that name; but his little swagger when he is down, and his freedom in kicking when he is up, show that he has ample ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the Rhine that society appeared like a vile phantom which had but to be exorcised to vanish. And the exorcism to which he had recourse was threats of vengeance, threats which before had terrified, because they had behind them a force which made them good. Torture had been an integral part of the old law. The peasant expected it were he insubordinate. Death alone was held to be too little to inspire respect for caste. Some frightful spectacle was usually provided to magnify ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... gone wrong?" demanded the witch. "Did yonder sniffling hypocrite thrust my darling from his door? The villain! I'll set twenty fiends to torture him till he offer thee his daughter on his ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... pain of Mr. Lindsay selecting some other lady and learning to love her as his wife, forgetting the child Regina; but when she forced herself to reflect that her guardian would soon be Mrs. Carew's husband, the torture seemed unendurable. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... strength: it was no mere weakly sentiment, but a powerful type of human love which had been able to carry me through fifteen years of married life without one hour of quarrelling; its roots were deep into my heart and mind: the very strength and perfection of it but made of it a greater instrument for torture. Why should this most beautiful of all human emotions carry with it so heavy a penalty, for which no remedy appeared to exist? It had not then been made clear to me that all human loves must first be offered up and ascend into the love of God: then only are they freed from this Pain-Tax. God ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... to be useless, since it was performed with vicarious promises. Churches were useless, for the Church of God consists of the congregation of the faithful; the Cross, as being the instrument of Christ's torture, was a symbol to be destroyed rather than invoked; there was no real presence and no sacrifice in the Mass, for Christ's body was made and given once for all at the Last Supper; all offerings and prayers for the dead were useless, ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... circle, an' all hands an' the oxen inside, an' drove the Indians off, killin' a lot of 'em. They was too strong that way, so what'd the Indians do, to draw 'em out into the open, but take two white girls, captured from some other train, an' begin to torture 'em. They done it just out of gunshot, but so everybody could see. The idea was that the white men couldn't stand it, an' would rush out, an' then the Indians'd have 'em where they ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... players' you are severe—and yet I was glad to hear you severe—it is a happy excess, I think. When men of intense reality, as all great poets must be, give their hearts to be trodden on and tied up with ribbons in turn, by men of masks, there will be torture if there is not desecration. Not that I know much of such things—but I have heard. Heard from Mr. Kenyon; heard from Miss Mitford; who however is passionately fond of the theatre as a writer's medium—not ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... night. The whole surface of sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep drawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendor which burns like gold, and bathes like blood. Along ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... much-enduring, good-humoured, kind, royally courteous, and considerate, even beyond what may be gathered from this part of the book, while the loyalty of the Highlanders (as in the case of Mackinnon, flogged nearly to death) was proof against torture as well as against gold. It is the Sobieski strain, not the Stuart, that we here admire in Prince Charles; it is a piety, a loyalty, a goodness like Gordon's that we revere in old ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... perished, for the vision of perfection ever haunted him. At first Christ's words and look of earnest affection filled his heart with a tumult of joy: but having fallen back into the old sordid self, the very memory of his master's face became a curse and torture. And so the vision ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the end of the line over the bough, sailorwise, and made a running bowline in the part that came down. There is torture in that way, and some of the men grumbled thereat, being less hard hearted. So they began to argue about the matter, and Streone watched my face, for this was pleasure to him, as it seemed, though he did not ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... interrogations that followed; she did not understand what Mrs. Dusautoy was aiming at, in the close questioning, which to her amazement did not seem to offend, but rather to be gratifying by the curious divination of all sensations. It made Albinia feel as if she had been carrying on a deliberate system of torture, when she heard of a pain in the back, hardly ever ceasing, aggravated by sitting upright, growing severe with the least fatigue, and unless favoured by day, becoming so bad at night as to take away many ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fathers, and brothers by brothers. The smoke rises in the valley, and the home is blotted out. All that makes life worth living goes, then life itself. What sterner test can a nation be put to than this? It is a torture long and slow; the agony and bloody sweat. I know well that if my own country were invaded I should, or hope I should, behave exactly as these men are doing; and as I should call it patriotism in my own case, I cannot refuse to ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... power in the state right under the eyes of the wise and good Andrea, who is subject to no illusions with regard to him. No objection can be made to Fiesco's mask of gayety and cynicism in the first two acts, for that is historical. But was it necessary for him to deceive and torture the wife to whom in the end he appears loyally devoted? In any case it is clear that the exposition should have hinted somehow at the true condition of affairs, for it is a good old rule that while the people on the stage may disguise themselves and befool one another as they will, the audience ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... force, what would we think of the world then, poor thing? A poor woman with nothing to live for walks the streets that she may live; a rich woman with much to live for dies slowly and in great torture, of cancer. If we accept the Great Design we shouldn't even feel pity for these two women, we should say of them merely, 'How right! How beautiful!' But we do feel pity for them, and by that mere feeling of pity deny automatically the beauty of the Great Design, in the ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... the ambassadors intimated their intention of employing personal violence; and, one of them having stamped three times with his foot, the Eunuch Sahil entered, followed by the jailers, bearing that frightful instrument of torture, ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... fact that the old Marquise, whose energy no fatigue, no moral torture could abate, fainted from happiness on ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... did not continue to guard her chastity. Ah, yes, it is better to live than to die, that I may be able to look after her! But God cannot wish that I should take such care and pains about a woman's belly without any pay or reward, and receive nothing in return but torture of soul and body. I will not bear all the trouble and anguish of mind that many suffer in living with their wives. It angers me and saddens me to think that God only permits me to live to enjoy the trifling incidents of married life. I want full liberty and freedom to ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... word, though Miss Bibby, going over and over again in her mind the great meeting, tried hard to imagine that she had forgotten some notable thing he had said. Then she began to torture herself with fears that she had behaved stupidly. The suddenness had been too much for her; she could not recollect one solitary thing that she had said except a fluttering "Certainly," when he asked permission to take the children with him. What must ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... dangling by the tongue from the wicked little charmers. If the flower assimilated their dead bodies as the pitcher plant, for example, does those of its victims, the fly's fate would seem less cruel. To be killed by slow torture and dangled like a scarecrow simply for pilfering a drop of nectar is surely an execution of justice ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... till he had time to try the experiment, especially as his own appetite would be improved by the exercise. This was a dreadful prospect for the unhappy prisoner, but meantime it prolonged his life a few hours, as he was immediately hung up in the larder and left to himself. There, in torture of mind and body, like a fish upon a hook, the wretched boy began at last to reflect seriously upon his former ways, and to consider what a happy home he might have had, if he could only have been satisfied with business and pleasure succeeding each ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... up and down the room. His face was white, his eyes were wild. He had the haggard look of one who has come through a long series of harrowing experiences up to the supreme torture where there is nothing ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... by the blows nor the menaces that were directed against him. He only exclaimed, "You have slain my chief and father, and lo! I have also struck down the head of your nation. It is well. Slay me—torture me, if you will. I can bear unmoved any torments ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... gave bases on balls he would prolong the struggle. Though it was torture for him to go slow, he fought his desire to hurry. But it was impossible to lose himself in the game. The edges of his skill were blunted. Little Falls began ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... Pope! I tell you not of things learned by hearsay; I myself have beheld all these horrors in the Holy Land of Palestine. Through the ancient streets of Jerusalem the accursed infidels stalk in the evil pride of conquest. They insult and oppress, they torture and murder the followers of Christ. They rob and maltreat the pious pilgrims from all lands who toil through desert and over mountain to worship at the tomb of their Lord. Scarcely will these heathen ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... finished roues, who are to be found in most genteel societies. The mysteries of his art are manifold, and principally consist in the following rules and regulations, put forth by an old member of the corps, whose conscience returned to torture him when his reign of earthly ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... with contempt of the red-men, but no red-men, cruel and blood-thirsty as they are, ever do that," he observed. "When they take prisoners they torture them, it is true, for a short time, but they then put them to death; they would not subject them to a long life of torture of soul ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... lungs. But there wasn't time for inventory. The aching silence was lost as the second stage fired. Acceleration built again. This time Rick slipped into the enveloping grayness almost at once. The acceleration was less, and the time of burning was less. Had he not been put through the torture of first-stage acceleration he could have taken the second stage without more than great discomfort. But now he had ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... in the same way in great torture, and in the confusion attending upon his death and funeral ceremonies the struggle which was impending with ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... decaying, and infinite torment of flies, Thoughts of the breezes of May blowing over an English field, Cholera, scurvy, and fever, the wound that would not be healed; Lopping away of the limb by the pitiful, pitiless knife— Torture and trouble in vain-for it never could save us a life. Valor of delicate women who tended the hospital bed; Horror of women in travail among the dying and dead; Grief for our perishing children, and never a moment ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... Katherine did not speak to the Medcroft contingent—in fact, they ignored them quite completely. Mrs. Rodney was very pale and very deeply distressed. She cast many glances at the red-eyed and sheepish Mr. Rodney,—glances that meant much to the further torture of ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... The former, who was quite used to adorning Miss Ethel against her will, looked as amused as her mistresses; and, before Ethel knew what was going on, her muslin was stripped off her back, and that instrument of torture, a half made body, was being tried upon her. She made one of her most wonderful grimaces of despair, and stood still. The dresses were not so bad after all; they were more tasteful than costly, and neither in material nor ornament were otherwise than suitable to the occasion and the wearer. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... foes paled into insignificance compared with the mosquitos. There are very few places on earth where these pests are so formidable as in the bottom lands of the Missouri, and for weeks and even months they made the lives of our explorers a torture. No other danger, whether from hunger or cold, Indians or wild beasts, was so dreaded by the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the perspiration from his forehead, and caught up his hat; he had been through the seventh circle of torture. ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... crew of the Aix vessel detests its cargo of "black-frocks" and would gladly send them to the bottom.—According to this system, which, up to Thermidor 9, grows worse and worse, imprisonment becomes a torture, oftentimes mortal, slower and more painful than the guillotine, and to such an extent that, to escape it, Champfort opens his veins and Condorcet swallows poison.[4121]The third expedient consists of murder, with or without trial.—178 ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... when Squeers, in a violent outbreak of wrath, and with a cry like the howl of a wild beast, spat upon him, and struck him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture, which raised up a bar of livid flesh as it was inflicted. Smarting with the agony of the blow, and concentrating into that one moment all his feelings of rage, scorn, and indignation, Nicholas sprang upon him, wrested the weapon from his ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... do we want to accomplish as good citizens and patriots? Do we mean only to inflict upon the late rebels pain, degradation, mortification, annoyance, for its own sake; to torture their feelings without any ulterior purpose? Certainly such a purpose could not by any possibility animate high-minded men. I presume, therefore, that those who still favor the continuance of some of the disabilities ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... which, with one continuous roar of thunder, blurted forth agony, and mutilation, and death upon their assailants. On the bare cold earth—the night was bitterly, intensely cold—with no food and no water—the living and the dying, in their exhaustion and torture, lay with the dead in their tranquillity. Broadfoot, with a happier fate, had already yielded up his spirit; Somerset, sensible, but helplessly benumbed, was lingering through the tedious hours, to die in the morning, knolled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... uninterrupted possession. Of our health this seems to me especially true; and it is too often the case that nothing but its suspension or the sight of its deplorable loss in others awakens us to a sense of our great privilege in having four sound limbs and a body free from racking torture or enfeebling, wasting disease. As for me, what I should do without my health I cannot conceive. All my good spirits (and I have a wonderful supply, considering all things) come to me from my robust physical existence, my good digestion, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... to Hallam's lips. "Hush! Do you suppose God blunders? I don't. If He had meant her to stay with us, He would have found a way to cure her. To think otherwise is torture. No. No, no, indeed no! Father is left and so are we. We have got to live and take care of him and ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... companion. "Any thing is better than passive submission in such circumstances. I see but little, indeed no hope of escape; but idleness is torture. If I endeavour to raise this ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... at Inanda's Kraal, when the vow is over, they will give you a taste of Kaffir habits. Not death, my friend—that would be simple enough—but a slow death with every refinement of horror. You have broken into their sacred places, and you will be sacrificed to Laputa's god. I have seen native torture before, and his own mother would run away shrieking from a man who had ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... flourishing and sending yearly to Salt Lake as many as they can find means to transport. The history of this people will probably never be fully written, but they endured hardships, privations, sufferings, torture and death. Their settlement of Utah was one of extreme peril and anxiety, and for years it was a question whether they would survive or perish. Had they been actuated by conscience, by pure religious zeal, by patriotism, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... demonstrations, where they promoted the idea of a general strike for an eight hours' day, and in the anti-militarist propaganda in the army, violent prosecutions were directed against them, especially in the Latin countries (including physical torture in the Barcelona Castle) and the United States (the execution of five Chicago Anarchists in 1887). Against these prosecutions the Anarchists retaliated by acts of violence which in their turn were followed by more executions from above, and new acts of revenge ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... then the impulse which leads one in the blindness of generous feeling to take up a man who is unworthy of one in every respect, a man who utterly fails to understand one, who is ready to torture one at every opportunity and, in contradiction to everything, to exalt such a man into a sort of ideal, into a dream. To concentrate in him all one's hopes, to bow down before him; to love him all one's life, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the massacre of citizens before his eyes. You have not, O Romans, to deal with a wicked and profligate man, but with an unnatural and savage beast. And, since he has fallen into a well, let him be buried in it. For if he escapes out of it, there will be no inhumanity of torture which it will be possible to avoid. But he is at present hemmed in, pressed, and besieged by those troops which we already have, and will soon be still more so by those which in a few days the new consuls will levy. Apply yourselves then to this business, as you are ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... taken all care of [2]. For at night, fastened with chains, he shall be watched; in the daytime, beneath the ground, he shall be getting out stone. For many a day will I torture him; I'll not respite him for a ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... advice sent by the governor of Aden to inform them of us. When the Calicut ship was under our command, the governor sent off a boat, manned with Arabs, having on board two Turkish soldiers of the garrison, who had formerly been instruments of Abdal Rahman[363] aga, to bind and torture our men whom they had betrayed. On seeing our men, whom they had used so ill, they were in great doubt what usage they might now receive, as their guilty conscience told them they merited no good treatment at our hands. They brought some ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... Dante's Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture chamber of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and bleeding heart through the shambles of our civilization needs no such fantastic images of the poet to teach ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... learned that for me there was no pleasure in taking needlessly the life of anything that lived. We are only partially civilized as yet in the treatment of our domesticated animals. How many people think of the torture of the curb bit, of the check, of neglect in the case of cold, of thirst, of hunger? How many people, I say, civilized and in our best society, are careful yet as to the comfort, the rights, of those that serve them in these ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... at love with our Simeon for a whole year. Such a Herod, the skunk! I didn't have a whole spot on me. I always went about in black and blue marks. And it wasn't for any reason at all, but just simply so—he'd go in the morning into a room with me, lock himself in, and start in to torture me. He'd wrench my arms, pinch my breasts, grab my throat and begin to strangle me. Or else he'd be kissing, kissing, and then he'd bite the lips so that the blood would just spurt out ... I'd start crying—but ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... society and conversation of the student Hoffland caused him a bitter pang. Denis sincerely loved the bright-faced young girl, and no one who has not loved can comprehend the sinking of the heart which preference for another occasions. The last refinement of earthly torture is assuredly jealousy—and Denis was beginning to suffer this torture. More than once Lucy seemed to feel that she was causing her lover pain; and then she would turn away from Hoffland and gladden poor Denis with one of her brilliant smiles, and with some indifferent word, nothing in itself, ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... on his first day aboard came back to the lad and made him shudder. There had been stories current among the men that gave a glimpse of how Stede Bonnet dealt with those who were treacherous. Which of a dozen awful deaths was in store for him? Ah, if only they would spare the torture, he thought that he could die bravely, a worthy scion of dauntless stock. He thought of Job who must have been seized in his bunk below. The poor fellow was to have short happiness in his changed way of ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... journal. He cowered in agony before these visions. He dared not seek the little park again. He feared to show himself in the streets. He dreaded the short walk from his dormitory to the Vatican. His life became a sustained torture—a consuming agony of uncertainty, interminable suspense, fearful foreboding. The cruelty of his position corroded him. His health suffered, and his cassock hung like a bag about his ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Sipping only what is sweet, Thou dost mock at fate and care, Leave the chaff, and take the wheat. When the fierce northwestern blast Cools sea and land so far and fast, Thou already slumberest deep; Woe and want thou canst outsleep; Want and woe, which torture us, Thy ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... loved him so was faithful and true, wishing to know truth of the matter, [the Governor] caused the cacique and some of his chief men to be called, on the next day, to his room. And he told them what was being said about them; after investigation had been made and torture had been given to some Indians, it came out that the cacique and the chiefs were without any blame, and it was certified that, neither by word nor deed, had they done anything to the hurt of the Spaniards, but that two chiefs had said that because their ancestors had never been subject ...
— An Account of the Conquest of Peru • Pedro Sancho
... undergraduate life flitting about the place—luckless youths, in white ties and bands, who are undergoing the peine forte et dure with different degrees of composure; and their friends who are there to look after them. You may go in and watch the torture yourself if you are so minded, for the viva voce schools are open to the public. But one such experiment will be enough for you, unless you are very hard-hearted. The sight of the long table, behind ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... heart from my bosom that I must say these things to you. I have risked all my honor in your hands. Is there no reward for that? Is my recompense to be only your assertion that I torment you, that I torture you? What! Is there no torture for me as well? The thought that I have done this covertly, secretly—what do you think that ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... narrow limits of his room. A natural impulse had caused him to interrupt Lydia's triumphant speech, which he knew was not intended for his ears, but her laugh rang in the air and mocked him. What was the torture that she had devised and whose effects she so curiously analyzed? There would ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... its tail, and teach the cat to jump for it.' No sooner did this thought present itself than it was put into practice, and I again was obliged to sustain the shocking sight of a brother put to the torture. I, in the mean time, was placed upon the table, with a pan put over me, in which there was a crack, so that I could see as well as hear all that passed: and from this place it was that I beheld my beloved ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... always considered jealousy a vulgar failing—and her face flushed with shame and humiliation that she, who had always prided herself upon being above petty weakness, should harbour so despicable a sentiment, and that of a dead woman. And yet she could only acknowledge honestly that it was torture to her to hear Francis speak of Phil in terms of such affection. Now that this odious whisper had made itself heard, how could she submit to his embrace? Could she ever forget? What could she do? Her deep, passionate love craved ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... "'What torture on both sides! Octave would be always doubting me, I doubting him. I, quite involuntarily, should give him a rival wholly unworthy of him, a man whom I despise, but with whom I have known raptures branded on me with fire, which are my shame, but ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... my father says!" said a little boy. "He can't swim, for he says it's better for a sailor not to be able to; it only keeps you in torture." ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... our way along the dry bed of the Sha Shin Ho, I jumped out, and for most of that day I either walked or rode the Mongol's pony. A Peking cart may have other and better uses, but as an instrument of torture it is unrivalled. Just as the thing was in Marco Polo's time, so it is to-day. You crawl in on hands and knees, and then painfully screw yourself round, and so sit cross-legged, or with feet outstretched if there is room, your head only escaping ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... discipline of unceasing pain, borne with that fortitude which could make her an entertaining and interesting companion even while the sweat of mortal agony was starting from her brow. Her own room she kept as a last asylum, to which she would silently retreat when the torture became too intense for the repression of society, and there alone, with closed doors, she wrestled with her agony. The stubborn independence of her nature took refuge in this final fastness; and she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... myself of an influence that would make her father fear me. Well, I played and I lost—and then, like other players and losers, even white ones, I was desperate. You were to be married to another—a man I hated. Life had lost its only charm, I could not bear that you should be his bride. My torture was intense. I asked ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... falls, for there is always a chapter of accedents prepared for us during our residence at them. the musquetoes continue to infest us in such manner that we can scarcely exist; for my own part I am confined by them to my bier at least 3/4ths of my time. my dog even howls with the torture he experiences from them, they are almost insupportable, they are so numerous that we frequently get them in our ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... there is mischief of some sort in the wind. The question is how to get to the bottom of it. Of course, the grand master might order the arrest of this Greek and of the prison officer, but you may be sure that neither would commit himself unless torture were applied; and I, for one, have no belief in what any man says under such circumstances. The most honest man may own himself a traitor when racked with torture, and may denounce innocent men. It is at best a clumsy device. What think you of ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... is being more capricious than the winds! You know, too well, how far my suit is unpleasant to your gardian, to torture a slight departure from cold observances into cause of serious complaint. I had hoped—perhaps, I should say, I have presumed on the contents of your letter, for which I return a thousand thanks; but do not thus cruelly destroy ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... a bad plan after all? You may laugh at my idea, perhaps—but I could not help its occurring to me all the same. Now with the rack and tortures and so on—you suffer terrible pain of course; but then your torture is bodily pain only (although no doubt you have plenty of that) until you die. But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour,—then in ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... her now, that life without love would be more than the agonies of the lowest hells. Then again, to live with Rathunor as his wife, while he all the time thought her to be Nu-nah, would be an incessant torture, keener and more intense than if she were chained by, as a third person, to behold him loving the actual ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... pierced with a sword; others have their breasts burnt, and others again have an instrument run through their tongue in order to calm the wrath of their offended deities; nor can they, in their opinions, put themselves to sufficient torture. ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... less oblivious of this monstrous crime. In the course of the following year, while at the fortress of Baux near Arles, Francois de Guise was in the act of firing off a cannon, which burst and wounded him in so frightful a manner that he expired two hours subsequently in extreme torture, thus partially expiating by a death of agony a ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... off, take it off! I don't wonder the poor old boy has the blues with a thing like that on"; and Charlie sat looking at what seemed to him an instrument of torture, with such a sober face that Rose took it gently away, and went in to bid ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... the less of it. Do not imagine that the illusion is, or can be, or ought to be, complete. If it were possible, no Phalaris or Perillus could devise a crueller torture. Here are two imitations: first, the poet's of the sufferer; secondly, the actor's of both: poetry is superinduced. No man in pain ever uttered the better part of the language used by Sophocles. We admit it, and willingly, and are at ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... incomprehensible, and, in doing it, asks you not to question, for she can not explain; asks you to think of her kindly; to trust her still. Here is a test for your friendship. Others may pry, drag her name about, torture her with their curiosity; she has appealed to you. Respect her secret. Let her bury it if she will, and can; you can not help her. If she has become that bad man's wife, she is past human help. Undoubtedly there ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... so why worry your head, dear, over a mere fable? I have already gone very carefully into all the facts that are proved, and have come to the conclusion that the story of the torture of his Eminence is a fairy-tale, and that the supernatural Whispers have only been heard ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... took the whole blame upon himself. Surprised at this magnanimity, the Viceroy—who is described in Don Quixote as "the homicide of all human kind"[74]—sent for him, and found him as good as his word. No threats of torture or death could extort from him a syllable which could implicate any one of his fellow-captives. His undaunted manner evidently overawed the Viceroy, for instead of chastizing he purchased Cervantes from his master ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... placed both out of his sight and of his reach. It is neither visible nor tangible. It is inaccessible by stripes or torments. Thus, while the body is in bondage, on account of the religion of the soul, the soul itself is free, and, while it suffers under torture, it enjoys the divinity, and feels felicity in his presence. But if all these things are so, it cannot be within the province either of individual magistrates or of governments, consisting of fallible ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... bring to your intelligence the battles at Fort Meigs and at the river Raisin. American prisoners were there given by English officers to their Indian allies for torture and death. The English war cry at Sandusky was, "Give the d—— ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... I have sometimes suffered with hunger, cold and pain, and have some idea of what starving, freezing and torture may be, but among all the ills to which flesh is heir, I doubt if there is one so trying to the nerves and brain of man as enforced and long-continued vigilance, when all his failing nature sinks for want of sleep. Insanity and death must soon ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... their feet. When a girl is seven or eight years old, her mother binds them for her, and everybody approves, If the mother did otherwise, the girl herself would be the first to reproach her when she grew up. It is wonderful how they endure the torture; but public opinion has sanctioned the custom for centuries, and made it as much a duty for a Chinese woman to have small feet as it is for us to wear clothes! And yet they do a wonderful thing. When ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... "You torture my words into an interpretation of which I never dreamed, and look upon all things through the distorting lenses of your own moodiness. It is worse than useless for us to attempt an amicable discussion, for your bitterness ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of His greatness and glory, whether expressed by the simple prayer of a Covenanter on the hill-side or by the ceremonies of a Catholic priesthood, or even by the prostrations of a Mahometan, or by the self-torture of a Hindoo, may and ought to inspire us with respect and with a devout feeling, at least when the worshippers themselves are pious and sincere. Otherwise, indeed, if the mummery is more apparent than ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... raw blood as food at dinnertime. When they were at work they could not even wipe off their faces—they were as helpless as newly born babes in that respect; and it may seem like a small matter, but when the sweat began to run down their necks and tickle them, or a fly to bother them, it was a torture like being burned alive. Whether it was the slaughterhouses or the dumps that were responsible, one could not say, but with the hot weather there descended upon Packingtown a veritable Egyptian plague of flies; there could be no describing this—the houses would be black ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... the rich Marienka lived in her castle, dying of hunger, and seeking in vain for a root to allay the torture that was consuming her. God had humbled ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... appeared, he wrote to a friend that his health had quite failed, and that indigestion, headaches, with a looming hopeless breakdown of body and mind made his life a burden and a curse. The twenty years of research he devoted to the problems of evolution were one long torture. For sixteen more years, during which he worked upon and produced immortal classics of biology, he was the most wretched and unhappy sufferer from neurasthenia. His life was a continuous alternation of small doses of work and large doses of rest. So he was enabled to publish ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... lips as he thought of the miserable girl's confession, following on hours of mental torture at the ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... smiles again. The hard man's eyes filled with tears, as he thought of it. He watched the deep, tearless sobs that shook her breast: he had wounded her to death,—his bonny Margret! She was like a dead thing now: what need to torture her longer? Let him be manly and go out to his solitary life, taking the remembrance of what he had done with him for company. He rose uncertainly,—then came to her: was that the way ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... gave the names of those who had been "made privy afterwards," but he still refused to reveal those of the original traitors. He was accordingly put to the torture. Gentle or ungentle, this worked its office: and on the ninth of November, after half-an-hour on the rack, Fawkes recounted the names of all his accomplices. He made also an admission which proved of considerable ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... old cathedral of Notre-Dame, stripped of everything worth stealing, and going from street to street (we paused a long time in the one where Calvin was born, a disagreeable, but I suppose useful, man!) that we began to realize the slow torture inflicted by the Germans. Of course, "lessons" had to be taught. Rebellious persons had to be "punished." Nothing but justice had been done upon the unjust by their just conquerors. And oh, how thorough and painstaking they were ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... man is rewarded by an eternity of bliss, happiness and joy—without end. Try to think of what ETERNITY means—think of the aeons upon aeons of time, on and on, and on, forever—and the poor sinner is suffering exquisite torture all that time, and in all time to come, without limit, respite, without mercy! And all the same time, the "good" man is enjoying his blissful state, without limit, or end, or satiety! And the time of ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... general, the greatest speaker, the greatest lawgiver, the greatest writer of Latin prose whom the great Roman people ever produced, and also the bravest man of his day, as he was the kindest. In an age when torture was a legitimate part of justice, he caused the pirates who had taken him, and whom he took in turn, to be mercifully put to death before he crucified their dead bodies for his oath's sake, and when his long-trusted servant tried to poison him he would not ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Constructive thought in Ireland for the solution of her own difficulties and the harmonizing of her own discordant elements had been systematically dammed, or diverted into revolutionary excesses, which, in the traditional spirit of Fitzgibbonism, were made the pretext for more stupid torture. Thus, O'Connell, whose attachment to law was so strong that in 1843, when the Repeal agitation had reached seemingly irresistible proportions, he deliberately restrained it, was tried for sedition. So, too, were dissipated the brilliant talents of the Young Ireland group and the ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... on the 27th of May, 1610, with the most atrocious severities of torture, of which the drawing by horses was but the last out of a scene that continued for many hours. The day before he had been racked to the very extremity of human suffering. The horses dragged at the wretch's body for an hour in vain; at length a nobleman present sent one of his own, which was ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... given my word to your father. But why did you send for me? Only to torture me? I must keep my word to hold my train apart. I've promised my men to stick ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... and the liberty which he bestowed upon them by driving out the despot Nabis, ought to be had in remembrance. There were some few, however, who in order to gain favour with Deinokrates, advised him to put Philopoemen to death by torture, pointing out that he was a dangerous enemy, and would be peculiarly exasperated against Deinokrates if he now were to regain his freedom after having been his captive and having been insulted by him. Finally they put him into what was called the Treasury, a subterranean ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... until, turning into the yard, we find that one of a party of French gentlemen who were on the mountain at the same time is lying on some straw in the stable, with a broken limb: looking like Death, and suffering great torture; and that we were confidently supposed to have ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... from the edge of the woods overlooking Jaulgonne to the east. It must have been directed upon the village, for no bullets whistled around us, so it was probably our first squadron engaging the German cavalry. When I got to the other end of the bridge my impatience increased. It was torture to think of the time it would take to collect my thirty men and hurry forward to help the others; and I noticed the same impatience in my men's looks. Those who were on the bridge, walking slowly and gently across, seemed to implore me to let them trot; but I pretended ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... behind the sea; to them I could return before it was too late, and here were the rough but honest Thither folk, who would doubtless let me live amongst them if that was to be my fate. One or other alternative were better than going to torture ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... preventing its success; just as, had the Government of Louis XVI shown more vigour at the outset of the Revolution, the Reign of Terror would probably never have taken place. Through evidence obtained by torture, the Government got possession of vast stores of arms which the rebels had prepared; by twice seizing the directors of the movement they deprived it of its central organization; and if they were ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... of his death filled all Achaea with lamentation and thirst for revenge. Messenia was ravaged with fire and sword till it submitted. Dinocrates and all who had voted for Philopoemen's death killed themselves to escape death by torture. All Achaea mourned at his funeral, statues were erected to his memory, and the highest honors decreed to him in many cities. In the words of Pausanias, a late Greek writer, "Miltiades was the first, and Philopoemen the last, benefactor to the ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... chemical symbol for raw rubber is C10H16, which turns into isoprene, or 2C5H8. Suddenly, without precedent, Babbitt was not merely bored but admitting that he was bored. It was ecstasy to escape from the table, from the torture of a straight chair, and loll on the ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... working in every heart—a miserable unrest. The miser stood there, and had forgotten the key of his strong box, and he knew the key was sticking in the lock. It would take too long to describe the various sorts of torture that were found there together. Inge felt a terrible pain while she had to stand there as a statue, for she was tied fast ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... go see Laocoon's torture dignifying pain; A father's love and mortal's agony With as immortal's patience blending; vain The struggle! Vain against the coiling strain And gripe and deepening of the dragon's grasp The old man's clinch; the long envenomed chain Rivets the living links; the enormous ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... how he raves! Let us be silent while the warmth and wine Provoke his sluggish blood to steady flow, And each dead sense comes back to life again, O'er the same path of torture which it trod When it went out from him. He'll slumber soon, And, when he wakens, we ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... evil. I was Trewinion's heir, whom her father wished her to marry, and yet she hated the thought of it; while she could not marry the man she loved because of her father's will. Meanwhile she was suffering a terrible torture—and ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... hearing, his form to grow indistinct. Was he playing with her suspense, or could it be that he—a being with heart and nerves like hers, had no conception of the rack on which she waa stretched—no suspicion that every one of his deliberate sentences was a turn of the screw that redoubled her torture? The Ayletts were a strong-willed race, and she repressed all sign of suffering save intense pallor; made this less palpable by screening her eyes from the lamp-light with a paper she took from the table, and thereby throwing ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... that do accuse me; I know of none." Then turning to Leonato, she said, "O my father, if you can prove that any man has ever conversed with me at hours unmeet, or that I yesternight changed words with any creature, refuse me, hate me, torture me ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... repress'd. Canst thou, with more than usual warmth she cried, Thy malice to indulge, and feed thy pride; 60 Canst thou, severe by nature as thou art, With all that wondrous rancour in thy heart, Delight to torture truth ten thousand ways, To spin detraction forth from themes of praise, To make Vice sit, for purposes of strife, And draw the hag much larger than the life, To make the good seem bad, the bad seem worse, And represent our nature as our curse? ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Such diseases not unfrequently manifest themselves after marriage, which is answer enough to the objection that if they did not wish children they should not marry. There are also women to whom pregnancy is a nine months' torture, and others to whom it is nearly certain to prove fatal. Such a condition cannot be discovered before marriage, and therefore cannot be provided against by a single life. Can such women be asked to ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... sin dies out in a man of itself, through satiety of earthly things, and because no excitement can any longer affect his exhausted powers, that is a death from which we see no new life proceed. The power of sin must be slain in a man by violence; a man must go through the torture of self-knowledge, showing him the contrast between his wretched condition and the higher life to which he is called; he must hear the cry, and accept it as an irrevocable sentence; that an end is to be put to this ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... under his leg and raising and lowering the hammer with one hand, keeping the muzzle pointed toward the steward's head all the while, the latter grew as white as a sheet and trembled in every limb. After he thought he had inflicted sufficient torture upon the timid fellow, the Confederate put up his weapon ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... day! rejoice, rejoice! Come bouse about the porter! Morality's demure decoys Shall here nae mair find quarter: Mackinlay, Russell, are the boys, That Heresy can torture: They'll gie her on a rape a hoyse, And cowe her measure shorter By ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... bursting in and interrupt them, thought Josephine. And supposing the bell rang in the middle? It might be somebody important—about their mourning. Would they get up reverently and go out, or would they have to wait... in torture? ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... side-tracks, which broke the continuity. It was also difficult to speak of Adrian in terms that did not tear our hearts. As a despoiler of the dead, his offence was rank. But we had loved him; and we still loved him, and he had expiated his crime by a year's unimaginable torture. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... there was brought to birth that modern Ireland, passionate for freedom, which has occupied the stage ever since. In our own time it has knit, as a fractured limb knits, into one tissue with the tradition of the Gaelic peasantry. Hanging and burning, torture and oppression, poison and Penal Laws, bribes and blackguardism so far from exterminating the Irish people actually hammered them into a nation, one and indestructible, proud of its past and confident ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... out-soared the shadow of our night: Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain, Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn With sparkless ashes load an ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... threshold into this vaster region stimulated by the Earth—all his longings would be housed at last like homing birds, nested in the gentle places his yearnings all these years had lovingly built for them—in a living Nature! The fever of modern life, the torture and unrest of a false, external civilization that trained the brain while it still left wars and baseness in the heart, would drop from him like the symptoms of some fierce disease. The god of speed and mechanism that ruled the world ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... an eye wearied to nausea by the perpetual vision of the neat teacher upon the platform, the backs of the heads of the pupils in front of him, and the monotonous stretches of blackboard threateningly defaced by arithmetical formulae and other insignia of torture. Above the blackboard, the walls of the high room were of white plaster—white with the qualified whiteness of old snow in a soft coal town. This dismal expanse was broken by four lithographic portraits, votive offerings of a thoughtful publisher. The portraits ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... great hooks, which are passed through the tender parts of their backs. Sometimes they swing for half an hour; sometimes an hour. The longer they can bear the torture of the swinging, the more acceptable they suppose it will be to their goddess. It occasionally happens, that the flesh in which the hooks are fastened gives way, in which case the poor creature ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder
... O. bear you to meward, or, clad in short frocks in the West, Are you growing the charms that shall capture and torture the heart ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... What is there in her mind? What meaning lurks In speech begun but to be broken short? Would both deceive me with a vain pretence? Have they conspired to put me to the torture? And yet, despite my stern severity, What plaintive voice cries deep within my heart? A secret pity troubles and alarms me. Oenone shall be questioned once again, I must have clearer light upon this crime. Guards, bid Oenone ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... made a vigorous resistance, and knocked down the first savage who seized him with a well-directed blow of his fist, but he was speedily overpowered by others. Thus we were again prisoners, with the prospect of torture and a violent ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... fire was a painful effort for him, and to move so as to cook his food was torture, and boys of his age can well feel for ...
— Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Vol. I, No. 1. - Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood • Prentiss Ingraham
... Mary was devoted to her religion. The fires which had burned in Henry's time were kindled again, but now for the torture of Protestants, bishops, and men of mark. Mary wedded the Catholic king and cruel fanatic Philip II of Spain, the most powerful monarch of Europe; so that only to her death and the reign of the persecuted Elizabeth could Protestant Englishmen look for relief. Thus the accession of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... tho' the text of this covenant be easy to be understood, yet some (who, at least think themselves learned), and whom we have found not only stable but stiffened in their own erroneous principles and opinions, will be trying their skill, if not their malice, to wrest, or, as the Greek imports, to torture and set this covenant upon the rack, to make it speak and confess a sense never intended by the composers, or proposers of it: and whereof (if but common ingenuity be the judge) it never will, nor can be ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... of a feeling which is ever the parent of glorious deeds. Was it not inspired by honor, that the Roman Regulus returned to certain torture and death? that the chivalrous King of Israel, when fainting with thirst, poured out to the Lord the water for which his soul longed? that gallant hearts innumerable have crimsoned the battle-field with their hearts blood, rather than that even a ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
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