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Rack   Listen
noun
Rack  n.  
1.
An instrument or frame used for stretching, extending, retaining, or displaying, something. Specifically:
(a)
An engine of torture, consisting of a large frame, upon which the body was gradually stretched until, sometimes, the joints were dislocated; formerly used judicially for extorting confessions from criminals or suspected persons. "During the troubles of the fifteenth century, a rack was introduced into the Tower, and was occasionally used under the plea of political necessity."
(b)
An instrument for bending a bow.
(c)
A grate on which bacon is laid.
(d)
A frame or device of various construction for holding, and preventing the waste of, hay, grain, etc., supplied to beasts.
(e)
A frame on which articles are deposited for keeping or arranged for display; as, a clothes rack; a bottle rack, etc.
(f)
(Naut.) A piece or frame of wood, having several sheaves, through which the running rigging passes; called also rack block. Also, a frame to hold shot.
(g)
(Mining) A frame or table on which ores are separated or washed.
(h)
A frame fitted to a wagon for carrying hay, straw, or grain on the stalk, or other bulky loads.
(i)
A distaff.
2.
(Mech.) A bar with teeth on its face, or edge, to work with those of a wheel, pinion, or worm, which is to drive it or be driven by it.
3.
That which is extorted; exaction. (Obs.)
Mangle rack. (Mach.) See under Mangle. n.
Rack block. (Naut.) See def. 1 (f), above.
Rack lashing, a lashing or binding where the rope is tightened, and held tight by the use of a small stick of wood twisted around.
Rack rail (Railroads), a toothed rack, laid as a rail, to afford a hold for teeth on the driving wheel of a locomotive for climbing steep gradients, as in ascending a mountain.
Rack saw, a saw having wide teeth.
Rack stick, the stick used in a rack lashing.
To be on the rack, to suffer torture, physical or mental.
To live at rack and manger, to live on the best at another's expense. (Colloq.)
To put to the rack, to subject to torture; to torment. "A fit of the stone puts a king to the rack, and makes him as miserable as it does the meanest subject."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Rack" Quotes from Famous Books



... be, all alone there, and seeing poor Castle Blanch going to rack and ruin. I could cry about it whenever I think of it; but how much worse would it have been if he had deserted too! As long as he is in the old vicarage there is a home spot to me in the world! Oh, I thank him, I do thank him for standing ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... for a few minutes with his finger tips still pressed together, his legs stretched out in front of him, and his gaze directed upward to the ceiling. Then he took down from the rack the old and oily clay pipe, which was to him as a counselor, and, having lighted it, he leaned back in his chair, with thick blue cloud wreaths spinning up from him, and a look of infinite ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... be where they set controls for launching," guessed Phillips, leaning back against a rack of emergency spacesuits. "That intercom screen on the bulkhead is probably plugged in to the control room. Looks as if the torpedoes themselves are stored under that ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe

... stand by the wheel or the rack while some poor body is tortured to death; who can stand by while a human heart is breaking with the extremity of anguish? When such a grief comes to any one as to Leone, one stands by in silence; it is as though a funeral is passing, and ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay

... Quick, alive, Quit, repaid,; acquitted, behaved, Raced (rased), tore, Rack (of bulls), herd, Raines, a town in Brittany famous for its cloth, Ramping, raging, Range, rank, station, Ransacked, searched, Rashed, fell headlong, Rashing, rushing, Rasing, rushing, Rasure, Raundon, impetuosity, Rear, raise, Rechate, note of recall, Recomforted, comforted, cheered, Recounter, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... of short focus, every object situated beyond a distance of three yards from the apparatus is in focus. In exceptional cases, where the operator might be nearer the object to be photographed, the focusing would be done by means of the rack of the objective. The latter can also slide up and down, so that the apparatus need not be inclined when buildings or high trees are being photographed. The door, E, performs the role of a shade. When the apparatus has been fixed upon its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various

... said Mrs. Parry triumphantly. "The sexton and your gardener quarrelled, and have not been on speaking terms for months. Thomas, the sexton, won't let Williams do anything to the grave, and out of spite won't touch it himself, so it went to rack and ruin. The grass is long—or rather was long—and the flowers all gone to seed. ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume

... his front door at noon, his first glance was at the rack in the corner of the hall, where, on the left-hand hook, Peter Junior's coat and hat had hung when he was at home, ever since he was a boy. They were not there. The Elder lifted his bushy brows one higher than the other, then drew them down ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine

... the fair clients fell off; the portfolios were returned with "thanks;" the drawings, so lately pronounced "perfect loves," and gazed upon as though worthy the creation of a Rubens, were now to be found doubled up in the card-rack, or transfixed by two or three pins on the cushion of a work-table; the three-cornered missives circulated in other channels; and the man of Taste found ample leisure once more to speak to a friend in the avenue, or fall quietly into the ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power

... a short laugh. "Remember how they used to rack along in front of a hoss for miles, keeping just ahead, lettin' out a link when you spurred up? Aggravatin' fowl! They got over tryin' to keep ahead ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... put a coal, a beam of immortality into us, which we might have blown into a flame, but blew it out by our first sin; we beggared ourselves by hearkening after false riches, and infatuated ourselves by hearkening after false knowledge. So that now, we do not only die, but die upon the rack, die by the torment of sickness; nor that only, but are pre-afflicted, super-afflicted with these jealousies and suspicions and apprehensions of sickness, before we can call it a sickness: we are not sure we are ill; one hand asks the other ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne

... admitted Abe, pointing to the window, "does look kind o' lonesome a-goin' ter rack an' ruin. Why, the winter I was over here, every man had his wife an' young 'uns on the Beach, ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund

... As soon as I was laid down, all the fatal consequences of my adventure presented themselves to my imagination. I could not sleep. I saw all the horrors of my misfortune, without being able to find any remedy; in vain did I rack my brain; it supplied me with no expedient. I feared nothing so much as daybreak; however, it did come, and the cruel Brinon along with it. He was booted up to the middle, and cracking a cursed whip, which he held in his hand, 'Up, Monsieur le Chevalier,' cried he, opening ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton

... floor was tiled. Its roof was cleverly arranged to give a pergola effect. It was quite vine-covered. The vines hid the glass that made it rain-proof. In one corner rugs were placed, wicker chairs, a swinging book-rack, and a tea-table. The lady motioned to Lewis to sit down. She sat down herself and started drawing off her long gloves. She ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain

... for that, anyway!" he observed, strolling to the chimneypiece and selecting a pipe from a rack. "I ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... willing to go, and I frequently had to carry him away by force, for which he thought me very cruel and unjust; and sometimes his father would insist upon my letting him remain; and then I would leave him to his kind friends, and retire to indulge my bitterness and despair alone, or to rack my brains for a remedy to this ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... nervous, JACK," said EDWIN DROOD, hastily concealing his ball and coming forward. "I noticed, myself, that you played more than half the notes in the air, or on the music-rack, without touching ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various

... plucked this lad from the sharks, only to hand him over to those other fiends of the Holy Office; for he is a handsome and stalwart lad, and those limbs of his were never meant to be seared with red-hot irons, and torn asunder on the rack!" ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... cooking fork in her hand, and a puff of steam hissing out after her, Mrs. Schum peered into the hallway. She was strangely smaller, Lilly thought, as if the flesh were beginning to wither off the rack of ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... long years. It was a miserable and totally inadequate price, but Edward could get no more. In the depths of his misery, he accepted it. The gentleman took the collection home, gave it to his boy, and finally allowed it all, for want of care and attention, to go to rack and ruin. And so that was the end of ten years of poor Thomas Edward's unremitting original work in natural history. A sadder tale of unrequited labour in the cause of ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen

... the vestibule, laboriously removed his rubbers, and dropped his heavy ash stick into its place on the rack. Then he carefully lifted the antique hat from his head, deposited it on a peg, and came forward into the room. The face, revealed as he left the vestibule's gloom for the bright sunlight, was at first glance hard, deeply lined, and stubborn; the effect accented by a set mouth, the little ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco

... Willow Springs, Kansas, a stage station, twenty-five miles west of Council Grove, I discovered twenty-five horses hitched to the rack. There was no retreat, so I had to drive right on in. Just as we drove up twenty-five men came out of the settlers' store and ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus

... of smiles, what graciousness, sweet as the peach orchard in blossom week! Now, some of you come in and put your hat on the rack and scowl, and say: "Lost money to-day!" and you sit down at the table and criticise the way the food is cooked. You shove back before the others are done eating, and snatch up the evening paper and read, oblivious of what has been going on in that home all day. The children are ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... all those pangs I bear; Of the false world, of an unpitying fair, Of Love, and fickle fortune I complain! From eve's last glance, till morning's earliest ray, Sleep shuns my couch; rest quits my tearful eye; And my rack'd breast heaves many a plaintive sigh. Then bright Aurora cheers the rising day, But cheers not me—for to my sorrowing heart One sun alone can cheering ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... Dolores was left standing alone by the midship shot-rack. She singled out a few of her men by name, and commanded them to rally to her side; then, seizing a cutlas from the deck, she glided tigerishly to the main companionway, down which the pirates were now driving the beaten crew, and the men she had ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle

... Indian fashion, to better acquaintance (I forgot to say that the poet had two dozen clay pipes ranged in a small wooden rack), we went forth for a seven miles' walk on the Downs. And at last, from the summit of one, I pointed down to a small field ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... would the strange interruption left a jarring note behind it, and to ease the tenseness the older man stepped forward and, taking from a rack near by one of several glass tubes filled with yellow liquid, held ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett

... she's gone visiting! I rack and rack my brains to find what grief could have come to Elspeth. She will ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... from his arm the sturdy spear withdrew; Then backward leap'd amid his comrades' ranks; While round his brother's waist Polites threw His arms, and led him from the battle-field To where, with charioteer and rich-wrought car, Beyond the fight, his flying coursers stood. Him, rack'd with pain, and groaning, while the blood Stream'd down his wounded arm, to Troy they bore. The rest fought on, and loud the ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... an address of almost unexampled grandeur, are unfortunately of no interest to us, except as illustrating the character of the priest who wrote them, and the king to whom they were written. The hand of the persecutor was not stayed. The rack and the lash and the stake continued to claim their victims. So far it was labour in vain. But the letter remains, to speak for ever for the courage of Latimer; and to speak something, too, for a prince that could respect ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... Rock to come down. "Yes, sir," answered Rock, "when I take my arms." "You must come without them," said Williams. "Oh, I must have my arms, sir," and as Rock stretched out his hand to seize his musket in the arm-rack, Williams shouted, "If you lay one finger on your musket I will cut you down," at the same time drawing his sabre. "Now, go down before me." Rock obeyed, was placed in irons, and within half an hour Clark, O'Brien, and nine other mutineers were embarked ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey

... pitchy blackness, knowing day from night only by the fact that once in twenty-four hours food would be slipped through a hole in the wall by unseen hands; lying here until oftentimes death or the cruel mercy of madness came upon them before the overworked executioner found time to rack their limbs or lop off ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... vanished. Nora was now once more under the dominion of a single thought, as she had been when she fled from her bridal home. Then, it was to escape from her lover,—now, it was to see him. As the victim stretched on the rack implores to be led at once to death, so there are moments when the annihilation of hope seems more merciful than the torment ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Throgmorton, and, as the council expressed it, "a world more," were in various prisons waiting their trials. Those who were suspected of being in Elizabeth's confidence were kept with their fate impending over them—to be tempted either with hopes of pardon, or by the rack, to betray their secrets.[259] ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude

... urgent request, he followed him up the back stairs to a narrow corridor, and thence to a small room looking out upon the stable-yard. It was plainly furnished with a bed, a table, a few chairs, and a rack for guns ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... other fifth-form fellows, Franklin and Cradock, whose excellence was almost solely due to Walter's influence. Kenrick, on the other hand, never interfered in the house, and let things go on exactly as they liked, although they were going to rack and ruin. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... themselves: the strongest fences cannot restrain them. My neighbour's horse will not only not stay by himself abroad, but he will not bear to be left alone in a strange stable without discovering the utmost impatience, and endeavouring to break the rack and manger with his fore feet. He has been known to leap out at a stable-window, through which dung was thrown, after company; and yet in other respects is remarkably quiet. Oxen and cows will not fatten by themselves; but will neglect the finest pasture that is not recommended by society. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... his fruit. One day while the stout Dutchman was at his midday meal, his son ran in to tell him that he had seen an Indian squaw enter the orchard. Van Dyck sprang from the table vowing vengeance, and from the rack made of deer's horns he took down his fusee and rushed into the orchard, taking care to conceal himself until he was within easy range. The squaw saw him and, with a yell of fear, wheeled to fly for her life; but Van Dyck was a true shot and, bringing his gun to ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick

... we find, immediately afterwards enters upon the stewardship or management of one of the most considerable districts in Bengal. We know very well, and shall prove to your Lordships, in what manner such men rack such districts, and exact from the inhabitants the money to repay themselves for the bribes which had been taken from them. These bribes are taken under a pretence of the Company's service, but sooner ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... by the way he came, went out of the front door, and through the garden to where the pony was made fast, and led him away in search of a stable. He found one behind the house, and filling the rack with hay, returned to the house, and seated himself at a porch which was at the door which led to the back premises, for the keeper's house was large and commodious. Edward was in deep thought, when he was roused by the little girl, the daughter of ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat

... they don't care if the country goes to rack and ruin so long as they fill their purses. Listen.' She put one hand on my arm. 'My boy came back with fever and dysentery. He was ill for months—at death's door—and I nursed him day and night. And almost before ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... the seas! on ocean wave Thy stars shall glitter o'er the brave; When death, careering on the gale, Sweeps darkly round the bellied sail, And frighted waves rush wildly back Before the broadside's reeling rack, Each dying wanderer of the sea Shall look at once to heaven and thee, And smile to see thy splendors fly In ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... which I experienced on this solemn occasion, I have come to the conclusion that the man who is led to death is not as unhappy as the public imagines him to be. Fifty ideas presented themselves nearly simultaneously to my mind, and I did not rack my brain for any of them; I only recollect the two following, which have remained engraved on my memory. On turning my head to the right, I saw the national flag flying on the bastions of Figueras, and I said to myself, "If I were ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago

... his horse to the rack before the store and entered the crowded place. The fumes of tobacco smoke, vinegar, cheese, and various other commodities gave a distinctive flavor to Caleb Schell's store—and not a pleasant one, ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... one of the oversized mail cylinders and routed through the tubes like sacks of recorded letters; in ten minutes, with a thump that knocked the breath out of all of us, we were in the switch-rack of Halsey's ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings

... but the victims whom holy men and righteous judges used to stretch on their engines knew better what they meant than you or I!—What is that great bucket of water for? said the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, before she was placed on the rack.—For you to drink,—said the torturer to the little woman.—She could not think that it would take such a flood to quench the fire in her and so keep her alive for her confession. The torturer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... indulge his master's vices and to sanction his prodigalities to a certain extent, knowing that if he attempts to draw the purse-strings too closely an open rupture will be the result, and then some steward will come in who has no taste for saving, and who will let everything go to rack and ruin. He was the first of the long line of English ministers who professed to regard economy as one of the great objects of statesmanship. He established securely the principle that to make the two ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... down and from a rack of arms Harry chose a plain black hanger with an agate hilt. As he did it on he saw below it some heavy staves loaded with lead—just such as ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey

... possible, but the ascent was difficult, and we could not gain on the speed of the pack train. Then the trail was lost in a gully where the animals had gone in every direction to get through. My nerves were now on the rack of suspense. ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson

... brandy, and a great deal of mental effort, to steel himself for it. Psycho-rehabilitation was a dreadful thing to face. There would be almost a year of unremitting agony, physical and mental, worse than a Khiftan torture rack. There would be the shame of having his innermost secrets poured out of him by the psychotherapists, and, at the end, there would emerge someone who would not be Salgath Trod, or anybody like Salgath Trod, and he would have ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper

... Resentment and loyalty, shame and heartache, kept her lips dumb. She walked to and fro in the garden, alone in the sweet early darkness, for an hour. Then she went indoors, and tried to amuse herself at the piano. Suddenly her face twisted, she laid her arm along the rack, and her face on her arm; but it was only for a moment; then she straightened up resolutely, piled the music, closed the piano, ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris

... known as the "Mandarin." Her powers of merciless inquisition suggested torments long drawn out. The commander of the Sirdar, homeward bound from Shanghai, knew that he was about to be stretched on the rack when he took his seat at the ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... composed of nothing but heads of chapters, and I think you tend the same way. Please take the trouble to make the two lines I have scored into a paragraph, so that poor devils who are not quite so well up in the subject as yourself may not have to rack their brains for an hour to supply all the links ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... for once delicious. O, great sir, The King's thy foe? Surrounded by his guards I would waylay him. Hast thou some fierce rival? I'll pluck his heart out. Yea! there is no peril I'd not confront, no rack I'll not endure, No great offence commit, to do thee service— So thou wilt spare me this, and spare thy soul This ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli

... whom they never saw or wished to see; and they let out the village, or other subdivision of their estates, to second parties quite as little interested, who again let them out to others, so that the system of rack-renting went on over the whole area of the immense possession. This was a system 'more honoured in the breach than in the observance'; for, as the great landholders became involved in the ruin of their cultivators, their estates were sold for arrears of revenue ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... you, then, think that it can befall a wise man to be oppressed with grief, that is to say, with misery? for, as all perturbation is misery, grief is the rack itself. Lust is attended with heat, exulting joy with levity, fear with meanness, but grief with something greater than these; it consumes, torments, afflicts, and disgraces a man; it tears him, preys upon his mind, and utterly destroys him: ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... him close his door; then, with a look of disgust on her face, picked up his hat and coat, and hung them on the rack in the hall. "I'm sorry for Mart," she said to herself. "He was company for him, but I can't stand the loafer a day longer. I hope I ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... superior to Christianity, have triumphed at Cincinnati, and trampled under foot, with impunity, the soul-stirring doctrine of "converging lines." The next steps with these "enemies of righteousness" will be the rack, the gibbet, and a second edition of the infernal inquisition! Will the friends of the "White Basis" Governor of Tennessee tamely surrender their dearest rights to these Cincinnati crusaders, without a single struggle? Will they allow the saddle of Federal domination to be quietly thrown ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... counsel,— At length the Mayor broke silence: For a guilder I'd my ermine gown sell; I wish I were a mile hence! It's easy to bid one rack one's brain,— I'm sure my poor head aches again, I've scratched it so, and all in vain, O for a trap, a trap, a trap!" Just as he said this, what could hap At the chamber door but a gentle tap? "Bless us," cried the Mayor, "what's that?" (With the Corporation ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... to three plants are put in a pile and tied with binding twine. The bundles are taken to the dry-house on wheelbarrows, made with racks on purpose for carrying the seeds. A cloth is spread over the rack to catch any shelling seeds. A man carries about 100 bunches at a load and passes them up to a man in the house who hangs them on nails driven for the purpose. The seed is allowed to hang a few days to thoroughly ripen ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier

... her to a rope, leads her to the rack and binds her fast. Then Hans goes to his mother. "Good evening, mother." "Good evening, Hans. Where hast thou been?" "With Grethel." "What didst thou take her?" "I took her nothing." "What did Grethel give thee?" "She gave me nothing, she came with me." "Where hast ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers

... wife or the hired girl, now it is made in the creameries by men. My mother made most of the butter for nearly forty years, packing thousands of tubs and firkins of it in that time. The milk was set in tin pans on a rack in the milk house for the cream to rise, and as soon as the milk clabbered ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... of many. Almost every evening after dinner Frances sat down at the old-fashioned piano, with the candle brackets at each side of the music rack, and sang. Occasionally we were her only auditors, but more often one or both of the curates or Doctor and Mrs. Bayliss or Bayliss, Junior, dropped in. We made other acquaintances—Mrs. Griggson, the widow in "reduced circumstances," ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln

... hundred dollars in giving all our friends an indigestion from a midnight meal, seems to me a very poor investment. Yet if we once begin to give the party, we must have everything that is given at the other parties, or wherefore do we live? And caterers and waiters rack their brains to devise new forms of expense and extravagance; and when the bill comes in, one is sure to feel that one is paying a great deal of money for a great deal of nonsense. It is, in fact, worse than nonsense, because our dear friends ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... and the sound of shuffling feet were pierced occasionally by the whoop of a drunken reveler. Once there rang out the high notes of a woman's hysterical laughter. Cowponies and packed burros drooped listlessly at the hitching-rack. Even loaded wagons were waiting to take the road as soon as the drivers could tear themselves away from the attractions of ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine

... extinct craters stud the frozen scene with round hollow mounds innumerable. A thousand features, but it remains one mighty mountain. How natural it seems for it to be sublime! It is the peer of the sea and of the sky. All day it flashed and darkened under the rack, and I rejoiced in the sight, and knew why Pindar called it the pillar of heaven; and at night it hooded itself once more with the ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... request remits all his slave's debts. But the slave does not remit his debtor's debt, but lets him be cast into prison. So the king summons him before his judgment-seat and says: I have shown you mercy, and you have shown your fellow no mercy. So now I shall have you put upon the rack until you have paid me your debts to the last farthing. Who does not show mercy to others, to him shall no ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger

... engineer. The conversation, in which we were immediately engulfed, was so vivacious that we had small chance to examine the surroundings as we would have liked to. But save for the typewriter on the desk and a few books in a rack, there was nothing to suggest literature. "Plutarch's Lives," we noticed—a favourite of Mac's since boyhood; Frank Harris's "The Bomb" (which, however, the Chief insisted belonged to him), E.S. Martin's "Windfalls of Observation," ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... the room and everything is covered with this fine dust so thick that it is not possible to tell the color of a table top. Cloissonne vases, or rather images of the famous blue ware stand under the old lady's portrait, and everything is going to rack and ruin. Meantime we wandered around, planning how it could be made over into use when the revolution comes. Get rid of the idea that China has had a revolution and is a republic; that point is just where we have been deceived in the United States. China is at present the rotten crumbling ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey

... him! ha, ha, ha! Doesn't he harry the poor, an' drive away their cows from them—doesn't he rack them an' rob them—harry them, rack them, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... for me, as through my brother-in-law I could visit all the prisons; at last I was obliged to confess the faith, and I suffered much on the rack and in the porphyry quarries; but every pain was dear to me, for it seemed to bring me nearer to the goal of my longings, and if I find ought to complain of up here on the Holy Mountain, it is only that the Lord deems me unworthy to suffer harder things, when his beloved and only ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... "potts, chafornes, skymmers, skellets, cressets, gredires, frying pannys, chfying dishes, a brazon morter with a pestell, stone morters, strykinge knives, broches, racks, brandards, cobberds, pot-hangings, hocks, a rack of iron, bowles, and payles." The live stock classed among the "moveable goods, consisted of 19 oxen, 28 kyne, 17 young beste, 24 young calves, 12 gots, 4 geldings, 2 mares, 2 naggs and a colte, 229 shepe, 12 swyne, a crane, a turkey cok, and a henne with 3 chekyns"—the lot being ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... give the gentle South Yet leave to court those sails that bring me safety, And you auspicious fires, bright twins in heaven Daunce on the shrowds; he blows still stubbornly, And on his boystrous Rack rides my sad ruin; There is no help, there can be now no comfort, To morrow with the Sun-set, sets my credit. Oh misery! thou curse of man, thou plague, In the midst of all our strength thou strik'st us; My vertuous Love is lost too: all, what I have been, No more hereafter to be ...
— Beggars Bush - From the Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... an oven in a closed pan with a small quantity of water constitutes braizing. This cooking process might be called a combination of stewing and baking, but when it is properly carried out, the meat is placed on a rack so as to be raised above the water, in which may be placed sliced vegetables. In this process the meat actually cooks in the flavored steam that surrounds it in the hot pan. The so-called double roasting pans are in fact braizing pans when they are properly used. A ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences

... in breakfasting on his coverings and the rushes of his couch; they are on his table, his seats, along his pillow and his walls; they are playing before his door, running hither and thither through the crevices of his roof, multiplying themselves on his rack and shelf; all biting, gnawing, nibbling—some his seal-skin hat, his tobacco-pouch, the bark ornaments of his furniture; others the handles of his tools, his pipes, his Bible, and even ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine

... staggered towards the cave I tripped and fell heavily, crushing her beneath me. But I struggled up, and bearing her within the cave, laid her upon my bed and closing the door, barred it; then I reached my muskets from their rack and set them in readiness. This done, and finding my lady so still and silent, I came to view her where she lay and, peering in the dimness, uttered a great cry to see the pale oval of cheek horribly bedabbled with blood. Trembling in a sickness of fear I sank beside her on my knees, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... if it don't!" he agreed sympathetically, mentally going over his rack of tires, not quite sure that he had four in that size, but hoping that he had five and that he could persuade the man to invest. He surely needed rubber, thought Casey, as he scrutinized the two casings on the car. He stood aside while the man backed, ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... time, and with a mingled shock of pain and pleasure, when he discovered that he could not walk under the high kitchen-table without bumping his head. He tried it very often before he learned to go around that article of furniture, on his way from the clothes-rack, which was his tent when he camped out on rainy days, to the sink, which was his oasis in the desert of the basement floor. This kitchen was a favorite playground of The Boy, and about that kitchen-table ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton

... no use arguing about it. Times are so diff'rent now from what they was when I was young, and peoples thinks so diff'rent, that it 'pears to me sometimes that the world is going to rack and ruin. We got along well 'nough fifty or sixty years ago without so much edication. But folks are got to be so stylish now, and boys know so much more than their grandpas, that I railly don't know what'll ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer

... to her heart, raised the other aloft, and, raising her lovely eyes—which reflected the infernal glare of the windows—aloft, towards the smoking canopy above her head, she swore by her eternal love to her beloved that she would never, not even on the rack itself, betray a word, a syllable of what she was about ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai

... heaven-arches soaring and striving upward, an Odeum of the tones of the Sphere-music, a world in the world! And overhead[8] the eye-socket of the light and of the sky gleamed down, and the distant rack of clouds seemed to touch the lofty arch over which it shot along! And round about them stood nothing but the temple-bearers, the columns! The temple of all gods endured and concealed the diminutive ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... we can readily believe that if Donaldson gets a first-class position of power, above the skies, he will make it decidedly warm for his persecutors when they come up to the desk with their gripsacks and register and ask for a room and a bath, and a fire escape. He will be apt to look up to the key rack and tell them everything is full, but they can find pretty fair accommodations at the other house, down at the Hot Springs, on the European plan, by ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck

... strange misgivings annoyed and perplexed her, though her respect for Dennis daily increased, and at times a sudden pity and softness made her little hands hesitate before giving an additional wrench to the rack of uncertainty upon which she kept him; still, she would not for the world have abandoned her purpose, and such compunctions were as yet but the little back eddies ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... Dawson. My limbs are on the rack, and my soul shivers in me, till this night's business be complete. Tell me thy thoughts: is Bates determined? ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore

... his hat from a rack by the door and prepared to depart for the evening. At the door he stopped and glared back. So fierce was his manner that Louise was frightened and ran upstairs to her own room. The daughters began to speak ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson

... vengeance of an injur'd king. Go, seize him, load him with reproachful chains; Before th' assembled troops, proclaim his crimes; Then leave him, stretch'd upon the ling'ring rack, Amidst the camp to howl ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... wide by seven high At the for'ard end a bunk overtopped by two ports looking out upon the main deck. At the after end a settee over which is my book-case. A chest of drawers, a shelf, a mirror, a framed photograph, a bottle-rack, and a shaving-strop adorn the starboard bulkhead. A door, placed midway in the opposite side, is hung with many clothes. A curtain screens my slumbers, and a ventilator in the ceiling chills my toes when ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... (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 found guilty. All that I shall say to such is that in the close of the verse quoted ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various

... to do in Ireland, and we have been too long away from it already. My husband has his business, and I have my home, and they are both going to rack and ruin. Besides," she added slyly, "it is just possible that if we did come to the States we might not find ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle

... swept across the hill with considerable violence, the sleet-like rain which it bore along pelted into their garments with pitiless severity. The father had advanced into more than middle age; and having held, at a rack-rent the miserable waste of farm which he occupied, he was compelled to exert himself in its cultivation, despite either obduracy of soil, or inclemency of weather. This day, however, was so unusually severe, that the old man began to feel incapable of continuing his toil. The son bore ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... should be explained. For years, the factor at Fort Severn had kept in his hallway an enormous pipe-rack. Here, in appropriate rings were souvenir pipes from every white man that had ever visited the post. Most prized of all was one that had belonged to the great governor of the Company, Sir George Simpson, who yearly traveled thousands of miles in regal state, ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... people in the boat. After looking on the picture till every mark and line in it were familiar to me, I turned over various leaves till I came to another engraving; a new source of wonder—a low sandy beach on which the furious sea was breaking in mountain-like billows; cloud and rack deformed the firmament, which wore a dull and leaden-like hue; gulls and other aquatic fowls were toppling upon the blast, or skimming over the tops of the maddening waves—'Mercy upon him! he must be drowned!' I exclaimed, as my eyes fell upon a poor wretch who appeared to be striving ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow

... his old haunts. For some time Mahony's regular evening walk was back to the store—a road he would otherwise not have taken; for it was odious to him to see Polly's neat little appointments going to rack and ruin, under the tenancy of a dirty Irish family. There he would find the animal sitting, in melancholy retrospect. Again and again he picked him up and carried him home; till that night when no puss came to his call, and Palmerston, the black and glossy, was seen no more: either he had fallen ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... trousers-pockets, by walking instead of ambling or slouching, by wiping the mud from my shoes before entering the house, by a personally conducted tour through the realms of manicuring, and by learning the position and use of the hat-rack. Getting no school credits for such incidental minors in the great scheme of life, I grew careless and indifferent and acquired a reputation that I do not care to dwell upon. If those who had me in charge, or thought they had, had only been wise and given me ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson

... realistically painted in the colours of nature, being life-size. At the end of the room opposite the dais was an engine or machine which even those who had never seen such a thing before might easily have identified as a rack; and there were four chairs, two on either side of the room, of such elaborate and sinister construction that there could be no question as to their being designed for the purpose of inflicting various kinds of ingenious and exquisite agony upon the unhappy occupants; while, in addition to ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood

... said Drake, producing it; and as he did so, there breathed upon him, like a breeze from home, a recollection of the dim light shining in an old library down on a broad-leaved volume resting on a carved rack,—of a brown-tressed girl who stood with him before it, her head just at his shoulder, looking at the cathedral on its page,—of the chance touch of a little hand on his,—of the brush of a perfumed sleeve,—of the flitting color in her clear cheek,—of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... Alaskan "panhandle," and southern Chile. Large subsidence areas on the Mediterranean coasts from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Bosporus have in essential features duplicated each other's histories, just as the low infertile shores of the Baltic from Finland to the Skager Rack have had much in common in their ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... on one side of the wall were twelve buck horns, and these served as a sort of rack for the miners to hang their hats and coats during the school session. Several mottoes, likewise upon the wall, were intended to attract the students' attention, the most conspicuous being: "Live and Learn" and "God Bless Our School." A great bear's skin formed a curtain ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco

... when tempests were abroad; his unquiet spirit found a solace in the expression of his own unrest on the face of Nature; danger lent a charm to his situation; he felt in harmony with the scene, when the rack was sweeping stormfully across the heavens, and the forests were sounding in the breeze, and the river was rolling its chafed waters into wild ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... smoking, all prove that a gun is in reality a sentient being of a very high order of intelligence. You may be quite certain that if you abuse your gun, even when you may imagine it to be far out of earshot, comfortably cleaned and put to roost on its rack, your gun will resent it. Why are most sportsmen so silent, so distraits at breakfast? Why do they dally with a scrap of fish, and linger over the consumption of a small kidney, and drink great draughts of tea to restore ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various

... a pleasurable excitement caused by the prolonged intimacy of the journey, but this only became definitely sexual when the youngest of the ladies, stretching before him to look out of the window and holding on to the rack above, accidentally brought her axilla into close proximity with his face, whereupon erection was caused, although he himself regards personal odors, at all events when emanating from ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis



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