|
|
|
More "Fiendish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lifted his head, and looked calmly about him. Every eye was fixed on his face. That face was as firm as a rock. Two eyes near the door were gleaming with the light of fiendish triumph. Ralph returned his gaze to the judges. Still the silence was unbroken. It seemed to hang in ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... glass of wine and drank it slowly. The mists were clearing away now. He was in London, at the Savoy Restaurant, and within a few yards of him sat the man with whose name all Europe once had rung—the man hailed by some as martyr, and loathed by others as the most fiendish Judas who ever drew breath. Bernadine was not concerned with the moral side of this strange encounter. How best to use his knowledge of this man's identity was the question which beat upon his brain. What use could ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... flames leaping from house to house, spanning chasms of emptiness, darting hither and thither like lizards or winged scorpions, or breaking out mysteriously in fresh places, so that already the cry of arson had arisen, and the ever-growing fire was set down to fiendish creatures labouring secretly at a ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... noble diction and versification, forget the great distinctions of good and evil. The spirit by which Dryden and several of his compeers were at this time animated against the Whigs deserves to be called fiendish. The servile Judges and Sheriffs of those evil days could not shed blood as fast as the poets cried out for it. Calls for more victims, hideous jests on hanging, bitter taunts on those who, having ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... came—whether he had followed me, or advanced by an opposite direction, I know not. But there he stood, and his flashing eyes read both of our unveiled faces. The expression of his countenance was almost fiendish. ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... intending by hook or by crook to bring back with me the much-needed catalogues, or the body of the printer dead or alive. Upon arriving in the City, however, to my chagrin I found his place of business closed, though the caretaker, with a touch of fiendish malignity, showed me through a window whole piles of my non-delivered catalogues. Not to be beaten, I hastened back to the West End and despatched a very long and explicit telegram to the printer at his private house (of course ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... enough for the victim (for, doubtless, flogging is the best of all punishments, being not only the shortest, but also a mere bodily and animal, and not, like most of our new-fangled "humane" punishments, a spiritual and fiendish torture), but for the executioner pretty certain to eradicate, from all but the noblest spirits, every trace of chivalry and tenderness for the weak, as well, often, as all self-control and command of temper. Be that as it may, old Sir Vindex had heart enough ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... had heard it once before. A second or two, during which the officers and chiefs kept their eyes intently fixed on one another, passed anxiously away; and then nearer to the gate, apparently on the very drawbridge itself, was pealed forth the wild and deafening yell of a legion of fiendish voices. At that sound, the Ottawa and the other chiefs sprang to their feet, and their own fierce cry responded to that yet vibrating on the ears of all. Already were their gleaming tomahawks brandished wildly over their heads, and ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... The universe for a mechanician is a machine that requires an operator; for chemistry—that fiendish employment of decomposing all things—the world is a gas endowed ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... except for her kirtle and the thin, gold-spangled robe upon her shoulders over which streamed her black, disordered hair. Contrasting strangely in the silver moonlight with her glistening, copper-coloured body, the mask of Little Bonsa on her head glared round with its fixed crystal eyes and fiendish smile as she turned her long neck from side to side. Seen thus she scarcely looked human, and Alan's heart was filled with pity for the poor bedizened wretch she named her husband, who had just been forced to announce the ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... before them the two men, double-jacking at a "swimmer", had their backs turned. Onward—until Harry and Fairchild were within ten feet of the "high-jackers", while Anita waited, stone in hand, in the background. Came a yell, high-pitched, fiendish, racking, as Harry leaped forward. And before the two "high-jackers" could concentrate enough to use their sledge and drill as weapons, they were whirled about, battered against the hanging wall, and swirling in ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... I will not describe, but never shall I forget the scene of those two heaps of worrying wolves, and of the maniac Khan, who yelled in his fiendish joy, and cheered on his death-hounds to finish ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... a glimpse of a man with glittering bright blue eyes that had an almost fiendish, baleful glare. An instant later the door which had so unexpectedly opened banged shut, we heard a key turn in the lock—and the man dropped to the floor before even Kennedy's automatic could test its ability to penetrate wood on a chance ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... from ourselves. He who made the sun, moon and stars, the world and all that therein is, came down from Heaven in the person of his Son, with the express purpose of leading a scorned life, and dying the most cruel, shameful death which fiendish ingenuity has invented. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... slaughtered because they had been wont to obey her. Nor were the monsters who slew them contented with murder. They tore the dead bodies into pieces; devoured the still bleeding fragments, or deliberately lighted fire and cooked them; or, hoisting the severed limbs on pikes, carried them in fiendish triumph through the streets. ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... was an expression of fiendish triumph. In his hand was a short black tube which he aimed with deliberate slowness at the crouching Nepthalim. Damis shifted his gaze from the Viceroy's eyes and concentrated it on the muscles of his wrist. Glavour's grip ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... shrieked. "Yes, and you are a liar, a coward, a villain! You are engaged in a fiendish plot; you are deceiving an innocent lady. Ah, I spurn ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... is the repulsion and loathing for the whole business of war, with its bloody ruthlessness, its fiendish ingenuity, and its insensate cruelty, that comes to a man after a battle, when the tortured and dismembered dead lie strewn about the trench, and the wounded groan from No-Man's-Land. But neither is that the ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... mothers do it! It seems to me that there's nothing too fiendish or diabolical for these people to do. Why, in some of the islands they have an institution called the Areoi, and the persons connected with that body are ready for any wickedness that mortal man can devise. In fact they stick at nothing; and one o' their customs is to murder their ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... gaze, which I felt must still be upon the gambler—there it was fixed, and stern as before; but it now conveyed a deeper expression of joy than of the other passions which were there met. Yet a joy so malignant and fiendish, that no look of mere anger or hatred could have so chilled my heart. I dropped my eyes. I redoubled my attention to the cards—the last two were to be turned up. A moment more!—the fortune was to the noir. The stranger had lost! He did not utter a single word. He looked ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that Johannesburg should suffer, but that the Government had no choice in the matter, as the popular pressure upon them was too great to be resisted." This determination is rightly characterised by Mr. Farrelly, the late legal adviser to the Government of the South African Republic, as the "fiendish project of wrecking the mines and plunging into hopeless misery for years tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children." But that is not all. He has put upon record[105] the sinister fact that the man entrusted with the execution ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... hour the inhabitants of a whole parish, one terrible grave. The desert which they had created filled them with dismay, heightened into terror by the howls of the masterless sheep dogs, and they turned to fly. Worn out with the suddenness of their long march from Glengarry, and with their late fiendish exertions, on their return they sat down to rest on the green face of Glenconvinth, which route they took in order to reach Lundi through the centre of Glenmorriston by Urquhart. Before they fled from Cilliechriost Allan divided his party into two, one passing by Inverness ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... of fiendish laughter he was then lifted from the ground, thrust into the hollow of the tree, and thence, as it seemed to him, conveyed into a deep ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... instrumentality of Tyrconnel and Catholic and Irish Rappadees, it perpetrated the inhuman atrocities of the Irish Massacres; that, it drove the Huguenots from France, and the Puritans from England; that it has delighted in the chains and dungeons of the Inquisition, and shouted, with fiendish exultation, at the cries and groans of the victims in the auto da fe; that no republican government has ever flourished under its sway; that it regards ignorance as the mother of devotion, and denies the obligation of an oath; that it gave rise to the Order of Jesuits, the most detestable ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... scrutiny, that some faded letters across the dirty lamp, intimated to the general public that this was the "Ace of Spades." And in the money-till of the Ace of Spades, doubtless was the price of many a poor man's toil, the bread and meat of his hungry children squandered and sacrificed with a fiendish recklessness. Within the dingy walls of the Ace of Spades was bartered the domestic happiness of many a home that had been cheerless enough, God ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... large mural decorations, in which he unfolded the scale of his sparkling colours, and affirmed his spirit, his fancy and his dreamy art. Cheret's harmonies remain secrets; he uses them for the representation of characters from the Italian comedy, thrown with fiendish verve upon a background of a sky, fiery with the Bengal lights of a fairy-like carnival, and he strangely intermingles the reality of the movements with the most arbitrary fancy. Cheret has also succeeded in proving his artistic descent ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... of various barbarous races, it was necessary that the prisoner should be similarly tattooed. It would be shown that, with unusual heartlessness, he had persuaded his victim to reproduce on his body the distinctive marks of Johnson, and then had destroyed him with fiendish ingenuity, in the very act of assuming his personality. The very instrument, it might be said, which stamped Cranley as Johnson, slew Johnson himself, and the process which hallmarked the prisoner as the heir ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... might have, their provisions and clothing, burn their wagons and drive their stock away. The fact is that many of the depredations committed in those days, for which the Indians were blamed, were done by those fiendish Mexicans. ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... back, and fingers were at his throat. Carew's face loomed above him, red, contorted, the lips curled into a fiendish snarl, an insane murderous light in his eyes. Martin was choking; a tremendous weight was on his chest. In Carew's hand was a knife descending. Above the ringing in his ears, Martin heard Carew's voice saying, "You ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge. Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... with howls and shouts of fiendish rejoicing at the brilliance of the feat which had culminated in the capture of this pestilent young foreigner, whose gallant resistance, so far from exciting admiration in the breasts of his captors, seemed to have filled them with the ferocity of wild beasts. As he was ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... sound of the name I started violently. Then, open-mouthed and trembling with excitement, I twisted myself round to get a glimpse of the witness as he approached the box. Could it be possible that Fate with fiendish irony had selected the ex-trooper whom we had befriended to administer to our case the coup de grace? It must be a man of another name. ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... malefactor and reserved for horrid tortures! That it should come to this! To this!—Perfidious, worthless spirit, and this thou hast concealed from me!—Stand! ay, stand! roll in malicious rage thy fiendish eyes! Stand and brave me with thine insupportable presence! Imprisoned! In hopeless misery! Delivered over to the power of evil spirits and the judgment of unpitying humanity I—And me, the while, thou wert lulling with tasteless ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... francs! I said to you as I embraced you: 'It is yours, my well-beloved, the source of all my happiness!' But you did not care for me—I wearied you! You loved another! And while you were deceiving me with your caresses, you were, with fiendish skill, preparing a conspiracy which, if it had succeeded, would have resulted in my death! I should consider myself amply revenged if I could make you suffer for a single day all the torments that I endured for long months. For this was not all! You had not even the excuse, ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... to speak, out of hand. We rushed tumultuously forward and fell on the Vivisector and two assistants, who stood motionless and perhaps unconscious, but with glittering knives just ready for their fiendish work. Before Esmo could interpose, these executioners were cut down with the "crimson blade" (cold steel); and we bore off our friend with more of eagerness and triumph than at all befitted our own consciousness of power, or suited ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... of the care of his children. In his case, however, the tendency to dwell upon and bring out the darker traits of biography does not exhibit itself in any remarkable way; and, on the whole, Shelley's character wears a mild and retiring rather than a defiant or fiendish aspect. The world is inclined to make allowances for him, on account of his beautiful poetry; and this is something of the justice which, on other grounds also, is probably due to him. Still, nobody has come forward to write his biography as it should be written; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... dare;" Thou keep'st thy ermine white, thy State secure, Thy fortunes prosperous, and thy freedom sure; No glozing art deceives thee to thy bane; The tempter and the usurper strive in vain! Thy spear's first touch unfolds the fiendish form, And first, with fearless breast, thou meet'st the storm; Though hosts assail thee, thou thyself a host, Prepar'st to meet the invader on the coast: Thy generous sons contending which shall ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... doubts whether it was quite wise and reasonable to give out to the public at large certain discoveries of modern science. Chemistry had led to the invention of too terrible means of destruction in our century to allow it to fall into the hands of the profane. What man of sense—in the face of such fiendish applications of dynamite and other explosive substances as are made by those incarnations of the Destroying Power, who glory in calling themselves Anarchists and Socialists—would not agree with us in ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... reconsideration. Though you will allow me to have my own opinion about her foolishness. Grammer is a very wise woman, and she was as wise in that as in other things. You think there was something very fiendish in the compact, do you not, Miss Melbury? But remember that the most eminent of our surgeons in past times have entered into ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... wheel, sometimes even scraping the corners of houses, and causing those pedestrians in their line of flight to skip like young unicorns. Then, recovering, the startled wayfarers would hurl their choicest blessings after the cab. To these, the madcap driver would reply with a shrill and fiendish yell, belabouring his frantic cattle with a view to attempting fresh feats. They succeeded. It only wanted a bullock-waggon coming down the street to afford them the opportunity. The bullock-waggon came. Then a dead, dull scrunch—an awful shock—and the ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... grunted, "either that or else he's took a notion to hunt that Gold Dust maverick again"—referring to a strange, wonderfully beautiful, outlaw filly that had appeared on the Kiowa range a year before and tormented the riders by her almost fiendish cunning in dodging corral or rope—"if he's riding Captain Jack that's probably what ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... cast The horror of the past; The fort that was no fort, The deep dark-heaving flood Of foes that broke in blood On our devoted camp, victims of fiendish sport; From that last huddling refuge lured to ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... rushed at us, seemingly on puffs of wind. Mocking, deep echoes bellowed from the ebon shades at the back of the cave, and the walls, taking them up, hurled them on again in fiendish concatenation. ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... the furnace, motionless as statues. The sable monster on his black throne watched them without moving a muscle in his great, coarse face, only his small eyes seemed like two scintillating sparks of infernal fire, as with a fiendish kind of pleasure he marked the agony of Ninon. Although the young girl instinctively gave up all hope of life, yet never had life seemed so sweet. Its homeliest details now appeared precious, and their poor little cottage, heaven, compared with this den of infamy. She had ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... on a lion track, followed him at a fiendish pace, dashed down the side of a mountain, and found that he had an angora goat ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... With fiendish earnestness Bismarck plotted to break the bones of two democratic editors whose writings threw the Prussian mastiff into periodical black rages. Bismarck justified his cruelty by insisting that "bounds must be set for these infamous press scribblings." He means that attacks ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... disgusted the European spectators. Ida nearly fainted, and Mrs. Rice turned green. Noreen shuddered at Chunerbutty's fiendish and bestial expression, as he leaned forward in the howdah, his face working convulsively, his eyes straining to lose no detail of the repulsive sight. He was enjoying it, like the excited, enthralled mobs of Indians of all ages around, who pressed forward, ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... in the ointment of Martin's content. Of late, his sanctuary was not always inviolate. On the occasion of the past Christmas, an absent and fiendish-minded nephew had presented Mrs. Meagher with a phonograph. This instrument of torture Mrs. Meagher installed in the little parlor, and at frequent intervals she sat herself down before it and indulged in a jamboree of ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... of the matter, in Mr. PUNCHINELLO'S benevolent eyes, is that each city appears to be perfectly delighted with the misfortunes and miseries of both the others. Instead of getting up subscriptions for each other, they chuckle and crow in a perfectly fiendish manner. Until they can behave better, we shall postpone the subscription which we propose ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... with cold, relentless zeal, With fiendish science both sides fought and watched, From loop-holes or from clouds which half conceal, Or in deep tunnels all their skill was matched. On sentry in the firebay, or the hov'ring 'plane, Mining and countermining ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... distinguished, and are permitted to carry larger walking-sticks than the Romans, whom the French commandant has forbidden to come abroad with any but the merest twig. Some of these spies wear spurs, the better to deceive and to succeed in their fiendish work. No disguise, however, can conceal the sbirro. His look, so unmistakeably villanous, proclaims the spy. These fellows will not be defeated in their purposes. They carry, it is said, articles of conviction, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... said, "perhaps I am a heretic. I don't know. But I do not believe that a being divine enough to be a God could be human enough to cherish so fiendish a passion as revenge. Look up, dear child, ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... believe it, Dick?—I saw the same accursed figure standing full front, and gazing at me with its stony and fiendish countenance, not two yards ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... inquired, though my tongue felt dry and parched, and the room, with his fiendish face, was swimming giddily ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... although it is true that the numbers there burned were relatively few and the reign of terror brief. How long is it since slaves were feeling the lash throughout the Southern States of our "land of freedom"? How long is it since fiendish mobs have burned or lynched the objects of their rage? How long is it since societies for preventing cruelty to animals and to children were established in England and America? Is it not a suggestive fact that it was needful ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... then you strove and shrieked aloud, Your bones and sinews bared; And fiendish on the gazing crowd With burning ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... no pause, no pity, no relenting rest in the world's kindness. It began to take shapes of almost fiendish cruelty in his mind, as if the devil's own ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... by the demonstrations he began to make. They could hear him rushing about—passing from door to window—striking both with his huge paws, and causing them to shake upon their hinges—all the while uttering the most fiendish roars. ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... get up, or get better, or take the air; with no curiosity, or care, or regret, of any sort or degree, saving that I think I can remember, in this universal indifference, having a kind of lazy joy - of fiendish delight, if anything so lethargic can be dignified with the title - in the fact of my wife being too ill to talk to me. If I may be allowed to illustrate my state of mind by such an example, I should say that I was exactly in the condition of the elder Mr. ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... the clearing they saw directly before them a party of men dressed in the ragged uniforms of American cavalrymen, and all drew deep breaths of relief. Help seemed now at hand. But just as they sprang forward to join their supposed comrades a fiendish yell broke from the horsemen. In another instant the four unfortunates were rushing to cover, with a dozen Indians, all dressed in the clothing taken from dead soldiers, ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... now making will succeed in driving me from the position which I have assumed. I stand upon the Constitution of my country, upon the liberty of speech which you have treacherously violated, and upon the rights of my constituents, and your fiendish yells may be well raised to drown an argument which you tremble to hear. You claim and have exercised the power to prevent all debate upon any and every subject, yet you have not as yet shown your right ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... hard work followed. The school was filled, the natives had ceased from persecuting the converts, and the prospects of missionary work were brighter than ever, when suddenly the news came that the fiendish King of Dahomey was marching on Abeokuta. Mr. and Mrs. Hinderer were at Abeokuta when the news arrived, and at once they hastened back to Ibadan, although there was a danger of being captured and tortured by the invading ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... what her relatives had been hiding so carefully, and though she became very pale while Athenais looked at her in fiendish delight, she determined to die rather than own her love for Gaston, and exerted all her will to master herself. The noise of a furious gallop resounded, and the Duc de Bligny dashed into the courtyard on a horse white with foam. He would have entered the drawing-room, but ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... words with a fiendish kind of elation, Montignac leaped from the bed after me, releasing his dagger by pulling the curtain from its fastening, while at the same time his sword-point, directed at my ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... scattered boulders to the east of the Hut, across a patch of polished snow they push to the first low ridge, and there they stop for breath. Up on the side of "Annie Hill," in the local phrase, the tide sweeps by with fiendish strength, and among the jagged rocks the man clutching the puffometer-box has a few desperate falls. At last both clamber slowly to an eminence where a long steel pipe has been erected. To the top of this the puffometer is hauled by means ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... was dreadful to witness. His hard, be-whiskered features were alight with fiendish joy. This youngster had gone beyond all expectations. No less than the life of the greatest bully in the lumber world ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... So now these two fiendish things were placed, and their devilish tails hanging out behind them. The fuses had been cut with the utmost nicety to burn the same length of ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... "I've gone fairly straight ever since. It hasn't been a very paying game. I tried my luck in the West, but it was right out. So I thought I'd come back here, and that was the turning-point. They took me on at the Fortescue Mine. It's a fiendish place, but I rather like it. I'm sub-manager there ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... it was found that he had written on the wall above the body a fragmentary sentence, apparently with a finger dipped in blood: 'This was self-defence and he had the gun. I meant no harm to him or any man but one. I am keeping the bullet for Pilgrim's Pond—O.R.' A man must have used most fiendish treachery or most savage and amazing bodily daring to have stormed such a wall in spite of ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... me in an instant with all his old ferocity. You cannot imagine a more savage-looking creature than Cullingworth is when his temper goes wrong. He gets a perfectly fiendish expression in his light blue eyes, and all his hair bristles up like a striking cobra. He isn't a beauty at his best, but at his worst he's really phenomenal. At the first danger signal his wife had ordered the maid ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... standing over the great kettle, dancing round it, and making sudden plunges with a stick into it, in the desperate effort to stir its boiling contents—desperate, because the fire was very fierce and large, and the flames seem to take a fiendish pleasure in leaping up suddenly just under Pierre's nose, thereby endangering his beard, or shooting out between his legs and licking round them at most unexpected moments, when the light wind ought to have been blowing them quite in the opposite direction; ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... window, and with a strength born of desperation, struggled to his knees, and before Rutherford realized what he was trying to do, the shade flew upward to the top of the window. Even then, Rutherford would have thought little of it, had not Haight betrayed himself by a leer of fiendish triumph. In an instant Rutherford understood that it had ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... have no English digne Unto thy malice and thy tyranny: And therefore to the fiend I thee resign, Let him at length tell of thy treachery. Fye, mannish, fye!—Oh nay, by God, I lie; Fye fiendish spirit, for I dare well tell, Though thou here walk, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... and awoke Ralph, and in a few moments more, Roe, Ralph, and myself, stood with ready guns, waiting for a chance to shoot. A shot passing through one of the savages, told the rest they were discovered; and now a regular firing began. The Indians simultaneously uttered a fiendish shout, such as no person can imagine who has not heard the Indian war-scream; and then brandishing their tomahawks rushed upon the house and began hewing at the door. In a moment we were all down stairs, and our fire became so fatal that they were forced to retire several ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... hero-warrior period of traditional history, when war and the clashing of shields and sword or spear were the main delights and occupations of man. It is strange to note what difference must have existed between these hero-warriors in regard to their ideas of manliness; some were brutal and fiendish, whilst others were magnanimous. McPherson, the historiographer of early Britain, cannot help but contrast the superior manliness of the heroes of Ossian in his graphic description of the ancient Caledonians, when compared to ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... they find her," he said accurately, and I could see his hand come up to cut the image. "For my dough they've given up trying to find her and are using you for a stalking horse," he added with fiendish accuracy. ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett
... victim. This was more than I could endure: a wild energy came over me; I sank upon my knees, and implored them not to murder me, or leave me alone with the bodies, for mercy's sake! I sank upon the floor, and grasped their legs in the fervency of my supplications. With a fiendish laugh, they spurned me from them; and, as they locked the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... bird of paradise is now almost extinct! Their sale here is possible because the Dutcher law protects from the feather dealers only the birds that belong to avian families represented in the United States. With fiendish cunning and enterprise, the shameless feather dealers are ferreting out the birds whose skins and plumes may legally be imported into this country and sold; but we will meet that with a law that will protect ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... meets and masters all inward opposition, through knowledge of the law and allegiance thereto, can conquer every outward phase of hybrid beast and human, whose selfish pride and cruel greed have been well imaged as a devil with cloven foot and fiendish face. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... you from whence you came," he said; "but this I can tell you—if we do not get out of this horrible place we shall both be slain upon this bloody altar. The woman was about to plunge her knife into my heart when the lion interrupted the fiendish ritual. Come! Before they recover from their fright and reassemble, let us find a way ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hard, they failed to ruin him. In other cases, clerical influence has dragged men from positions of competency and caused them to end their days in the workhouse. Then, again, the priests never denounced outrage. They might have stopped the fiendish deeds of the murderous blackguards whose evil propensities were fostered and utilised by the Land League, but they said no word of disapproval. On the contrary they tacitly favoured, or seemed to favour, the most awful assassinations. When ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... and tore out his roll of bills. Then he reached low at Duane's hip, felt his gun, and took it. Then he slapped the other hip, evidently in search of another weapon. That done, he backed away, wearing an expression of fiendish satisfaction that made Duane think he was only a common thief, a novice at ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... that kind of service," Bud said jokingly. Then he became serious. "I'd sure like to meet that creep who snagged you, Tom. What a fiendish trick! You realize you might ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... happiness before, she was, for the present at least, incapable of imagining a more profound joy than walking arm in arm in the moonlit patio with the man she loved. Without the adobe walls, the zephyr lashed the sage and whirled the sand with fiendish disregard of human happiness, but within the Hat Ranch enclosure Donna Corblay knew that she had found a paradise, and ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... A foolish member of the Interrogation family whose most fiendish offspring is "How old ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... now took the war-path and was totally defeated by Uncas in a battle on the Great Plain in the present township of Norwich. Encumbered with a coat of mail which his friend Gorton had given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured. By ordinary Indian usage he would have been put to death with fiendish torments, as soon as due preparations could be made and a fit company assembled to gloat over his agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas, threatening dire vengeance if harm were done to his ally. This message puzzled ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... on the contrary, the voice of vengeance, rising up in many a cottage, reached my ears in every direction as I walked abroad. The hatred in itself seemed horrid and unchristian, and still more so after the man's death; but, though horrid and fiendish for itself, it was much more impressive, considered as the measure and exponent of the damnable oppression which must have existed ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... one elevated attribute. If, in the circumstances, society does not become a moral pesthouse it is only because the people continue better than their religion. The human heart, though fallen, is not fiendish. It has still its purer instincts; and, when the legends about abominable gods and goddesses are falling like mildew, these are still to some extent kept alive by the sweet influences of earth and sky and by the charities of family life. When the heart of woman is about to be swept ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... be soothed and petted—to have her Hour brought back, but she saw that her beauty was gone from him—and all the mystery which had been in their relation a minute before.... Her rebellion, so far hard-held, now became fiendish. It was not against him, but herself. So vivid and terrible was her concentration of hatred upon the cause, that Bedient caught the picture of the Brigadier in her mind. He saw the man afterward—a fat and famous soldier.... She spat upon the floor. Her lower lip was drawn in ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... written in the most plausible manner; the hand-writing and name of the Chairman of my Committee was forged, and every thing was admirably calculated to give the impression, that it was genuine truth. But, fortunately, this fiendish scheme failed of its purpose; for, as my family had left Rowfant before the letter arrived, the letter was never opened till we returned together after ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... through the forest And while they laughed in fiendish glee, A redskin took the baby from her And dashed out its ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... six. Please do not interrupt me again. These ruffians, after relieving me of my valuables and wearing apparel, so that I was clad in nothing but a loose-fitting suit of air, proceeded, with fiendish design, to tie me to ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... his companions. As they did so, the black cat, having finished its meal, sprang on to his shoulder to crouch there, watching the three men through the curling smoke drift with its green blinking, fiendish eyes. Dr. Nikola smiled as he noticed the effect the animal had ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... eight thousand and some in his breast pocket," she said with fiendish accuracy. "Every penny he ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... roll up in his blanket when, out of the dark distance, there sounded the evening cry of the Coyote, the rolling challenge of more than one voice. Jake grinned in fiendish glee, and said: "There you are all right. Howl some more. I'll see you in ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... the tatooed cross upon my breast, then with a fearful curse, he spat full into my breast, the vileness running down the sacred sign. Then, as a fiendish look filled his face, he ordered the chief eunuch to send me for sale in any market that would be ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... on-looker it would have seemed that an impudent boy deliberately insulted a harmless benevolent old gentleman. To the fair young man, however, it was well known that the old gentleman's name was famous across Northern and Eastern Africa for monstrous villainy and fiendish cruelty—the name of the worst and wickedest of those traders in "black ivory," one of whose side-lines is frequently gun-running. Also he knew that the benevolent-looking old dear was desirous that the Leading Gentleman, his partner, should join with him in a little scheme (a scheme revealed ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... century. The wearers are provided with flutes, whistles, cymbals, flageolets, snare drums, and rattles, or other noise-makers. The result is an indescribable hubbub; a garish human kaleidoscope, accompanied by fiendish clamor and unmusical noises which fairly outstrip a dozen jazz bands. It is bedlam let loose, a scene ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... conscience obey it; but I challenge you to point to a single instance in which such a body has recommended forcible resistance. To the vast accumulation of impiety uttered in support of your law has been added a fiendish ridicule of the benevolent and Christian feeling arrayed against it. It is true, that some of our free blacks and fugitives have declared, that they would, at the hazard of their lives, defend themselves against the kidnapper. Whatever may be thought of ...
— A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Voting For the Fugitive Slave Bill. • Hancock
... ready for sleep. Then, as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose himself in English or French history until sleep conquered. His room-mate did not approve of this habit; it interfered with his own rest, and with his fiendish tendency to mischief he found reprisal in his own fashion. Knowing his companion's highly organized nervous system he devised means of torture which would induce him to put out the light. Once he tied a nail to a string; an arrangement which he kept on the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... iron mines meant industrial depression, and finally a second and third rate position. Rather than lose her place Germany determined to go to war with France and Belgium and grab their iron mines. To break down resistance on the part of the French people, the Germans used atrocities that were fiendish beyond words. The richer the province she wished to steal, the more ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... of the man she had the farcical absurdity to love. Imaginative, for once, in her morbid fatigue, she began to wish that she could fade away and become part of the fog that lay about London, be drawn into its murkiness, with all her murky recollections, her fiendish knowledge, her mechanical wiles of the streets, her thin and ghostly despairs and desires. For they seemed thin and ghostly, they too, to-day, fit food for the fog, as indeed the whole of her was. How could such as she evaporate into sweet air, a ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... be chums again, if you're anything like the dear old stick-in-the-mud of former days! Don't you recollect that sketch of Rag's? I had nearly forgotten to mention it, the one with the three ropes of life. I am climbing ahead with fiendish energy. Rag follows, steadily ascending, weighted as he is with a treasure, a box marked "Mrs. Rag, with care," and your noble form is squatting on the floor, a glass of the best blend at your feet, and a cigar you are enjoying from ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... cold, smiling countenance he took advantage of the fiendish power which fate and the too sensitive feeling of honor of a lofty soul had given into his hand; and then shrugged his shoulders, clasped his hands, turned his eyes to heaven, and said 'there is no room ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... infidel blood. You will do well to yield peaceably. The thread of your very existence passes through my hands, to cut or tangle it as I list—yield you must!' With this he strode frantically from the room, leaving me more dead than alive. As he disclosed his fiendish secret something about my heart kept tightening with every word till, at length, it seemed as if it must burst, so terrible was the pressure. I could not breathe. My lungs seemed filled with molten lead. How long this agony continued I do ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... lived in a very humble way in the New Road, and his wife was too glad to receive some of Jos's little baby things, with which Mrs. Sedley accommodated her at the birth of one of Osborne's own children. The fiendish ingratitude of that man, she was sure, had broken Mr. S.'s heart: and as for a marriage, he would never, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... chieftain was also to be appointed Governor of Fort William.[249] But the emissaries of William the Third could not have chosen a worse period than that in which to treat with the brave and wary Cameron. The massacre of Glencoe was fresh in the remembrance of the people, and the stratagem, the fiendish snares which had been prepared to betray the unsuspecting Macdonalds to their destruction, were also recalled with the deep curses of a wronged and slaughtered people. The game of cards, the night before the massacre, between the villain ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... and you will only see those deformed limbs and disgusting features with which devilish malice has disguised you." Poor little Poinsinet looked, and came back in tears. "But," resumed the magician,—"ha, ha, ha!—I know a way in which to disappoint the machinations of these fiendish magi." ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... miserably sad, that his auditors could never afterwards connect the idea of joy with the place where it had happened. Here, a heart-broken woman, kneeling to her child, had been spurned from his feet; here, a desolate old creature had prayed to the Evil One, and had received a fiendish malignity of soul, in answer to her prayer; here, a new-born infant, sweet blossom of life, had been found dead, with the impress of its mother's fingers round its throat; and here, under a shattered oak, two lovers had been stricken by lightning, and fell blackened corpses ...
— The Lily's Quest (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... high message of reason into her heart. We sitting here in this sunny courtroom, gentlemen, can think and reason. But Pauline Pollard, struggling in the embrace of a leering savage, listening to his fiendish mockeries of her virtue—the virtue he had stolen from her—ah! the soul and brain of Pauline Pollard vanished in a darkness. The law is the law, gentlemen. There is no one respects it more than I. If this girl killed a man coldly and with reason functioning ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... it," said the old beldam with a fiendish laugh"it was nae plot of my making; but what they did or said I will not say, because I did not hear. Lang and sair they consulted in the black wainscot dressing-room; and when your brother passed through ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... a fight to the death, as most insect duels are, and it could not last long. It was too tense, too fiendish, too shockingly ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... discoverers at sixteen; there we have Mozarts, composers at three; there we have our inspired boy preachers already consecrated to their great ideal of work; and we have also our Jesse Pomeroys, fiendish murderers before adolescence. I believe with Carlyle that it is the heroes, the geniuses of the race, to whom we owe its achievements; and the hero and the genius are the men and women of "greatest variability" in ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... out of a clear sky, or the overflow in raging lava tide of an unsuspected volcano, the most stupendous, ghastly and brutally devilish war the world has ever known was on in all its fiendish fury, sweeping from England to the Euphrates and from the Rhine and Danube on the north to the glittering sands of Africa on the south, rolling its waves of blood and sending its sickening and indescribable horrors through ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... the team, and watch the match from the Pavilion, you escape these trials, but there are others. In the first few overs of a School match, every ball looks to the spectators like taking a wicket. The fiendish ingenuity of the slow bowler, and the lightning speed of the fast man at the other end, make one feel positively ill. When the first ten has gone up on the scoring-board matters begin to right themselves. Today ten went up quickly. The fast man's first ball was outside the off-stump and a half-volley, ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... Mrs. Schmitz was assuring one section of Rabbit township that her poor, miserable husband had sold his soul to hell, and was at that moment dancing fiendish dances with the devil himself in her kitchen, a red-headed youth, almost beside himself with horror, was stirring up the other section with the tale of Dutchy Schmitz howling mad in the hotel, while a great, hairy, hideous jim-jam capered ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... room, which served as a sleeping apartment, the disorder was even greater. It seemed as though some furious hand had taken a fiendish pleasure in upsetting everything. Near the fireplace, her face buried in the ashes, lay the dead body of Widow Lerouge. All one side of the face and the hair were burnt; it seemed a miracle that the fire ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... traveler journeying over the Wabash Railroad on Easter Sunday would have seen only the usual quiet little towns of the Middle West; three days later, if he could have looked down over the same territory he would have seen nothing but a raging torrent sweeping through the region like some fiendish monster devouring and destroying as it pursued its mad course. He would have found the entire Wabash Valley, including Logansport, Wabash, Lafayette and Peru, a desolate scene, its scores of prosperous cities absolutely paralyzed and cut off from the outer world. ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... This experience became so common that at last the conclusion forced itself upon me that the golf ball had a sort of impish intelligence that could only be met by a superior cunning. I suspected that it deliberately hid itself, and that so long as it was aware that you were hunting for it, it took a fiendish delight in dodging you. If, said I, one could only let the thing suppose it was not being looked for it would be taken off its guard. I put the idea into operation, and I rejoice to say it ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... of anticipating this fiendish consummation of her revenge she almost forgot her heinous crime, and ceased to be haunted by the hideous specter of ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... something, while in actuality they were carefully holding his own entrails—even that hideous recollection faded before the sight of this Janus head, all peace, all gentle humanity on one side; all war, all distorted, puffed-up image of fiendish hatred ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... him. He forgot Creech's horses. Something gripped him, burned him—some hard and bitter feeling which he thought was hate of Creech. Again the wave of fire ran over him, and his huge hands strained on the cables. The fiend of that fiendish river had entered his soul. He meant ruin to a man. He meant more than ruin. He meant to destroy what his enemy, his rival loved. The darkness all about him, the gloom and sinister shadow of the canyon, the sullen increasing roar of the' river—these lent their influence ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... possesses in any such degree." Of one man, in the midst of all his philosophy, our hero speaks very bitterly. We allude to Major Turner, military warden of the prison. He describes him as possessed of a vindictive, depraved, and fiendish nature, and moralizes over the man and his ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... I see him fly, the wood, and the rock, and the water, gleaming back the dark-red furnace-light, that is shed on them by his dragon wings! By my soul, I can hardly suppose it fancy—I can hardly think but that I was under the influence of an evil spirit—under an act of fiendish possession! But gone as he is, gone let him be—and thou, too ready implement of evil, be thou gone after him!" He drew from his pocket his right hand, which had all this time held his hunting-knife, and threw the implement into the court-yard as he spoke, then, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... easily do) that while most human acts were of doubtful responsibility and not really wicked, yet the invasion, and, above all, the impoverishment of the Nepioi was so foul a wrong as would certainly call down upon its fiendish perpetrator the ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... would not answer that question. With extreme cunning, and an almost fiendish delicacy, she managed to remind me of my failure in saving the lives of the prisoners in the guardroom, without wounding my pride. She knew, of course, the whole story. Gaspar Ruiz, she said, entreated me to procure for him a safe-conduct from General San ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... the hut is fiendish. The sleeping family rudely roused by the yelping pack, utter the most discordant screams. The women with garments fluttering behind them, rush out beating their breasts, thinking the very devil is loose. The wails of the unfortunate cat mingle with the ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... would have sighed if I had suggested to him on the gallows any thoughts of that beautiful and quiet Elleray which he had left behind in England. Just at that moment I acknowledge that it would have been fiendish, but yet what a heaven of a luxury it would have been in the way of revenge—to have stung him with some neat epigram, that I might have composed in our walk to the gallows, or while the ropes were getting into tune, on the generosity and magnanimity of Bonaparte! Perhaps, in a sober estimate, hanging ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the yell that followed the second shot, can determine that it came from no shadow, but from a fierce and vindictive enemy. The cry denoted even something more than the ordinary defiance of an Indian: it seemed to express a fiendish sentiment of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... have been erelong an attempt at reconciliation, to which end the efforts of Captain Howe were ceaselessly directed. But Le Loutre made this forever impossible by an outrage so fiendish as to call forth the execration of even his unscrupulous employers. One morning the sentries on Fort Lawrence were somewhat surprised to see one who was apparently an officer from the garrison of Beausejour, with several followers, approaching the banks of the Missaguash ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... horror, their painted faces and blood-stained garments looking ghastly in the moonlight. One man threw an ornament, torn from the person of a white woman, to his squaw, who had brought his supper; and another, with a fiendish laugh, tossed a scalp to Millicent, calling out in coarse tones, "Here little white-skin, take that for a remembrance of ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... as the legends assert, have lingered on, or been at least revived during the later ages of the empire, in remote provinces, left in their primeval barbarism, at the same time that they were brutalised by the fiendish exhibitions of the Circus, which the Roman governors found it their interest to introduce everywhere. Thus the serpent became naturally regarded as the manifestation of the evil spirit by Christians as well ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... introduced by the French airmen, and which is extremely deadly when hurled against dense masses of men, is the steel arrow, or "flechette" as it is called. It is a fiendish projectile consisting in reality of a pencil of solid polished steel, 4 3/4 inches in length. The lower end has a sharp tapering point, 5/8ths of an inch in length. For a distance of 1 1/8th of an inch above this point the ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... adventure. Hidden in her ambush, the woman who had shot him had been in both purpose and act an assassin. Her determination had been to kill him. She had disregarded the white flag with which he had pleaded for mercy. Her marksmanship was of fiendish cleverness. Up to her last shot she had been, to all ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... rare sight in those parts at any time, and rarer still in winter. Both of them had certainly seen one before, but as certainly, never a pair of lighted carriage-lamps, with reflectors to make of them fiendish eyes. It had but two horses, and, do what the driver could, which was not much, they persisted in standing stock-still, refusing to take a single step farther. Indeed they could not. They had tried and tried, and done their best, but finding themselves unable to move the carriage ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... clutching convulsively, as though he longed to have all things within his grasp. Whenever he appeared above the waves, it was only to pursue and overturn vessels, and to greedily drag them to the bottom of the sea, a vocation in which he was thought to take fiendish delight. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... Hobart, during the scene that I have just described, has only served to confirm my previous suspicions of him. He took no part in the almost fiendish energy with which we gnawed at our scraps of leather; and, although by his conduct of perpetual groanings, he might be considered to be dying of inanition, yet to me he has the appearance of being singularly exempt from the tortures which we are all ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... purpose in view than our own gain. It is the poor, miserable inebriates, and their wives and children, who will suffer; and when the news of your victory was flashed over our Dominion, it caused sorrow to visit the hearts of thousands of the purest and best, while a fiendish howl of exultation went up from every low groggery and brothel that ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... her presence of mind. Flashes of his temper she had known, but she had never seen the cruel, fiendish thing—his anger. Not his anger, but the anger of the destroyer that she beheld waking now after its long sleep, and taking possession of him, and transforming him before her very eyes. She had been able to cope with the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that Chauvelin had accepted his suggestion of summarily sending to the guillotine one member of every family resident in Boulogne, if Marguerite succeeded in effecting an escape, and, of a truth, Chauvelin had hailed the fiendish suggestion with delight. The old abbe with his nephew and niece were undoubtedly not sufficient deterrents against the daring schemes of the Scarlet Pimpernel, who, as a matter of fact, could spirit them out of Boulogne just as easily as ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... generous action. Smiles and pleasant greetings from Polly, who had heretofore met him with venomous looks and stinging words, were balm to his soul. He felt well-satisfied with himself and kindly toward the whole world. The fiendish torturer of helpless men and harmless beasts, the cold-blooded murderer, the devilish intriguer to incriminate an innocent man, thought that he was a very good fellow, after all; much better than, say, such a man as Jack Payson. He had at least always treated women ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... posts, one side of which was roughly planed. On the upper part of each of these posts was a rude carving of a hideous human face with prominent teeth. The cheeks and teeth were slightly coloured. A most fiendish appearance was presented by these figures, called by the Koreans syou-sal-mak-i, and if looks counted for anything, they ought well to serve their purpose,—the scaring away of evil spirits from the village near which the figures always ...
— Our Little Korean Cousin • H. Lee M. Pike
... the wasp, breathing fire and fury; his usual snarling hum changed into a fiendish roar of rage. Then did begin a most tremendous battle!! The fairy's blows fell thick and fast upon the horny head of his enemy, who vainly sought to sting him; but the trusty shield was never off duty. The wasp kept up a horrid din, as with maddening ferocity and desperation, ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... of the infamous story of the brig Carl and her fiendish owner, a Dr. Murray, who with half a dozen other scoundrels committed the most awful crimes—shooting down in cold blood scores of natives who refused to be coerced into "recruiting". Some of these ruffians went to ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... fair hands again, but it seemed to me—oh, how suspicious I had grown—that the evil light I had so often noticed in her eyes deepened till, in defiance of her beauty, she looked absolutely fiendish. ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity—how awful it is! Yea, whilst he is still allowed to bear the divine image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view,—for the lonely gaze of a being next to devil, and only not quite devil,—and yet a character which Shakespeare has attempted and executed, without ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Nebuchadnezzar's furnace-flare, And Daniel and the den affair, And other stories rich and rare, Were writ to make old doctrine wear Something of a romantic air: That the Nain widow's only heir, And Lazarus with cadaverous glare (As done in oils by Piombo's care) Did not return from Sheol's lair: That Jael set a fiendish snare, That Pontius Pilate acted square, That never a sword cut Malchus' ear And (but for shame I must forbear) That — — did not reappear! . . . - Since thus they hint, nor turn a hair, All churchgoing will I forswear, And sit on Sundays in my chair, ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... mention the name o' Simon Girty," replied Younker, in a deliberate and startlingly solemn tone, "I al'ays call down God's curse upon the fiendish renegade—and I do ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... from the rest of the chaotic mass of friend and foe, swaying out to one side of the plaza, and under the walls of a convent. Bansemer was facing it; and just at the moment that he felt his strength giving way and could see a grin of triumph on the fiendish face, there carne a flash and a report, and his adversary fell at his feet. Glancing up to ascertain who had fired the shot that had saved his life, he thought he saw a figure disappearing from one of the windows. The incident acted as an inspiration. Gathering together ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... moment felt an unprincipled and fiendish wish to annihilate his rival at all cost. By the exercise of that treachery which love for the same woman renders possible to men the most honourable in every other relation of life, he could send off Phillotson in agony and defeat by ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... evening he had driven her out of her mind, he said, by his behavior in the garden; she was not answerable for her actions; and his evidence at the trial was merely dictated either by the desire to make his own case look less black or by the fiendish wish to punish Juliet Sparling ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... be only well repaid if we permitted Captain Barry to fix the payment," he murmured to them. "Such fiendish barbarity deserves payment in kind; and if it were only an official matter, gentlemen, I would gladly send you and your men away and stand by while settlement was made. As it is, I cannot permit these men to rob me of Leyden. ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... not regarding the real agitation of her auditor (so much was she occupied in appearing overwhelmed herself), and wringing her hands, she continued, "That frightful wretch Mr. Lascelles is just come in to dinner. You cannot think with what fiendish glee he told me that several days ago, as he was driving out of town, he saw Mr. Constantine, with two bailiffs behind him, walking down Fleet Street! And, besides, I verily believe he ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... is all war but a succession of horrors? The sights which I saw, the sounds which I heard from hour to hour, were enough to sicken me of human nature. In the gloom and pain of my sleepless nights, I literally began to think it possible that a fiendish nature might supplant the human condition, and that the work before my eyes was merely an anticipation of those terrors, which to name startles the imagination and wrings the heart. Surrounded with agonies, the involuntary remark always came to my mind with renewed freshness, in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... from his thinking about them, particularly Grace Elderby, now twelve years old. Nothing could have been so grand, for instance, as an opportunity to rescue her single-handed, from wild savages that had her tied to a tree and were piling fagots about her; then to dance in fiendish glee about her as the flames rose. He would dash up on a splendid charger, his sword flashing in the sun; savage heads would roll in the dust, or fall open, cleaved in twain; there would be wild yells of fright and a wilder flight for life; he would leap from his horse, speak ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... you well; My 'fiendish yell' Is certain sure to please. 'Sepulchral tones,' And 'rattling bones,' I'm ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... fiendish fit of laughter, and fell back on his pillow, dark with rage and the unutterable fury that made of his being a volcano. The two men had been standing dumb before him, Donal pained for the man on whom this phial of devilish ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... is wanton cruelty,—it is fiendish insult,—is it not, Evelyn? Am I not a villain? Are you not grateful for your escape? Do you not look on the past with a shudder at the precipice ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IX • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the same policy? But the Rebel Government had determined upon a barbarous policy in dealing with captured Negro soldiers,—and barbarous as that policy was, the rebel soldiers exceeded its cruel provisions tenfold. Their treatment of Negroes was perfectly fiendish. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... some things excelled the other island peoples of the Pacific, and some of their customs approached closely to the cultural level of the Polynesians, but in certain fundamental things they remained the most fiendish savages upon earth. Indeed we should expect that contact with a somewhat high culture would introduce new wants, and thus affect their arts more ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... news of the infamous story of the brig Carl and her fiendish owner, a Dr. Murray, who with half a dozen other scoundrels committed the most awful crimes—shooting down in cold blood scores of natives who refused to be coerced into "recruiting". Some of these ruffians went to the scaffold or to long terms of imprisonment; ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... care for nothing but the filling of their insatiable appetite;—this man's nature was too hard, too iron in its moulding, to give way to temporary imbecility; liquor made him savage, fierce, brutal, excited his fiendish temper to its height, nerved his muscular system, inflamed his brain, and gave him the aspect of a devil; and in such guise he entered his wife's peaceful Eden, where she brooded and cooed over her child's slumbers, with one gripe of his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... particularly loud burst of approval from the spectators of the dancing going on in the adjoining room, and instinctively the men at the bar half-turned towards the noise. The prisoner's eyes followed their gaze and a fiendish grin replaced the look of dismay on his face. "No, he is there dancing with a girl," he said under his breath. A moment later Nick let down the bearskin curtain, shutting off completely the Mexican's ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... heat per pound than fat people; in other words, fat people are regular fireless cookers! They hold the heat in, it cannot get out through the packing, and the food which is also contained therein goes merrily on with fiendish ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... said, with awful calm. "Wait till to-morrow night! I'll show him! Went very well, did he? Ha! Took eleven calls, did he? Oh, ha, ha! And he'll take them to-morrow night, too! Only"—and here his voice took on a note of fiendish purpose so terrible that, hardened scout as he was, Clarence felt his flesh creep—"only ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... Twitt,—if a cat sneezed, it was a sign that there was going to be sickness in the village,—and she always carried in her pocket "a bit of coffin" to keep away the cramp. She also had a limitless faith in the power of cursing, and she believed most implicitly in the fiendish abilities of a certain person, (whether male or female, she did not explain) whose address she gave vaguely as, "out on the hills," and who, if requested, and paid for the trouble, would put a stick into the ground, muttering a mysterious malison on any man or ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row—is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... he reeled heavily against the sturdy form of one of the warders who held him—his lips were flecked with blood and foam. Shocked and appalled, no less at his words, than at the fiendish contortion of his features, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... inner room, which served as a sleeping apartment, the disorder was even greater. It seemed as though some furious hand had taken a fiendish pleasure in upsetting everything. Near the fireplace, her face buried in the ashes, lay the dead body of Widow Lerouge. All one side of the face and the hair were burnt; it seemed a miracle that the fire had not ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... Nineteen had fallen a prey to the fiendish sack; the town was stripped of the last rag of its ancient glory. Its mourning was not showy, ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain
... that unfortunate class of beings who are afflicted with friends ("Heaven defend me from such friends") who appear to take a fiendish delight in recounting to me my real or (by them) imagined ill-looks; who come into my presence, and scrutinizing me closely, inquire, with what looks to me like a shade of anxiety, "Are you sick?" and if I, in astonishment, echo, "Sick? why, no; I never felt better in my ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... his face hurt?" asked the astounded old Nelson. The truth dawned suddenly upon his innocent mind. "Dear me!" he cried, enlightened. "Get some brandy, quick, Freya. . . . You are subject to it, lieutenant? Fiendish, eh? I know, I know! Used to go crazy all of a sudden myself in the time. . . . And the little bottle of laudanum from the medicine-chest, too, Freya. Look sharp. . . . Don't you see ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the last twenty years. Are they men of charity? Are they Christian men? Is not invective the chosen and accustomed language of their lips? Do they not follow those against whom they have opposed themselves, whether for good cause or otherwise, into their graves with a fiendish lust of cruelty, and do they not delight to trample upon great names and sacred memories? Are they men whom we love? Do we feel attracted to their society? Teachers of toleration, are they not the most intolerant of all men ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... off their sweaters and put on their nose-guards, Also the fiendish expressions the great occasion demanded. Ajax stood on the right; in the center the great Agamemnon; Diomed crouched on the left, the god-like rusher and tackler, Crouched as a panther crouches, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... fire weakens their hearts; Ay, this huge sin of nature, the salt sea, Shall be afraid of me, and of the mind Within me, that with gesture, speech and eyes Of the Messiah flames. What element Dare snarl against my going, what incubus dare Remember to be fiendish, when I light My whole being with memory of Him? The malice of the sea will slink from me, And the air be harmless as a muzzled wolf; For I am a torch, and the flame ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... ye both! Oh Sire! 'tis wrong upon the dying lion To loose thy dog! (Turns to Triboulet) And thou, whoe'er thou art, That with a fiendish sneer and viper's tongue Makest my tears a pastime and a sport, My curse upon thee!—Sire, thy brow doth bear The gems of France!—on mine, old age doth sit; Thine decked with jewels, mine with these gray hairs; We both ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... fact, about the time of the French revolution, silver forks have been recognized as not less indispensable appendages to any elegant dinner table than silver spoons; and, along with silver forks, came in the explosion of that anti-Queensberry brutalism which forks first superseded—viz., the fiendish practice of introducing the knife between the lips. But, in defiance of all these facts, certain select hacks of the daily press, who never had an opportunity of seeing a civilized dinner, and fancying that their own obscene modes of feeding prevailed every where, got up the name of the Silver-fork ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... the discomfort and feverous heat arising from intoxication, for his silken vest was loosened as though for greater ease and coolness, thus leaving the smooth breadth of his chest bare and fully exposed. To this Lysia pointed with a fiendish glee, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... dark-red furnace-light, that is shed on them by his dragon wings! By my soul, I can hardly suppose it fancy—I can hardly think but that I was under the influence of an evil spirit—under an act of fiendish possession! But gone as he is, gone let him be—and thou, too ready implement of evil, be thou gone after him!" He drew from his pocket his right hand, which had all this time held his hunting-knife, and threw the implement into the court-yard as he spoke, then, with a sad quietness, and ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... his prosperity, threatening, dangerous to his peace of mind; he envied and feared as well as hated him. Cruel, cunning and sinister, Fenayrou spent the next two months in the meditation of a revenge that was not only to remove the man he feared, but was to give him a truly fiendish opportunity of satisfying ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... top of his head is of puny dimensions, and the huge thickness of his neck has a conical shape. To see him thus pricking and unhanging from the air strips of viscera and rags of flesh, you could take him for a butcher at some fiendish task. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... her head. "There it is again. I couldn't take it home without lying about where I got it. And Kate would catch me up on it—she takes a perfectly fiendish delight in cornering me in a lie, lately." She brightened a little. "I'll tell you, Jack. We'll go up to the cave and cook some there. Kate can't," she told him grimly, "tell what I've been eating, thank goodness, once ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... jet-black eyes; the Babu clicked his tongue in utter confusion. Imagine a skeleton seven feet high, covered with brown leather, with a dead child's tiny head stuck on its bony shoulders; the eyes set so deep and at the same time flashing such fiendish flames all through your body that you begin to feel your brain stop working, your thoughts become entangled and your ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... through the eye, rested half upright propped against the lower step. He was a sandy-bearded fellow, no better dressed than the one without, but with a belt about him, containing pistol and knife. His yellow teeth protruding gave his ghastly features a fiendish look. Beyond him a pair of legs stuck out from behind the staircase, clad in long cavalry boots, and above these, barely showing, the green cloth of the Queen's Rangers. Then Grant had not gone when this attack was made, or else he had left some men behind? ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... must do all and every thing, even as the foe have done. We have been generous, we have been merciful—we have protected property, we have returned slaves, we have let our wounded lie in the open air and die rather than offend the fiendish-hearted women of Secessia—and what have we got by it? Lies and lies, again and yet again. For refusing to touch the black, Mr. Lincoln is termed by the Southern press 'a dirty negro-stealer,' and our troops, for not taking the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Juke, "I alone can save you from yon bloody pirut! Ho! a peck of oats!" The oats was brought, and the Juke, boldly mountin the jibpoop, throwed them onto the towpath. The pirut rapidly approached, chucklin with fiendish delight at the idee of increasin his ill-gotten gains. But the leadin hoss of the pirut ship stopt suddent on comin to the oats, and commenst for to devour them. In vain the piruts swore and throwed stones ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... sword or spear were the main delights and occupations of man. It is strange to note what difference must have existed between these hero-warriors in regard to their ideas of manliness; some were brutal and fiendish, whilst others were magnanimous. McPherson, the historiographer of early Britain, cannot help but contrast the superior manliness of the heroes of Ossian in his graphic description of the ancient Caledonians, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... for southern men to carry dirks, especially during the war. This officer had one, and for something the boy displeased him in, he drew the knife and made a fatal stab between the boy's collar bone and left shoulder. As the victim fell at the brutal master's feet, we negroes who had witnessed the fiendish and cowardly act upon a helpless member of our race, expected an immediate interference from the hand of justice in some form or other. But we looked and waited in vain, for the horrible deed did not seem to have changed the manner of those in authority in the least, but they rather treated ...
— My Life In The South • Jacob Stroyer
... shoulders, even as bewilderment and sleep clung to his mind. His senses knew that it was night, although details about him were brought into sharp relief by a thousand flashes spasmodically flooding the dug-out with fiendish brilliancy; and he knew that his body was cold, although the walls and timbers seemed to be consumed by raging fires. He felt the ground trembling in the throes of a titanic upheaval, while his entire being seemed to be hammered and torn by the ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... forwards amidst the trees. Presently they disappeared as we worked nearer to their lines. We were now rushing forward, lying down to fire, rising and running only to drop down again and discharge another round. Within fifty yards of the coppice the order to charge was given. A yell, almost fiendish in its intensity, issued from a thousand throats; anticipation of the real work which is to be done some day, lent spirit to our rush. In an instant we were in the wood, smashing the branches with our bayonets, thrusting at imaginary enemies, roaring at the top of our voices, ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... inhabitants of woe and death, a gloomy fanatic was revolving in the recesses of his own dark, bewildered, and overwrought mind, schemes of indiscriminate massacre to the whites. Schemes too fearfully executed as far as his fiendish band proceeded in their desolating march. No cry for mercy penetrated their flinty bosoms. No acts of remembered kindness made the least impression upon these remorseless murderers. Men, women and children, from hoary age to helpless infancy were ...
— The Confessions Of Nat Turner • Nat Turner
... it's no use beating about the bush. I hate them both. Lord Northmorland has a fiendish, ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... you see, was "Champion" of his land, And these were "Trojans all" you'll understand. ("Champion be blowed!" SAYERIUS said. "Wus luck, They wasn't Trojans. This is British pluck!") Then from the Corner fiendish howls arise, And oaths and execrations rend the skies. ENTELLUS stoutly to the fight returned. Kicked, punched and mauled, his eyes with fury burned, Disdain and conscious courage fired his breast, And with redoubled force his foe he pressed, Laid on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... we knew would riot there. But virtue was its own reward, for as we were looking into the depths of the first real oubliette which I ever had seen, and I was just shivering with the vision of that fiendish Catharine de' Medici who used to drop people into these holes every morning before breakfast, just as an appetizer, we heard a most blood-curdling shriek, and there stood that wretched Jimmie watching us from an open door, waving ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... to make himself a sandwich. "You see, I live the simple life out here. I've got an old couple to look after the place—Mr. and Mrs. Hargis. Mrs. Hargis is an excellent cook—but to ask her to stay awake till midnight would be fiendish cruelty. So she leaves me a lunch in the ice-box, and goes quietly off to bed. I'll give you some berries for breakfast such as you don't often get in New York—and the cream—wait till you try it! Have ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... gotten up in the Democrat office for political effect. I tell you, Merritt, we have "border ruffians" here at home—a little more refined in their way of outraging and torturing the lovers of freedom, but no less fiendish. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... minutes after there was nothing but confusion in the room. Elsworthy had been standing behind backs, with a half-fiendish look of rage and disappointment on his commonplace features. "Let them help her as likes; I washes my hands of her," he cried bitterly, when he saw her fall; and then rushed into the midst of the room, ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... stranger; one at the gate, another through the crevices of the wooden fence, another over it. Khabar, with his arms haughtily a-kimbo, gazed with stern pride from the other gate. Now for the frightful face with mouse's ears, winking owlish eyes streaming with fiendish fire! now for the beak! They beheld a young man, tall, graceful, of noble deportment, overflowing with fresh vigorous life. In his blue eyes shone the light of goodness and benevolence through the moisture called up by the recent spectacle of the execution: ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... on one of the broadest tombstones she saw sitting a circle of lamias. These hideous wretches took off their ragged garments, as if they were going to bathe; then with their skinny fingers they clawed open the fresh graves, and with fiendish greed they snatched up the corpses and ate the flesh. Eliza was obliged to pass close by them and they fastened their evil glances upon her; but she prayed silently, and collected the burning nettles, and ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... distant country and their young Queen—pity the stupid, frantic folly of human beings who are always ready to tear each other to pieces, and to deluge the earth with each other's blood; this is your extended humanity—and this the great field of your compassion. Extinguish in your heart the fiendish love of military glory, from which your sex does not necessarily exempt you, and to which the wickedness of flatterers may urge you. Say upon your death-bed, 'I have made few orphans in my reign—I have made few widows—my ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... image of it still haunts me whenever I see iron bars in the darkness of a passage—was the face of a man who has died from utter, stark horror. It was frozen in a silent shriek of agony, staring out at me with fiendish maliciousness. Lips twisted apart. White teeth gleaming in the light. Bloody eyes, with a horrible glare of colorless ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... shot, Bertrand of Gourdon! Maddened by the pain of the wound, the brute nature of Richard was aroused: his fiendish appetite for blood rose to madness, and grinding his teeth, and with a curse too horrible to mention, the flashing axe of the royal butcher fell down on the blond ringlets of the child, and the children of Chalus were no ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... came in for blows from the servant, without showing that he felt them. The furniture was knocked about, the ground shook, the plates rang on the dresser, and still he did not give in, but he grew more and more false and fawning. The rogue knew that, irascible and fiendish as the little woman was, she was open to flattery like all human beings, and that it was for the interest of his stomach to keep her in a good humour. Finally, roaring like a bull, he caught her by the waist and held her up in the air. He ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... people sit up all night in lone places on the hills, with Bibles and tremulous psalms, they will be apt to hear some of the most fiendish noises in the world: the wind will beat on doors and dance upon roofs for them, and make the hills howl around their cottage with a clamour ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... He behaved to his daughter as if she had been responsible for its incurable character. He had been heard to bellow at the top of his voice, as if to defy Heaven, that he did not care: he had made enough money to have ham and eggs for his breakfast every morning. He thanked God for it, in a fiendish tone as though ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... I?" he shrieked. "Yes, and you are a liar, a coward, a villain! You are engaged in a fiendish plot; you are deceiving an innocent lady. Ah, I ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... the boat bounds on, the oars almost lifting her out of the water. The canoes abeam begin to fall astern, but those on the bows are forging dangerously near, while the savages in them, now on their feet, brandish spears and wind their slings above their heads. Their fiendish cries and furious gestures, with their ghastly chalked faces, give them an appearance more demoniac ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... glared for a moment with fiendish curiosity upon the young girl who stood before her like one of God's angels. She measured her from head to foot, noted every fold of her white robe, every flexure of her graceful form, and drank in the whole beauty and innocence of her aspect with a feeling of innate spite at ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... * * * * *?" answered the other, and then burst out into that peculiar, wild, ringing, fiendish laugh—has ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Heathcliff chuckled a fiendish laugh at the idea. I made no reply, because I saw that he expected none. Meantime, our young companion, who sat too removed from us to hear what was said, began to evince symptoms of uneasiness, probably repenting that he had denied himself ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... exhausting the Swift One. He deliberately ran her down. After a long time she began to tire and could no longer maintain her headlong flight. Then it was that she began going far out on the thinnest branches, where he could not follow. Thus she might have got a breathing spell, but Red-Eye was fiendish. Unable to follow her, he dislodged her by shaking her off. With all his strength and weight, he would shake the branch back and forth until he snapped her off as one would snap a fly from a whip-lash. The first time, she ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... the voice of vengeance, rising up in many a cottage, reached my ears in every direction as I walked abroad. The hatred in itself seemed horrid and unchristian, and still more so after the man's death; but, though horrid and fiendish for itself, it was much more impressive, considered as the measure and exponent of the damnable oppression which must have existed to ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... head, and looked calmly about him. Every eye was fixed on his face. That face was as firm as a rock. Two eyes near the door were gleaming with the light of fiendish triumph. Ralph returned his gaze to the judges. Still the silence was unbroken. It seemed to ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... the great kettle, dancing round it, and making sudden plunges with a stick into it, in the desperate effort to stir its boiling contents—desperate, because the fire was very fierce and large, and the flames seem to take a fiendish pleasure in leaping up suddenly just under Pierre's nose, thereby endangering his beard, or shooting out between his legs and licking round them at most unexpected moments, when the light wind ought to have been blowing them quite in the opposite ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the man replied, "was once an inhabitant of the Western Heaven, and under the direct control of the Goddess of Mercy. He must, however, have been filled with evil devices and fiendish instincts from the very beginning, for he seized the first opportunity to escape to earth, and to take up his residence in the grottoes and caverns that lie deep down beneath the waters of the Tien-ho. Other spirits almost as bad as himself have ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... at her side, joining in wrathful denunciations of the tyrant man; and fair, persecuted Dr. Simcoe's assenting voice was faintly heard amid the fiendish shrieks of those pestiferous younglings, ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... explaining to a fiendish old bachelor," said Anthony, leading the way out of the place, "that I'd think I was missing a good deal if I should get so far away that I couldn't hear little Tony laugh—or cry. Julie, where's the boy? ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... descriptions of Indian life, with its alternations of human affection and fiendish cruelty, of daring and cowardice, of gorging and starving, make one of the most interesting features of Radisson's book. He lived the life himself and left such a picture of it as few white men could have drawn. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... could they experience or see what took place at Raleigh on that day. They would be willing to testify in any court that beer will not only intoxicate, but, taken in sufficient quantities, it will make men beastly drunk and fill them with a spirit of fiendish cruelty. There were on that day as many as four fights, with enough miscellaneous howling, cursing and billingsgate to fill out the natural make-up of a hundred more. I was drunk—so drunk that I did not ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... Israel!' A raucous cry of horror rose from all around, and was echoed more shrilly from above. Almighty Father! The Jew-haters had worked their fiendish trick. Now the men were become as the women, shrieking, wringing their hands, crying, 'Ai, vai!' 'Gewalt!' The Rabbi shook as with palsy. 'Satan! Satan!' ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... modesty Gave it new charms, and made him gloat the more. She loathed the man, for Hamuel's eye was bold, And the strong workings of brute selfishness Had moulded his broad features; and she feared The bitterness of wounded vanity That with a fiendish hue would overcast His faint and lying smile. Nor vain her fear, For Hamuel vowed revenge, and laid a plot Against her virgin fame. He spread abroad Whispers that travel fast, and ill reports That soon obtain belief; how Zillah's eye, When ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... and surprised inmates to the ground, immediately began their butchery. They scalped and mutilated the dead bodies of their victims in their usual sickening manner, not a single individual escaping, apparently, to tell of their fiendish acts. ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... he stood, the pivot round which circled the infernal hunt, unable to stay the relentless riders as with bony hands rattling against their skeleton steeds they encouraged them to charge, gore, and trample the hapless stranger, whose cries of agony were drowned by shrieks of fiendish glee and the incessant cracking of whips. Overcome at last by terror, the count fell senseless, his eyes dazed by the still whirling spectres and their flying quarry. When at last he slowly awaked from his swoon he looked around, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... as possible: he was made an out-and-out monster in appearance, all hairy and shaggy, with a "bottle nose" and an "evil face," having horns, hoofs, and a long tail; so that the sight had been at once loathsome and ludicrous, but for the great strength and quickness of wit, and the fiendish, yet merry and waggish malignity, which usually marked his conversation. Sometimes, however, he was endowed with a most protean versatility of mind and person, so that he could walk abroad as "plain devil," scaring all he met, or steal into society ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... failed to ruin him. In other cases, clerical influence has dragged men from positions of competency and caused them to end their days in the workhouse. Then, again, the priests never denounced outrage. They might have stopped the fiendish deeds of the murderous blackguards whose evil propensities were fostered and utilised by the Land League, but they said no word of disapproval. On the contrary they tacitly favoured, or seemed to favour, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... which streamed her black, disordered hair. Contrasting strangely in the silver moonlight with her glistening, copper-coloured body, the mask of Little Bonsa on her head glared round with its fixed crystal eyes and fiendish smile as she turned her long neck from side to side. Seen thus she scarcely looked human, and Alan's heart was filled with pity for the poor bedizened wretch she named her husband, who had just been forced to announce the date of ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... could go to sleep in the unfinished building upon a sack of lime, I would creep up through the grass, set fire to the house, and dance round it, whooping and waving my tomahawk, watching with fiendish delight the frantic but futile efforts of the palefaces ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... was the sturdy head of the post, the Scotchman, who, despite his age, had seemed to the boys so like an oak—was it possible, after all, there could be something fiendish back of this conflagration, and that Alexander Gregory had been first of all stricken in his house ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... "The truth can no longer harm any but myself; and though you may inflict death upon me, you shall not enjoy the fiendish satisfaction of mutilating my limbs with your horrid enginery. I did aid Hamilton, not indeed in ruining an injured maiden, but in rescuing from the thraldom she abhorred a lovely lady whom Providence formed ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... and half rotten with decay. It was a place where crimes might be committed, unrecorded and unsuspected—where screams would lose themselves in vacancy, and desolation and solitude would swallow up the ghastly evidences of outrage. Here was the fitting scenery for tales of preternatural terror or fiendish crime. Lucille felt her heart sink within her as she entered this vast and awful labyrinth. But she felt that, be her destiny what it might, she had herself no power to mend it. What resource was left to her? Necessity retained ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... prisoners I have spoken to, the blue-eyed Saxons and plump Bavarians with whom I travelled for awhile after the battle of Neuve Chapelle, seemed to me uncommonly like the yokels of our own Somersetshire and Devonshire. Their officers were polite and well-bred men in whom I saw no sign of fiendish lusts and cruelties. In normal moods they are a good-natured people, with a little touch of Teuton grossness perhaps, which makes them swill overmuch beer, and with an arrogance towards their womenfolk which ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... conversation became general. Each individual had some invalid story to relate, and I too, so far forgot my usual taciturnity as to indulge my hearers with a detail of my late indisposition—of its origin in the Mysterious Tailor—of the wretch's inconceivable persecution—of the fiendish peculiarities of his appearance—of his astonishing ubiquity, and lastly, of my conviction that he was either more or less than man. Scarcely had the very uncourteous laughter that accompanied this narrative concluded, when a low, intermittent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... the Rebel Government had determined upon a barbarous policy in dealing with captured Negro soldiers,—and barbarous as that policy was, the rebel soldiers exceeded its cruel provisions tenfold. Their treatment of Negroes was perfectly fiendish. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... not," gazing in wonder at his girlish face. "But tell me, who were guilty of such fiendish cruelty—the savages ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... with demoniac looks, hideous shouts, and a war-song,—crouching, jumping, spitting, springing with the spear, and throwing dust at them, as they slowly retired. In short, their hideous crouching postures, measured gestures, and low jumps, to the tune of a wild song, with the fiendish glare of their countenances, at times all black, but now all eyes and teeth, seemed a fitter spectacle for Pandemonium than for the light of the bounteous sun. Thus they retired, dancing in a circle, and leaving the strangers ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... mad. A foolish member of the Interrogation family whose most fiendish offspring is "How old is Ann?" ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... weapons, and the business-like way in which they lined up along the shore was a study in discipline, and a terror to any one unused to war. Above all the din and clash of arms rang the hearty, stentorian laughter of the Red Margrave actually echoing back in gusts of fiendish merriment from the hills on the ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... home, was it?" asked Telson, who seemed to be urged by a most fiendish curiosity on ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... palace, near the Tiber, a chapel dedicated to St. Thomas, he remarked to the architect, when instructing him to design a family vault, "That is where I hope to bury them all." The architect often subsequently admitted that he was so terrified by the fiendish laugh which accompanied these words, that had not Francesco Cenci's work been extremely profitable, he would have refused to go ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... through the mob at these grim words, which seemed to intoxicate the hearts of all who heard them with a fiendish cruelty. ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... to answer you," said Aubrey undauntedly. "Were I to make him acquainted with the fiendish plot you have contrived against his daughter's fame and honour, he would scarcely allow ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... a kind of fiendish animation, "in one chop; I wish you'd see how I scattered the consultation; begad they didn't wait to ax ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... accord, they raised their eyes to the ceiling and uttered a terrible cry. The chandelier, the immense mass of the chandelier was slipping down, coming toward them, at the call of that fiendish voice. Released from its hook, it plunged from the ceiling and came smashing into the middle of the stalls, amid a thousand shouts of terror. A wild ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... anticipating this fiendish consummation of her revenge she almost forgot her heinous crime, and ceased to be haunted by the hideous specter of ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... up in his blanket when, out of the dark distance, there sounded the evening cry of the Coyote, the rolling challenge of more than one voice. Jake grinned in fiendish glee, and said: "There you are all right. Howl some more. I'll see you in ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... appalling. But here again the Kaiser himself, as chief commander of the army, must be held largely responsible; for his more than lenient treatment of the convicted offenders is nothing less than a direct encouragement to their fellows to continue in these fiendish practices. One sergeant, a man by the name of Franzki, belonging to the Eighty-fifth Regiment of the Infantry, was shown at the trial to have been guilty of no less than twelve hundred and fifty individual cases of cruelty and of one hundred ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... of the thirteenth century, after the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan had overrun southern Russia, he turned northward and captured the cities of Moscow, Vladimir, and Ryazan, putting to death many of the inhabitants by the most fiendish methods of torture. Thousands were slaughtered merely to wreak vengeance for the strong resistance offered by the besieged before surrendering. Hundreds of thousands of the Russians both high and low were made slaves. Wives of the nobles who ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... moment he stumbled against a little puppy of an imp, who had escaped between the feet of the combatants. "What is the matter?" said the king. "Such a matter as will endanger your crown, unless you look to yourself," said the imp. Close behind him came another fiendish courier, bawling hoarsely, "you are plotting disquiet for others, look now to your own repose. Yonder are the Turks, the Papists, and the bloody-handed Roundheads, in three bands, filling all the plains of the dark abodes, committing terrible ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... shattered jaw dropped, and the wretch yelled aloud, to the horror of the spectators.[2] A mask taken from that dreadful head was long exhibited in different nations of Europe, and appalled the spectator by its ugliness, and the mixture of fiendish expression ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... foot, about our mounts; the Indians riding, in a wide circle around us, with blankets flapping, and streamer-decked lances waving high. And as I see, I hear again that wild, unearthly shriek and taunting yell and fiendish laughter. From every point the riflle-balls poured in upon us, while out of buffalo wallow and from behind each prairie-dog hillock a surge of arrows from unmounted Indians swept up against us. I had been on battle-fields before, but this was a circle out of hell set 'round us there. And every ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... guide; and down he went, down, down, down, till Neverbend looking over, could barely see the glimmer of his disappearing head light. Was it absolutely intended that he should disappear in the same way? Had he bound himself to go down that fiendish upright ladder? And were he to go down it, what then? Would it be possible that a man of his weight ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... have spoken. There was a cry of fiendish glee and then the report of a gun, and Bertram fell back with a groan. A shriek of triumph rose at a distance. "The traitor Atma is dead!" A noise of the flying feet of Lal's minions and then silence. Atma stood alone. With anguished ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... words fallen from his lips when the real Capuzzi leapt to his feet, utterly beside himself, quite out of his mind, his face all aflame with the most fiendish rage, and doubling his fists and shaking them at his counterpart on the stage, he yelled at the top of his voice, "No, you won't, no, you won't, you rascal! you scoundrel, you,—Pasquale! Do you mean to cheat yourself out of ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... myself, and saw innumerable rotting dead that lay unburied in all postures on the bare, shell-tossed earth. A horror of death such as I had never known before came upon me—a crushing, annihilating horror that seemed to impart a fiendish character to the shouting and singing in the camp, as though millions of demoniac spirits were howling and dancing with devilish glee over the accomplishment of the greatest iniquity ever known. At the same time I felt ashamed of not joining in the general ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... cartridge in his hot revolver at the circling braves and, as he reloaded, the Indians ran up on the platform and threw themselves against the door. Fiendish faces peered through the window-panes and one Indian smashed a sash in with ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... warming at his own words. "It is but a weak-kneed patriotism which would be content with securing the objects for which we began to fight. We shall not hesitate to sacrifice the last of our men, the last of our money, in the sacred task of achieving the complete ruin of the fiendish Power which has brought this great calamity on the world. Even if our enemies surrender we will fight on till we have dictated terms on the doorsteps ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... room, took in the pictures and decorations, and then came down to meet the faces of his companions. As they did so, the black cat, having finished its meal, sprang on to his shoulder to crouch there, watching the three men through the curling smoke drift with its green blinking, fiendish eyes. Dr. Nikola smiled as he noticed the effect the animal had upon ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... lust of blood is a frightful demon when once it is aroused. A Hungarian woman of noble birth, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, tortured to death thirty or forty of her maidservants. She began by inflicting severe punishments and developed a fiendish passion for the sight of suffering and blood.[520] It is the combinations of the other elements, religion, ambition, sex, vanity, and the lust of blood, with the dislike of dissenters, which has caused the most frightful developments ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
