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More "Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... others in sky-blue, in gold and pink and combinations of brilliance that blended their loose garments to kaleidoscopic hues. But the figures were similar in one unvarying respect: they were repulsive and ghastly, and their faces showed bright blotches of blood vessels and blue markings of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... east with its stormy gold, But the turbulent ocean raged and rolled, And dashed on many a rock girt shore The wrecks of ships that would sail no more,— Lifting, at times, to the topmost wave Ghastly faces no hand could save,— And then, far down with his treasures vain, Burying each ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... pitiless despotism of Russian officialism and superstition, that I fell, as so many thousands of my race have fallen, into that abyss of nameless misery and degradation that Russian hands have dug for the innocent in the ghastly solitudes of Siberia, and, without knowing it, dragged my sweet and loving wife into it ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... time, so if you make up to him he will tell you some wonderful stories. Now, Manning, these boys are smitten with the 'scarlet fever' at present, as a young friend of theirs has just enlisted. Tell them something about the Crimea; you had plenty of ghastly experiences there." ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... also practiced his speech of acceptance. They rehearsed together and were "letter perfect" when they mounted the platform in the town hall. The throng which confronted them had, however, a disastrous effect. Holding the horn at arm's length, the fireman stalked across the platform and with a ghastly expression on ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... effect—rather with the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side with the dread of her husband had grown the self-dread which urged her to flee from the pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse. The vision of her past wrong-doing, and what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, such as she had made in her marriage. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... voice was heard singing that holy hymn, the flower-garlands about the boat broke into ghastly flames, and wreathed it with a dreadful burning; and the radiant figures were changed into dark shapes crowned with fire; and the song of longing and love became a wailing and gnashing of teeth. The island vanished away in rolling smoke; and the boat burned down like a darkening ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... the king was accustomed to make of the heads and quarters of such people was to have the quarters hung about in conspicuous parts of London like quarters of beef; and the heads were set up on poles on Temple Bar or London Bridge to rot as a ghastly warning. ...
— The American Revolution and the Boer War, An Open Letter to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on His Pamphlet "The Confederacy and the Transvaal" • Sydney G. Fisher
... sleeping?' Yes, he was sleeping; sleeping the sleep from which there is no awaking; and the slight touch of Kate having disturbed the equilibrium of the corpse, down it rolled on the snow: the frozen body rang like a hollow iron cylinder; the face uppermost and blue with mould, mouth open, teeth ghastly and bleaching in the frost, and a frightful grin upon the lips. This dreadful spectacle finished the struggles of the weaker man, who sank and died at once. The other made an effort with so much spirit, that, in ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... ooze and the coral, down where earth's wonders are spread, Helmeted, ghastly, and swollen, Kanzo Makame lies dead: Joe Nagasaki, his 'tender', is ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... expos'd the tragic Muse, Rude were the actors, and a cart the scene, Where ghastly faces, smear'd with lees of wine, Frighted the ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... as a dead body lifted from the floor and a ghastly face was turned toward his own. A few unfortunate ones had gone down with the ship, and most of the ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... watched the remnant of his band approach. Groaning and sighing, a ghastly procession, it dragged its wretchedness past. It was given to Koolau to taste a deeper bitterness, for they hurled imprecations and insults at him as they went by; and the panting hag who brought up the rear halted, and ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... when Tamara awoke. Where was she? What had happened? Something ghastly, but where? Then she perceived her torn blouse, and with a terrible pang remembrance came back to her. She started up, and as she did so realized that she was in her stockinged feet. The awful certainty.... ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... night, when it was quite dark, the hollow echoes of old London Bridge responded to the rumbling of the cart which contained the ghastly load, the object of Will Marks' care. Sufficiently disguised to attract no attention by his garb, Will walked at the horse's head, as unconcerned as a man could be who was sensible that he had now arrived at the most dangerous ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... hysteria over the uproar. The singer was bowing profuse acknowledgments from the stage, his eyes, sly in their cynical humour, upon the face of the Slav at the piano, his head thrown back, the pallor of his face ghastly. ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... over the plain, revealing a world as wild as ever the frozen north outspread—as wild as ever poet's despairing vision of desolation. I see it! I see it! but how shall I make my reader see it with me? It was ghastly. The only similitude of life was the perplexed and multitudinous motion of the drifting, falling flakes. No shape was to be seen, no sound but that of the wind to be heard. It was like the dream of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... which they both, patient and priestly ministrant, place implicit trust. Confession, the Eucharist, Extreme Unction,—these all inspire a confidence which without this symbolism is too apt to be wanting in over-sensitive natures. They have been peopled in earlier years with ghastly spectres of avenging fiends, moving in a sleepless world of devouring flames and smothering exhalations; where nothing lives but the sinner, the fiends, and the reptiles who help to make life an unending torture. It is no wonder ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... thee, caitiff, far beyond the seas, To the grim tyrant Echetus, who mars All he encounters; bane of human kind. Thine ears he'll lop, and pare the nose away From thy pale ghastly visage: dire to tell! The very parts, which modesty conceals, He'll tear relentless from the seat of life, To feed ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... men you pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivety, (even if you have achiev'd a secure 10,000 a year, or election to Congress or the Governorship,) and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty, is the great fraud upon modern civilization and forethought, blotching the surface and system which civilization undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears the immense features it spreads ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... surrounds the church. These niches in the wall are rented for a certain yearly sum, and in the old Spanish days, when this rental was not promptly paid by relatives, the corpse was removed and thrown with others into a great pit. Recently this ghastly practice has been frowned on ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... misrepresented. It is true that no punishment is more dreaded by the Chinese than the Ling chi; but it is dreaded, not because of any torture associated with its performance, but because of the dismemberment practised upon the body which was received whole from its parents. The mutilation is ghastly and excites our horror as an example of barbarian cruelty: but it is not cruel, and need not excite our horror, since the mutilation is done, not before death, but after. The method is simply the following, which I give as I received it first-hand from ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... light threw a ghastly livid hue on the strongly-marked features of the sleeper, rendered sharp and haggard by disease and his penurious habits; she could just distinguish through the gloom the spectre-like form of the invalid, and the long bony attenuated hands which ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... acquaintances. I secretly hoped—such is human weakness—that I should not find them at home, and again I was mistaken. Both were at home. The change that had taken place in them during the last three days must have struck any one. Punin looked ghastly white and flabby. His talkativeness had completely vanished. He spoke listlessly, feebly, still in the same husky voice, and looked somehow lost and bewildered. Baburin, on the contrary, seemed shrunk into himself, ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... receded during that decade. To the intelligent young as well as to the intelligent elderly, efforts in the present atmosphere to opiate the public with mere pictures of frontier enterprise have a ghastly unreality. The Texas Rangers have come to seem as remote as the Foreign Legion in France fighting against the Kaiser. Yet this Guide, extensively added to and revised, is mainly concerned, apart from the land and its native life, with frontier ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a brain- eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvelously dear experience. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I was in this life to woo a second time the woman I had killed by my own neglect ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... I went. My life is all reminiscence and anticipation—if you can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak of it, ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... before the 23rd of June when these brave men knew their time was come. All night they prayed, and prepared themselves to die by giving one another the last rites of the Church, and at daylight each repaired to his post, those who could not walk being carried in chairs, and sat ghastly figures, sword in hand, on the brink of the breach, ready ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... these great purposes, he used to twist the lad's arms and administer a certain number of hard blows upon them. This he did every day so long as the whim lasted. As for the smoking, poor Brokenribs had to smoke a certain number of pipes every day. A single pipe made him look ghastly, and the whole series made him dreadfully ill. I remember his white face at such times; but he attained his reward in becoming ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Ghastly beings haunted the site of so many crimes, shapeless monsters, hovering by night, and weaving a fearful dance. Frequently they caught fire, as it seemed, and burned as they flew or floated in the air. Remembering these stories, which in part, at least, now seemed to be true, Felix ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... sagacity. As he looked he began to see perverse, insidious resemblances to the physician himself. When Schulze reappeared and busied himself writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with fascinated repulsion—the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike. Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician's—his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at the superstitions ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm; Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... order was that, after the great wash-basket of parcels had been distributed, and the school had rioted for twenty- four hours upon these unaccustomed luxuries, Rose was found lying on her bed, ghastly ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... head was butting turned and said in a lordly way, "Let that kid through," and he was roughly bundled to a front position. The boy who had commanded his presence jolted him in the back with his knee and said, using the school argot for to cheer or shout, "Swipe up, you ghastly young ass! Swipe up! Can't you see they're ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... seems to weigh upon him, rendering even gloomier his melancholy thoughts. How intolerably quiet the night is, not even a breath of wind is playing in the trees outside. On such a night as this ghosts might walk and demons work their will. There is something ghastly in this unnatural cessation of all ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... A ghastly superstition was attached to the Yew when thus growing in a churchyard, that it would prey upon [621] the dead bodies lying beneath its sombre shade. So Tennyson writes ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... to ice. All my hopes dashed to the ground. "Dig! Dig!" cried the bloodthirsty accuser, working himself with all his might. I looked at the rector. He was ghastly pale, staring with wide-open eyes ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... With ghastly, frightened faces they came rushing in one by one, huddled up in sheets and counterpanes or whatever else came first to hand, like so many ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... outside; the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city of which God is the light—where the evil dogs go ranging, silent as the dark, for there is no sound any more than sight. The time of signs is over. Every sense has its signs, and they were all misused: there is no sense, no sign more—nothing now by means ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... mixture of sham sprightliness and real anguish, "Thank you, sir; I only trust that you will always find servants as devoted to your interest as my gratitude would have made me. Good-morning, sir." He clapped his hat on with a sprightly, ghastly air, ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... glided by, and the party reached the period when ladies' back-hair begins to look forgotten and dissipated; when a perceptible dampness makes itself apparent upon the faces even of delicate girls—a ghastly dew having for some time rained from the features of their masculine partners; when skirts begin to be torn out of their gathers; when elderly people, who have stood up to please their juniors, begin to feel sundry small tremblings in the region of the knees, and to wish the interminable dance ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... ghastly! When man, sorrowful, Firstly, lastly, Of to-morrow full, After tarrying, Yields to ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... a ghastly face and haggard eyes and wavering steps followed the keeper to the American court-room the next morning; for nothing could be tortured into a principle to stimulate Isaac's courage. It is easy to die for right, ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... had lived on for two days after that ghastly ride. Peter had been killed instantly, the doctors said. They gave no hope for Blackie. My escape with but a few ridiculous bruises and scratches was due, they said, to the fact that I had sat in the tonneau. I heard them all, in a stupor of horror and ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... her, would she be able to forget. That narcotic would never be given to her. Unrelenting, unsparing memory would be with her always to remind her of those last days of tragedy. Already her mind was dwelling on the details of that ghastly farewell dinner-party and recalling one by one the incidents of ill-omen that had marked it; how they had sat down seven to table and how one liqueur glass in the set of seven had been shivered into fragments; how her glass had slipped from her hand as she raised ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... were nearly now extinct; but the faint light of the fast dawning day threw a ghastly, sickly, hue over the countenances of the savages, which rendered them even more terrific in their war paint. The chiefs grouped themselves immediately around their prisoner, while the inferior warriors, forming an outer ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... descended into the cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down, fettered and manacled in the place of those found there beside the big bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to cook their dinners. How ghastly the thought of it was! If we had really seen this kettle and the skeletons there—as we did not—we could not have suffered more than we did. They took all the life out of the House of Perseus, and the beauty from his pretty little ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... did not look as ghastly in sunlight as they had done in the pale light of the moon. I could see too that this path was ancient, and nowhere could I find traces of its being used. As I had seen the night before, it led straight across the desert, and in the distance in that direction ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... willing to play with her. Now it was notorious in Littlebath that she had never played well, and that she had long since forgotten all she had ever known. The poor old woman had already had some kind of a fit; she was very shaky and infirm, and ghastly to look at, in spite of her paint and ribbons. She was long in arranging her cards, long in playing them; very long in settling her points, when the points went against her, as they generally did. And yet, in spite of all this, Mrs. ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... between the two men from Scotland Yard. Kerry stood awhile, chewing and staring at the ghastly face of ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... whispered Mrs. Doria, with a ghastly look, and a shudder at young men of republican sentiments, which he was reputed to entertain. "'The compensation for Injustice,' says the 'Pilgrim's Scrip,' is, that in that dark Ordeal we gather ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... terrible suspense ensued. It was worse than she had even feared. Carl lay by the roadside, not far from the mill, insensible, covered with blood, moaning feebly at first, and afterwards silent, if not breathless. Ghastly wounds covered his head, and his arms and shoulders were livid with bruises. The neighboring peasants surrounded the apparently lifeless body, and listened with awe to the frenzied imprecations of Frau Proch upon the murderer of her son. "May he die in a foreign land," said she, lifting her withered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... was being consummated. The king and courtiers must have been troubled under the spell of that horror, as Belshazzar when the hand wrote in characters of mystery over against the sacred candlestick. And when the soldier entered, carrying in the charger that ghastly burden, they beheld a sight which was to haunt some of them to their dying day. Often Herod would see it in his dreams, and amid the light of setting suns. It would haunt him, and fill his days and nights with anguish that all the witchery of ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... to tell over again the ghastly story of John's death, which no other words than the Evangelist's can tell half so powerfully. I need only remind you of the degradation of the poor child Salome to the position of a dancing girl, the half-tipsy generosity of the excited ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Hundreds of candles fill the sacred hall with their light and the whitened walls and ceiling appear to glow with glory. Rows of men in ghastly attire, constant reminder of the inevitable end of mundane greatness, stand with covered heads and with their faces turned towards the orient, fervently praying. Screened by the lattice-work of the galleries are the women, ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... that I was in the vault at Rhyd-Alwyn, and that my name was Weir Penrhyn, I knew that I was laid out as a corpse, and that the dead were about me. Child as I was, it seemed to me that I must go frantic with the horror of the thing, stretched out in that ghastly place, a storm roaring about me, bound hand and foot, unable to cry for help. I think that if I had been left there all night I should have died again or lost my mind, but in a moment I heard a noise at the ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... moment when the men, with their faces lighted by the small flame of the flickering fire, all looked up towards my eyrie. The culminating point of their treachery had come, and their countenances seemed ghastly and distorted, as seen from the fissure in the wall behind which I knelt. They listened to hear if we were asleep. Then all but one rolled themselves in their blankets, completely covering their heads and bodies. The one figure I could now see sat up by the fire for some time, as if absorbed ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... with the hat on, and with the bundle on his back, was none other than Anna Sophia Detzloff, daughter of the old school-teacher. She saw that the one who was following her, whose countenance was so ghastly pale—not because the moon was shining upon it, but because he was so sad, so truly wretched—that this other was Charles Henry Buschman, who was coward enough to let his bride go to battle in his stead! The moon saw them ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... shot was put at his feet, but not sufficient, and he was cast into the sea. In a few days the putrified body rose to the surface head upwards, as though the murdered man had come again to haunt his executioners and give them a further opportunity of gazing at the ghastly features of their victim.[11] The sight of his old friend emerging again terrified Ferdinand, and he became afflicted with a feeling of abiding horror which he sought to appease by having the body interred in a Christian ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... neither was he alive. To live, one must chose to live. He was dead with a death that was heavy upon him. There is a far worse death—the death that is content and suffers nothing; but annihilation is not death—is nothing like it. Cosmo's condition had no evil in it—only a ghastly imperfection—an abyssmal lack—an exhaustion at the very roots of being. God seemed away, as he could never be and be God. But every commonest day of his life, he who would be a live child of the living has to fight with the God-denying look of things, and believe that in spite ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... though the savages made vigorous search for him, he remained undiscovered. You can imagine the horrible sight the fort presented when the sun went down, the soldiers in their red uniforms lying there scalped and mangled, a ghastly heap under the summer sky. And to just think it was only a short time ago, a little more ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... back upon the pillow and he made one or two painful efforts to speak before he succeeded in finding a ghastly semblance of ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... all murderers to conceal the traces of their guilt. They dig holes in the earth and bury it, they carry it into the wilderness and hide it, they sink it in the depths of the sea. But the earth will not contain it, the wilderness betrays the ghastly secret, the waves ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... Philosophy had come, with its high-sounding terminology, and invaded the hallowed precincts of Scriptural truth. Literature, with its captivating notes, had well-nigh destroyed what was left of the old Pietistic fervor. The songs of the church were no longer images of beauty, but ghastly, repulsive skeletons. The professor's chair was but little better than a heathen tripod. The pulpit became the rostrum where the shepherdless masses were entertained with vague essays on such general terms as righteousness, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... had been awed and overwhelmed by the accounts of the terrific cannonade and the murderous hand-to-hand struggles. At night she would start up from vivid dreams wherein she saw the field with thousands of ghastly faces turned towards the white moonlight. In her belief Merwyn was incapable of looking upon such scenes. Therefore why should she think of him with scorn and bitterness? She herself had never before realized how terrible they were. Now that the dread emergency, with its imperative demand ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... and stretched himself at full length upon the cushions of the seats. A ghastly, greenish pallor was upon his face and no proof was required that he was far from ...
— Go Ahead Boys and the Racing Motorboat • Ross Kay
... health had been just struck down by a violent kick from a horse, and was not expected to live more than a few hours. The blow had broken his skull bone, and cut out a piece as large as the palm of his hand, presenting a ghastly and horrible sight. ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... sentence. He saw Suzanne opposite him, glaring at the pair of them. She was ghastly pale; and her mouth was wrung with a terrible expression of pain and hatred. He felt that she was ready to fling herself upon them ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... thickness of their chests—what had these figures to do with their captivity? And then the flyer saw the measures compared with the dimensions of a steel cage. Its latticed shape could be endlessly compressed, and within, he saw, were lancet points that lined the ghastly thing throughout. Long enough to torture, but not to kill; a thousand delicate blades to pierce the flesh; and the instrument, it seemed, was of a size that could enclose the writhing, helpless body ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... a shudder. "Hush!" he said, sharply. "It's too ghastly. Don't tell me any more about it." He wandered across the room, pulling a leaf from the azaleas, stopping at the window for a long look out. The wind was blowing some riotous young clouds over the sky like inarticulate shouts. There was an arrogant bird in the elm; there were pert crocus-buds ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... fact that his own wife was wishing him out of the way, praying for death to claim him. Praying? What if the prayers of the wife had in some way wished an illness upon the unsuspecting old man? Of course that was purely grotesque, yet as the ghastly notion occurred to her, Esther felt a sudden longing to confide in someone—Miss Clifford, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... through the ruinous streets of what had been their home, were compelled to tread upon the unburied remains of their fathers, husbands, or brethren. To none of these miserable creatures remained a living protector—hardly even a dead body which could be recognized; and thus the ghastly procession of more than three thousand women, many with gaping wounds in the face, many with their arms cut off and festering, of all ranks and ages, some numbering more than ninety years, bareheaded, with grey hair streaming upon their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... or his son bend to put a head within its jaws, and but for their watchfulness and quickness the tragedy of that other awful night would surely be repeated. Sir, it is not natural; I know now, as surely as if the lion itself had spoken, that someone is at the bottom of this ghastly thing, that some human agency is at work, some unknown enemy of the chevalier's is doing something, God alone knows what or why, to bring about his death as his ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... in vain that Mary prayed and reasoned and strove against the feelings that had been thus powerfully excited. One object alone possessed her imagination—the image of her grandfather dying—dead; his grim features, his ghastly visage, his convulsive grasp, were ever present, by day and by night. Her nervous system had received a shock too powerful for all the strength of her understanding to contend with. Mrs. Douglas sought by every means to soothe ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... become to terrible sights, the horror of that silent, grotesque figure began to freeze Dick Durwent's blood. A few minutes before it had been a thing of life. It had loved and hated and laughed; its veins had coursed with the warm blood of youth; and there it sprawled, a ghastly jumble of arms and legs—motionless, silent, dead. He tried to keep his eyes turned away, but it haunted him. When he stared straight ahead into the dark it beckoned to him—he could see the fingers twitching! And not till he ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... cried in battle-time, When my beautiful heroes perished; The earth of the Lord shall bloom sublime By the blood of his martyrs nourished. "Amen!" I have said, when limbs were hewn And our wounds were blue and ghastly The flesh of a man may fail and swoon But God shall ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement, in the ancient Russian city of Nizhni-Novgorod, which sheltered a small Jewish colony of some twenty families. While comparatively circumscribed as far as the material loss is concerned, the Nizhni-Novgorod pogrom stands out in ghastly relief by the number of its human victims. A report, based upon official data, which endeavors to tone down the colors, gives the following description of ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... strange sea wall That checked the prow of the audacious Gaul, What time he steered towards the southern snow, From zone to zone, four hundred years ago!*3* By yonder gulf, whose marching waters meet The wine-dark currents from the isles of heat, Strong sons of Europe, in a far dim year, Faced ghastly foes, and felt the alien spear! There, in a later dawn, by shipless waves, The tender grasses found forgotten graves.*4* Far in the west, beyond those hills sublime, Dirk Hartog anchored in the ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... with constant zeale, and courage bold, 355 After long paines and labours manifold, He found the meanes that Prisoner up to reare; Whose feeble thighes, unhable to uphold His pined corse, him scarse to light could beare. A ruefull spectacle of death and ghastly drere. 360 ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... impaled on spikes; men, women, and children, were flung from precipices, hacked, tortured, roasted alive; the heads of some of the dead were boiled and the brains eaten; there are forty printed pages, and twenty-six ghastly engravings, by way of Protestant tradition of the ascertained variety of the devilry. The massacre was chiefly in the Valley of Luserna, but extended also into the other two valleys. The fugitives were huddled in crowds high among the mountains, moaning and starving; and not a few, women ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... as Faber was turning to go after him, out, like a bolt, shot from the open door a long-legged, gaunt mongrel dog, in such a pitiful state as I will not horrify my readers by attempting to describe. It is enough to say that the knife had been used upon him with a ghastly freedom. In an agony of soundless terror the poor animal, who could never recover the usage he had had, and seemed likely to tear from himself a part of his body at every bound, rushed through the spectators, who scattered horror-stricken from his path. Ah, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... an hour longer profound silence prevailed. Then Grandidier came out of the pavilion, bareheaded and still ghastly pale. Passing the little glazed work-shop on his way, he perceived Thomas and Pierre there, and at once came in. But he was obliged to lean against a bench like a man who is dazed, haunted by a nightmare. His good-natured, energetic ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... animated, if not a more picturesque landscape, and frequently met and overtook small caravans. One of these had been attacked the previous evening; the poor Arabs had offered a brave resistance, and had beaten off the foe; but one of them was lying half dead upon his camel, with a ghastly shot-wound in ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... I am just after having been killed in a sham battle, and so consequently I feel rather ghastly to-day. I don't exactly know whether I was a Red or a Blue, because I did a deal of fighting on both sides, but always with the same result. I was killed instantly and completely. People got sick of putting me out of my misery after a while and I was allowed to wander around at large ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... promised to be merciful, Marius would make no sign. [Sidenote: Death of Octavius.] Octavius is said to have seated himself in his official chair, dressed in his official robes, on the Janiculum, and to have awaited the assassins there. His head was fastened up in front of the Rostra in emulation of the ghastly precedent set by Sulla. He was an obstinate, dull man; and if this burlesque of the conduct of the senators when the Gauls took Rome was really enacted, the theatrical display must have been cold comfort for those of his party on whom his incapacity brought ruin. [Sidenote: Chief victims ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... me advice in his old manner. Twice he addressed me as "My boy," and corrected himself quickly to "Captain." My mate was about to leave me (to get married), but I concealed the fact from Mr. B-. I was afraid he would ask me to give him the berth in some ghastly jocular hint that I could not refuse to take. I was afraid. It would have been impossible. I could not have given orders to Mr. B-, and I am sure he would not have taken them from me very long. He could not have managed that, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... end with that, sir," the major replied with a gesture of repulsion. "There was a gruesome, ghastly, appalling addition in the shape of two mummy cases—one empty, the other filled. A parchment accompanying these stated that the caliph could not sleep elsewhere but in the land of his fathers, nor sleep there until his beloved ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... fakir sat and stared at them and grinned. Brown raised the lamp and let its rays fall on him. The light glinted off his eyes, and off the only other part of him that shone—the long, curved, ghastly fingernails that had grown through the palm of his ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... in the silent watchfulness of these giants of the deep that a sailor always feels unpleasantly disposed toward them. I thought how ghastly would be the ending of any one who should get overboard that night. The sudden splash, the warm water about the body, and the heads of the fellows at the rail starting to pull the unfortunate aboard. Then the sudden ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... falsely to believe her his benefactor, his agony struck her with remorse. She put her hand to her heart as he ended, and as he left them he saw through his own tears her hand still pressed to her side and her faded face ghastly ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... treats that ghastly experience! It is a dear and lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features of an experience. Susy had that disposition, and it was one of the jewels of her character ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... passed by many Zouaves, lying stiff and stark; one I shall always call to mind: he was lying flat on his back, the soles of his feet firm on the ground, his knees drawn up to right angles above, and with his elbows planted on the grass, his fingers clinched the air. His open mouth grinned ghastly on us as ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... of her face and dress. Let me see if I can put together my impressions in the way and form in which I received them, as they were engraved ineffaceably on my brain in the light of the street-lamp which shone luridly over that ghastly scene. But I am exciting myself too much, though there is reason enough for it, as you will see further on. Don't be concerned, however, for the state of my mind. I am ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... They might well strain one another in these terrible clasps, they cried out with pain, they burnt and bruised each other, but were unable to calm their frightfully excited nerves. Each strain rendered their disgust more intense. While exchanging these ghastly embraces, they were a prey to the most terrible hallucinations, imagining that the drowned man was dragging them by the heels, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... breakfast table. She leaned upon her stick as she walked, and her face seemed more than ever lined in the early morning sunlight. She wore a dress of some soft black material, unrelieved by any patch of color, against which her cheeks were almost ghastly in ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a pitiful wreck. Gordon was cold sober, and it was as if all his vital fluid had evaporated. His face was ghastly, his nerves utterly out of control, and his tongue stumbled as though it were hung by the middle with both ends at odds. Yet for all his shocking physical condition, something in the wastrel Englishman appealed to Barry as no part of the ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... irresponsible, but up to this he had not clearly seen the villainy of Rochester. The woman showed it. Rochester had picked up a stranger, because of the mutual likeness, and sent him home to play his part, hoping, no doubt, to have a ghastly hit at his family. What about his wife? He had either never thought of her, ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... me by thy petty malice," answered Front-de-Boeuf, with a ghastly and constrained laugh. "The infidel Jew—it was merit with Heaven to deal with him as I did, else wherefore are men canonized who dip their hands in the blood of Saracens? The Saxon porkers whom I have slain—they were the foes of my country, and of my lineage, and of my liege lord. Ho! ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... alas!—Now ghastly desolation, In triumph, sits upon our shatter'd spires; Now superstition, ignorance, and errour, Usurp our temples, and profane ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... or gave to their people peace, happiness or justice, but on the contrary inaugurated a veritable reign of terror under which murder became a governmental institution, while rape, inhuman torture, burying alive and other ghastly crimes were of common occurrence, and usually went unpunished. The data which I use in establishing these contentions are for the most part taken directly from the Insurgent records, in referring to which I employ ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... from the stream and laid on the shingle just as the foot men arrived with torches. It was a sad spectacle, this fine old man we all loved and respected so much, only a few hours before full of life and health, now a ghastly corpse, his hair and long white beard lying dank over his cold white face and glaring eyes. The scene was rendered all the more weird and awful by the surroundings, the still dark night, the rushing water, and overhanging cliffs under the red glare of ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... upon the disposition, rank, residence, of the young lady attempting it. Town-bred girl will utter some moral paradox on fast men, or love. Country miss adopts the more material media of taking a ghastly fence, whistling, or making your blood run cold by appearing to risk her neck. (MEM. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... sun had driven the appearance of night from the room, making the paraphernalia of sickness more ghastly than they had been under the light of the lamp, the brother turned himself back again, and began to talk of those things which ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... melancholy at that time, O Friend! Were my day-thoughts,—my nights were miserable; Through months, through years, long after the last beat Of those atrocities, the hour of sleep 400 To me came rarely charged with natural gifts, Such ghastly visions had I of despair And tyranny, and implements of death; And innocent victims sinking under fear, And momentary hope, and worn-out prayer, 405 Each in his separate cell, or penned in crowds For sacrifice, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... eyes she stared. Surely the heavy breath had come more quickly a moment ago. It seemed an age between each rise and fall of the coverlet. There was a ghastly whistling sound of it ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... a puzzling and unexplainable feature of these battlefields was that so many of the dead were found lying on their backs with rigid arms stretched straight up toward heaven—a ghastly spectacle. ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... briefly; and his glance rested on me for a moment in defiant significance. And then, without another word, he turned on his heel. He took no heed of Lafleur's dead body, that seemed to fondle the box, huddling it in a ghastly embrace, nor of me, who swayed and tottered and sank on the ground by the corpse. With set lips and eager eyes he passed me, taking the road by which we had come. And I, hugging my wounded arm, with open eyes and parted lips, saw him dive ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... with the works of Edgar A. Poe. Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius. It is a ghastly and gruesome creation. Not one bright ray redeems it. It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience. But it fascinates. Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... her two hands upon her heart, and struggled, and gasped,—as though she wished to speak but could not. "I suppose it is that girl who has done it all," said Lucinda. Lizzie nodded her head, and tried to smile. The attempt was so ghastly that Lucinda, though not timid by nature, was frightened. She sat down and took Lizzie's hand, and tried to comfort her. "It is very hard upon you," she said, "to be twice robbed." Lizzie again nodded her head. "I hope it is not much now. Shall we go up and see?" The ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... firewood, and without too much trouble can be dragged out by horses! As a preliminary calamity, half-starved cows were turned in to nibble the grass, and incidentally to trample and crush flowers and ferns into one ghastly ruin. And at the same moment, as if inspired by the same spirit of destruction, some idle railroad "hand," with a scythe, laid low the whole bank of grapevines. Ruthless was the ruin, and wrecked beyond repair the spot, after man's desolating hand passed over it; a scene ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... the dense thicket or isolated places, seeking lost friends and comrades, whose names were unanswered to at the roll call, and who were not among the wounded and dead at the hospital. The pale moon looked down in sombre silence upon the ghastly upturned faces of the dead that lay strewn along the battle line. The next day was a ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... her husband in education, and in almost every respect. She is surrounded by the most numerous and delicate attentions. Yet she is not satisfied.... The Anglo-Saxon 'new woman' is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and destined to be the most ghastly failure of the century." Apart from the deprecation—perhaps well placed—which is contained in this presentment, it adds nothing but obscurity to the woman question. The grievance of the new woman is made up ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... did not speak a word and his very neighbors could not have stated at what precise moment he had sat down between them; but every one felt that if the dead did ever come and sit at the table of the living, they could not cut a more ghastly figure. The friends of Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin thought that this lean and skinny guest was an acquaintance of Debienne's or Poligny's, while Debienne's and Poligny's friends believed that the cadaverous individual belonged to Firmin ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... you, sir," said the sufferer, with a ghastly attempt at a smile, as he screwed his head round to ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... "A ghastly error," said Braddock Washington angrily. "But of course there's a good chance that we may have got him. Perhaps he fell somewhere in the woods or stumbled over a cliff. And then there's always the probability that if he did get away his ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the booth stood the old Laird Fisher, his face ghastly pale, his eyes big and restless, the rain dripping from ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... disappears on the horizon, dashing his hopes to the ground. It appeared, as I learned afterwards, that these children saw me, though I could not see them, and ran away terrified at my unearthly aspect. Doubtless the head of a man protruding from a deep snow drift, crowned and bearded with ice like a ghastly emblem of winter, was a sight to cause a panic among children, and one cannot wonder that they ran off to communicate the news that "there was the bogie in the snow." Happily, however, for the bogie, he had noticed the direction from which these voices came, and struggling ...
— A Night in the Snow - or, A Struggle for Life • Rev. E. Donald Carr
... he showed his great powers of oratory and the splendid and thrilling notes of his fine voice. He defended himself at once from the charge of undue partiality with strong passion and deep emotion, which lie hidden beneath his deep reserve. With a face ghastly almost in its greyness, in its deepening glows and manifest passion, he repudiated the charge of unfairness; he vehemently struck his hand on the order paper which he held, and as he neared to the end of his little speech there was a ring in his voice dangerously near a sob ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... without doubt; but are the blind man, the beggar, the madman, the poor peasant, recompensed for their long life of misery by the single reflection that death is not an evil for them? No! An implacable melancholy, a ghastly fatality, overshadows the artist's work. It resembles a bitter imprecation upon the ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... light of dawn was just sufficient to give a ghostly appearance to what may be truly termed the ghastly ruins around them, and to reveal in undefined solemnity the neighbouring mountains. Smoke still issued from the half-smothered fires, and here and there a spectral figure might be seen flitting silently to and fro. But all was profoundly still and quiet, ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... a combined effort on the part of mankind to improve natural knowledge might have loomed larger than the Plague and have outshone the glare of the Fire; as a something fraught with a wealth of beneficence to mankind, in comparison with which the damage done by those ghastly evils would shrink ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... sitting with her master's head in her lap. Marie had taken off Claude's helmet and revealed a ghastly wound on the temple. Marguerite stood beside her horse, shading her eyes with her hand, her face tense and strained as she watched the issue of the combat. It was not till the victor, flushed but triumphant, his gay riding-suit covered with blood and dust, advanced, and doffing ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... prevent this latter calamity, we hauled the boat farther up and held the cable in our hands. Occasional flashes of lightning shone with a ghastly glare through the watery curtains around us, and lent additional horror to the scene. Yet we longed for those dismal flashes, for they were less appalling than the thick blackness that succeeded them. Crashing peals of thunder seemed to tear the skies in twain, and fell upon our ears through ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... Say, Gren, I have killed a man. Dannox got my bullet right in the head and he never knew what hit him. Ghastly, isn't it? I feel beastly queer. It was he who turned on the lights and went at you with a club. I heard you call, and was in the door just as he hit you. His finish came inside of a second. You and he spoiled the handsomest ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... milder efforts; the door did not even shake to his stoutest kick. Breathless and panting, he desisted. I then tried the door myself, equally in vain. As I ceased from the effort, again that creep of horror came over me; but this time it was more cold and stubborn. I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We precipitated ourselves into the landing place. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... of running water outside their shelter gradually forced its way into the tumult. The road was a yellow waterway; the brook tore above the limit of its deep banks into a widening saffron river among the green meadows, which showed in the ghastly light ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... Lord, will you be pleased to try the block?" Lord Kenmure, in reply, laid down his head on the block, and spread forth his hands. The headsman instantly performed his office. The usual words, "This is the head of a traitor!" were heard as the executioner displayed the streaming and ghastly sight ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... face very white and wan. Out in the dining-room could be heard voluble voices, weeping, and Irish expletives of mingled wrath and grief,—and then, with eyes dilating with horror, with streaming hair, with pallid lips and a ghastly look in her white face, Grace Truscott, clad in a morning wrapper, came rushing through the little parlor into the hall, gave one glance at her girl friend, and then, stretching ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... I verily believe it is my last visit," he answered, with a ghastly attempt at a smile. "I am done for, Holly. I am done for. I do not believe that ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... the possibility of collision with the armed forces of the Spaniards; and thenceforward, for four full days, the train wound its perilous way along narrow pathways bounded on the one hand by towering, inaccessible, rocky cliffs, and on the other by ghastly precipices, of such awful depth that their bases were frequently hidden by the wreaths of mountain mist floating far below; across frail swing bridges stretched from side to side of those awful, fathomless rifts called barrancas which seem ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... saw Pros Passmore standing at the foot of the steps—the moving speck come to full size. The old man was a wilder-looking figure than usual. He had no hat on, and a bloody cloth bound around his head confined the straggling gray locks quaintly. The face was ghastly, the clothing in tatters, and his hands trembled as they clutched a bandanna evidently full of some small articles that rattled together in his ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... law. Not merely the English state trials and the French causes celebres are there, but the criminal trials of Scotland and of America, and detached publications of remarkable cases, Newgate Calendars, Malefactors' Register, Chronicles of Crime, with ghastly prints of Newgate and Old Bailey, with their executions. The Chancellor is not responsible for this part of the library, which owes its completeness to the morbid taste of his successor, who defends the collection as best illustrating the popular ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... to the other of us, with the expression of a madman. His face was ghastly white, and the scar on his cheek stood out livid, in contrast with the white skin. I thought for a moment he was about to draw his revolver, but suddenly he turned and ran toward the crowd, and in a moment was lost ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... the country,—where neighbors take care of each other, and where every symptom is talked over, and the history of every fatal disorder turns into a tradition,—learn about sickness and the meanings of it; on its ghastly and ominous side, at ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... scored. But both Zalu Zako and Marufa regarded him as one who, having had dealings with the devil and yet had emerged safely, was to be suspected of some ghastly pact. After a calculated pause Sakamata ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... opens, that the villages get scantier, and that at last a great giant iceberg walls up the way in front, and we feast our eyes on the long-desired sight till after that the setting sun has tinged it purple (a sure sign of a fine day), its ghastly pallor shows us that the night is upon us. It is cold, and we are not sorry at half-past nine to find ourselves at Bourg d'Oisans, where there is a very fair inn kept by one Martin; we get a comfortable supper of eggs and go ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... it is true, also interest Andreyev. "The Red Laugh" is an attack on war through a portrayal of the ghastly horrors of the Russo-Japanese War; "Savva," one of the plays of this volume, is taken bodily (with a poet's license, of course) from the actual revolutionary life of Russia; "King Hunger" is the tragedy of the uprising of the ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... The rope that yoked them together was exchanged for a longer one; the party were secured, Marguerite second, and the Cellarman last; and they set out for the Refuges. The actual distance of those places was nothing: the whole five, and the next Hospice to boot, being within two miles; but the ghastly way was whitened ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... deadly white, surrounded me. The hard varnished bedstead (the mattress felt as if it were varnished) nearly filled the little room. Two stiff chairs, and a yellow window-shade which looked as if it were made of varnished wood, glittered in the feeble light of a glass lamp, while the ghastly grayish pallor of the ewer and basin on the wash-stand was thrown into bold relief by the intenser whiteness of the ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... when both with all their power and force, like a giant, fasten on them; as God saith, "Can thine heart endure, or can thine hands be strong, in the days that I shall deal with thee?" (Eze 22:14). Now will the ghastly jaws of despair gape upon thee, and now will condemnings of conscience, like thunder-claps, continually batter against thy weary spirit. It is the godly that have boldness in the day of judgment (1 John 4:17); but the wicked ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... was no easy task; all men are so like when the bones are bared; yet with pains and long scrutiny we could make them out. They lay pell-mell in undistinguished heaps, with none of their earthly beauties left. With all those anatomies piled together as like as could be, eyes glaring ghastly and vacant, teeth gleaming bare, I knew not how to tell Thersites[117] from Nireus the beauty, beggar Irus from the Phaeacian king, or cook Pyrrhias from Agamemnon's self. Their ancient marks were gone, and their bones ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... deep. The white trader would then stretch out enough calico to cover them. The strip was their price. The Maoris loved the higgling of the market, and would enjoy nothing better than to spend half a day over bartering away a single pig. Moreover, a peculiar and profitable, if ghastly, trade sprang up in tattooed heads. A well-preserved specimen fetched as much as twenty pounds, and a man "with a good head on his shoulders" was consequently worth that sum to any one who could kill him. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... peaks. But this flood of glory is soon followed by the pure whiteness of death. "Like a gigantic ghost shrouded in sepulchral sheets, the mountain now hovers in the background of the landscape, towering ghastly through the twilight until darkness ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... nephews, by four nobles. The one preferred was obliged to have distinguished himself in war, and his coronation did not take place until a successful campaign had provided enough captives to grace his triumphal entry into the capital, and enough victims for the ghastly sacrifices which formed an important part of all their religious ceremonies. Communication was held with the remotest parts of the country by means of couriers, who, trained to it from childhood, travelled with amazing swiftness. Post-houses were established on the great roads, and the messenger ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... holes and a shallow sunken lane. In spite of the difficulties of darkness and fog, relief was complete before dawn when the 1st Division moved forward towards Wassigny, and we were able to look round our new sector. We found a ghastly relic in the sunken lane where a German cooks' wagon had been hit by one of our shells as it tried to escape, and now, in the early morning light, the scattered remains of wagon, horses and cooks, all smashed ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... said, when they questioned him on the morrow; "watch and pray." In a few days more a solitary fugitive escaped from the slaughter told that the Picts had turned desperately to bay as the English army entered Fife; and that Ecgfrith and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of corpses, on the far-off moorland ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... more," was the quick reply. "When you find it in a woman like Ardea Dabney, it raises her to the seventh power angelic. It is only when you find it, or some ghastly imitation of it, in such people as the Farleys...." He changed the subject abruptly. "You said the Dabneys had gone up on the mountain for the summer, ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... thou not speak? hast thou seen a ghost?—As I live, she signs horns! that must be for my husband: he's returned. [JUDITH looks ghastly, and ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... his work, cutting of him down, hewing both bark and heart, both body and soul asunder. The man groans, but death hears him not; he looks ghastly, carefully, dejectedly; he sighs, he sweats, he trembles, but ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... tempests of grief, or anger, or excitement—she was always being chided for not restraining her feelings—she was always being gently lectured for using too strong expressions. What did Primrose mean by throwing down this kind though somewhat mysterious, letter, and by making use of so ghastly a word as "separation?" Who was going to divide them? Certainly not ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... had been horribly cut to pieces. Mount Gilboa was ghastly with the dead. On the morrow the stragglers came on to the field, and they lifted the latchet of the helmet from under the chin of the dead, and they picked up the swords and bent them on their knee to test the temper of the metal, and they opened the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... he usurped my property, but by a still faithful domestic we were admitted, and I, knowing every secret passage in my house, came shoeless from behind some arras, and stood before them as they sat at supper. I was a ghastly sight. I had not shaved for a fortnight, and my uniform hung in tatters from my body; round my head was the same bloody white handkerchief with which I had bound up my head at Jena. I was deadly pale from hunger, too; and from my entering so silently they believed ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... fight with Indians near Walla Walla some years before, in which a Methodist missionary had been killed; but his revolting personal appearance was now worse than ever, and the sacrilegious use of Father Pandoza's vestments, coupled with the ghastly scalp that hung from his bridle, so turned opinion against him that he was soon captured, dismounted, and his parade brought to an abrupt close, and I doubt whether he ever after quite reinstated himself in the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... sportive they seem! The pale gaslight throws a spectre-like hue over their paler features; the artificial crimson with which they would adorn the withered cheek refuses to lend a charm to features wan and ghastly. The very air is sickly with the odor of their cosmetics. And with flaunting cambrics they bend over carriage sides, salute each and every pedestrian, and receive in return answers unsuited to refined ears. They pass into the dim ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... years, lacking the graces of buoyancy and abounding youth. They are bent, gnarled, shriveled, faded, weak, and wizened. Their faces reveal the absence of the looks that betoken hope, courage, aspiration, and high purpose. Their lineaments and their gait show forth a ghastly forlornness that excites pity and despair. They seem the veriest derelicts, tossed to and fro by the currents of life without hope ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... there was a mirror, to throw the light down upon him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth's together. Haunted in a most ghastly manner that abominable place would have been, if the glass could ever have rendered back its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead. Some passing thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... would be the society which he would meet in such a reproduction of a famous Parisian haunt. He thought of a Cafe chantant at Port Said, and said to himself, "It can't be worse than that." He was right then. The world had no shambles of ghastly frivolity and debauchery like ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Leonard with a shudder, for the dead man's face was ghastly to behold. Then turning to him as if ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... 9th, after a short march, the column entered the village of Appomattox Court House by what seemed to be the main road. Several dead men, dressed in the uniform of United States regular artillery, were lying on the roadside, their faces turned up to the blaze of the sun. One had a ghastly wound in the breast, which must have been made by grape ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... chair. Now that the ghastly moment had come, he felt too petrified with fear even to act the little part in which he had been diligently rehearsed by the obliging Mr. Teal. He ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... the foul streets, to drop their horrid burdens into the great pit at Aldgate; the bells of London tolled all day and all night for the passing of human souls. Hundreds of homes, isolated because of a victim of the plague found therein, became ghastly breeding-places of the disease, and then silent, disgusting graves. If a man shivered in fear, or staggered from weakness, or for very hunger turned sick, he was marked as a victim, and despite his protests was huddled ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... about the trenches—the mud, the odours, the inhumanity of compelling men to live under such foul conditions. Nothing that they have said can be too strong. Under the best conditions the life is ghastly, horrible, impossible. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... it was rather a burning curiosity and a deep sense of duty that urged me on, than anything I could properly call affection—still less, revenge or malice. I didn't remember my father as alive at all: the one thing I could recollect about him was the ghastly look of that dead body, stretched at full length on the library floor, with its white beard all dabbled in the red blood that clotted it. It was abstract zeal for the discovery of the truth that alone pushed me on. This search became to me henceforth an end and aim in itself. It stood out, ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... to such an extent, Petrie—and I don't wonder at it; the sight was a ghastly one—that probably you don't remember what occurred when you struck out ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... mourn'd. Then towards the palace of the Destinies, Laden with languishment and grief, he flies, And to those stern nymphs humbly made request, Both might enjoy each other, and be blest. 380 But with a ghastly dreadful countenance, Threatening a thousand deaths at every glance, They answer'd Love, nor would vouchsafe so much As one poor word, their hate to him was such: Hearken awhile, and I will tell you why. Heaven's ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... deformed, bowed legs, bent backs and shrivelled little, old faces—such faces as we find in cripples aged by pain. Our hearts have been almost stilled as we have listened to the terrible stories of the hundreds of little girls in the ghastly fleshmarkets of India and China who, by the knife and the insertion into their tender bodies of wedges of expanding wood, are thus made ready, through months of torture, for the use of some inhuman Hindu or Chinese monster who for the sum of a few dollars ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... feverish brightness of her eyes, she would have looked like a corpse. Her wrinkled forehead, her hollow cheeks, her white lips told their terrible tale of the suffering of years. The ghastly appearance of her face was heightened by the furnishing of the room. This doomed woman, dying slowly day by day, delighted in bright colors and sumptuous materials. The paper on the walls, the curtains, the carpet presented the hues ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... voice. After that he became restless and increasingly snappish; his face darkened at "Fallen Leaves," and he began to look positively dangerous when a young man who was a railway porter in town, now home for a holiday, made a ghastly attempt at merriment by singing a low-class music-hall catch. What he would have done or said I do not know, for at that moment the announcement was made which the reader has been expecting—that Mrs. Abel would give ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... the woman was ghastly pale, and her sleep must have been very light, for suddenly she opened her eyes, and seeing the officers, uttered the cry, which at first only caused her lord and master to growl out an oath and turn over; whereupon she clutched at him wildly and cried to the men to leave them; they ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... it seemed to her that if life were really what she had believed it to be last night, these men and women could not walk so buoyantly, could not smile so gaily, could not spend so much thought and time on the way they looked and the things they wore. "No, it must have been a mistake, a ghastly mistake," she insisted almost passionately. "Some day we shall laugh over it together as we laughed over my jealousy of Abby. He never loved Abby, not for a minute, and yet I imagined that he did and suffered agony because of it." And her taxicab went on merrily between the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... l'univers!' In words of imperishable intensity, he dwells upon the omnipotence of Death: 'Nous sommes plaisants de nous reposer dans la societe de nos semblables. Miserables comme nous, impuissants comme nous, ils ne nous aideront pas; on mourra seul.' Or he summons up in one ghastly sentence the vision of the inevitable end: 'Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle que soit la comedie en tout le reste. On jette enfin de la terre sur la tete, et en voila pour jamais.' And so follows the conclusion of the whole: 'Connaissez donc, superbe, quel paradoxe vous ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... thee, to thousands, of whom each And one as all a ghastly gap did make In his own kind and kindred, whom to teach Forgetfulness were mercy for their sake; The Archangel's trump, not Glory's, must awake Those whom they thirst for; though the sound of Fame May for a moment soothe, it cannot slake The fever of vain longing, and the name So honoured ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... blown so chilling over the lake and through the thin shells of tenements in the neighborhood of the Settlement. Never had the pressure for food and fuel and clothes been so urgently thrust up against the people of the city in their most importunate and ghastly form. Night after night the Bishop and Dr. Bruce with their helpers went out and helped save men and women and children from the torture of physical privation. Vast quantities of food and clothing and large ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... Bible text that came into my head—the heart that is humble, which is the case with me, may look for it here. And with that I shut my eyes and let fly at it, though every knock brought my heart into my mouth. Now guess: who d'ye think answered the door? Why, that ghastly boy of hers! There he stood, all freckles and pimples; ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... remain impart a more living sense of the past than such wisely ordered accumulations; for it is the Pompeian paradox that in the image of death it can best recall life. It is a grave which has been laid bare, and it were best to leave its ghastly memories unhindered by other companionship. One feels that one ought to be there alone in order to see it aright. One ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... heard now was a new one, and one that caused her flesh to tingle. It was the sound of a stealthy hand upon her door. The knob turned noiselessly, the hinges gave a faint whine, and there on the threshold stood a white-robed figure, ghastly and spectral in the pallid light that fell upon it from the cloud-freed moon outside. Miss Blake did not utter a sound and the apparition glided forward with slow, measured steps until it stood beside her bed. Its eyes were staring and wide ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... puzzled, took his leave, but had not gone ten yards when the housekeeper flew screaming after him. It seemed she had heard a fall, and when she had gone into the Professor's bedroom she had found him lying there dead upon the hearthrug. There was a razor in his hand, and there was a ghastly gash across ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... as one in dead of night From forth dull sleep by dreadful fancy waking, That thinks she hath beheld some ghastly sprite, Whose grim aspect sets every joint a shaking: What terror 'tis! but she, in worser taking, From sleep disturbed, heedfully doth view The sight which makes ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Ulysses' griefs renew, Tears bathe his cheeks, and tears the ground bedew As some fond matron views in mortal fight Her husband falling in his country's right; Frantic through clashing swords she runs, she flies, As ghastly pale he groans, and faints and dies; Close to his breast she grovels on the ground, And bathes with floods of tears the gaping wound; She cries, she shrieks: the fierce insulting foe Relentless mocks her violence of woe: To chains condemn'd, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... had "stuck," but he had gone under early. He lay prone in the foreground, his face ghastly with a smear of blood across the cheek. The fellow who had done it was still standing there, looking down ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... suddenly dead. Another was sick of the plague with conceit. One seeing his fellow let blood falls down in a swoon. Another (saith [1619]Cardan out of Aristotle), fell down dead (which is familiar to women at any ghastly sight), seeing but a man hanged. A Jew in France (saith [1620]Lodovicus Vives), came by chance over a dangerous passage or plank, that lay over a brook in the dark, without harm, the next day perceiving what danger he was in, fell down ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm; Till the war-drum ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... useless. No remonstrances shook the iron resolution of the man who had hewed his way through the rank and file of political humanity to his own high place apart from the rest. Helpless, ghastly, snatched out of the very jaws of death, there he lay, steadily distilling the clear common-sense which had won him all his worldly rewards into the mind of his son. Not a hint was missed, not a caution was forgotten, that could guide ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... inadequate. When I came back from Chatalja to Kirk Kilisse, King Ferdinand sent his private secretary for me as an independent witness of the state of things at the front. I took the occasion to acquaint His Majesty frankly with the ghastly consequences that had followed from the absence of all precautions to ensure a wholesome water supply, from the neglect of latrine regulations in the camps and other failures in the medical and sanitary service. I ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... places where they lived and moved and died, and the buildings and monuments they erected, become like the men of yesterday. Art has made them our contemporaries. They are as near to us as Pius VII. and Napoleon. I never drive out of the old Nomentan Gate without remembering the ghastly flight of Nero,—his recognition there by an old centurion,—his damp, drear hiding-place underground, where, shuddering and quoting Greek, he waited for his executioners,—and his subsequent terrible and cowardly death, as narrated by Tacitus and Suetonius; and it seems nearer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... the lamp above his head. As the light swept them, there leaped out from the walls a collection of Tibetan devil-dance masks, hanging above the fiend-embroidered draperies of those ghastly functions—horned masks, scowling masks, and masks of idiotic terror. In a corner, a Japanese warrior, mailed and plumed, menaced him with a halberd, and a score of lances and khandas and kuttars ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... I live, you see, Go through the world, try, prove, reject, Prefer, still struggling to effect My warfare; happy that I can Be crossed and thwarted as a man, Not left in God's contempt apart, With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart, Tame in earth's paddock as her prize. ... ... ... ... ... Thank God, no paradise stands barred To entry, and I find it hard To be a Christian, as ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... to receive Maieddine in the room where she had entertained the Roumia girl last night. Being a near relation, Si Maieddine was allowed to see Lella M'Barka unveiled; and even in the pink and gold light of the hanging lamps, she was ghastly under her paint. The young man was struck with her martyred look, and pitied her; but stronger than his pity was the fear that she might fail him—if not to-day, before the journey's end. She would have to undergo a strain terrible for an invalid, and he could spare her much of this if ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... achieve the first of these great purposes, he used to twist the lad's arms and administer a certain number of hard blows upon them. This he did every day so long as the whim lasted. As for the smoking, poor Brokenribs had to smoke a certain number of pipes every day. A single pipe made him look ghastly, and the whole series made him dreadfully ill. I remember his white face at such times; but he attained his reward in becoming ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice and bad conduct". The Sh[u][d.]ra servant is to be "regarded as a younger son"; a slave is to be looked on "as one's shadow," and if a man is offended by him he "must bear it without resentment"; yet the most ghastly punishments are ordered to be inflicted on Sh[u][d.]ras for ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant
... talking about. You may care for me as a child cares. You don't care as a woman does. No woman who cared for a man would write the letters you do. I ask you to tell me about yourself—what you're feeling and thinking—and you send me some ghastly screed about Spinoza or Kant. Do you suppose any man wants to hear what his sweetheart thinks about Space and Time and ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... lifeboats. Like the "Zulu," however, when day dawned it was found she was able to come into Boulogne under her own steam. After driving some cases over there, I went to see the remains in dry dock. It was a ghastly sight, made all the more poignant as one could see trunks and clothes lying about in many of the cabins, which were open to the day as if a transverse section had been made. The only humorous incident that occurred was ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... drawn from widely separated parts of Saladin's dominions. Here were Nubians from the Nile, tall and powerful men, jet black in skin, with lines of red and white paint on their faces, giving a ghastly and wild appearance to them. On their shoulders were skins of lions and other wild animals. They carried short bows, and heavy clubs studded with iron. By them were the Bedouin cavalry, light, sinewy men, brown as berries, ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... noblest Felt their hearts sink to see On the earth the bloody corpses, In the path the dauntless Three: And, from the ghastly entrance Where those bold Romans stood, All shrank, like boys who unaware, Ranging the woods to start a hare, Come to the mouth of the dark lair Where, growling low, a fierce old bear Lies amidst ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... cry of horror from the young folks that ended in a sigh of relief. David and Tom Gray quickly raised Mabel to her feet and turned to Grace, whose face was ghastly, while she trembled like a leaf. The reaction had set in the moment she realized that Mabel was safe. Jessica and Nora had both begun to cry, while the faces of the others fully expressed ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... any of you!" And almost as if it were a real mother's heart, Christian felt hers yearn over the poor pale face, growing every minute more ghastly. ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... will, Nor ever have we happy fortune tried; Then why should hope with our rent state abide? Nay, let us run unto the baseful cave, Pight in the hollow ribs of craggy cliff, Where dreary owls do shriek the live-long night, Chasing away the birds of cheerful light; Where yawning ghosts do howl in ghastly wise, Where that dull, hollow-eyed, that staring sire, Yclep'd Despair, hath his sad mansion: Him let us find, and by his counsel we Will end ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... burst open, and Caterina, ghastly and panting, her eyes distended with terror, rushed in, threw her arms round Sir Christopher's neck, and gasping out—'Anthony ... the Rookery ... dead ... in the Rookery', fell ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... stone, and it ceases to be a stream; it becomes what Charles Lamb calls "a mockery of a river—a liquid artifice—a wretched conduit." But take away the water from the most beautiful river-banks, and what is left? An ugly road with none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... intervals, lapsing back into a death-like sleep after each awakening. During one of these periods of unconsciousness Wabi cut short the tangled beard and hair, and for the first time they saw in all its emaciation the thin, ghastly face of the man who, half a century before, had drawn the map that led them to the gold. There was little change in his condition during the night that followed, except that now and then he muttered incoherently, and at these times Rod always caught in his ravings the name that he ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... back into the boat, staggering down upon their seats. One alone remained standing, and with an expression upon his face as if he was desirous of again beholding the sight. It was not a look that betrayed pleasure, but one grim and ghastly, yet strong and steady, as if it penetrated the profoundest depths of the ocean. It was the look of the ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... feast here!" Soon some lighted brands were flying In the hut of Fridolinus; And they sprang rejoicing through the Flames in singing, "Praised be Woden!" From the distance gazed with pleasure The old grandam, and her face shone Ghastly in the lurid light. ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... forward: the thicket was full of smoke and quick flashes of flame: then the woods took fire, and the scene of carnage had a new and ghastly feature added to it. Dense clouds of smoke rose, blinding and choking the combatants: the flames crackled, soared aloft, and were blown in the men's faces; and still, in the midst of this frightful array of horrors, the carnival of destruction ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... raise his heart in thankfulness to the Power that protects him; it was no doubt a pious spirit that placed them there; but the people appear to pay the reverence to the picture which they should give to its spiritual image, and the pictures themselves are so shocking and ghastly, they seem better calculated to excite horror than reverence. It was really repulsive to look on images of the Saviour covered with blood, and generally with swords sticking in different parts of the body. The Almighty is represented as an ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... running, so that it took a painful grip upon my inflamed imagination, I dreamt of my uncle's face, only that it was ghastly white like a clown's, and the throat was cut from ear to ear—a long ochreous cut. "Too late," ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Campus Martius and there massacred to the last man, so that the clatter of arms and the groans of the dying were distinctly heard in the neighbouring temple of Bellona, where Sulla was just holding a meeting of the senate. It was a ghastly execution, and it ought not to be excused; but it is not right to forget that those very men who perished there had fallen like a band of robbers on the capital and the burgesses, and, had they found time, would have destroyed them as far as fire and sword ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... who, near allied, O'er Nature's wounds, and wrecks, preside; Whilst Vengeance, in the lurid air, 20 Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare: On whom that ravening[15] brood of Fate, Who lap the blood of sorrow, wait: Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see, And look not madly ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... aid-post. The latter helped nobly with the wounded, so I had a note sent down with them, that they had earned good treatment. The officer had a friend from the same military college in Stamboul, which friend had a ghastly shell-wound in his back. What happened, I think, was this. When his friend was knocked out, the unwounded officer—they were both boys, well under twenty—brought up a medical orderly. All three were then overwhelmed by our rush, and in ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... of indirect questions which led me to believe that neither Hargrib nor his master knew of the thing I had been conscious of from the start—that we had aboard the ship an amount of high explosive sufficient to do ghastly damage not only to this section of the coast but to the whole planet of Orcon. I gathered, however, that Leider suspected we were armed against him in some way, and would ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... among you, keep your beautiful nature unspoiled, or, where change is absolutely necessary, try to imitate nature's own methods by using the glorious trees around you, instead of iron and tin shaped by man's hand; pause before you have murdered your natural loveliness by ghastly modernity, or you will ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... one at the foot, on little tables. I entered the room and looked long at the dead old man. I thought it strange that there should be no one to watch him, but I am not afraid of dead men after the first shudder is past. It was a ghastly sight enough, however, and the candles shed a glaring yellowish light ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... and which the tyranny of nature or of man has condemned to disease through arrested growth. And where neither Christianity, nor any other religion conveying some moral help, has reached, the animal energy of such races necessarily flames into ghastly conditions of evil, and the grotesque or frightful forms assumed by their art are precisely indicative of ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... gossip and revealed the places where crimes had been committed or treasure buried. More often, perhaps, ghosts have walked the night without any ostensible or useful purpose, apparently in obedience to some ghastly compulsion that crept over them in death, as if a hesitating sickle had left them still hanging to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... said George. His voice was very unpleasant, and so was the fire of his eyes and the ghastly rage of his scarred face. "The old man has endeavoured in his anger to rob me of everything because I would not obey him in his wickedness when I was here with him a short while before he died. Such a will as ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... says Hume, 'anarchy is the shortest lived.' The one may 'break out like a wild overthrow'; but the other from its secret, sacred stand, operates unseen, and undermines the happiness of kingdoms for ages, lurks in the hollow cheek, and stares you in the face in the ghastly eye of want and agony and woe. It is dreadful to hear the noise and uproar of an infuriated multitude stung by the sense of wrong and maddened by sympathy; it is more appalling to think of the smile answered by other gracious smiles, of ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... reflected on the ghastly situation created by the collusion of German and Austro-Hungarian diplomacy, the more certain did I feel that the key to that situation (as M. Sazonoff said later) lay in Berlin, and that there was no need to look further for the solution of the problem. ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... then, Jacksonville were to-day in ashes, and the ghastly spirit visions of 'The World' materialized into terrible realities, the negro haters would have no, cause to be disappointed. 'The World' hailed the alleged repulse and massacre of the negroes ...
— 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
... excused, we knew, in the light of subsequent events. So we headed for the great labor-ghetto on the South Side in the hope of getting in contact with some of the comrades. Too late! We knew it. But we could not stand still and do nothing in those ghastly, silent streets. Where was Ernest? I was wondering. What was happening in the cities of the labor castes and Mercenaries? ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... window came the stench of this hideous parody, as if in mockery. I removed it, and another appeared in the same place shortly afterward. The earthman was rampant and insulting. Pan is not dead yet. At least he still makes a ghastly sign ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... their flags on the parapets, and, while the Federals converged from every point to this, exploding powder burned the faces of these contending hosts, who, hand to hand, fought each other to death, while far-away widows and orphans multiplied to mourn through the coming years over this ghastly folly ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... blood and choked with the bodies of the slain. Here and there the ground, deep dinted with the tramp of man and steed and plashed and slippery with gore, showed where had been some fierce and mortal conflict, while the bodies of Moors and Christians, ghastly in death, lay half concealed among the matted and trampled shrubs and ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... answered Sidney: and a sudden flash of lightning showed his countenance, ghastly, as if with the damps of Death. What could the brother do?—stay there, and see the boy perish before his eyes? leave him on the road and fly to the friendly light? The last plan was the sole one left, yet he shrank from ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that must be given in the home, in the schools and from the pulpit and from the public press. I have become convinced from long labor in this reform that the ordinary license system is only a poultice to the dram seller's conscience, and for restraining intemperance it is a ghastly failure. Institutions and patent medicines to cure drinkers have only had a partial success. The only sure cure for drunkenness is to stop before you begin. Entire legal suppression of the dram shop ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... with some strange tempest of riot and turmoil, should not be unmarked in Australia, two of the most disastrous expeditions in the annals of exploration started during its course. One, Leichhardt's, as we have just seen, vanished, and all must have perished. Of the other, under Kennedy, two ghastly famished spectres, that had once been white men, and a naked blackfellow, alone were rescued out ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... vacant caverns, whence the sons of Mohammed Bahadur were once dragged forth to die by daring Hodson's smoking pistols, their slaughtered shades grinned over the ghastly vengeance of the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... This ghastly jest, if such it may be considered, proceeded for some time before the nobles still waiting learned what was going on. When at length a whisper of the frightful mystery of the red tent was borne to their ears, there were no longer ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... o'er his face the grave's dark hue Was in fixed shadow cast; His spasm-drawn lips more fearful grew In the ghastly shade of their lurid blue; With a shudder that ran that cold form through, The murderer's ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... the agony— Dread pain that sees the future all too well With ghastly preludes whirls and racks my soul. Behold ye—yonder on the palace roof The spectre-children sitting—look, such things As dreams are made on, phantoms as of babes, Horrible shadows, that a kinsman's hand ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... slouching gait disturbed the grim peace of the lonely bluff. Arizona shuffled slowly off the road. He reached the edge of the bush; but he went no further. For he reeled, and his hands clasped his body somewhere about his chest. His eyes were half closed, and his face looked ghastly in the wintry light. By a great effort he steadied himself and abruptly sat down in the snow. He was just off the track and his back ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... scenes to whose realization he looked forward, or of spirits whose presence he invoked. And the man must be little capable of receiving a religious impression of any kind, who, to this day, does not acknowledge some feeling of awe, as he looks up at the pale countenances and ghastly forms which haunt the dark roofs of the Baptisteries of Parma and Florence, or remains altogether untouched by the majesty of the colossal images of apostles, and of Him who sent apostles, that look down from the darkening gold of the domes of ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... relation had any sacredness in his eyes—that he was unfit to move among human relations who had violated one so sacred and tender. Therefore, the Mosaic law uplifted his bleeding corpse, and brandished the ghastly terror around the parental relation to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... sound as of footsteps coming from the direction of the drawing-room window, across the wet slate flags which surrounded the cottage, and a moment afterwards, peering through the darkness, Mrs. Goddard saw a man with a ghastly face standing ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... rejection and death and the consequent destruction of Jerusalem and he pronounced his pathetic lament, "If thou hadst known in this day, even thou, the things which belong unto peace!" He predicted the ghastly horrors of the coming siege and the desolation of Zion and declared that it was due to inability to see that he had come as a Saviour and that his ministry had been a gracious visitation which might have resulted in repentance ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... whiter and more deathlike. She quite forgot the words she was saying, all remembrance of them faded from her mind. She came to a sudden stop. Her father's promptings were all in vain, she could hear nothing he said, she could see nothing but her mother's sorrowful and ghastly face. ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... he was compelled to submit to conditions galling alike to the sovereign and the man. He found, on his accession, the terrible penal laws against the Papists in full force; the hangman's knife was yet warm with its ghastly butcher-work of quartering and disembowelling suspected Jesuits and victims of the lie of Titus Oates; the Tower of London had scarcely ceased to echo the groans of Catholic confessors stretched on the rack by Protestant inquisitors. He was torn by conflicting interests ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... ancient rooms. Modern paper-hangings are too superficial and wishy-washy for the purpose. Tapestry, it is true, there is now, completely covering the walls of several of the rooms, but all faded into ghastliness; nor could some of it have been otherwise than ghastly, even in its newness, for it represented persons suffering various kinds of torture, with crowds of monks and nuns looking on. In another room there was the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and other subjects not to be readily ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... up to the cabin-table with an assumption of firmness which was completely belied by the ghastly pallor of his countenance and the convulsive twitching of his white lips. Grasping the table with both hands, he said in a voice which he in ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... only keep this from her for a few days, till my own control of her has strengthened. I must keep it from her. She must not see to-morrow's papers with their ghastly story." He chilled with a fuller sense of the suicide's power to torture her. "She must leave the city to-night. She will be called before the coroner, her mediumship and Clarke's control of her will be howled through the street—" He groaned with the shame ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... dreadfully, and did almost as much harm to their masters as the deadly bullets of the whites; and when the fire ceased, not more than half of them regained their seats and galloped off, leaving the rest, men and horses, in a ghastly heap. Seeing them in full retreat, the occupants of the tower descended to receive Mr. Hardy and Fitzgerald, Terence much delighted at having at last had his share in ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... said Jackson. He saw the priest reel and turn pale to the lips. "I should say a—a Brownhill," he added hastily. The other man gulped, steadied himself with an effort, and gave a ghastly smile. If you had walked into a temple at Thibet and planked down sixpence and asked for an idol wrapped up in brown paper you could not have done a more dreadful thing than Jackson had done; but the priest forgave him and produced in silence a trayful of Brownhills. Then was Jackson like unto ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... present who had known him as Mr. Underwood's partner. Walcott, taking advantage of the situation, began to protest his innocence. Mr. Britton, unmoved, at once beckoned Darrell to his side. Upon seeing him Walcott's face took on a ghastly hue and he seemed for a moment on the verge of collapse, but he quickly pulled himself together, regarding Darrell meanwhile with a venomous malignity seldom seen on a human face. Not the least surprised man in the ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... a check for the balance to his credit and demanded currency, but the cashier had become alarmed by the investigations made by the General and had temporized—said he must consult the president, and asked the major to call two hours later, whereat Burleigh had taken alarm. He was looking ghastly, said the cashier. It was apparent to every one that mentally, bodily, or both, the lately debonair and successful man of the world had ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... were closely and loyally attached to Ragnar. Then Ragnar attacked him with his fleet, but, by the just visitation of the Omnipotent, was openly punished for disparaging religion. For when he had been taken and cast into prison, his guilty limbs were given to serpents to devour, and adders found ghastly substance in the fibres of his entrails. His liver was eaten away, and a snake, like a deadly executioner, beset his very heart. Then in a courageous voice he recounted all his deeds in order, and at the end of his recital added the following sentence: "If the porkers knew the punishment ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... I should slow diverge, and listless stray Into some thought, feeling, or dream unright, O Watcher, my backsliding soul affray; Let me not perish of the ghastly blight. Be thou, O Life eternal, in me light; Then merest approach of selfish or impure Shall start ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... bed, with the 'day of great importance' tingling in his ears. He could not go to sleep for reflections on the subject, and even after shutting his eyes it hovered over him in ghastly dreams. There was an immense table in an immense hall, with ten thousand parsons on the one side, and ten thousand old maids on the other. At the head presided Mrs. Marsh, with the bishop in waiting ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... "Fort of London" had been drenched with the "ghastly dew" of aerial navies barely three hours before Parliament met on June 13, Members showed themselves uncommon calm. They were at their best a few days earlier in paying homage to Major Willie Redmond. It had been his ambition to be Father of ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... gnashing their teeth with mutual and unchangeable hatred. Kalilah and his sister made reciprocal gestures of imprecation, whilst the two other princes testified their horror for each other by the most ghastly convulsions, and screams that could not be smothered. All severally plunged themselves into the accursed multitude, there to wander in an ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... going to try and show off," said Lalage, "by using ghastly long words which nobody could possibly understand you'd better go and do it to the Cat. She'll like it. I'm not going to sit here all day listening to you. Either read the magazine or don't, whichever you like. ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... of a human being, flocks of hideous galanasas and great droves of condors would rise lazily, too heavy from their ghastly feast, ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... that the effect would be tremendous upon nerves so highly strung and sensitive as those of Andre. But he need not have been alarmed on this point. As the young painter mastered the contents of the letter his features became ghastly pale, and a shudder convulsed every nerve and muscle of his frame. With a mechanical gesture he extended the paper to M. de Breulh, uttering the one ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... ceiling, the walls, the floor, were all covered with portraits, staring sternly and fixedly at him with living eyes. The room extended and stretched out to a vast and interminable gallery, to afford room for millions of repetitions of the ghastly picture. In vain did numerous physicians seek to discover, with a view to the alleviation of the poor wretch's sufferings, some secret connexion between the incidents of his past life and the strange phantom that thus eternally haunted him. No explanation or clue could be obtained from the patient, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... had not clearly seen the villainy of Rochester. The woman showed it. Rochester had picked up a stranger, because of the mutual likeness, and sent him home to play his part, hoping, no doubt, to have a ghastly hit at his family. What about his wife? He had either never thought of her, or ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... dawn was just sufficient to give a ghostly appearance to what may be truly termed the ghastly ruins around them, and to reveal in undefined solemnity the neighbouring mountains. Smoke still issued from the half-smothered fires, and here and there a spectral figure might be seen flitting silently to and fro. But all was profoundly still ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... being laid in a chamber, where, when about one o'clock, I heard a voice that awakened me. I drew the curtain, and in the casement of the window I saw, by the light of the moon, a woman leaning through the casement into the room, in white, with red hair and pale and ghastly complexion. She spoke loud, and in a tone I had never heard, thrice. "A horse;" and then, with a sigh more like the wind than breath, she vanished, and to me her body looked more like a thick cloud than substance. I was so much frightened, that my hair stood on end, and my night- clothes fell ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... grew ghastly pale in the uncertain light of the half-veiled moon. She moved a step and caught the ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... round table, and in order that the ladies and gentlemen should alternate themselves properly, Mr Musselboro was opposite to the host. Next to him on his right was old Mrs Van Siever, the widow of a Dutch merchant, who was very rich. She was a ghastly thing to look at, as well from the quantity as from the nature of the wiggeries which she wore. She had not only a false front, but long false curls, as to which it cannot be conceived that she would suppose that any one would be ignorant ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... his head sank lower and lower as he neared the place. The sound of Dorothy's voice in the garden unnerved him completely; shame swept over him like the swift river-tide that still roared in his ears, his chin fell on his breast, and a ghastly pallor whitened his cheeks. A sob broke from him as he bent low and hurried by. He did not dare to snatch even a glimpse of the scene beyond ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... round, and found himself confronted by Mrs Irwin, her pale features and white night-dress dabbled with blood, in consequence of a partial disturbance of the bandages in struggling with the nurse—a terrifying, ghastly sight even to me; to him utterly overwhelming, and scarcely needing her frenzied execrations on the murderer of her child to deprive him utterly of all remaining sense and strength. He suddenly reeled, threw his arms wildly into the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... that when he came running aft, howling with pain (for, for all his obstinacy, he seemed to lack courage)—to complain of the outrage, to Schantze—his eye popped out so far that it seemed as if leaping out of its socket! It was ghastly and ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... the poor child who had fallen so suddenly at my feet, when the vision came, and I saw him gazing at me from a distance so remote—across a desert so immeasurable—that nothing but death could create such a removal or make of him the ghastly silhouette I saw. He is dead. At that moment I felt his soul pass; and so I say that ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... became aware of the close clinging embrace in which Regina held her, a ghastly smile parted Olga's colourless lips, and she said said ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... due, and she had nothing saved to meet it. The official notice had come that morning from the Bank. Her mind was black with confused pictures of bulbs, departed pensionnaires, hostile bankers, and—the ghastly charite de la Commune which awaited her. Yet her husband, before he went into the wine-business so disastrously, had been pasteur here. He had preached from this very church whose bells now rang out the mid-day hour. The spirit of her daughter, she firmly believed, still ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... precincts of Scriptural truth. Literature, with its captivating notes, had well-nigh destroyed what was left of the old Pietistic fervor. The songs of the church were no longer images of beauty, but ghastly, repulsive skeletons. The professor's chair was but little better than a heathen tripod. The pulpit became the rostrum where the shepherdless masses were entertained with vague essays on such general terms as righteousness, human dignity, light, progress, truth, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... he remembered that this man was Jim's father—and the father of the young girl he was in love with; and the shock drove every drop of blood out of his heart and cheeks. Ghastly, staring, he stood confronting Herold; and the latter, leaning heavily, shoulder against the wall, stared back ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... majority of his corps commanders were otherwise minded and were for renewing the conflict, he returned to the northern bank, leaving behind him his wounded soldiers, 14 guns, and 20,000 stand of arms. Another ghastly price had been paid to settle another experiment and establish the value of another general. The North lost in killed and wounded 12,197 men, with 5000 others "missing," and found out that General Hooker was not the man to beat General Lee. The Confederate loss was 10,266 killed ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... written them! There is neither the same boldness of design, nor mastery of execution in Johnson. In the one, the spark of genius seems to have met with its congenial matter: the shaft is sped; the forked lightning dresses up the face of nature in ghastly smiles, and the loud thunder rolls far away from the ruin that is made. Dr. Johnson's style, on the contrary, resembles rather the rumbling of mimic thunder at one of our theatres; and the light he throws upon a subject is like the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... by dismal reverberations and a deathlike atmosphere—everywhere mildewed, faded, 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 ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... along the wall for support. Was this a dream, some ghastly, soul-terrifying nightmare! Danglar! Those working lips! That callous viciousness, that leer in the degenerate face. It seemed to bring a weakness to her limbs, and seek to rob her of the strength to stand. She could not even hope against ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... him to forget the fearful scene through which he had passed. Only once did he partially come to himself, and show an interest in worldly affairs, and that was when it was found that he had sat down on some raspberry jam with his white pants on. When told of it, he smiled a ghastly smile, and said they were all welcome to his ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... a vehemence and recklessness about his performance that made Simpson, too, start to his feet in amazement, and betrayed even the doctor into letting the pipe slip from between his lips. Hank's face was ghastly, but Cathcart's showed a sudden weakness—a loosening of all his faculties, as it were. Then a momentary anger blazed into his eyes, and he too, though with deliberation born of habitual self-control, got upon his feet and faced the excited guide. For this was unpermissible, ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... an instance to be shown in any civilized community where a prisoner has been forced to trial for his life, when so disabled by sickness or ghastly wounds as to be unable even to sit up during the proceedings, and compelled to be carried to the judgment hall upon a litter. Such a proceeding shames the name of Justice, and only finds a congenial place amid the records ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... of these landscapes. The inlets of the Bothnian Gulf were hard, snow-covered plains, inclosed by bold, rugged headlands, covered with ink-black forests. The more distant ridges faded into a dull indigo hue, flecked with patches of ghastly white, under the lowering, sullen, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Carmarthen, noted for its ghastly noises of rattling iron chains, brazen caldrons, groans, strokes of hammers, and ringing of anvils. The cause is this: Merlin set his spirits to fabricate a brazen wall to encompass the city of Carmarthen, and as he had to call on the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... There were but two rooms and overhead a great loft with a peaked roof where the children slept. Philippe lay on the floor, his face ghastly and contorted. There were some hemlock cushions under him, and his poor wife ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... a terrible way. I thought Death looked like that. Even now I am afraid I could not swim long in clear waters with those fearful colors under me. I am sure they found Ophelia floating like a ghastly lily in such ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... that she was not dead. After a period of prostration, during which she seemed a corpse, she had slowly come back to earthly existence. The graphic descriptions of the scenes by her bedside, of her apparent death, her cold and bloodless body, her lagging and ghastly revival to consciousness, aroused in the servants' hall a fevered interest. Ameerah was asked questions, and gave such answers as satisfied herself if not her interlocutors. She was perfectly aware of the ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... hand was upon his windpipe, and he was being borne to the earth. He battled furiously but futilely—with the grim tenacity of a bulldog those awful fingers were clinging to his throat. Swiftly and surely life was being choked from him. His eyes bulged, his tongue protruded, his face turned to a ghastly purplish hue—there was a convulsive tremor of the stiffening muscles, and the Manyuema ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Oaks, husband and wife went up to London to the funeral, which took place at one of those fearful London cemeteries that strike a chill at one's very soul. Of all the horrible things in the world there is nothing so calmly ghastly ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... money, Maisie, for there's nothing more ghastly in the world than poverty in London. It's scared me. By Jove, it put the fear into me! And one oughtn't to ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... smiled the ghastly smile of a man who sees no way of escape from imposition, and has, therefore, resolved to submit with the best grace possible. But M. Fortunat's gravity did not relax. He gave what he had promised—neither more nor less—in exchange for the bank-notes, and even gravely exclaimed: "See if the ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... infatuation for Mahin, combined with a desire to reform him. This second desire now became the stronger. She had already heard about poor Maria Semenovna. But, after that kind woman had been murdered in such a ghastly way, and after Mahin, who learnt it from Stepan, had communicated to her all the facts concerning Maria Semenovna's life, Lisa herself passionately desired to become like her. She was a rich girl, and was afraid that Mahin had been courting her because of ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... leading a lady to the dance, thought Godfrey. Then he bent himself and pulled. Out flew the age-withered corpse. The head came off, the body broke above the hips and fell upon the floor, leaving the legs standing in the case, a ghastly spectacle. On to this severed trunk the Pasteur leapt, again as he had done upon the black beetle. It crunched and crumbled, filling the air with a pungent, resinous dust. Then he stood amidst the debris, ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... feature wore only an expression of abject humility; sturdy professional street beggars scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp, whom despair alone had driven forth into the night for charity; feeble and ghastly invalids, upon whom death had placed a sure hand, and who sidled and tottered through the mob, looking every one beseechingly in the face, as if in search of some chance consolation, some lost hope; modest young girls returning from long and late labor to a cheerless home, and shrinking more ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... heart is all trembling for thy sons, lest my father forthwith destroy them together with the strangers. Slumbering just now in a short-lived sleep such a ghastly dream did I see—may some god forbid its fulfilment and never mayst thou win for thyself bitter care ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... His glazed eyes, their faculty of vision now extinguished, were fixed upon her; and she lay on the ground with the dead man. At length her piercing screams for help reached the ears of some people passing at a distance; they hurried up and freed her from the arms of her ghastly lover. The horror prostrated her in a serious illness. Her life, and mine too, was despaired of; but she recovered, and her accouchement was more favourable than could have been expected. But the terror of that ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... met us when we rode in among the whispering cottonwoods. We found Hank Rowan in a little open place, where rifts of sunlight filtered through the tangled branches; one yellow bar, full of quivering motes, rested on the wide-open eyes and mouth, tinting the set features the ghastly color of a plaster cast. The horse he had ridden lay dead across his legs, and just beyond, a crumpled heap against the base of a tree, was the carcass of a mule, half-hidden under a bulky pack. The thing that sickened me, that stirs me even yet, ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... repetition of their astonishment, their indignation and their sympathy afforded the poor fellow the most visible satisfaction, harassed as he was becoming by one dread which entirely swallowed up the thought and fear of death. This ghastly terror was the then usual consignment of a body after death to the surgeons for dissection; and the uncontrollable trepidation which would take possession of him each time this hideous recollection forced itself upon him, although unaccountable ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... home, free from privations, free from danger, let us, each of us, do his part as nobly as those heroes of ours are doing it at the front. [Cheers.] It would be horrible for us to think that those who fall fall through our neglect. It would be a still more ghastly reflection to think that those who fell have given their lives in vain through any slackness or selfishness on the part of any one ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... first stage the general proposed that Catherine should take his place in the curricle that she might "see as much of the country as possible;" and, for the rest of the journey she was tete-a-tete with Henry, who amused himself by rallying her upon the sliding panels, ghastly tapestry, funereal beds, vaulted chambers, and kindred uncanny apparatus which, judging from her favourite kind of fiction, she must be expecting to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... could most powerfully realise to the audience the ruffian's sense of horror and abhorrence has been there overlooked. The ghastly figure follows him everywhere. He hears its garments rustling in the leaves. "If he stopped, it stopped. If he ran, it followed." Turning at times to beat the phantom off, though it should strike him dead, the hair rises on his head, and his blood stands still, for ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... not look at her husband—Husband! In that moment of cruel memory, of ghastly chopfallen vanity, it was all she could do not visibly to shrink from him. She forgot that he was her best friend, her friend from babyhood almost, Theodore Hargrave. She felt only that he was her husband, her jailer, the representative of all that ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... in the sequel, and the Baron returned just at nightfall; while his ghastly demeanour and unquiet eye betokened the nature of his visit. It is said many a wild and unearthly peal of laughter resounded ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... exclaimed Gaut, with a laugh so inconceivably devilish that his own lawyer, even, recoiled at the sound. "Ha, ha!" he repeated, with a smile on his lips, made ghastly by the fires of concentrated malice that shot from his eyes. "Wouldn't my good friends, here, like to try this ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... was evidently satisfactory, to judge from the beaming smile that played on his features. But, not content with the general effect, he tried the effect of expression—frowned portentously, scowled savagely, gaped hideously, and grinned horribly a ghastly smile. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Canadian, at the end of his strength and patience, made no further appearances. Conseil couldn't coax a single word out of him and feared that, in a fit of delirium while under the sway of a ghastly homesickness, Ned would kill himself. So he kept a devoted watch ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... parchments, with large seals attached to them. He is now occupied with a deed, on one of the skins of which the plan of an important estate is painted, and on this his attention becomes fixed. His countenance is cadaverous, and its ghastly hue adds to its grimness of expression. A band is tied round his head, and there is an expression of pain in his face, and an air of languor and debility in his manner, very different from what is usual with him. It is plain he has not yet recovered from the effects of the ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... mingled with savage yells. He wheeled, drove spurs into his horse, and flew back to Waldron. As he re-entered the wood he met wounded men streaming through it, a few marching alertly upright, many more crouching and groaning, some clinging to their less injured comrades, but all haggard in face and ghastly. ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... Claiborne; it's funny. It's too funny for any use. When your teeth show it's something ghastly. For God's sake go in ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... that," said the Colonel; and the apothecary thought there was something ghastly in his look and tone. "Why, 't is ten year, you old fool; and do you think a man with a treasure like that in his possession ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... entirely dissimilar individuals of the human family than this lunatic duke and that theological professor. And yet, perhaps, the two names, more concisely than those of any other mortals, might serve as an index to the ghastly chronicle over which a coming generation was to shudder. The death of the duke was at first thought likely to break off the negotiations for truce. The States-General at once declared that they would permit no movements on the part of the Spanish party to seize the inheritance ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mercy of God I survived this awful seizure; and when I rose, a weak, broken-down man, and surveyed my ghastly features in a glass, I thought of my mother, and asked myself how I had obeyed the instructions I had received from her lips, and to what advantage I had turned the lessons she had taught me. I remembered her prayers and tears, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... book, Ran through our hurried grasp. But when we turned, The scene around was smitten with a change: The lamps with lurid fire-light flared and burned; And through the wreaths and flowers,—oh, mockery strange!— The prison-walls with ghastly horror frowned; Scarce hidden by vine-leaves and clusters thick, A grim cold iron grating closed around. Then from our silken couches leaping quick, We hurried past the dancers and the lights, Nor heeded the entrancing music then, Nor the fair women scattering delights In flower-like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... appearance was ghastly, but I attributed this pallor to fright and not to pain, for I believed from my heart that the wound was no more than a slight prick. I left the hotel, took a cab to my lodgings, and after reading a light Spanish novel in order to change the current of my thoughts, I passed an excellent ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... down them through strong currents and cockling seas. The clear air, the still soft outlines, the rich and yet delicate colouring, stir up a sense of purity and freshness, and peace and cheerfulness, such as is stirred up by certain views of the Mediterranean and its shores; only broken by one ghastly sight—the lonely mast of the ill-fated Rhone, standing up still where she sank with all her crew, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... poor dear Jack!' exclaimed his lordship, throwing himself off his horse, and wringing his hands in despair, as a select party of thimble-riggers, who had gone to Jack's assistance, raised him up, and turned his ghastly face, with his eyes squinting inside out, and the foam still on his mouth, full upon him. 'Oh, my poor dear Jack!' repeated his lordship, sinking on his knees beside him, and grasping his stiffening hand as he spoke. His lordship sank overpowered ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... had been very good to him, in that He had ordained that during all his life the Desert Rat should be engaged in learning how to die, and meet the issue unafraid. For the Desert Rat was a philosopher, and even at this ghastly spectacle his sense of humor did not desert him. He sat down on the skull of one of the burros and laughed—a ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... remembered, too well, when those finely moulded features—now, so worn by sorrow, so marked by sickness, so ghastly in the hue of death—were rounded with young-woman health and tinted with rare loveliness. He recalled that day when he saw her a bride. He remembered the sweet, proud dignity of her young wifehood. He saw her, again, when her ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... herself so oppressed and awestruck as now. As she sat there alone with the apparently dying man, she felt that a silent, yet mighty struggle was going on between the forces of life and death. She feared death would obtain the victory. By a terrible fascination, her eyes became fixed on the ghastly face over which she fancied she could perceive, more and more distinctly, shadows cast by the hand of the destroyer. Every moment she thought of recalling her mother, but feared that the slightest jarring ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... shudder. "Hush!" he said, sharply. "It's too ghastly. Don't tell me any more about it." He wandered across the room, pulling a leaf from the azaleas, stopping at the window for a long look out. The wind was blowing some riotous young clouds over the sky like inarticulate shouts. There was an arrogant bird in the elm; there were pert crocus-buds ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... homage, but in vain— The deathlike spell was on him like a chain, And his clogged tongue, that still he strove to teach, Denied all answering speech! The monarch bade him mark The clotted blood that, dark, Distained his royal bosom, and that found Its way, still issuing, from a mortal wound, Ghastly and gaping wide, upon his throat! The shadow passed—another took his place, Of the same royal race; The noble Yumuri, the only son Of the old monarch, heir to his high throne, Cut off by cunning in his youthful pride; There was the murderer's gash, and the red ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... vestry-room, entering upon the second year (or is it the third?) of his long and ghastly wait, grows increasingly nervous, and when he hears the organist pass from the Spring Song into some more sonorous and stately thing he mistakes it for the wedding march from "Lohengrin," and is ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... this time taken her mistress away and changed her clothes; for she was back presently in a dressing-gown and slippers, and with the traces of blood removed from her hands. She was now much calmer, though she trembled sadly; and her face was ghastly white. When she had looked at her father's wrist, I holding the tourniquet, she turned her eyes round the room, resting them now and again on each one of us present in turn, but seeming to find no comfort. It was so apparent to me that she did not know where ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... and prostrate Nature lay, Like some sore-smitten creature, nigh to death, With feverish, pallid lips, with laboring breath, And languid eyeballs darkening to the day; A burning noontide ruled with merciless sway Earth, wave, and air; the ghastly-stretching heath, The sullen trees, the fainting flowers beneath, Drooped hopeless, shrivelling in the torrid ray: When, sudden, like a cheerful trumpet blown Far off by rescuing spirits, rose the wind, Urging great ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... it becomes what Charles Lamb calls "a mockery of a river—a liquid artifice—a wretched conduit." But take away the water from the most beautiful river-banks, and what is left? An ugly road with none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... our greatest medical schools, and one who has studied deeply into the forces that build the body and the forces that tear it down: "The mind is the natural protector of the body. . . . Every thought tends to reproduce itself, and ghastly mental pictures of disease, sensuality, and vice of all sorts, produce scrofula and leprosy in the soul, which reproduces them in the body. Anger changes the chemical properties of the saliva to a poison dangerous to life. It is well known that sudden and violent emotions have not only ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... beside the round opening, where the carpenters had left it, not half an hour ago, after lowering a stick of wood into the water, "to season it". All about Duke were these usual and reassuring environs of his daily life, and yet it was his fate to behold, right in the midst of them, and in ghastly juxtaposition to his face, a thing of ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... generally willing to play with her. Now it was notorious in Littlebath that she had never played well, and that she had long since forgotten all she had ever known. The poor old woman had already had some kind of a fit; she was very shaky and infirm, and ghastly to look at, in spite of her paint and ribbons. She was long in arranging her cards, long in playing them; very long in settling her points, when the points went against her, as they generally did. And yet, in spite of all this, Mrs. King Garded would encourage her because her father had been ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... as exhausted," he amplified, "as if I had been all day digging ditches or shovelling coal. I could scarcely realize that my mission had succeeded; I feared the entire proceeding was only a stupendous, ghastly hoax, which my uncle had in mind, but to what end, or who the intended victim, I could not ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... rubbing my begritten face with my coat sleeve. To make matters worse, it was wearing to the darkening. The floor was all covered with lappered blood, and sheep and calf skins. The calves and the sheep themselves, with their cuttit throats, and glazed een, and ghastly girning faces, were hanging about on pins, heels uppermost. Losh me! I thought on Bluebeard and his wives ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... constrained air and an apparent sense of a danger that he, Squire Hawkins, might fall to pieces in his weak way and manner, and of the success and futility of all attempts at reconstruction. For by this time the ghastly pupil of the left eye, which was black, was looking away round to the left, while the little blue one on the right twinkled cheerfully toward the front. The front teeth would drop down so that the Squire's mouth was kept nearly closed, and his ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... fit of imagination George Sand, when telling such a wholesome story of country life, should evoke the ghastly vision of Holbein's Dance of Death. It is the close of day, the horses are thin and exhausted, there is an old peasant, and, skipping about in the furrows near the team, is Death, the only lively, careless, nimble being ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... knew that in this last encounter I should need every whit of my skill, all my wit, audacity, and strength. I had met my equal, and he came to it fresh and I jaded. I clenched my teeth and prayed with all my heart; I set her face before me, and thought if I should fail her to what ghastly fate she might come, and I fought as I had never fought before. The sound of the surf became a roar in my ears, the sunshine an intolerable blaze of light; the blue above and around seemed suddenly beneath ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... supplemented by leaden or marble images. Over one grave I found a little porcelain angel, his wings blue as with the cold; and under him last year's angel in melancholy supersession. Elsewhere, most terrible sight of all in this ghastly place, was a white porcelain urn on which were painted a woman's and a man's hand clasped, the graceful feminine fingers in artistic contrast with the scrupulously-cuffed male wrist with the motto, "A mon mari, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... from the paralyzing fatalism of the heathen and the savage, and to look at the mysteries that perplex, and the portents that daunt you, from the Christian's point of view. If I can succeed in this, I shall clear your mind of the ghastly doubts that now oppress it, and I shall reunite you to your friend, never to be parted ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... the radio room. It showed me Snap lying there on the floor. He was bound with wire. His torso had been stripped. His livid face was ghastly plain in my light. ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... it cannot help being eternal, not temporary. In no department of life, has the scientific principle of self-interest and the rule of reason had a more confusing, corrupting, and destructive influence. To attempt to translate the meaning of a marriage into terms of a business partnership is a ghastly mockery. ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... summer sends a mighty thrill Through clust'ring icy floes, until Their shudd'ring breaks the ghastly sleep ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... with her baby in her arms; the girl he had defended in the alley, and whose face he had last seen lying white and unconscious in the moonlight, looking ghastly enough with the dark hair flung back against the harsh pillow ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... savages made vigorous search for him, he remained undiscovered. You can imagine the horrible sight the fort presented when the sun went down, the soldiers in their red uniforms lying there scalped and mangled, a ghastly heap under the summer sky. And to just think it was only a short time ago, a little more than a ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... send thee, caitiff, far beyond the seas, To the grim tyrant Echetus, who mars All he encounters; bane of human kind. Thine ears he'll lop, and pare the nose away From thy pale ghastly visage: dire to tell! The very parts, which modesty conceals, He'll tear relentless from the seat of life, To ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... gouts plashed heavily on the damp pavement; the walls were covered with green slimy mould; the atmosphere was close and foetid, and so heavy that the huge waxen torches, four of which stood in rusty iron candelabra, on a large slab of granite, burned dim and blue, casting a faint and ghastly light on lineaments so grim and truculent, or so unnaturally excited by the dominion of all hellish passions, that they had little need of anything extraneous to render them most hideous and appalling. There were some twenty-five men present, variously clad indeed, and ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,— "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, 45 Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore: Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... mutinous day by day; My men grow ghastly wan and weak." The stout mate thought of home; a spray Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek. "What shall I say, brave Admiral, say, If we sight naught but seas at dawn?" "Why you shall say at break of day, 'Sail on! sail on! ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... that the alcove was an invention of the eighteenth century. There were alcoves at all times. But, Doris, good heavens! what are those trees? Never did I see anything so ghastly; they are like ghosts. Not only have they no leaves, but they have no bark nor any twigs; nothing but ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... "Stop your rude reviling!" Then I wheeled my office-chair in front of bird and bust and door; And upon its cushion sinking, "I," I said, "will smash like winking This impeachment you are bringing, O you ominous bird of yore, O you grim, ungainly, ghastly, grumbling, gruesome feathered bore!" Croaked ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... still sitting hand in hand as Miss Anne had left them; but they both started up as Stephen entered, pale and ghastly from his long conflict with grief and temptation on the hills. He was come home conquered, though he did not know it; and the expression of his face was one of hatred and vengeance, instead of sorrow and love. He bade Black ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... is always underlying our lives, this mysterious and frightful element of existence; an uncertainty at times, though we do trust every thing to God. Under the best-loved and most beautiful face we know, there is hidden a skull as ghastly as that from which we turn aside with a shudder in the anatomist's cabinet. We smile, and are gay enough; God pity us! We try to forget our heart-aches and remorse. We even call our lives commonplace, and, bearing our own heaviest burdens silently, ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... of Christian (as some may think it a part of natural) religion. All over Rome we may count how much devotion in fine art is owing to it; and, through all ugliness or superstition, its intention still speaks clearly to serious minds. The poor dead bones, ghastly and forbidding:—we know what Shakespeare would have felt about them.—"Beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a man!" And it is with something of a similar feeling that Browne is full, on the common and general ground of humanity; an awe-stricken sympathy ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... the doorway of the king One grim and ghastly, shadowy, horrible, Bearing the likeness of a king himself, Erect as one who serveth not,—upon His head a crown, within his fleshless hands A sceptre,—monstrous, winged, intolerable. To him a stranger coming 'neath the trees, Which slid down flakes of light, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... true. The egotism of memory absorbed itself in the part he himself had played—that other, an evil fancy born of an evil time. And here was the Colonel saying it was true. The Boy dropped his eyes. It had all happened in the night. There was something in the naked truth too ghastly for the day. But the Colonel went on ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... as ghastly dreadfull, as it seemes, Bold men, presuming life for gaine to sell, Dare tempt that gulf, and in those wandring stremes Seek waies unknowne, waies leading down to hell. For, as we stood there waiting on the strond, Behold! an huge great vessell to us came, Dauncing upon ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... from the public press. I have become convinced from long labor in this reform that the ordinary license system is only a poultice to the dram seller's conscience, and for restraining intemperance it is a ghastly failure. Institutions and patent medicines to cure drinkers have only had a partial success. The only sure cure for drunkenness is to stop before you begin. Entire legal suppression of the dram shop is successful where a stiff, righteous, public sentiment thoroughly enforces it. Otherwise ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... I gathered from what they said that some imperious and ghastly thing was looking for the Sphinx, and that something that had happened had made its arrival certain. It appeared that they had slapped the Sphinx to vex her out of her apathy in order that she should pray to one of her gods, whom she had littered ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... circumstance of finding a humming-bird in the upper part of a barn with its bill stuck fast in a crack of one of the large timbers, dead, of course, with wings extended, and as dry as a chip. The bird seems to have died as it had lived, on the wing, and its last act was indeed a ghastly parody of its living career. Fancy this nimble, flashing sprite, whose life was passed probing the honeyed depths of flowers, at last thrusting its bill into a crack in a dry timber in a hayloft, and, with spread wings, ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... but that would be too great a risk," she responded. "It would be ghastly for us both if I married you and found myself incapable of loving you, and tragic if I fell in love with somebody else later. Please be patient, Tony. I am really and truly trying to fall in ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... a long walk," he returned. "It was such a lovely evening, so I resolved to miss supper for once." He tried to speak in a jaunty fashion, but it was a ghastly failure, and he knew it. He was so sick and faint with inanition that he felt as though he could not utter another word. "I am tired, I think I will go to bed. Good-night you two;" and he groped ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... heresy. The sentence was too drastic for the French government to sanction immediately; it was therefore postponed by command of the king, but it was finally executed, at least in part. [Sidenote: 1545] A ghastly massacre took place in which eight hundred or more of the Waldenses perished. A cry of horror was raised in Germany, in Switzerland, and even in France, from which the king himself ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... naturally rejoiced over the bare fact, briefly cabled without ghastly details, that the Philippine generalissimo had fallen prisoner, because it portended the peace which all desired. In deference to public opinion, the President promoted Colonel Funston of the volunteers to the rank of Brig.-General in ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... likewise fallen upon and their "joint" subdivided and hacked to pieces with knives made from shells. The bodies were not cooked all through, so that the condition of some of the revellers, both during and after the orgy, may best be left to the imagination. A more appalling, more ghastly, or more truly sickening spectacle it is impossible for the mind of man to conceive. A great corroboree was held after the feast, but, with my gorge rising and my brain reeling, I crept to my own humpy and tried to shut out from my mind the ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... behold so sudden a change in the human countenance! The rector's eyes glared at me! There was something ghastly in the sunken form of his features! My shirt was still red, and my coat spotted with blood; the hair had been cut away from the wound on my head, which was covered with a large plaister. My eye was black, and swelled up, and my forehead too was plaistered above the eye-brow. My body he had ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... face was ghastly white, and his eyes wandered, but he tried to bear himself as if nothing had happened. Smiling horribly, and nodding all round, as a man does sometimes in battle the moment the bullet strikes him, he turned to Grannie and moved ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... the old woman's ghastly conception so engrossed the minds of her hearers that a sound abroad in the night, rising like the roar of a blast, had grown broad, deep, and terrible, before the fated group were conscious of it. The house and all within it trembled; the foundations ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the mirth of that grinning multitude. I shook my clenched, up-stretched fists against them. And when at last their ghastly merriment ceased, I raised my voice once ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... uncolored &c. (see color &c. 428); colorless, achromatic, aplanatic[obs3]; etiolate, etiolated; hueless[obs3], pale, pallid; palefaced[obs3], tallow-faced; faint, dull, cold, muddy, leaden, dun, wan, sallow, dead, dingy, ashy, ashen, ghastly, cadaverous, glassy, lackluster; discolored &c. v. light-colored, fair, blond; white &c. 430. pale as death, pale as ashes, pale as a witch, pale as a ghost, pale as a corpse, white ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... massacred to the last man, so that the clatter of arms and the groans of the dying were distinctly heard in the neighbouring temple of Bellona, where Sulla was just holding a meeting of the senate. It was a ghastly execution, and it ought not to be excused; but it is not right to forget that those very men who perished there had fallen like a band of robbers on the capital and the burgesses, and, had they found time, would ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... His yellow face was wet and ghastly now. The big purple veins stood out like cords on his forehead. "Am I never to be free from the terror of this mystery? Where did it come from? How could it be possible when the very man I have most reason to dread is no ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... all those glorious battlefields, that have been made classic in history, frequently coming across the skull of some poor fellow sitting on top of a stump, grinning a ghastly smile; also the bones of horses along the road, and fences burned and destroyed, and occasionally the charred remains of a once fine dwelling house. Outside of these occasional reminders we could see no evidence of the desolation ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... strangers among you, keep your beautiful nature unspoiled, or, where change is absolutely necessary, try to imitate nature's own methods by using the glorious trees around you, instead of iron and tin shaped by man's hand; pause before you have murdered your natural loveliness by ghastly modernity, or you will ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... name of the murderess. "Scene on the scaffold!" It was a little after nine o'clock; the enterprising paper had promptly got out its gibbet edition. A morning of midwinter, roofs and ways covered with soot-grimed snow under the ghastly fog-pall; and, whilst I lay there in my bed, that woman had been led out and hanged—hanged. I thought with horror of the possibility that I might sicken and die in that wilderness of houses, nothing ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... a different woman by that time." The contralto voice dropped oddly and suddenly with these words: an effect of the headache, of course. And the pallor of the dark face was almost ghastly. Angela thought that her hostess looked very ill. "You may ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... their eyes, the pitchy darkness all round it rendering its glare still more blinding. Its phosphoric coruscation filled the Projectile with white streams of lurid light, tinging the contents with a pallor indescribably ghastly. The travellers' faces in particular, gleamed with that peculiar livid and cadaverous tinge, blue and yellow, which magicians so readily produce by ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... "that I will never pity you again. You have triumphed even over Fate—even over those terrible, relentless laws which sometimes make a ghastly nightmare of life even to the happiest of us. You have turned sorrow into joy. It is a great deed. You have made my own suffering seem ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by fourteen feet in size. In the center a great slab of stone rested on four large blocks of the same material. It had evidently once done duty as a table for at one side of it was a bench of stone, and upon the bench sat, or rather lolled, four white, ghastly, grinning skeletons. Death had evidently come to the sitters like a bolt from the sky. One rested, leaning forward, with the bony claws clinching the table, while yet another held a pewter mug as if about to raise it to his ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... valley of the Clyde is now. You can't have. It's filled with girls, and they come into it every morning by train to huge stations specially built for them, and they make the most ghastly things for killing other girls' lovers all day, and they go back by train at night. Only some of them work all night. I had to leave my own works to organise the canteen of a new filling factory. Five thousand girls in that factory. It's frightfully dangerous. They have to wear special clothing. ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... essential; his mind composed, Kirkwood set himself in search of it. The floor he was on, however, afforded him no assistance; the mantels were guiltless of candles and he discovered no matches, either in the wide and silent drawing-room, with its ghastly furniture, like mummies in their linen swathings, or in the small boudoir at the back. He was to look either above or below, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... down at the bits of paper. She could smell the wall-flowers under the window as though they were in the room—drenched in dew and moonlight, they were reckless of their fragrance. All this peace and cleanliness and orderly beauty—what a ghastly trick for God to have played—to have taught her to adore them, and then to snatch them away! All about her, warm with candle-light, lay the gracious loveliness of the little room with its dark waxed furniture, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... of their aim. As they reentered to review their work, two of the bandits were found alive and untouched, having thrown themselves in a corner amid the confusion of smoke in the onslaught. Thus they were spared the fate of the others, though the ghastly sight of seven of their number, translated from life into death, met their terrorized gaze. Human blood streamed across the once peaceful hearth, while brains bespattered life-sized figures in bas-relief of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child which adorned the broad columns ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... base sharp bolts broke and burst perpetually; and with the outer world wrapped in quivering curtains of blue flame, now and then a shaft of fire lanced its straight spear down the dense darkness of the woods behind in ghastly illumination, and a responsive spire shot up in some burning bush that blackened almost as instantly. Flor fancied that the lightning was searching for her, a runaway herself, and the burning bush answered, like a sentinel, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... to-day," replied Joab, "the same stranger whom we caught lurking amidst the olives on the night of the burial of Solomona—(that was nigh being his last night upon earth!) He looked ghastly, as if himself new risen from the grave, and scarcely able to drag his steps along. I helped to raise him on my mule, and it bore him to a house in the city which he mentioned. I doubt whether the Gentile recognized me—his ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... the cloud acquired the dimensions and approximate outline of an adult human body, although all was still vague and blurred. It hovered lightly in the air, a foot or so above the couch. Backhouse looked haggard and ghastly. Mrs. Jameson quietly fainted in her chair, but she was unnoticed, and presently revived. The apparition now settled down upon the couch, and at the moment of doing so seemed suddenly to grow dark, solid, and manlike. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... its dead moonlight, with its dead mud and its dead snow, is therefore no better than a ghastly illusion when considered in isolation from the soul or the souls which look forth from it. To the soul of which those elements are the "body" neither mud nor water nor rain nor earth-mould can appear desolate or dead. To the soul which contemplates ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... that a puzzling and unexplainable feature of these battlefields was that so many of the dead were found lying on their backs with rigid arms stretched straight up toward heaven—a ghastly spectacle. ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... held up the lamp she opened the bundle. Guess, guess at the astonishment of the tailor and his wife, when, instead of seeing a suit of clothes, they discovered, wrapped in a napkin, in its most horrid and ghastly state, a human head! ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... Gervase occupies one of those retired green spots which prove so well the good taste of the monks of old. A turn which this valley takes to the left affords the view, first, of the old castle of Tende, looking quite ghastly in the dusk of evening, and next of the town of Tende itself, which stands piled like Saorgio, against the shelving side of the valley. Tende is a large and apparently flourishing town, affording two inns of very respectable appearance. The Albergo Imperiale is high in its charges, but makes ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... condemnation. Over the very bridge where the heads of his adherents, exposed to view, held out a fearful picture of the fate which had threatened himself, he now made his triumphal entry; and to remove these ghastly objects was his first care. The exiles again took possession of their properties, without thinking of recompensing for the purchase money the present possessors, who had mostly taken to flight. Even though they had received a price for their estates, they seized on every thing which ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... said Dick, drawing back, shocked by the ghastly appearance of the man. 'They're after Rogers. They've got him by this, I expect, an' they'll soon have you if you don't ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... turned to that shadowy corner where the prisoner sat crouched in the same posture, bloody head bowed feebly on bowed breast. And now, as the glasses emptied and were refilled (with the exception of mine), we hearkened to tales of horrid murders and ghastly suicides, of gruesome deeds and bloody affrays of hunters and hunted until the landlady gasped and, calling the maid for company, went off to bed, while the men turned to stare uneasily behind them ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... lay thine care, And there such ghastly noise of iron chaines, And brazen caudrons thou shalt rombling heare, Which thousand sprites, with long-enduring paines, Doe tosse, that it will stun thy feeble braines; And often times great groans and grievous stownds, When too huge toile and labour them constraines; And often ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... grim studies after Hamlet unconsciously or consciously taken by Jonson and Marston, may pass as wellnigh passable imitations, with an inevitable streak of caricature in them, of the first Hamlet; they would have been at once puerile and ghastly travesties of the second. The Queen, whose finished figure is now something of a riddle, stands out simply enough in the first sketch as confidant of Horatio if not as accomplice of Hamlet. There is not more difference between the sweet quiet flow of those plain verses which open the original ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... feared to drive desperate men to extremities, so they forbore to attempt the thicket. Toward night they gave over the attack, and returned all-glorious with the scalps of the slain. Then came on the usual feasts and triumphs, the scalp-dance of warriors round the ghastly trophies, and all the other fierce revelry of barbarous warfare. When the braves had finished with the scalps, they were, as usual, given up to the women and children, and made the objects of new parades and dances. They were then treasured up as invaluable trophies and decorations by the braves ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... "The ghastly head became more of a mystery than before. The baffled Detectives could again only look at it helplessly, and send descriptions of it over the country. At last it was seen by a woman named Callahan, living in Boston, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... also haunted by the dread of God's wrath at her loving her children more than she did Him, for, with all the fervency of her gentle devotion, she never escaped the ghastly Hebrew conception of God, always in wrath at every omission or transgression of the Law, who, at the last great day, would demand of her an account of every neglect of duty, every idle word and thought, and especially of the manner in which she had taught her children to obey his commandments. ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the noise of castanets. We also have the impression of being carried away in the irresistible swing of this incomprehensible gayety, composed in proportions we can scarcely measure, of elements mystic, puerile and even ghastly. A sort of religious terror is diffused by the hidden idols divined in the temple behind us; by the mumbled prayers, confusedly heard; above all, by the horrible heads in lacquered wood, representing foxes, which, as ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... (No. 11) was and still is made: a candle which in early days was probably the universal candle, which, till within a few years, was the night candle of every sick chamber, in which most of us can recollect it as a most ghastly object as it used to stand, "stationed in a basin on the floor, where it glimmered away like a gigantic lighthouse in a particularly small piece of water" (Pickwick), till expelled by the night-lights, and which is still made by Welsh labourers, and, I ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... held back. I was standing where I could see his face. It was ghastly with mortal fear. Grasping his pinioned arms, the sheriff forced him onward. After contending with the crowd for nearly ten minutes, the officers gained the passage below; but the mob was denser here, and blocking up the ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... of the frozen stream, which was covered with ghastly forms, when Captain Rose suddenly clasped his hand to his side and uttered ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... their way to Marseilles to embark for Algiers. They were mostly youths, from sixteen to twenty years of age, and seemed little to forebode their probable fate. In looking on their fresh, healthy faces and bounding forms, I saw also a dim and ghastly vision of bones whitening on the desert, of men perishing with heat and fever, or stricken down by the aim ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... mountains, where some of them lived not only on mules but on each other. The strongest lay down and died, and the horrible features of Fremont's fourth expedition were only approached by that of Lieutenant Strain on the Isthmus of Darien. When the few ghastly survivors staggered out of the mountains they tottered to Carson's ranche, where they received the kindest treatment from him who had served Fremont so faithfully on ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... in with the last army of the Empire, and there shattered itself. Then he clenched his fists and said between his teeth: "If I had been there at the head of the 23d, Blucher and Wellington would have seen another fate!" The invasion, the truce, the martyr of St. Helena, the ghastly terror of Europe, the murder of Murat—the idol of the cavalry, the death of Ney, Bruno, Mouton Duvernet, and so many other whole-souled men whom he had known, admired, and loved, threw him into a series of paroxysms of rage, but nothing upset him. In hearing of ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... on the back and knocking a ghastly white smile into his face] You shall. I like you, my boy. We ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... storm-light blazed up once more, and fell upon an object so fearful and startling that they both fell back amazed. A woman was standing before them, tall, upright, and bareheaded; her long black hair falling over a face as white and ghastly as a three days' corpse; her wild countenance rendered more terrible by the blue glare of the lightning shining on the rain that streamed from every lock of her hair and every shred of her garments. She looked like ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... Luke Darvil on the grass—still living, but a horrible and ghastly spectacle. One ball had pierced his breast, another had shot away his jaw. His eyes rolled fearfully, and he tore up ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that the faces of the speakers were revealed to me with extraordinary vividness, and their horrified expressions were even more startling than was the silent, ghastly figure of the Unknown. The scene comes back to me, here, in my little room in Norwood, with its every detail as clearly marked as on the night it was first enacted. The long range of cone-shaped mountains, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... memorable expedition with his two companions in dissipation from York Stairs. As his account proceeded Captain Obadiah's face altered by degrees from its natural brown to a sickly yellow, and then to so leaden a hue that it could not have assumed a more ghastly appearance were he about to swoon dead away. Great beads of sweat gathered upon his forehead and trickled down his cheeks. At last he could endure no more, but with a great and strident voice, such ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... was tolerably certain that she was suffering from some obscure brain trouble. The effort of talking to him had clearly exhausted her; but he had not been able to refrain from making her talk. At the end of the half hour he had advised her—in some alarm at her ghastly look—to see a doctor. But the suggestion had made her angry, and he ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... brain began to clear Young Denny forgot the dripping blood that made his white face ghastly, he forgot the stinging odor of the broken demijohn, thick in the room—forgot everything but Judge Maynard's face when the latter had looked up and found him standing at the Tavern door. He knew now what the light was that ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... announcement was to be made to them formally, a little later. And now it was Louisa who was making the announcement, brutally, coarsely. The outrage of the episode was a hundredfold intensified; it grew into an inconceivable ghastly horror. Hilda's self-respect seemed to have a physical body and Louisa to be hacking at it ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... for a moment gone, They lay in ghastly plight; Their fiery steed From burden freed, Maintained ...
— The Adventure of Two Dutch Dolls and a 'Golliwogg' • Bertha Upton
... he looked steadily at her, and his heart leaped when he saw that she must believe him, for though her face was as white as an ivory cross she was smiling at him—yes! she was smiling at him in that gray and ghastly death-gloom ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... lustre of a Beauty's eye Assumes the ghastly stare of death; The fair, the brave, the good must die, And sink the ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... become the most disputed spot on the map of Europe; "The Elephant" a heap of waste in No Man's Land, while doubtless from the very place where Corot painted his masterpiece, a German machine gun dominating the city is belching forth its ghastly ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... quarter at a depth to the back; in this hell they appear at a distance like serpents of various kinds; and the most deceitful like vipers: but in the hell into which I was permitted to look, they appeared to me as if they were ghastly pale, with faces of chalk: and as they are mere concupiscences, they do not like to speak: and if they do speak, they only mutter and stammer various things, which are understood by none but their companions who are near them; but presently, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... it,' said Vea, her face becoming ghastly pale. 'Do look out again, Lily dear, and see if Alfred is coming ...
— Bluff Crag - or, A Good Word Costs Nothing • Mrs. George Cupples
... too ghastly a joke. Hal straightened, and lifted his head to an eye-level with his denouncer. "Enjoy!" he said, in a low tone. "You may guess how much when I tell you that I've loved Esme with every drop of my blood since the first time I ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... reiterated assurances that he was glorying in the discovery; he told himself that he was not made of the human stuff that can forgive bitter wrongs or forget them until cancelled. He painted in lurid colours his past griefs; through a ghastly morass of revenge grown stale, of memories deadened by time, he tried to struggle back to his original starting-point in vanished years, and feel as he felt when he flung Will Blanchard ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Lean on me." The little sofa was close by, and she helped him to it and ran for eau de cologne. When she came back he was lying with his head thrown back, white and still, yet looking more like himself than in that first ghastly moment. Presently the blood came back to cheek and lip, and he looked up and smiled. "You ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
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