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More "Torture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as a madman's dream. The mob howled around the walls until late in the night. Inside, a lumber trust lawyer and his official assistants were administering the "third degree" to the arrested loggers, to make them "confess." One at a time the men were taken to the torture chamber, and so terrible was the ordeal of this American Inquisition that some were almost broken—body and soul. Loren Roberts had the light in his brain snuffed out. Today he is a shuffling wreck. He is not interested ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... doctor hoped to find from the death of the one some means for preserving the life of the other. The councillor was in a violent fever, agitated unceasingly both in body and mind: he could not bear any position of any kind for more than a few minutes at a time. Bed was a place of torture; but if he got up, he cried for it again, at least for a change of suffering. At the end of three months he died. His stomach, duodenum, and liver were all in the same corrupt state as his brother's, and more than that, the surface of his body was burnt away. This, said ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... things. No appellation could be so terrible as that first. He would take the thirty thousand dollars if it should be forthcoming, vote and take the first train west the same day. In the Orient he could lose his identity as a bribe-taker and a murderer. The torture never relaxed during the days ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... their folly. There used to be special houses of correction in those days, mad- houses built upon an approved system, for the special treatment of cases of this kind; mediaeval dungeons, an occasional application of the rack, and other gentle instruments of torture of an inventive age, were wonderfully efficacious in curing a man of his folly. Nor was there any special limit to the time during which the treatment lasted. And in case of a dangerous fit of folly, there were always a few faggots ready, or a sharpened axe, to put ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... pleaded the seaman respectfully. "You've got us, sir, and you've got Jerry, there; but you ain't goin' to torture ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... "I can; therefore I will." He knows that the forces fighting for him are more than those that fight against him, strong as these are. Man in his noblest relationships, the songs of the poet (the best interpreter, from Homer and Virgil to the "Winepress" of Alfred Noyes), the torture, the pains, the sufferings, the woes, the vision of the prophet of a loving and perfect humanity, the reason of logic—all these and more are to him inspirations, and strengthen him in his great quest. He is a knight of the Holy Grail that is filled from ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... be one long torture," he cried with uplifted hands. "May every enterprise in which he engages end in disaster; may his father and mother die, and let him be left desolate; may a subtle and incurable disease lay its grip upon him; may misfortune pursue him in every shape and form; may he become a beggar with ulcered ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... a little lad ever hangs to a bigger, were he to torture the life out of him. Small thanks for us women after our good looks be past. But I'll look in on the child in early morn, thanks or no thanks; for I know his mother well, and if I can help it, the hyenas shall not make game of his bones, as I hear them ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of them were killed; but the women and children were captured to the number, it is said, of seven hundred. [Footnote: Relation des Decouvertes, MS. Frontenac to the King, N.Y. Col. Docs., ix. 147. A memoir of Duchesneau makes the number twelve hundred.] Then followed that scene of torture, of which, some two weeks later, La Salle saw the revolting traces. [Footnote: "Ils [les Illinois] trouverent dans leur campement des carcasses de leurs enfans que ces anthropophages avoient mangez, ne voulant meme d'autre nourriture que la chair de ces infortunez."—La ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... not spoken them it was my purpose to kill myself, here before your eyes, since that is a sin for which none can be asked to suffer save the sinner. Also, I say that this Inquisition which you have set up shall eat out the heart of Spain and bring her greatness to the dust of death. The torture and the misery of those Jews, than whom you have no better or more faithful subjects, shall be avenged on the heads of your children's children for so ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... at your taking the step, nor can I blame you. Your life was one of torture, and it was torture to others to see ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... apology to her for not killing a man who had laid a rough hand upon her person. He was ashamed and seemed to be in a torture that she would not understand why he had not killed the man. There seemed to be something of passionate scorn in him that he had not been able to avenge her ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... he who had annoyed the gentle maiden, and given her so much trouble with Monsieur Hautmartin, because he bore a grudge against her; he had been the one who had teased her with flowers, in order to torture her curiosity. Wherefore? He hated Marietta. He behaved himself always most shamefully toward the poor child. He avoided her when he could; and when he could not, he grieved the good-natured little one. With ...
— The Broken Cup - 1891 • Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke
... what I observed to-night, she loves you. You are a dangerous man for a jealous woman to love. You are not a cloistered monk, you are a man before the public; you win the admiration of many; some women do not hesitate to show you their preference. To a woman like Mildred that would be torture; she could not and would not separate the professional artist ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... to get that letter, to have to read so many lines in that loathsome, large, neat, inflated handwriting, but she took it that it meant that those toys which he had sent Roger every six months were not, as she thought, mere attempts to torture her by reminding her of his existence, but signs that he had really wanted to be a father to his son, and that now that Harry was dead he was declaring his desire freely. That made her very happy, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... divine, but all of earth, Half-way 'twixt hell and heaven, near to man, The whole world's tangle gathered in one span, Full of this human torture and this mirth: Life with its hope and error, toil and bliss, Earth-born, earth-reared, ye know it ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... impressed by some shock of fear or sudden pain, and does the remembrance of prolonged strain pass away? Who can tell? But it would seem strangely merciful if nature should blot out these weeks of slow but inevitable torture. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... A new torture came from it now. Did she love me—or Tarrano? I remembered the gentleness of the man with her. His dignity, his power—his undoubted genius. And who, what was I? A mere news-gatherer. A man of no force, and little personality. A nonentity. Sometimes as in my jealousy I contemplated Elza ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... commence with the sack of the great Roman city of Verulamium by the followers of Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni[e] (A.D. 61). Our knowledge of the event is largely drawn from Tacitus, and Dion Cassius, who give revolting details of the torture of the inhabitants by the Britons. The martyrdom of St. Alban (circa A.D. 304) the Synod of Verulam (429), the second destruction of that city by the Saxons towards the end of the sixth century and the siege of Hertford by the Danes in 896, when Alfred the Great grounded their vessels by cutting ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... place Before his eyes appeared; and, noisome, dark, A lazar-house it seemed; wherein were laid Numbers of all diseased; all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... excitable, Pocahontas assented absently; she was bracing her will, and steeling her nerves to endure without flinching. Not for worlds would she—even by the quivering of an eyelash—let Norma see the torture she was inflicting. She felt that Norma had an object in this disclosure, and was dimly sure that the object was hostile. She would think it all out later; at present Norma must not see her anguish. A ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... thinks at all, With the sweet milk of human kindness bless'd, The furious ardour of my zeal repress'd. Canst thou, with more than usual warmth she cried, Thy malice to indulge, and feed thy pride; 60 Canst thou, severe by nature as thou art, With all that wondrous rancour in thy heart, Delight to torture truth ten thousand ways, To spin detraction forth from themes of praise, To make Vice sit, for purposes of strife, And draw the hag much larger than the life, To make the good seem bad, the bad ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... drawn together on the opposite corner. Le Duc narrated how he had been captured just as he was quitting the village. His great fear had been lest he should be compelled to betray them; and he declared to Rayner, who believed him, that he would have undergone any torture rather ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... I expected my unwelcome visitors would seize me, and in their insane glee practise upon me some savage torture. Would they never cease? For nearly thirty minutes I sat still as death, where they had flung me. Safety lay in not attracting their attention; but a dreadful ordeal was in store ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... me some small coins, when she bent swiftly down to my hand, and tried to kiss it, evidently imaging that I had given her the ruble. I muttered something, and quitted the kitchen. I was ashamed, ashamed to the verge of torture, as I had not been for a long time. I shrank together; I was conscious that I was making grimaces, and I groaned with shame as I fled from the kitchen. This utterly unexpected, and, as it seemed to me, utterly undeserved shame, made a special impression on me, because ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... by vivisection. As regards the second, it is by no means sure that anything can be proved of direct use to mankind from discoveries made by doctors and scientists after operating on animals. "What sort of tenderness for man can we expect from surgeons who can thus teach by torture, or from students who can endure to listen?" Here Francis Newman puts his finger on a very significant factor in the case—that of the barbarizing, the deteriorating of the mind that cannot touch the black pitch of torture and ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... Tumultuous Sitting of the Convention A Committee appointed to frame a Plan of Government Resolutions proposed by the Committee William and Mary proclaimed; the Claim of Right; Abolition of Episcopacy Torture William and Mary accept the Crown of Scotland Discontent of the Covenanters Ministerial Arrangements in Scotland Hamilton; Crawford The Dalrymples; Lockhart; Montgomery Melville; Carstairs The Club formed: Annandale; ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Complete Contents of the Five Volumes • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... decision there is but one appeal, the appeal open to all condemned persons, but rarely made— the appeal to Long ju-ju. This Long ju-ju means almost certain death, and before it a severe frightening that is worse to a negro mind than mere physical torture. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... vigorous, and pointed, in no ordinary degree. When one remembers how much co-operation is needed to bring out even the slightest volume, one is truly astonished at the feat of bringing out so many and such good ones, while the hourly fear of capture, torture, and death hung over the heads of all. When threatened with danger in one place the press ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... friend, I am undone. I am slighted, rejected, by the man who once sought my hand, by the man who still retains my heart. And what adds an insupportable poignancy to the reflection is self-condemnation. From this inward torture where shall I flee? Where shall I seek that happiness which I have madly ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... preux chevaliers. We have at the other extremity the people who are craving for loot and vengeance, who clamour for the humiliation and torture of the enemy, who rave against the village burnings and shootings by the Prussians in one column and exult in the same proceedings by the Russians in another, who demand that German prisoners of war shall be treated as criminals, who depict our Indian ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... I have been in danger," he said to himself, wiping his brow, "since at one time that black brute, disregarding the sanctity of an envoy, had it in his mind to torture and to kill me. So, so, king Ithobal, Metem the Phoenician is also an honest merchant who 'always pays his debts,' as you may learn in the market-places of Jerusalem, of Sidon and of Zimboe, and I owe you a heavy bill for the fright ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... the spirit of their owner could, from his "gilt tub," have witnessed the grimaces and jokes which marked the sale—with the distorted countenances and boisterous laughter which were to be seen on every side—how it must have writhed under the smart of general ridicule, or have groaned under the torture of contemptuous indignation! Peace to Henley's[384] vexed manes!—and similar contempt await the efforts of all ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the words; but the boy held the cross very tenderly, and looked long upon the face of the Man there in torture—and was grieved ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... began afresh, tearing her, he turned aside, and could not look. But his heart in torture was at peace, his bowels were glad. He went downstairs, and to the door, outside, lifted his face to the rain, and felt the darkness striking unseen ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... grimly relished his own agony. Heaven only knows how bitterly this hard man may have felt the separation between himself and his only son, or how much the more terrible the anguish might have been made by that unflinching self-conceit which concealed the torture. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... me if it isn't the little girl we saw this morning," shouted Dudley, without, however, stopping the torture of the defenseless Susan Jemima. "Where did you ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... be tortur'd if thou dost not agree to go back to the Door from when thou camest, and to which we will conduct thee in Peace." But the Soldier calling to mind how God had before delivered him, despised their Menaces: Then the Devils cast him down on the Ground, and began to torture him. But upon his invocating the Lord Jesus, they failed in ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... with thine own hand killed my father and my two brothers. Torture me as thou wilt; I shall rejoice in having freed ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... torture of the strain, and his thoughts were full of the deed that should change his whole life, Aquilina was lying luxuriously back in a great armchair by the fireside, beguiling the time by chatting with her waiting-maid. As frequently happens in such cases ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... fire has burned within my brain. He knows the wrongs that wrought upon my poor weak nature; that converted the tenderest of affections into the deadliest of fury. He knows best whether a frail erring creature has expiated by long-enduring torture and measureless remorse, the crime of a moment of madness. Often, often have I prostrated myself in the dust, and implored that he would give me a sign of his forgiveness, and let ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... ever see a "Jim-Crow" waiting-room? There are always exceptions, as at Greensboro—but usually there is no heat in winter and no air in summer; with undisturbed loafers and train hands and broken, disreputable settees; to buy a ticket is torture; you stand and stand and wait and wait until every white person at the "other window" is waited on. Then the tired agent yells across, because all the tickets and ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... one of the gravest of my life, I had happily no leisure to think of myself. My whole soul sickened with anxiety for the girl. I knew enough of Indian ways to guess her fate. For Shalah and myself there might be torture, and at the best an arrow in our hearts, but for her there would be things unspeakable. I remembered the little meadow on the Rapidan, and the tale told by the grey ashes. There was only one shot in my pistol, but I determined that it should be saved for her. In such a crisis the memory ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... on, stumbling from street to street, holding Hilda to her breast. Famine gnawed incessantly at her stomach; walk though she might, turn upon her tracks up and down the streets, back to the avenue again, incessantly and relentlessly the torture dug into her vitals. She was hungry, hungry, and if the want of food harassed and rended her, full-grown woman that she was, what must it be in the poor, starved stomach of her little girl? Oh, for some helping hand now, oh, for one little mouthful, one little ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... the first alarm, terror will spread over all. Many will seek safety by flight. Those that are reputed rich will flee, through fear of torture to make them produce more than they are able. The man that has a wife and children, will find them hanging on his neck, beseeching him to quit the city, and save his life. All will run into confusion, amid cries and lamentations, and the hurry and disorder of departures. The few that remain, will ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... mind he took with him—what torture of questions! Was he being lifted or pulled down? His tastes,—were they rising or sinking? Were little negligences of dress and bearing and in-door attitude creeping into his habits? Was he losing his discriminative sense of quantity, time, distance? Did he talk of small achievements, small ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... bull; and if a horse is gored in the fair fight, there are men especially in attendance to put him out of his misery at once. It is doubtful whether the animal suffers more than, or as much as, the unhappy favourites, that are sent alive, and in extremest torture, to Amsterdam and other foreign cities, to be manufactured into essence of meat and such-like dainties, after a life of cruelly hard work in our omnibuses and cabs has made them no longer of ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... our critic says your people worship. You had Brantome, you had Tallemant, you had Retif, and a dozen others, to furnish materials for scenes of voluptuousness and of blood that would have outdone even the present naturalistes. From these alcoves of "Les Dames Galantes," and from the torture chambers (M. Zola would not have spared us one starting sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as Scott would have turned, without a thought of their profitable literary uses. You had other metal to work on: you gave us that superstitious and tragical true love ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... madness for rejecting her. Why had he done it? Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely inspired. She warned him against the step. But he, proud of his armoury, went his way. He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed Genoese going under; worse, for the drowner's delirium swirls but a minute in the gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Perhaps he had gone, fled already to France to avoid this dreadful, useless torture. I could see the hounds with open mouths, dripping white fangs, and greedy eyes all closing in on the defenceless quarry. Would the huntsman give the word? We were ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... haunting to the imagination. It represents the youthful, slender figure, nude, save for slight drapery, laid on the gridiron while the fire is being kindled under it and the fagots shovelled in. The physical shrinking of the flesh—of every nerve—from the torture, the spiritual strength and invincible energy of the countenance, are wonderfully depicted. The great aisle was painted by order of Pius IX by Cesare Fracassini; in it are two pulpits of marble. A double staircase of marble conducts to that part of the Basilica of Constantine which by Honorius ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... he answered with coolness, thrusting his elbow into the cushions and smoking hard: "But, no, he is not dead. Selamlik Pasha has as great an instinct for a bargain as for revenge. Also Selamlik Pasha would torture before he kills. Is ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the Templar; "such discourse now avails but little. Thou art condemned to die not a sudden and easy death, such as misery chooses, and despair welcomes, but a slow, wretched, protracted course of torture, suited to what the diabolical bigotry of these men calls ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... impressive. It was the sculptured counterfeit of a human face, that of a man distraught with agony. The eyes stared wildly from their sockets, the hair struggled in maniac disorder, the forehead was wrung with torture, the cheeks sunken, the throat fearsomely wasted, and from the wide lips there seemed to be issuing a horrible cry. Above this hideous effigy was carved the legend: 'MIDDLESEX HOUSE ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... be full, and that Mr. Puddleham's first Sunday would be a success. And the chapel, of course, had a bell,—a bell which was declared by Mrs. Fenwick to be the hoarsest, loudest, most unmusical, and ill-founded miscreant of a bell that was ever suspended over a building for the torture of delicate ears. It certainly was a loud and brazen bell; but Mr. Fenwick expressed his opinion that there was nothing amiss with it. When his wife declared that it sounded as though it came from the midst of the shrubs at their own front gate, he reminded her that their own church bells ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... them as humorous. And yet he was utterly indifferent to their love. He'd got beyond caring for what anybody thought of him. He was too absorbed in establishing reasons for thinking well of himself. I learnt things about him—one does in the presence of physical torture. I learnt secrets about the fineness of his spirit which, I believe, he never allowed you to suspect. Probably he never suspected them himself until the ordeal of terror had sifted the gold from the dross. It ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... sincere," Nancy cried; "women must have loved you deeply, tragically, and have suffered all the torture ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... already introduced into the palaces of Italian nobles, strangely contrasted the rough pavement, spread with heaps of armour negligently piled around. At the farther end of the apartment, Adrian shudderingly perceived, set in due and exact order, the implements of torture. ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a very short time the blessed numbness was gone, and consciousness became once more a torture, the medium of terrors not to be borne. Isaac hated her—she would be taken from her children—she felt Watson's grip upon her arm—she saw the jeering ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tended carefully as any babe; he is permitted to indulge his pugnacity, which it would be harsh to restrain, and at worst he dies fighting like a gentleman. A Tenerifan would shudder at the horror of our fashionable sport, where ruffians gouge or blind the pigeon with a pin, squeeze it to torture, wrench out its tail, and thrust the upper through the ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... through the agony of death," said Varney, "and have again endured the torture—for it is such—of the re-union of the body and the soul; not having endured so much, not the faintest echo of such feelings can enter into ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... could their course hold that way, and—it was Anna who first proposed retreat. The very havoc was fascinating and the courage of Constance and Miranda, though stripped of its mirth, remained undaunted; but the eye-torture of the cotton smoke was enough alone to drive them back ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... people writhe in despair. Once it becomes the instrument of a regenerate humanity, that is to say, when men have become compassionate, loving, and devoted, then the social question will cease to exist, and the old instrument of torture will become ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... carieth him, as it were captiue. They punish no man with sentence of death, vnles hee bee taken in the deede doing, or confesseth the same. But being accused by the multitude, they put him vnto extreame torture to make him confesse the trueth. They punish murther with death, and carnall copulation also with any other besides his owne. By his own, I meane his wife or his maid seruant, for he may vse his slaue as he listeth himself. Heinous theft also or felony they punish with death. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... according to the offense. They told me they had known them taken down chilled to death. It was said to be one of the most cruel punishments. They showed me the stump of the whipping post, where hundreds of writhing victims had suffered this kind of torture. But it did seem as if the better day was coming, to see a hundred and fifty-three black children here so eager to learn, and to hear them read so well after only four months' schooling. I met a woman on the street in deep mourning who was weeping. I inquired the cause of her grief. She ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... on, Wulf," Beorn said as they threw themselves down on the ground late that night, when the carousal was ended, "I shall snatch the count's dagger from his belt and bury it in his heart, though they put me to death by torture afterwards." ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... the one who causes me these palpitations for the slightest thing. I know that we do not run any danger, that everybody is in his own room by this time, and yet, somehow, I feel terribly frightened. There are women, so they say, who get used to this torture, and end by being guilty and tranquil at the same time. It is an unworthy thought, but I'll confess that, sometimes, when I suffer so, I wish I were like them. But it is impossible; I was not made for wrong-doing. You can not understand this, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... at moments jealous doubt made my torture, so the moment's relief from it sufficed for my rapture. But I had a cause for disquiet less acute but ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... observe any thing—that she had no living soul belonging to her, neither father, mother, brother, nor sister, to pity her or to blame him; since to think him either blamable or blamed would have been the sharpest torture she could have known. ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... by what I have been interrupted? By a legal notice from Bechet, who summons me to furnish her within twenty-four hours my two volumes in 8vo, with a penalty of fifty francs for every day's delay! I must be a great criminal and God wills that I shall expiate my crimes! Never was such torture! This woman has had ten volumes 8vo out of me in two years, and yet she complains ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... he cried, when we were out of earshot of the crowd. "I have told her everything. I have insisted that it's simple torture for me to wait with this idle view of loving her less. It's well enough for her to ask it, but I feel strong enough now to override her reluctance. I have cast off the millstone from round my neck. I care for nothing, I know ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... good reason. I came because I was awfully lonely. There isn't a soul that I can speak out to, except you. You don't know what that means. I go about in the schoolroom, and up and down the streets, and see things—horrible things. The world gets to be one big torture chamber, and then I have to cry out. I come to you to cry out,—because you really care. Now I can go away, and keep silent for ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... clear. None of the physical torture he had felt in the past mile was now registered upon his consciousness. No thought but ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... it, and crying aloud with wild cries as if their lives were in danger. If any man were to injure the tree, which of course is no more valuable than any other bush of its sort, they'd tear him to pieces on the spot, and kill or torture every member of his family. And so too, in England, most people believe, without a shadow of reason, that if men and women were allowed to manage their own personal relations, free from tribal interference, all life and order would go to rack and ruin; the ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... You may torture me, but you must do it yourself; I won't help you. [Hotly] Let me alone! [The Doctor presses button ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... jail. This was a sweet morsel for the Federalists. It mattered not that the Governor denied it; that McComb contradicted it; that no proof supported it; or that the Assembly acquitted him by a party vote of thirty-five to twenty; the story did effective campaign service, and lived to torture Aaron Burr, one of the commissioners, ten years afterward. Burr tried to escape responsibility by pleading absence when the contracts were made; but the question never ceased coming up—if absence included all the months of McComb's negotiations, what time ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... look at it Here you are in hell! Caged up with two old crows picking the life out of you. They'll kill you-I can see it; you're being killed by inches. You can't go anywhere, you can't have anything. Life is just torture ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... it, Billy. It's to save you torture, old fellow, just to save you useless suffering, Billy." He drew his pistol from his belt, took careful aim just behind the pony's ear, and, turning his head ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... into women's fashions, he had unearthed the origin of the fashionable aigrette, the most desired of all the feathered possessions of womankind. He had been told of the cruel torture of the mother-heron, who produced the beautiful aigrette only in her period of maternity and who was cruelly slaughtered, usually left to die slowly rather than killed, leaving her whole nest of baby-birds to starve while they awaited the return of ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... about three o'clock and was immediately told by the quartermaster that we were leaving for France in a few hours. He told me that I needed a complete change of equipment. At this news I rejoiced, because so far we had all worn, in our battalion, the leather harness known as the "Oliver torture." I knew that the active service, or web, equipment could ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... prosecutrix, and so was already prejudiced against her. The defendant, knowing this, turned the tables on her opponent by bringing an accusation of witchcraft against her, and Catherine Kepler was imprisoned and condemned to the torture in July, 1620. Kepler, hearing of the sentence, hurried back from Linz, and succeeded in stopping the completion of the sentence, securing his mother's release the following year, as it was made clear that the only support for ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... Prussian principle. Any European might feel a genuine fear of the Yellow Peril; and many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have felt and expressed it. Many might say, and have said, that the Heathen Chinee is very heathen indeed; that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture and utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people do not. Nor do I doubt the German Emperor's sincerity when he sought to point out to us how abnormal and abominable such a nightmare campaign would be, ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... in a flood of new emotion; she tried once or twice to be discreetly angry with herself for admitting so unreservedly the pleasure she felt in Pierre's admiration; she placed her soul on a rack of self-questioning torture, and every inquisition she made of her heart returned the self-same ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... but though her heart longed to believe, her mind remained unconvinced. She shrank from all mention of the subject with her step-mother, knowing how one-sided a partisan she would be, but could not deny herself the self-torture of questioning Lola again. The child relentlessly stuck to her text, painting the scene with a vividness that did credit to her descriptive powers; and being one of those vivacious and ubiquitous children never to be ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... would have slain them at once without torture, but Signy besought him that they might breathe the earthly air a day or two before their death, and he listened to her, for he saw how he might thus give them greater pain. He bade his men lead them to ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... her companion had advanced. As her eyes became used to the ruddy dusk, she could see better, but everywhere they lighted on shapes inexplicable, whose forms to the first questioning thought suggested instruments of torture; but cruel as some of them looked, they were almost too strange, contorted, fantastical for such. Still, the wood-cuts in a certain book she had been familiar with in childhood, commonly called Fox's Book of Martyrs, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... had taken his seat. Why had he not emigrated to Australia, and escaped all this,—escaped all this, and Mrs. Smiley also? That was John Kenneby's reflection as he slowly mounted the two steps up into the place of his torture. Near to the same spot, and near also to Dockwrath who had taken these two witnesses under his special charge, sat Bridget Bolster. She had made herself very comfortable that morning with buttered toast and sausages; and when at Dockwrath's instance Kenneby had submitted to a slight infusion of ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... orders of the Afridi who is now dead. They made ready to torture me, showing me the knives they would use. But she came, and they obeyed her, binding the Afridi fast to me. After that I heard the sahib's voice, and then this ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... I tell you that if you won't deliver up the ornament by fair means—of course I am willing to pay you double for it—you shall soon see me march up with Argenson's serviceable underlings."—"Well, then, may Satan torture you with scores of red-hot pincers, and hang three hundredweight on the necklace till it strangle your bride." And therewith, thrusting the jewellery into the bridegroom's breast pocket, Cardillac seizes him ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... could not stomach the peculiar Moorish saddle with its high-peaked cantle and crupper, and its catch-and-carry stirrups. We took a calesa, as I have said. To my dying day I shall not forget that vehicle of torture. But it may be necessary to tell what is a calesa. Procure a broken-down hansom, knock off the driver's seat, paint the body and wheels the colour of a roulette-table at a racecourse, stud the hood with brass nails of the pattern ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... with this secret gnawing at my heart; every piece of gold I count out, I see his hands outstretched over it, and hear him whisper 'Mine!' He gives me no peace night or day; he is always by me; I have no rest. And you must come, adding to my torture, and striving to tear from me that for which I bartered conscience, peace, soul, everything that would make life desirable. If there is mercy in you, leave me with what I give you, and come back no more. Life has so little to offer, that rather than bear this continued ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that the extravagance of thought and diction which characterizes much of our modern poetry is traceable to the influence of Shakspeare. We see in it only the futile effort of misguided persons to torture out of language the secret of that inspiration which should be in themselves. We do not find the extravagances in Shakspeare himself. We never saw a line in any modern poet that reminded us of him, and will venture to assert that it is only poets of the second class ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... no more; 'Tis now a torture worse than all I bore; I'll not be bribed to suffer life, but die, In spite of your mistaken clemency. I was your slave, and I was used like one; The shame continues when the pain is gone: But I'm a king while this is in my hand—[His sword. He wants no subjects, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... hunchback, and his body was twisted and distorted to a remarkable degree yet in spite of his curved shoulders he was of more than average height, and of a breadth incredible. But his face! who can describe it? Seamed and scarred in deep gashes, as though by some hideous torture, the nose broken and flattened almost upon the cheek, there remained but little human about the awful countenance except the eyes. But these, as I found later, were of a beauty and expressiveness to make one forget their terrible setting. Large, pellucid, ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... temerity of the Titan by chaining him to a rock of Caucasus, and causing a vulture to devour his still-renewed heart. There was a prophecy afloat in heaven portending the fall of Jove, the secret of averting which was known only to Prometheus; and the god offered freedom from torture on condition of its being communicated to him. According to the mythological story, this referred to the offspring of Thetis, who was destined to be greater than his father. Prometheus at last bought pardon for his crime of enriching mankind with his gifts, by revealing the prophecy. ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... strikes, in the 1st of May demonstrations, where they promoted the idea of a general strike for an eight hours' day, and in the anti-militarist propaganda in the army, violent prosecutions were directed against them, especially in the Latin countries (including physical torture in the Barcelona Castle) and the United States (the execution of five Chicago Anarchists in 1887). Against these prosecutions the Anarchists retaliated by acts of violence which in their turn were ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... I suppose, through being myself a victim. Oh, I don't say there's any torture involved, but now and again mamma gives me an anesthetic, and when I wake up I find something has been done that I don't like—something vital taken ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... all thy lifelong weary years, A Man of sorrows and of tears, The cross, where all our sins were laid, Upon thy bending shoulders weighed; And death, that sets the prisoner free, Was pang and scoff and scorn to thee; Yet love through all thy torture glowed, And ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... procure whom the father and mother were shot. No reproach is inherited by the mistress who, day after day, tied up her female servant in an agonising posture, and had her beaten until there was no sound part in her body, securing her in the stocks during the intervals of torture. That man did not lose caste who tied up another woman and had her thrashed until she brought forth at the whipping-post. These are merely examples of thousands of cases which could be proved were an Imperial Commission to sit, and could the wretched victims ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... and receded. On our return we visited the ancient town of Aigues-Mortes, near the sea, famous for having been the place where the Protestant women were confined and punished even to death. We entered most of the strong and gloomy cells, and saw the instrument of torture. The tower and fortress are a perfect ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... truth, I was suffering more torture than if I had been run through, for in Diane's last word I felt all my hopes vanish, I was taken off my cross, however, by the necessity for action, for Pechaud, who had discreetly retired at mademoiselle's entrance, ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... out now, the thing he longed to know. It had been writing its fiery way through his soul. Had she meant to torture him this way all along, or was it the yielding to a sudden impulse that perhaps she had already repented? He looked at Marcia with piteous, almost pleading eyes, and her tortured young soul would have given anything ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... or would he be Christian? All the Roman in him said "No!" when he thought of submission to the patent and open injustice and fiendish tyranny which had disinherited him, slain his kindred, and held its impure reign by torture and by blood. He looked on the splendid snow-crowned mountains whose old silver senate engirdles Rome with an eternal and silent majesty of presence, and he thought how often in ancient times they had been a shelter to free blood that would not endure oppression; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... he needed money. The informers were there and he got it, and with it that spectacle of torture and of blood which he needed too. Curiously, his melancholy increased; his good looks had gone; Psyche was no longer amorous of his eyes. Something else haunted him, something he could not define; ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... much she dared not think—but she would not believe that his threat to take her boy from her was genuine. All she could think of, as she sat huddled up on the ground, was to cling to the belief that her boy would not be taken away, and that somehow the mental torture the man's existence caused her, and the physical pain he never hesitated to inflict, might some ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... at low water. The Island was very much out of the world; and the echoes of what went on in the world came vaguely as from a distance to the ears of the Island people. They were like enough to be safe, though there was blood and fire and torture on the mainland. They were all old and helpless people, and they might well be safe from the soldiery. There was no yeomanry corps within many miles of the Island, and it was the yeomanry, tales of whose ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... Carrier called his Republican Baptisms. The Republican Marriages were, if possible, a still greater refinement of cruelty. Two persons of different sexes, bereft of every species of dress, were bound together, and after being left in torture in that situation for half an hour, thrown into the river. Such was the quantity of corpses accumulated in the Loire, that the water of that river was affected, so as to render a public ordinance ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... He finds little children crying in the dark and leads them Home! Batholommey and the rest of them sneer at me for sticking to the old hell-fire Calvin doctrines in these days of pew-cushion religion. But I tell you, in all reverence, if there's no hell for the people who torture children, then it's time the Almighty turned awhile from pardoning ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... began to resume its normal position again, though he felt that this seeming ignorance of his identity might be a mere veneer, a wile of guile, as the bard puts it. He remembered, with a pang, a story in some magazine where a prisoner was subjected to what the light-hearted inquisitors called the torture of hope. He was allowed to escape from prison, and pass guards and sentries apparently without their noticing him. Then, just as he stepped into the open air, the chief inquisitor tapped him gently on the shoulder, and, more in sorrow than in ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... discover, that your aim is to torture me, for relinquishing a beloved object, whom you are, at this moment, attaching to yourself;—to know, that a diabolical disposition, for which I cannot account, prompts you to come here, without ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... from the rest of the cafe, so that only the waiters commented on the strange party. At first there was oppressive silence; then the host turned to Europena and asked her what she liked best to eat. A moment of torture ensued for the small lady, during which she nearly twisted her thumb from its socket, then she ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... with her, sit opposite to her while she ate and drank, see her, perhaps, with her hair in curl-papers, know possibly that she had a corn upon her foot, hear her speak maybe of a decayed tooth, or of a chilblain, would have been torture to me. Into such abyss of the commonplace there was no fear of my dragging her, and for this I was glad. In the future she would be yet more removed from me. She was older than I was; she must be now a woman. Instinctively ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Since Christ is the corner stone whereon we are laid, it must be only through him that we are to treat with God, as we have heard sufficiently above; for God does not look upon my cross even though I torture myself to death, but he looks upon Christ through whom my works are acceptable before God, which otherwise would not be worth an alms of a straw's value. Therefore Scripture calls Christ properly a precious corner stone which imparts its virtue to all who through faith are built upon it. So, ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... months before escaping, Washington had been secreted in order to shun both master and auction-block. Smith believed in selling, flogging, cobbing, paddling, and all other kinds of torture, by which he could inflict punishment in order to make the slaves feel his power. He thus tyrannized over about ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... say. "This world is the real hell, ending in the eternal naught. The dreams of a life beyond and of re-union there are but a demon's mocking breathed into the mortal heart, lest by its universal suicide mankind should rob him of his torture-pit. There is no truth in all your father taught you" (he was a clergyman and rather eminent in his profession), "there is no hope for man, there is nothing he can win except the deep happiness of ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... not forget either their merit or their sufferings. There are men (and many, I trust, there are) who, out of love to their country and their kind, would torture their invention to find excuses for the mistakes of their brethren; and who, to stifle dissension, would construe even doubtful appearances with the utmost favour: such men will never persuade themselves to be ingenious and refined in discovering disaffection ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... are indoor compositions, enclosed spaces in which wander aimlessly or deliriously the wraiths of damned men, not a whit less wretched nor awful than Dante's immemorial mob. Piranesi shows us cavernous abodes where appalling engines of torture fill the foreground, while above, at vertiginous heights, we barely discern perilous passageways, haunted windows peering out upon the high heavens, stone-fretted ceilings that are lost in a magic mist. By a sort of diabolic modulation the artist conducts our eye ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... one of a class of religious fanatics, who, ignorant of a God of love and mercy, believe that holiness can be obtained by practising the most rigid self-denial and the infliction of every variety of torture on themselves. ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... shuddering undergraduate life flitting about the place—luckless youths, in white ties and bands, who are undergoing the peine forte et dure with different degrees of composure; and their friends who are there to look after them. You may go in and watch the torture yourself if you are so minded, for the viva voce schools are open to the public. But one such experiment will be enough for you, unless you are very hard-hearted. The sight of the long table, behind which sit Minos, Rhadamanthus & Co., full-robed, stern of face, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... "only suffered from not being able to prove to Satan how much she burned to suffer for his sake;" here she has no Satan. Both European and African are the firmest believers in their own powers; they often confess, although knowing that the confession leads directly to torture and death, with all the diabolical ingenuity of which either race was capable. In Tuckey's time a bargain was concluded by breaking a leaf or a blade of grass, and this rite it was "found necessary to perform with the seller of every fowl:" apparently it is ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the Bible and other absolutely loathsome literary lepers, dwell among broken pens, bad, groundy ink and ruled blotting-paper made in France—all eagerly burning to write, and all inflicted with incurable aphasia. I should not have thought upon that torture had I not suffered it in moderation myself, but it is too horrid even for a hell; let's let 'em ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of inaction to which we were doomed, aggravated by the stings of mosquitoes and large green-eyed flies, became a perfect torture. ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... of her judgment told her it was better for them to remain apart, but her longing to see Brandon grew stronger as the prospect of it grew less, and she became angry that it could not be gratified. Jane was right; an unsatisfied desire with Mary was torture. Even her sense of the great distance between them had begun to fade, and when she so wished for him and he did not come, their positions seemed to be reversed. At the end of the third day she sent for him to come to her rooms, but he, by a mighty effort, ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... little from the force of the blast by a huge stack of chimneys that rose to windward: while he clung thus waiting—louder than he had yet heard it, almost in his very ear, arose the musical ghost-cry—this time like that of a soul in torture. The moon came out, as at the cry, to see, but Donal could spy nothing to suggest its origin. As if disappointed, the moon instantly withdrew, the darkness again fell, and the wind rushed upon him full of keen slanting rain, as if with fierce intent of protecting the secret: there was little ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... could not help her and that his presence only made matters worse, went away perplexedly. The following week was a miserable one for him. His duties were distasteful to him and meeting his people a positive torture. Sometimes Mrs. Danby looked dubiously at him and seemed on the point of saying something—but never said it. Isabel King watched him when they met, with bold probing eyes. In his abstraction he did not notice this any more than he noticed ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the great masters mentally; on one side the holy figures of El Greco, with their greenish or bluish spirituality, slender and undulating; beyond, the wrinkled, black heads of Ribera, with ferocious expressions of torture and pain—marvelous artists, whom Renovales admired, while determined not to imitate them. Afterwards, between the railing that protects the pictures and the line of busts, show-cases and marble tables supported by gilded lions, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... situation and remind me of Booker Washington. They will say, "He was not lynched. He was accepted. Any Negro like him is safe, if he behaves himself." I answer that I have no fancy for mob murder or torture of any human being, ignorant or wise, good or bad. There are, moreover, other answers to the riddle of that great constructive educator's career. One is creditable to the white southerners. They are not all eager for Negro blood. There ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... continuation of present pleasures. His Heaven is a delightful country, far away beyond the unknown Western seas, where the skies are ever bright and serene, the air genial, the spring eternal, and the forests abounding in game; no war, disease, or torture are known in that happy land; the sufferings of life are endured no more, and its sweetest pleasures are perpetuated and increased; his wife is tender and obedient, his children dutiful and affectionate. In this country of ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... call me here the wizard, boy, Of dark and subtle skill, To agonize but not destroy, To torture, not to kill. When swords are out and shriek and shout Leave little room for prayer, No fetter on man's arm or heart Hangs half ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... she "has a hundred hideous deaths" reserved for her victims, "such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed," which "she uses with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and justice;" "she inflicts torture in apparent wantonness;" "everything which the worst men commit against life and property is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents;" "Nature has noyades more fatal than those of Carrier: her plague and cholera far surpass the poison-cups of the Borgias." Such ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... Nanna, being wakeful with the torture of an aching tooth, happened to glance through the north windows of the room occupied by the sisters and saw a dull-red glow on the horizon—a conflagration. She aroused Esmay, and the two ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... points to the south-west, whilst Dir and all other indications point to the south-east. But Pashai seems to me the reading to which all texts tend, whilst it is clearly expressed in the G. T. (Pasciai), and it is contrary to all my experience of the interpretation of Marco Polo to attempt to torture the name in the way which has been common with commentators professed and occasional. But dropping this name for a moment, let us see to what the other indications ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... but the boy's manifest acquiescence in the affair when his cool moments came next morning, and the melancholy air of kindness with which the Doctor went in to kiss him a goodnight, after such regimen, kept alive her faith in the unvarying justice of the parson. Therefore she tried hard to torture her poor little heart into a feeling of its own blackness, (for that it was very black she had the good man's averment,) she listened gravely to all he had to urge, and when he had fairly overburdened her with the enumeration of her wicked, worldly appetites, she could only say, with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... unshaken Conviction, at least, that our meeting would be Without peril to YOU, although haply to me The salvation of all my existence. "I own, When the rumor first reach'd me, which lightly made known To the world your engagement, my heart and my mind Suffer'd torture intense. It was cruel to find That so much of the life of my life, half unknown To myself, had been silently settled on one Upon whom but to think it would soon be a crime. Then I said to myself, 'From the thraldom which time Hath not weaken'd there rests but one hope of escape. That ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... see," glancing at the empty baskets, "every crumb cleared. This is wonderful air for giving one an appetite," she remarked, turning to Mrs. Vercoe, and Mrs. Vercoe agreed; but the children felt that neither of them understood that fact as they did. It was almost torture to hear Cousin Charlotte say she was going home to her meal. Their longing to join her was almost more than they could bear. They were thankful, though, that she did not ask them how they had enjoyed their lunch, and what Anna's patties were like, or ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... with Artemis Or yield the breast to Aphrodite? Both are mighty; Both give bliss; Each can torture if divided; Each claims worship undivided, In her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his people, but who is racked by the thought that in giving his mind to temporal duties and domestic affections while such spiritual difficulties are still unsolved, he may be preparing for himself an eternity of torture such as that—" and he pointed to an old and blackened picture of the Last Judgment that hung on ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... overboard everything that degrades music to a science, and 'go to nature,' as Mr Ruskin counsels, 'rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.' What would be the result? The result would be the torture of everybody in the country who had the misfortune to possess a cultivated ear. And yet the music of that time would not be absolutely disagreeable in itself: it would merely involve the deprivation of what had become a necessary to the taste; for nature would still inspire simple ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... 'kelleg'?" said Harvey, who had a vague idea it might be some kind of marine torture, ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... had brought in no prisoners, he did not now witness their horrible mode of torture. Before he left them, however, he saw enough of their awful cruelty in this way. Sometimes the poor prisoner would be tied to a stake, a pile of green wood placed around him, fire applied, and the poor wretch left to his horrible fate, while, amid shouts ...
— The Adventures of Daniel Boone: the Kentucky rifleman • Uncle Philip
... which the cruel punishment of impalement used to be inflicted. And Paul's thought is, not that he has a little, trivial trouble to bear, but that he is, as it were, forced quivering upon that tremendous torture. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... careless Indian would swing himself into the saddle, and in a few rough jerks teach the unruly animal to recognize a master. Of course, long before this, the rooster was dead, for at the first strong clutch his neck was broken, so that there was no unnecessary torture. The stream of riders flowed on, and at last one lucky fellow gave the right kind of a pull, and out came the rooster, to be swung around his head with a fierce ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum[320] Of human cities torture: I can see[jg] Nothing to loathe in Nature, save to be[jh] A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, Classed among creatures, when the soul can flee, And with the sky—the peak—the heaving plain[ji] Of Ocean, or the stars, mingle—and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... despatch was necessary in rifling any towns or villages into which they could force an entrance; every one whose appearance indicated the probability of his possessing money was immediately put to the most horrid torture till he either pointed out his hoard or died under the infliction. Nothing was safe from the pursuit of Pindari lust or avarice; it was their common practice to burn and destroy what they could ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... work to a close by the glare of his leaping camp-fire. Now, unless he meant only to perish, he must once more eat and sleep while he might. Then let the storm fall; the moment it was safely over and the wind in the right quarter he would sail. As for the thirst which had been such a torture while thwarted, now that it ruled unchallenged, it was purely a wild, glad zeal as full of method as of diligence. But first he must make his diminished provisions and his powder safe against the elements; and this he did, covering them with a waterproof ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... feet, in maintaining an air of respect and of ease suitable to a superior class of walking gentlemen, while those best qualified are about to do the same thing over in the queen's apartment.[2142]—The king, however, as an indirect consequence, suffers the same torture and the same inaction as he imposes. He also is playing a part; all his steps and all his gestures have been determined beforehand; he has been obliged to arrange his physiognomy and his voice, never to depart from an affable ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a pause which, the Englishman knew, might be broken by an order to torture and kill him. He did not understand their hesitancy, but he meant at any rate to take advantage of it. He must engage the attention of the giant chief before him. Slowly he pulled from his pocket his heavy silver watch and held it up ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... drew his revolver. The bullet would do quickly what the cold would accomplish after lingering hours of torture, yet, facing those pricking ears and the brave trust of the eyes, he was blinded by a mist and could not aim. He had to place the muzzle of the gun against the roan's temple and pull the trigger. When he turned his back he was the only ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... George said, 'I could not sleep for thinking of that light, jab-jabbing the poor fellow in his cell. Nay, it appeared to be in my own bedroom, searching for my face and challenging me, "Are you there? Ha, ha, are you there?" What an eerie torture, to a slumbering soul, in that recurrent flame from the prison darkness! The thing stings and ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... without any thing visible to torment them, groaning more piteously than any that I had hitherto heard in Hell. "Mercy upon us," said I, "what causes these people to complain more than the rest, when they have neither torture nor devil near them?" "O," said the angel, "the less torment they have without, the more they have within. These are refractory heretics, atheists, antichristians, worldly- wise ones, abjurers of the faith, persecutors of the church, and an ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... slavery was a bad thing. This story is the things my mother and father told me of slavery and my own observations since I became old enough to remember the general happenings. Mother said the place which had been a place of torture in slavery days turned out to be a haven of rest after slavery, a home where peace, ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... the magistrate. "But if you know all about it, why put my professional discretion to the torture by asking absurd questions?" ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... proclaims that she has, a 'horror of blood.' Nevertheless, when confronted by heresy, she does not content herself with persuasion; arguments of an intellectual and moral order appear to her insufficient, and she has recourse to force, to corporal punishment, to torture. She creates tribunals like those of the Inquisition, she calls the laws of the state to her aid, if necessary she encourages a crusade, or a religious war, and all her 'horror of blood' practically culminates into urging the secular power to shed it, which proceeding ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... put to death. But he must go presently without all delay: and he that hath suffered the iniury, carieth him, as it were captiue. They punish no man with sentence of death, vnles hee bee taken in the deede doing, or confesseth the same. But being accused by the multitude, they put him vnto extreame torture to make him confesse the trueth. They punish murther with death, and carnall copulation also with any other besides his owne. By his own, I meane his wife or his maid seruant, for he may vse his slaue as he listeth himself. Heinous theft also or felony they ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... Henry C. Superstition and Force. Essays on the wager of law, the wager of battle, the ordeal, torture. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... near torture, as she played with his tie again, and he controlled himself and spoke ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... born to torture me! O what a fall, what a humiliation! Such a scheme to wreck upon so small a trifle! But ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... permitting glimpses of unfamiliar perspectives within; life suddenly made itself visible to me under a totally novel aspect. I felt as though I had just been born into a new world and a new order of things. A frightful anguish commenced to torture-my heart as with red-hot pincers. Every successive minute seemed to me at once but a second and yet a century. Meanwhile the ceremony was proceeding, and I shortly found myself transported far from that world of which my newly born ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... homes and families from savages who give no quarter, though they have often received it, and where the possibility of defeat in action carries with it the certainty of death and often of preceding torture. ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... since you want me to specify the reason, you understand that I am not going to torture my brain to turn it into a romance for you, or commence by recounting in the naturalistic manner of what stuff my first trousers were made, or, as the neo-Catholics would have it, how often I went as a child to confession, and how much ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... could behold the roasting of his own subjects with infinite self-applause and sang-froid. The stone marks the spot, in this area, on which those cruel exhibitions were executed. Here our martyr Latimer preached patience to friar Forest, agonizing under the torture of a slow fire, for denying the king's supremacy; and to this place our martyr Cranmer compelled the amiable Edward, by forcing his reluctant hand to the warrant, to send Joan Bocher, a silly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... her now, that life without love would be more than the agonies of the lowest hells. Then again, to live with Rathunor as his wife, while he all the time thought her to be Nu-nah, would be an incessant torture, keener and more intense than if she were chained by, as a third person, to behold him loving the actual ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... of terrible frigidity. Somewhere on the other side of the Tweed and Cheviots was the spot selected by the Celt of southern Britain. On the other hand, the eastern mind, which knew the terrors of a sun-smitten land and of a heat that was torture, had for a hell a fiery place of ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... he produced contained exactly these words: "With respect to your ladyship's anxiety to know how far the acquaintance with Mr. De Q. is likely to be of service to your son, I think I may now venture to say that"—There the sibylline fragment ended; nor could we torture it into any further revelation. However, both of us saw the propriety of not ourselves practising any mystery, nor giving any advantage to Mr. G. by imperfect communications; and accordingly, on the day after we reached Dublin, we addressed ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... her seat at the tea-table—"so impulsive and volatile. But he's a dear good boy nevertheless—was so kind to his mother while she was alive, and ran away from school when quite young—and no wonder, for it was a dreadful school, where they used to torture the boys,—absolutely tortured them. The head-master and ushers were tried for it afterwards, I'm told. At all events; Eddy ran away from it after pulling the master's nose and kicking the head usher—so it is said, though I cannot believe it, he is usually so gentle and ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... France, where alone, of all the Catholic states, there were any great numbers of Protestants. In 1762 a Huguenot of Toulouse, unjustly charged with crime, was put to torture and to death, under the pressure of the old persecuting spirit. Many Huguenots thought the persecutions of former times were reviving, and prepared to flee to Switzerland. But Voltaire took up the matter, and so wrought upon public opinion that the Paris parliament reviewed the case, and ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... "You can torture me," she said scornfully. "You can kill me. But I will never give you the papers; you may be ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... party has developed new and alarming modes of torture for our helpless and sleeping victims. Last Thursday night we loaded up a small organ on a hack and with our other usual instruments made an assault upon the quiet air of midnight that made the ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... 'tis not true. In vain, in vain I smother All the torture that racks me. I love Mimi, she is my only treasure! I love her, ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... very obscure. Some critics think that Plutarch is speaking of torture. But it is more likely that he is speaking of the debtors being in attendance at the courts and waiting under the open sky at all seasons till the suits about the debts ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... Massacre in the Vivarais. 26. Decreed, that the Louvre and the Tuilleries united shall be the habitation of the King, and that all monuments of science and art shall be collected and kept there. 31. Decreed, that the punishment of death shall be inflicted without torture. From thence came the use of the guillotine;-an instrument of death so called from its author, a member of the national assembly. June. Letter of the Abbe Raynal to the assembly. Persecutions against non-conforming ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... often consists of shamming. Good manners are the absence of sham. It is not the gentleman's place, certainly, to insult the lady. Good manners seldom go quite so far as that. But even politeness cannot expect him to endure the torture for more than a limited time, especially if the topic chosen chances to be his own specialty. It is his place to lead the conversation, as gently as possible, back upon more neutral ground, where he may find what consolation he can in sprightly ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... her collection with the swiftness and directness of the entomologist discovering a new bug. She herself loved music—without understanding it very deeply—and Baskinelli, whatever might be his other gifts, could summon all the cadences of love from the machines that people call a piano—engine of torture or ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... back into the machine, and sank limply into the shaded corner of the seat. Six hours of this—it would be torture; and there would be one long night of walking to reach water; another day of waiting for night—without food—and again a long, staggering walk before they reached ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... which he confessed. Afterwards he told me of poor Mr. Spong, that being with other people examined before the King and Council (they being laid up as suspected persons; and it seems Spong is so far thought guilty as that they intend to pitch upon him to put to the wracke or some other torture), he do take knowledge of my Lord Sandwich, and said that he was well known to Mr. Pepys. But my Lord knows, and I told him, that it was only in matter of musique and pipes, but that I thought him to be ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of the Afridi who is now dead. They made ready to torture me, showing me the knives they would use. But she came, and they obeyed her, binding the Afridi fast to me. After that I heard the sahib's voice, and then this happened. ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... theatre of sad horrors; past and gone as they are, these things stir a man's blood, like a great wrong or passion of the instant. And with these in their minds, and with a museum there, having a chamber full of such frightful instruments of torture as the devil in a brain fever could scarcely invent, there are hundreds of parrots, who will declaim to you in speech and print, by the hour together, on the degeneracy of the times in which a railroad is building across the water at Venice; instead ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... Clever at self-torture, he continued to harass his soul, always on the same line. "Suppose," he said, "for the sake of argument, that I have tamed my pride, and subdued my body, suppose that at present there were nothing to do, but to go forward, I am still brought up, for the final ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... instrument in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure under its blade—which the custodian confessed to be a modern improvement placed there by Signor P——. Yet my credulity was so strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation the torture of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as well preserved as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton beneath it—found as we saw it—was entire ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... gaolers, lictors[146]—all that we now understand by the police force—waited subserviently on his nod. It rested with him, says Lydus, to establish the authority of the Court of Justice by means of the wholesome fear inspired by iron chains and scourges and the whole apparatus of torture[147]. Nay, not only did the subordinate magistrates execute their sentences by his agency, he had even the honour of being chosen by the Emperor himself to be the minister of vengeance against the persons who had incurred his anger or his suspicion. 'I myself remember,' says Lydus, ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... protection one to the other, flew to arms. A short and desperate struggle ensued, but the victory remained in the hands of the abbot of Vezelay. Hundreds of brave men were put, without mercy, to the sword, and many, with less mercy, burnt alive or died by the torture in the dark dungeons of the abbatical palace. Vezelay still preserves in its archives the names of twelve ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... the repentance which God required, was for a man to punish himself bitterly for his sins; to starve and torture himself, to give up all that makes life pleasant, and so to atone. And good and pious men and women, with a real hatred and horror of sin, tried this: but they found that making themselves miserable took ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... pictures to himself a continuation of present pleasures. His Heaven is a delightful country, far away beyond the unknown Western seas, where the skies are ever bright and serene, the air genial, the spring eternal, and the forests abounding in game; no war, disease, or torture are known in that happy land; the sufferings of life are endured no more, and its sweetest pleasures are perpetuated and increased; his wife is tender and obedient, his children dutiful and affectionate. In this country of eternal ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... apparitions used to come to my bedside, and if I dropped to sleep with any thought half formed or half developed, the odd half of that thought became impregnated, somehow, and straightway loomed up a goblin, or a giant, or a grotesque something, that proceeded to torture me, like a sort of Frankenstein, for having made it. Amid all these ghastly things, there came beautiful glimpses of form, scene, and sensation, that straightway changed to horrors. I remember, for example, that I was gliding down a stream, where the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Holy Father, the Pope! I tell you not of things learned by hearsay; I myself have beheld all these horrors in the Holy Land of Palestine. Through the ancient streets of Jerusalem the accursed infidels stalk in the evil pride of conquest. They insult and oppress, they torture and murder the followers of Christ. They rob and maltreat the pious pilgrims from all lands who toil through desert and over mountain to worship at the tomb of their Lord. Scarcely will these heathen suffer the adoration of Christ ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... reached him. The wonder of the incident was that a thrush should still be left—there had not been one in the garden for two months. Berries all gone, ground hard and foodless, streams frozen, snow lying for weeks, frost stealing away the vital heat—ingenuity could not devise a more terrible scene of torture to the birds. Neither for the thrushes nor for the new-born infants in the tent did the onslaught of the winter slacken. No pity in earth or heaven. This one thrush did, indeed, by some exceptional ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Americans in the Archangel area they had found the French soldiers wildly aflame with the idea that a man captured by the Bolsheviks was bound to suffer torture and mutilation. And one wicked day when the Reds were left in possession of the field the French soldiers came back reporting that they had mercifully put their mortally wounded men, those whom they could not carry away, out of danger of torture by the Red Guards by themselves ending ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... But what have lovers to do with ridiculous affectations of fearing no man or woman? They know that in the turning of a hand the whole cosmic engine to the remotest star may become an instrument of music or an instrument of torture. They hear a song older than Suckling's, that has survived a hundred philosophies. 'Who is this that looketh out of the window, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... were leading him to a hut where he might be confined and guarded against the coming of the nocturnal orgy that would mark his torture-laden death. He halted as he heard the notes of Tantor's call, and raising his head, gave vent to a terrifying scream that sent cold chills through the superstitious blacks and caused the warriors who guarded him to leap back even though their prisoner's arms ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... follows:— "Ne'er does the clever man, who seeks to advise us in sorrow, Think how little his chilling words our hearts can deliver From the pangs which an unseen destiny fastens upon us. You are happy and merry. How then should a jest ever wound you? But the slightest touch gives torture to those who are suff'ring. Even dissimulation would nothing avail me at present. Let me at once disclose what later would deepen my sorrow, And consign me perchance to agony mute and consuming. Let me depart forthwith! No more in this house dare I linger; ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... about your bag," I cried. "And I don't care a hang if I've lost my pyjamas and my best shoes and my only razor. And I've been through an hour's torture for nothing, and I don't mind that. But oh!—to think that you aren't going ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... abated without his being put to the torture of amputation. But we must surely admire the manly resolution which he discovered while it ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... because I am a man, a free man of Dantzic, that I appeal against this monstrous treatment. Be a man! why, I appeal to you, sir, to be a man, and to give up that situation, if it can only be retained by cruelty to others. I say again, be you a man, and cease to torture me." ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... limits. In the country it is asked "Does he drink?" In the city it is asked "Does he get drunk?" The two methods are essentially the results of two conditions. The mistake of the one locality is to apply its own preliminary to the other. Now, again, to this frightful question of woman-torture: Society knows all about woman. It knows that the wife must be the arbiter of her own sufferings. Her brother, being less wise than Society, separates the ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... fright as she stood alone by the door and stared into the gloomy twilight into which her companion had advanced. As her eyes became used to the ruddy dusk, she could see better, but everywhere they lighted on shapes inexplicable, whose forms to the first questioning thought suggested instruments of torture; but cruel as some of them looked, they were almost too strange, contorted, fantastical for such. Still, the wood-cuts in a certain book she had been familiar with in childhood, commonly called Fox's Book of Martyrs, kept haunting her mind's eye—and were they not Papists into ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... person cutting a chicken's head off, and as for shooting a poor, innocent bird for sport, I think it is a great wrong and should not be allowed. Did you ever think what a barbarous set we were—worse than Indians or Fiji Islanders! There is nothing living but what we torture and kill. As for fear . . . my candid opinion is that the only time one is out of danger is when sailing through ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... must go at once and be rigged up. You had better order a hansom—never mind the extravagance—it will be untold torture, but it is a promise, and it must be done. Annie, love, you are exquisite on the subject of dress; come and see Antonia ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... infernal machines, thumb screws, spiked collars, and other dretful implements of torture like black shadders throwed from the past. A piece of the boat that the Doge went to his weddin' in when he married the water wuz interestin'; weddin's always did interest females and males too, no matter whether the bride wuz formed out of dust or nothin' but clear ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... of?" he demanded of himself, "to have forgotten her, and what my madness would bring upon her? I am a selfish fool! Let it go. I will give it up. I will stay in Riggan for the future—it will not be long, and she need torture herself no more. I will give it up. Let them think I am afraid to face him. I am afraid—afraid to wound the woman ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... attend to her hurt, interrupting Amalia's flow of speech, and Harry went out to the animals, full of care and misgiving. What now could he do? How endure the days to come with their torture of repression? How shield her from himself and his love—when she so freely gave? What middle course was possible, without ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... for that, dear, dear Mr. Littlepage! Oh! Thank you for that, from the bottom of my heart. But may they not torture him? Do not these Hurons torture their prisoners? Conceal nothing from me, Corny; you cannot imagine how much self-command I have, and how well I can behave. ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... cruelty which by that beldam ill Was practised on the prisoned cavalier, And who prepared the wretched Child to kill, By torture new and pains unused whilere, While so Rogero pined, the gracious will Of Heaven conveyed to gentle Leo's ear; And put into his heart the means to aid, And not to let ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... wholly perfect harmony, and for this reason musicians deliberately intercalate discordant sounds—what are technically called dissonances. So, finally, it happens that physical exercise, even if it was at first undertaken for pleasure, becomes a torture when continued without interruption. ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... began the man slowly, "isn't that there's danger and death. They are easy. The trouble with war is this. It's dull, damned deadly dull. It's the slowest thing in the world. It wears away at your mind, like water dripping on a rock. The old Indian torture of letting water fall on your skull, drop by drop, till you went raving crazy, is nothing to what war does to the mind of millions of men. They can't think of anything else but war, and they have no thoughts about that. They can't talk of another blessed ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... apart of her arms over her head, Sarah separated the stricks into three and laid them overlapping on the carriage. The ribbon thus created was never-ending and wound away into the torture chambers of wheels and teeth within, while from the rear of the Spreader trickled out the new-created sliver. Great scales hung beside Sarah and from time to time she weighed fresh loads of long line and ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... New England borders, where they surprised and burned farmhouses and small hamlets, killed men, women, and children without distinction, carried others prisoners to their village, subjected them to the torture of "running the gantlet," and compelled them to witness dances of triumph around the scalps of parents, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... once at the watch on his wrist. He did not feel the torture of the tight gold cord. He was thinking in terms of daylight, and of how much time had passed since he ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... pony), as, except in Reykjavik, horse furniture is of the most miserable description, and the constant breakages cause many delays, while there are actually no side-saddles, except in the capital, and a chair is an instrument of torture only to be recommended to your ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... such memorials as these will be the only remains of that noble but unfortunate race who once peopled the continent of North America. War has slain its thousands, but alcohol its tens of thousands; and the fortitude which could bear without shrinking the most cruel inflictions of torture, has proved powerless to resist the seductions of strong drink. It is to be feared a heavy retribution awaits the white man, the ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... door as judge; retains Charon in his old office of boatman over the Stygian lake; puts fabulous people with real among the damned, Dido, and Cacus, and Ephialtes, with Ezzelino and Pope Nicholas the Fifth; and associates the Centaurs and the Furies with the agents of diabolical torture. It has pleased him also to elevate Cato of Utica to the office of warder of purgatory, though the censor's poor good wife, Marcia, is detained in the regions below. By these and other far greater inconsistencies, the whole place of punishment becomes a reductio ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... you can't. If you do I shall go away a sorrowful man. I shall go at once too—to-night or to-morrow morning at latest, for my heart bleeds to look at you and I can't stay here any longer to see you suffer. It is not torture to ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Yet at the time I must argue with her—with her! When all my courage should have gone to love-making, I was plucking it up to sail as near as I might to plain remonstrance! I little dreamt how the ghost of every petty word was presently to return and torture me. ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... reflections of Agnes were also startlingly alert. She seemed two or three unfortunate people at once. Now it was Lady Jane Grey going to the tower. Now it was Beatrice Cenci going to torture. Now it was Mary Magdalene going to the cross. At almost every house she felt a kindness speak for her, except mankind; a recollection of nursing, comforting, praying with some one, but all forgotten ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... was yet day. Fierce was the pain of my wound, But I saw it was death to stir, For fifty paces away Their trenches were. In torture I prayed for the dark And the stealthy step of my friend Who, stanch to the very end, Would creep to the danger zone And offer his life as a ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... leaders. To San Marco they went, fired the buildings, burst open the doors, fought their way into the cloisters and church, dragged Savonarola from his devotions, and thrust him into a loathsome dungeon. After languishing there, amid every indignity and torture, for some weeks, on May 23, 1498, he was led forth to die. The bishop, whose duty it was to pronounce his degradation, stumbled at the formula declaring—"I separate thee from the Church, militant and triumphant." "From the militant thou mayest, ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... sought by violent emotions and excessive fatigue to escape from the thoughts which were persecuting him like spectres, and driving him to his death. In vain the physicians commanded rest and quiet. When attacked by an incurable lung trouble, he required absolute repose: but repose was torture; he preferred death as a deliverance. Dr. Malfatti, who took the keenest interest in him, and who was much disturbed by his many imprudences, entreated him not to throw away wantonly a life which might be so well and usefully employed. "It is a great ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... of frame must be added the torture of the heart arising from a difference with his father, who, as a Catholic, was disturbed by the skeptical tendencies of his son, and the perpetual irritation of a conflict with the large majority of even philosophical minds. An early death might ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... pitiable. While all this was torture to her inexperience and timidity, her fear of her mother rendered her wholly submissive. Each day brought with it some new trial. She was admired for many reasons,—by some for her wealth, of which all had heard rumors; by others for her ...
— Esmeralda • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... wooden "contraptions" went on with straps and I could not make the runners stay in the middle of my soles where they belonged, hence my ankles not only tipped in awkwardly but the stiff outer edges of my boot counters dug holes in my skin so that my outing was a kind of torture after all. Nevertheless, I persisted and, while Burton circled and swooped like a hawk, I sprawled with flapping arms in a mist of ignoble rage. That I learned to skate fairly well even under these disadvantages argues a high degree ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... confessional is similarly arranged and equally plain. We examined this rather more minutely than the other, and whilst we could find nothing dreadful in the penitents' apartment, we fancied, on entering the priest's side, that, we had met with something belonging the realm of confessional torture as depicted by the Hogans, Murphys, and Maria Monk showmen, and which the officials had forgot to put by in some of their secret drawers. It was hung upon a nail, had a semi- circular, half viperish look, and was cupped at each end as if intended for ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... They generally killed the lords and nobles in the following way. They made wooden gridirons of stakes, bound them upon them, and made a slow fire beneath: thus the victims gave up the spirit by degrees, emitting cries of despair in their torture. 9. I once saw that they had four or five of the chief lords stretched on the gridirons to burn them, and I think also there were two or three pairs of gridirons, where they were burning others; and because they cried ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... Gersay overcame any scruples that might have arisen in her mind against again yielding to the maternal instinct, and another son came to her, one who was destined to meet a most horrible fate and cause her the most exquisite mental torture. ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... and said, "As there is a God in heaven, thou dost not love me, an thou canst go to war and leave me to die o' grief." Then, as though 'twas torn from him, he burst forth, "Now as there is a God, thou dost not love me, to torture me thus!" ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... "They have civilly asked her and grossly forced her to ask civilly to go away, which she has done, with a pension of twelve hundred a year." Such a request is like the embrace of the "virgin" in old torture-chambers. She is robed in soft raiment, but beneath it are the knife-blades which are ready to lacerate and kill the victim, if he awaits the pressure of ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be {251} flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, "You lie!" No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, "We ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... been indiscriminately herded together to form it, it was (with the exception of Mrs. Alwynn) a dreary or at best an uninteresting ordeal; while to four people among the number, the four who had met last on the church steps, it was a period of slow torture, endured with varying degrees of patience by each, from the two soups in the beginning, to the peaches and grapes at ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... driven him down there, and he cursed with his own lips, while he stifled in the depths of his own soul another name. His years, his life, had been wasted, just as this man Prebol's life was wasted, just as Slip's life was being wasted. Buck gave himself over to the exquisite torture of memories and reflections. He wondered what had become of the woman for love of whom he had let go all holds and degenerated to this heartless occupation ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... you say this to me?" cried Mrs. Vane, with a sudden flash of indignation, and then the tears streamed over her lovely cheeks; and even a Pomander might have forborne to torture her so; but Sir ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... to do it, Billy. It's to save you torture, old fellow, just to save you useless suffering, Billy." He drew his pistol from his belt, took careful aim just behind the pony's ear, and, turning his ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... striving to master the fierce emotion in his breast. His eyes were mostly fixed on me with a savage scowl, and for a moment or so I fancied that he must have saved my life so as to take it himself in some way which would add torture and throw dismay amongst ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... of the frightful manner in which the knife had cut Merriwell, and then, despite his feeble struggles, Diamond was placed upon the instrument of torture. ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... what numbers of young men in Catholic countries devote themselves to lives of celibacy. Think how many young men lose all their confidence in the presence of the young woman to whom they are most attracted, and at last steal away from a companionship which it is rapture to dream of and torture to endure, so does the presence of the beloved object paralyze all the powers of expression. Sorcerers have in all time and countries played on the hopes and terrors of lovers. Once let loose a strong impulse on the centre of inhibition, and the warrior who had faced bayonets and batteries ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and error. Better any error than persecution! Better any opinion than the thumb-screw, the rack, and the stake! And he knows also how unspeakably absurd it is, for a creature to whom himself and everything around him are mysteries, to torture and slay others, because they cannot think as he does in regard to the profoundest of those mysteries, to understand which is utterly beyond the comprehension of either the persecutor ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... conscience, or nothing can be more unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the Christians. It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the vermin they harbored. Our libraries are crammed with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... take us home!" Side by side they threaded an aisle between rows of the carefree dead, whom no malignant Miss Juliana could torture. Behind them marched their captor, Merle stepping blithely ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... visible was a slight pallor and a graver aspect. Mrs. Loring scrutinized her countenance closely. This she bore without a sign of embarrassment. She partook but lightly of food. After the meal closed she retired to her own room, once more to torture her brain in a fruitless effort to solve this great problem ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... without reserve or return. To uncertainty, disquietude of soul, anguish, longing for an unknown good, bitter regrets, had succeeded a delicious calm, the ecstasy of the lost child who finds his mother, and forgets in a moment the torture ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... moaned Little, squirming out of his bed and trying to lift his friend up. Then his own world spun around him, and he fell beside Barry, every inch of ant-bitten skin a blazing patch of torture. ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... francs' worth, notes and bonds, the wicked gains of one of her lovers (Grippon, the Marquis's fraudulent intendant), and promptly expiring—may pair off with Falgouet's repeating on himself the Spanish torture-death of the guanches,[530] as pure melodrama. In fact the whole thing is undigested, and shows, in a high degree, that initial difficulty in getting on with the story which has not quite disappeared in L'Abbe Tigrane, but which has been completely ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... asses—One really pitied the poor saints and martyrs for having such blind biographers—such dunghill cocks, who overlooked the pearl of real human love and nobleness in them, in their greediness to snatch up and parade the rotten chaff of superstition, and self-torture, and spiritual dyspepsia, which had overlaid it. My dear fellow, that Calendar ruins your cause—you are "sacres aristocrates"—kings and queens, bishops and virgins by the hundred at one end; a beggar or two at the other; and but one real human lay St. Homobonus to fill up the great ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... delight to torture me; behold the man who loves you more than his own eyes; more than the joys of ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... came because I was awfully lonely. There isn't a soul that I can speak out to, except you. You don't know what that means. I go about in the schoolroom, and up and down the streets, and see things—horrible things. The world gets to be one big torture chamber, and then I have to cry out. I come to you to cry out,—because you really care. Now I can go away, and keep silent for a ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... brought our instruments of torture with us to the play, and Elfreda agreed to have you girls in her ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... damnable heresy, and have taken refuge in one of two courses. Either they deny that Genesis was meant to teach scientific truth, and thus save the veracity of the record at the expense of its authority; or they expend their energies in devising the cruel ingenuities of the reconciler, and torture texts in the vain hope of making them confess the creed of Science. But when the peine forte et dure is over, the antique sincerity of the venerable sufferer always reasserts itself. Genesis is honest to the core, and professes to be no more than it is, a repository of venerable ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... slumber, at the moment when I was falling into oblivion, a hand seemed to pluck me back into consciousness. In the same instant there gleamed before my eyes a little circle of fire, which blazed and expanded into immensity, until its many-coloured glare beat upon my brain and thrilled me with torture. No sooner was the intolerable light extinguished than I burst into a cold sweat; an icy river poured about me; I shook, and my teeth chattered, and so for some minutes I lay in anguish, until the heat of fever re-asserted itself, and I began once more to toss and roll. A score ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... stations beside it, holding the handspikes, for turning the rending wheels, like muskets, on their shoulders. The moment that Mavrovitch mounted the scaffold, the trumpets and the tolling bells ceased; all was silent, and he walked with a firm tread towards the engine of torture. The executioners stepped forward, each took him by the arm. At the same moment a wild shriek rose; but what ensued is so well known, that I may spare myself from further ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... the garden. You were all that I knew of in life to yearn for—you were a wonderful light that had flashed upon me and blinded me; and when I saw my own vileness in it I flung myself down on my face, and felt a more fearful despair than I had ever dreamed could torture a soul. I would have crawled to you upon my knees and groveled in the dirt and begged you to have mercy upon me; and afterwards when you lifted me up, I could have kissed the ground that you trod. But oh, I knew one thing, and it was all that ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... never! Only let my perverse imagination 'light, for the space of a breath, on the possibility, to my unutterable torment. All men's fancies play 'em such tricks now and then, to torture them and take down their vanity. Men would rest too easy in their security, were it ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the 'Tosca' of M. Sardou, the torture of the hero, if we were to see it, might be received with incredulity, but we are far more likely to accept it as real when we perceive it only thru the sufferings of the heroine at the sight of it. So again, in the 'Darling of the Gods,' the destruction of the little band of ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... flowers and any precious gift, which was to be paddled over the foaming cataract by one either drawn by lot or selected by the chiefs; or, as often happened, a voluntary offering of life, as it manifested heroism beyond their usual test of torture. Martyrs thus sacrificed had this consolation: that their spirits were sure to rise in the mist and follow the bright path above, while bad Indians' spirits passed down in the boiling, crashing current, ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... fought a long fight with Death for the life that stood between him and the woman. He was not an expert swimmer, his clothes hampered him, he was already blown with his long race, the burden in his arms dragged him down, the water rose slowly enough to make his torture fit for ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... common-sense—and not Eugenics. The human race has excluded such absurdities for unknown ages; and has never yet called it Eugenics. You may call it flogging when you hit a choking gentleman on the back; you may call it torture when a man unfreezes his fingers at the fire; but if you talk like that a little longer you will cease to live among living men. If nothing but this mad minimum of accident were involved, there would be no such thing as a Eugenic Congress, and certainly no such ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... salvation, while Buddhism offered extinction. Turning from the masses to the philosophical ascetic—when he cuts himself off from family life with all its variety of pleasure and interest, not to speak of the self-torture he also sometimes inflicts, he too has some corresponding demand, some adequate motive to satisfy. His is the resolute quest for salvation of the higher, older type. But we are dealing with modern, new-educated ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... delicate sensibilities, you may thank Heaven that you did not become a medical man; your life would have been one of torture, disgust, and agonising sense of responsibility. But do you not see that you must thank Heaven for the sufferer's sake also? I will not shock you again by talking of amputation; but even in the smallest matter—even if you were merely sending medicine to an old maid—suppose that your imagination ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... I told you: Only my son I feared; For I doubt the sapling courage That goes without the beard. But now in vain is the torture, Fire shall never avail: Here dies in my bosom ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... rigid rule, The dull restraint, the chiding frown, The weary torture of the school, The taming of wild nature down. Her only lore, the legends told Around the hunter's fire at night; Stars rose and set, and seasons rolled, Flowers bloomed and snow-flakes ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... patch of grey sea beyond the hole in which their oar worked. The sweat poured off their chests and backs in streams, until their waist-bands clung to the flesh like soaked sponges. Some began to moan and sob; others to entreat Heaven for a respite, as if God were directing their torture and taking delight in it; others again broke out into frightful imprecations, cursing their Maker and the hour of their birth. And while the oars swung and the chains clashed and the cries redoubled their volume, the three ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the Apostate was Emperor, three Christian soldiers were brought before him. Their names were Emmanuel, Sabael, and Ismael. He ordered them to be examined apart, lest they should encourage one another in their faith and endurance under torture. Emmanuel, seeing his object, said, "Tyrant! we Three are one in ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... Important Factor in Health. Few more ingenious instruments of crippling and torture have ever been invented than fashionable tight ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... this infernal torture being at length despatched, and suspended on the muzzle of the gun as a trophy of victory, a rush is made to the bar or counter, and brandy and rum, accompanied by lewd stories, and perhaps quarrelling and ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... content with this Calvin had his spies in all parts of the city, who reported to him what people were saying about his methods and his government. The punishment meted out by the courts were of a very severe and brutal kind. No torture that could be inflicted was deemed too much for any one bold enough to criticise the Consistory or ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... not sleep that night. Every twig and every needle of her pine mattress seemed to have conspired to torture her. She tossed about until she could no longer endure her bed; and in the middle of the night she crept out of the tent, and sat, wrapped in a blanket, before the smouldering embers of the fire. The hobbled horses grazed not far away; a night bird twitted solitarily ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... future path. Nothing is more painful to a man of any energy than the inability to put things in order in himself— to place before himself what he has to do, and arrange the means for doing it. To be the passive victim of a rushing stream of disconnected impressions is torture, especially if the emergency be urgent. So when the sun came up Zachariah began to be ashamed of himself that the night had passed in these idiotic moonings, which had left him just where he was, and he tried to settle what he was to do when he reached Manchester. He did not know a soul; ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... to the pleadings of these men there flashed into my mind a conviction of the malignant humor of my situation. Here was I, father of a plan in the successful execution of which I had figured myself out as a benefactor to all concerned, turning the torture screws of "Standard Oil's" new dollar rack—fashioned from my structure—and I was powerless to stop or rescue the screaming victim. "But why," ask my readers, "did you not denounce the men and renounce the work, instead of profiting ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... has she been requested to answer, under pain of torture, in what state of mind she was when a young nobleman died in consequence of his commerce with her. Then by her speaking has it been replied, that she remained quite melancholy and wished to destroy herself; and prayed God, the ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... and addressed them as follows: "Miserable and heathenish men, calling yourselves priests! Know ye not that to lay claim to a capacity to do anything better than my predecessor is a capital offence? Take that chessboard and, before day dawns upon the torture chamber, cut it into four equal parts of the same shape, each containing sixteen perfect squares, with one of the gems in each part! If in this you fail, then shall other sports be devised for your special delectation. Go!" The four ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... an infuriated bull. "If I had her here—I'd strangle her!" he swore. "That brother of yours is an artist. He has sketched her to the life—the she-devil!" His voice cracked and broke. He was breathing like a man in torture. ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... his hands. He refused to see more. Whether ghost or optical illusion, an emanation from another world, or an image born of his remorse and proceeding from himself, it should torture his ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... there, I heard some news that made me sit up and take notice, as the Yankees say. It seems that, for some time past, the Government of Korea has been playing some very hanky-panky games: taxing the people until the burden has become unbearable; punishing the smallest offences with death by torture; confiscating the goods and money of every man who dared to allow himself a few more luxuries than his neighbours; and, in short, playing the very mischief all round. Naturally, even the mildest-mannered worm will turn under too much of that kind of thing, and the average Korean ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... merry jest! But here I must wander alone in the night, Alas, they have all forsaken me quite! Olaf! The storm is rending my hair! The rain beats against me wherever I fare! Olaf, Olaf! Can you see me thus languish Beneath this unspeakable torture ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... theatre. They applaud, they condemn, they criticise. They know all about it. Into such company as this, even I, whose poor old head is always getting itself wedged in where it has no business to be, have chanced to be thrown. This is torture. My cue is to turn into the Irishman's echo, which always returned for his "How d'ye do?" a "Pretty well, thank you." I cling to the skirts of that member of the party who is agreed to have the best taste and echo his responses an octave higher. ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... said, below. No one heard save the uncouth being who clung to the window, revolver in hand, steadily dying the creeping red death. But they knew that, out of sight, a man who had smiled on them, full of life and hope, but an hour ago was facing such torture as had tried the martyr's courage, and facing it with as high ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... I seem to be a part of this human beast! When I wake up I feel as if my soul had been stained, dragged in the mire, almost lost. It seems as if I could never again feel any self-respect. Oh, doctor," Penelope's voice broke and the tears filled her eyes, "you must help me! I cannot bear this torture any longer! What can I do to ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... on his whole body. This was a formality employed in cases of witchcraft, so that the devil should have no place to hide in; for it was the common belief that if a single hair were left, the devil could render the accused insensible to the pains of torture. From this Urbain understood that the verdict had gone against him and that he was ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the Landgrave's castle. A few scattered cries of triumph were heard from the crowd; but they were drowned in a tumult of conflicting feelings. As human creatures, fallen under the displeasure of a despot with a judicial power of torture to enforce his investigations, even they claimed some compassion. But there arose, to call off attention from these less dignified objects of the public interest, a long train of gallant cavaliers, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... to rescue their companion. This was the signal for the goat to adopt new tactics. He probably thought it was some new form of torture that ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... asserted in England, and by those who really think they know whereof they speak, that although such torture-houses as Dotheboys Hall certainly did exist, even so lately as Dickens wrote, the publication of "Nicholas Nickleby," by turning attention upon the abuse, effectually swept it out of English civilization. We "smile bitterly," as romance people do, whenever we hear this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... magnitude to our little army (if I may so call it), but we would not think of them. We were now in the situation that I had labored to get ourselves in. The idea of being made prisoner was foreign to almost every man, as they expected nothing but torture from the savages, if they fell into their hands. Our fate was now to be determined, probably in a few hours. We knew that nothing but the most ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... worshiped demons. But above them bent the tender and pitiful Mother of Christ who had seen her Son crucified, and Christ Himself stood surrounded by innumerable witnesses. Among the saints were some who had died at the hands of the heathen, many who had died by torture. The poor and ignorant men who listened were caught up for the moment into the vision of Fray Jeronimo and regained their self-control. When the prayer was ended Gonzalo Guerrero sprang up, and rallied them to furious labor. Under his direction ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... are insulting me! And that is just the point. You may be a very clever lawyer, Mr. Ashley, and everybody says you are—very able, and talented, and all that, but you can't get round that point. You may torture any meaning you please out of my words, but I shall always say you brought it ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... tell him how the title of the picture is to be read. And thus the whole book being gone over by the bare titles of the pictures, reading cannot but be learned; and indeed too, which thing is to be noted, without using any ordinary tedious spelling, that most troublesome torture of wits, which may wholly be avoided by this method. For the often reading over the Book, by those larger descriptions of things, and which are set after the Pictures, will be able perfectly to beget ...
— The Orbis Pictus • John Amos Comenius
... look at his face in the light. "Ah, heart of me, will you grow up too to live in a lightship and leave a poor woman at home to weary for you in her trouble? Rogue, rogue, what poor woman have I done this to, bringing you into the world to be her torture and her joy?" ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... tried to rest your weight on them for a moment they described an arc toward the rear. Moreover, you could not sit well back on the saddle to balance matters, because of the high cantle. The result, whether you did with stirrups or without them, was torture, for anybody but an Arab, who has notions of ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... impressed, busied himself meanwhile on my behalf, and at seven in the morning a springless, open, two-wheeled Arab cart, drawn by a moth-eaten old mule, was ready for my conveyance to Gafsa. In this instrument of torture were spent the hours from 7.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m., memories of that ride being blurred by the physical discomfort endured. Over a vast plateau framed in distant mountains we were wending in the direction of a low gap which never came nearer; the road itself was full of deep ruts that caused ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... to that!" I cried, jumping up. "I'll sooner earn a precarious livelihood by turning fisherman in this island! Any labor will be preferable to that daily renewing torture." I seized my violin in a desperate clutch, and feverishly leant over the wall, where I could hear the dirge-like boom of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... suggestion to the test, and the surgeons of Europe had acknowledged with one accord that all hope of finding a means to render operations painless must be utterly abandoned—that the surgeon's knife must ever remain a synonym for slow and indescribable torture. By an odd coincidence it chanced that Sir Benjamin Brodie, the acknowledged leader of English surgeons, had publicly expressed this as his deliberate though regretted opinion at a time when the quest which he considered futile had already led to the most ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... were returned to the Bastile, and there shut up in iron cages: and a King of SIAM, having lost his daughter, and fancying she was poisoned, put most of his court, young and old, to death, by the most exquisite torture; by this horrid act of cruelty, near two thousand of the principal courtiers suffered the most dreadful deaths; the great Mandarins, their wives, and children, being all scorched with fire, and mangled with knives, before ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... gathered in a circle, but took no part in the preparations,—the torture of women ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... angel, I am Iolas, and not Jupiter. I adore you, and I seek to quench the desires which torture me." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... money is a burden. You are forced to carry it about, for fear. You look guilty as you go running in the streets, because you fear everybody. Do good with it. Let it be money with a blessing on it! It will save us from horrid misery! from death! from torture and death! Think, uncle! look, uncle! You with the money—me wanting it. I pray to heaven, and I meet you, and you have it. Will you say that you refuse to give it, when I see—when I show you, you are led to meet me and help ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in Green Street Court-House that the political offenders in Ireland are tried. Within its narrow and grimy walls I saw many a gallant Irishman, when I was a young reporter, pass through a foregone and prearranged trial to torture, agony, madness, premature death. I can only think of it as of a shambles, or, perhaps, to put it more strongly, but more accurately, as I think of that wooden framework in which I saw the murderer, Henry Wainwright, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... women. Eyes were gouged out, ears hacked off, arms and legs torn from the body in presence of the victims' children or wives, whose agony was thus begun before their own turn came. Men and women and infants were burned alive. Chinese executioners were specially hired to inflict the awful torture of the "thousand slices."[281] Officers had their limbs broken and were left for hours in agonies. Many victims are credibly reported to have been buried alive. History, from its earliest dawn down to the present day, has recorded nothing so profoundly revolting as the nameless ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... there came to Lenox the peculiar long-drawn note with which the hill villagers call to one another across the valleys. An infectious spirit of jubilation pervaded the air. The sun himself, in these cheerful latitudes, is transformed from an instrument of torture to the golden-locked hero of Norse and Greek legend; and with every step of the ascent Lenox felt the blood course more ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... Berthelier, to whom there stands a memorial on the island in the Rhone; he caused Jean Pecolat to be hung up in an absurd posture in his banqueting-hall, in order that he might mock at his discomfort while he dined; he executed, with or without preliminary torture, several less conspicuous patriots. Happily, however, some of the patriots—notably Besancon Hugues—got safely away, and succeeded in concluding treaties of alliance between Geneva and the cantons of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... rest, Noted the Master's sign and fashion, And unbefooled by the heart's compassion, Undeterred by form and feature, Caught the creature, Tried by the test of water and fire, Pierced and pinioned with silver wire, Circled with signs that could control, Battered with spells that tame and torture The demon nature, Till he writhed in his shape, a fiend confest, And vanished— Then had come back, the poor soul banished, Then had come back the little soul. But now there is nothing to do or to say. Will no one grip him and tear ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... continual rebellion against them; and as they can never convince you that they are right: they can govern you only by beating you, imprisoning you, torturing you, killing you if you disobey them without being strong enough to kill or torture them. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... disconcerted by his indignation, that he mistook his mark, and applied the sharp heel of his shoe to the side of Mr. Jolter's foot, comprehending his little toe that was studded with an angry corn, which he invaded with such a sudden jerk, that the governor, unable to endure the torture in silence started up, and, dancing on the floor, roared hideously with repeated bellowings, to the enjoyment of Peregrine and the lady, who laughed themselves almost into convulsions at the joke. Hornbeck, confounded at the mistake he had ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... journals characterize as 'princes of science.' For a quarter of an hour I have had to listen to the most contradictory opinions. On one point, however, all agreed: that my patient was a dead man. Finally they compromised and decided that the poor wretch's torture should be needlessly prolonged by a course of moxas. I timidly remarked that it would be simpler to send for a confessor, and then assuage the sufferings of the dying man with repeated injections of morphine. If you had seen their faces! They came as near as anything ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... curse, that his mirth might be encreased. I saw his Father also, when he was possessed, I saw him in one of his fits, and saw his flesh (as 'twas thought) by the Devil, gathered up on an heap, about the bigness of half in Egge; to the unutterable torture and afflict[i]on of the old man. There was also one Freeman, (who was more than an ordinary Doctor) sent for, to cast out this Devil; and I was there when he attempted to do it. The manner whereof was this. They had the possessed into an out- room, and laid him on his belly upon a Form, with ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... that their impersonal and unconscious immortality is a brighter hope than an eternity of personal and conscious existence, the very thought of which they say is torture. This assumes, what there seems to be no ground for assuming, that eternity is an endless extension of time; and, in the same way, that infinity is a boundless space. It is more natural to conceive of them as emancipation respectively from ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... replied De Chemerant, "a council will be formed; they will interrogate this rascal; if he does not answer, we shall have plenty of means to force him to it; there is more than one kind of torture." ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... far as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him for the purpose of insuring the testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down material nature under the inquisition of reason, and force from her, as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived questions—yet still they would not have been talked of or described as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic at ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... said, 'I could not sleep for thinking of that light, jab-jabbing the poor fellow in his cell. Nay, it appeared to be in my own bedroom, searching for my face and challenging me, "Are you there? Ha, ha, are you there?" What an eerie torture, to a slumbering soul, in that recurrent flame from the prison darkness! The thing ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... had done a praiseworthy and necessary act. I was asking myself: "Did I do wrong or right?" They had that shut up in their hearts, just as some people carry a bullet in a closed wound. Will they not be happier now? It was too late for their torture to begin over again and early enough for them to remember ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... her and enfolded her, met in kind by the radiance of her wonderful hair, her sunny eyes, her glowing skin. The joy of the night before, the morning's passionate grief, the ingenuous hope and prayer in her ride after Steering, the sweet, anxious torture of the journey to Salome Park were all giving place to a large, impersonal comprehension of the conflict in Steering's soul. She had known before that there was trouble brewing between him and her father. ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... they were not so thirsty as they really were, for no man likes to give in before a member of an inferior race; but when Yarloo went away it became harder and harder for them to keep up their pluck. For thirst is the most terrible of all forms of torture. The pain comes on slowly but surely, and increases till it seems impossible that the human body can stand any more. Yet the body is such a marvellous thing that it does stand even the terrible pain of thirst, till it gets beyond endurance and the man goes mad. The thirst which kills men in ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... up against what was harder yet to encounter than all these. Charles Barclay's was one of those natures which, being miserable, are apt to become desperate. To such men, affliction seems to be torture, but no discipline. But our humanity perceives from a level, and therefore a short-sighted point of view. We may well be thankful that the Great Ruler sees above and around and on all sides the creatures to be governed, the events to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... that the world is of evil, and that we need deliverance. It preached despisal of the world, self-denial, chastity, giving up of one's will, that is, turning away from life and its illusory pleasures. It taught the healing power of pain: an instrument of torture is the symbol of Christianity. I am quite ready to admit that this earnest, this only correct view of life was thousands of years previously spread all over Asia in other forms, as it is still, independently ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... country this is," he thought; "pleasant enough, though, as far as the climate goes; but the people in it are awful! What a lot of bloodthirsty, bilious-looking wretches, to be sure; ready to consign to torture and death a poor innocent, unprotected orphan because he happens to be of a different colour ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... said the Princess, "you need not torture yourself by trying to converse with discretion; because Mr. Neeland knows about many matters which ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... carefully controlled, so that the only change visible was a slight pallor and a graver aspect. Mrs. Loring scrutinized her countenance closely. This she bore without a sign of embarrassment. She partook but lightly of food. After the meal closed she retired to her own room, once more to torture her brain in a fruitless effort to solve this great problem of ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... discovered "what a labour it is to publish a book, and how GREEN (NEUF) an author is the first time they print him." Or it may be that Campanella turned over, with hands unstrung, and still broken by the torture, these leaves that contain his passionate sonnets. Here again is the copy of Theocritus from which some pretty page may have read aloud to charm the pagan and pontifical leisure of Leo X. This Gargantua ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... all the fine family estate behind,—pigs, poultry, and relations,—divil a tenpenny did we ever touch since. It's not your honor that will be angry to hear a few family misfortins," said Barney, hesitating to proceed with his narration, "Give me my hat, fellow," said 25I, "and don't torture me with your nonsense."— "May be it an't nonsense your honor means?" "And why not, sirrah?"—"Bekase it's not in your nature to spake light o' the dead." Up to this point, my attention had been divided between the Morning ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Sampei, she told the story of her vision, her certainty that inquiry would establish the truth of its accusation. Jinzaemon had no recourse. The Yoshiwara bugyo[u], with do[u]shin, was soon at hand. "To kill a man on such evidence...." But before applying torture he would question the victim. Chu[u]dayu's case was hopeless. The liver was almost severed. Death was but a matter of an hour or two. During that time his ravings in delirium, his confession in lucid moments, added ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... than take the loose end of the rope in your hand, and you have the persuader or bit completed. By pulling on the end which you now hold, you draw his mouth up towards his throat, and can thereby inflict the most excruciating torture that is possible for a horse to undergo, and the beauty of it is, without the least injury to the animal. One pull on this persuader is more dreaded by the horse than a whole day's flogging with raw-hide. In fact he cannot stand ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... to obtain from them, either from their good-nature, or from their not being able to tell the truth firmly, a commendation, of which he may afterwards avail himself.' JOHNSON. 'Very true, Sir. Therefore the man, who is asked by an authour, what he thinks of his work, is put to the torture, and is not obliged to speak the truth; so that what he says is not considered as his opinion; yet he has said it, and cannot retract it; and this authour, when mankind are hunting him with a cannister at his tail, can say, "I would ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... General caused, on the 16th of August, 1672, Cornelius de Witt to be arrested; and the noble brother of John de Witt had, like the vilest criminal, to undergo, in one of the apartments of the town prison, the preparatory degrees of torture, by means of which his judges expected to force from him the confession of his alleged plot against William ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... laid them aside until the next occasion when I should feel disposed for self-torture, and got out of bed. A bath and breakfast braced me up, and I left the house in a reasonably cheerful ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... kept down, and their spirits broken. We are to see them again subject to individual persecution, as anger, or malice, or any bad passion may suggest: hence the whip, the chain, the iron-collar! hence the various modes of private torture, of which so many accounts have been truly given. Nor can such horrible cruelties be discovered so as to be made punishable, while the testimony of any number of the oppressed is invalid against the oppressors, however they may be offences against the laws. ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... prison with a curiosity previously denied him. One glance was sufficient. The Gray Man had come to conduct an inquisition. What more fitting place, therefore, could be found to strike terror to the hearts of the guilty or weakling than the torture ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... behind his head, staring up into the darkness, his thoughts galloping incessantly through his brain, suffering without pain as he had never imagined a human being could suffer though racked with torture from ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... see a hurricane heading towards you with its frightful force, you will undergo torture and suspense, striving to avert failure and ruin in ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... memory, even the thought, of Elizabeth, and left him a victim of its associated emotions. Bitter jealousy racked him, remorse and profound grief. The ten miles of road to the railroad became ten miles of torture, of increasing domination of the impulse to go to her, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of Dullness, blind and bold! Tyrant! more cruel than Procrustes old; Who, to his iron bed, by torture, fits, Their nobler part, the souls of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... woke in the middle of the night. He did not then regard them as an education. In some vague way he set them down as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a taste for a better life. He felt that it was his own conscience that made these things torture him. That was his mother's idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions, also for her courage. Among other things, he had seen her one day defy a vicious devil of a Corsican—a common terror in the town-who ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... peerages; civil service appointments; the use of torture in India; law reform; difficulties in the execution of the treaty of Paris; the questions connected with the Isle of Serpents and Bulgrad, on the new Russo-Bessarabian frontier; the disposal of the Aland Islands ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... goe study mischief, And put a look on, arm'd with all my cunnings, Shall meet him like a Basilisque, and strike him: Love, put destroying flames into mine eyes, Into my smiles, deceits, that I may torture him, That I may make him love to ...
— The False One • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... love!" repeated Maurice with culminating anguish. "Then you love him,—you do love him still? Answer me, Madeleine. Do not torture me by suspense! ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... was born to torture me! O what a fall, what a humiliation! Such a scheme to wreck upon so small a trifle! But ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hour. Mrs. Dudley lay very still. But for her soft breathing the little watcher at her side would have thought her dead. Many times Polly lifted herself upon her elbow, leaned over to listen, and dropped back again satisfied, but with a stifled groan. Every movement now was torture. ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... a private dressing-room meant a great deal. It was a refined torture to her to be herded among the other women, with their noise and quarrelling and coarse jokes. She found changes too. Her friend the toothless lion had succumbed to old age, several of the helpers ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... could strip myself down to the last lie—only there'd always be another one left under it!—and do penance naked in the market-place, I should at least have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don't you see that the worst of my torture is the impossibility of ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... heart and soul? These lips are ready to smile, to utter a cry of rapture and delight, and behind the veil of my eyes lies a soul, which one touch of thine will arouse! O Frederick! Frederick! why do you torture me? Do you not know that your wife worships, loves, adores you; that you are her salvation, her god? Oh, I know these are unholy, sinful words! what then? I am a sinner! I am ready to give my soul in exchange for thee, Frederick. Why do you not hear me?—why have ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the state of inaction to which we were doomed, aggravated by the stings of mosquitoes and large green-eyed flies, became a perfect torture. ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... necessity. Providence, perhaps, has destined Bonaparte to become the tyrant who is to awaken Germany from its slumber by means of cruelties; he is, perhaps, to revive among the Germans love of honor, liberty, and country; he is, perhaps, to be the scourge that is to torture us, so that we may overcome our indolence, and that our true national spirit may be aroused. I hope the tyrant will accomplish this, and deliver Germany. God knows I would not like to serve him, but to the liberators of the world I should willingly devote my ideas and my feelings, nay, ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... in the cars the shadows came over his spirits again and began to torture him with doubts and possibilities. It might be, he thought, that her sprightliness of the morning was due to fever, rather than to health. He wished he had looked into her throat, and he regretted that he had not cautioned his wife about her. He nursed ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... M'Collop as an artist has long since been established. His pictures of 'Lord Lovat in Prison,' and 'Hogarth painting him,' of the 'Blowing up of the Kirk of Field' (painted for M'Collop of M'Collop), of the 'Torture of the Covenanters,' the 'Murder of the Regent,' the 'Murder of Rizzio,' and other historical pieces, all of course from Scotch history, have established his reputation in South as well as in North Britain. No one would suppose from the gloomy character of his works that Sandy M'Collop is one ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and pinioned him. My fingers dug into his throat, and I threw him to the ground. He bared his wolf's teeth and began his death song. But I raved at him, and choked him to silence. "You are not to die now!" I shouted at his glazing eyes. "You shall live. I shall torture you. You shall live ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... he loved the mountains. Why shouldn't he? They had given him refuge when he needed it most, saving him and Boyd from dreadful torture and certain death. Somewhere in the heart of them lay the great treasure that he meant to find, and they possessed a majesty that appealed not merely to his sense of beauty, but to a spiritual feeling that was in truth ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... despair, and took the seat to which the conspirator invited him. The meal was excellent; the host not only affable, but primed with curious information. He seemed, indeed, like one who had too long endured the torture of silence, to exult in the most wholesale disclosures. The interest of what he had to tell was great; his character, besides, developed step by step; and Somerset, as the time fled, not only outgrew some of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unless it should move him to intercede with the Marquis to change the manner thereof from hanging, or simple suspension, to breaking your limbs on the roue or wheel, with the coulter of a plough, or otherwise putting you to death by torture, surpasses my comprehension. Were I you, Ranald, I would be for miskenning Sir Duncan, keeping my own secret, and departing quietly by suffocation, like your ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... and drew his revolver. The bullet would do quickly what the cold would accomplish after lingering hours of torture, yet, facing those pricking ears and the brave trust of the eyes, he was blinded by a mist and could not aim. He had to place the muzzle of the gun against the roan's temple and pull the trigger. When he turned ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... Why had these men formed this plot against me? What had I done to merit such deadly vengeance as this?—a torture of the Middle Ages! ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... His revealed Nature are things, which, though not opposed to Reason, are infinitely strange to the Imagination; as in His works we can neither reject nor admit the ideas of space, and of time, and the necessary properties of lines, without intellectual distress, or even torture; really, Gentlemen, I am making no outrageous request, when, in the name of a University, I ask religious writers, jurists, economists, physiologists, chemists, geologists, and historians, to go on quietly, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... slightly, but she kept her eyes steadily fixed on her companion's face. She began to understand where the point of the torture was ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... between life and death was protracted by the confusion; and the miserable Caneri suffered the additional torture of hearing for some time the appalling heralds of his fate, before the blow was struck. The door burst open, and the savage eyes of his enemies glared upon their victim, and the glitter of their weapons struck fearfully ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... Independence, in which we have the satisfaction of assuring ourselves that the fathers of our liberty had two legs apiece, and crossed them in concert with the utmost regularity. One might think, at first, that these narrow boots were as uncomfortable to the calesero as the Scottish instrument of torture of that name; but his little swagger when he is down, and his freedom in kicking when he is up, show that he has ample ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... show too soft a spirit.' The skilful poet knows that habit is a good teacher how to bear pain. And so Ulysses, though in extreme agony, still keeps command over his words. 'Stop! hold, I say! the ulcer has got the better of me. Strip off my clothes. O, woe is me! I am in torture.' Here he begins to give way; but in a moment he stops—'Cover me; depart, now leave me in peace; for by handling me and jolting me you increase the cruel pain.' Do you observe how it is not the cessation of bodily anguish, but the necessity of chastening ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the candle, leaving a long wick to smolder and fill the room with its evil odor, and threw herself on her bed; there she bit the pillow, and tore at it with her teeth while she brooded over the torture she had to endure. Sleep only came to her after she had heard a door shut—the door of the lonely chamber of the master; then she was ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... Holman, nerved somewhat by the thought that the trail he passed over would carry me. The dangers were hidden by the darkness, and my imagination was too stunned by the happenings of the night to make any endeavour to torture my nerves by ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... kind of cruelty. But there is nothing in the least barbaric or ignorant about intellectual cruelty. The great Renaissance artists who mixed colours exquisitely mixed poisons equally exquisitely; the great Renaissance princes who designed instruments of music also designed instruments of torture. Barbarity, malignity, the desire to hurt men, are the evil things generated in atmospheres of intense reality when great nations or great causes are at war. We may, perhaps, be glad that we have not got them: but it is somewhat dangerous to be proud that we have not ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... shuddered as I reflected on what was before them. They were to endure thirst in all its gradations—from the simple, scarce painful longing for water—which most of them already felt—to the extremest agony and torture which that appetite can inflict. But a few days before, I had myself experienced thirst; but what signified that compared to what they would be compelled to endure? Simply nothing—a mere foretaste, that enabled me to judge how terribly painful thirst ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... little real value for art. Like all descriptions of moments of extremity, of agonies, of death rattles, of contractions of the muscles where all elasticity is lost, where the nerves, ceasing to be the organs of the human will, reduce man to a passive victim of despair; they only serve to torture the soul. Deplorable visions, which the artist should admit with extreme circumspection within the graceful circle of ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... again he examined the broken foreleg more carefully. Gentle as was his touch, yet Link knew it must cause infinite torture. But the dog did not flinch. He seemed to understand that Ferris meant kindly, for he moved his magnificent head far enough to lick the man's hand softly ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... from the darkness, but I have no one to take care of me from the light.—As I was telling you, I lay dying in the sun. All at once I drew a deep breath. A cool wind came and ran over my face. I looked up. The torture was gone, for the death-lamp itself was gone. I hope he does not die and grow brighter yet. My terrible headache was all gone, and my sight was come back. I felt as if I were new made. But I did not get up at once, for I was tired still. The grass grew cool ...
— Harper's Young People, December 30, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... indecision. Oh, I know all about it." His hand moved a little upon her shoulder; it almost seemed to caress her. "I haven't studied human nature all these years for nothing. I know you're in a perfect fever of doubt, and it'll go on till you're married. What's the good of it? Why torture yourself like this when the way to happiness lies straight before you? Are you hoping against hope that something may yet turn up to prevent our marriage? Would you be happy if it ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... zancudos gritones los parece cria la naturaleza para castigo y tormento de los hombres." "Those mosquitos which are called buzzing zancudos, Nature seems to have created for the especial punishment and torture of man." Fray Pedro Simon.) These strange punishments have not always been confined to the lay-brothers. There happened in 1788 one of those monastic revolutions, of which it is difficult to form a conception ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... you sir, I hardly know you any longer. May I die before your eyes, if you do not encourage this malicious, unfeeling wretch. In spite of gallows, axe, and torture I could... yes, I could have throttled him with these hands, and torn him to pieces ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... indispensable. The old Dutch law condemned criminals to a diet of unsalted food, the effects being said to be those of the severest physical torture. Years ago an experiment tried near Paris demonstrated the necessity of its use. A number of cattle were fed without the ration of salt; an equal number received it regularly. At the end of a specified time, the unsalted ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... of course all been pulled down) was a crime punishable with death; and any Huguenot caught whilst attempting to escape from the country was sent to the galleys—a fate worse than mere death, for it meant death by slow torture. And every child was forcibly taken from its heretic parents at the age of five, and ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... not having taken the left-hand road in life instead of the right are our chief mental resources after forty, and they tell me that we men only know half the poignancy of these miserable recollections. Women have a special adaptiveness for this kind of torture—would seem ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... brush and briers had been annoying and hurtful, and the roughness of the way very trying. Now the one was wounding and cruel; the other made every step with his jaded limbs a torture. With the low spirits engendered by the great fatigue, came a return of the old fears and tremors. The continual wails of the wildcats roundabout filled him with gloomy forebodings. Every hair of his head stood stiffly up in mortal ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... consists in a total departure from the use and wont of his time, in respect of the nature of the studies to be pursued and the order in which they should be taken. There was to be an end of that wretched torture of Latin and Greek theme-making and versifying, and that dreary toiling amid obsolete subtleties of scholastic Logic and Metaphysics, which he had denounced in a previous passage, and which had made University Education, he says, nothing better than "an asinine ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... another. All this evil flows directly from the Christian morality which teaches that all hopes, efforts, and aims should be turned towards laying up treasures in heaven, where also the heart should be. One need scarcely add a word of reprobation as to the horrible doctrine of eternal torture, although that, too, is part of the teaching of Christ. The whole conscience of civilised mankind is so turning against that shameful and cruel dogma, that it is only now believed among the illiterate and uncultured ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... to your friend. Comfort her. The poor girl is no more guilty than if a traction engine had run over her or a wild beast had broken on her out of his cage. She must not torture herself any longer. It is not right, it is not good. Our body is not the only part of use that is subject to diseases, and you must save her from a disease ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... aristocrats of Paris, were toned down to the quality of tempered steel. With not a spare ounce of flesh on them—the rations of the French army are not as rich as ours—and tested by long marches down dusty roads, by incessant fighting in retreat against overwhelming odds, by the moral torture of those rearguard actions, and by their first experience of indescribable horrors, among dead and dying comrades, they had a beauty of manhood which I found sublime. They were bronzed and dirty and hairy, but ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... always been accustomed to torture himself in various ingenious ways, nearly always connected with sex. He would burn his skin deeply with red hot wire in inconspicuous places. These and similar acts were generally followed by manual excitation nearly always ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... desperations From such have risen! But yet remaining, What is't but chaining Hearts which, once waning, Beat 'gainst their prison? Time can but cloy love, And use destroy love: The winged boy, Love, Is but for boys— You'll find it torture Though sharper, shorter, To wean and not ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... emaciated by fasting nor weakened by penance. Anticipating the glory of extirpating heresy, he is feeling the sharp edge of an axe, to be employed in the decollation of the enemies to the true faith. A sledge is laden with whips, wheels, ropes, chains, gibbets, and other inquisitorial engines of torture, which are admirably calculated for the propagation of a religion that was established in meekness and mercy, and inculcates universal charity and forbearance. On the same sledge is an image of St. Anthony, accompanied by his pig, and the plan ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... bajan lies upon a table, undergoing the planing of his tusks, "while a saw lies upon the ground, suggestive of the actual de-horning of the beast. The work itself and later apologies for the institution mention among the instruments of torture a comb and scissors for cutting the victim's hair, an auriscalpium for his ears, a knife for cutting his nails; while the ceremony further appears to include the adornment of the youth's chin with a beard by means of burned cork ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... ego of yours in negro-hatred, whilom chief magistrate and disgrace of that unfortunate city. But under your life-service regime things are managed in a more enlightened way. There they who have liberty—and sometimes use the liberty—to torture women into beastly submissions, do not hide from the laws, they make the laws. There such a personage as the one mentioned may be a gentleman, a man of high standing," one of the most respectable men in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... sleep for a couple of hours, but at daybreak had turned out again to start upon the plastering and work at it doggedly, with no more sustenance than a dry biscuit. It had all been one long-drawn physical torture; and the grey plaster smeared on his face showed ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... church and put into the pastoral charge over his subjects one who, under his travestied name of Megapolensis, has obtained a good report as a faithful minister of Jesus Christ. It was he who saved Father Jogues, the Jesuit missionary, from imminent torture and death among the Mohawks, and befriended him, and saw him safely off for Europe. This is one honorable instance, out of not a few, of personal respect and kindness shown to members of the Roman ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... English into disgrace. Their warehouses at Surat were seized, and the president and factors were placed in irons, in which condition they remained seven months. This grievance was the greater, as it happened at the time that the cruel torture and execution of Captain Towerson and his crew by the Dutch took place at Amboyna. It was bad enough to be made responsible for the doings of their own countrymen, but to be punished for the misdeeds of their enemies was a bitter pill to swallow. In 1630, just as peace was being concluded with France ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... I am very glad of it, ile plague him, ile torture him, I am glad of it, Tub. One of them shewed me a ring that hee had of ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. Then took they those men that they thought had any property ... and put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with unutterable torture; for never were martyrs so tortured as they were. They hanged them up by the feet and smoked them with foul smoke; they hanged them by the thumbs or by the head and hung armour on their feet; they put knotted strings about their heads and writhed them so that they went into ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... overhanging bough, which alone saves her from the black destruction beneath. Unable to conquer the opposition he encountered here, Belmont went West, and finally strayed into the solitudes of Oregon and British America. At one time, for a year, I did not know whether he were living or dead, and what torture I silently endured! Six months ago he returned, buoyed by the hope of retrieving his past; and one of his pictures was bought by a wealthy man in Philadelphia, who had commissioned him to paint two more landscapes. At last we began to dream of an humble little home somewhere, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... him from many tortures which he must have suffered in company with his fellow-prisoners, whole nails they tore out, also cutting off their fingers, and burning them in several places. They put to death on the same day two or three, and, in order to increase their torture, treated them in the ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... We contrived, after infinite torture, to put on our boots again, and then walked up the hill to the village-like town. Besides the church of mixed Romanesque and Gothic, there was nothing worth seeing there, unless the spectacle of a woman ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... valiant Stranger, haste away, Lest you become the Giant's prey. On his return he'll bring another Still more savage than his brother;— A horrid, cruel monster, who, Before he kills, will torture you. Oh, valiant Stranger! haste away, Or you'll become these ...
— The Story of Jack and the Giants • Anonymous
... unstrung. It seemed, even with, his eyes closed, that he could feel the weight of the cone of light upon his face. The desire to escape from its searching glare became well-nigh irresistible. How long would this torture continue? He began to feel intensely tired and worn out and realized that could he but shut out the blinding brilliancy which enveloped him, he would sink exhausted to sleep. Sleep! He could no more sleep, under the present conditions, ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... confess nothing. In those days it was customary to extort confessions from prisoners, by means of torture, a mode long since abolished in this country; but the king and his ministers did not wish to render themselve obnoxious to the Romanists by resorting to the rack. Instead, therefore, of using torture, they ...
— Guy Fawkes - or A Complete History Of The Gunpowder Treason, A.D. 1605 • Thomas Lathbury
... crusade. We cannot stop to describe these courts, which became especially notorious in Spain some two centuries after their establishment. The unfairness of the trials and the cruel treatment to which those suspected of heresy were subjected, through long imprisonment or torture—inflicted with the hope of forcing them to confess their crime or implicate others—have rendered the name of ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... he continued in a lower tone, "what's the talk in the Capitol, that at Rome they are proceeding on a new plan against the Christians with great success. They don't put to death, at least at once; they keep in prison, and threaten the torture. It's surprising how ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... in the streets of the imperial city. It has very low wheels, a heavy, awkward body, and is as noisy as a hard-running Concord coach. Some one describes it as being a cross between a cab and an instrument of torture. There is no rest for the occupant's back; and while the seat is more than large enough for one, it is not large enough for two persons. It is a sort of sledge on wheels. The noise made by these low-running conveyances as they are hurried ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... state in which it spares bodily torture to the worst criminals, and having agreed, if criminals be put to death at all, to kill them in the speediest way, I consider the question with reference to society, and not at all with reference to the criminal, holding that, in a case of cruel and deliberate murder, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... cruelty frequently occurs. At Aerschot "women had to witness the sight of the conflagration holding their hands up. Their torture lasted six hours." At Crevic, the Germans began their sinister work by burning a chateau which they knew belonged to General Lyautey. The troops, commanded by an officer, shouted out for Madame and Mademoiselle Lyautey "that they might cut their ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... his life, is a Muni even though he may lead a domestic life. Such a man is purged of all his sins. Fasts and other penances cannot destroy sins, however much they may weaken and dry up the body that is made of flesh and blood. The man whose heart is without holiness, suffers torture only by undergoing penances in ignorance of their meaning. He is never freed from sins of such acts. The fire he worshippeth doth not consume his sins. It is in consequence of holiness and virtue alone ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... don't understand." Piteously she turned and clasped his arm in desperate entreaty. "I shall lie awake in torture. I shall hear him calling all night long. He is there beyond the mountains, wanting me. And I can't get to him. It is agony—oh, it is agony—to ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... constitution, sometimes associating ideas of pleasure and enjoyment with those of blood and destruction; as, for example, it happened in the games of the circus under the Roman emperors; nay, some have even looked upon homicide and torture as religious duties, and a part of the worship due to the Divine Being! Fanaticism naturally engenders that sacrilegious alliance, and man, under its irresistible influence, becomes more frightful in his hatred, more cruel in his hostilities, than ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... see if I have this straight. You want me to take this ship to earth and swipe you a high dragon bump. And you're going to keep Sheilah here and torture her if I don't deliver ...
— High Dragon Bump • Don Thompson
... a prison be not enough for you, I will teach you a lesson in the art of torture which I learned from our chaplain, or one of his substitutes.—'Make your cells round and smooth; let there be no prominent point for the eye to rest upon, so that it must necessarily turn inward, and I will warrant that you will soon have the pleasure of seeing your victim frantic.' Look well to ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... and life, surrounds them with glory of affectionate service, and festivity of pure human beauty. Superstition contemplates its idols as lords of death, appeases them with blood, and vows itself to them in torture and solitude. Religion proselytes by love, superstition by war; religion teaches by example, superstition by persecution. Religion gave granite shrine to the Egyptian, golden temple to the Jew, sculptured corridor to the Greek, pillared aisle and frescoed wall to the Christian. Superstition ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... she cried, "I have done everything I can, and all for you; all for you. I cannot stand any more. This is torture to me. Let me go home, and another day when I am calmer I will ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... hears it said that the cruelty of the Indians was not greater than that of mediaeval Europeans, as exemplified in judicial torture and in the horrors of the Inquisition. But in such a judgment there is lack of due discrimination. In the practice of torture by civil and ecclesiastical tribunals in the Middle Ages, there was a definite moral ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... a thousand times, no!" Don Carlos cried. "I was desolated when you refused to dance with me last night, and you put me to the torture later in the conservatory. I wanted to murder the other man, the one in particular on ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... wish me to keep her for ever in my service, for her to torture my ears incessantly, to infringe all the laws of custom and reason, by a barbarous accumulation of errors of speech, and of garbled expressions tacked together with proverbs dragged out of the ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... was marked by open folly and vanity. Desirous of some token of appreciation from Mary for his services, he entered into a long correspondence with her, which was intercepted by the spies of Walsingham. On the 4th of August Ballard was seized and betrayed his comrades, probably under torture. Babington then applied for a passport abroad, for the ostensible purpose of spying upon the refugees, but in reality to organize the foreign expedition and secure his own safety. The passport being ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... English nation has authorized, by a tacit consent, an almost general mitigation of such part of those judgments as savours of torture and cruelty: a sledge or hurdle being usually allowed to such traitors as are condemned to be drawn; and there being very few instances (and those accidental or by negligence) of any persons being embowelled or burned, till previously deprived ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... hope and doubt and torture, seemed mercifully unreal now, they lay so far back in the past—six or eight years, in fact, which is a lifetime to the lad of twenty—and meantime he had conquered many of the adverse circumstances that had threatened to cloud ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was precious, he continued to read the diary till he came to an entry which excited his deep interest: "Poor Allan Garland was captured to-day by the Yankees; and I suppose they will torture and starve the poor fellow, as they have the rest of our boys who have fallen into their hands. We shall never meet again. He was a good fellow. ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... themselves down from the rock; aye, time has been when whole cities came utterly to an end: while for the sake of Freedom that is true, and sure, and unassailable, dost thou grudge to God what He gave, when He claims it? Wilt thou not study, as Plato saith, to endure, not death alone, but torture, exile, stripes—in a word, to render up all that is not thine own? Else thou wilt be a slave amid slaves, wert thou ten thousand times a consul; aye, not a whit the less, though thou climb the Palace steps. And thou shalt know how true the saying of Cleanthes, that though the words ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... burned to ashes by this time, and, best of all, "that pig of a sergeant," as Moreno called him, that hound and murderer, Feeny,—he who had slain Ramon,—bound, gagged, and left to miserable death by torture. Indeed, as he was jolted along in the ambulance, groaning and cursing by turns, Pasqual wondered why he had not insisted that Harvey, too, should be given the coup de grace before their start. It was an unpardonable ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... her ankle to her knee, and when she tried to take another step she found the darting agony returned. But stop she could not. Her face grew gray and lined with misery as she dragged forward, saving her injured ankle as much as she could, but always having to torture it intolerably with every onward limp. Her persecutor caught up with her promptly, and she cast beseeching looks for deliverance on every side, which the hurrying, preoccupied crowd was too intent on its own affairs to see. If only she could see a policeman! ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... any subject whatever, outside of the restricted circle of his functions, would have been for him in any case useless and a fatigue; thought on the day which had just passed was a torture. Nevertheless, it was indispensable that he should take a look into his conscience, after such shocks, and render to himself ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... but when the people of Pherae came to lament over him, Pelopidas bade them be of good courage, as now if ever the tyrant would have to pay the penalty of his crimes: and he sent a message to the tyrant himself, saving that he was a strange man, to torture and murder his wretched and innocent citizens every day, and to spare him, who he knew would be sure to wreak vengeance on him if he should escape. The tyrant, admiring his spirit and fearlessness, said, "What! does Pelopidas wish to die?" The other, hearing of this ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... from GREECE, but accounts of the depredations of the robbers which now infest all parts of the country. In the provinces of Acarnania, Levadia and Attica, several villages have been sacked, and the inhabitants put to the torture. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... inclination; he gives her folly motion and advantage: and now she's going to my wife, and Falstaff's boy 30 with her. A man may hear this shower sing in the wind. And Falstaff's boy with her! Good plots, they are laid; and our revolted wives share damnation together. Well; I will take him, then torture my wife, pluck the borrowed veil of modesty from the so seeming Mistress Page, divulge 35 Page himself for a secure and wilful Actaeon; and to these violent proceedings all my neighbours shall cry aim. [Clock heard.] The clock gives me my cue, and my assurance bids me ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... sit opposite to her while she ate and drank, see her, perhaps, with her hair in curl-papers, know possibly that she had a corn upon her foot, hear her speak maybe of a decayed tooth, or of a chilblain, would have been torture to me. Into such abyss of the commonplace there was no fear of my dragging her, and for this I was glad. In the future she would be yet more removed from me. She was older than I was; she must be now a ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... bubbles up in him. I know something of it myself, for when I was a child I sometimes had fits of angry passion which left me exhausted on the floor, and even now, when the gusts arise within me, I have to fight against myself and torture myself in order that I may not act madly. But my poor Dario does not know how to suffer. He is like a child whose fancies must be gratified. And yet at bottom he has a good deal of common sense; he ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... my enemies can, and I believe will, capture me and throw me into prison. They will scarcely take my life, for to do so would excite a storm of indignation; but I always carry poison about with me and, if they applied torture as a preliminary to death, I have the power of releasing myself from ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... you. I would chastise you, with all my years upon me, in spite of my white head. Yours, if this boy should die, will never become white, or will become so suddenly, as your soul will wither, with its own self-torture, within you. Begone!—keep back—do not approach me, and, above all, do not approach me with uplifted hand, or, by Heaven, I will fell you to the earth as surely as you felled this boy! You have roused a feeling ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... we owe God for our redemption, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. For each of us Jesus suffered hunger and thirst, the temptation in the wilderness, the agony in the Garden, the cruel torture of the Cross. Do we think lightly of our sins? They were heavy enough to drive those piercing nails through the Hands and Feet of Jesus. Do we speak lightly of our sins? They were heavy enough to force that bitter cry from Jesus, "My God, My God, why hast ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... it certainly brought a flood of bitter ridicule on the unfortunate Minister. In addition to this, there was published, on the clever initiation of Henry Mayhew, the sheet of "Anti-Graham Wafers"—an instrument of diabolical torture for the unhappy Secretary, who already figured as "Paul Pry" in half a hundred of the more important papers. In this sheet, 10 inches by 7-3/4 inches in size, drawn by H. G. Hine, there were printed sixteen wafers, in ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... like that;" and then was silent again. What was there he could say?—he was in no mood for sympathy. The touch of Fern's soft arms, her little attempt at consolation, were torture to him. His idol was gone in another man's possession. He should never see again the dark southern loveliness that had so inthralled his imagination; and the idea ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... fight, in which the rescuer was greatly outmatched in strength, the cowardly ruffians were put to flight. That little ragamuffin was no less a personage than the King of England, and the curious circumstance by which he got into those rags and into that cruel torture is told by Mark Twain, in his most interesting story-book, ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... all the majesty of the English Navy, all the law, all the noble polity of England, arrayed to judge a boy to death, for a five minutes' prank. They would drag me on a hurdle to Tyburn, as soon as torture had made ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... may find rest, or even so much as live. I am driven hither and yon, a fugitive and a vagabond, even as the accursed Cain (Gen. iv, 14). I have already said that "without were fightings, within were fears" (II Cor. vii, 5), and these torture me ceaselessly, the fears being indeed without as well as within, and the fightings wheresoever there are fears. Nay, the persecution carried on by my sons rages against me more perilously and continuously than that of my open enemies, for my sons ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... too soon do we forget. And yet, when we were new-born we did remember other times and places. We, helpless infants in arms or creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air-flight. Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim and monstrous things. We new-born infants, without experience, were born with fear, with memory of ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... next day the familiars appeared, and led me to the hall of judgment, where I was asked whether I confessed my crime. I replied that I did not know what I was accused of. They again asked me if I would confess, and on my making the same answer I was ordered to the torture. ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... Church, on the Baltimore turnpike, about four miles from Gettysburg, and reached there after dark. They had sixty wounded undergoing every variety of suffering and torture. The church was small, having but one aisle, and the narrow seats were fixtures. A small building adjoining provided boards which were laid on the tops of the seats, and covered with straw, and on these ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... of the true Morito," said the chief. "Their young men are initiated by torture. That is one mark. Then their chief men wear feathers on their heads. That is the second. And the third mark is that they are tattooed, as I am," and he pointed to the strange figures on his naked chest; "and ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... is no putting up with that!" So saying, he sprang up and made off through the gate of the city, hardly believing in his escape. Quoth the King, "I excuse her, and in my son's hands be her doom. If he will, let him torture her, and if he will, let him kill her." Quoth the Prince, "Pardon is better than vengeance and mercy is of the quality of the noble;" and the King repeated, "'Tis for thee to decide, O my son." So the Prince set her free, saying, "Depart from our neighbourhood and Alla pardon ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... was a well-trained debater before he entered the House, and at once took a prominent position in its deliberations. He illustrated the virtue of persistence in its highest degree, and had the art of annoying his opponent in discussion to the point of torture.—John Beatty of Ohio, who had served a brief period in the preceding Congress, now appeared for a full term. He had an excellent record as a soldier, was a successful man of affairs, and was endowed with a firmness ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... deal of shuddering undergraduate life flitting about the place—luckless youths, in white ties and bands, who are undergoing the peine forte et dure with different degrees of composure; and their friends who are there to look after them. You may go in and watch the torture yourself if you are so minded, for the viva voce schools are open to the public. But one such experiment will be enough for you, unless you are very hard-hearted. The sight of the long table, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... profusion! at how dear a rate Are we made up! all hope of thrift and state Lost for a verse. When I by thoughts look back Into the womb of time, and see the rack Stand useless there, until we are produc'd Unto the torture, and our souls infus'd To learn afflictions, I begin to doubt That as some tyrants use from their chain'd rout Of slaves to pick out one whom for their sport They keep afflicted by some ling'ring art; ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... her body with rude disciplines, and one cannot describe without a sensation of horror, the cap, bristling with sharp points, that she wore secretly on, her head night and day. The Sisters once accidentally saw this instrument of torture, and begged her to discontinue its use, but she smilingly told them, it caused her no more pain than a ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... 'tisn't true! 'tisn't true!' cried Cytherea in an agony of torture. 'He has never loved anybody else, I know—I ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... forget not, neither will I keep silence regarding the severity of Thy scourge and the wondrous swiftness of Thy mercy. Thou didst torture me with toothache; and when the pain had become so great that I could not even speak, it came into my mind to tell all my friends who were there to pray to Thee for me, to Thee the God of all manner of succour. And I wrote my request on a wax tablet and I gave it them ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... founded, and convert what was intended as an asylum for repentant vice, not into a house merely of salutary correction, which may moderate with reviving morality and cease entirely with complete reformation, but into a prison of endless torture, where though the sufferings of the body may terminate, the worst species of torture, the endurements and mortifications of the soul, are to end only with existence? Shall a vile faction be allowed to inflict on the unfortunate convict a punishment ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... thought she must have made sunshine where ever she went, was the skeleton, or the misery, or the bore, or the Nemesis of Clavering House, and of most of the inhabitants thereof. As one little stone in your own shoe or your horse's, suffices to put either to torture and to make your journey miserable, so in life a little obstacle is sufficient to obstruct your entire progress, and subject you to endless annoyance and disquiet. Who would have guessed that such a smiling little fairy as Blanche ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... think,' she said with a half laugh, 'that I was an inquisitor, and that you were answering under torture!' ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... share of fanatical sects, some of whom push their religion to a wonderful extreme. One sect has a way of sacrificing children by a sort of slow torture in no way commendable. Another sect makes a burnt offering of some of its adherents, who are selected by lot. They enter a house prepared for the occasion, and begin a service of singing and prayer. After a time spent in devotions, the building is set on fire and consumed with ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... letters—by the simple and peremptory preaching of the Evangel. He recognised it as a case calling for sympathy, and he does not find the sympathy hard. Knox, indeed, like the other Reformers, had parted for ever with the mediaeval idea of salvation by self-torture—even by self-torture for sin. Like all the wisest of the human race, too—even before Christianity came to sanction their surmise—he held that religion must be an objective thing, and that salvation lies in dealing, not with ourselves, but with One outside of us and above. Yet ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... his own agony. Heaven only knows how bitterly this hard man may have felt the separation between himself and his only son, or how much the more terrible the anguish might have been made by that unflinching self-conceit which concealed the torture. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... not worse folly to torture a poor girl as you do me — all for a worthless ring? What can you want with the ring? I do not know that he ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... the Reformation set us free. The minister has no longer power to press into the retirements of conscience, to torture us by interrogatories, or put himself in possession of our secrets and our lives. But though we have thus controlled his usurpations, his just and original power remains unimpaired. He may still see, though he may not pry: he may yet hear, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... death an opportunity of gratifying the unnatural hatred which she had long felt for her son Cluentius. She would accuse him of poisoning his step-father. Her first attempt failed completely. She subjected three slaves to torture, one of them her own, another belonged to the younger Oppianicus, a third the property of the physician who had attended the deceased in his last illness. But the cruelties and tortures extorted no confession from the men. At ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... many causes of the army's disruption was its losses in prisoners. Not less than 5,000 men were at that moment dying by slow torture in the foul prisons or pestilential floating dungeons of New York. Turn from it as we may, there is no escaping the conviction that if not done with the actual sanction of Sir William Howe, these atrocities were at least committed with his guilty knowledge.[1] The calculated barbarities practised ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... voice of Harrington. A criminal on the scafford with the noose about his neck and the trap sagging underneath his feet could not have welcomed a pardon more eagerly than I welcomed my deliverance out of this torture-chamber. ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... Sannyasin. The life of wandering during eight months and the rest during the rainy season agree exactly; and in many other points, for example in the use of confession, they agree with the Buddhists. They agree with Brahma[n.]s alone in ascetic self-torture, which Buddhism rejects; and specially characteristic is the fact that ancient Brahmanism recommends starvation to its penitents as beneficial. [Footnote: An example may be found in Jacobi's careful comparison of the customs of the Brahmanic and Jaina ascetics, in the beginning of his translation ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... but just left the last remnants of his candle-ends burning, and climbed glowing to his room, delighted with the success of his experiment, when those quick-following, hideous sounds rent the night, like flashes from some cloud of hellish torture. His heart seemed to stand still. Without knowing why, involuntarily he associated them with what he had been last about, and for a moment felt like a murderer. The next he caught up his light, and rushed from the room, to seek, like his father, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... from your lips, curse you!" cried Wilde, furiously. "I will torture you here, starve you here, until you go mad ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... yet always envying their felicity. They would have it, because it is easy and comfortable; yet cannot abide to think of it, because they have lost it for ever. Ever laden with the delight of sin; and yet that is the greatest torture; always desiring to put it out of their mind, and yet assuredly know they must for ever abide ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... it most. When a man is under the shadow of a bereavement, he can test for himself how he has used love. If he finds that the loving looks and words and caresses of those that are left to him are a mere torture to him, then he has used love wrongly, just as a selfish and agreeable delight; but if he finds strength and comfort in the yearning sympathy of friend and beloved, reassurance in the strength of the love that is left him, and confidence in the indestructibility of affection, then he ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... soft collision; but the owner of those eyes did not hear the words that earned him that torture. He lay still ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... from downcast eyes, And when they turned their heads; And when their garments clung to them, Or fell from them, in exquisite draperies. Their spirits watched my ecstasy With wide looks of starry unconcern. Their spirits looked upon my torture; They drank it as it were the water of life; With reddened cheeks, brightened eyes, The rising flame of my soul made their spirits gilt, Like the wings of a butterfly drifting suddenly into sunlight. And they cried to me for life, life, life. But in taking life for myself, In seizing and crushing ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... of my generals arose and said: 'We can change some of our tactics without loss to our cause. The sword and torture only strengthen our enemies. We should resort more to the ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... Devils Laws in a Spectral Book laid before them; which two or three of these poor Sufferers, being by their tiresome sufferings overcome to do, they have immediately been released from all their miseries and they appear'd in Spectre then to Torture those that were before their Fellow-Sufferers. The Witches which by their covenant with the Devil, are become Owners of Spectres, are oftentimes by their own Spectres required and compelled to give their consent, for the molestation of ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... think you are in peril, too. O, Simon Fraser! to think upon that man! For his life and the dirty money, to be dealing in such traffic!" And just then she called out aloud with a queer word that was common with her, and belongs, I believe, to her own language. "My torture!" says she, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... put on a look of pain, and walk hastily from the room, as if the torture to my ears ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... sheep; but there was something beside that moved his heart to pity. It was the lurking sadness of a man deep hurt, who fights the whole world in his anguish; the protest of a soul in torment, demanding, like Job, that some one shall justify his torture. ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... rubbers in unpleasant bubbles until it seemed to her as if she must kill herself. Hot air coming out from a steam laundry. Hot, stifling air. Bernice didn't work in the laundry but she wished that she did so that the hot air would kill her. She wanted to be stifled. She needed torture to be happy. She also needed a good swift clout on ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... whose breast the sources of life are frozen. I chatted—I who never chatted—with women, and with men. I even smiled—once. That was when my little white-faced wife asked me if it were not time to go home. Even a man under torture might find strength to smile if the inquisitor should ask if he were not ready to ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... of Flora. Oh, speak to me of Flora, if you would not have me die at once of suspense, and all the torture ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... country, determined to invent one; and there was brought to birth that modern Ireland, passionate for freedom, which has occupied the stage ever since. In our own time it has knit, as a fractured limb knits, into one tissue with the tradition of the Gaelic peasantry. Hanging and burning, torture and oppression, poison and Penal Laws, bribes and blackguardism so far from exterminating the Irish people actually hammered them into a nation, one and indestructible, proud of its past and confident ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... testify under oath, but a slave's oath is counted worthless. The slaves may be the only important witnesses to a given act, but under only one condition can they testify. With the consent of their master they may testify UNDER TORTURE. It is a critical moment at this hearing when a litigant who is confident of his case proudly announces, "I challenge my enemy to put my slaves under torture"; or the other, attacking first, cries out, "I demand that my enemy submit his slaves to torture." Theoretically ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... giggle, who ought to have been in the nursery instead of serving his master with liquid stimulants and assisting in all sorts of wickedness, was a peculiarly nauseating object, and got on my nerves far more than the terrors of the torture-chamber. This painful business was done off, and indeed most of the bloody work was carried on out of sight—a curious economy in a play where there was so much talk of lethal tools. It is true that an arrow once flopped on to the stage, but it only brought a note from a friend's hand. Swords, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... slipping, slipping down the greasy slate. And now a new peril threatened. A chill ran through me of cold and nervousness, and I slid an inch. I suppressed the growing shivers with all my will. I would keep perfectly quiet till Muir came back. The sickening pain in my shoulders increased till it was torture, and I could not ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... fight this out single-handed. Two courses lie before me. I might become this woman's lover. Or I must endure such persecutions as she can inflict upon me. Even if none come, I shall live in a hell of apprehension. But she may torture me, she may drive me mad, she may kill me: I will never, never, never give in. What can she inflict which would be worse than the loss of Agatha, and the knowledge that I am a perjured liar, and have forfeited the name ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture chamber of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and bleeding heart through the shambles of our civilization needs no such fantastic images of the poet to teach ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... hitherto escaped. Perse and Moter began to row toward the ship, but Perse soon fainted, and Moter was left to manage the boat alone, as he had escaped unwounded. The body of Greene was thrown immediately into the sea. Wilson and Thomas died that day in great torture, and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... shine upon the black And hideous structure of the guillotine; Beside the haloed countenance of saints There hangs the multiple and knotted lash. The Christ of love, benign and beautiful, Looks at the torture-rack, by hate conceived And bigotry sustained. The prison cell, With blood-stained walls, where starving men went mad, Lies under turrets matchless in ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... brought before it could be taken. Even while the conflict between the Mormons was going on, in 1846, there was vitality enough in this old organization, in Pope and Massac counties, to call for the interposition of a band of "regulators," who made many arrests, not hesitating to employ torture to secure from one prisoner information about his associates. Governor Ford sent General J. T. Davies there, to try to effect a peaceable arrangement of the difficulties, but he failed to do so, and the "regulators," who found the county officers opposed ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... examined about the matter whose interest it was so much to conceal it. When they had once gained the king's ear for insinuations of this sort, they went on to show a thousand grounds of suspicion against Philotas, till at last they prevailed to have him seized and put to the torture, which was done in the presence of the principal officers, Alexander himself being placed behind some tapestry to understand what passed. Where, when he heard in what a miserable tone, and with what abject submissions Philotas ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... at her horse's neck; she did not see him smile. He had felt quite sure that she sought relief for the silences of her life in literary composition. When an unattractive woman has not talent she finds a double revenge in the torture of words, he thought. What shall I say to her? That she is whittling thorns for her own soul? Bah! Did I not find enjoyment once in the very imaginings of all that has scourged me since? Would I have thanked anyone for opening my eyes? And the ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... second time he found that he had fainted. He gave him a toss and a rude kick, leaving him to lie lifeless, as he thought, upon the floor. Turning again to the old lady, he pulled her lack from the fire and removed her gag, threatening to again torture her if she persisted in refusing to reveal the secret. Although her feet were horribly burned by the coals and her suffering was so intense that her whole frame shook convulsively with the inexpressible pain she endured, she remained silent. His ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... of faith. The religious basis of government was not so much that people put their trust in princes, as that they did not put their trust in any child of man. It was so with all the ugly institutions which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were never talked of as good things; they were always talked of as necessary evils. A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves just as a modern business man speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks: "It's very horrible; but how else can society be conducted?" ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... it is that a man or a boy, not radically destitute of generous comprehensions, will often cruelly torture and tyrannize over a woman whom he both loves and reveres, who stands in his soul in his best hours as the very impersonation of all that is good and beautiful. It is as if some evil spirit at times possessed him, and compelled him to utter words which were felt at the moment to be ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a coincidence about the convent," Mary told herself. Why should Miss Bland wish to torture Angelo's wife, even if she knew anything? And she could not know. It was impossible that she should know. But suddenly the girl remembered Marie's hints about a long-ago flirtation between the cousins. And Idina's manner had been odd when she begged Angelo to smoke because of old ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... cruel. The games they play, at least those they invent, instinctively partake of some element of brute nature. They chase, they capture, they imprison, they torture, and they kill. No secret rendezvous of a boy's pirate gang ever failed to be soaked with imaginary blood! And what group of boys have not played at being pirates? The Indian games are worse—scalping, with red-hot cinders thrown ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... whimpered a little, but he shrieked outright when those in the tongue were removed. Rolf had hard work to hold him, and any one not knowing the case might have thought that the two men were deliberately holding the dog to administer the most cruel torture. ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... And Mercy from that hour implored in vain. Ah! who will e'er believe the words I say? His daughters he accused, and the same day They both were cast into the dungeon's gloom, That dismal antechamber of the tomb, Arraigned, condemned, and sentenced to the flame, The secret torture and the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... life I have sometimes suffered with hunger, cold and pain, and have some idea of what starving, freezing and torture may be, but among all the ills to which flesh is heir, I doubt if there is one so trying to the nerves and brain of man as enforced and long-continued vigilance, when all his failing nature sinks for want of sleep. Insanity and death must soon be ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... Little by little confidence had waned, and doubt and dread replaced it. Some, probably, had been earlier shot by the storm of centring bullets; some, possibly, had sent their last shot into the reeling brain,—death by one's own hand being better at least than by slow and fiendish torture; and at last, probably just at dusk, the triumphant savages were able to close in upon their helpless prey and reap their reward of scalps and plunder and wreak their fury on a mute ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... the work of "a milder age," consider the hanging of Penelope's maids and the abominable torture of Melanthius. There is no torturing in the [blank space] for the Iliad happens not to deal with ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... failed. And so annoyed was he at his failure, that he suggests to Thurloe, that it would 'not to be unfit to make' the malignants 'speak forcibly, by tying matches, or some kind of pain, whereby they may be made to discover the plot;' and as he re-urges his craving to inflict torture on his prisoners, the proposal had drawn no disapproval from ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... headed by two brothers, of the name of Zeck, George and Luke. When it was quelled, George, not Luke, was punished by his head being encircled with a red-hot iron crown: 'coron candescente ferre coronatur[16].' The same severity of torture was exercised on the Earl of Athol, one of the murderers of King James I. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... arranged my plans—had relieved my heart of every burden, when, a second time, he throws a mountain upon it. Stop, friend conscience, why do you take his part?—For twenty years thus you have used me, and been my torture. ...
— Lover's Vows • Mrs. Inchbald
... myself, while God permits man to wreck himself, he denies him the power to destroy the world. The grass covers the graves; the flowers grow in the furrows of the cannon balls; the graceful foliage festoons with blossoms the ruins of the prison and the torture-chamber; and the corn springs alike under the foot of the helot or the yeoman. And I said to myself that, even though civilization should commit suicide, the earth would still remain—and with it some remnant of mankind; and out of the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many victims—old men, young women, tiny children until the day when it would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... Thank God it had grown dark—dark enough to hide the whiteness that she knew had crept over her face, and the horror that had crept into her eyes. "You mean"—her voice was very low—"you mean you're going to torture ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... dignify with the name of a canal, runs through the centre. There is generally but little water in this ditch, but millions of restless mosquitoes, which populate the whole town, and (I speak from experience) are a perfect torture. The houses being mostly plastered, have a stone-like and cleanly appearance, with their green Venetian blinds, and plantations of acacias and other Eastern trees, waving gracefully in front of them. The climate is salubrious, and provisions of all kinds abundant and cheap. I ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... amongst us. Going out shooting, and dragging his gun through a hedge after him, the trigger caught in a bush, and the poor little man was brought home to his father's house, only to live a few days and expire in pain and torture. Under the yew-trees yonder, I can see the vault which covers him, and where my bones one day no doubt will be laid. And over our pew at church, my children have often wistfully spelt the touching epitaph in which Miles's ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... accomplice, the "neighbour" who had put them up to the crime, were caught. The "neighbour," as soon as he arrived in the village, was given twenty-five lashes, and for two hours was subjected to the agonizing torture of having his head and his feet in the stocks at the same time. Next day he was given ten lashes, and the following day five, and eight days later they took him to Durango. His two Indian associates, father and son, were also put in the ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... abstinence, to refrain from fault or reduce the body to subjection, though starvation is the antidote for desire; the more active, and, perhaps, more effectual operation of periodical flagellations and bodily torture were added. Ingenuity was taxed to find new means of personal infliction. A hermit who never permitted himself to sleep more than an hour without being awakened endured torments not inferior to those of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Although much blood was shed in their pursuit, this lawless, misguided man and his band were never taken. Great as their sin would naturally seem to the noble family at the castle, no less lamentable and equally worthy of torture and death would the heretics of Bruneck appear. About the same time the sacrilegious books, as they were called, of Zwingli and Luther were sold there openly, conventicle hymns were sung in the streets, and the priest Stephan Gobi preached against the holy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... did not tamely submit to the yoke sought to be imposed upon their necks, they only acted as human beings, civilized and uncivilized, have always acted upon like provocation. Those who have characterized the Indian as inhuman and fiendish because he put his prisoners to the torture, seem to have forgotten that the wildest accounts of Indian ferocity pale beside the undoubtedly true accounts of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. Christian Spain—nay, even Christian England—tortured prisoners with a diabolical ingenuity which never entered into the heart of a pagan Indian ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... waiting heap. Then he heard a low, evil, chuckling laugh from someone beside the rift, and he understood. Saya Chone was there, playing with him, as a cat plays with a mouse. The half-caste was tossing torches within Jack's reach, simply to torture him with the idea of what would happen when one of the flaming splinters of pine fell into the heap of tinder ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... land, and houses; but behind his delight stood a ghost that cried out that his enjoyment of these things should not be of long duration. It was the ghost of the rich relative, who had been permitted to return to earth to torture his nephew into the grave. Wherefore, under the spur of this constant reminder, John Hay, always preserving the air of heavy business-like stolidity that hid the shadow on his mind, turned investments, ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... the curtain began Edward Henry's torture and bewilderment. The scene disclosed a cloth upon which was painted, to the right, a vast writhing purple cuttle-fish whose finer tentacles were lost above the proscenium arch, and to the left an enormous crimson oblong patch with a hole in ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... dark hour of the Church, there flashes out some bright form of human heroism, to be a beacon and a comfort to all future time. Victor, for instance, tells the story of Dionysia, the beautiful widow whom the Vandals tried to torture into denying the Divinity of our Lord.—How when they saw that she was bolder and fairer than all the other matrons, they seized her, and went to strip her: and she cried to them, 'Qualiter libet occidite: verecunda tamen membra nolite nudare,' but ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the paper, bowed with a certain languid, easy grace that camp life never cured him of, and went. He knew that the man who should take the news of his treasure's loss to the Emir Ilderim would, a thousand to one, perish by every torture desert cruelty could frame, despite the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream! 95 I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream Of agony by torture lengthened out That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav'st without, Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree, 100 Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, Or lonely house, long held the witches' ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a child!" observed Hester, aside to the minister. "O, I have much to tell thee about her! But, in very truth, she is right as regards this hateful token. I must bear its torture yet a little longer,—only a few days longer,—until we shall have left this region, and look back hither as to a land which we have dreamed of. The forest cannot hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... attained to the long-desired dignity of attorney-general, a post which he filled with power and energy, but which he disgraced by the torture of Peacham, an old clergyman, who was charged with having written treason in a sermon which he never preached nor published. As nothing could be extorted from him by the rack, Bacon informed the king that Peacham "had a dumb devil." It should be some palliation of this deed, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... indifference and interest. The awful Brother, you must die, of the Trappists seemed constantly legible in the eyes of the peasants with whom Raphael was living; he scarcely knew which he dreaded most, their unfettered talk or their silence; their presence became torture. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... and drew herself up until she stood straight and tall before him. "Have you not punished me enough?" she asked, in a whisper. "Are you not satisfied? Was it brave? Was it manly? Is that what you have learned among your savages—to torture a woman?" She stopped with a quick sob of pain, and pressed her hands ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... tobacco, a knife and tinder to ignite their tobacco. At the close of the Sixteenth Century tobacco was introduced into the East. In Persia and Turkey where at first its use was opposed by the most cruel torture it gained at length the sanction and approval of even the Sultan himself. Pallas gives the following account in regard to ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... which she quenched her thirst renewed his own momentarily forgotten torture. His tongue seemed to swell. He ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... face of the Blessed One receding into an infinite distance. She knew that every day added a link to the heavy Karma that was bound about the feet she loved, and her soul said "Set him free," and her heart refused the torture. But her soul was the stronger. She set ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... minded the physical discomfort," he went on. "It's the mental torture that's been killing me. We've pushed hot on your trail hour after hour, day in and day out. When they made me rest, I could only lie and listen to you sob for help until—O my ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... that they might be tormented for ever in Gehenna—granted that they did not desire to burn their bodies on earth; those words are still dark and unchristian. They could only be written by men who believed that God hates sinners, that his will is to destroy them on earth, and torture them for ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... without food and water, and loaded their limbs with fetters. This was their second imprisonment; and what followed these few severities your Lordships will remark,—still more severities. They continued to persecute, to oppress, to work upon these men by torture and by the fear of torture, till at last, having found that all their proceedings were totally ineffectual, they desire the women to surrender their house; though it is in evidence before you, that to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... of color of the Niagara region made Mosely's case their own and determined to prevent his delivery up to the American authorities to be taken to the land of the free and the home of the brave, knowing that there for him to be brave meant torture and death, and that death alone could set him free. Under the leadership of Herbert Holmes, a yellow man,[31] a teacher and preacher, they lay around the jail night and day to the number of from two to four hundred to prevent the prisoner's delivery up. At length the deputy sheriff with ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... becomingly? Dreamest thou they talk and act like checkmen at Banbury fair? How can thy shallow brain suffice for their vast conceptions? How darest thou say, as they do: 'Hang this fellow; quarter that; flay; mutilate; stab; shoot; press; hook; torture; burn alive'? These are royalties. Who appointed thee to such office? The Holy Ghost? He alone can confer it; but ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... breathing frosty air directly into the lungs. Invalids shut themselves scrupulously indoors for weeks and even months at a stretch, for fear of the terrible results of a "blast of raw air" striking into their bronchial tubes. All sorts of absurd instruments of torture, in the form of "respirators" to tie over the mouth and nose and "keep out the fog," are invented, and those who have the slightest tendency to bronchial or lung disturbances are warned upon pain of their life to wrap up their mouths ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... Imagination onely makes it monstrous. When we are sick we endure a hundred fitts, This is but one; a hundred waies of torture, And cry and howle, weary of all about us, Our frends, allyes, our children teadious to us, Even our best health is but still sufferaunce. One blow, one short peece of an howre dos this, And this cures all; maintaines no more phisitians, Restores our memories, and there's ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... religion. Here it is sufficient to observe that the old law which had been hitherto altogether arbitrary—either the will of the Emperor or of the Shogun—was revised on the model of the Napoleonic code and soon published throughout the land. The use of torture to obtain testimony ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... rid of the burden of existence, is by re-absorption into Brahma. But this return to Brahma is dependent upon the soul's purification, for no impure soul can be re-absorbed into the primal essence. The necessary freedom from passion and the required purity of soul can best be attained by self-torture, by a severe mortification of the flesh; hence the asceticism of ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... as you think," said Harold, pointing to Chimbolo, whose sad story he had heard; "they will try every kind of torture before they ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... fatigue combined, together with the oppressive sensations caused by the ponderous native saddle, or recado, with its huge surcingle of raw hide drawn up so tightly as to hinder free respiration. The suffering animal remembers how at the last relief invariably came, when the twelve or fifteen hours' torture were over, the toil and the want, and when the great iron bridle and ponderous gear were removed, and he had freedom and food and drink and rest. At the gate or at the door of his master's house, the sudden relief had always come to ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... disapproving of the divorce, and making severe comments upon it, he also banished her [607]. At last he (365) put her to death, upon a charge of adultery, so impudent and false, that, when all those who were put to the torture positively denied their knowledge of it, he suborned his pedagogue, Anicetus, to affirm, that he had secretly intrigued with and debauched her. He married Poppaea twelve days after the divorce of Octavia [608], and entertained a great affection for her; but, nevertheless, killed her ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... were of that faith. Not until they refused to make a statue of AEsculapius did he vow vengeance and turn on them, venting his fury. In the persecution that followed four Master Masons and one humble apprentice suffered cruel torture and death, but they became the Four Crowned Martyrs, the story of whose heroic fidelity unto death haunted the legends of later times.[63] They were the patron saints alike of Lombard and Tuscan builders, and, later, of the working Masons of the Middle Ages, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... have said, like a venomous toad it lurks in dark corners. It deserves neither quarter nor sympathy; but as we can never reconcile it let our rule of conduct be to scorn it with a good heart, and as our happiness and glory is torture to it we ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... he, when the Prince was dragged before him, 'you have deserved death, but you shall live only to suffer more cruelly. Go, and add to the number of those whom it is my pleasure to torture.' ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... took the medicine and choked on it, and when he could speak said he wouldn't be with them. He could tell by his feelings, he said, that he would never get through this day of torture, and he wanted to say some last words. Then he said that he wanted the 'Coon to have his Sunday suit, which was getting a little tight for him and would just about fit Mr. 'Coon, and that he wanted the Crow to have his pipe and toilet articles, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... cause out; I had ne're been mad to fight else: I confess Sir, The daily torture of my side that vext me, Made me as daily careless what became of me, Till a kind sword there wounded me, and eas'd me; 'Twas nothing in my valour fought; I am well now, And take some pleasure in my life, methinks now, It shews as mad a thing to me to see you scuffle, And kill one another foolishly ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (2 of 10) - The Humourous Lieutenant • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... was always a local governor. The first of these, Hubert de Grandfontaine, came out in 1670. He and some of his successors were men of force and ability; but others, such as Brouillan, who issued card money without authority and applied torture to an unconvicted soldier, and Perrot, who sold liquor by the pint and the half-pint in his own house, were unworthy ...
— The Acadian Exiles - A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline • Arthur G. Doughty
... some good man's bosom-flower, And gather children round your matron knees! Then, when all this is past, and you and I Remember each our youth but as an hour Of joy—or torture; one, serene, at ease, May meet the other's grave yet steadfast eye, Thinking, 'He loved me well!'—clasp hands, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... and not pertaining in the least degree to their profession? If not, then each officer may define cruelty according to his own temper, and if it is not usual he will make it usual. Corporal punishment, imprisonment, the gag, the ball and chain, and all the almost insupportable forms of torture invented for military punishment lie within the range of choice. Third. The sentence of a commission is not to be executed without being approved by the commander, if it affects life or liberty, and a sentence of death must be approved by the President. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... lonely. There isn't a soul that I can speak out to, except you. You don't know what that means. I go about in the schoolroom, and up and down the streets, and see things—horrible things. The world gets to be one big torture chamber, and then I have to cry out. I come to you to cry out,—because you really care. Now I can go away, and keep silent for a ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... for me from twenty to thirty people whose friends and relatives were in the suspected institution, all in such acute distress of mind that to see them was to look upon the victims of deliberate torture. In most cases my visitor would state that it seemed impossible to put their invalids in any other place, but if these stories were true, something must be done. Many of the patients were taken out only to be returned after a few days or weeks to meet the sullen hostility of their attendants ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... any Invention visit the human pericranium? Are we forever to be doomed to the thousand inconveniences of the balloon? Will nobody contrive a more expeditious mode of progress? The jog-trot movement, to my thinking, is little less than positive torture. Upon my word we have not made more than a hundred miles the hour since leaving home! The very birds beat us—at least some of them. I assure you that I do not exaggerate at all. Our motion, no doubt, seems slower than it actually is—this on account of our having no objects ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... their home. The last of these bodies fell upon the Jews, who are indeed enemies of the Christian faith, but who have now, at least, nothing to do with the question of the holy sepulchre. As soon as they entered into Germany the Crusaders put them to death with horrible torture. Plunder and rapine indeed appeared to be the object of the crusaders. On this as well as on most other preceding bands, their misdeeds drew down the vengeance of the people. At an early period of their march, and as soon as they reached Hungary, the people fell upon them, and put the greater ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... brother at Eltham, as they were keeping their Christmas festivities there, and that this attempt failed through the Court receiving intimation of the design and suddenly removing to Westminster."[26] Lord Cobham was put to death by cruel torture in St. Giles's Fields, London, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... large, and kept slipping off, so that she could not wear them. For a time, they persevered in making what they considered their escape from certain death, for, as I have said, the children had been taught, by the tales they had heard, to regard all strange Indians as ministers of torture, and of horrors worse than death. Exhausted with pain and fatigue, the poor little girl at length declared she ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... inequality fills me with disgust. The example of Christ is too sublime. He was human only in His sufferings. He bore our burdens and He shared our agonies. He was deceived, despised, rejected: the first torture and the firstfruits of His Passion was the treachery of a disciple. When I am sorrowful and wretched, He seems Real to me and vivid. But when I am well and wildly happy, He seems far away and unreal—an invisible God, watching mortals with a certain contempt. Now the Pagans had a ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... exhortation, sound reason, nor friendly entreaty had any avail on these hardened offenders, they resorted to the more urgent arguments of torture; and having thus absolutely wrung the truth from their stubborn lips, they condemned them to undergo the roasting due unto the heinous crimes they had confessed. Some even carried their perverseness so far as to expire under the torture, protesting their innocence to the last; but these were ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... that they will melt it and will pour it into her palms rather than fail to make her speak. They seek and search for fire and lead; they kindle the fire; they melt the lead. Thus the base villains maltreat and torture the lady, for they have poured into her palms the lead, all boiling and hot just as they have taken it from the fire. Nor yet is it enough for them that the lead has passed through and through the palms, ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... his coming, for the strain had been great, and every minute beyond his customary time for returning was torture to her fond heart, since, in imagination, she could see him being possibly arrested for something that any one with half a heart must know he would ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... a famous classic she had read with a favourite teacher at school came to her, and she knew that she was the witness of a retribution, of a suffering beyond conception of a soul prepared for suffering,—not physical suffering, but of that torture which is ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... boy, shouting "My God! Oh! my God!" writhed and leaped so as to displace the gratings, and scatter the nine tails of the scourge all over his person. At the next blow he howled, leaped, and raged in unendurable torture. ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... sacrifice; there is room for the innocent lamb that goes to the slaughter; there is room in those realms of infinity for every bird of the air and every beast of the field that either the necessity (that tyrant's plea) or the ignorance of man has condemned to torture, injustice, or neglect! ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... blockhouse burst into flames. Paully and his men were landed at the Ottawa camp, where a horde of howling Indians, including women and children, beat them and compelled them to dance and sing for the entertainment of the rabble. Preparations were made to torture Paully to death at the stake; but an old squaw, who had recently lost her husband, was attracted by the handsome, dark-skinned young ensign, and adopted him in place of her deceased warrior. Paully's hair was cut close; he was dipped into the stream to wash the white ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... his own men. The Bishop of Clogher was routed by Coote and Venables and shared the same fate. "All their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously," Cromwell wrote at Drogheda—as the Catholic martyrologies assert, with torture. Peaceable inhabitants were not to be molested. But all who had taken part in or supported the rebellion of 1641 were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... in having reserve drivers and brassies, even if one is only a very moderate golfer. Everybody knows what it is to suffer torture during the period when one is said to be "off his drive," and I think there is no remedy for this disease like a change of clubs. There may be nothing whatever the matter with the club you have been playing with, and which at one time gave you so much delight, ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... Demetrius!" exclaimed Nisida. "And this is how our aims shall be accomplished," she continued, in a lower and less excited tone: "The ambitious views of Ibrahim Pasha must experience a signal defeat; and as he is too powerful to be personally injured by us, we must torture his soul by crushing his relations—we must punish him through the medium of his sister and his aunt. This evening I had a long discourse with Dr. Duras, who is devoted to my interests, and over whom I wield a wondrous power of persuasion. He has undertaken to induce his brother, Angelo Duras, ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... Northern Railway is the tsetse fly: especially was he to be found at a place called Same, and during the long trek from German Bridge on the Northern Railway to Morogoro in the south. At one place there is a belt thirty miles wide, and our progress was perpetual torture, unless we passed that way at night. For the Glossina morsitans sleeps by night beneath leaves in the bush, and only wakes when disturbed. For this reason we drive our horses, mules, and cattle by night through these fly-belts. Savage and pertinacious to a degree are these pests, and their ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... Very few showed any great signs of fear, with the exception of the overseers, who had been often and often the actual instruments of cruelty towards those who now had them in their power. I am surprised that the ignorant savage blacks did not torture them as they had themselves been tortured, before putting an end to their existence. Perhaps they wished to set an example of leniency to the civilised whites. They went about the execution, however, with deliberation, sufficient to make it a ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... uncle was to "educate" him, though this was to be paid for out of that money of his very own. He was rudely shocked to learn that you had to pay money to go to school. Loathing school as he did, to pay money for your own torture—money that would buy things—seemed unutterably silly. But despite this inbecility the prospect retained ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... information that the chemical symbol for raw rubber is C10H16, which turns into isoprene, or 2C5H8. Suddenly, without precedent, Babbitt was not merely bored but admitting that he was bored. It was ecstasy to escape from the table, from the torture of a straight chair, and loll on the davenport ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... is called Sakar and is prepared for those who neglect prayer. The sixth is called Hatamah and is appointed for Jews and Christians. The seventh is named Hwiyah and is prepared for hypocrites. Such be the seven stages.' Quoth Bulukiya, 'Haply Jahannam hath least of torture for that it is the uppermost.' 'Yes,' quoth King Sakhr, 'the most endurable of them all is Jahannam; natheless in it are a thousand mountains of fire, in each mountain seventy thousand cities of fire, in each city seventy thousand castles of fire, in each castle seventy thousand ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... headsman's 'prentice, and folding his arms he stood right in front of the defenceless wretch. "My lad," said he, "you know, don't you, that I have been the headsman's assistant these six years? You know, don't you, that I am accustomed to torture and kill man and beast in cold blood? You know the sort of smile with which I am wont to reply to the agonised despair of my victim, and the memory of it ought to make your brain freeze in your skull. Very well! Let me tell you that I am prepared to ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... railings, without the dread of beginning to talk to them of an impenetrable mystery destined. . . . He was becoming scientifically afraid of insanity lying in wait for him amongst these lines. "To hang for ever over." It was an obsession, a torture. He had lately failed to keep several of these appointments, whose note used to be an unbounded trustfulness in the language of sentiment and manly tenderness. The confiding disposition of various classes of women satisfied the needs of his self-love, and put some material ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... continuity. It was also difficult to speak of Adrian in terms that did not tear our hearts. As a despoiler of the dead, his offence was rank. But we had loved him; and we still loved him, and he had expiated his crime by a year's unimaginable torture. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... to which of the two passes the deer would choose. As it was a physical impossibility to have his eyes on both passes at once, the old gentleman soon found that turning his head every few seconds from one side to the other became irksome. Then it became painful. At last it became torture, and then he gave up this plan in despair, resolving to devote a minute at a time to each pass, although feeling that by so doing his chances were ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... do? What am I to do? The Good Book says forgive your enemies, but how can I forgive a wrong like that? And my poor girl—he deserted her, drove her to the streets. Ugh! if I could kill him by slow torture, gloat over his agony—but I ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... living skeleton, wandering about and condemned to live forever without food. More than once he bitterly regretted the resolution he had taken, but having taken it, he would never alter it. His silent, concentrated nature would not let him. Yet he endured undoubted torture day by day. Torture was the only name ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with felt miseries, to sign the Devils Laws in a Spectral Book laid before them; which two or three of these poor Sufferers, being by their tiresome sufferings overcome to do, they have immediately been released from all their miseries and they appear'd in Spectre then to Torture those that were before their Fellow-Sufferers. The Witches which by their covenant with the Devil, are become Owners of Spectres, are oftentimes by their own Spectres required and compelled to give their consent, for the molestation ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... of poisoned cups, but found it not. I tried to extinguish this memory of the past, that tears my heart to shreds like a devouring flame; in vain. When the body succumbed, the pitiless heart kept watch. With this corroding torture making life a burden, do you wonder that I should seek rest which can only be ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... weighs upon me as a continued torture. During the first few days I wandered about as if bereft of reason; I could not fix my thoughts, or apply myself to any occupation. The illness of the princess has restored some energy to my soul. The injury to her foot, which she at first neglected, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... caught by Friedel, and made him say to Ebbo, who would again have escaped the disagreeableness of the scene, "We had better tarry at hand. Unless we hold the folk in some check there will be no right execution. They will torture him to death ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from their good-nature, or from their not being able to tell the truth firmly, a commendation, of which he may afterwards avail himself.' JOHNSON. 'Very true, Sir. Therefore the man, who is asked by an authour, what he thinks of his work, is put to the torture, and is not obliged to speak the truth; so that what he says is not considered as his opinion; yet he has said it, and cannot retract it; and this authour, when mankind are hunting him with a cannister at his tail, can say, "I would not have published, had not Johnson, or Reynolds, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... you spoke as you did. I'm glad to know that you've got a kind heart," said Uncle Solon. "Kind-heartedness to man and beast is one of the best things in life. It's what holds this world together. Anybody that uses Cayenne pepper to torture an animal, or play tricks on it, is no friend of ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... desperate passage through the rifted wall revived, fearfully vivid, on his mind. He remembered all the emotions of his first night's labour in the darkness, all the miseries of his second night's torture under the fallen brickwork, all the woe, danger, and despondency that accompanied his subsequent toil—persevered in under the obstructions of a famine-weakened body and a helpless arm—until he passed, in delusive triumph, the last of the hindrances in the long-laboured breach. One after another ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... 'Don't torture me,—you're not. Atherton!' He seized me by the lapels of my coat, seeming half beside himself,—fortunately he had drawn me into a recess, so that we were noticed by few observers. 'What ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... vault, from which the cheerful sun is for ever excluded, the victim lay extended upon the rack, until death itself became a welcome relief; and upon its walls were arranged, in dreadful order, all the infernal instruments of torture, by which the cruelty of man endeavoured to extort from the wretched prisoners a confession of crimes, perhaps never committed, and of conspiracies, existing only in the guilty imaginations of their oppressors. A little court within the precincts of the building ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... guilty would be counted against them by grain and ounce. "But Christ died for our sins, say ye, and we are no longer subject to the law. But I say unto you, hell will not be cheated of a single one of you, and not a single iron tooth of the torture wheel of hell shall pass beside your flesh. You build upon the cross of Golgotha, come, come! Come and look at it! I shall lead you straight to its foot. It was on a Friday, as you know, that they thrust Him out of one of their gates and laid the heavier end of a cross ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... twilight, the people work. The roads are mere tracks among the blocks and hills of broken marble, yellow, black, and white stones, that are hauled on enormous trolleys by a line of bullocks in which you may often find a horse or a pony. Staggering along this way of torture, sweating, groaning, rebelling, under the whips and curses and kicks of the labourers, who either sit cursing on the wagon among the marble, or, armed with great whips, slash and cut at the poor capering, patient brutes, the oxen drag these immense wagons over the sharp ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... his chin, and a weak growth of hair on his upper lip; with a look half brazen, half shamefaced; with eyes half wistful, half malicious; his pear-shaped face expressing some love of the beautiful, some wit, some cynicism, much personal vanity, vicious inclinations and practices, restlessness, the torture of secret self-reproach, a vague distress, a longing to escape ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... his teeth in a firm resolutions not to say a word. The taunts of his captor were harder to bear in silence than the prospects of torture. ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... like an insurance agent? If so, say that I have already policies in three Hartford companies. Meanwhile prepare the stake, and see that the squaws are ready with their implements of torture." ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... the man fell out of the balloon into a warm lake and was delighted with the change, for his very soul was chilled—until he realised, at first dimly, that the water was growing hotter every minute and that the intention was to torture him to death! I was that man, moreover, and I kicked and screamed wildly, though every motion in the boiling water was agony. Just at the point when my breath was failing and my heart slowed, they turned off the water in the lake from a tap, and as it slowly receded, I was safe again, and ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... fetched half a dollar apiece," observed Higson; "had these rascals any bowels of compassion, they would have spared them all the sufferings they've had to endure; but for the sake of the few dollars they may pocket, they would not mind what amount of torture they inflict. I wish we had liberty to string up the whole lot of them at our yard-arms, they would only get their ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... dropping her hold of Miss Haight, and turning to face the others. "You call me a bully, and you yourselves, eight great grown girls, standing around to torment and torture this poor helpless child? Shame on you! Shame on you all, every one! I'm ashamed to be in the same school with you. I—" (Here, I am sorry to say, Peggy forgot that she was a young lady, forgot everything save that she was the daughter ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... dreadful to think of the power placed in their hands. Already thousands of the inhabitants of the Netherlands have been burned, or drowned, or hung, or killed on the rack; those who can taking to flight, till many parts are well-nigh depopulated. Nothing can be more dreadful than the system of torture employed. The accused person is carried off to prison, often without knowing the crime he is accused of, or his accusers. He is tortured to make him confess. The torture takes place at midnight in some gloomy dungeon, dimly-lighted by torches. The victim, whether man, woman, ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... the shegrin wagers is his courage and endurance in the face of torture and an unknown fate. On his side, the stakes are clearly determined beforehand. But if he loses, his punishment or penalty is at the whim of the one who has accepted him, and he may be put to whatever doom ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... impelled by the same feelings, threw ourselves before him, and by signs showed that we had resolved to protect him. The Indian seemed to comprehend what we were about, though perhaps he thought we wanted to preserve his life only to torture him, for he did not show that he was in any way obliged to us. The moment the lance was withdrawn, he sprung up with his weapon in his hand, ready to fight on; but one of the rancheroes threw his lasso over his shoulders, and, with a jerk which, had it been round ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... little lad ever hangs to a bigger, were he to torture the life out of him. Small thanks for us women after our good looks be past. But I'll look in on the child in early morn, thanks or no thanks; for I know his mother well, and if I can help it, the hyenas shall not make game ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... exist in Ireland I believe no one who hears me can deny. That such laws have existed in former times many and various examples clearly evince. The Saviour of the world suffered by the Roman laws—by the same laws His Apostles were put to the torture, and deprived of their lives in His cause. By my conduct I do not consider that I have incurred any moral guilt. I have committed no moral evil. I do not want the many and bright examples of those gone before me; but did I want this encouragement, ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... to the table against which I leaned. His face had grown white and quiet at my attack and he waited to answer for a long horrible minute that pulled me apart like one of those inquisition machines they used to torture women with when they didn't know any better modern way to ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... next morning. Here I met for the first time Andrew Johnson, Military Governor of Tennessee. He delivered a speech of welcome. His composure showed that it was by no means his maiden effort. It was long, and I was in torture while he was delivering it, fearing something would be expected from me in response. I was relieved, however, the people assembled having apparently heard enough. At all events they commenced a general hand-shaking, which, although ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... wretched portion of the human race, and was making exertions to dissuade them from taking either side in the war, the enemy has not scrupled to call to his aid their ruthless ferocity, armed with the horrors of those instruments of carnage and torture which are known to spare neither age nor sex. In this outrage against the laws of honorable war and against the feelings sacred to humanity the British commanders can not resort to a plea of retaliation, for it is committed in the face of our example. They can not mitigate it by calling it ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Madison • James Madison
... Here a gallows in our sense of the word, but usually a stake on a scaffold, to which the condemned to a death of torture was bound hand ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... had pointed up her finger to the sky, and immediately brought down upon his head all the combined waters of heaven; how she had vanished from his sight in this storm, he knew not how; and how immediately intense pains began to torture his joints, until he became half frantic with agony, and had been compelled, by hideous visions, to quit the shelter he had sought, in order to be exposed to all the peltings of the storm. He had since suffered, he declared, the tortures of the damned in all his limbs, with occasional fits ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... strange to men unacquainted with the masquerade of life: I deceived others, and I endeavoured to deceive myself; and have worn the face of pleasantry and gaiety, while my heart suffered the most exquisite torture. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... love, and to lose that which you cherish, but it is unluckier still never to know the meaning of love, or to find 'Him whom your soul loveth.' I try to be kind to that poor forsaken woman. I am sorry for his sake that she calls out his name, but she seems to be in such torture of mind and body that she is unable ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... over him what state of suspense and torture Fay and Jane must be in at that very moment. And, leaping up, he ran out of the cedars to the slope behind and hurried down at risk of limb. The sun had set by this time. He hoped he could catch up with the party before dark. He went straight ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... swear at his jailers was like trying to make a noise in a vacuum. Not to be able to make himself felt became a positive torture ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... despair resound; that is, the farewell of the vanquished. The two condemned are again in the hands of the archers. D'Artagnan approaches them, seeing them pale and sinking: "Console yourselves, poor men," said he, "you will not undergo the frightful torture with which these wretches threatened you. The king has condemned you to be hung: you shall only be hung. Go on, hang them, and it ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... only show themselves!" thought he, his leaden eyes closing in an overmastering lassitude, a vast swooning weakness of blood-loss and exhaustion. Not even his parched thirst, a veritable torture now, could keep his thoughts from wandering. "If they'd tackle again, I could score with—with lead—what's that I'm thinking? ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... road, with their shoes, which were brand-new, strung across their shoulders. When they got near the church, they sat on the side of the road and, with many grimaces, tenderly packed their feet into those instruments of torture. This furnished, indeed, a trying test of their religion. The famous preachers come from near and far and take turns in warning sinners of the day of wrath. Food, in the form of those two Southern luxuries, fried chicken and roast pork, is plentiful, and no one need go hungry. On the ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... who did not either kick or strike us. When we went first on board, I perceived a humour in my finger, which I neglected at first, till it spread over my hand and swelled up my arm, afflicting me with the most horrid torture. There was neither surgeon nor medicines to be had, nor could I procure anything to ease my pain but a little oil, with which I anointed my arm, and in time found some relief. The weather was very bad, and the wind almost always against us, and, to increase our perplexity, the whole ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... tie the bushranger hand and foot, and then place him on an ant hill. The black ant of Australia has a bite that is very painful, and when hundreds of thousands of ants are biting a man all at once, the feeling is something fearful. The ant-hill torture was generally successful. After submitting to it for a time, the bushranger generally gave up the secret of the whereabouts of his gold. I do not mean to say that all the police officials indulged in this ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... quieter down below there . . . No water - no light - no air - seven days battened down, and the seas mountain high, and the ship labouring hell-deep! Two hundred and five, two hundred and five, two hundred and five - all to eternal torture! ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... that Dick had almost paid the penalty for having roused them, and the matter would have to rest where it was; for Ford was just. As to the jug, he could empty it upon the ground and be done with that particular form of torture. But he felt sure that Josephine was secretly "keeping cases" on the jug; ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... hooks, which are passed through the tender parts of their backs. Sometimes they swing for half an hour; sometimes an hour. The longer they can bear the torture of the swinging, the more acceptable they suppose it will be to their goddess. It occasionally happens, that the flesh in which the hooks are fastened gives way, in which case the poor creature is dashed to the ground. When this occurs, the people hold him in the greatest ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder
... what I meant," said the other, passively. "Then the week is not to be finished until to-morrow at noon. Twenty-four hours of torture to me! I suppose that the ingrates will count time to the last shadow! Oh, Mata, Mata, you once were a faithful servant! Why did you let me make that foolish promise of giving them an entire week? A day would have been ample, then Tatsu and I could ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... concluding bang—"On thy seven hills thou satt'st of yore,"—another still more desperate and discordant flourish, which continues alternating with her "most sweet voice," till she has piped through the whole of her song: when the group around, apprehensive of a repetition of the torture to which they have been subjected, overwhelm her with thanks and expressions of admiration, under cover of which they hurry her to her seat. Such is the stuff palmed off on us, varied as it is by glees, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... has quite recovered himself now. Whatever torture his secret soul may impress upon him in the future, no ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... rooms. The first room, with a large, dilapidated stove and two dirty windows, had a black measure for measuring the prisoners in one corner, and in another corner hung a large image of Christ, as is usual in places where they torture people. In this room stood several jailers. In the next room sat about twenty persons, men and women in groups and in pairs, talking in low voices. There was a ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... have to fight for their lives, and defend the persecuted church of the Lord against foes who knew nothing of conformist or nonconformist, but who were as proficient as Queen Mary herself in the use of fire and torture. These misgivings might now be dismissed; if the ruler of so many tribes was willing to stand their friend, who should harm them? So they all gathered round Samoset on that sunny spring morning; the women observing curiously and in silence his strange aspect and gestures, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... turning it over and over and scrutinizing both the stones and the setting with the closest attention, though Ray could see that his hands were trembling with excitement, and knew that his heart was undergoing the severest torture. ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... of Ten on the night of the twentieth of January, 1406, the warrant for his examination authorized the use of torture. But even ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... accomplices. This method failing to reveal anything except that Gruet had written on one of Calvin's tracts the words "all rubbish," his judges put him to the rack twice a day, morning and evening, for a whole month. The frightful torture failed to make Gruet incriminate anyone else, and he was accordingly tried for heresy. He was charged with "disparaging authors like Moses, who by the Spirit of God wrote the divine law, saying that Moses had no more power than any other ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... lictors[146]—all that we now understand by the police force—waited subserviently on his nod. It rested with him, says Lydus, to establish the authority of the Court of Justice by means of the wholesome fear inspired by iron chains and scourges and the whole apparatus of torture[147]. Nay, not only did the subordinate magistrates execute their sentences by his agency, he had even the honour of being chosen by the Emperor himself to be the minister of vengeance against the persons who had incurred his anger or his ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... called "a sealed book" to you, begin by reading Hazlitt's famous essay on the nature of "poetry in general." It is the best thing of its kind in English, and no one who has read it can possibly be under the misapprehension that poetry is a mediaeval torture, or a mad elephant, or a gun that will go off by itself and kill at forty paces. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the mental state of the man who, after reading Hazlitt's essay, is not urgently desirous of reading some poetry before his next meal. If the essay so inspires you I would suggest ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
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