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Rack   Listen
verb
Rack  v. t.  
1.
To extend by the application of force; to stretch or strain; specifically, to stretch on the rack or wheel; to torture by an engine which strains the limbs and pulls the joints. "He was racked and miserably tormented."
2.
To torment; to torture; to affect with extreme pain or anguish. "Vaunting aloud but racked with deep despair."
3.
To stretch or strain, in a figurative sense; hence, to harass, or oppress by extortion. "The landlords there shamefully rack their tenants." "They (landlords) rack their rents an ace too high." "Grant that I may never rack a Scripture simile beyond the true intent thereof." "Try what my credit can in Venice do; That shall be racked even to the uttermost."
4.
(Mining) To wash on a rack, as metals or ore.
5.
(Naut.) To bind together, as two ropes, with cross turns of yarn, marline, etc.
To rack one's brains or To rack one's brains out or To rack one's wits, to exert one's thinking processes to the utmost for the purpose of accomplishing something; as, I racked my brains out trying to find a way to solve the problem.
Synonyms: To torture; torment; rend; tear.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Rack" Quotes from Famous Books



... despair when he felt this relation between Warren and himself. Something within him cried out to him to reveal his identity. Warren would kill him; but it was not fear of death that put Cameron on the rack. He had faced death too often to be afraid. It was the thought of adding torture to this long-suffering man. All at once Cameron swore that he would not augment Warren's trouble, or let him stain his hands with blood. He would tell the truth ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey

... up, a tall, slab-sided rack of a man, with his long arms dangling at his sides, half facing Judge Priest and half facing his nephew and his nephew's lawyer. Without hesitation he began to speak. And this ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... sat patient by her side, watching until the sun of her consciousness should rise and scatter the clouds of sleep. Hour after hour he sat, and still she slept, outwearied with the rack of emotion. Morning had begun to peer gray through the window-curtains, when she woke with ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... no great crowd on the train. They easily found a second-class compartment without occupants. He swung the luggage on the rack and sat down, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... murmured her Father. Already he had crossed the threshold into the hall and was rummaging through an over-loaded hat rack for his fur coat. "Why, yes," he called back, "I quite forgot to ask. Just what kind of a Christmas is it, Flame, that you want to make?" With unprecedented accuracy he turned at the moment to force his wife's arms into the sleeves of ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... was a small prie-dieu, surmounted by a crucifix of Ober-Ammergau workmanship: there was a mahogany writing-table with a revolving chair set before it; there were a couple of deep padded arm-chairs, a pipe-rack, and a row of photographs—his mother in evening dress, a couple of sisters, with other well-bred-looking relations. Altogether, with the curtains drawn and the fire blazing, it was exactly the kind of room that such a wholesome young man ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson

... as Sir Miles Hardyman, Bar., Son to the late Sir Henry Hardyman of Somersetshire, my dear and honoured Brother-in-Law: Who is certainly—the most unhappy Wretch crawling on Earth! (interrupted Miles) O just Heaven! (persu'd he) How have I been rack'd in my Soul ever since the Impious Vow I made, that I never would see my dearest Father more! This is neither a Time nor Place to vent your Sorrows, my dearest Brother! (said his Friend, tenderly embracing him.) I have something now more material ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn

... the photographs of my real friends," said Leonore, "except yours. I want you to give me one to complete my rack." ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford

... space helmet down from its rack and put it on. He tested it, reading the tank air-pressure, power-storage, and other data from the lighted miniature instruments visible through pinholes above his eye-level. He fastened a space rope about himself, speaking ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster

... deeds of darkness than beneath those of light. But if we can scarcely believe that "happiness in crime" be possible, have we more warrant for faith in the "unhappiness of virtue"? We know that the executioner can stretch Spinoza on the rack, and that terrible disease will spare Antoninus Pius no more than Goneril or Regan; but pain such as this belongs to the animal, not the human, side of man. Wisdom has indeed sent science, the youngest of her sisters, into the realm of destiny, with the mission to bring ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck

... to do it myself," said Robinette, keeping down a hysterical laugh. "See how easily it goes when you know the secret!" and she deftly turned her key in two locks one after the other, let down the mysterious facade of the affair, and pulled out an extraordinary rack on which hung so many dresses and wraps that Mrs. Benson ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... wires marking lines of altitude and azimuth. Power for rotating the disc is provided by a float rising in a clepsydra jar and connected, by a rope or chain passing over a pulley to a counterweight or by a rack and pinion, to an axle which supported the rotating disc and ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... of new tortures and improved racks; the oubliettes, which are wells or pits dug under the Temple and most other prisons, are the works of his own infernal genius. They are covered with trap-doors, and any person whom the rack has mutilated, or not obliged to speak out; whose return to society is thought dangerous, or whose discretion is suspected; who has been imprisoned by mistake, or discovered to be innocent; who is disagreeable to the Bonapartes, their favourites, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... shades the waters rush and roll, (Or whitened only by the unfrequent shoal,) Till two dark hills, with darker yet behind, Confront them,—purple mountains almost black, Each behind each self-folded and withdrawn, Beneath the umbrage of yon cloudy rack.— That orange-gleam! 't is dawn! Onward! the swan's flight with the eagle's blending, On, winged Muse! still forward ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... marvellous paper of branching trees and parrots and red-robed Chinamen, in the taste of the morning room downstairs, a carved four-post bed, a grate adorned with purplish Dutch tiles, an array of family miniatures over the mantelpiece, and on a neighbouring wall a rack of old swords and rapiers. The needlework hangings of the bed were full of holes; the seats of the Chippendale chairs were frayed or tattered. But, none the less, the inalienable character and dignity of his sleeping-room ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... respectable Turks strangled there, and then was stabbed by his own slave in the Mosque of St. Sophia. Every change cost human blood. When the sultan went to Edren, twenty-six important men were arrested, and twenty of them beheaded, while the other six were stretched on the rack. After they had made false accusations against the great men of the country in order to save themselves, they were strangled; then those were arrested against whom they had borne witness, and these suspected nobles disappeared ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... defeat, first by angry glances, and at last by contemptuous murmurs. Seged likewise shared the anxiety of the day, for considering himself as obliged to distribute with exact justice the prizes which had been so zealously sought, he durst never remit his attention, but passed his time upon the rack of doubt, in balancing different kinds of merit, and adjusting the claims of all ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... have several packages, and wish to put any of them in the rack over your head, you will be less likely to forget them, if you put all together, than you will if you keep ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... prepared for mischief. They meant to wreck the Meeting, and had brought along bags of cayenne pepper, and pots of chemicals to stink us out. They opened one—phew! And I have another, captured from them, in the pocket of my greatcoat on the rack, there. I'll show it to you by and by. Luckily our stewards had wind, early in the afternoon, that some such game was afoot, and had posted a body of bruisers conveniently, here and there, about the hall. So in the end they were thrown out, one by one—yes, sir, ignominiously. ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... this she lifted the old rifle out of the rack over the door and rubbed her hand over the barrel to get the sight clear. 'I am not going to tell you to go ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... was fully aware of this noisy intrusion, the intruder had disappeared. He lost no time, however, in setting the usual machinery in motion. By a continuous series of movements of the receiver rack on the telephone he aroused Miss Dolly Bobbitt, the night operator, from the depths of the novel she was reading, and notified the Police Department in East Ketchem across the lake to be on watch for the car. ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... swords, halbards, sheep-hooks, cardinals' hats, turbans, drums, gallipots, a gibbet, a cradle, a rack, a cart-wheel, an altar, an helmet, a back-piece, a breast-plate, a bell, a ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... early days of the summer, and Queen Thyra went with him. Southward he sailed, and as he came in turn to fiord after fiord many vikings and wealthy warriors joined him with their ships. When at length he stood out across the Skager Rack, he had a fleet of sixty longships and sixty smaller transports, and with these in his wake he sailed south along Denmark through the Eyr sound, and ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton

... use of the faculties under a central purpose gives strength and power, while the use of faculties without an aim or end only weakens them. The mind must be focused on a definite end, or, like machinery without a balance-wheel, it will rack itself ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... him hence; to the rack with him! We'll touse you Joint by joint, but we will know his ...
— The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] - Introduction and Publisher's Advertising • William Shakespeare

... emissaries of Satan, so it was God's work to root them out and destroy them. Thus the Gradys have reasoned for a thousand years; and thus in black dungeons underground they have turned the thumb-screws and pulled the levers of the rack. They do it still in many of the large cities of America, where superstition runs the police-force, in combination with liquor ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... the beatific visions that opium bestows, having once enchained its victims. Little wonder that, after spending nights upon a poisoned rack, Mr. Jocelyn was in no condition to meet his fellow-men ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... continues; second quarter, browning begins; the third quarter, browning is finished; the fourth quarter, bread shrinks from the side of the pan. These are always safe tests to follow in your baking. When baked, the bread should be turned out of the pans and allow to cool on a wire rack. When cool, put the bread in a stone crock or bread box. To prevent staleness, keep the old bread away from the fresh—scald the bread crock or give your bread box a sun bath at ...
— Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918) • C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss

... sped away, but in vain did the assembly rack their brains for some plan of action which might in any way be likely to serve the purpose they had in view. The first wild suggestion, that they should go in a body and carry Horace House by storm, was abandoned as ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery

... and much taste and discrimination have been exercised in its adornment. There are many good paintings, including portraits of the various presidents of the club, which adorn the entrance hall. After books, perhaps the most distinctive feature of the club is our collection of pipes. In a large rack in the smoking-room—really a superfluity, since smoking is permitted all over the house—is as complete an assortment of pipes as perhaps exists in the civilized world. Indeed, it is an unwritten rule of the club that no one is eligible for membership who cannot produce ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... his ghost; O let him pass! he hates him That would upon the rack of this rough world Stretch ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant

... her. A madness of remorse, she said, had seized her. She had gone, in spite of her disgust, to several houses which she found open. There were worse cottages there than even her father's; some tradesmen in a neighbouring town had been allowed to run up a set of rack rent hovels.—Another shudder seized her when she spoke of them; and from that point in her story all was fitful, broken, like the images of a hideous dream. 'Every instant those foul memories were defiling her nostrils. A horrible loathing had taken possession of her, recurring ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... side of the hall was Uncle Geoffrey's study—a somewhat grim, dingy apartment, with brown shelves full of ponderous tomes, a pipe-rack filled with fantastic pipes, deep old cupboards full of hetereogeneous rubbish, and wide easy-chairs that one could hardly lift, one of which was always occupied by ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey

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

... fortunate enough to convey my prize to the asylum I had prepared for their reception. Inexpressible was the rage of Mendoza, when he heard of their elopement. He raved like one deprived of reason—swore he would put all the servants of the family to the rack—and, in consequence of the intelligence he obtained by threats and promises, set on foot a very strict inquiry, in order to apprehend the fugitives and Orlando, who had by some means or other incurred ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... show him a couple garments which we got it here. Take for instance them 1080's, which we are selling Fine Brothers, oder that 2060—that overskirt effect with the gilt net yoke and peacock-feather-design braid, Flaxberg. Them two styles made a big hit, Flaxberg. They are all hanging on that end rack there, Flaxberg, and you could look at ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass

... fine saloon beyond, painted in white and gilt like the cabin he had just quitted. This saloon was fitted in the most excellent taste imaginable. A table extended the length of the room, and a quantity of bottles, and glasses clear as crystal, were arranged in rows in a hanging rack above. ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle

... all the west was dark, and inky black The level ruffled water underneath, And up the wind-cloud tossed, a ghostly rack, In many a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... the air very clear, and as they rode Ralph said: "Quite clear is the sky, and yet one cloud there is in the offing; but this is strange about it, though I have been watching it this half hour, and looking to see the rack come up from that quarter, yet it changes not at all. I never saw the ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris

... reason why he was going he had not given. During the days she had been lost he had been on the rack of torture. He did not want her to suffer months of such mental distress while the man she loved was facing alone the peril of his grim work in the ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine

... meal, and then Vane drew up a wicker chair to the fire for Evelyn and sat down opposite her. The room was low and shadowy, and partly paneled. Against one wall stood a black oak sideboard, with a plate-rack above it, and a great chest of the same material with ponderous hand-forged hinge-straps stood opposite it. A clock with an engraved metal dial and a six-foot case, polished to a wonderful luster by the hands of several generations, ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... felt that he was here brought up to the rack. He recognized Dr. Deane's advantage, and could only evade it by accepting his proposition for delay. True, he had already gone over the subject, in his lonely, restless broodings beside the window, but this encounter had freshened and resuscitated many ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor

... I left home my whole (youthful) male experience consisted of one brother, three cousins, and two curates, dealt with separately and with long sleepy intervals between. I began to wonder how I could possibly manage five tall youths at once, and to rack my brains for the right kind of conversation; but before I should have had time to say "knife" to a curate, I found myself chatting away with those cadets as if I had grown up with them. I never once stopped to think what I should say next, ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... town, and Brian knew that it would be almost impossible to find him in a short space of time if he did not wish to be discovered. It was possible that he had gone into the woods; he was as fond of them as a wild animal of his lair. Brian took his gun from the rack, as an excuse for an expedition, then sallied forth, scarcely hoping, however, to be successful ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... kind of hard fortune pursue you every day you rise, you desavin' villain, that would have me turn informer, bekase your brother-in-law, rack-rintin' Moore's stables and horses were burnt; and to crown all, make the innocent childre the means of hanging their own fathers or brothers, you rap of the divil! but I'd see you and all your breed in the flames o' hell first." ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton

... dread of the Dutch mariners. This hill, according to Irving, was peopled with a multitude of imps, too great for man to number, who wore sugar-loaf hats and short doublets, and had a picturesque way of "tumbling head over heels in the rack and mist." They were especially malignant toward all captains who failed to do them reverence, and brought down frightful squalls on such craft as failed to drop the peaks of their mainsails to the ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... I were able to manage and contrive and bring to pass; I that rejoiced in the work of my hands and the pyeertness of my mind and the fruits of my industry, and when my man died were able to run the farm and take keer of the children as good as before—I am sot down here in the midst of rack and ruin, with the roof a-leaking over me, the chimbly sagging out, the fence rotten and the hogs in the corn, the property eatin' their heads off, and the young uns lacking warm coats and kivers, John ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman

... in an Italian court at that period than in a Roman Emperor's in the first century, when the arrest is made of Cneius Novius for being found treacherously armed with a dagger while mixing with the throng of courtiers bowing to the prince; and then when he is stretched on the rack, no confession being wrung from him as to accomplices; and the doubt that prevailed whether he really had fellow-conspirators. "Cneius Novius, eques Romanus, ferro accinctus reperitur in coetu salutantium principem. Nam, postquam tormentis ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... from the rack, she lashed and drove them yelping; while Glasson flung himself on a couch and lay panting, with a sickly yellow face and a hand ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... have not a conscience which forbids them from acting thus, just as, even three or four hundred years ago, when people burnt men at the stake and put them to the rack they had a conscience which prohibited it; the conscience is there, but it has been put to sleep—in those in command by what the psychologists call auto-suggestion; in the soldiers, by the direct conscious hypnotizing exerted by the ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... times he had to rub it with all his strength to straighten it. This done the flattening-stone was moved on wheels to a cooler part of the furnace and the sheet of glass upon it was transferred to a cooling-stone. When stiff enough it was taken off and placed either flat or on edge in a rack ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett

... sea all this insubstantial pageant had faded like the baseless fabric of the vision that it was and left not a rack behind. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce

... Monte Cristo. Then he would be free to make his researches, not perhaps entirely at liberty, for he would be doubtless watched by those who accompanied him. But in this world we must risk something. Prison had made Edmond prudent, and he was desirous of running no risk whatever. But in vain did he rack his imagination; fertile as it was, he could not devise any plan for reaching the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... the wagon with him were uproariously funny. When the wagon stopped now and then, one whom Phil recognized as the head clown, Mr. Miaco, would spring to the edge of the rack and make a stump speech in pantomime, accompanied by all the gestures included in the pouring and drinking of a glass of water. So humorous were the clown's antics that the spectators ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington

... been resorted to; but now, in accordance with the repeated solicitations of the Pope, King Edward gave orders that the imprisoned Templars should be subjected to the rack in order that they might be forced to give evidence of their guilt. Even then there seems to have been reluctance to resort to this cruel and shameful treatment, and a series of delays occurred, so that nothing was done till the beginning of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... imprisonments were unjust and cruel, and his executions, always upon the gibbet, were military murders. And if, to gain his point, he did not, like the Duke of Alva, (employed in a similar vocation) make use of the rack, the stake, and the faggot, yet Lord Cornwallis resorted to every other mode of punishment, a more improved civilization had left him, to suppress civil liberty. Such was the character of the commander in chief of the ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James

... mounts into the wind. Our love's like mountains high above the clouds; Though winds and tempests beat their aged feet, Their peaceful heads nor storm nor thunder know, But scorn the threatening rack that rolls ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... sufficiently comprehensible to all who are familiar with the disgust and aversion in which the paramours of the evil one were held in that age, so that even upon the rack these subjects ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold

... dressing-room adjoining, a thick scum rose to the surface of the water, and she realized the bowl had not been washed for some time. At first she gazed at the dust helplessly. Utterly unused to doing anything for herself, she looked about anxiously. Two towels, clean but not ironed, lay on the rack. She hesitated, then grasping one of them as if it were the proverbial nettle, she attacked the bowl, gingerly at first, then with some vigor; and presently, with the aid of some dirty fragments of soap she found ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray

... Mackay's farm is due, Noel. I really think you might bestir yourself a little to look after the estate. Jones is the most execrable manager I ever knew. Here you are, with nothing to do all day except smoke or shoot, letting things go to rack and ruin. We shall be in the poor-house soon. Umph! I've no ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy

... the sigh, and teach the tear to flow; To put on frenzy's wild, distracted glare, And freeze the soul with horror and despair; With just desert enroll'd in endless fame, Conscious of worth superior, Cibber[63] came. When poor Alicia's madd'ning brains are rack'd, And strongly imaged griefs her mind distract, Struck with her grief, I catch the madness too, My brain turns round, the headless trunk I view! 790 The roof cracks, shakes, and falls—new horrors rise, And Reason buried in the ruin lies! Nobly disdainful of each slavish art, She makes her ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

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

... whether Alexander had had criminal conversation with them, they confessed it, but said they knew of no further mischief of his against his father; but when they were more severely tortured, and were in the utmost extremity, and the tormentors, out of compliance with Antipater, stretched the rack to the very utmost, they said that Alexander bare great ill-will and innate hatred to his father; and that he told them that Herod despaired to live much longer; and that, in order to cover his great age, he colored his hair black, and endeavored to conceal what would discover how old he ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... dainty room still full of tokens of her presence. The piano stood open with a song he liked upon the rack; a bit of embroidery, whose progress he had often watched, lay in her basket with the little thimble near it; there was a strew of papers on the writing table, torn notes, scraps of drawing, and ball cards; a pearl-colored glove ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott

... have only a small quantity of berries or fruit to can use a deep saucepan with a tight-fitting cover and a few slats of wood. This rack is absolutely necessary to keep the contents of the jars from becoming overheated. Even if they should not break there is a tendency for part of the contents to escape under the cover and be lost. Do not use hay, old clothes, newspapers or excelsior for a false bottom; they are unsatisfactory because ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray

... house, Mr. Baron encountered his niece, who had been a witness to the scene, which explained everything to her. "You see, you see," cried the old man, "everything going to rack and ruin! Would to Heaven you could be married to-night and sent away ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe

... swallow it all." The executioner said not a word, but began taking off her cloak and all her other garments, until she was completely naked. He then led her up to the wall and made her sit on the rack of the ordinary question, two feet from the ground. There she was again asked to give the names of her accomplices, the composition of the poison and its antidote; but she made the same reply as to the doctor, only adding, "If you do not ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... house is goin' to rack an' ruin," pursued the lady, slopping a little water into the dishpan. "No woman never had to put up with all I hafter put up with—not even Job's wife! There! all the water's gone ag'in. I do wish you'd ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long

... even of heresy, and their protectors. It is 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 ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston

... of my pocket that way, I shouldn't need to stoke for a living now. But if God will give me health and work I shan't come to the workhouse yet awhile! That's where the Fowley's are shaping for. Both drinking, and the children left anyhow, and everything going to rack and ruin." ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis

... money, and I wished I hadn't started. Presently Bill looked up, and spying me, pointed to my stack of chips, and said, "Whose stack is that?" "Mine," I replied, and with one fell swoop he dashed the chips into the rack, and taking a ten-dollar bill from the drawer, he turned to his side partner and said, "Jim, take the deal," and then he got up, took me by the arm, saying, "You ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady

... the folding doors. With the patient attention to minutia which was a part of his literary instinct, his memory followed the great man across the ugly yellow squares in the carpet and fixed itself upon a row of small green bottles standing in a wooden rack upon the table. Through the half hour of his visit, which brief as it was casually dismissed him to his death, those slender green phials seemed to his fancy to hold an absurd and grotesque prominence. "In a climate like this ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... neglects or knows not how to develop. I became suddenly conscious of a burning curiosity respecting this lonely traveller who travelled at an hour so strange. With no definite plan in mind, I went downstairs, took a cap from the rack and walked briskly out of the house and across the common in a direction which I thought would enable me to head ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... their bright-looking children, occupied two seats near the stove, and were in constant pleasant converse, save when an occasional anxious and impatient shadow flitted across the face of the husband and father. On the rack over their heads reposed a small travelling-bag, which the day before had been filled with luncheon for the children. Upon its bottom was painted in small white letters the name, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... to a typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and carefully transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative adjectives, and take words away out of their natural place in the sentence and generally put the Queen's English—yes, the Queen's English—on the rack. And who is a penny the better for it? The silly authors get no real praise, not even in the horrible stucco villas where their clique meet on Sundays. The poor public buys the Marvel and gasps at the cleverness ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... cannon and the chief's ruling that we were no longer Ward's prisoners appealed to me as a reprieve. At least the girl was snatched from Ward's clutches. But the unanimous vote that one of us must die threw me back on the rack. ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter

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

... merely for the purpose of continuing their species. In wild, tropical countries, at the first glance there appears to be some consideration for him, but it is on the surface only. The lion pounces on him, the rhinoceros crushes him, the serpent bites, insects torture, diseases rack him. Disease worked its dreary will even among the flower-crowned Polynesians. Returning to our own country, this very thyme which scents my fingers did not grow for that purpose, but for its own. So does the wheat beneath; we utilise it, but its original and native ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... said, having selected a seat near the rear of the car and deposited his suitcase in a rack. "It's on ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt

... the parlour. It was a cold, clammy room, dark. He could hear footsteps passing outside on the asphalt pavement below the window, and the wind howling with familiar cadence. He began feeling for something in the darkness of the music-rack beside the piano. He touched and felt—he could not find what he wanted. Perplexed, he turned and looked out of the window. Through the iron railing of the front wall he could see the little motorcar sending its straight beams of light in front ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... Samson shot a deer which had waded into the rapids. Fortunately, it made the opposite shore before it fell. All hands spent that evening dressing the deer and jerking the best of the meat. This they did by cutting the meat into strips about the size of a man's hand and salting and laying it on a rack, some two feet above a slow fire, and covering it with green boughs. The heat and smoke dried the meat in the course of two or three hours and gave it a fine flavor. Delicious beyond any kind of meat is venison treated in this manner. If kept dry, it will retain its flavor and its sweetness ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller

... representative of the host until he shall appear. Some portraits, a fine old engraving, a map of the county, and some sprays of evergreen intermingled with red berries, take away all bareness from the walls, while in a corner near the door stands a rack, formed in part by the branching antlers of a stag, on which hang fur caps and collars, warm wraps and coats, all suggesting abundant means of robbing winter of its rigor. On hooks above the sliding-doors are suspended a modern rifle and a double-barrelled shot-gun, and above ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... the living power of Jesus Christ in history, and to-day; a force that is mightier than all other forces; a force that all other forces have in vain endeavored to destroy, or counteract, or arrest; a force that has pushed its way against wit and learning and wealth and power, and the stake and the rack and the sword and the cannon, till it has shaped the master forces of the world, inspired its art, formed its social life, subsidized, its great powers, and wields to-day the heavy battalions; a force that this hour ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... practically without furniture, except for a bare table suspended from the upper beams and a few chairs securely resting in chocks. The deck was bare, but had been thoroughly scrubbed, the water not entirely dried, and forward there was a rack of small arms, the polished steel shining in the gray light of the transom overhead. The Dutch character of the bark was very apparent here, in the excessively heavy deck beams, and the general gloom of the interior, finished off in dark wood and ornamented with carved paneling. ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish

... Daisy were hitched to the big lumber wagon. Father and Hobson took the wagon box off and put the wide hay-rack on. ...
— Bobby of Cloverfield Farm • Helen Fuller Orton

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

... gradual approximation in crushing it. This can be managed by an ingenious arrangement, which leaves the movable blade under the control only of the operator's thumb till the stone is found, and yet, by touching a spring, gives him the advantage either of a fine screw or of a rack and pinion movement for crushing ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... trodden highway for walking with upturned eyes On the way of the wind in the treetops, and the drift of the tinted rack. For the will to be losing no wonder of sunny or starlit skies I have chosen the sod for my pillow and a threadbare coat for ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger

... induced Povoreek the chief, Too-gee, and Hoo-doo, with his brother, one of his wives, and the priest, to launch their canoes. They went first to the largest of the two islands, where they were joined by Tee-ah-wor-rack, the chief of the island, by Komootookowa, who is Hoo-doo's father-in-law, and by the son of that chief who governs the smaller island, called Opan-a-ke. They were some time about the ship before ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... A "Walker" is a fuller of cloth. "She curst the weaver and the walker." Boy and Mantle, Percy Rel., iii., 5.] Rowing, and Burling and in Racking [Footnote: Stretching. "Two lutes rack's up / To the same pitch." The Slighted Maid, p. 53.] the Clothes aboue measure vpon the Teintors: all which faults may be learned of honest men, which faults are to be knowen to the merchant, to be shunned and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... have: (How right the blockhead hits!) Yet more to rack thy heart, and break thy brain, Thy niece has been before ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... attentions had been slighted. This discovery laid many smaller matters open. No doubt it had been from jealousy.—In Jane's eyes she had been a rival; and well might any thing she could offer of assistance or regard be repulsed. An airing in the Hartfield carriage would have been the rack, and arrowroot from the Hartfield storeroom must have been poison. She understood it all; and as far as her mind could disengage itself from the injustice and selfishness of angry feelings, she acknowledged that Jane Fairfax would ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... a scene of beauty: "a thousand ships propelled by creaking oars or flapping sails float over a calm sea: all of a sudden a hailstorm bursts from a circular rack of clouds: simultaneously billows rolling to uncertain heights before shifting squalls that blow from every quarter shut out the view and impede navigation: the soldiers, in their alarm and knowing nothing ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... us in fuel; and be quick, thou'rt best, To answer other business. Shrugg'st thou, malice? If thou neglect'st, or dost unwillingly What I command, I'll rack thee with old[388-98] cramps, Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar, That beasts shall ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... brown rows of books still lined the walls of the morning room. The long mahogany table in the center was still littered with maps and papers. There were the same rusted muskets and small swords in the rack by the fireplace, and in front of the fire in a great, high-backed armchair my father was sitting. I paused with a curious feeling of doubt, surprise and diffidence. Somehow I had pictured a different meeting and a different man. He must surely ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand

... Mac,[77] Dr. Mac, You should stretch on a rack, To strike evil doers wi' terror; To join faith and sense Upon ony pretence, Is ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

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

... They had been spoken by the Inquisitors who came to Italy with one of the Spanish princes. Instantly he recalled the scene where first he had listened to them—the dungeon draped in black—the white-hot irons which had seared his flesh; the rack which had maimed his limbs, the masked men who had ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... wrong? The salvation of the world came out of it; all that is noblest in history came out of it. This is the supreme lesson to God's children never to despair. All may be dark; everything may seem going to rack and ruin; evil may seem to be enthroned on the seat of God; yet God liveth; He sits above the tumult of the present; and He will bring forth the dawn from the womb ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker

... The rack, or brake, now in the Tower, was introduced by the Duke of Exeter in the reign of Henry VI., as an auxiliary to his project of establishing the civil law in this country; and in derision it was called his daughter.—Cowel's Interp. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... coast of Norway, he rounded the North Cape, passed into the White Sea, and entered the Dwina River (nmicela). On his second voyage he sailed southward along the western coast of Norway, entered the Skager Rack (wds:), passed through the Cattegat, and anchored at the Danish port of Haddeby ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith

... spirits. It was this girl's father that I was pursuing. It was to bring him to the halter that I must keep up my masquerade. It was to bring her to sorrow and disgrace that I was bound by the dead hand of my murdered friend. Oh, why was this burden laid upon me? Why was I to be torn on the rack between inclination and duty? ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott

... persons worshipping as Dissenters, on penalty of fine, imprisonment, banishment, transportation, and of being sold as slaves. Persecutions of former times were surpassed, the thumbscrew and the boot were used as mild punishments, the rack dislocated the limbs of those who respected conscience, and the stake consumed their bodies to ashes. Villagers were driven to the mountains, and eighteen thousand Dissenters perished, not counting those who ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green

... party is complete," said Holmes, buttoning up his pea-jacket and taking his heavy hunting crop from the rack. "Watson, I think you know Mr. Jones, of Scotland Yard? Let me introduce you to Mr. Merryweather, who is to be our ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... could not be taken at first. We intended to dry it at the willows, and then we could carry it along as daily food over the wide plain we had yet to cross. Having carried the meat forward, we made a rack of willows and dried it over the fire, making up a lot of moccasins for the barefooted ones while we waited. We were over most of the rocky road, we calculated that our shoemaking would last us through. This was a very pleasant camp. The tired ones were taking ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly

... Carlyle came out of her bedroom to go to her daughter-in-law's room she met Audrey flying up the stairs with a rack of dry toast on a tray. "I remembered that you used to eat toast always for tea, granny, so I thought you might still. Oh, granny, it is so nice to see you in your pretty caps again, it ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... afflictions that we meet with for the gospel's sake. Yea, the body is ofttimes the greater sufferer, in all the calamities, that for Christ's sake we here undergo; it is the body that feels the stocks, the whip, hunger and cold, the fire and rack, and a thousand calamities; it is the body in which we have the dying marks of the Lord Jesus, "that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal1 flesh" (Gal 6:17; 2 Cor 4:11). God is so just a God, and so merciful to his people, that though the bodies ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... so am I," replied Braddock, nodding. "As you very truly observed, my child, the house would have gone to rack and ruin without a woman to look after my interests. Well," he took the arms of the two young people, "I really think that we must have a bottle of champagne on the strength ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume

... did sound rude. I was still a cad. She eyed me, with a certain whiteness, a certain puzzled intentness, a certain fugitive wistfulness—a mute estimation that made me too conscious of her clear appraising gaze and rack my brain for some ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... image—a human being shrieking on the rack, rose up before me at those strange semi-human cries, and would not be put away—and I tried to turn, and yet my eyes were riveted on the black mass, which seemed vainly to implore the help of man against the ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... shame and duty, love and fear present A thousand sorrows to my martyr'd soul. Whom should I wish the fatal victory, When my poor pleasures are divided thus, And rack'd by duty from my cursed heart? My father and my first-betrothed love Must fight against my life and present love; Wherein the change I use condemns my faith, And makes my deeds infamous through the world: But, as the gods, to end the Trojans' toil, Prevented Turnus ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe

... his nerves well-nigh on the rack, he nevertheless crossed the guard-room with a firm step and entered the cell where the prisoner was still lying upon the palliasse, as he had been all along, and still presenting that naked piece of shoulder through the ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... and if he reduced them to ten, he could not hope to withstand the final rush of ten big-jawed and active animals. Even if he could keep them off in that open space, he could not stay there another day; and if they tackled him in the reeds, he would have no chance. He began to rack his brain for a scheme; but while he thought, the circle closed in until quite plainly he could distinguish the staring eyes all centered upon him. He piled on more fuel, and as the flames sprang up they ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville

... dismount at once and let one of the men take Billy. Get into the wagon now.' When father spoke in that way I was never slow to obey, so I climbed into the wagon, and, being anxious to get a better look at the Indians, I took a field-glass out of the rack where it hung and put it to my eyes. The glass clicked as I took it from the rack and like a flash the Indians wheeled their ponies and scattered, taking the noise for the click of firearms. I ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... evening filled with bound volumes of The Christian Treasury, where we wrestled with tales of religious bigotry and persecution until we seemed to breathe the very atmosphere of dark and mouldy cells; and became daringly familiar with the thumb-screw and the rack, the Inquisition and other devildoms of Spain. I used to wonder pitifully why it had never occurred to the poor victims to say their prayers in bed, and thus save themselves ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... our supper; beautiful white bread, butter, cheese, pickles, apple and mince pie, and excellent peach preserves. She gave us her warm bedroom to sleep in, and on a row of pegs hung the loveliest embroidered petticoats and baby clothes, all the work of that young woman's fingers, while on a rack was her ironing perfectly done, wrought undersleeves, baby dresses, embroidered underwear, etc. She prepared a 6 o'clock breakfast for us, fried pork, mashed potatoes, mince pie, and for me, at my especial request, a ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... of it before. Do you know, perhaps I won't answer at the trial at all.... And I seem to have such strength in me now, that I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist.' In thousands of agonies—I exist. I'm tormented on the rack—but I exist! Though I sit alone on a pillar—I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there. Alyosha, my angel, all these philosophies ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... Catherine's bedchamber women, and the bosom friend and disciple of Anne Askew. And she had sat in Smithfield, with blood curdled by horror, to see the hapless Court beauty, a month before the paragon of Henry's Court, carried in a chair (so crippled was she by the rack) to her fiery doom at the stake, beside her fellow-courtier, Mr. Lascelles, while the very heavens seemed to the shuddering mob around to speak their wrath and grief in solemn thunder peals, and heavy drops which hissed ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... so am I— quite upon the Rack, but where is the rest of Our Party? Miss Bashfull here's mighty good Room. Bob Smart won't you hand miss Bashfull ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin

... of the compound and the calendering, that is the spreading it in sheets, the great roll of rubber and cloth that is to be made into corrugated matting is sent to the pressman. Here it is hung in a rack and fifteen or twenty feet of it drawn between the plates of the huge hydraulic steam press. The bottom plate of this press is grooved its whole length, so that when the upper platen is let down the plain sheet of rubber is forced into the grooves and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various

... enormous padlocks and bolts having been thoroughly fastened, Seoul was severed from the outer world till the following morning. Adjoining the gate stood the gatekeeper's house, and in front of the door of this, a rack with a few rusty and obsolete spears standing in a row, was left to take care of the town and its inhabitants, while the guardians, having finished the work of the day, retreated to the warm room inside ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... the opposite side of the ship caught his eye. Miles' space suit hung on its rack, the heavy fish-bowllike space helmet beside it in its open locker. Roger's heart skipped a beat as he noticed the holster for a paralo-ray gun nearby. But the large flap was closed and he could not see if ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman

... came to him, and quickly he reached into a rack for the chart of the local sea-floor. His brow creased with puzzlement as he ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... his hat and stood irresolute, expecting some greeting. But nothing happened. On a rack against the wall he saw a gray uniform coat like that which Mr. Quimbleton had worn in the Balloon office, and a similar gray cap with the silver monogram. He glanced at the books. One was The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the other was a Bible, open at the second chapter of ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley

... the other was entirely new to Little Compton. It was a pine tree on a field of white, with a rattlesnake coiled at its roots, and the inscription, "DON'T TREAD ON ME!" A few hours later Uncle Abner Lazenberry made his appearance in front of Compton's store. He had just hitched his horse to the rack ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris

... town where Doctor Rack was guide, His only daughter was the boast and pride - Wise Arabella, yet not wise alone, She like a bright and polish'd brilliant shone; Her father own'd her for his prop and stay, Able to guide, yet willing to obey; Pleased with her learning while discourse could please, And with her ...
— Tales • George Crabbe

... wonderful oration? He opened his great mouth and spoke. What is this? A falsetto note, a piping instead of the musical thunder we have heard. He poses strangely, his gestures shoot up and out like the arms of a dislocated clothes rack. He rises on his toes with a quick springlike movement, as if he were a puppet loosened by a spring from a box. He sways from side to side to give emphasis to his words. His mouth opens to huge proportions in moments ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... His assistants whispered each other; one of them rose, and disappeared behind the canvas at the back of the tent. Presently the hangings were withdrawn; and the prisoner beheld an interior chamber, hung with various instruments the nature of which was betrayed by their very shape; while by the rack, placed in the centre of that dreary chamber, stood a tall and grisly figure, his arms bare, his eyes bent, as by ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Albion's flow'ry vale A parent's deep complaint I hear! A sister calls the western gale To waft her soul-expressive tear; 'Tis Asgill claims that piercing sigh, That drop which dims the beauteous eye, While on the rack of Doubt Affection proves How strong the force which binds the ties ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams

... indicative. 'If any member absents himself, he shall forfeit a penny for the use of the club'; this ought to be either 'absent,' or 'should absent.' 'If thou neglectest or doest unwillingly what I command thee, I will rack thee with old cramps'; better, 'if thou neglect or do unwillingly,' or 'if thou should neglect.' The indicative would be justified by the speaker's belief that the supposition is sure to turn ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)

... her mother about it, Madeline took her Candy Rabbit, and, with her two little friends, went up to the bathroom. She drew the tub full of water, and while she was doing this she set the Rabbit on a glass shelf near the towel rack. ...
— The Story of a Candy Rabbit • Laura Lee Hope

... heaven! that anything in the likeness of man should suffer these rack'd extremities, for the uttering of his sophisticate ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson

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

... SCORES of devils in your dreams! Merely out of Christian charity he had come to you to say, 'I perceive a poor widow going to rack and ruin, and likely soon to stand in danger of want.' Well, go to rack and ruin—yes, you and ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... river seems to find the escape and the freedom it was so eagerly seeking. Better to be completely changed into foam and spray by one single leap of six hundred feet into empty space, the river seems to say, than be forever baffled and tortured and torn on this rack of ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... man—struggling from day to day under the hard rule of a soulless gold-worshipper; the knowledge that years must pass thus; the sickening idea of her own poverty, and of living mainly on the grudged charity of neighbors—thoughts, too, of former happy days—these rack'd the widow's heart, and made her bed a sleepless ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... answer. The ominous sound of drawn bolts and the click of a key, and the girl and baby were inside the bars of the cage. These bars, foreshortened from where I stood, looked like a row of gun-barrels in an armory rack. ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... wonder the Cirque Rocambeau had come to grief, if it depended on such canaries as Lackaday. Didn't he know he was there to make the audience laugh?—not to give a representation of Monsieur Mounet-Sully elongated by the rack. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... O my People, year by year Strengthened by sufferings; pains that crush the weak, Your helpers. Men have been that, poison-fed, Grew poison-proof: on pain and wrong feed ye! The wild-beast rage against you! frost and fire Rack you in turn! I'll have no gold among you; With gold come wants; and wants mean servitude. Edge, each, his spear with fish-bone or with flint, Leaning for prop on none. I want no Nations! A Race I fashion, playing not at ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... lying upon the barricade, which was little more than three feet high. Their rifles were stacked between the projecting paving-stones as though in a rack. Now and then bullets whistled overhead and struck the walls of the houses around us, bringing down a shower of stone and plaster. Occasionally a blouse, sometimes a cap-covered head, appeared at the corner of a street. The soldiers promptly fired at it. When they hit their ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... ourselves with leaving the red bundle on the seat beside her. It was lucky, I told her, that the carriage wasn't full, otherwise it would have had to go up in the rack, where it wouldn't have ...
— Peterkin • Mary Louisa Molesworth

... called 'business opportunities' to enterprising members. True, there was no police to execute its decrees; and at one time a punctilious resident complained that 'there was not even a common hangman, nor a jail, nor even a tormentor to rack the criminals or inflict other appropriate tortures.' But appeals took a long time and cost much money; so even the officials of the bailiwick could pick up a living by threats of the law's delay, ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood

... coat among the row of garments lining the wall—he had come twice as far as the others—crowded his dripping umbrella into a broken Chinese jar that did duty as a rack, and, catching sight of the canvas, walked toward the easel holding the ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... himself. They certainly could not be enjoying themselves. Carley shut her eyes, clutched the pommel of the saddle, trying to support her weight. How could she endure another mile? Alas! there might be many miles. Suddenly a terrible shock seemed to rack her. But it was only that Spillbeans had once again taken to a trot. Frantically she pulled on the bridle. He was not to be thwarted. Opening her eyes, she saw a cabin far ahead which probably was the destination for the night. Carley knew she would never reach it, ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... was owing to a coachman carrying a lighted candle into the stable, and, agreeably to Dean Swift's Advice to Servants, sticking it against the rack; the straw being set in a flame in his absence, by the candle falling. Eight or nine horses perished, and fourteen houses were burnt to the ground. Walpole was, most probably, not an idle spectator for the newspapers relate, that the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

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

... with a latch-key; and to Daisy it seemed as if paradise had been opened—from the carved walnut rack, upon which entering angels might hang their hats and coats, to the carpet upon the stair and the curtains of purple plush that, slightly parted, disclosed glimpses of an inner and more sumptuous paradise upon the right—a ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... me if there was a place in which he could hold service on Sunday. I told him that the only place was the billiard-room at the hotel. I prepared it for the ceremony by draping a blue blanket over the table, and I put a red one opposite over the cue rack, thinking it might help him to put a little fire into his discourse. When all was ready, I obtained the bullock bell from the kitchen. The Chinaman cook, who was a sporting character, said:—"Wha for, nother raffle, all ri, ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield

... stall, he could hardly help envying the animal's apparent acquiescence in a life so monotonous. "The stupid brute," he said, "thinks neither of the race-ground or the hunting-field, or his green paddock at Bucklaw, but enjoys himself as comfortably when haltered to the rack in this ruinous vault, as if he had been foaled in it; and, I who have the freedom of a prisoner at large, to range through the dungeons of this wretched old tower, can hardly, betwixt whistling and sleeping, contrive to pass away ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... Sybaris and Chloreus bleed, Dares the bold, Orsilochus the brave, Thymoetes, pitched from off his plunging steed. As on the AEgean when the North-winds rave, And the fierce gale rolls shoreward wave on wave, And drives the cloud-rack through the sky; so these Shrank back from Turnus, as his path he clave, Urged by his impulse, and each turns and flees; Loose streams his horsehair crest, blown ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil

... play. There are weaknesses inherent in all direct self-revelation; the thing, perhaps, is greatly said, yet there is no great occasion for the saying of it; a fine reticence is observed, but it is, after all, an easy reticence, with none of the dramatic splendours of reticence on the rack. In the midst of his pleasant confidences the essayist is brought up short by the question, "Why must you still be talking?" Even the passionate lyric feels the need of external authorisation, and some of the finest of lyrical poems, like the Willow Song of Desdemona, or Wordsworth's ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh

... we sacrificed it to them, it might be a doubtful benefit. I often thank my stars I wasn't born in the age of martyrs. If J. had been, I'm sure the very sight of the rack or the faggot would have made ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)

... went through the hall he kept looking all around as if he expected to see sharpshooters behind all the doors. It was a dandy house, with a nice big wide hall and it had a moose's head for a hat rack. First I guess we were ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... repealing the laws which secured property to the owner, and only admitted him to a sort of partnership with the tiller of the soil, old Gill speedily assured them that these were changes only to be adopted in Ulster, where the tenants were rack-rented and treated like slaves. 'Which of you here,' would he say, 'can come forward and say he was ever evicted?' Now as the term was one of which none had the very vaguest conception—it might, for aught they knew, have been an operation in surgery—the appeal was an overwhelming success. ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... good, had been bought, piece by piece, to replace ruder articles they had made at the mill. One or two handsome skins lay upon the uncovered floor, and the walls were made of varnished cedar boards. A gun-rack occupied a corner, and the books on a shelf indicated that their owners had some literary taste, though there were works on mining and forestry. Above the shelf, the huge head of a moose, shot on a prospecting Journey to the North, hung between the ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss

... to the baseless fabric of a vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all things which inherit, shall dissolve, And, like an unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind." ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley

... followed; but one afternoon when I rides up to the ranch house to get some orders about a drove of beeves that was to be shipped, I hears something like a popgun go off. I waits at the hitching rack, not wishing to intrude on private affairs. In a little while Luke comes out and gives some orders to some of his Mexican hands, and they go and hitch up sundry and divers vehicles; and mighty soon out comes one of the sisters or so and some of the two or three men. But two of the ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry

... the agent had not been able to learn anything about her trunk, and was unwilling even to prophesy concerning it. Gaites left him to question at her hands, which struck him as combining all the searching effects of a Roentgen-ray examination and the earlier procedure with the rack; and he wandered off, in a habit which he seemed to ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells

... followed this; and there was a rattling noise which Roy interpreted, for he knew that the men in the guard-room had seized the pikes from the rack, and that a bristling hedge of steel was being formed in ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn

... barb and serve also to pres it forward when onece entered a small distance. these barbed seed penetrate our mockersons and leather legings and give us great pain untill they are removed. my poor dog suffers with them excessively, he is constantly hinting and scratching himself as if in a rack of pain. the prickly pear also grow here as abundantly as usual. there is another species of the prickly pear of a globular form, composed of an assemblage of little conic leaves springing from a common root to which their small points are attached as a common center and the base ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... rolling of turf, and trimming up of the place, does not make much difference to you, old fellow, does it? You don't look altered since I saw you last, when old Jervis was letting the place go to rack and ruin. So they have a new entrance—very handsome conservatory—flowers—the banker does things in style. There," as Norman helped him off with his plaid, "wrap yourself up well, don't get cold. The sun is gone in, and I should ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... matter, ma'am. Hope twenty live geese inside it's enough-eh? Bed, do you call it? It's the rack! It's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... a small room, dimly lighted and very disorderly. Scraps of paper were strewn around the floor. Dust had settled on the ink-rollers of the foot-press. A single case of type stood on a rack and the form of a bill-of-fare—partly "pied"—was on a marble slab which formed the top of a small table. On an upturned soap-box was a pile of unprinted menu cards. Josie noted a few cans of ink, a bottle of benzine, and a few ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)



Words linked to "Rack" :   plate rack, single-foot, cut, roof rack, hatrack, framework, pluck, pace, clutch, take out, demolition, surcharge, dish rack, rob, magazine rack, toastrack, fleece, torture, hook, tripod, fly, strain, cruet-stand, towel rack, music stand, work on, dress rack, plume, bier, hurt, hayrack, barbecue, rack and pinion, wheel, wipeout, barbeque, music rack, try, draw, torment, rack railway, wing, put to work, gazump, excruciate, rack rent, bomb rack, rack of lamb, spice rack, sail, anguish, carrier, bleed, gait, overcharge, cut of meat, pipe rack, coat rack, work, instrument of torture, soak, torturing, navigation, extort, wrack, piloting, seize, support, prehend, scud, luggage rack, stress, bicycle rack, pilotage, tie rack



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