"Torturing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whispered accusing conscience, "even before you loved him; and have you not seen him writhing at your feet in agonies of remorse, for the indulgence of passions more torturing to himself than to you! It is you who have driven him from country and home, innocently, it is true, but he is not less a wanderer and an exile. Write and tell him the simple, holy truth, then folding your hands meekly over your heart, leave the result ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... of May; yet there seemed a gloom on Nature's face, as if she sympathized with mortal pain and sorrow Roger Malvin's hands were uplifted in a fervent prayer, some of the words of which stole through the stillness of the woods and entered Reuben's heart, torturing it with an unutterable pang. They were the broken accents of a petition for his own happiness and that of Dorcas; and, as the youth listened, conscience, or something in its similitude, pleaded strongly with him to return and lie down again by the rock. He felt how hard was the doom ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... little comfort in recognizing that he had made no demands on her affection. Bitter as she was, she could not blame him; she had been madly foolish and must suffer for it. She called her pride to the rescue, but it failed her. The torturing anxiety about the man's fate remained, and with it a humiliating regret, which was not altogether selfish, that it was Sylvia Marston he had chosen. Sylvia, who was clever, had, of course, tricked him; but this was no consolation. It was, however, needful to hide her feelings from ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... needles. He sobbed, and the birch-tree quivered in a wind of human grief. He saw Charlotte going to church in her bridal bonnet with Thomas Payne more plainly than he could ever see her in life, for a torturing imagination reflects life like a magnifying-glass, and makes it clearer and larger than reality. He saw Charlotte with Thomas Payne, blushing all over her proud, delicate face when he looked at her; he saw her with Thomas Payne's children. "O God!" he gasped, and he threw ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... himself can do nothing for him. It is but the natural result of his making the loveliest of God's gifts into his God, and worshipping and serving the creature more than the creator. Oh my child, it is a terrible thing to be! Except he knows God the saviour, man stands face to face with a torturing enigma, hopeless ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... To Pretas and to Bhutas.[FN35] Yea, and those Who practise bitter penance, not enjoined By rightful rule—penance which hath its root In self-sufficient, proud hypocrisies— Those men, passion-beset, violent, wild, Torturing—the witless ones—My elements Shut in fair company within their flesh, (Nay, Me myself, present within the flesh!) Know them to devils devoted, not to Heaven! For like as foods are threefold for mankind In nourishing, so is there threefold way Of worship, ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... which we refer a province of the dominions belonging to Philip of Spain. It was ruled with no very paternal hand by the Duke of Alva, who resided chiefly at Brussels. He had been employed for several years in burning, hanging, drowning, and cutting off the heads of his loving subjects, and torturing them in a variety of ways, in order to make them dutiful children of the Church of Rome, and of his master, Philip. Not with great success, for they still hated, with an unalterable deadly hatred, both one and the other. Brill at ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... visiting the market again, was imprudent enough to carry under his belt the fine embroidered gloves of his master. Knowing these gloves could not belong to a merchant, the suspicious magistrates seized the boy again, and after torturing him, threatened to cut out his tongue unless he revealed his master's name. On learning the truth from the frightened lad, they informed the archduke, who sent soldiers to surround the inn. When the troopers ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... soul, Caudle; and if it wasn't for that Miss Prettyman—no, I'm not torturing you. I know very well what I'm doing, and I wouldn't torture you for the world; but you don't know what the feelings of a wife ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... hands!' I know not what idea that lord may entertain of God and nature; but I know that such abominable principles are equally abhorrent to religion and humanity. What! attribute the sacred sanction of God and nature to the massacres of the Indian scalping-knife—to the cannibal savage, torturing, murdering, roasting, and eating—literally, my lords, eating—the mangled victims of his barbarous battles—To send forth the merciless cannibal, thirsting for blood! Against whom?—Against your Protestant brethren; to lay waste ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... hag! Have you no touch of feeling, that your eyes Gloat on a sight so horrible as this? Help me—take hold. What, will not one assist To pull the torturing arrow from ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... surround. Feverish startings and tossings proved that the soul was not sharing the body's rest, and dreams, which are said to be of real events the forms and shadows, disturbed him with dark and monstrous images, the fitful phases of which, as they changed, grew yet more fearful and torturing. His mother, pale and anxious as she looked before her death,—purses, money, prisons, and judgment-halls,—all came up in disjointed medley together. Beads of sweat standing upon his brow showed how great was the ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... beds, of diseases bred of modern civilisation. But I am glad that those old barbarians, those rudimentary creatures working their way up into the divine likeness, when they were not hanging, drawing, quartering, torturing, and chopping their neighbours, and using their heads in conventional patterns on the tops of gate-posts, did devote their leisure intervals to rearing fortresses like this. Edinburgh Castle could not be conceived, much less built, ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... not a second look, 525 In haste he sped him up the brook, Nor backward glanced, till on the heath Where Lubnaig's lake supplies the Teith. —What in the racer's bosom stirred? The sickening pang of hope deferred, 530 And memory, with a torturing train Of all his morning visions vain. Mingled with love's impatience came The manly thirst for martial fame; The stormy joy of mountaineers, 535 Ere yet they rush upon the spears; And zeal for Clan and Chieftain burning, And hope, from well-fought field returning, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... of Borneo, and on the Sumatran island of Nias, where they torment the living, plague women who are with child, and kill the embryo in the womb, thus causing abortion; in Java, they make women in labour crazy; in Amboina, the Uliase and Kei Islands, and Gilolo, they become evil spirits, torturing women in labour, and seeking to prevent their successful delivery; in Gilolo, the Kei group, and Celebes, they even torment men, seeking to emasculate them, in revenge for the misfortune which has overtaken ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... while they are the expression of a genius so refined as to be all essence of spirit. In Gray, excellent as he is, we continually encounter the marks of labour and effort, and occasional crudeness, which shows that effort had not always succeeded, such as "iron hand and torturing hour;" but nothing of this kind occurs in the principal poems of Collins. There is a fire of mind which supersedes labour, and produces what labour cannot. It has been said that Collins is neither sublime nor pathetic; but only ingenious and fanciful. The truth is, that he was cast in the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... juries, but only of course till the first outcry had subsided and the matter could be allowed to slip out of sight. The consequences of this wretched administration of justice appeared especially in a system of plundering and torturing the provincials, compared with which even previous outrages seemed tolerable and moderate. Stealing and robbing had been in some measure legitimized by custom; the commission on extortions might be regarded as an institution for taxing the senators returning from the provinces ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the rather that all attempts to dislodge him from his mountain fastness, and destroy his band, had failed. Blackburn seemed to enjoy the same kind of protection as Ughtred, and practised the same atrocities, torturing and imprisoning his captives unless they were heavily ransomed. He also led a life of wildest licence, and, when not engaged in some predatory exploit, spent his time in carousing with ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... days, each of them containing a month of torturing suspense, have since passed. Our lodging-place grew so unpleasant that we preferred wandering all day through the misty, muddy, smoky streets, taking refuge in the covered bazaars when it rained heavily. The gloom of every thing around us, entirely ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... torturing me?" Zinaida Fyodorovna said suddenly in Russian in a breaking voice. "What is it for? Think of my misery ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... saw Death awaiting himself, and, worse than that, he saw Talbot—alone, friendless, despairing, in the hands of remorseless fiends. Talbot, on the other hand, saw Death awaiting Brooke, and never could shake off the torturing thought that his death was owing to her, and that he was virtually dying for her. Had it not been for her he might still have been safe. And it seemed to her to be a very hard and bitter thing that such a man as this should have to die in such ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... yet, there is a torturing sense of life, E'en in the feeling of the quick drawn breath, That tells of many years of woe and strife, Ekeing our being out, though bringing death: While Fancy, with a thousand thronging tales, Now in her gladness, now in woe, prevails,— Till the dark moment of o'erwhelming ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... torturing thoughts, the figure of Grace came and went unceasingly. What would she do—what could she do, to aid him? He had warned her not to ask Mr. Phelps to take any steps looking to his release. He realized that were Hartmann to appear now, and ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... terror wins its effect by ever-varying means. Scientific discoveries open up new vistas, and the twentieth century will evolve many fresh devices for torturing the nerves. The telephone set ringing by a ghostly hand, the aeroplane with a phantom pilot, will replace the Gothic machinery of ruined abbeys and wandering lights. The possibilities of terror are manifold, and it is impracticable here to do more than pick up a few threads in the tangled skein. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... and did not look at her for a long time. That episode in her past history of which she had told him—of the poor Christminster graduate whom she had handled thus, returned to Jude's mind; and he saw himself as a possible second in such a torturing destiny. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... with him?" she breaks forth, advancing toward him, as though to compel him to give her an answer to the question that has been torturing ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... heavily fringed lids quivered, drooped, the magnificent eyes closed as if to shut out some vision too torturing even for their brave penetrating gaze, and in her rigid whiteness she seemed some unearthly creature, who had done for ever with feverish life and the frail ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... so carefully during these last seven days?" "Are they getting me ready for the torturing?" "Are they making me well in order that I may suffer all the more?" Grim speculation of that kind must have been running through his simple mind. For when we opened the door of his room, he slunk cowering over to his bed, staring at us as ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... this chapter, the early commercial voyages of the English East India Company have been detailed; and it is now proposed to conclude this part of our arrangement, by a brief narrative of the unjustifiable conduct of the Dutch at Amboina, in cruelly torturing and executing several Englishmen and others on false pretences of a conspiracy, but the real purpose of which was to appropriate to themselves the entire trade of the spice islands, Amboina, Banda, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... have any soul, as their masters believe, he was quite right. There were outcries and clamours, sobs and bursts of chattering laughter, silences where the trained ear yearned for the clear note, and torturing reduplications where there should have been one deep voice. Down the screw-shaft ran murmurs and warnings, while a heart-diseased flutter without told that ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... gone! oh, chilling sound! That tolls the knell of hope and joy! Potent with torturing pang to wound, But not ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... Two hours of torturing suspense had passed since the terrible awakening, which but served to make the feeling of restored security the more delightful, and the remainder of the night was spent in relating the events of the rencontre. Louisa's was not ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... said the Professor, a trifle grimly. "I didn't at all like his looks when I was talking about the flying machine. The brute looked as if he were quite capable of locking me up and starving or torturing me until I gave him the secret. My word, I should like to see him try! I'd have him grovelling at ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... happily, that more than half of those who are now in our gaols might have been enjoying liberty and using that liberty well, that such a hell on earth as Norfolk Island, need never have existed, if we had expended in training honest men but a small part of what we have expended in hunting and torturing rogues. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the savages dropped where they stood, life rived away by the torturing ultra-violet, burned away by the blast of pure heat, or consumed by the conflagrations that raged instantly wherever that wide-sweeping fan encountered combustible material. In the face of power supernatural they lost all thought of attack ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... features—now fearing the worst; "Gone so soon!" repeated he, "gone to tell my Marion that her Wallace comes. Blessed angel!" cried he, clasping her to his breast, with an energy of which he was not aware, "take me, take me with thee!" The pressure, the voice, roused the dormant life of Helen. With a torturing sigh she unsealed her eyes from the death-like load that oppressed them, and found herself in the ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... the front locks on pins all night, and let them tickle his eyes all day, pinch his waist into a corset, and give him gloves a size too small and shoes the same, and a hat that will not stay on without torturing elastic, and a little lace veil to blind his eyes whenever he goes out to walk, and he will know what ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... at winning the governor was more than overbalanced by the torturing fear that it would all be too late. He believed they would be in time to stop Reedy from getting away with his four hundred thousand dollars' worth of cotton. Jenkins would not start until he had lost hope of getting that $150,000 from the ranchers for water. But Bob feared he was already ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... go unpunished; and where he who with many years' cheating and grinding the faces of the poor grows rich, receives office and honor in life, and after death brave funeral and a splendid mausoleum:—this world, where, since its making, war has never ceased, nor man paused in the sad task of torturing and murdering his brother; and of which ambition, avarice, envy, hatred, lust, and the rest of Ahriman's and Typhon's army make a Pandemonium: this world, sunk in sin, reeking with baseness, clamorous with sorrow and misery. If any see in it also a type of the sorrow of the Craft ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and thou great Mother Earth, Thou, too, O sun, with thy all-seeing eye, Look how a god is treated by the gods! See the pains that I must bear, Even to the thousandth year! Such the chains that heaven's new king Forges for my torturing. Ah me! Ah me! my present woe Does but the pangs to come foreshow, Pangs that an end will ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape—the most abominable in all the category of crimes, even worse than murder. Mobs frequently avenge the commission of this crime by themselves torturing to death the man committing it; thus avenging in bestial fashion a bestial deed, and reducing themselves to a level with ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... was addressed to the government by the Czech deputies Binovec, Filipinsk and Stejskal (Socialists) regarding the outrageous and inhuman treatment of the Czech political prisoners. They mentioned a vast number of appalling instances of deliberate torturing and starving of the prisoners. All rights of the prisoners were suspended and they depended entirely on the will of the commander: many of these political prisoners were imprisoned together with ordinary murderers; ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... for dead. During the night he revived, and dragged himself up to some rocks; but the Indians in the morning, following up his trail, came on him praying in a loud voice. They told him that he served a blind God, or at best a powerless God, as He did nothing to defend His servant; then, after torturing him cruelly, they despatched him, and, taking out his heart, said: 'Let us see if his soul will take the road to heaven.' These savages do not seem to have been genuinely interested in finding out what became of the soul after the dissolution of the ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... in order that she might have the experience of catching it each time. No mercy is shown the helpless mouse, which is the same to her as the toy ball—in the same way as a real beetle and a toy beetle are the same to a small child. Evidently the cat does not play with the mouse for the delight in torturing it, but purely for practice that she may become skilled in the art of catching it. The cat also exercises in springing movements, and by studying the mouse's probable movements, learns to acquire a knowledge and ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... naked savages were never tired of testing their respective strengths. They would paddle away like so many black devils—dashing up the water whenever they succeeded in coming near each other, and delighting in drenching us with the spray. The greatest pleasure to them, it appeared, was torturing others with impunity to themselves. Because the Wazungu had clothes, and they had none, they cared not how the water flew about; and the more they were asked to desist, the more obstinately they persevered. For fear of misapprehension, I must state that though these negroes go stark naked ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... these physical ills as well? You know how ill I was not long ago at Basle, more than once. I was beginning to suspect that that year would be fatal to me: illness followed illness, always more severe. But, at the very time when this illness was at its height, I felt no torturing desire to live and no trepidation at the fear of death. My whole hope was in Christ alone, and I prayed only that he would give me what he judged most salutary for me. In my youth long ago, as I remember, I would shiver at the very name of death. This ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... been so obscure to him hitherto. Knowledge! What satisfaction was there in that? Fame! What profit in that by itself? Yet he had thought these aims predominant; had been willing to toil day and night in such pursuits. His eyes were opened. His first torturing love might be for ever frustrate, but it had revealed him to himself. He looked forth upon the world, its activities, its glories, and behold there was for him but one prize worth winning, the love of the ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... constant dread and fear of change, which is not the least of their torturing troubles. A kind owner may be taken away by death, and the new one be harsh and cruel; or necessity may compel him to sell his slaves, and thus they may be thrown into most unhappy situations. So they live with a heavy cloud of sorrow ...
— Step by Step - or, Tidy's Way to Freedom • The American Tract Society
... example. Look at the class of men who, in all England, undergo the most fearful dangers; who know not at what hour of any night they may not be called up to the most serious labour and responsibility, with the chance of a horrible and torturing death. I mean the firemen of our great cities, than whom there are no steadier, braver, nobler-hearted men. Not a week passes without one or more of these firemen, in trying to save life and property, doing things which are altogether heroic. ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... awake; the mind of man was ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to think of the mediaeval students poring over a single ill-translated sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract from its clauses whole systems of logical science, and torturing their brains about puzzles more idle than the dilemma of Buridan's donkey, while all the time, at Constantinople and at Seville, in Greek and Arabic, Plato and Aristotle were alive, but sleeping, awaiting ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... owe. In every other circumstance, the mind Has this to say, 'It was no deed of mine;' But when to all the evil of misfortune This sting is added—'Blame thy foolish self!' Or worser far, the pangs of keen remorse; The torturing, gnawing consciousness of guilt,— Of guilt, perhaps, where we've involved others; The young, the innocent, who fondly lov'd us, Nay, more, that very love their cause of ruin! O burning hell! in all thy store of torments, There's not a keener lash! Lives ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of her intended harbour, while the near neighbourhood of that place, and of these circumstances which could alone put an end to the calamities under which her people laboured, served only to aggravate their distress, by torturing them with a view of the relief they were unable to reach. She was at length delivered from this dreadful situation at a time when we least expected it: For, after having lost sight of her for several days, we were joyfully surprised, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... will have a friend," mused the elder man. "Well, in moments when I could think, that torturing thought of my dragging her down with me was too much. It drove me back always to the old, old despair." The look of terror, that Jack noticed before came back into the haggard face. It was as if he feared ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... grinning at one side of his twisted mouth. Then with a vicious whirl of his arm he brought the hard hemp down on the boy's naked shoulders—once, twice, three times—the lad lost count. At last he nearly lost consciousness under the torturing fire of the blows. When the buccaneer ceased for lack of breath his victim hung limp and twitching over the wooden bar. Long welts that were beginning to drip red crossed and recrossed his back. "Now, where's that other whelp?" ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... paradise of fluttering hope and expectation for the dreary reality of housekeeping and cold mutton on Mondays? Why should we not be satisfied with the real pleasure of the passing moment, without for ever torturing our souls about the imaginary but delusive pleasure of the ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... the blessed autumn arrived, and found my Ludecke still torturing and burning, and Sidonia still practising her evil sorceries upon man and beast, of which, however, it would be tiresome here to notice all the particulars. And on the 11th day of September, Jobst and his fair daughter ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... know whether this was owing to some innate depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing instinct, which, under different circumstances, might have made a Fijian anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I was not answerable. It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact like endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted. A thin film of politeness ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... solemn; and then his wife had answered him with a full, but not grieving heart. "Had our lot," he once said, "been cast in an Indian village, the prejudices of the country would have required you to submit to a horrid, torturing death upon my tomb. The prejudices of Christian lands, which attribute blame to the wife who does not yield herself a living sacrifice to a life of desolation from a false regard to her husband's memory, are, if not so horrid, ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... anyway," snorted the Cow, switching her tail. "All the choice bits of torturing. Why, I've not had so much as a single toss since I've been on this job; no I haven't!" And she shook her sharp ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... the prostrate form of him for whom he was giving his life; but feeling secretly grateful that there was no painful struggle imminent in his case; that death itself would come unperceived, without torturing forebodings. ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... of Jove, relentless power, Thou tamer of the human breast, Whose iron scourge and torturing hour The bad affright, afflict the best! Bound in thy adamantine chain The proud are taught to taste of pain, And purple tyrants vainly groan With pangs ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... easily; but these pliant excitable temperaments, so anxiously in earnest, may be made useful. The more dangerous, frightful, or unnatural their performances, the more profit for their keepers. Men and women are trained by torturing processes to deny their nature, and then they are exhibited to bring grist to the mill—like birds and beasts forced to postures and services against the laws of their being—like those who must perform perilous feats on ropes or with ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... way. The fact of my love is now a past disaster, and I must bear the consequences with such fortitude as I can. But what you ask would drive me mad. If I should live, possibly in the future I might meet you often without the torturing regret I now feel. But to make a smiling member of Charles Hunting's friendly circle would require on my part the baldest hypocrisy; and I can't do it, and won't try. If that man comes into my room, I will crawl ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... yet only upon the borders of the pandemonium, and Ford was torturing his ingenuity to devise some argument strong enough to turn back the threatened invasion. There were reasons enough why a party with women among its members should not be projected into the grading and track-laying field. It was no place for women, Ford was ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... hat cocked over one ear with a defiant coquetry above a would-be conquering smile. The unerring wits in the crowd had already picked her out for special attention, but her active 'public form' was even more torturing to the fastidious feminine sense than her 'stylish' appearance. For her language, flowery and grandiloquent, was excruciatingly genteel, one moment conveyed by minced words through a pursed mouth, and the next carried away on a turgid tide of rhetoric—the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... victory in 1794. These were the Indians who kept Boone in captivity, made Simon Kenton run the gauntlet, stole thousands of horses in Kentucky, and who for years attacked the flatboats and keel boats that floated down the Ohio, torturing their captives by burning at ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... Chia Yn, which unconsciously so affected her heart that she hastily returned, quite disconsolate, into her room, and lay herself down on her bed, giving herself quietly to reflection. But while she was racking and torturing her brain and at a moment when she was at a loss what decision to grasp, her ear unexpectedly caught, emanating from outside the window, a faint voice say: "Hsiao Hung, I've picked up your pocket handkerchief in here!" and as soon as Hsiao ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... ungodly theology that some of our creeds torture the poor brains of their professors with. As the wild Indian of the plains runs sticks through his anatomy and capers wildly about to torture his body, so some of the creeds delight in torturing their devotees. The Jewish religion is the one best suited to tranquilize the mind; it is very philosophical and rational. Were he to acknowledge Christ, he would not have to change his course of life to become a most exemplary Christian. The celebrated letter of Moses Mendelssohn to the Swiss ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... word of what they say about your friends," said Cameron to Dick in a low tone while the Indians were thus engaged. "Depend upon it they hope to hide them till they can send to the settlements and get a ransom, or till they get an opportunity of torturing them to death before their women and children when they get back to their own village. But we'll balk them, my friend, do ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... it. It will break him. It will kill him. Alas, it is the ungrateful child that has the power to inflict a slow and torturing death! Poor father! Poor mother! And it is I that must witness it. I, that would die to save them from such ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... threw the ashes into the sea; fearing, as they exclaimed, lest their remains should be collected and a temple raised over them, as the relics of men who, being urged to forsake their religion, had preferred to endure torturing punishments even to a glorious death, and so, by keeping their faith inviolate, earning the appellation of martyrs. In truth the wretched men who underwent such cruel punishment might have been protected by the aid of the Christians, if both ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... little hamlet of Jaffra. During the entire of that day, the pain of my wounded limb had been excruciating; the fatigue of the road and the heat had brought back violent inflammation, and when at last the little village came in sight, my reason was fast yielding to the torturing agonies of my wound. But the transports with which I greeted my resting-place were soon destined to a change; for as we drew near, not a light was to be seen, not a sound to be heard, not even a dog barked as the heavy mule-cart rattled over ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... disappeared. Somehow I felt afraid—a sort of horror had come upon me—my imagination had been over-excited by the evil dream which I had experienced, and a feeling of oppression was crushing my heart.... I leapt from the chair, and involuntarily uttered a cry—a cry wrung from me by the terrible, torturing sensation that was upon me. Presently the ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... One moment's disobedience, and then to suffer for it all her life! to see Evie—dear, sweet, graceful Evie—limping about, crippled and helpless; to keep ever in one's mind the memory of that last wild run—the last time Evie would ever run! Could retribution possibly have taken to itself a more torturing form? She had spoiled Evie's life, and brought misery into ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... weapons of which he managed with perfect skill. He had a rapier for aristocratic immunities of evil, arrows to transfix prescriptions and shams; and with snobs (we must change the figure) he played as a cat does with a mouse, torturing and then devouring. In the words of Miss Bronte, "he was the first social regenerator of the day, the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things." But this was his chief and glorious strength: in the truest sense, he was a satirist and a humorist, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... existence among this tribe. They have wisely renounced both war and its horrors long ago. Among the wilder inhabitants of the prairies, however, it is still in vogue, with all the dismal accompaniments of killing, scalping, roasting, and torturing that distinguished American warfare ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... used in the mysteries of the most civilised of ancient peoples, the most probable explanation is, that the Greeks retained both the mysteries, the bull-roarer, the habit of bedaubing the initiate, the torturing of boys, the sacred obscenities, the antics with serpents, the dances, and the like, from the time when their ancestors were in the savage condition. That more refined and religious ideas were afterwards introduced into the ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... trench, head erect. If a splinter struck me it would wound me in the shoulders or the arms or knees. I bent low so that I might protect my stomach; I had seen men struck in that part of the body, the wounds were ghastly and led to torturing deaths. When a shell came near, I put the balls of my hands over my eyes, spread my palms outwards and covered my ears with the fingers. This was some precaution against blindness; and deadened the sound of explosion. Bill for a moment was unmoved, he ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... "How have you come? Oh, do not touch me — do not hurt me! Go — go quickly from this evil place, or perchance those devils will return and capture you as they have captured me, that they may torture you to death as they are torturing me. Oh, how did you come? I know the doors are locked and bolted. Are you devils in human guise, or hapless prisoners like myself? Oh, if you are still free, go — go ere they can return! They know that they cannot keep me much ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... words the warder maiden said He heard with soul disquieted, And thus as fiercer grief assailed, His troubled senses wellnigh failed. Consumed by torturing fires of grief The king, the world's imperial chief, His lady lying on the ground In most unqueenly posture, found. The aged king, all pure within, Saw the young queen resolved on sin, Low on the ground, his own sweet wife, To him far dearer than his life, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... mind of Joseph Smith had overmastered Susannah's mind. As Elvira had said, he, lying in a gaol far away, enduring hardship, imminent danger of torturing death, was by his spirit animating this motley crowd, and now at last again his will broke down the barriers of reason that Susannah had raised and fortified even against the love of her child and the long reverence she had yielded to her husband. The true secret of ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... them, standing a little distance asunder in the dull confined room, each proudly cherishing her own anger; each, with a fixed determination, torturing her own breast, and torturing the other's. He said a word or two of leave-taking; but Miss Wade barely inclined her head, and Harriet, with the assumed humiliation of an abject dependent and serf (but not without defiance for all that), made as if she ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... longer, however,' Harland again replied, addressing the second. 'Besides,' he added, 'it might be'—and here stopped short with the manifest intention of torturing the cowardly wretch. It was noticed by Roland that Ham was constantly casting his eyes up the hollow, as if expecting somebody. At last a thought ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... following the armies in the field and ministering to the sick, the wounded and the suffering, regardless of their nationality, the general kind treatment to prisoners, accentuated by some very horrible exceptions, and all this contrasted with the enslaving, torturing, the crucifying, the flaying alive of prisoners captured in war by barbaric nations ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... not easy to conceive a situation more severely torturing than this of captain Snipes. His house, with all his furniture, his kitchen, his barn and rice-stacks, his stables, with several fine horses, and his negro houses, all wrapped in flames; himself scorched and blistered with the furious heat, yet not daring to stir; his retreat well known ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... form of warfare with mankind; The abhorrence of his friends, a source of hate From strangers, and from each once-loving mate; But if his wife despise him, then 't were meet In some lone wood to seek a safe retreat. The flame of sorrow, torturing his soul, Burns fiercely, yet contrives to leave ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... races faced one another, of which the higher professed small concern for the amelioration of the lower, while amalgamation was excluded by the mutual pride of race and the instinctive enmity that divided them. There was no enslaving of Indians, and the torturing was done entirely by the savages, but, while the English method spared the individual Indian the suffering his defenceless brother in the south had to endure, the aboriginal races have everywhere receded before the relentless advance of civilisation. The battle ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... contempt of their captain and his triumph, they were not only struck with admiration of so rare a virtue, but moreover inclined to mutiny, and were even ready to rescue the prisoner out of the hangman's hands, he caused the torturing to cease, and afterwards privately caused him to be thrown into the sea.—[Diod. Sic., ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... a torturing, doubt-raising, perplexing thing this Love was! A few hours ago he had known nothing whatever of it ... had merely imagined cold, austere, wrong things about it ... and now it had hold of him and was hurting him. Every particle of his mind was concentrated ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... wife, but in a way torturing to himself and to her. If she is gone from the house he is wretched, and yet when she returns he often forbears to speak to her, or if he does speak it is with a constraint that hurts her more than his silence. I was present when she came in today. Her step, which had been eager on the ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... mechanically and leant forward, straining her eyes to steer for a possible landing-place; but the beating of her heart had quieted down, and she had a curious feeling that she was drifting, drifting, in this solemn silence, out of a region of torturing fear into the ...
— Troublesome Comforts - A Story for Children • Geraldine Glasgow
... endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great, warm love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without! Her little efforts to amuse him! How pitiful, yet magnanimous, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in mind that convents have many tortures outside of the torturing conscience on account of having the virtue of their inmates destroyed. The teachings of Catholicism lead people to practice self-infliction upon their person in order to appease a living God, as they seem to worship a ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... under which her faith had reeled and it had never had a chance of recovery. She laughed harshly. The heart of her tragedy was now revealed to her. She saw herself the sport of gods who sat about like cruel louts torturing a helpless animal and laughing stupidly at its sufferings. She turned again to Thresk ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... cold and haughty. Filippo, too, became reserved and distant; or at least I suspected him to be so. Heavens!—was this mere coinage of my brain: was I to become suspicious of all the world?—a poor surmising wretch; watching looks and gestures; and torturing myself with misconstructions. Or if true—was I to remain beneath a roof where I was merely tolerated, and linger there on sufferance? "This is not to be endured!" exclaimed I; "I will tear myself from this state ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... cruelly beaten and whipped, caesam fustibus flagellisque, &c. Jerom, tom. i. p. 121, ad Principiam. See Augustin, de Civ. Dei, l. c. 10. The modern Sacco di Roma, p. 208, gives an idea of the various methods of torturing prisoners ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... brighter—a cloud having passed off the eastern sky. Objects could be seen more distinctly, and then the mystery, that had so long held the young hunters in torturing suspense, was solved. The large animal reared up and stood with its side towards them; and its long pointed snout, its short erect ears, its thick body and shaggy coat of hair, showed that it was no Indian nor human creature of any sort, ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... of the rarest power could conceive such a denouement, requiting a life of black ingratitude by no mere common horrors, no vulgar Bedlam frenzy; but by the torturing apprehension of a happiness never quite grasped, always just beyond the verge of realisation. Only an imagination of the finest and rarest touch, absolutely certain of tread on that path of a single hair which alone connects this world with the land of dreams. Few ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... there is no reason why it should be one to my readers. Grace Carden, for the first time in her life, was in the clutches of a fiend, a torturing ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... pleasure of love tasted in those slender arms. Then I lost that firmness with which all judges should be furnished. This demon by me questioned, reasoned with me in such a manner that at the second interrogatory I was firmly persuaded I should be committing a crime in fining and torturing a poor little creature who cried like an innocent child. Then warned by a voice from on high to do my duty, and that these golden words, the music of celestial appearance, were diabolical mummeries, that this body, so pretty, so infatuating, would transmute itself ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... to think of the gentle Louise, secretly anticipating the rigours of convent life, torturing her delicate skin by wearing coarse serge, and burning tallow candles in her chamber to accustom herself ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... this giant, there plays the baby boy who is to cleave him to the ground. This Nero slowly returns to the city. He meets the congratulations of a senate, which thank him and the gods that he has murdered his own mother. With the agony of an undying conscience torturing him, he strives to avert care by amusement. He hopes to turn the mob from despising him by the grandeur of their public entertainments. He enlarges for them the circus. He calls unheard-of beasts to ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... warmly and went upstairs to Helen's room. I knew what it was Helen feared. The consequences of her crime. The terrible fear of public prosecution for the murder of her husband was torturing her poor delirious brain. For a moment I forgave her everything and pitied her from the depths of ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... the monster, recovering itself, was turning madly to finish off its insignificant but torturing opponent, A-ya came leaping back to the rescue, with a blazing and sparkling faggot in each hand, and the old men, some with fire-brands, some with spears, clamoring resolutely behind her. With fearless dexterity, she thrust the fire straight ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... would redound to public benefit; and I only ask, if my suggestion be approved of, that I may be remembered as the inventor, and not treated as Admiralty Lords do the constructors of new targets, testing the metal and torturing the man. Bear in mind, therefore, if the political 'Wreck Register' be ever carried into execution, its ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... that he did not recall and linger over with a boyish yearning, now that these things were over forever. He chafed under his weakness. If the day would but come when he could go out and conquer his fate, as a man ought to do! On Christmas eve he would put an end to these torturing taunts, his soul should not be balked longer of its rightful food. For I fear that even now Stephen Holmes thought of his own need ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... Let that pass, however. But I cannot give you time. I cannot hold out—who can hold out, under injurious secrecy— under mocking injustice—under torturing doubt from the one who is pledged to the extreme of confidence? Let us once understand one another, and we will never meet more, and I will endure whatever must be endured, and we shall have time—Oh, what a weary ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... Helper. He was a Kentuckian by birth, kind and open-hearted,—a slave-holder by habit, not by nature. Warm feelings of regard had long existed between him and Mr. Noble; and to him the broken merchant applied for advice in this torturing emergency. Though Mr. Helper was possessed of but moderate wealth, he had originally agreed to endorse his friend's note for fifteen hundred dollars; and he now promised to empower some one to expend three thousand dollars in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... listening to the torturing discords of the Alvin Silver Cornet Band that was practicing in the room above the store, till finally the patrons had departed, when I approached the postmaster and informed him of my unpleasant mission, which, ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... which Hoche had embarked returned to port without having seen any of its companions. The invasion had failed, but the panic which it roused woke passions of cruelty and tyranny which turned Ireland into a hell. Soldiers and yeomanry marched over the country torturing and scourging the "croppies," as the Irish peasantry were termed from their short-cut hair; robbing, ravishing, and murdering at their will. The lightest suspicion, the most unfounded charges, were taken as warrants for bloodshed. So hideous were these ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... of torturing you," Charlie said. "A confession extorted by pain is as likely to be false as true, and even did you tell me one name, there might still be a dozen engaged in it who would remain unknown. No, Hossein, you have failed in your duty, ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... is lack of imagination which makes men and women brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... draw thy sword? Is it not that the church and state should be reformed by the free voice of a free parliament, with such laws as shall hereafter prevent the executive government from spilling the blood, torturing and imprisoning the persons, exhausting the estates, and trampling upon the consciences of men, at ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... that some of the Klemantans cannot be so whole-heartedly defended against the charge of torturing their captives. But we believe that it is not regularly practised by any Klemantan tribe, but rather only on occasions which in some way evoke an exceptional degree of emotional excitement. Thus, in one ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... was mistaken and the girl should be really delirious, after all. But just as I had reached the point of torturing doubt hardly to be borne, the girl stopped her delirious muttering, opened her eyes and looted steadily ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... supposed that Master Horner was of a cruel and ogrish nature—a babe-eater—a Herod—one who delighted in torturing the helpless. Such souls there may be, among those endowed with the awful control of the ferule, but they are rare in the fresh and natural regions we describe. It is, we believe, where young gentlemen are to be crammed for college, that the process of hardening heart ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... the perfect number." Durant affected abstraction, and turning to the window gazed out into the dim green landscape. His host's eye followed him; it marked him down as the fourth; it hovered round him, dubious, vacillating, troubled. The Colonel had still some torturing remnants of a conscience; he had read the deep repugnance on the young man's face, and hesitated to sacrifice a guest on his first night. He turned helplessly to Mrs. Fazakerly, who put an ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... profligate Danby to God alone knew what infamy—even she would return to act for me her part of sorrowing wonder—to weep and sigh. Oh, shameful hypocrisy! And with her would be my aunt and uncles to wonder also and shake grave heads over me, torturing me with their love while in my consciousness gnawed this undying horror that, like a demon raged within me, passioning for utterance, insomuch that day or night I had dreaded lest I babble the obscenities ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... The Soul of a Bishop (CASSELL). It's not that I object to the irreverence of stripping a poor tired bishop of cassock and gaiters, pursuing him to a sleepless bed and cinematographing all his physical twistings and turnings, his moral misgivings, his torturing doubts. I owe too much to Mr. WELLS' irreverences to mind that sort of thing; and I must say that, for a man who can't have had very much to do with the episcopacy in his busy life, he does manage to give a confoundedly plausible atmosphere to the whole setting. There are two letters from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... most charming of all women, who is your sister, that her noble man was in great good fortune; and I envy him because the Gods showed their love for him even up to the last. The wicked, torturing devils respected his gay spirit as he passed along and forgot to fill him full of arrows, poisoned arrows, as he ran the gauntlet down to the River. Her letters are beauteous reflections of her thoroughbred soul, and they give delight ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... himself at the base, in hospital. When the surgeons came to examine him for the bullet, they found that it had struck the broad brass plate of his cross-belt fairly in the middle, penetrating it and shattering his breast bone. But after torturing him vilely with the probe, they were about to give up the search in despair, when he told them he felt a pain in his back. Examining the spot indicated by him, they found a bullet just beneath the skin, which a touch with the knife allowed to tumble out. Further examination revealed ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... Truth stands no more in need of the patronage of error, than does a natural good complexion of paint. And it is certain, that the opinion which has been prevalent for many ages, of the power granted to devils, of torturing human bodies and minds, has been several ways made subservient to the subtle designs of crafty men, to the very great detriment and shame of the ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... this, that the sooner he could engage himself to marry Mary Bonner the better. If he were once engaged, the engagement would not then be broken off because of any previous folly with Miss Neefit; and, again, if he were once engaged to Mary Bonner, Neefit would see the absurdity of torturing him further in regard to Polly. On the Wednesday evening he went up to town, and on the Thursday morning he put himself into a cab and ordered the man to drive ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... began to talk to her of that Belgian landscape in which he had first seen a windmill, and he laughed at the blank unintelligence with which she received his reminiscences of travel. For the moment, the torturing stress was lifted from his soul; he wished that the breakfast in the miller's house might never come to an end; he explored the mill with Flavia; he bantered the Squire on his saturnine preference for steam power in the milling business; ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... inculcates that sins of thought should be confessed in order that the confessor may judge of their mortal or venial character. What sort of a chain this links around the strictly conscientious I would attempt to portray, if I could. But it must have been worn to understand its torturing character! Suffice it to say that, for months past, according to this standard, I had not made a good confession at all! And now, filled with remorse for my past sacrilegious sinfulness, I resolved on making a new general confession to ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... flame. Smoke blinded and choked her. Then clear, dry, keen wind sung in her ears and whipped her hair. The light about her darkened. The King had headed into the pines. The heavy roar of the gale overhead struck Lucy with new and torturing dread. Sage King once in his life was running away, bridleless, and behind him there was fire on the wings ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... thought had been torturing me before Godensky came! I had been thinking of the Juge d'Instruction, and his terrible cross-examination which only a man of steel or iron can answer without trembling. I had thought that questions ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... stop at nothing to save themselves if worst came to worst; their fear will make them fiends. One couldn't suppose they would dare seize Martinez in all defiance of law—but they did. One can't believe they would dream of torturing him for information—but I haven't a doubt that's what they've done. So you see why I'm worried about you. If anything happened, if any harm came to you ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... and in the power of the enraged mutineers, about to suffer whatever their vengeance might impel them to inflict. Poor Spot was swinging, a livid corpse, at one of the yard-arms. Browne was bound to the main-mast, while Luerson and his fiendish crew were exhausting their ingenuity in torturing him. The peculiar expression of his mild, open countenance, distorted by pain, went to my heart, and the sound of that familiar and friendly voice, now hoarse and broken, and quivering with agony, thrilled me with horror. As he besought ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... destroy one another, with such an exterminating rage on both sides, that few have been left alive on either; and to say the truth, they were, generally speaking, mere cannibals. It was rarely the case that they did not devour some limbs, at least, of the prisoners they made upon one another, after torturing them to death in the most cruel and shocking manner: but they never failed of drinking their blood like water; it is now, some time, that our Micmakis especially are no longer in the taste of exercising ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... so clever why don't they put a stop to this torturing of poor dumb beasts?" cried the general indignantly. "I've shown them the man. It's Hinds; I know it. I've just been to see that fellow Wensdale. Why, dammit! he ought to be cashiered, and I told ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... turn round in, and where no space would exhaust the infinities of the affliction, it is not our purpose to heighten, or rhetorically to colour, any one feature of the dismal story. Rhetoric, and art of all kids, we forswear in a tragedy so torturing to our national sensibilities. We pass, in sympathy with the burning wrath of our readers, the madness of dallying and moping over the question—to starve or not to starve. We pass the infamy of entertaining a treaty with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... garble and twist the very words that he said in his agony? The process they have published is foully falsified,—stuffed full of improbable lies; for I myself have read the first draught of all he did say, just as Signor Ceccone took it down as they were torturing him. I had it from Jacopo Manelli, canon of our Duomo here, and he got it from Ceccone's wife herself. They not only can torture and slay him, but they torture and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... correspondents, scattered through all the counties of the state, report the cat as one of the greatest enemies of birds. The reports that have come in of the torturing and killing of birds by cats are absolutely sickening. The number of birds killed by them ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... renewal of the attacks made on Roman Catholics and their places of worship in London. On the 11th November the mob broke into St. John's, Clerkenwell, where rumour declared there were stored gridirons, spits and other instruments for torturing Protestants. The troops were called out and one or two of the rioters killed. It was deemed advisable to close all the Roman Catholic chapels except the royal chapels and those belonging to foreign ambassadors.(1630) Another sign of ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... name of Louise Florence Petronille-Tardieu d'Esclavelles, was married at twenty to her cousin. It seems to have been really a marriage of love; but the weak and faithless M. d'Epinay was clearly incapable of truth or honor, and the torturing process by which the confiding young wife was disillusioned, the insidious counsel of a false and profligate friend, with the final betrayal of a tender and desolate heart, form a chapter as revolting as it is pathetic. The fresh, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... mam with the steady, blunt-featured face, that she had crossed the Channel on a night boat not many hours after Von Hillern had walked away from Berford Place. The exact truth was that she had been miserably prowling about the adjacent streets, held in the neighbourhood by some self-torturing morbidness, half thwarted helpless passion, half triumphing hatred of the young thing she had betrayed. Up and down the streets she had gone, round and round, wringing her lean fingers together and tasting on her lips the salt of tears which rolled down her ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sizes and numbers and their authors' names? Here you have a science that turns a philosopher into a librarian. This is not feeding the soul with wisdom: it is the crushing it under a weight of riches or torturing it ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... with moisture; "I am sweating gall, lad. God!" striking the table with his fist; "could you but look within and see the lust to kill, the damnation and despair! Woe to him whom I hear laugh! And yet . . . he will be within his rights. Whenever men tire of torturing animals, nature gives them a cripple or a bastard to play with. And look! I am calm, my hand ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... Spain: "Such slaughter was done that day on land and water that killed and prisoners numbered forty thousand; and such were the shrieks and weeping of women and children that there were none of us whose hearts did not break." He adds that it was impossible to contain the savage killing and torturing by their allies the Tlascalans, who practised such cruelty as had never been seen, and "out ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... to them. We cannot be wholly mistaken in thinking that it is these rare spirits which sustain, enliven, and enrich the world. And yet they seem to be regarded with no special favour by the Creator; they have to contend with insuperable obstacles; the very sensitiveness of their spirit is a torturing disability. The selfish, worldly, hard, brutal temperaments have almost invariably a far better time of it in the world; yet both the exalted spirit and the brutal spirit are undeniable facts; the lofty, unselfish, pure spirit ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Karnis laughing. "By Sirius! The world is turning upside down. Now that girls are forbidden to perform to the gentlefolks, art is being cultivated by the upper classes; it cannot be killed outright. For the future the listeners will be paid to keep quiet and the singers pay for the right of torturing their ears—our ears, our ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Daniel Boone, Cooper's great hero—Hawk-eye, of the 'Last of the Mohicans'—Deer-slayer—Leather-stocking! He has been here before us—ay, brave spirit! Long before other hunters had dared to venture far into the territory of the scalping, torturing, yelling red-skin, this bold heart had pushed westward, fearless and alone, until his eagle eye rested on the great Pacific. It must have been he. I have followed him, Ned, in spirit, throughout all his wild career, for I knew him to be a real man, and no fiction; ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... who knowest I have slept undisturbed but three nights out of seventeen, four hours out of each of the other fourteen having been spent in destroying my insatiable foe. Thou seest that nightly vigils are torturing me pale and weak, thou knowest what unspeakable affection I have for the youth yclept by the ancients Morpheus. Yet listen to my vow: If Port Hudson holds out, if our dear people are victorious, I offer ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... and one great side was leaning up against the sloping rock, bows on, like some wild sea-creature never before beheld of men, and come there but to die. So strong was this impression that when I afterwards saw men at work upon the wreck, tearing out the iron bolts and chains, it seemed like torturing the last moments of a living thing. At my next visit there was no person in sight; another companion fragment had floated ashore, and the two lay peacefully beside the sailors' graves (which give the name to ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... three other officers lay in a field hospital outside Ladysmith just after the relief, in a single bell tent, and saw Tommies all around us crowded into these tents with fever and dysentery, whereby all our cases, I am sure, were made much worse by the torturing sun which poured in all day on our heads), makes me very glad that the "Hospital Commission" is now sitting, and I sincerely hope that such absurd mistakes will be noticed and corrected by them for the good of the whole ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... is not likely to be imaginatively equipped to explore the spiritual fastnesses of a sensitive and alien orphan. Beulah tried earnestly to get some perspective on the child's point of view, but she could not. The fact that she was torturing the child would have been outside of the limits of her comprehension. She searched her mind for some immediate application of the methods of Madame Montessori, and produced a lump ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... escritoire to get the papers. When she opened the senseless chamber of wood, she found herself in the presence of many a torturing, tender memory. In one compartment there were a number of trout-flies. She remembered the day her husband had made them—a long, rainy, happy day during his last visit. Every time she passed him, he drew her face down to kiss it. And she could hear little Joris talking about the work, ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... repugnance, that it was with the utmost difficulty I resisted the almost overwhelming temptation to pitch my slender stock of sea-sodden biscuit overboard. On the other hand, I was consumed with a torturing thirst that I vainly strove to assuage by so reckless a consumption of my equally slender stock of wine, that at the end of the day only two bottles remained. Such recklessness was of course due to the fact that I was unaccountable for my actions; I was ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood |
