"Acrid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on his bed-end in the dark, like a spectacled image of Buddha, when the first of the three men came on guard again and at last Ismail came for him holding a pitchy torch that filled the dim passage full of acrid smoke and made both of them, cough. Ismail was ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... the intervening houses, the glass roof of some huge public baths glittered like crystal in the afternoon sun. Underneath him the branch post-office was opening its doors, as was its custom between two and three o'clock on Sunday afternoons. An acrid odor of ink rose upward to him. Occasionally a cable car passed, trundling heavily, with a strident whirring of jostled ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... March and the evenings were chill, so Jane had lit the fire, but the wind drove the smoke downwards and the air was full of its acrid taint. Johnson felt chilled to the bone, though rather by his apprehensions than by the weather. He crouched over the fire with his thin white hands held out to the blaze. At ten o'clock Jane brought in the joint of cold meat and laid ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... casement window and let the cool, moist air steal into the room. For several minutes she leaned out, breathing in the night odours of the dark garden. With them came a heavier odour that was familiar, the acrid, pungent smell of the doctor's tobacco. By it she could tell that he, too, had his window open; he was sitting close to it, reading and smoking. She had no idea how he spent his evenings, but when she came to bed his light was always on. What an odd, self-contained, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... kicking up the acrid alkali dust from the cattle-trail that snaked its way through the cactus and sagebrush, the roar behind us died; and before us, far away, dull muffled thunders grew up in the hush of the burning noon. Thunders in a desert, and no cloud! ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... not understand either the letter or the spirit of these American words, but they drank their drink, and the concertina resumed its acrid melody. The boy had taken himself off without ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... muffled rushing noise and the faintly acrid smell of ion electrodes as the Time Translator deposited Mrs. Mimms back into the year 1958. Being used to such journeys, she looked calmly about with quick gray eyes, making little flicking gestures with her ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight
... recovered its ground, and pursuing, had passed out of it forever, leaving only its dead behind, and knowing nothing more of that struggle than its own impact and momentum—even this wild excitement had long since evaporated with the stinging smoke of gunpowder, the acrid smell of burning rags from the clothing of a dead soldier fired by a bursting shell, or the heated reek of sweat and leather. A cool breath that seemed to bring back once more the odor of the upturned earthworks along the now dumb line of battle ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... silenced by it as he had been on the night of his birthday; he too, as he sat there with his "girl" and his wider experiences, felt that the ground over which Archelaus roamed was not altogether untrodden by himself. Annie, by the incursion of her eldest born, was changed, as always, from an acrid acquiescence to definite enmity towards Ishmael and his concerns. She became so rude to Blanche that it seemed the temper of a veritable angel still to be able to smile and answer with politeness. For her sake Ishmael also kept his temper, though inwardly he was ragingly ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... although I saw lights in the form-rooms and heard the voices of boys, I stood awkwardly in the playground, not knowing where I ought to go. The mist in the air surrounded the lights with a halo, and my nostrils were filled with the acrid smell ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... stories, tempting weary men to rest beneath its thick foliage, and insinuating death into the limbs that relax in the fatal coolness of its shade. It is like the apples of Sodom, fair to look upon, but turning to acrid ashes on the unwary lips. It is like the magician's rod that we read about in old books. There it lies; and if, tempted by its glitter, or fascinated by the power that it proffers you, you take it in your hand, the thing starts into a serpent with erected crest ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... went through the Blackfoot's body. The foot twitched. An acrid odor of burning flesh filled the room. No sound came from the ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... neck by a broad black ribbon, and a big bow tie, as if a big American moth had alighted on him. His dress and gestures were bright enough for a boy's; it was only when you looked at the fish-bone face that you beheld something acrid and old. His manners were excellent, though hardly English, and he had two half-conscious tricks by which people who only met him once remembered him. One was a trick of closing his eyes when he wished to be particularly polite; the other was ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... known that whatever we do, we two together, the king will be content therewith." Then he reproached the duke with his inertness against the English, with the capture of Pontoise, and with his alliances amongst the promoters of civil war. The conversation was becoming more and more acrid and biting. "In so doing," added the dauphin, "you were wanting to your duty." "My lord," replied the duke, "I did only what it was my duty to do." "Yes, you were wanting," repeated Charles. "No," replied the duke. It was probably at these words that, the lookers-on ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... undone from its sleek, smooth plaits, and now hung like a veil of gold on her shoulders. She looked closely at herself in the glass, and her face looked worn and haggard in the dim light. A pungent acrid odour permeated the room, and the heavy velvet curtains moved with subdued rustlings as the wind stole in through the window. On a table near her was a portrait of Vandeloup, which he had given Madame two days before, and though she could ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... close air of the stable all combine to rouse the latent tendency to disease in the eye, while direct injuries by bridle, whip, or hay seeds are not without their influence. In the same way local irritants, like dust, severe rain and snow storms, smoke, and acrid vapors ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... del Sol was being asphalted; ten or twelve furnaces ranged in a row were belching thick acrid smoke through their chimneys. The white illumination of the arc-lights had not yet been turned on; the silhouettes of a number of men who were stirring with long shovels the mass of asphalt in the caldrons danced diabolically up and down before the flaming mouths ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... mixture[35] is boiling and heaving in the brazen cauldron, placed {on the flames}, and whitens with swelling froth. There she boils roots cut up in the Haemonian valleys, and seeds and flowers and acrid juices. She adds stones fetched from the most distant East, and sand, which the ebbing tide of the ocean has washed. She adds, too, hoar-frost gathered at night by the light of the moon, and the ill-boding wings of a screech owl,[36] together ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... it,) exists in tobacco combined with an acid in excess, and in this state is not volatile. As obtained by distillation with caustic soda, and afterwards treated with sulphuric acid, etc., it is a colorless fluid, volatilizable, inflammable, of little smell when cold, but of an exceedingly acrid, burning taste, and alkaline. Nicotia contains a much larger proportion of nitrogen than most of the other organic alkalies. In its action on the animal system it is one of the most virulent poisons known. It exists in varying, though small proportion, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... and more commonly known to the Tenement as Miss C'rew, of somewhat tart and acrid temper, being pressed for her version of the story, paused in her awkward and intent efforts at soothing the beautiful, fair-haired child upon her lap and explained that she was stepping out her door that morning ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... the third day after its abandonment (unless the constituion has become so impaired by long habituation that there will probably be no vital reaction) opium begins to show its dissolutions from the tissue by a profuse and increasingly acrid bilious diarrhea, which must not be checked if diagnosis has revealed sufficient constitutional vigor to justify any attempt at abandonment of the drug. Hemorrhoids may result; they must be topically treated; mild astringents may be used when the tendency seems getting out ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... avoiding the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr. Matthew Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge. The day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count "Moll Flanders," ay, or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in this manoeuvre at first, but the secret of it was not kept for long. An acrid smell stole out into the air, which thickened every minute in intensity. Kettle seemed dimly to recognize it, but could not put a name to it definitely. Besides, he was working with all his might at scraping away the earth from the foot ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... indignant landladies, the dependent and drudge of her kinswoman's gynaeceum, the despised of her father? The flavour of these waters was very familiar to her lips. The draught was only a little more acrid, a little deeper, and habit had enabled her to drain the cup without complaining, if not in a spirit of resignation. To-day she had been betrayed into a brief outbreak of passion; but the storm had passed, and a more observant person than Charlotte ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... in India, and in place of rennet from calves a vegetable rennet is made from withania berries. This names a cheese of agreeable flavor when ripened, but, unfortunately, it becomes acrid with age. ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... pleasure seeker fails to get happiness; that is an inexorable law. He develops into a pessimist with an acrid, satirical disgust at all the simple, worth-while, real ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... as we have not been able to discover the existence of any glands manifestly organized for the secretion of poison. The fangs are inclosed in a soft, pulpy sheath, the inner surface of which is commonly coated with a thin glairy secretion. This secretion possibly may have something acrid and irritating in its qualities, which may, when it enters a wound, cause pain and even swelling, but nothing ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... have made his head-quarters in any one of them. As for children, you stumbled over them at every step, quite weighed down with the heaviness of their joy, and the money burning their pockets; the acrid old brokers and pettifoggers, that you met with a chill on other days, had turned into jolly fathers of families, and lounged laughing along with half a dozen little hands pulling them into candy-stores or toy-shops: ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... That is the time to make an indelible impression of principles upon the mind. In the first period of life, character is a blossom that should be carefully touched; in the second the petals fall, and the fruit sets; it is hard and acrid then until the third period, when, if things go well, it will ripen on the bough, and be sweet and wholesome—if ill, it will drop off immediately, and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... with all the newspapers and periodicals of civilized Europe, attached to the Kursaalian premises. There can be no harm, he thinks, in glancing over "Galignani" or the "Charivari," although under the same roof as the abhorred Trente et Quarante; but, alas! he finds Galignani engaged by an acrid old lady of morose countenance, who has lost all her money by lunch-time, and is determined to "take it out in reading," and the Charivari slightly clenched in one hand by the deaf old gentleman with the dingy ribbon of the Legion of Honour, and the curly ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... "Ejects some of this acrid oil through the thorn? Practically the uncanny thing stings when it is hurt? That is my own idea, Petrie. And I can understand how these Eastern fanatics accept their sentence— silence and death—when they have deserved it, at ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... want to do it myself," she said at last, and thrust the envelope into the flame. It burned slowly, at first a thin blue flame tipped with yellow, then, eating its way with a small fine crackling, a widening, destroying blaze that left behind it black ash and destruction. The acrid odor of burning filled the room. Not until it was consumed, and the black ash fell into the saucer of the candlestick, did Carlotta ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... seen and treated other cutaneous diseases which were very closely allied to leprosy—the legs, arms, thighs, and, in fact, the whole body, being covered with scales, and the necessary movements of the patient would cause the diseased parts to crack, and discharge blood, or a thin, acrid, and burning ichor; yet, under all these circumstances, I have been particularly successful in the treatment of these cases; a great variety of them having yielded to the mode which I have suggested to the sufferers, after many other means had been ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... darkening rapidly, and the firelight flickered over the back of the toy dogs piled up on the dresser. Jim had lit his pipe, and the acrid and warm odour of quickly-burning tobacco overpowered the smell of grease and the burnt skin of the baked potato, a fragment of which remained on the plate; only the sickly flavour of drying paste was distinguishable in the reek of the short black clay which the man held firmly between ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... blue of morning-glory spires, Balloon-blown foam of moonflowers, and sweet snows Of clematis, through which September goes, Song-hearted, rich in realized desires, Are flanked by hotter hues: by tawny fires Of acrid marigolds,—that light long rows Of lamps,—and salvias, red as day's red close,— That torches seem,—by which the Month attires Barbaric beauty; like some Asian queen, Towering imperial in her two-fold crown Of harvest and of vintage; ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... cause, result in girls as well as boys. Temporary congestions become permanent, and develop into permanent irritations and disorders. Leucorrhea has already been mentioned. Contact with the acrid, irritating internal secretions also causes soreness of the fingers at the root of the nails, and warts. Congestion and other diseases are other ultimate results of the habit; and these congestions to which it gives rise unduly ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... village, and when he passed the first lamps he vacantly noticed the ugliness of the place. The small, grimy houses were packed as close as they could be got, the pavement was covered with black mud, and the air filled with acrid smoke. Presently, however, he came to a pretentious hotel, built of glaring red brick and ornamented with sooty paint. He wondered what accounted for its being planted there; but it offered shelter for the ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... once men safely strode Along the open road, A sinister and stertorous machine Exhales its acrid breath And deals impartial death To all the dwellers ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... most acrid and stimulating spice with which we are acquainted. It is a powder prepared from several varieties of the capsicum annual East-India plants, of which there are three so far naturalized in this country as to be able to grow ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... morning was well gone; the town had wakened to the day's affairs—a pleasant light grey reek with the acrid odour of burning wood soaring from chimneys into a sky intensely blue; and the roads that lay interlaced and spacious around the castle of Argyll were—not thronged, but busy at least with labouring folk setting out upon their duties. To them, meeting the wounded form ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... appeared a peculiar kind of Irishman. He is so unlike the English image of Ireland that the English have actually fallen back on the pretence that he was not Irish at all. The type is commonly Protestant; and sometimes seems to be almost anti-national in its acrid instinct for judging itself. Its nationalism only appears when it flings itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner or the invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift. Thackeray simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was not a stage Irishman. He was ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... actress I ever saw is the expression of a certain combined and concentrated hatred and scorn. Her reply to Andromaque's appeal to her, in that play, was one of the most perfect things I have ever seen on the stage: the cold, cruel, acrid enjoyment of her rival's humiliation,—the quiet, bitter, unmerciful exercise of the power of torture, was certainly, in its keen incisiveness, quite incomparable. It is singular that so young a woman should so especially excel in delineations and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... stomach, by Gad you play the very devil with it, and with the whole machine besides. Vegetable matter ferments, and becomes gaseous; while animal substances are changed into a putrid, abominable, and acrid stimulus. (Don't bother again!) You are going to ask, 'What has all this to do with my eye?' I will tell you. Anatomy teaches us, that the skin is a continuation of the membrane which lines the stomach; and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... Christian name. We may yet hope to retain y short in 'cylinder', 'cynosure', 'lycanthropy', 'mythology', 'pyramid', 'pyrotechnic', 'sycamore', 'synonym', 'typical'. As for 'h[y]brid' it seems as much a caprice as '[a]crid', a pronunciation often heard. Though 'acrid' is a false formation it ought to follow 'vivid' and 'florid'. The 'alias' rule enforces a long y in 'hygiene' ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... of distress afterward. Other fruits were less satisfactory. Of the samples which the skin-test said were non-poisonous, one was acrid and astringent, and two others had no taste except that of greenness—practically the taste of any ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... a poetic word—mere mention of it would distress Mr. Yeats; but it is potent as "Sesame" to unlock the treasures of memory. And before the laggard Spring comes round again many of us will sigh for a whiff of yellow, acrid smoke, curling from a smoldering fire in the heart of the ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... produce until it had been properly worked, dressed, cleansed, and purged of that sour quality that was naturally inherent in it, which it derived from the droppings of wet from the leaves of gum and other trees, and which were known to be of an acrid destructive nature. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... its type, had no furnace, and moisture and cold seemed to penetrate it, and linger therein. Wind howled past the dark windows, rain dripped from the cornice above the front door, the acrid odor of drying woolens and wet rubber coats permeated the halls. Mrs. Lancaster said she never had known of so much sickness everywhere, and sighed over the long list of unknown dead in the ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... I appointed them," rejoined the Spaniard, in an acrid tone, as if resenting some supposed ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... The air was acrid with the smell of burning. Blouses, pink and green, and cream, and blue, were stirred into a seething mass in the fireplace, as in a witch's cauldron, their fluffy laces burnt and blackened. Chiffon fichus torn in ...
— Rosemary in Search of a Father • C. N. Williamson
... stiff and precise woman, with an acrid temper and a sharp tongue. She had been teaching unruly girls for so many years that she was to a degree quite soured upon the world—especially that world of school which she had ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... spots upon different parts of the body, which finally settle upon the hands or feet, where the skin becomes withered, and cracks in many places. At length, the ends of the fingers swell and ulcerate, the discharge is acrid and foetid; the nails drop off, and the bones of the fingers become carious, and separate at the joints. In this manner the disease continues to spread, frequently until the patient loses all his fingers and toes. Even the hands and feet are sometimes destroyed ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... is likely to produce acrid humours, and an inflamatory or impoverished state of the blood, engenders vicious secretions, which nature struggles to free herself from by the natural outlet of the skin, for this organ is fitted equally, to excrete and secrete. ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... tired explorers rested. They were still on the north shore of what we now call the state of Michigan, and their course had been due westward by the compass. A cloud of Indian tobacco smoke rose from the lowly roof of each canoe, and its odor mingled with the sweet acrid breath of burning wood. Jolliet and the voyageurs had learned to use this dried brown weed, which all tribes held in great esteem and carried about with them in ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... bullrushes (Typheae), and the arums (Aroideae). This last-mentioned order, familiar to us by the kind known as "Lords and Ladies," presents some climbing forms in tropical countries. Generally acrid, some species, when in flower, even produce headache and vomiting; at least an explorer was attacked with these symptoms after gathering forty specimens of Arum dracunculus. The order is also interesting from experiments as to vegetable heat, which have been made with the flowers of some ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Substance very temperate, yielding soft and wholesome Nourishment, incapable of doing any Harm. And if this intrinsick Coldness is no more to be feared, it must be own'd, that it will be henceforward ridiculous, if not pernicious, to join it with hot acrid Spices, more likely to alter and destroy its good and real Qualities, than to correct the bad ones which it has not: I nevertheless do not doubt but the Pleasantness of the Smell, and the favourite Taste of several agreeable Spices, being pretty much liked in this Mixture, ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus
... water in great piles and mountains of clouds; it lifted them over the great ranges of mountains and rained down its thousands of tons of sweet water a thousand miles from the sea, so gently that not a stalk of wheat was trampled down, nor was a single root made acrid ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... breathing once more, the keen clean air stabbing his lungs, the while he swam unsupported in an ethereal void of brilliance. His mouth was full of something that burned, a liquid hot, acrid, and stinging. He gulped, swallowed, slobbered, choked, coughed, attempted to sit up, was aware that he was the focal center of a ring of glaring, burning eyes, like eyes of ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... either orally or in writing. Only difficult definitions are appended: in the case of words not defined, pupils may be required to form the definition by reference to the signification of the radicals and the formative elements, thus, acr id acrid, being bitter, acr id ity state of ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... colony of robbers, who pillage and shoot the natives at discretion. On the opposite side of the river there is a large neglected garden, belonging to the mission. Although the soil is extremely rich, neither grapes nor pomegranate will succeed; they bear fruit, but of a very acrid flavour. Dates blossom, ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... to judge of the sensation," continued Mr. Blunt, with a faint grimace, as though the words had an acrid taste in his mouth. "And the consternation," he added venomously. "Many of those men on that great morning had some one of their womankind with them. But their hats had to go off all the same, especially the hats of the fellows who were under some sort ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... minor Scherzo but not in the A flat Ballade. The F minor Ballade overflows with it, and so does the F sharp minor Polonaise, but not the first Impromptu. Its dark introspection colors many of the preludes and mazurkas, and in the C sharp minor Scherzo it is in acrid flowering—truly fleurs du mal. Heine and Baudelaire, two poets far removed from the Slavic, show traces of the terrible drowsy Zal in their poetry. It is the collective sorrow and tribal wrath of a down-trodden nation, and the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... its parts is excessively acrid. I remember a man being persuaded to take the leaves reduced to powder, as a remedy for Syphilis, and he died in consequence in great ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... cobwebs, the counters and benches black with reminiscences of twenty thousand tradings and Chinese meals. The windows were but half a dozen bars, and the heavy vapors of a cruel past hung about the sombre walls. Though opium had long been contraband, its acrid odor permeated the worn furnishings. Here with some misgivings I prepared to spend my second ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... refinements of sybaritic summer homes in the Adirondacks. All these are camps. And when you talk of making camp you must know whether that process is to mean only a search for rattlesnakes and enough acrid-smoked fuel to boil tea, or a winter's consultation with an expert architect; whether your camp is to be made on the principle of Omar's one-night Sultan, or whether it is intended to accommodate the full days of an ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... compact heap, his sorrowful eyes abrim with sorrow, he lay scanning the bumpy mountainside and straining his ears, for sign of the car's return. His breathing was not as splendidly easy as usual. For, increasingly, that earlier twinge of acrid smoke-reek was tickling his throat. The haze, that had hovered over the farther hilltops and valleys, was thickening; and it was creeping nearer. The breath of morning breeze was stiffening into a steady wind; a wind that blew strong from the west and carried ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... out a tool no bigger than a nutcracker, forced the edge in, and sent the door flying open. The room or den was full of an acrid vapour, and close to them sat ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... and its sombre flowers open in the sunlight? "It is the work of an insect. It is the shelter in which the Cicadellina deposits her eggs. What a miraculous chemist! Her stiletto excels the finest craft of the botanical anatomist" by its sovereign art of separating the acrid poison which flows with the sap in the veins of the most venomous plants, and extracting therefrom only an ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... that some low-lurking instinct, some vague foreboding of what awaited him, on his own side the globe, in the air of so-called civilisation, prompted him to drain to the last drop the whole perfect negation of the acrid. He might have been waiting for the tide of the insipid to begin to flow again, as it seems ever doomed to do when the acrid, the saving acrid, has already ebbed; at any rate his holiday had by the end of the springtime of 1914 done for him all it could, without a grain of waste—his assimilations ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... yet at the first streak of dawn it was in motion. It was an endless procession, in which every man was for himself. I can see them now, bent under their burdens, straining at their hand-sleighs, flogging their horses and oxen, their faces crimped and puckered with fatigue, the air acrid with their curses and heavy with their moans. Now a horse stumbles and slips into one of the sump-holes by the trail side. No one can pass, the army is arrested. Frenzied fingers unhitch the poor frozen brute and drag it from the water. Men, frantic with rage, beat savagely at ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... sails were gathered about the masts and made fast, and presently we drifted against the small forest of poles supporting the flakes and fishhouses. These were black and glistening with the rain and from them came an odor, acrid and penetrating, of decaying fish in ill-emptied gurry-butts and of putrefying livers oozing out a black oil in ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... the swine!" is the cry. Heavy explosions are shaking the earth—underground, in the dug-outs. We are all at once divided by huge clouds of smoke so thick that we are masked and can see nothing more. We struggle like drowning men through the acrid darkness of a fallen fragment of night. One stumbles against barriers of cowering clustered beings who bleed and howl in the bottom. Hardly can one make out the trench walls, straight up just here and made ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... falls as moves the waist of the 'Sui' man when brandishing the sword. The tender leaves of tea, so acrid to the taste, have just been ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... and its spiritual value would be akin to that of the Past and Distant; it would be innocuous, because it had lost half of its vitality. We should have to lay down music, like wine, for the future; poisoning ourselves with the acrid fumes of its must, the heady, enervating scent of scum and purpled vat, in order that our children might drink vigour and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... approached nearer the front, I got my first smell of the dead. It is something you never get away from in the trenches. So many dead have been buried so hastily and so lightly that they are constantly being uncovered by shell bursts. The acrid stench pervades everything, and is so thick you can fairly taste it. It makes nearly everybody deathly sick at first, but one becomes used to it ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... disposition of our favorite writers becomes a matter of great importance to us. A surly, sour-tempered person, taking advantage of our confidence, can turn us against our best friends. If he has an acrid wit he may make us ashamed of our highest enthusiasms. He may so picture human life as to make the message "Peace on earth, good will to men" seem ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... his worldly success and extracts its acrid juices. This is not the romantic melancholy of youth, which dreams of infinite things, but the pain of manhood, which feels the limitations of life, which can laugh at the mockery of attainment, which ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... sight, but to live eagerly and hopefully in them and through them; not to try to school oneself into hardness or indifference, but to love lovable things, and not to condemn or despise the unlovable. That was indeed a message out of the very heart of God. But of course all the acrid divisions and subdivisions of it come, not from itself, but from the material part of the world, that determines to traffic with the beautiful secret, and make it serve its turn. But there are plenty of true souls within it all, true teachers, faithful learners—and the ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... preposterous to speak as if their repression really cost very much. I think with bitterness of that age-long repression, of its unmeasured cost; of the gibe contained in the phrase "old maid," with all its implication of a narrowed life, a prudish mind, an acrid tongue, an embittered disposition. I think of the imbecilities in which the repressed instinct has sought its pitiful baffled release, of the adulation lavished on a parrot, a cat, a lap-dog; or of the emotional "religion," the parson-worship, on ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... lichen. These arid rocky places, so characteristic of Southern France, have a poetry of their own that to me is ever enticing. I love the stony wastes and their dazzling sun-glitter. There I find something that approaches companionship in the prickly juniper, the narcotic hellebore, and the acrid spurge. And these plants likewise love the places where the world has remained unchanged by man. The heat, however, was too great for me to linger upon this shadeless hill, where every stone was warm, and the reflected glare was almost as blinding ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... until daylight seeped in through the one dingy window. Ford awoke to the acrid smell of scorched bacon, thought at first that Sandy was once more demonstrating his inefficiency as a cook, and when he remembered that Sandy's name was printed smudgily upon that page of his life which he had lately turned down as a blotted, ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... is no less certain: the fire evaporates and disperses all that is innocent and pure, leaving only acrid and sour matter which resists its influence. The effect produced by poisons on animals is still more plain to see: its malignity extends to every part that it reaches, and all that it touches is vitiated; it burns and scorches all ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... crowd melted away, and the acrid odour of wet wood mingled with the smell of burning. And gradually that second odour gave way to the persuasive sweetness of the summer evening, the sharp, delicate fragrance that is loosed when the first dew falls, and the perfumes of reviving flowers. ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... trifoliata. (Annales de Chimie volume 12 page 117.) We saw at Peru the barks of two new species of weinmannia and wintera mixed with those of cinchona; a mixture less dangerous, but still injurious, on account of the superabundance of tannin and acrid matter contained in the false cascarilla.) As the tree which yields the real Cortex angosturae does not grow in great abundance, it is to be wished that plantations of it were formed. The Catalonian monks are well fitted to spread this kind ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... water, with an equal quantity of new-slacked lime. Boil it half an hour, frequently stirring it; adding as much more hot water, and drawing off the liquor, when the residuum may be boiled afresh, and drained, until it ceases to feel acrid to the tongue. ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... has fourteen, a fairly good September and October pear, rather large, a good bearer, "flesh white, but somewhat acrid and gritty" (Barron). ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum
... and fomentations, and to drink copiously of camomile tea, or any other diluting liquor, till the spasms be relieved, and the nature of the disease more clearly understood. Persons who are subject to the bilious cholic in particular, should abstain from acrid, watery and oily food, especially butter, fat meat, and hot liquors: and pursue a calm ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... set your guests eating and drinking betimes on these occasions. The fasting man takes an acrid view of your arrangements compared with that taken by the man who has well fed; and the deferred opening of the supper-room has sealed the fate of many a dance which but for that had been voted pleasant ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... caustic, pungent, stinging, acetous, acrid, cutting, savage, tart, acid, acrimonious, harsh, sharp, vinegarish, acidulated, biting, irate, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... There was a light, spiteful "ping" and for an instant a cone of white light stood out in the dim room like a solid thing. Then it was gone, and with it was gone the black mold, leaving a circular area of blistered paint on the wall and an acrid odor in the air. Forepaugh leaped to the ventilating louver and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... Mr. Halsted and his patients with a visitation. Whenever the muscles of the abdomen are in a state of constriction, as described by him, the usual cause is spasm of some part of the intestinal canal, produced by colic, either of an accidental nature, arising from some acrid ingesta, which irritate the bowels without producing diarrhoea, attended with griping pains and distention, and spasmodic contraction of the abdominal muscles, with costiveness; or of a bilious form, closely allied to bilious diarrhoea and cholera (Gregory.) These are the varieties ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... bitterly angry with her for her failure to see things as he did. He would wander about the museum conducting imaginary discussions with her and making even scathing remarks. At other times he had to summon all his powers of acrid discipline and all his memories of her resentful retorts, to keep himself from a headlong rush ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... expression. A moment more—another kiss, and she might have been compromised, she might have responded to the thrilling love which was calling to her heart, but the goddess of her destiny willed otherwise. The front door opened; an angular form appeared; an acrid voice fairly curdled love-thoughts as it assailed the impetuous lover. Within a minute he was slinking away and the rescued maiden was safe in the indignant, resenting arms of her mother—safe, but for years to be tempted and troubled by remorse and wishes, to be haunted by unaccepted hopes. ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... And Khiva, deg. and ferment the milk of mares. deg. deg.120 Next, the more temperate Toorkmuns deg. of the south, deg.121 The Tukas, deg. and the lances of Salore, deg.122 And those from Attruck deg. and the Caspian sands; deg.123 Light men and on light steeds, who only drink The acrid milk of camels, and their wells. 125 And then a swarm of wandering horse, who came From far, and a more doubtful service own'd; The Tartars of Ferghana, deg. from the banks deg.128 Of the Jaxartes, deg. men with scanty beards deg.129 And close-set ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... not cheerful; she was rather of an acrid disposition. People said that there was only one subject on which the shopkeeper and his wife agreed, that was as to the superiority of their daughter in beauty, talent, and amiability, over all other young women far or near. In their broad Scotch fashion they called this daughter ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... wind would soon resume its normal direction. Besides, the discovery that he had just made seemed to hold and occupy all the territory of his thought: he was scarcely aware of the burning pain that the acrid, resinous green-wood smoke brought to his eyes. This was the most bitter moment of his life, and he was lost and remote in his dark broodings. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... indifferent figure, the shoulders being narrow and drooping. His finest feature was the eye, which was gray and full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt says: "I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural. They were like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes." Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and Haydon that he had none of form. The best likeness of him, in De Quincey's judgment, is the portrait of Milton prefixed to Richardson's notes ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... contempt for the new woman. Moreover, he had lived on the fringe of high society and not in it; he had drunk in the bitterness of the client's life, and had lived in the enveloping atmosphere of scandal that always surrounds society for those who are excluded from it. A man of an acrid and jealous temperament, easily angered and not readily appeased, he yields too lightly and indiscriminately to that indignation, which, he tells us, is the fountain-head of all he writes. Satire should be something more than a wild torrent sweeping away obstacles great and small with ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Ramsey chew his sour grapes if he wants to. I sha'n't say anything about it. Anybody with any sense can't help knowing a man of sense would have rather had you than Lily Merrill. I ain't afraid of anybody thinking you're slighted." There was indignant and acrid loyalty in Aunt Maria's tone. She closed the door, as was her wont, with a little slam and went down-stairs. Aunt Maria walked very heavily. Her steps ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... morn salute From a nocturnal root, Which feels the acrid juice Of Styx and Erebus; And turns the woe of Night, By its own craft, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... extended around the corner and doubled back and forth in the cross-street to the stoppage of all traffic. The announcement in the Clarion had done its work, and the baleful flower of panic, which is a juggler's rose for quick-growing possibilities, was filling the very air of the street with its acrid perfume—the scent of all others ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... and embarked on a century and a half of war and bloody persecution. It's a melancholy story." Mr. Scogan lighted a match. In the intense light the flame was all but invisible. The smell of burning tobacco began to mingle with the sweetly acrid ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... yard long, "curing" patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling, selling lies at a guinea apiece,—a routine, in short, of giving unfortunate sick people a mess of things either too odious to swallow or too acrid to hold, or, if that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... friendship, and which she could not shake off. It came from a lost battle, from a silent and great defeat. She was afraid of it, for it was black and profound beyond all plumbing. Often in her ten years of retirement she had felt melancholy. But this was a new sort of sadness. There was an acrid edge to it. It had the peculiar and subtle terror of a grief that was not caused only by events, but also, and specially, by ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... remain senseless long. When he recovered he became aware of a confused shouting, and an acrid smell of ...
— Jack of the Pony Express • Frank V. Webster
... epidemically under the observation of Dr. Sydenham, who records it. For many years after the time of Dr. Cullen, who frequently promulgated opinions founded on those of some fancy author rather than on his own observation, it was very much the fashion to speak of redundancy of bile, or of acrid bile, as the cause of the whole train of symptoms in this disease; but, since the attention of medical men has been more particularly drawn to the subject, practitioners may be found in every town in England who can inform you that, in severe ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... Wilson shuffling impatiently behind him, smelled the acrid smoke that floated from the tip ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... the inauguration of the new household, there was trouble in the camp. Sour bread had appeared on the table,—bitter, acrid coffee had shocked and astonished the palate,—lint had been observed on tumblers, and the spoons had sometimes dingy streaks on the brightness of their first bridal polish,—beds were detected made shockingly awry,—and Marianne came burning ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... round and fired point-blank at Desmond. But Desmond had stooped to spring at the other and the bullet went over his head. With ears singing from the deafening report of the pistol in the confined space, with the acrid smell of cordite in his nostrils, Desmond leapt at Mortimer's throat, hoping to bear him to the ground before he could shoot again. As he sprang he heard the crash of glass and a loud report. Someone cried out sharply "Oh!" as though in ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... many future possibilities, and all the foreground was crowded with the impatient symbols of the intervening time. Moreover, he well knew that the savor would be gone from his happiness with the woman were the taste of another failure acrid in his mouth. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... have done credit to a mind-reader, Brock knew that attack was imminent. To him the wind that blew across the river October 12th was laden with omens of war. The air seemed charged with the acrid smell of burnt powder. The muffled beat of drums, the smothered boom of artillery, the subdued clash of steel meeting steel, the stealthy tramp of armed men, seemed ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... shapeless shack. The hoofs of El Sangre bit into the dust, choking and red in daylight, and acrid of scent by the night. All was very quiet except for a stir of voices in the distance here and there, always kept hushed as though the speaker felt and acknowledged the influence of the profound night in the mountains. Someone came down the street carrying a lantern. It turned ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... as it was, to his fancy, of cold metals and warm sooty surfaces; of the savour of kippers cooking over innumerable London grates and the aroma of mugs of beer served out over innumerable London bars; something at once acrid yet genial, suggesting sordidness and unlimited possibility. The vibration of adventure was in it and the sentiment, oddly intermingled, of human ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of sanctimony became an easy substitute for the sense of sanctification, and the tithe of mint and cummin ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... position, she was very humble and subservient and, as Tommy the Mate used to say, "as smooth as an old threepenny bit" to the ruling powers, which always meant my Aunt, but spiteful, insolent, and acrid to anybody who was outside my Aunt's ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... the floor-boards rotting in their tracks. Fallen mortar, rusty tins, yellow teeth of glass, whitened soot—all the decay and rubbish of a generation of neglect littered the place and filled it with an acrid odour. From one of the rooms we looked forth through a little discoloured window upon a patch of forlorn weedy garden, where the very cats glowered in a depression that no surfeit of mice ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... like a child with a sea-shell at his ear, he began to be aware of the great roar of the "underground," that, in his third-class carriage, the cruelty of the reservation penetrated, with the taste of acrid smoke, to his inner sense. It was really degrading to be eager in the face of having to "alter." Peter Baron tried to figure to himself at that moment that he was not flying to betray the extremity of his need, but hurrying to fight ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... away across the desert beyond the last palms of the oasis. A haze hung round about, shimmering in the heat and blurring the outline of the distant hills. A tiny breeze brought the acrid smell of camels closer to her, and the creaking whine of the tackling over the well sounded not very far away. Diana gave a little sigh. It had all grown so familiar. She seemed to have lived no other life beside ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... pro. accuse : kulpigi, akuzi. ace : aso. ache : dolor'o, -i. acknowledge : konfesi. acorn : glano. acquaint : sciigi. acquainted, become—with : konatigxi kun. acquire : akiri, atingi. acquit : senkulpigi. acrid : akra, morda, pika. act : ag'i, -o; far'i, -o; legxo; akto. action : agado; ("law") proceso. active : agema, aktiva. actor : aktoro. actual : nuna, efektiva. adapt : alfari. add : aldoni, kunmeti, sumigi. address : alparoli al; sin turni al; ("letters") adresi. adhere : aligxi, algluigxi ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard. 8. There are not more than five primary colors (blue, yellow, red, white, and black), yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen. 9 There are not more than five cardinal tastes (sour, acrid, salt, sweet, bitter), yet combinations of them yield more flavors than can ever be tasted. 10. In battle, there are not more than two methods of attack - the direct and the indirect; yet these two in combination give ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... always equal to the demand, as in the case of the betel nut, the wild species afford a tolerable substitute. The tender leaves are preferred as being less pungent. For the same reason domestic species are used in preference to the wild ones, these latter possessing a highly acrid taste. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... Dick. He could hear, through the boy's nasal chant, the camels grunting in the squares behind the soldiers outside Suakin; could hear the men swearing and chaffing across the cooking pots, and could smell the acrid wood-smoke as it drifted over camp before the wind of ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... respectable, and dull. But they had not found much open fault with her, and she was aware that it was for her interest to remain on good terms with them. Her letter, therefore, to Mrs. Eustace was somewhat less acrid than that written ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... disperse and the church bell ceased tolling, Dormy turned to another bell at his elbow, and set it ringing to call the Royal Court together. Sharp, mirthless, and acrid it rang: ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... little hill from which Napoleon first saw Moscow and I look upon the vastness of the city. I will go down and see the people whom I know more intimately than so many of my friends, Alyosha, and Vronsky, and a dozen more. But my eyes fall on a piece of porcelain and I smell the acrid odours of China. I am borne in a chair along a narrow causeway between the padi fields, or else I skirt a tree-clad mountain. My bearers chat gaily as they trudge along in the bright morning and every now and then, distant and mysterious, ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... toward the ridge their feet made no sound on the soft tundra. They peered down hill into the shady recesses under the stunted alder and salmon-berry bushes. Jean's nostrils twitched as there was wafted up to her the strong, acrid odor which lingers about the places of nesting birds. As her eyes became accustomed to the dimness, she ventured a remark which died abruptly as she caught her breath. Beneath the low canopy of branches the ground was bare of vegetation, and on the cool brown earth, ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... Kentucky jeans pantaloons, neatly fitting boots, and no vest. There was nothing remotely suggestive of unusual ability or force of character, and I thought as I studied him that the sting of George D. Prentice's bon mot about him was in its acrid truth. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... an' crawl back!" She recognized the rough half contemptuous voice of Hod Blake. And the next instant she thought of the roar of guns, the acrid smell of burned powder, and the thin red streaks of flame that had pierced the night like swift arrows of blood. They would kill him. "He's the best man among them all," she sobbed, and closing her eyes, held the candle at arms length before her, and walked slowly toward the black opening ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... the gold of Glengyle. Having delivered this defiance to humanity he shut himself up, without the smallest expectation of its being answered. One day, however, a deaf and seemingly senseless lad from a distant village brought him a belated telegram; and Glengyle, in his acrid pleasantry, gave him a new farthing. At least he thought he had done so, but when he turned over his change he found the new farthing still there and a sovereign gone. The accident offered him vistas of sneering speculation. ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... should be. His grand pre-eminence as an artist was due, in great measure, to his personality. Frigid, austere, and splendid; not genial like that of Simonides, not passionate like that of Sappho, not acrid like that of Archil'ochus; hard as adamant, rigid in moral firmness, glittering with the strong, keen light of snow; haughty, aristocratic, magnificent—the unique personality of the man Pindar, so irresistible ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... by, and she received no sign. Was he going to ignore her, was he going to take no further notice of her secret? A dreary weight of anxiety and acrid bitterness settled on her. And yet Ursula knew she was only deceiving herself, and that he would proceed. She said no word ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence |
