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More "Fiendish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the legends assert, have lingered on, or been at least revived during the later ages of the empire, in remote provinces, left in their primeval barbarism, at the same time that they were brutalised by the fiendish exhibitions of the Circus, which the Roman governors found it their interest to introduce everywhere. Thus the serpent became naturally regarded as the manifestation of the evil spirit by Christians as ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... to get dashed to death at the bottom as they went flying down past the different floors, and heard a fiendish chuckle from the Frenchman above ...
— The Bradys and the Girl Smuggler - or, Working for the Custom House • Francis W. Doughty
... and disgusted the European spectators. Ida nearly fainted, and Mrs. Rice turned green. Noreen shuddered at Chunerbutty's fiendish and bestial expression, as he leaned forward in the howdah, his face working convulsively, his eyes straining to lose no detail of the repulsive sight. He was enjoying it, like the excited, enthralled mobs of Indians ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... mass of friend and foe, swaying out to one side of the plaza, and under the walls of a convent. Bansemer was facing it; and just at the moment that he felt his strength giving way and could see a grin of triumph on the fiendish face, there carne a flash and a report, and his adversary fell at his feet. Glancing up to ascertain who had fired the shot that had saved his life, he thought he saw a figure disappearing from one ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... afterward, then, I bethought me upon the Turk again. And at first methought his terror nothing, when I compared with it the joyful hope of heaven. Then I compared it on the other hand with the fearful dread of hell, casting therein in my mind those terrible fiendish tormentors, with the deep consideration of that furious endless fire. And methought that if the Turk with his whole host, and all his trumpets and timbrels too, were to come to my chamber door and kill me in my ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... is offered gratuitously, as in the case of the weak, the old, the cripple and other unfortunates who deserve pity rather than mockery; the quality of contumely of this sort is brutal and fiendish. Others will say for justification: "But he said the same, he did the same to me. Can I not defend myself?" That depends on the sort of defense you resort to. All weapons of defense are not lawful. If a man uses evil means to wrong you, there is no justification, in Christian ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... "Yes, and you are a liar, a coward, a villain! You are engaged in a fiendish plot; you are deceiving an innocent lady. Ah, I spurn you, ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... elevated about two thousand feet above the level of the water, they continued to descend, by a very winding and difficult road, for an hour and a half; and during the whole of this descent they were compelled to be inactive spectators of the fiendish spectacle below. The Kalmucks, reduced by this time from about six hundred thousand souls to two hundred thousand, and after enduring for two months and a half the miseries we have previously described—outrageous heat, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... is fiendish insult,—is it not, Evelyn? Am I not a villain? Are you not grateful for your escape? Do you not look on the past with a shudder at the precipice on which ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IX • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... could be made the torture of a victim already worn to the ragged edge, how much sooner the scream be wrung from his throat. With each passing league that brought them nearer the end of the journey could be seen the fiendish eagerness ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... hope these devils are satisfied with Jana's answer to their accursed offerings, and if they try their fiendish pranks ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... half past six. Please do not interrupt me again. These ruffians, after relieving me of my valuables and wearing apparel, so that I was clad in nothing but a loose-fitting suit of air, proceeded, with fiendish design, to tie me ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... the savages thought they had hit their white prisoners they uttered a yell of triumph, and Dr Lascelles knew that this terrible scene was only the prologue to one of a far more hideous nature, when, with a fiendish cruelty peculiar to their nature, they would fall upon their victims with their knives, to flay off their scalps and beards, leaving the terribly mutilated bodies to the birds and beasts ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... Edward Grey and Prince Lichnowsky is recorded in the famous No. 123. With the rather childish subsequent attempt to minimize No. 123 on the ground that the Prince was merely an amiable nincompoop who did not really represent his fiendish sovereign, neither I nor any other serious person need be concerned. What is beyond all controversy is that after that conversation Prince Lichnowsky could do nothing but tell the Kaiser that the Entente, having at last got his imperial head in chancery, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... clear-toned enunciation of this Yiddish lullaby, as the rest of the ward called it, brought many a heartless, fiendish laugh from the occupants of the other beds. We almost lost one of our patients on account of that laugh. He nearly laughed ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... his spirit fold on fold; From his heart, all day and night, It doth suck God's blessed light. Drink it will, and drink it must, Till the cup holds naught but dust; All day long he hears it hiss, Writhing in its fiendish bliss; 110 All night long he sees its eyes Flicker with foul ecstasies, As the spirit ebbs away Into the absorbing clay. Who is he that skulks, afraid Of the trust he has betrayed, Shuddering if perchance a gleam Of old nobleness should stream Through the pent, unwholesome ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... knees. His eyes were fiercely focused upon a cartridge-belt hanging upon the wall, and there they remained, seemingly a fixture, while thought, no longer chaotic, flew through his revivified brain. He gave no sign; he uttered no word. But his face told its story of a fiendish joy which swept from his head to his heart, ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... will eat you up. You are bad, same as me. You two won't be able to go to any more Zoos;" and Pen rolled round and round in fiendish delight. ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... Bertrand of Gourdon! Maddened by the pain of the wound, the brute nature of Richard was aroused: his fiendish appetite for blood rose to madness, and grinding his teeth, and with a curse too horrible to mention, the flashing axe of the royal butcher fell down on the blond ringlets of the child, and the children of Chalus were ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the horrified spectators! The father, however, after some agonising moments of deliberation, brings him down with his rifle; and the cougar, falling among the eager crowd below, is torn to pieces in a moment. But this does not get rid of the peccaries, who set up their fiendish screams anew as they discover two other victims in the tree. The father fires again and again, dropping his peccary each time, till five lie dead upon the ground; but the rage of the rest only becomes ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... it was marked in large bold letters, 'John Othard.' Now, I must know what it contained; I could wait no longer; a sort of determined malice took possession of me to connect it with the newspaper, and with my husband—fiendish thought. I did not desire to prove him other than the pure and noble man I had loved; but I was not myself—I would do it just to still my excited suspicions. Putting the lamp down over the name, as if that could blot it out, ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... shallow, indeed, but sufficiently deep to throw any horse passing over it. Its top had been screened with interlacing twigs, over which had been scattered soil and dust enough to hide them. One who rode with his eyes on the ground, as Antonio used, might easily, perhaps, have discovered the fiendish work; but he who rode with head upraised and his gaze on the distance would ride to his ruin as Marty had done. To make the treachery more secure, some sprays of wild grapes had been tightly stretched beneath the whole, and this showed a deliberation of evil ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... his white teeth grinning through his short black beard. His two clenched hands were raised above his head, and a heavy blackthorn stick lay across them. His dark, handsome, aquiline features were convulsed into a spasm of vindictive hatred, which had set his dead face in a terribly fiendish expression. He had evidently been in his bed when the alarm had broken out, for he wore a foppish embroidered night-shirt, and his bare feet projected from his trousers. His head was horribly injured, and the whole room bore witness to the savage ferocity of the blow which had struck him down. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... now that Chauvelin had accepted his suggestion of summarily sending to the guillotine one member of every family resident in Boulogne, if Marguerite succeeded in effecting an escape, and, of a truth, Chauvelin had hailed the fiendish suggestion with delight. The old abbe with his nephew and niece were undoubtedly not sufficient deterrents against the daring schemes of the Scarlet Pimpernel, who, as a matter of fact, could spirit them out of Boulogne just as easily as ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... With a look of fiendish hatred, instead of returning blow for blow, Thad made a sudden grab and tore Bill's crutch out of the hand which had felt no impulse to use it in defense against ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... the young man was almost fiendish in its expression as he spoke. It seemed as if his heart was the concentration of hate and ...
— Wild Bill's Last Trail • Ned Buntline
... malignant passions, and still less, if that be possible, a determination to make money by flattering the envy and cupidity, the vindictive restlessness and self-conceit of the half-witted vulgar; a determination almost fiendish, but which, I have been informed, has been boastfully avowed by one man, the most notorious of these mob-sycophants! From the commencement of the Addington administration to the present day, whatever I have written in ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... head aside whilst Gatton accomplished this task; then together we bore Coverly out into the porch. At this point we were both overcome again by the fumes. Gatton was the first to recover sufficiently to stoop and examine the victim of this fiendish outrage. I clutched dizzily at an ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... where good Democrats their fellow men may sell! O, what a grin of fiendish glee runs round and round thro' hell! How all the damned leap up for joy and half forget their fire, To think men take such pains to claim the notice of ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... and become the protege of such pious men as Semler was at heart, there would have been no limit to the damage it might inflict upon the cause of Protestantism. And there were indications favorable to either result. However, by some plan of fiendish malice, skepticism received all the support it could ask from the learned, the powerful, and the ambitious. Here and there around the horizon could be seen some rising literary star that, for the hour, excited ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... into the alcove. At first they encountered some difficulty when they endeavored to force the body of the man into the small space she had selected for it, but eventually they succeeded in doing so. Smith-Oldwick was again impressed by the fiendish brutality of the girl. In the center of the room lay a blood-stained rug which the girl quickly gathered up and draped over a piece of furniture in such a way that the stain was hidden. By rearranging the other rugs and by bringing one from the alcove she ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... him pleasant spectacles; and the bleeding and mutilated wretches, whom his accusations had conducted to the pillory, when brought back to their dungeons, could not escape his hateful presence—worse to them, from his fiendish derision of their agonies, than that of ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... these I can guess he must have watched—and with what feelings!—the progress of the dreadful fires starting over the city; must have seen, down the long straight street, native Christians burning like torches, and must have heard the fiendish shouts of "Kill!" "Kill and burn!" issuing from ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... roll up in his blanket when, out of the dark distance, there sounded the evening cry of the Coyote, the rolling challenge of more than one voice. Jake grinned in fiendish glee, and said: "There you are all right. Howl some more. I'll ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... of this reached the coast the English determined to intervene in the interests of humanity. While the horror was yet fresh in the public mind, a party of native merchants of Colombo came to Kandy to trade. The fiendish king ordered them seized and horribly mutilated. When, a few weeks later, the survivors returned to the sea-coast deprived of ears, noses and hands—with the severed members tied to their necks—the English decided to act immediately. Three months later Kandy was in their possession, ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... yelled the Mormon, again setting into motion the fiendish echoes. He was naked to the waist; he had lost flesh; he was haggard, worn, dirty, wet. While he pulled on a shirt Nas Ta Bega made the rope fast to a snag of a log of driftwood embedded in the sand, and the boat swung to shore. It was perhaps thirty feet ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... of beauty calm and cold, That wean'd me from myself, yet knit me still With kindred bonds to Nature. All is past, And he—who won from me such love for him, And he—my valiant uncle and my friend, Comes not to lift the cloud that drapes my soul, And shield me from the fiendish Prophet's power. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... abandoning, in his terror, all solicitude about the fate of the Ourang-Outang. The words heard by the party upon the staircase were the Frenchman's exclamations of horror and affright, commingled with the fiendish jabberings of the brute. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... when a fire weakens their hearts; Ay, this huge sin of nature, the salt sea, Shall be afraid of me, and of the mind Within me, that with gesture, speech and eyes Of the Messiah flames. What element Dare snarl against my going, what incubus dare Remember to be fiendish, when I light My whole being with memory of Him? The malice of the sea will slink from me, And the air be harmless as a muzzled wolf; For I am a torch, and the flame ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... bees and the wasps were there. The old queen bee, with fiendish glee, Was pulling a hornet's hair. The monkey thought 'twas rough; He took a pinch of snuff, And then the bees began to sneeze, ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... position, and what we have are poorly clad and equipped, and not half fed. Then we have reason to suspect that the enemy will come with greater inhumanity to man, and that fire and sword will do a more fearful work than ever. What some of the British officers are capable of doing in the way of fiendish devastation was shown in Boston, when the burning of every town between that city and Halifax was ordered, and Portland was laid ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional night-mare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... dark-skinned, with black hair, and eyes sparkling in the moonlight, who were torturing him with tongue and touch,—who pinched and spat upon him,—who looked altogether like a band of infernal Furies collected around some innocent victim that had fallen among them, and giving full play to their fiendish instincts! ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... the third degree with all the fiendish deviltries of their distorted minds, to get the exact location of this rival of the Comstock lode. The aged man was tied hand and foot and beaten and abused the whole night long. In pushing splinters under his toenails, the lamp ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... as big as a large rat, it was, gray and huddled and evidently startled by our appearance. It had the queerest, most devilish little face!—pointed ears or horns and satanic eyes that seemed to sparkle with a sort of fiendish intelligence. ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... stumbled blindly from the hall; The city crashed on me, the fiendish sounds Of cruelty and strife, but over all "Three thousand pounds!" ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... ever trampled upon man, proud man, learned man, civilized man, over all the plans of man, over every man, and over every association of men, even the largest, the widest, the mightiest. And now the Infidel, having taken away our hope of help from heaven, comes with the serpent's hiss, and fiendish sneer, to taunt the perishing world with this miserable truism—that the tendency of everything on earth is to perdition, and that it needs no inspiration to tell it. Truly it does not. Were that all the prophets of God had to tell us—as ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... inherited wide, white, starched collars, and from his father's side, a burning desire to spit through his teeth. But this is only a simple tale, with no great problem in it, save that of a boy working out his salvation between a fiendish lust for suspenders with trousers and a long-termed incarceration in ruffled waists with despised white china ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... "This is fiendish!" cried Jack, dragging the poor fellow away, his scorched coat smelling horribly. "Brave Bruno, you are the second hero of ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... brandishing his ax, he deftly all but cuts off a hand here, an arm or leg there, an ear yonder. He suddenly rushes forward and grinningly feigns cutting off a man's head. He contorts himself in a ludicrous yet often fiendish manner. This dance represents the height of the dramatic as I have seen it in Igorot life. His is truly a mimetic dance. His colleague with the spear and shield, who sometimes dances on the outskirts of the circle, now charging ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... This officer had one, and for something the boy displeased him in, he drew the knife and made a fatal stab between the boy's collar bone and left shoulder. As the victim fell at the brutal master's feet, we negroes who had witnessed the fiendish and cowardly act upon a helpless member of our race, expected an immediate interference from the hand of justice in some form or other. But we looked and waited in vain, for the horrible deed did ...
— My Life In The South • Jacob Stroyer
... passing moment on Angie's face as she sat half-turned from her cousin and Willa caught her breath to stifle a sudden startled exclamation. She had seen Angie in many fits of temper, sullen and raging, but never had the girl's expression been so fiendish! The doll-like beauty was gone in a distortion of anger, but there was a suggestion of malignant triumph, ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... there was nothing the matter with him beyond a mistaken choice of the theatrical profession. Surely there are here the elements of a play, not to mention a cinema play. Surely a New England village maiden might find herself among the wigwams in the power of the formidable and fiendish 'Little Blue Bison,' merely through her mistaken sympathy with his financial failure as a Film Star. The notion gives me glimpses of all sorts of dissolving views of primeval forests and flamboyant theatres; but this impulse of irrelevant theatrical production must be curbed. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... phantasm of their Turkish turbans and gleaming sabres, their skill at massacre and their fiendish tortures; Italy, fair and sad, "woman-country," droops shuddering at sight of their Austrian uniforms; and the Brahmin sees them in scarlet, blood-dyed, hurling from the cannon's mouth helpless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... was drawn—she knew not why—towards the closet, and from out it she fancied she saw issue the tall dark figure of a man. She was sure she saw him; for her imagination could not body forth features charged with such a fiendish expression, or eyes of such unearthly lustre. He was clothed in black, but the fashion of his raiments was unlike aught she had ever seen. His stature was gigantic, and a pale phosphoric light enshrouded him. As he advanced, forked lightnings shot into the room, and the thunder split overhead. ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... looked at me with a fiendish grin. "None of your insolence," said he, with a dreadful oath. "I never saw a Virginia nigger that I couldn't manage, proud as they are. Your master has left you in my hands, and you must obey my orders. If you don't, why I shall have to make you 'hug the widow there,'" ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... from Gloucester, where he had been imprisoned in a dungeon in the keep, in 1327, his remains were brought to the abbey church at Gloucester for interment, a shrine being raised over them by the monks. The king was murdered with fiendish cruelty. Lord Berkeley at the castle would willingly have protected him, but he fell sick; and one dark September night Edward was given over to two villains named Gurney and Ogle. The ancient chronicler ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... quality. To the casual on-looker it would have seemed that an impudent boy deliberately insulted a harmless benevolent old gentleman. To the fair young man, however, it was well known that the old gentleman's name was famous across Northern and Eastern Africa for monstrous villainy and fiendish cruelty—the name of the worst and wickedest of those traders in "black ivory," one of whose side-lines is frequently gun-running. Also he knew that the benevolent-looking old dear was desirous that the Leading Gentleman, his partner, should join with ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... entered a farmer's house in his absence and after having gotten liquor from his wife by threats, "they forcibly took from her arms the infant babe and rudely throwing it upon the floor, they threw her down, and while one of them accomplished the fiendish design of a ravisher the other, pointing the muzzle of a loaded gun at her head, said he would blow out her brains if she resisted or made any noise." The miscreants then loaded a horse with plunder from the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... course I'd quit if they discovered my intentions—my game. When we were talking of such things, the other day, I said I was a coward, but really I'm not. I've a frightful temper when I'm roused— really fiendish. As a matter of fact, I've"—he smiled sheepishly and tapped his slender, high-arched foot with his rattan ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... second floor Ted saw a score or more of forms leap into prominence; the forms of men who cast aside their skins of wolf, and who had turned their wolfish howls into the scarcely less fiendish yells of men. ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... from ourselves. He who made the sun, moon and stars, the world and all that therein is, came down from Heaven in the person of his Son, with the express purpose of leading a scorned life, and dying the most cruel, shameful death which fiendish ingenuity has invented. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... halves. "The oracle of Delphi was not more impudently worked," he said. "Observe this sponge, these plates of metal that close down upon it and exert the pressure necessary to send the liquid with which it is laden oozing forth." As he spoke he tore out the fiendish mechanism. "And see now how ingeniously it was made to work—by pressure upon this ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... get out of it. This was evident by the demonstrations he began to make. They could hear him rushing about—passing from door to window—striking both with his huge paws, and causing them to shake upon their hinges—all the while uttering the most fiendish roars. ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... rise and in front of us rose the huge expanse of the moor, mottled with gnarled and craggy cairns and tors. A cold wind swept down from it and set us shivering. Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast him out. It needed but this to complete the grim suggestiveness of the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky. Even Baskerville fell silent and pulled ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... diseased imagination and morbid feelings; the latter, beautiful and virtuous, and instilling something of her own excellence into the wild heart of her brother, but not enough to cure the deep taint of his nature. The third person was a wizard; a small, gray, withered man, with fiendish ingenuity in devising evil, and superhuman power to execute it, but senseless as an idiot and feebler than a child to all better purposes. The central scene of the story was an interview between this wretch and Leonard Doane, in the wizard's hut, situated beneath a range ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thinking (so much against her nature was it to resign herself to him) that it would not have been so difficult with an ill-favoured man. With one horribly ugly, it would have been a horrible exultation to cast off her youth and take the fiendish leap. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fiendish cruelty!" I ejaculated when Richards had finished his story. "By the by," I suddenly added, moved by an impulse which I could neither analyse nor account for, "of what nationality was the leader of the pirates? Do you think he was ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... can never tell you; it was an act of fiendish revenge—cruel, ruthless, treacherous. I cannot reveal the perpetrator. My wife did not deceive me, did not even know that I had been deceived; she thought, poor child, that I was acquainted with the whole of her father's story, ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... and accede to his demands. By this course Moulin attracted a good deal of attention, and an inquiry was suggested and made as to whether he was compos mentis. The parties who made the inquiry reported that he was not insane, but was actuated by a fiendish malignity, a love of notoriety and the expectation of extorting money by blackmail. For years—indeed until September, 1871—he continued to besiege and annoy the grand juries of the United States courts with his imaginary grievances, ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... the 'pageant' all the little that was possible was done to meet the needs of the presentation. Below the main floor, or stage, was the curtained dressing-room of the actors; and when the play required, on one side was attached 'Hell-Mouth,' a great and horrible human head, whence issued flames and fiendish cries, often the fiends themselves, and into which lost sinners were violently hurled. On the stage the scenery was necessarily very simple. A small raised platform or pyramid might represent Heaven, where ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... country for the last twenty years. Are they men of charity? Are they Christian men? Is not invective the chosen and accustomed language of their lips? Do they not follow those against whom they have opposed themselves, whether for good cause or otherwise, into their graves with a fiendish lust of cruelty, and do they not delight to trample upon great names and sacred memories? Are they men whom we love? Do we feel attracted to their society? Teachers of toleration, are they not the most intolerant of all men living? Denouncers of bigotry, are they not ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... work followed. The school was filled, the natives had ceased from persecuting the converts, and the prospects of missionary work were brighter than ever, when suddenly the news came that the fiendish King of Dahomey was marching on Abeokuta. Mr. and Mrs. Hinderer were at Abeokuta when the news arrived, and at once they hastened back to Ibadan, although there was a danger of being captured and tortured by the invading force. They reached Ibadan in safety, only, ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... die?" I inquired, though my tongue felt dry and parched, and the room, with his fiendish face, was ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... seditions again and civil wars after a state of harmony. They declared that they had proved themselves both destroyers of Caesar and liberators of the people, but in fact their plot against him was one of fiendish malice, and they threw the city into disorder when at last it possessed a stable government. [-2-] Democracy has a fair appearing name which conveys the impression of bringing equal rights to all from equal laws, but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity—how awful it is! Yea, whilst he is still allowed to bear the divine image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view,—for the lonely gaze of a being next to devil, and only not quite devil,—and yet a character which Shakespeare has attempted and executed, without disgust and ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... clearing they saw directly before them a party of men dressed in the ragged uniforms of American cavalrymen, and all drew deep breaths of relief. Help seemed now at hand. But just as they sprang forward to join their supposed comrades a fiendish yell broke from the horsemen. In another instant the four unfortunates were rushing to cover, with a dozen Indians, all dressed in the clothing taken from dead ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... but I've known many boys who would take a fiendish delight in seeing a kitten drown," retorted ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... amount of evidence. I've been an ass—and worse. But I can't get out of it. I don't mean to try to get out of it. I promised of my own free will. Only I've found out now I can never live with her. Her temper is fiendish. It degrades her—and me. But you saw! She has made my life a burden to me lately, because I wouldn't name a day for us to be married. I wanted to see my father quietly first—without my mother knowing—and ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... cold, especially under such surroundings. All the camp was now in the utmost confusion, and there was a great panic among our carriers, who flung themselves on the ground yelling with fear. Never was there such a fiendish noise! I sprang to my feet, flinging my note-book away and picking up my rifle, and ran back to where Monckton was yelling out: "Fall in, fall in, for ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... can only say good-bye. That tiresome engine is snorting with a fiendish impatience to bear me away. Good-bye, Miss Lovel, and a thousand thanks for the companionship that has made this journey ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... his family, now that they were left alone again face to face. His father seemed quite offensive for appearing to be in just as high spirits as when the guests were there; and as for grandfather James (who had not yet left), he was quite fiendish in being rather ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... across the room with the supple grace her slender figure had never lost and sat down beside the older woman. In a moment the astonished dowagers who had "suffered from her fiendish temper all evening," saw her talking with spontaneous graciousness to both the strangers. Madame Delano was at first more distant and reserved than Mrs. Thornton had ever been, manifestly betraying all the suspicion and unsocial ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... at her vexedly, for the fiendish Perkins was checked, and the Countess in alarm, about to commit herself, was a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... their manner, with all kinds of antics, whooping and crying out in the most horrible fashion. Then they took the burning coals and sticks, flaming with fire at the ends; and held them near my face, head, hands and feet, with fiendish delight, at the same time threatening to burn me entirely if I called out or made the least noise. So, tortured as I was, I could make no sign of distress but shedding silent tears, which, when they saw, they ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... seemed offended. He tapped on his teeth, and remarked that the weather bad no business to be so warm in winter. "But it was fiendish ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... hut. The escape of Thorne destroyed all the satisfaction which his success would have given him. He had good reason to know the fiendish malignity of the man and, in spite of the warnings he had given Kate Ellison, and his strict orders to the police on guard, he felt a thrill of anxiety, now that he was aware her enemy ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... Simultaneously with the fiendish atrocities committed on the Saline and Solomon rivers and the attack on Comstock and Grover, the pillaging and murdering began on the Smoky Hill stage-route, along the upper Arkansas River and on the headwaters of the Cimarron. That along the Smoky Hill ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... roof of the verandah, I have overheard a conversation between the count and Sir Percival. They spoke with complete frankness—with fiendish frankness—to one another. Fosco pointed out that his friend was desperately in need of money, and that, as Laura had refused to sign the document, he could not secure it by ordinary means. If Laura died, Sir Percival would inherit L20,000, and Fosco himself ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... it and off it went on its momentous journey. Cook began to take a renewed interest in his platoon, and, having discovered the recalcitrant one of No. 11 actually coming on parade with only the front of the tip of his bayonet-scabbard polished, he took a fiendish delight in seeing the criminal writhing under the brutal and savage sentence of three ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... frighten the fell tiger back with democratic rose-water. We must do all and every thing, even as the foe have done. We have been generous, we have been merciful—we have protected property, we have returned slaves, we have let our wounded lie in the open air and die rather than offend the fiendish-hearted women of Secessia—and what have we got by it? Lies and lies, again and yet again. For refusing to touch the black, Mr. Lincoln is termed by the Southern press 'a dirty negro-stealer,' and our troops, for not taking the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to the general public that this was the "Ace of Spades." And in the money-till of the Ace of Spades, doubtless was the price of many a poor man's toil, the bread and meat of his hungry children squandered and sacrificed with a fiendish recklessness. Within the dingy walls of the Ace of Spades was bartered the domestic happiness of many a home that had been cheerless enough, God knows, without this ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... the room, that a moment before rang with excited voices and shrill laughter, the man's husky, straining, whispered boast sounded like the mocking of some invisible, fiendish presence ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... Giovanni, still with the same fiendish scorn. "Thy very prayers, as they come from thy lips, taint the atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us to church and dip our fingers in the holy water at the portal! They that come after us will perish as by a pestilence! Let us sign crosses ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and, as often happens in such marriages, he forgot to ask for a certificate of character, forgot to ask what sort of mother he was providing for his children. She came with all her meretricious splendour covering one of the most fiendish natures that ever wore a woman's form. She developed, if she did not bring with her, all imaginable vices—her vindictive passion revelled in blood; her religion was the filthiest licentiousness; her beauty became the painted face of a common harlot. Her figure stands forth in ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... that everybody hated her, and thirsted for her blood; nay, many kind-hearted creatures that would have pitied her profoundly, as regarded all political charges, had their natural feelings warped by the belief that she had dealings with fiendish powers. She knew she was to die; that was not the misery; the misery was that this consummation could not be reached without so much intermediate strife, as if she were contending for some chance (where chance was none) of happiness, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... become so well acquainted with her delightful points that you forget your early impression of her. How do you feel when you are enthusiastically enumerating her many lovable attributes, if the member of the household with the fiendish memory strikes ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... thus for years, with cold, relentless zeal, With fiendish science both sides fought and watched, From loop-holes or from clouds which half conceal, Or in deep tunnels all their skill was matched. On sentry in the firebay, or the hov'ring 'plane, Mining and countermining ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... lie,—a fiendish and malignant lie,—and he knows it. Here lies her father, my own husband, murdered by that scoundrel there. Her baptismal certificate is in my room. I've kept it all these years where he never could get it. No, Frank, she's your own, your own baby, whom you never saw. Go—go ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... were obliged to remain in their seats with the appearance at least of discipline. It is stated by good authority that the rolling of croquet balls across the floor during recitation was objected to, under the fiendish excuse of its interfering with their studies. The breaking of windows by base balls, and the beating of small scholars with bats, were declared against. At last, bloated and arrogant with success, the under-teachers threw aside all disguise and revealed themselves in their true colors. A ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... week-old papers. In the next room I can hear the general, seated at a table and intent on his map, talking to an officer that has just come from the firing line. Outside the window a gun is making a fiendish row, shaking the whole house. Occasionally there is a bit of a rattle—that's shrapnel bullets falling on the ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... roses. They were rough, and their lives were rougher. They were no gentler with Spaniards than Spaniards were with them when both were fighting. But, except by way of revenge, and then very seldom, they never practised such fiendish cruelty as the Spaniards practised the whole time. "Captain John Smith, sometime Governor of Virginia and Admiral of New England" (whom the Indian girl Pocahontas saved from death) did not write The ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... circled the infernal hunt, unable to stay the relentless riders as with bony hands rattling against their skeleton steeds they encouraged them to charge, gore, and trample the hapless stranger, whose cries of agony were drowned by shrieks of fiendish glee and the incessant cracking of whips. Overcome at last by terror, the count fell senseless, his eyes dazed by the still whirling spectres and their flying quarry. When at last he slowly awaked from his swoon he looked around, fearing to see again the hideous spectacle. All but the stranger, however, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... plausible manner; the hand-writing and name of the Chairman of my Committee was forged, and every thing was admirably calculated to give the impression, that it was genuine truth. But, fortunately, this fiendish scheme failed of its purpose; for, as my family had left Rowfant before the letter arrived, the letter was never opened till we returned together after ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... was surely not the cry of living mortal, but of that unknown Thing that passed before the portrait, and that stood beside me even then in the lonely room. Certain I am that the echoes of that cry had in them something inexpressibly fiendish, and through the deathly gloom of the mansion they came back, reverberated and repeated from a hundred invisible corners and galleries. Now, I had to pass, on my return, a long, broad window that lighted the principal staircase. This window had neither ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... business. He behaved to his daughter as if she had been responsible for its incurable character. He had been heard to bellow at the top of his voice, as if to defy Heaven, that he did not care: he had made enough money to have ham and eggs for his breakfast every morning. He thanked God for it, in a fiendish tone as ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... Cunningham & varis other notid persons, and also for a sertin pirut named Hix. I've bin so long amung wax statoots that I can fix 'em up to soot the tastes of folks, & with sum paints I hav I kin giv their facis a beneverlent or fiendish look as the kase requires. I giv Sir Edmun Hed a beneverlent look, & when sum folks who thawt they was smart sed it didn't look like Sir Edmun Hed anymore than it did anybody else, I sed, "That's the ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... is war but organized murder, murder of malice aforethought, in cold blood, under sanction of impious law, through the operation of extensive machinery of crime, with innumerable hands, at incalculable cost of money, by subtle contrivances of cunning and skill, or amidst the fiendish atrocities of the savage, brutal assault. The outrages, which, under most solemn sanction, it permits and invokes for professed purposes of justice, cannot be authorized by any human power; and they must rise in overwhelming ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... until he tried it, and found it so pleasant that it paid him to go on the war-path every spring, to have a royal old revel in blood and bestiality until fall, and then yield to the blandishments of civilization for the winter. But to officer or soldier capture means death, and death by fiendish torture as a rule. The Indian fights for the glory and distinction it gives him. He has everything to gain and nothing to lose. The soldier of the United States fights the red man only because he is ordered to. He has nothing to gain—even glory, for the Senate has fixed a bar ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... as she was concerned, the matter was settled. You would have thought, however, that Caspian would be the rock I'd split on, now that he has a "say" in the affairs of Patricia. But the Winstons and I hadn't forgotten this chance in our calculations. We expected C. to take a fiendish joy in the prospect of kicking me when I was down: "putting me into my place" and making love to Miss Moore before my starting eyes—a great triumph for him after the very different Long Island trip in the same car with some of the same passengers. Well, we were as right as ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... his inward satisfaction when he found himself possessed of the ring of Gomez Arias—a ring which he well recollected had been the gift of Queen Isabella,—a precious gage, which, in the process of his fiendish machinations, might contribute materially to their successful termination. While on the one hand the renegade was thus awaiting with anxiety the result of every move in his diabolical game, and Don Lope on the other was congratulating himself upon the speedy close of his heartless ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... How incredible it seems that such awful crimes can be committed in our quiet neighborhood? who could have been so guilty; and what motive could have prompted such a fiendish act?" ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... spirits whistling and whizzing all round them, spears were pointed at them. Their skins were scratched with stone knives and mussel shells. Hideously painted, fiendish-looking creatures suddenly rushed upon them. Should they show fear and quail at the Little Boorah they would be returned to their mothers as cowards unfit for initiation, and sooner or later sympathetic magic would do its work, a poison-stick or bone would end them. Or if one of ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... and the feeble, ran a terrified rabble to the shelter of the chapel. Before the Hurons could man the walls, Iroquois hatchets had hacked holes of entrance in the palisades. The fort was rushed by a bloodthirsty horde making the air hideous with fiendish screams. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... are permitted to carry larger walking-sticks than the Romans, whom the French commandant has forbidden to come abroad with any but the merest twig. Some of these spies wear spurs, the better to deceive and to succeed in their fiendish work. No disguise, however, can conceal the sbirro. His look, so unmistakeably villanous, proclaims the spy. These fellows will not be defeated in their purposes. They carry, it is said, articles of conviction, that is, political papers, on their person, which they use, in lack of ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the face upon the pillow assumed a dark and almost fiendish expression. "Why, yes, I love him as a brother, but nothing else. I respect him for his goodness, but it would be impossible to love ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... windows; that, on rising in great agitation, he was startled by the sudden appearance of "The Northern Star," rolled hard, and bent into the form of a boomerang, or East-Indian club, that sailed into the window, described a number of fiendish circles in the room, knocked over the light, slapped the baby's face, "took" him (the subscriber) "in the jaw," and then returned out of the window, and dropped helplessly in the area. During the rest of the day, wads and strips ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... if this story were a single one, it were worthy to be had in remembrance; but Walter Raymond is not the only noble-hearted boy or man that has been slowly tortured and starved and done to death, by the fiendish policy of Jefferson Davis and Robert Edmund Lee. No,—wherever this simple history shall be read, there will arise hundreds of men and women who will testify, "Just so died my son!" "So died my brother!" "So died my husband!" "So died my father!" The numbers ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... hundred millions of people, does not possess one elevated attribute. If, in the circumstances, society does not become a moral pesthouse it is only because the people continue better than their religion. The human heart, though fallen, is not fiendish. It has still its purer instincts; and, when the legends about abominable gods and goddesses are falling like mildew, these are still to some extent kept alive by the sweet influences of earth and sky and by the charities of family life. ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... be all right, I daresay," said George, rather sulkily; for, with the exception of Snarleyow, in whose fiendish temper he found something refreshing and congenial, he liked no dogs. "But you must be careful, or Snarleyow, my dog, will give him a hammering. Here, good dog, good dog," and he attempted to pat Aleck on the head, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... Husky, dirty yellowish gray, with bristling neck, sharp fangs, and green eyes, like a wolf. Her name was Babette. She had a fiendish temper, but no courage. His father was supposed to be a huge black and white Newfoundland that came over in a schooner from Miquelon. Perhaps it was from him that the black patch was inherited. And perhaps there were other things in the ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... desperation, struggled to his knees, and before Rutherford realized what he was trying to do, the shade flew upward to the top of the window. Even then, Rutherford would have thought little of it, had not Haight betrayed himself by a leer of fiendish triumph. In an instant Rutherford understood that it ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... lobby, and inserted the numbered notes into young Clifford's coat, and the false keys into his bag. Then he whipped back hastily into the office, with his craven face full of fiendish triumph. ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... you were here to share all these thrills with me! War is actually in progress, and if you could see me hanging out of the window at midnight yelling for a special, then chasing madly around to get someone to translate it for me, see me dancing in fiendish glee at every victory won by this brave little country, you would conclude that I am just as young as I used to be. I tell you I couldn't be prouder of my own country! Just think of plucky little old Japan winning ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... the name I started violently. Then, open-mouthed and trembling with excitement, I twisted myself round to get a glimpse of the witness as he approached the box. Could it be possible that Fate with fiendish irony had selected the ex-trooper whom we had befriended to administer to our case the coup de grace? It must be a man of another name. But Dale ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... The lust of blood is a frightful demon when once it is aroused. A Hungarian woman of noble birth, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, tortured to death thirty or forty of her maidservants. She began by inflicting severe punishments and developed a fiendish passion for the sight of suffering and blood.[520] It is the combinations of the other elements, religion, ambition, sex, vanity, and the lust of blood, with the dislike of dissenters, which has caused the most frightful developments ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... face of fiendish barbarity that once was over me, when I was a miserable little school-boy! He did it; and ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... back from the felon's cell which he was about to enter, and addressing Redding, who stood mimicking, with fiendish glee, the groans and contortions of French, as he lay gasping and writhing in mortal agony on the spot where he fell, just beyond the short passage dividing the prison-rooms—"monster," he repeated, "would ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... had made glad the hearts of his coming kinsman and the baronet by a surprise visit in their study. He found them actively unpacking a few home treasures, including a small hamper full of ham, a pistol, some boxing-gloves, and a particularly fiendish-looking bull-dog. The last- named luxury was the baronet's contribution to the common store, and, having been forgotten for some hours in the bustle of arrival, was now removed from his ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... shore was a study in discipline, and a terror to any one unused to war. Above all the din and clash of arms rang the hearty, stentorian laughter of the Red Margrave actually echoing back in gusts of fiendish merriment from the hills on the other side of ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... result, we stand yet more astounded at this most barbarous, most diabolical act. . . . We can trace its cause through successive steps back to that source which is the spring of all our woes. No one can say that if the perpetrator of this fiendish deed be arrested, he should not undergo the extremest penalty of the law known for crime; none will say that mercy should interpose. But is he alone guilty? Here, gentlemen, you perhaps expect me to present some indication of my future ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... amusement. But the minute I set eyes on you near the door something must have begun to drag me back. I'll own I've never liked to let myself dwell on that memory. It wasn't a good thing because it had a trick of taking me back in a fiendish way to the little chap with his heart bursting in the railway carriage—and the betrayal feeling. It's morbid to let yourself grouse over what can't be undone. So you faded away. But when I danced past you somehow ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... failed him, and he reeled heavily against the sturdy form of one of the warders who held him—his lips were flecked with blood and foam. Shocked and appalled, no less at his words, than at the fiendish contortion of his features, the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... of the team, and watch the match from the Pavilion, you escape these trials, but there are others. In the first few overs of a School match, every ball looks to the spectators like taking a wicket. The fiendish ingenuity of the slow bowler, and the lightning speed of the fast man at the other end, make one feel positively ill. When the first ten has gone up on the scoring-board matters begin to right themselves. Today ten went up quickly. The fast man's first ball was outside the off-stump and ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... flight of literature, general demoralization, the lowering of the tone of moral feeling, the ascendency of unscrupulous men, the exaltation of military talents, general grief at the loss of friends, fiendish exultation over victories alternated with depressing despondency in view of defeats, the impoverishment of a nation on the whole, and the sickening conviction, which fastens on the mind after the first excitement is over, of a great ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... of the Imperial Guard; and the Prussians had no supports. "They have no reserve," he remarked, as he swept the hostile position with his glass. This was true: their centre consisted of troops that for four hours had been either torn by artillery or exhausted by the fiendish strife in Ligny. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... personal adventure. Hidden in her ambush, the woman who had shot him had been in both purpose and act an assassin. Her determination had been to kill him. She had disregarded the white flag with which he had pleaded for mercy. Her marksmanship was of fiendish cleverness. Up to her last shot she had been, to all intent and purpose, ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... himself; a power healthful enough for the victim (for, doubtless, flogging is the best of all punishments, being not only the shortest, but also a mere bodily and animal, and not, like most of our new-fangled "humane" punishments, a spiritual and fiendish torture), but for the executioner pretty certain to eradicate, from all but the noblest spirits, every trace of chivalry and tenderness for the weak, as well, often, as all self-control and command of temper. Be that as it may, old Sir Vindex had heart ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... to your religion, Mr. Orthodox, is that it violates reason and conscience. To be more specific, let us consider a few instances. There is your doctrine of eternal punishment, in which you ascribe fiendish qualities to our dear heavenly Father such as the most savage human being could not be capable of. Then, take your doctrine of the Trinity, around which most of your dogmas cluster, and we see at once that it violates the simplest postulates of reason. I know that you will ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... return with clubs freshly cut from the trees, an ominous indication of the fate in store for us. To the number of several hundred the savages had gathered upon the plain, and were arranging the preliminaries for their fiendish sport. We watched their preparations with a peculiar interest; at length all seemed in readiness—two rows of Indians stretched along the plain for a distance of about three hundred yards—all were armed with clubs, and stood facing each other; an interval of three ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... The fiendish company approved of the plan of their chief, and were all anxious to get to work. But it was too late at the time, for the moon was just about to set, and the sun was rising. But they worked zealously at their preparations all day till late in the evening. The Devil ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... that fact scarcely tends to prove the proposition. That massacre is only an example of what Grierson, John Morgan, and many others might have repeatedly done on their respective raids, had they chosen to incur the personal hazard, and possessed the fiendish hearts to ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... them now is cast The horror of the past; The fort that was no fort, The deep dark-heaving flood Of foes that broke in blood On our devoted camp, victims of fiendish sport; From that last huddling refuge lured to ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... in the Yukon, struggling along its creeks; Roaming its giant valleys, scaling its god-like peaks; Bathed in its fiery sunsets, fighting its fiendish cold, Twenty years in the Yukon ... ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... nothing and care for nothing but the filling of their insatiable appetite;—this man's nature was too hard, too iron in its moulding, to give way to temporary imbecility; liquor made him savage, fierce, brutal, excited his fiendish temper to its height, nerved his muscular system, inflamed his brain, and gave him the aspect of a devil; and in such guise he entered his wife's peaceful Eden, where she brooded and cooed over her child's slumbers, with one gripe of his hard hand lifted her from her chair, kicked the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... flames, as if she were about to leap into them, and back of her so close that he might have touched her, was a figure that sent a chill of horror through him. It was Woonga, the outlaw chief! He was talking, his red face was fiendish, ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... her fiendish wickedness, and knew that as they had been seen last together she must account for McKay's disappearance. At the end of an interval long enough to make rescue impossible she startled the ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... because, you see, when one has been beheaded, one's consciousness that one has been beheaded comes off too. It is inevitable. And then, what does it matter, when one doesn't know? Let us think of something really cruel—really fiendish. I have it—deprive him of social position for the rest of his life—force him to remain ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... you have a fiendish power of getting your own way; but so has anyone who does not scruple about, the way it is accomplished. How did you get Doctor Norling away, for instance, and how did you get ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... plausible this view of the situation appeared to me. By the time we succeeded in starting the engine, after cranking for nearly half an hour, I was so consumed by wrath over the scurvy trick she had played upon us that I swore she should not enter my castle if I could prevent it; moreover, I would take fiendish delight in dumping her ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... disgraced her sex and the age. No language can describe adequately the various diabolical modes of extermination practiced against all those who refused to bow the knee and kiss the English rod. No code of laws ever enacted in even the most barbarous age of the world, could compare in fiendish cruelty with the early penal enactments of the Pale—so forcibly supplemented in after years by the perjured "Dutch boor" and the inhuman Georges. The foul fiend himself could not have devised laws more diabolical in their character or destructive in their ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... man walks into the closet to slay the doll. But he returns pale and trembling, having destroyed her while asleep, and believing to have seen her spirit escape through the window with fiendish laughter.—Yet awed by his deed, he sees Heinrich returning who confesses to his uncle, that he has found out his secret about the doll, and that, having accidently broken it, he has substituted a young girl. Cornelius, half ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... before, his hands looking as though they were modeling something, while in actuality they were carefully holding his own entrails—even that hideous recollection faded before the sight of this Janus head, all peace, all gentle humanity on one side; all war, all distorted, puffed-up image of fiendish hatred ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... and young men stopped long enough to go behind the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts. This always jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at sight of the startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with laughter as ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... off was only the more certain. A woman's mind works swiftly in great crises, and Mme. de Marville had hit at once upon the one method of repairing the check. She chose to look upon it as a scheme of revenge. This notion of ascribing a fiendish scheme to Pons satisfied family honor. Faithful to her dislike of the cousin, she treated a feminine suspicion as a fact. Women, generally speaking, hold a creed peculiar to themselves, a code of their own; to them anything which serves their interests or their passions is true. The Presidente ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... smiling at Margaret, walking or riding with Margaret, was enough to send her writhing upon her bed in the darkness of a wakeful night. She would clench her pretty hands until the nails dug into the flesh and brought the blood. She would bite the pillow or the blankets with an almost fiendish clenching of her teeth upon them and mutter, as she did so: "I hate her! I hate her! I could ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... at me with a fiendish grin. "None of your insolence," said he, with a dreadful oath. "I never saw a Virginia nigger that I couldn't manage, proud as they are. Your master has left you in my hands, and you must obey my orders. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... he looks attractive. He can run, swim, dive, catch rabbits, retrieve, or do anything. I grieve to say that he is a dog of an intriguing disposition; and no prudent lady would introduce him among dogs who have not learned mischief. The Bedlington seems to have the power of command, and he takes a fiendish delight in ordering young dogs to play pranks. He will whisper to a young collie, and in an instant you will see that collie chasing sheep or hens, or hunting among flower-beds, or baiting a cow, or something equally outrageous. Decidedly the Bedlington does not shine as a pet; and he should ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... The escape of Thorne destroyed all the satisfaction which his success would have given him. He had good reason to know the fiendish malignity of the man and, in spite of the warnings he had given Kate Ellison, and his strict orders to the police on guard, he felt a thrill of anxiety, now that he was aware her enemy was ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... clasped about his knees. His eyes were fiercely focused upon a cartridge-belt hanging upon the wall, and there they remained, seemingly a fixture, while thought, no longer chaotic, flew through his revivified brain. He gave no sign; he uttered no word. But his face told its story of a fiendish joy which swept from his head to his heart, and thrilled his ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... task, and lingered not, For he rejoiced at this catastrophe, And with a smile of fiendish satisfaction, Placed the strong bow before him—Rustem grasped The bended horn with such an eager hand, That wondering at the sight, the caitiff wretch Shuddered with terror, and behind a tree Shielded himself, but nothing could avail; The arrow pierced both tree and him, and ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... revolution, silver forks have been recognized as not less indispensable appendages to any elegant dinner table than silver spoons; and, along with silver forks, came in the explosion of that anti-Queensberry brutalism which forks first superseded—viz., the fiendish practice of introducing the knife between the lips. But, in defiance of all these facts, certain select hacks of the daily press, who never had an opportunity of seeing a civilized dinner, and fancying that their own obscene modes of ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... only show up in greater and more exaggerated contrast the sullen indifference of the majority, and the active hostility of the minority, who would have seen our country and its people overrun and defeated not only without regret, but with fiendish delight."[92] ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... vied with each other in inventing deaths of fiendish cruelty and outrage upon every man, woman, and child of the better classes who fell into their hands. Owing to the number of nobles who had fallen at Cressy and Poitiers, and of those still captives in England, very many of their wives and daughters remained unprotected, ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... six. Please do not interrupt me again. These ruffians, after relieving me of my valuables and wearing apparel, so that I was clad in nothing but a loose-fitting suit of air, proceeded, with fiendish design, to tie ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... me sympathetically; he knew something of my search with Nayland Smith for the dark-eyed, Eastern girl who had brought romance into my drab life; he knew that I treasured my memories of her as I loathed and abhorred those of the fiendish, brilliant Chinese doctor who had ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... particularly loud burst of approval from the spectators of the dancing going on in the adjoining room, and instinctively the men at the bar half-turned towards the noise. The prisoner's eyes followed their gaze and a fiendish grin replaced the look of dismay on his face. "No, he is there dancing with a girl," he said under his breath. A moment later Nick let down the bearskin curtain, shutting off completely the Mexican's ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... after this conversation two more rifle bullets came crashing through the window. A death-like stillness ensued for about five minutes, when two more balls in quick succession were fired through the door, then followed a tremendous punching with a log, the door gave way, and with a fiendish yell an Indian was about to spring in, when the unerring rifle fired by the old lady stretched his lifeless body across the thresh-hold of the door. The remaining, or more properly the surviving Indian fired at random and ran, doing no injury. "Now" ...
— Heroes and Hunters of the West • Anonymous
... Digby," he said, "must have been at the bottom of the mischief, Davie. It must have been he who put the spoon into your pocket. What a fiendish contrivance!" ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... a terrible set-to between two tribes of gipsies in the Overboro' road. They fought like tigers, making the lovely summer day hideous with their cries and shrieks—the women, the fiercer by far, tearing each other's hair. One fiendish creature drew her scissors, and, using them like a stiletto, drove the sharp point into a ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... scrutiny, that some faded letters across the dirty lamp, intimated to the general public that this was the "Ace of Spades." And in the money-till of the Ace of Spades, doubtless was the price of many a poor man's toil, the bread and meat of his hungry children squandered and sacrificed with a fiendish recklessness. Within the dingy walls of the Ace of Spades was bartered the domestic happiness of many a home that had been cheerless enough, God ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... laws,—and a law, if recognised as a law, was a law to him whether enforced by a penalty, or simply exigent of obedience from his conscience. This girl had been thrown in his way, and he had first pitied and then loved her from his childhood. She had been injured by the fiendish malice of her own father,—and that father had been an Earl. He had been strong in fighting for the rights of the mother,—not because it had been the mother's right to be a Countess,—but in opposition to the Earl. At ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... that the golf ball had a sort of impish intelligence that could only be met by a superior cunning. I suspected that it deliberately hid itself, and that so long as it was aware that you were hunting for it, it took a fiendish delight in dodging you. If, said I, one could only let the thing suppose it was not being looked for it would be taken off its guard. I put the idea into operation, and I rejoice to say it works ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... tree as that against which her head was fastened; her position was one that must have been most painful: she had evidently been thus left to perish by a miserable death, of hunger and thirst; for these savages, with a fiendish cruelty, had placed within sight of their victim an earthen jar of water, some dried deers' flesh, and a cob [FN: A head of the Maize, or Indian corn, is called a "cob."] of Indian corn. I have the ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... tail of the horse, spread all dishevelled upon the ground; and gaunt and naked children grasping knives and daggers in their tiny hands. Of the patriotic troop not one appeared to have fallen; and when, after their enemies had retreated with howlings of fiendish despair, they told their numbers, only one man was missing, who was never seen again, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... well-controlled tones: "Frenchmen, I am no spy," but they gave him the lie with increasing uproar. Had not Gabrielle Rouget said that he was an English spy? As the bottle was poised in the air with a fiendish cry of "A baptism! a baptism!" and Shorland was debating on his chances of avoiding it, and on the wisdom of now drawing his weapon and cutting his way through the mob, there came from the door a call of "Hold! hold!" and a young ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... understand," Tallente intervened, "that you feel bound to take this seriously, Dartrey, but after all there is nothing traitorous to our cause in what I wrote. I attacked the trades unions for their colossal and fiendish selfishness when the Empire was tottering. I would do it again under the same circumstances. Remember I was fresh from Ypres. I had seen Englishmen, not soldiers but just hastily trained citizens—bakers, commercial travellers, ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the grizzly. They knew that superlative cunning of his wickedness, the wolverine; the stealth of the red fox; the ferociousness of the ermine whose brown skin, soon to be white, suggested only something silken and soft and tender instead of a fiendish cutthroat, terror of the Little People; the skulking cowardice of the coyote; and the incredible savagery and agility of the fisher,—that middle-sized hunter that catches and kills everything he can master except fish. They climbed high hills and descended into still, mysterious ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... almost fatal event had just occurred. The man at the wheel, suddenly seized with a suicidal mania, had rushed from his post, possessed himself of two mops, which were lying on the deck, and putting one under each arm, with a wild and fiendish shriek had jumped overboard. The captain immediately stopped the ship and ordered a boat to be lowered; but owing to the high sea running, some time elapsed before this could be accomplished, and ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... dedication has been the theme of many volumes. Machiavelli was poor, was idle, was out of favour, and therefore, though a Republican, wrote a devilish hand-book of tyranny to strengthen the Medici and recover his position. Machiavelli, a loyal Republican, wrote a primer of such fiendish principles as might lure the Medici to their ruin. Machiavelli's one idea was to ruin the rich: Machiavelli's one idea was to oppress the poor: he was a Protestant, a Jesuit, an Atheist: a Royalist and a Republican. And ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... expression of searching anxiety, as if he sought to trace the outlines of some visionary spirit as it receded before him. Quickly reassured, as it seemed, by the glance he threw on all sides, his countenance lighted up, not with pleasure, but with a fiendish expression of revengeful triumph, which even his voice evinced as he called ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... weariness, with no desire to get up, or get better, or take the air; with no curiosity, or care, or regret, of any sort or degree, saving that I think I can remember, in this universal indifference, having a kind of lazy joy - of fiendish delight, if anything so lethargic can be dignified with the title - in the fact of my wife being too ill to talk to me. If I may be allowed to illustrate my state of mind by such an example, I should say that I was exactly in the condition of the elder Mr. Willet, after the ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... galley, and said at once that it sounded like an explosion. Presently Pettersen [64] stuck a head in at the door as black as a sweep's, great lumps of soot all over it, and said that the stove had exploded right into his face; he was only going to look if it was burning rightly, and the whole fiendish thing flew out at him. A stream of words not unmingled with oaths flowed like peas out of a sack, while the rest of us yelled with laughter. In the galley it was easy to see that something had happened; the walls were covered with soot in lumps and stripes pointing towards the fireplace. The explanation ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... were staring wildly into the flames, as if she were about to leap into them, and back of her so close that he might have touched her, was a figure that sent a chill of horror through him. It was Woonga, the outlaw chief! He was talking, his red face was fiendish, he stretched out ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... the "Rogue's March" been a popular melody in those times, it would have suited the procession much more admirably. The queen and the dwarf went first, and a vivid contrast they were—she so young, so beautiful, so proud, so disdainfully cold; he so ugly, so stunted, so deformed, so fiendish. After them went the band of sylphs in white, then the chancellor, archbishop, and embassadors; next the whole court of ladies and gentlemen; and after them Sir Norman, in the custody of two of the soldiers. The condemned earl came last, or rather allowed himself to be dragged by his ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... beings who are always ready to tear each other to pieces, and to deluge the earth with each other's blood; this is your extended humanity—and this the great field of your compassion. Extinguish in your heart the fiendish love of military glory, from which your sex does not necessarily exempt you, and to which the wickedness of flatterers may urge you. Say upon your death-bed, 'I have made few orphans in my reign—I have made few widows—my object has been peace. I have used all the weight ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... would not answer that question. With extreme cunning, and an almost fiendish delicacy, she managed to remind me of my failure in saving the lives of the prisoners in the guardroom, without wounding my pride. She knew, of course, the whole story. Gaspar Ruiz, she said, entreated me to procure for him a safe-conduct from General San Martin ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... pulled along in savage triumph and laid before the chiefs. One day, when some of us were in a war-fort endeavouring to mediate for peace, a dead body of one of the enemy was dragged in, preceded by a fellow making all sorts of fiendish gestures, with one of the legs in his teeth cut off by ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... than a second the entire camp was awake, and every man gripped his rifle in readiness. No one dared to leave the rampart. Safety lay in being all together. The pounding of hoofs grew louder and louder, the picketed horses whinnied, then there was a wild gallop past the little camp, accompanied by fiendish yells. Not a man dared to investigate, for fear of ambush. All that they could do was to patiently await the coming ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... none more bothersome to treat successfully nor more difficult to diagnose than those of the skin. There are none either that afford the quack or patent-nostrum monger a larger field for the practice of his fiendish gifts. If I were to be asked the questions, "Why do dogs suffer so much from skin complaints?" and "Why does it appear to be so difficult to treat them?" I should answer the first thus: Through the neglect of their owners, from want of cleanliness, from injudicious ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... more exalted social position than those whom they scorned, had not their tenderness of heart or their real refinement. Indeed it would be difficult to find in history, even among the fierce brutal women of the French revolution, any record of conduct more absolutely fiendish than that of some of the women of the South during the war. They insisted on the murder of helpless prisoners; in some instances shot them in cold blood themselves, besought their lovers and husbands to bring them Yankee skulls, scalps and bones, for ornaments, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... deliverance, if possible, of between thirty and forty of my own countrymen, languishing in a bitter captivity, and in daily, if not hourly, peril of death by torture as cruel and protracted as the fiendish malignity of ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... only desired to give me a fair chance "to look him over." Without a second thought, I read that portion of the letter in the greenroom, and the laughter had scarcely died away when that admirable actor, but perfectly fiendish player of tricks, Louis James, was going quietly from actor to actor arranging for the downfall of ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... us apart when we are angry. He is like me: he has my fiendish temper. No matter what I say or do, keep us apart till I am calm. By God's grace I will never touch ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... this wretched tittle-tattle about you!" chafed Lady Susan. "My poor little Ann, it really is a stroke of the most fiendish ill-luck." ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... lower than the beasts that perish. Well may every Christian wish and pray that the name and the gospel of the blessed Jesus may be sent speedily to the dark places of the earth; for you may read of, and talk about, but you cannot conceive the fiendish wickedness and cruelty which causes tearless eyes to glare, and maddened hearts to burst, in the lands ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... Shades beyond the river Styx—and may be it is a good thing for them that they don't—but you can see that there is an occasional exception even to that rule, for I have just returned from a hell, the like of which, for human brutality and fiendish barbarity, is not to be found even in the fire-and-brimstone creeds ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... holding down those tearing hands, in binding whenever she could those uplifted restless arms prompt and prone to do mischief. All the time she subdued him with her cunning or her strength, she spoke to him in pitying murmurs, or abused the third person, the fiendish enemy, in no unmeasured tones. Towards morning the paroxysm was exhausted, and he would fall asleep, perhaps only to waken with evil and renewed vigour. But when he was laid down, she would sally out to taste the fresh air, and to work off her wild sorrow in cries ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... amiable, but it was with a fiendish glee caused by the belief that the American prisoners were to be ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... their lungs. These vocal measures proving inadequate, stones and other missiles commenced to fly. They could not see through the windows of the room so an accurately thrown brick shivered the pane of glass. Through the open space I caught glimpses of the most ferocious and fiendish faces it has ever been my lot to witness. Men and women vied with one another in the bawling and ground their teeth when ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... guns began their chorus. With boom and roar, roar and boom they sang their anthem of death. The rattle of rifles came in as a response, and all this was punctured by fiendish yells. ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... between them, since the more I show myself sensible of their wickedness the more she triumphs in her victory, and the more he flatters himself that I love him devotedly still, in spite of my pretended indifference. On such occasions I have sometimes been startled by a subtle, fiendish suggestion inciting me to show him the contrary by a seeming encouragement of Hargrave's advances; but such ideas are banished in a moment with horror and self-abasement; and then I hate him tenfold more ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... greater part of the diners at the restaurants are single, and seem to have no knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill of the fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at their meals, is rather calculated to chill than warm the heart. But, in any case, a drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen,—no, not at evening ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Had I but some one who would back them off And cast them from me that I might be clean— For washing would not cleanse them, even if I dipped them in thy blood. Away! Away! So stood'st thou not to deal the deadly blow, Thy wolfish eyes fixed on him steadily, With fiendish grin disclosing thy intent Before the time! But slyly didst thou creep Behind him, ever shrinking from his gaze, As wild beasts do that fear the human eye, And peered to find the spot, that I—Thou dog, What was thine oath ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... and half carried and half dragged into the alcove. At first they encountered some difficulty when they endeavored to force the body of the man into the small space she had selected for it, but eventually they succeeded in doing so. Smith-Oldwick was again impressed by the fiendish brutality of the girl. In the center of the room lay a blood-stained rug which the girl quickly gathered up and draped over a piece of furniture in such a way that the stain was hidden. By rearranging the other rugs and by bringing one from the alcove she restored the room to order so no outward ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the choking sob and tears no longer. Stealing down a side street, where he would have to pass few people, Phin gave way to his pent-up shame. Yet in it all there was nothing of repentance. He was angry with himself—-in a fiendish rage ...
— The High School Captain of the Team - Dick & Co. Leading the Athletic Vanguard • H. Irving Hancock
... hook or by crook to bring back with me the much-needed catalogues, or the body of the printer dead or alive. Upon arriving in the City, however, to my chagrin I found his place of business closed, though the caretaker, with a touch of fiendish malignity, showed me through a window whole piles of my non-delivered catalogues. Not to be beaten, I hastened back to the West End and despatched a very long and explicit telegram to the printer at his private house (of course he would not be back in the City until Monday), requiring him, under ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... was almost stifled by the rising waves, and the bubbling groan of her last agony was reaching her fellow-martyr farther up the beach, one heartless ruffian stepped up to Margaret Wilson, and, with a fiendish grin and mocking laugh, asked her, 'What think you of your friend now?' And what was the calm and noble reply? 'What do I see but Christ, in one of his members, wrestling there? Think you that we are the sufferers? No. It is Christ in us—he who sendeth us not on a ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... the house. Exultingly they told their tale of horror, their painted faces and blood-stained garments looking ghastly in the moonlight. One man threw an ornament, torn from the person of a white woman, to his squaw, who had brought his supper; and another, with a fiendish laugh, tossed a scalp to Millicent, calling out in coarse tones, "Here little white-skin, take that for a remembrance of ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... gust of wind, And, with a fiendish rush, The flames leapt o'er the narrow path And lit the fence of brush. 'The crop must burn!' the farmer cried, 'We cannot save it now,' And down upon the blackened ground ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... the strength then of the buffalo's foot,[cw] When he spurns high the dust, beholding his Near enemy; or let me have the long And patient swiftness of the desert-ship, The helmless dromedary!—and I'll bear[cx] Thy fiendish sarcasm with ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... reward for his great services to her, she gave him one of the magic necklaces. While they were whispering words of love in each other's ears, they heard a deafening noise at the bottom of the tower. "Rush for safety to your ladder!" cried Clotilde. "One of the fiendish friends of the magician is ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... said in a voice strangled and altered with suffering. "I see every link in the chain—but, O God! why have they deceived me? What can it mean? What hideous, fiendish cruelty! And Michael ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... all there is the repulsion and loathing for the whole business of war, with its bloody ruthlessness, its fiendish ingenuity, and its insensate cruelty, that comes to a man after a battle, when the tortured and dismembered dead lie strewn about the trench, and the wounded groan from No-Man's-Land. But neither is that the fear of death. It is a repulsion which breeds hot anger more often than cold fear, reckless ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... it seems that such awful crimes can be committed in our quiet neighborhood? who could have been so guilty; and what motive could have prompted such a fiendish act?" ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... no pity, no relenting rest in the world's kindness. It began to take shapes of almost fiendish cruelty in his mind, as if the devil's own ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... drew herself up, watching his face, and expecting to witness his utter confusion. But she was no match for the actor whom she had promised to marry. Del Ferice began to read, and as he read, his frown relaxed; gradually an ugly smile, intended to represent fiendish cunning, stole over his features, and when he had finished, he ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... the two knowing fellows to that shaft? Shall we mark the bewildered expression of amazement with which they gazed into it, and listen to the wild fiendish laugh of mingled amusement and wrath that bursts from them in fitful explosions as the truth flashes into their unwilling minds? No; vice had triumphed over virtue, and we deem it a kindness to your sensitive nature to draw a veil over the ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... thirty yards in advance when a rifle-ball struck my leg, and I fell straightway to the ground. I recollect a rush forward of Indians and Frenchmen after that, the former crying their fiendish war-cries, the latter as fierce as their savage allies. I was amazed and mortified to see how few of the whitecoats there were. Not above a score passed me; indeed there were not fifty in the accursed action in which two of the bravest regiments of the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sooth, "With bearing worthy of so fair a cause; "Spoilers of love, and constancy, and truth, "And laurelled by a sordid world's applause! "Curses upon ye and your gilded ruth, "Whom pity nor remorse could ever pause; "Curses upon ye, deep as your own shame, "Deep as your fiendish hearts ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... on the name of his forefathers for the sake of gold—to-day you have removed that fiend from the sacred soil of India. From Nuren Gossain to Talit Chakravarti, all turned approvers through the machinations of that fiendish wizard Shams-ul-Alam and by his torture. Had you not removed that ally of the monsters, could there be ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... the story of its doom, The fiendish mob, the prostrate law, The fiery jet through midnight's gloom, Our gazing ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... order was shortly restored both north and south of the Arkansas. Guerrilla warfare was summarily suppressed, marauding stopped, and the perpetrators of atrocities so deservedly punished that all who would have imitated them lost their taste for such fiendish sport. As far north as the Moravian Mission, the Confederates were undeniably in possession; but, at that juncture, Holmes called Hindman to other scenes. A sort of apathy then settled like a cloud upon the Cherokee Nation[524]. Almost lifeless, ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... repeated and repulsed. An attack—a repulse; and each time with added but never-varied slaughter. The consumption of raw spirits among the rebel ranks must have been enormous during the day; for every rebel canteen found on the field had been filled with that maddening compound, with or without the fiendish addition of the sulphur and nitre of gunpowder. Their attacks were like the rolling of billows toward a beach: their waves of battle swept up with raging fierceness, but broke and receded at every dash; and, like the waves when the tide is fast ebbing, the surging lines broke ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... making will succeed in driving me from the position which I have assumed. I stand upon the Constitution of my country, upon the liberty of speech which you have treacherously violated, and upon the rights of my constituents, and your fiendish yells may be well raised to drown an argument which you tremble to hear. You claim and have exercised the power to prevent all debate upon any and every subject, yet you have not as yet shown your right ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... we lay by our arms, watching the destruction of our property, and thankful only that the wives and children of our officers and men were safe under our care, and not exposed to the fury of the wretches engaged in their fiendish work. ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... and foe, swaying out to one side of the plaza, and under the walls of a convent. Bansemer was facing it; and just at the moment that he felt his strength giving way and could see a grin of triumph on the fiendish face, there carne a flash and a report, and his adversary fell at his feet. Glancing up to ascertain who had fired the shot that had saved his life, he thought he saw a figure disappearing from one of the windows. The incident acted as an inspiration. Gathering ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... with a passion of anger. It was too late that night to telephone to Aberdeen and make enquiries, but he knew already all that his enquiries might have taught him. With fiendish cunning she had chosen a time when they were making up their periodical accounts at the bank and there was no chance that he could follow her. He was imprisoned by his work. He took up a paper and saw that there was a boat sailing for Australia next morning. She must ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... Olivia die?" I inquired, though my tongue felt dry and parched, and the room, with his fiendish face, was ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... up, with the sun shining brighter than ever, ain't that so, Tony? Of course it is. Well," went on Phil, sagely, "I guess I can size the McGee up, all right. He's just got a fiendish temper. He does things on the spur of the moment, that he's sorry for afterwards. All right. I can understand such a man; and Tony, take it for me, I'd rather deal with such a fiery disposition than the cold, calculating ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... of a wolf on a near by eminence sounded like a voice to him, mocking, taunting, fiendish. Never, it seemed to him, had any man been thus unhappy. Even the wilderness had failed him! In a land of desolation ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... home—dreading the consequences of the butchery, and gladly abandoning, in his terror, all solicitude about the fate of the Ourang-Outang. The words heard by the party upon the staircase were the Frenchman's exclamations of horror and affright, commingled with the fiendish jabberings of the brute. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of the lake. From this pass, elevated about two thousand feet above the level of the water, they continued to descend, by a very winding and difficult road, for an hour and a half; and during the whole of this descent they were compelled to be inactive spectators of the fiendish spectacle below. The Kalmucks, reduced by this time from about six hundred thousand souls to two hundred thousand, and after enduring for two months and a half the miseries we have previously described—outrageous ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... a Buff ball; which is to be held in a Buff town, in the very heart and centre of a Buff population; which is to be conducted by a Buff master of the ceremonies; which is to be attended by four ultra Buff members of Parliament, and the admission to which, is to be by Buff tickets! Does our fiendish contemporary wince? Let him writhe, in impotent malice, as we pen the words, WE ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... from the earth. She was tired of the horrid life that crowded her so closely—that crushed itself against her in the crowded cars—that leered into her face on the street—that reached out for her from every side—that hungered for her with a fierce hunger and longed for her with a damnable, fiendish, longing. She was faint and weak from contact with the loathsome things that she was forced to know and that would leave their mark upon her womanhood as surely as the touch of pitch defiles. And she was weary, so weary, waiting for that one ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... some old-fashioned skinkers and drawers, all with portentously red noses, were spreading a banquet on the leaf-strewn earth; while a horned and long-tailed gentleman (in whom I recognized the fiendish musician erst seen by Tam O'Shanter) tuned his fiddle, and summoned the whole motley rout to a dance, before partaking of the festal cheer. So they joined hands in a circle, whirling round so swiftly, so madly, and so merrily, in time and tune with the Satanic music, that their ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... moment felt an unprincipled and fiendish wish to annihilate his rival at all cost. By the exercise of that treachery which love for the same woman renders possible to men the most honourable in every other relation of life, he could send off Phillotson in agony and defeat by saying that the scandal was true, and that ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... am disposed to think it was surely not the cry of living mortal, but of that unknown Thing that passed before the portrait, and that stood beside me even then in the lonely room. Certain I am that the echoes of that cry had in them something inexpressibly fiendish, and through the deathly gloom of the mansion they came back, reverberated and repeated from a hundred invisible corners and galleries. Now, I had to pass, on my return, a long, broad window that lighted the principal staircase. This window had neither shutters nor blind, and ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... heard ferocious yells in their rear, and beheld their fiendish pursuers, now also in the canon. It was like Christian tracking the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and listening to the screams and curses of devils. At every reappearance of the Apaches they had diminished the distance ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... "I alone can save you from yon bloody pirut! Ho! a peck of oats!" The oats was brought, and the Juke, boldly mountin the jibpoop, throwed them onto the towpath. The pirut rapidly approached, chucklin with fiendish delight at the idee of increasin his ill-gotten gains. But the leadin hoss of the pirut ship stopt suddent on comin to the oats, and commenst for to devour them. In vain the piruts swore and throwd stones and bottles at the hoss—he wouldn't ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne
... what I thought? I was bad! I was so bad that I was glad I was bad. Perhaps it was nerves. Maybe I really had taken care of the baby too long. But however that may be, for the first time in my life I enjoyed the consciousness of having a bad disposition—or perhaps I ought to say that I felt a fiendish satisfaction in the discovery that ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... white teeth grinning through his short black beard. His two clenched hands were raised above his head, and a heavy blackthorn stick lay across them. His dark, handsome, aquiline features were convulsed into a spasm of vindictive hatred, which had set his dead face in a terribly fiendish expression. He had evidently been in his bed when the alarm had broken out, for he wore a foppish embroidered night-shirt, and his bare feet projected from his trousers. His head was horribly injured, and the whole room ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Further report we read in the Democratic Evening Post of Vicksburg as follows: "When the two Negroes were captured, they were tied to trees, and while the funeral pyres were being prepared they were forced to suffer the most fiendish tortures. The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured, ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... jail guarded by one of his former slaves! The conduct of the negro troops was very well spoken of by their officers, but is the subject of a good deal of ribaldry among the white soldiers at Beaufort, who exhibit a degree of hatred really fiendish towards the black regiment, taking their cue from their commanding officer, ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... Tom said scornfully; "and do you beware, too. It is wild beasts like yourself who have brought disgrace and ruin on Spain. No defeat could dishonor and disgrace her as much as your fiendish cruelty. It is in revenge for the deeds that you and those like you do, that the French carry the sword and fire to your villages. We may drive the French out, but never will a country which fights by murder and treachery become a great ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... and brutality—thousands of chapters—that would touch the chords of sympathy to the very core of the heart. Many a poor child of destitution—prostrated by the sickness of the sea—has submitted to the direst tyranny and most fiendish abuse on the part of those who should have cheered and protected him, and many a one has carried to his far forest home a breast filled with resentment against the mariner of the ocean. It is a matter of great regret, that the governments ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... (so much against her nature was it to resign herself to him) that it would not have been so difficult with an ill-favoured man. With one horribly ugly, it would have been a horrible exultation to cast off her youth and take the fiendish leap. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Wilmot also leaned forward eagerly, but they could hear only the fiendish shrieking of the wind and the sullen ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... went on its momentous journey. Cook began to take a renewed interest in his platoon, and, having discovered the recalcitrant one of No. 11 actually coming on parade with only the front of the tip of his bayonet-scabbard polished, he took a fiendish delight in seeing the criminal writhing under the brutal and savage sentence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... conversation drifted to possible dangers. And it appeared there was not, in Her Majesty's dominions, a more lawless and fiendish set of ruffians than those who lurked in Kilronan. Why, what did they do in the days of the Lague? Didn't they take his predecessor, as honest a man as ever lived, and strip him, and nail him by the ears to his door, where his neighbors found him in the morning? But "the poluss? the poluss?" ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... and was totally defeated by Uncas in a battle on the Great Plain in the present township of Norwich. Encumbered with a coat of mail which his friend Gorton had given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured. By ordinary Indian usage he would have been put to death with fiendish torments, as soon as due preparations could be made and a fit company assembled to gloat over his agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas, threatening dire vengeance if harm were done to his ally. This message puzzled the Mohegan chief. The appearance of a schism ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... the clearing they saw directly before them a party of men dressed in the ragged uniforms of American cavalrymen, and all drew deep breaths of relief. Help seemed now at hand. But just as they sprang forward to join their supposed comrades a fiendish yell broke from the horsemen. In another instant the four unfortunates were rushing to cover, with a dozen Indians, all dressed in the clothing taken from dead soldiers, ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... on his fore-legs, bellowing all the time with agony. At this point the slaughterer would often leap lightly on to its back, stick his spurs in its sides, and, using the flat of his long knife as a whip, pretend to be riding a race, yelling with fiendish glee. The bellowing would subside into deep, awful, sob-like sounds and chokings; then the rider, seeing the animal about to collapse, would fling himself nimbly off. The beast down, they would all run to it, and throwing themselves on its quivering side as ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... a member, may I ask what is this object, the secret of which you guard with such fiendish ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... allow for these, throw the book out of the railway-carriage window! You have paid your money, and to the verdict of your pale morality or absurd sense of art in fiction I am therefore absolutely indifferent. You are too angelic for me; I am too fiendish for you. Let us agree to differ. I say nothing about my boyhood. Twenty-five years ago a poor boy-but no matter. I was that boy! I hurry on to the soaring period of manhood, 'when the strength, the nerve, the intellect is or should be at its height,' or are ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... ready for sleep. Then, as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose himself in English or French history until sleep conquered. His room-mate did not approve of this habit; it interfered with his own rest, and with his fiendish tendency to mischief he found reprisal in his own fashion. Knowing his companion's highly organized nervous system he devised means of torture which would induce him to put out the light. Once he tied a nail to a string; an arrangement which he kept on the floor behind the bed. Pretending ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Yukon, struggling along its creeks; Roaming its giant valleys, scaling its god-like peaks; Bathed in its fiery sunsets, fighting its fiendish cold, Twenty years in the Yukon ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... in a speculative way. She could not have told you, at the moment, why her first act had been to render the bomb impotent in so queer a manner when she could have simply destroyed the entire fuse. But, of course, no one would try to use the fiendish contrivance unless it ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... out upon her neck in a great ruff, which accentuated the fiendish ferocity of her, adding a hyena-like slope to her ungainly body. But it was in the expression of her face that she reached the climax of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... Brahmanic worship. At first a mountain lightning fiend, then identified with Rudra, a recognized deity, then made anthropomorphic. There are, especially in the South, a host of minor Hindu deities, half-acknowledged, all more or less of a fiendish nature in the eyes of the orthodox or even of the Civaite. Seen through such eyes they are no longer recognizable, but doubtless in many instances they represent a crude form of nature-worship or demonology, which has been taken from the cult of the wild ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... shattered by Mactavish's uncle, Bloomer's maiden aunt, and Wiggins' brother-in-law. I put on one side the statement of Mirfin's grandmother because her allegation that 193 trains passed her house one night might have been based on the shunting of a single goods train. One knows the fiendish persistency of the shunted goods ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... anybody be fiendish enough to have tried to destroy that ship even before it was launched? How could a German spy have got into ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... yelling below his windows; that, on rising in great agitation, he was startled by the sudden appearance of "The Northern Star," rolled hard, and bent into the form of a boomerang, or East-Indian club, that sailed into the window, described a number of fiendish circles in the room, knocked over the light, slapped the baby's face, "took" him (the subscriber) "in the jaw," and then returned out of the window, and dropped helplessly in the area. During the rest of ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... shortly we found ourselves in a small, paved courtyard. It was a perfect summer's night, and the deep blue vault above was jeweled with myriads of starry points. How impossible it seemed to reconcile that vast, eternal calm with the hideous passions and fiendish agencies which that night had loosed ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... bottles. "Help yourself," and he proceeded to make himself a sandwich. "You see, I live the simple life out here. I've got an old couple to look after the place—Mr. and Mrs. Hargis. Mrs. Hargis is an excellent cook—but to ask her to stay awake till midnight would be fiendish cruelty. So she leaves me a lunch in the ice-box, and goes quietly off to bed. I'll give you some berries for breakfast such as you don't often get in New York—and the cream—wait till you try it! ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... popularity of the general had caused to be regarded with more affectionate veneration than any other structure in the province." On Good Friday, the 17th of April, 1840,[141] a miscreant of the name of Lett introduced a quantity of gunpowder into this monument with the fiendish purpose of destroying it; and the explosion, effected by a train, caused so much damage as to render the column altogether irreparable. Lett, who was by birth an Irishman and by settlement a Canadian, had been compelled to fly into the United States for his share ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... appeared lost in thought. Suddenly his face became illumined by a fiendish light, and he rubbed his hands in ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... be quite sure that the accident at Bolsover was the result of a deliberate murderous design, or indeed of anything more than the accidental catastrophe of a blundering fit of temper—criminal, if you like, and cowardly, but not fiendish. And his conscience made coward enough of him just now to cause him to hesitate before plunging into ruin one who, hateful as he was to him, was after all a poor wretch, miserable enough for ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... and hair, and clawlike fingers ever clutching convulsively, as though he longed to have all things within his grasp. Whenever he appeared above the waves, it was only to pursue and overturn vessels, and to greedily drag them to the bottom of the sea, a vocation in which he was thought to take fiendish delight. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... Rebel Government had determined upon a barbarous policy in dealing with captured Negro soldiers,—and barbarous as that policy was, the rebel soldiers exceeded its cruel provisions tenfold. Their treatment of Negroes was perfectly fiendish. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... few minutes after there was nothing but confusion in the room. Elsworthy had been standing behind backs, with a half-fiendish look of rage and disappointment on his commonplace features. "Let them help her as likes; I washes my hands of her," he cried bitterly, when he saw her fall; and then rushed into the midst of the room, thrusting the others out of his way. The man was beside himself with mortification, with disgust, ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... was done; and when my eyes became somewhat accustomed to the suddenly dazzling light and glare, I saw Levasseur and the clerk Dubarle standing directly in front of me, their faces kindled into flame by fiendish triumph and delight. The report that they had been drowned was then a mistake, and they had incurred the peril of returning to this country for the purpose of avenging themselves upon me; and how could it be doubted that an opportunity, achieved at such fearful risk, would be effectually, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Mr. Wilson tumbelled, and laffin a fiendish grin, he sung out in axcents wild: "Get me a Gatlin Gun, and lode it down to the mussle with thirty-leven charges of dannymite, and let me get a shot, at that incorragerbel imp ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... these cases we are shocked at the utter absence of the sentiment relating to the sanctity of human life. But our horror at this fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that the victims are not strangers but members of the same family. I must defer to the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom of slaughtering sick relatives and aged parents; here I will confine myself to a few words regarding ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Jim's career, in its way, is interesting to us. He has spent already six years in prison for manslaughter, and a year for a brutal assault upon a constable. Guiseppe was tried in his native country for a particularly fiendish murder, and escaped, owing, I believe, to some legal technicality. That, however, has nothing to do with the matter. These men have sworn to fight to the death, and the girl, I understand, is willing to return to Jim if he should be successful, or to remain ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... finger thicker than his father's loins. He headed a grand parade, and brought with him a supply of new garments, which he had purchased as bribes for the occasion. With the bishop and others, he entered the house of every Protestant, and by bribes and promises, followed by fiendish threats, carried off many captives. Some few had previously sold themselves, and agreed to take their stand on this occasion, and then they headed the crowd, and declared that every Protestant had decided to return, and that Protestantism was ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... were posts, one side of which was roughly planed. On the upper part of each of these posts was a rude carving of a hideous human face with prominent teeth. The cheeks and teeth were slightly coloured. A most fiendish appearance was presented by these figures, called by the Koreans syou-sal-mak-i, and if looks counted for anything, they ought well to serve their purpose,—the scaring away of evil spirits from the village near which the figures always stood. The mile-posts, ...
— Our Little Korean Cousin • H. Lee M. Pike
... for one moment granted to Union sympathizers by rebel authorities in the South. They never have a word to say against the way in which loyalty to the Union is there crushed down by imprisonment, banishment, confiscation, and hanging. They have never a word to say against the brutal and fiendish atrocities of cruelty perpetrated there upon all who are even suspected of Union sentiments. They reserve all their indignation for the moderate repression which our Administration has seen fit, in some cases, to apply to traitorous ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Bell turned ghastly pale. Mrs. Butler saw that she had unexpectedly driven a nail home, and with fiendish glee ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial within him, what is there left for us to refer to it, but the fiendish? Passion without any ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... came the news of the infamous story of the brig Carl and her fiendish owner, a Dr. Murray, who with half a dozen other scoundrels committed the most awful crimes—shooting down in cold blood scores of natives who refused to be coerced into "recruiting". Some of these ruffians went to the scaffold or to long terms of imprisonment; and from that time ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... the mothers do it! It seems to me that there's nothing too fiendish or diabolical for these people to do. Why, in some of the islands they have an institution called the Aroi, and the persons connected with that body are ready for any wickedness that mortal ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... spent in this fiendish work, and no attempt was made to rescue him. Towards sundown the body was dragged into his own back-yard, his regimentals all torn from him, except his pantaloons, leaving the naked body, from the waist up, a mass of mangled ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... and statistics of story-paper and dime-novel publishers. The illustrated papers which can be bought and are bought by youth are crammed to overflowing with details of vice and barbarity. They have columns headed "A Melange of Murder," "Fillicide, or a Son killing a Father," "Lust and Blood," "Fiendish Assassination," "Particulars of the Hanging of John C. Kelly," "Carving a Darky," "An Interesting Divorce Case in Boston," "A Band of Juvenile Jack Sheppards." And the pictures match the reading,—a jealous lover shooting a half-naked girl; a father murdering his family; ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... man have fun, Indian have fun, too." And it is a valid excuse, from one point of view. When "there's nothing in caribou" except the value of the tongue, the tongue has been cut out of the living deer, whose only other value is considered to be the amusement afforded by his horrible fate. And, fiendish cruelty like this is not confined to the outer wilds. When some civilized English-speaking bird-catchers get a bird they do not want, they will deliberately wrench its bill apart, so that it must die of lingering ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... might more fiendish than that of most other ghosts, that he spoke in this fashion: 'Great eagerness have you shown to meet me, Grettir, and little wonder will it be though you get no great good fortune from me; but this I may tell you, that you have now received only half of the strength and vigour that was destined ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... prisoners placed him foremost in the ranks of "British beasts" that have disgraced the pages of history, and earned for him the unenviable title of "The Butcher of Culloden." It has been suggested in extenuation of his fiendish conduct that His Grace was "deep in his cups" the night before the battle, and that the General to whom the order was given, realizing the condition of the Duke, insisted that his instructions should be reduced to writing. His Grace thereupon angrily seized a playing card from ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... crossed his dark visage as he crept to the edge of the underwood and saw the schooner at anchor in the bay. This was succeeded by a fiendish grin of exultation as his eye fell on the slumbering form of the youth. He instantly took advantage of the opportunity; and so deeply was he engrossed with his murderous intention, that he did not observe the captain of the schooner as he turned a projecting rock, and suddenly ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... land of the living? Ye gods, what a fiendish night! Many thanks for the beacon! It's kept me straight for more than ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... proud man, learned man, civilized man, over all the plans of man, over every man, and over every association of men, even the largest, the widest, the mightiest. And now the Infidel, having taken away our hope of help from heaven, comes with the serpent's hiss, and fiendish sneer, to taunt the perishing world with this miserable truism—that the tendency of everything on earth is to perdition, and that it needs no inspiration to tell it. Truly it does not. Were that all the prophets of God had to tell us—as it is all the prophets of Infidelity can prophecy—we ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... I raised the jug And took one lovin' pull - I was holler clar from skull to boots. It seemed I couldn't git full. But I was roused by a fiendish laugh That might have raised the dead - Them ornary sneaks had sot the clock A half ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... myself, ashamed of my fears; "a poor innocent bird—a companion and watcher of the dead, and therefore its voice is full of sorrowful lamentation—but it is harmless," and I crept on with increased caution. Suddenly out of the dense darkness there stared two large yellow eyes, glittering with fiendish hunger and cruelty. For a moment I was startled, and stepped back; the creature flew at me with the ferocity of a tiger-cat! I fought with the horrible thing in all directions; it wheeled round my head, it pounced toward my face, it beat me with its ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... and sorrow, and evil enough in this fallen world of ours, that meddling gossips must needs poison the few pure springs of enjoyment and peace? Not the hatred of the Theban brothers could more thoroughly accomplish this fiendish design than the whisper of detraction, the sneer of malice, or the fatal innuendo of envious, low-bred tattlers. Human life is shielded by the bulwark of legal provisions, and most earthly possessions are similarly protected; but there are assassins whom the judicial ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... convenient. His custom for years was to effect policies of insurance on the lives of his relations, and then at the proper time administer strychnine to his victims. The heart sickens at the recital of his brutal crimes. On the life of a beautiful young girl named Abercrombie this fiendish wretch effected an insurance at various offices for L18,000 before he sent her to her account with the rest of his poisoned too-confiding relatives. So many heavily insured ladies dying in violent convulsions drew attention to the gentleman who always called to collect the money. ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... adorable alacrity. And as far as she was concerned, the matter was settled. You would have thought, however, that Caspian would be the rock I'd split on, now that he has a "say" in the affairs of Patricia. But the Winstons and I hadn't forgotten this chance in our calculations. We expected C. to take a fiendish joy in the prospect of kicking me when I was down: "putting me into my place" and making love to Miss Moore before my starting eyes—a great triumph for him after the very different Long Island trip in the same car with some of the same passengers. Well, we were as right as ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... sword-thrust, which ended a life so fraught with daring and danger, he sprang like a tiger at the throat of Santa Anna, his face wearing even in death this expression of fiendish, ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... "Oh fiendish!" his interlocutor said with a short smothered laugh that might have represented for a spectator a sudden start at such a flash of analysis from such ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... himself, the amazed cat screeched in unison when that sound first smote his ears. He slunk away and hid for hours in his remotest lair, wondering if it would follow him. When, in the course of weeks, he grew so far accustomed to the fiendish sound that he could go about his hunting within half a mile of it, he found that the saws had worked him an unspeakable injury. They had fouled his ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... to be with him I hate, once more, And now accuse him of the fiendish deed That I through chance averted. Now I too Command him to return to his true wife, And no more cross my path; should he remain, He shall but wait to meet her, for my words Already have been sent ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
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