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More "Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it,' and he drew his dagger. The poor fellow stretched out his throat, and awaited the stroke with a ghastly smile. Raphael caught his eye; his heart ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... met his wife on the stairs. She had somewhat recovered her calmness on the road, and as he interrogated her with a searching glance, she made a ghastly effort ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... now's de time! Git up quick, deary, but fer de Lawd's sake doan' make no noise! Follow de ole woman—dis way.' I got up at once and obeyed her. It was a ghastly sort of thing, this Marse Edwin business, but I saw a chance of escape at the bottom of it. We went to the lower part of the house on tip-toe, and the negress, opening the street door, pushed me ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... drew off his mailed gauntlet, and gave Gascoyne's hand one last final clasp, strong, earnest, and intense with the close friendship of young manhood, and poor Gascoyne looked up at him with a face ghastly white. ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... man got up. He spread out his arms; and he shouted, with a great voice, like the heroes of the Iliad. The two wounds were mortal; they were hideous, ghastly wounds, ripping up the vital organs in the man's body and severing the great arteries. The splendid pagan knew he had received his death wounds; and, true to his atavistic ideal, the ideal of the Greek, the Hebrew and the Roman, ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... the light where all of us could see—the thing Rolldown had discarded from his treasures, that I had picked up and been robbed of in the kindly dark—the old brown casket-thing with the polished surfaces and the bits of intricate and ghastly carvings that had once let in the light of day and the sound of words—the old, brown, sea-bitten, sand-scoured skull of Andrew Blake, with the two gold teeth in the upper jaw dulled by the tarnishing tides that had brought it up slowly from its bed in the bottom of the sea. And to think ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... chest—Life and Death on the Ocean—quarto-sized and printed in agate. It was filled with mutiny, murder, storm, open-boat cannibalism and agonies of thirst, handspike and cutlass inhumanities. No shark, pirate nor man-killing whale had been missed; no ghastly wreck, derelict nor horrifying phantom of the sea had escaped the nameless, furious compiler. For four days and nights, Andrew glared consumingly into this terrible book, and when he came to the writhing "Finis," involved in a sort of typhoon tailpiece—he was whipped, and never could bring ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... excused this seeming weakness to a companion thus: "Tim, I haven't cried this twenty year; but they were all good boys, and my countrymen." The next day when the roll was called, and they answered not, we thought of their ghastly faces as we laid them in the trench, and hearts beat quick. When we sat down to eat and missed a messmate, the query went round, "Will it be my turn next?" A comrade's faults were now forgotten, his good qualities magnified, and all ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... and I suppose I'll be as lonely with my success as you with your adversity. Think of it—that people feel hurt by your fortune! Oh, it's ghastly ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... couldn't bear the thought of your moping here by yourself, and it was a ghastly shame of Weevil ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... Tree of the Triple Bough And the ghastly Dreams that tend you, Your growth began with the life of Man And only his death can end you: They may tug in line at your hempen twine, They may flourish with axe and saw, But your taproot drinks of the Sacred Springs In the ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... in the apartment, and he felt the hair rising upon his head, and cold drops of sweat trickling down his brow. His ghastly and bewildered look was hardly noticed by his parents and sister during the first moments of salutation; and, when it was, the excuse was illness and fatigue. He could neither eat nor drink, (it seemed as if he had lost altogether the faculty of swallowing,) but sat silent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... temple and an obsequious "Yes, Ma'am," any romance that had gathered round him fled away, leaving the saddest of all sad facts in living guise before me. Not only did the manhood seem to die out of him, but the comeliness that first attracted me; for, as he turned, I saw the ghastly wound that had laid open cheek and forehead. Being partly healed, it was no longer bandaged, but held together with strips of that transparent plaster which I never see without a shiver and swift recollections of scenes with which it is associated ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... back, with her face turned toward Angelica. There were deep lines of suffering marked upon it, and her eyes glittered feverishly, but otherwise she was gray and ghastly, and old. It was the horrible look of age that impressed Angelica. There were three gentlemen present, the bishop, Dr. Galbraith, and Sir ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Society, that he promoted their efforts within his own dominions to the utmost of his ability." He pointed to the condition of Spain, which was "overspread with the thickest gloom of heathenish ignorance, beneath which the fiends and demons of the abyss seem to be holding their ghastly revels." He described it as "a country in which all sense of right and wrong is forgotten . . . where the name of Jesus is scarcely ever mentioned but in blasphemy, and His precepts [are] almost utterly unknown . . . [where] the few who are enlightened ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... people drawn from widely separated parts of Saladin's dominions. Here were Nubians from the Nile, tall and powerful men, jet black in skin, with lines of red and white paint on their faces, giving a ghastly and wild appearance to them. On their shoulders were skins of lions and other wild animals. They carried short bows, and heavy clubs studded with iron. By them were the Bedouin cavalry, light, sinewy men, brown as berries, with white turbans and garments. Near these were the cavalry ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... And Hecuba's ghastly low-voiced 'In a crowd we are terrible!'—[Greek: deinon to plethos]—as she and her women turn upon the Thracian, put out his eyes, and tear his children ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Cumberland River. That's where she's bound for, if she don't stop before she gets there Guess there ain't many of 'em inquired where she was goin', or cared much," he added, with a ghastly effort ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... rioted down the thoroughfare. Men rushed forth from every quarter, and the ghastly object in the dirt was hidden by a seething mass ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... of adverse circumstances as the combined result of parental egotism and pedantic, pedagogical ignorance, is it wonderful, I would ask, that the ghastly record of the hideous sacrifice of child-life is what it is, and that the young lives which do by chance escape the horrible holocaust, still reap the prevailing harvest of prolific ills of which the coming explanation will ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... at last experienced all that he had dreaded. He was utterly overcome. White, ghastly, trembling from head to foot, he stared at Talbot with something like horror in his face, yet he could not move. He stood shuddering, ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... Captain?" cried Doe, struggling again to rise, while Bruce drew the girl gently from his arms. "Is it the captain?" he repeated, bending his eager looks and countenance ghastly with wounds upon the Virginian. "They han't murdered you then? I'm glad on it, captain;—I'll die the easier, captain! And the gal, too?" he exclaimed, as his eyes fell upon Edith, who, scarce knowing in her horror what she did, but instinctively ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... flower from the bouquets on the table, or when the handmaiden came round to him with a dish of leguminous vegetables, could readily have been traced by a clairvoyant to associations connected with the ghastly belladonna and with the deadly bean of St. Ignatius the Martyr. For Mr. Arcubus had now arrived at the investigation of the positive poisons,—a fact which might have revealed itself to the man of science by the general narcotico-acrid expression ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... horrid burdens into the great pit at Aldgate; the bells of London tolled all day and all night for the passing of human souls. Hundreds of homes, isolated because of a victim of the plague found therein, became ghastly breeding-places of the disease, and then silent, disgusting graves. If a man shivered in fear, or staggered from weakness, or for very hunger turned sick, he was marked as a victim, and despite his protests was huddled away with the real victims to die the awful death. From every church, where ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... amusement. He considered Viola in corals as too rude a jest to share with her. Had poor Viola once grasped Harold Lind's estimation of her she would have as soon gazed upon herself in her coffin. Harold's comprehension of the essentials was beyond Jane Carew's. It was fairly ghastly, partaking of the nature of X-rays, but it never disturbed Harold Lind. He went along his dance-track undisturbed, his blue eyes never losing their high lights of glee, his lips never losing their inscrutable smile at some happy understanding ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... started, gazed wildly on the face of the dead, turned ghastly pale and, with a low moan and suffocating sob, fell fainting into the ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... is at his work, cutting of him down, hewing both bark and heart, both body and soul asunder. The man groans, but death hears him not; he looks ghastly, carefully, dejectedly; he sighs, he sweats, he trembles, but death ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... there scarcely a mile to the east lay the camp of the traders. In the morning they would ride into the Indian camp saddled with bright beads and colored calicoes. In the morning—Carl shuddered and lay very quiet, fighting again the ghastly torment that had racked and driven him into the melancholy solitude of the Everglades. Now the firelit palmetto roof of the wigwam he knew to be Diane's seemed somehow, to his distorted fancy, redder than the others—the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... Frayne start and shiver as a little scream escaped her. I didn't wonder. Even I, knowing that it was an illusion and a snare, felt my flesh creeping as I looked at the ghastly thing in the window. ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Fanny; "but one must always think of one's self—at least, I am afraid I must. Not that I mean to be selfish," she added, seeing a look of consternation spread over Miss Symes's face. "The fact is this, St. Cecilia, I have had the most horrible fright. Those ghastly little creatures the twins—the Vivian twins—brought a most enormous spider into your room, hid it in the center of my bed, and then ran away again. I never saw such a monster! I was afraid to go near the creature at ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... be said of Ernest Renan that he was toniours seminariste, and there is a flavour of the pulpit in these beautiful sentences. Beautiful indeed they are, and not more beautiful than true. The implacable Mary, whose ghastly epithet clings to her for all time, like the shirt of Nessus, found in Pole an apt and zealous pupil in persecution. Both are excellent specimens of their Church, because according to that Church they are absolutely blameless. Punctilious in the discharge ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... retire, or I shall not be able to sleep": upon which, whilst he held up the lamp she opened the bundle. Guess, guess at the astonishment of the tailor and his wife, when, instead of seeing a suit of clothes, they discovered, wrapped in a napkin, in its most horrid and ghastly ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... motion from 'Tana. She had not uttered a word yet. All she could do was to stare in wonder at the wreck of a woman before her—a painted wreck; for, even on her deathbed, the ghastly face ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... a ghastly stare and wheeled away to stride down the path. Once he turned to flash his convulsed face at Lucy. Then he passed out of sight among the trees ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... came a period of unusual irritation, to which we owe, in part at least, Carlyle's railings against progress and his deplorable criticism of England's great men and women,—poor little Browning, animalcular De Quincey, rabbit-brained Newman, sawdustish Mill, chattering George Eliot, ghastly-shrieky Shelley, once-enough Lamb, stinted-scanty Wordsworth, poor thin fool Darwin and his book (The Origin of Species, of which Carlyle confessed he never read a page) which was wonderful as an example of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of her injured husband, together with his ghastly paleness disturbed her, and her inquietude grew to painful anxiety as he maintained silence. At length he said "I have learned to love you truly and passionately, my wife, and now you show me how you have returned the affection which my heart bestowed upon you. You are right when you accuse me of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... thing, if you want to make a ghost," said Tod Yorke, "is to get a tin plate full of salt and gin, and set it alight, and wrap yourself round with a sheet, and hold the plate so that the flame lights up your face. You never saw anything so ghastly. Scooped-out turnips ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... every sadness he had his own achievements to set. There was Rome in its marble visibly about him, that he had found in brick and in ruins; Rome now capable of centuries of life, that had been, when he came to it, a ghastly putridity. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... aside their veils, and the flickering light of the dim lamp gave a ghastly and unearthly appearance to their pale and severe countenances. They were all three elderly persons: and their aspect was of that cold, forbidding nature, which precludes hope on the part of any one who might have to ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... his head and held the cup to his lips. Chance stood in the middle of the room strangely subdued, yet he watched each movement of his master with alert eyes. The moonlight faded from the window and the fire died down. The air became chill as the faint light of dawn crept in to emphasize the ghastly picture—the barren, rough-boarded room, the rusted stove, the towering figure of Sundown, impassively waiting; and the shattered, shrunken figure of the Mexican, hopeless and helpless, as the morning mesas welcomed the golden glow of dawn ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... slightly with horror. The whole face of things was to her livid and ghastly. Being a moralist rather than an artist, coming of fervent Wesleyan stock, she began to scourge herself. She had done wrong again. Looking back, no one had she touched without hurting. She had a destructive force; anyone she embraced she injured. Faint voices echoed back from her conscience. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... Artie lying in a sheltered spot, on a hastily constructed couch of pine boughs. Over the wounded young man stood Surgeon Farnwright, binding up a ghastly wound ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... Tump Pack detached himself from the group and gave a pantomime of thrusting. He was clearly reproducing the action which had won for him his military medal. Then suddenly he fell down in the dust and writhed. He was mimicking with a ghastly realism the death-throes of his four victims. His audience howled with mirth at this dumb show of the bayonet-fight and of killing four men. Tump himself got up out of the dust with tears of laughter in his eyes. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... he did not see a strange, level mass of gray that advanced slowly toward him. From a distance to the lay observer this mass would have looked like an ordinary cloud-bank, but the experienced eyes of a fisherman would have discerned its ghastly gray hue and its ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... being visible, she yet shed a little glimmer of light over the plain, revealing a world as wild as ever the frozen north outspread—as wild as ever poet's despairing vision of desolation. I see it! I see it! but how shall I make my reader see it with me? It was ghastly. The only similitude of life was the perplexed and multitudinous motion of the drifting, falling flakes. No shape was to be seen, no sound but that of the wind to be heard. It was like the dream of a delirious ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... now ghastly, and was listening with breathless earnestness to his visitor. Merriman realized what he had always suspected, that the man was weak and a bit of a coward, and he began to believe his bluff would ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... very wide, and I had the headlight taken off of our engine and placed on the bank; and presently a wrecker came up from the south, and her headlight was similarly placed, casting a ghastly weird, white light over the scene of suffering and desolation. I cut in a wrecking office, Truxton took off his ground, I put on mine, and Mr. Antwerp was soon in possession of all the facts. A little later ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... my ghastly countenance, Peggy commanded the nurse to take the child from the room. Theresa followed with lingering steps, casting back upon me a glance of pity and remorse. I never saw ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... prostitution or mortality. Those that die are, like factory children that die, instantly succeeded by new competitors for misery and death." There is no hour of a summer's or a winter's night, in which there may not be found in the streets a ghastly wretch, expiring under the double tortures of disease and famine. Though less aggravated in its features, the picture of prostitution in New York or Philadelphia would ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... never can I forget her countenance—pale, ghastly pale she looked; she was seated to be undressed, and attended by Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave and Miss Goldsworthy ; her whole frame was disordered, yet she was still and quiet. These two ladies assisted me to undress her, or rather ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... from a gangway near; then one of my own boys came, exclaiming, 'Oh, Miss! I prayed to Jesus, and He saved me.' Then the deck became a fearful scene of confusion, poor foreigners weeping, and oh! the mutilated men and women, ghastly with fright, some of their faces ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... after a prolonged resistance, when all the other cities of Asia Minor had surrendered. Twelve years later it was captured by Timur, who built a wall with the corpses of his prisoners. A fragment of the ghastly structure is in the library of Lincoln cathedral. The town is connected by railway with Afium-Kara-Hissar and Smyrna. It is dirty and ill-built; but, standing on elevated ground and commanding the extensive and fertile plain of the Hermus, presents at ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... scourged the slave's bare back, The red blood running down at every stroke, The dark skin clinging ghastly to the lash. No moan escaped him at the stinging pain. Tremblingly he stood, and patiently bore all; His heart indignant, shaking his broad breast, Strong as the heart that Hippodamia wept, Which with the cold, intrusive ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... the body of her dead husband cutting out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eaten. The daughter was seen eating the father; and the mother, that [viz. body] of her children; children, that of father and mother. The emaciated, wild, and ghastly appearance of the survivors added to the horror of it. Language can not describe the awful change that a few weeks of dire suffering had wrought in the minds of the wretched and pitiable beings. Those who one month before would have shuddered and sickened at the thought ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... closed, and her breathing laboured under her failing strength. She had put forth a tremendous effort, and the reaction was terrible. The ghastly hue of her cheeks and lips terrified Steve. He dreaded lest at that moment the final struggle was actually ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... the inert figures and sleepily regarded us before it dropped back into the shadows. The stranded ship, the recumbent men, the mountain flaming overhead—it was like a phantom world into which had been suddenly thrust this ghastly and incredible reality. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Of ghosts, And that without reflectors; And creepy things With wings, And gaunt and grisly spectres! He can fill you crowds Of shrouds, And horrify you vastly; He can rack your brains With chains, And gibberings grim and ghastly. Then, if you plan it, he Changes organity With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity - Driving your foes to the verge of insanity. Barring tautology, In demonology, 'Lectro biology, Mystic nosology, Spirit philology, High class astrology, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Melville, to whom she was telling it, saw nothing but perhaps a lesson on the duty of having chimneys regularly swept, because of the danger to neighboring thatch. But had not Annie been seated in the shadow, her ghastly countenance would, even to the most casual glance, have betrayed a certain guilty horror, for now she knew that she had found and given away what she ought at once to have handed back to its rightful owner. It was true he did not even know that he had lost it, and could have ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... thing he saw was his grandfather propped up in bed, with a ghastly pallor on his face. When he beheld his truant grandson, the scowl upon his brow deepened, and he ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... on which he founded the story. In his water-side wanderings during his last book, the many handbills he saw posted up, with dreary description of persons drowned in the river, suggested the 'long shore men and their ghastly calling whom he sketched in Hexam and Riderhood, "I think," he had written, "a man, young and perhaps eccentric, feigning to be dead, and being dead to all intents and purposes external to himself, and for years retaining ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... The officers were elegantly dressed and were in great spirits, thinking it was only a pleasant little enterprise to go over to Charlestown and drive those Yankees out of their fort; but when they returned it was a sad sight. The dead and dying were carried through the streets pale and ghastly and covered with blood. She said the people witnessed the battle from the houses in Boston, and as regiment after regiment was swept down by the terrible fire of the Americans, they said that the British were feigning to be frightened and falling ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... All sorts of tales were told of great blazing skeletons that dashed out from the gate with dart in hand, and of a skull that breathed out red fire from a blazing mouth, and grinned and gibbered at them. As to the noises and the ghastly green fire, none could account for them, and I do believe that there is not a villager who would approach within a quarter of a mile of the house after dark, ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... house, where he was concealed by one of the women, and though the savages made vigorous search for him, he remained undiscovered. You can imagine the horrible sight the fort presented when the sun went down, the soldiers in their red uniforms lying there scalped and mangled, a ghastly heap under the summer sky. And to just think it was only a short time ago, a little more than ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... make it quite likely that there were really two apparitions of the Tree is this fact: From the most ancient times if one saw a villager of ours with his face ash-white and rigid with a ghastly fright, it was common for every one to whisper to his neighbor, "Ah, he is in sin, and has got his warning." And the neighbor would shudder at the thought and whisper back, "Yes, poor soul, he ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... meantime, the caitiff minister had reached his manse, and found a ghastly loneliness awaiting him—oh, how much deeper than that of the woman he had forsaken! She had lost her repute and her baby; he had lost his God! He had never seen his shape, and had not his word abiding in him; and now the vision of him was closed in an unfathomable abyss of darkness, far, ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... than an hour they returned, bringing with them a keen-eyed, tall young man, who had a number of tools wrapped in an apron. Evidently he was unused to such scenes, for he became deathly pale upon seeing the ghastly spectacle on my bed. With staring eyes and open mouth he began to ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... terrors. Her breath came quick and short, a film came over her eyes, and cold drops of sweat stood upon her forehead, yet she would not now have left the room without penetrating into the mystery of death. Miss Thusa laid her hand upon the sheet and turned it back from the pale and ghastly face, on whose brow the mysterious signet of everlasting rest was set. Still, immovable, solemn, placid—it lay beneath the gaze, with shrouded eye, and cheek like concave marble, and hueless, waxen lips. What depth, what grandeur, what duration in that repose! ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... on or below the level of the ground, and the floor, as well as the lower end of the planks which formed the walls, was black with moisture. The cell was littered with straw and every kind of indescribable filth, while the walls and ceiling were mildewed and spotted with ghastly growths of mould, feeding on the moist and filthy vapors, which were even more ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... them, the Indians perceaved that those were no men descended from heaven. Some of them, therefore, hidd their victualls, others hidd their wives and their children. Some other fledd into the mountaines to seperate themselves afarr of from a nation of so harde natured and ghastly conversation. The Spaniardes buffeted them with their fistes and bastianadoes, pressinge also to lay their handes on the lordes of the townes. And these cases ended in so greate an hazarde and desperatnes, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... though it seemed ages to us, a whole posse came flying down the hill. The incessant lightning made all things appear as in the glare of day. Mata's curly hair fairly stood on end, and his eyes rolled with ghastly ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... Noland's appearance to terrify the girl as he lay before her, wasted and woebegone, his low forehead blue-veined and colourless, his hands blue-veined and transparent, and all his shrunken figure sharply outlined under the thin summer covering of the bed with ghastly and suggestive significance. Instantly she wanted to go down by his side and with her arms about him give him the sympathy and comfort his lonely heart craved, but because it was so deliciously tempting she ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... me," she continued. "Do not be sad," she added, observing her mother's pale and ghastly countenance. "I am going to a world where no one is sick, and no one ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... of the Slave Trade tried to enlist this winning voice in the service of their cause. Cowper disliked the task, but he wrote two or three anti-Slave-Trade ballads. The Slave Trader in the Dumps, with its ghastly array of horrors dancing a jig to a ballad metre, justifies the shrinking of an artist from a subject hardly fit ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... from their seats and hauled from side to side, their liveries were in ribbands, their terrified faces, ghastly with terror and streaming with blood, might be seen one moment in one place, the next in another, sometimes they seemed down on the ground. The crowd roared with rage and laughter at their cries. One lady swooned with terror, one or two crouched on ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ways of telling ghastly stories on Hallowe'en. Have a large ball of different colored yarn handy and before the midnight hour, turn out the lights, and ask all the players to sit in a circle. The hostess, holding the ball of yarn, begins by telling some weird story, unwinding the yarn as she proceeds, until ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
... passage; With his mittens and his snow-shoes Vainly walked he through the forest, Sought for bird or beast and found none, Saw no track of deer or rabbit, In the snow beheld no footprints, In the ghastly, gleaming forest Fell, and could not rise from weakness, Perished there from cold and hunger. Oh the famine and the fever! Oh the wasting of the famine! Oh the blasting of the fever! Oh the wailing of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... own clothing, and, with a shudder, put on the leggings and breechcloth of the dead Indian. Then Shif'less Sol and Tom Ross painted him from the waist up in a ghastly manner, and, with their heartfelt wishes for his safety and success, he departed for the camp, the others following in silence not far behind. He soon heard the sound of the chant and he knew that the orgie was proceeding. An Indian dance could ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... shuddered to conjecture. That he, Scout Harris, whose reputation for being wide awake had gone far and wide in the world of scouting, should be carried away unwittingly by a pair of thieves and find himself in imminent peril of being added to that ghastly galaxy of "dead ones." It ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... remember," I said, "that I should like very much to see you again before you go." "I don't know what's to prevent you. The damned thing won't make me invisible," he said with intense bitterness,—"no such luck." And then at the moment of taking leave he treated me to a ghastly muddle of dubious stammers and movements, to an awful display of hesitations. God forgive him—me! He had taken it into his fanciful head that I was likely to make some difficulty as to shaking hands. It was too awful for words. I believe I shouted suddenly at him as you would bellow to a ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... to the Treasury came the exhibition of the Ochavo, the octagonal chapel of dark marbles, that pantheon of relics where the most repulsive human remains—skulls with their ghastly grin, mummified arms and worn-eaten vertebras—were shown in gold or silver shrines. The gross and credulous piety of former days displayed itself in the full tide of unbelief, so that even Don Antolin, ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the perfume of the roses into the open window came the stench of this hideous parody, as if in mockery. I removed it, and another appeared in the same place shortly afterward. The earthman was rampant and insulting. Pan is not dead yet. At least he still makes a ghastly sign ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... and rustled mournfully. With the exception of the riders and an occasional Gila monster, no life was discernible. Cacti of all shapes and sizes reared aloft their forbidding spines or spread out along the sand. All was dead, ghastly; all was oppressive, startlingly repellent in its sinister promise; all was ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... bridegroom whom the lady had captured. There he was before my panic-stricken eyes! The wedding was exactly as I had already described it. It took place in London, just as I had said. The remembrance that the book had passed beyond my own control, the irrevocability of certain ghastly sentences, came over me in a flash, together with the certainty that, however earnestly I might deny, swear, take solemn oaths on family Bibles, nothing, nothing, not even a voice from heaven, much less that of a rural dean still on earth, could ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... surrender; others fled to Spain, in the hope of stirring up some movement there against England, or at least of finding a place of shelter. Ireland was suffering almost everywhere from famine, and in many districts famine of the most ghastly order. Tyrone found it impossible to carry on the struggle for independence under such terrible conditions. There was nothing for it but to surrender and come to terms as best he could ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... hospital, or at Mr. Ramsden's," said Ethel, with a ghastly suspicion that he thought Margaret in a state to ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... gleamed in a swarthy fist. Undaunted the braves of Wakawa's band Leaped into the thicket with lance and knife, And grappled the Chippeways hand to hand; And foe with foe, in the deadly strife, Lay clutching the scalp of his foe and dead, With a tomahawk sunk in his ghastly head, Or his still heart sheathing a bloody blade. Like a bear in the battle Wakawa raves, And cheers the hearts of his falling braves. But a panther crouches along his track— He springs with a yell on Wakawa's back! The tall chief, stabbed to the heart, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... is all reminiscence and anticipation—if you can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak of it, ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... cloudy day; and heavy volumes of vapor are wreathing and unwreathing themselves around the gaunt forms of the everlasting rocks, like human reasonings, desires, and hopes around the ghastly realities of life and death; graceful, undulating, and sometimes gleaming out in silver or rosy wreaths. Still, they are nothing but mist; the dread realities are just where they were before. It is odd, though, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... armor. So for five long minutes the gallant horsemen of Spain and of France strove ever and again to force a passage, until the wailing note of a bugle called them back, and they rode slowly out of bow-shot, leaving their best and their bravest in the ghastly, blood-mottled ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pretence of the girl was stripped from her. She was a ghastly, pitiable sight, as she stood there, her big eyes fixed on Dicky, her breath coming unevenly in ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... sister. Annette, driven to desperation, came to me with her story the night of the Match. She was awfully cut up, poor girl. I had to leave the dance and go right off to Toronto. Too late for the train, I drove straight through,—ghastly roads,—found Tony, fetched him back, and up till yesterday he has been hiding in his own home. Meantime, I managed to get things fixed up—paid his debts, the prosecution is withdrawn and now he wants,—or, rather, he doesn't want ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... swept the landscape, with a voice of dirge, while the rain poured down in torrents. For long hours Zulma knelt beside the inanimate form. M. Belmont sat at the head of the bed with the rigidity of a corpse. But for the ever Watchful Eye over that stricken house, who knows what ghastly scene the morning ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... the sons of Mohammed Bahadur were once dragged forth to die by daring Hodson's smoking pistols, their slaughtered shades grinned over the ghastly vengeance ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... remark might have been meant for a covert reference to his own thievish tendencies, Wapoota restrained his somewhat ghastly humour, while the chief continued his arrangements ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... have lived in such a country," he told himself, with perhaps a tinge of regret. "Poor little thing, I wonder what's to become of her? The whole thing's a shame—a ghastly shame. Wait till Stefan and I find out all about it. Somebody's got to ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... cheerful in these ancient rooms. Modern paper-hangings are too superficial and wishy-washy for the purpose. Tapestry, it is true, there is now, completely covering the walls of several of the rooms, but all faded into ghastliness; nor could some of it have been otherwise than ghastly, even in its newness, for it represented persons suffering various kinds of torture, with crowds of monks and nuns looking on. In another room there was the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and other subjects not to be readily distinguished in the twilight ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thee, caitiff, far beyond the seas, To the grim tyrant Echetus, who mars All he encounters; bane of human kind. Thine ears he'll lop, and pare the nose away From thy pale ghastly visage: dire to tell! The very parts, which modesty conceals, He'll tear relentless from the seat of life, To feed his ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... heavily to the window, and raised the shade. "There's a ring around the moon as plain as my wedding ring!" And then as she looked there clung to the window-pane a single flake of snow, showing ghastly white in the instant before ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... enters the shadow; but, as one looking into a tunnel from without can see nothing therein, though the open country beyond is plainly visible, so, standing in that submarine shadow, all around is dark, though beyond the sable curtain of the shadow the view is clear. Apply this optical fact to the ghastly story of a diver's alleged experience in the cabin of a sunken ship. It is narrated that there was revealed to his appalled sight the spectacle of the drowned passengers in various attitudes of alarm or devotion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... was with her now—ill and exhausted from the combined effects of excitement, horror, and the unaccustomed ride across the desert—most anxious for his daughter—worried, to the verge of desperation, by the ghastly ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... Meldon, "that you've improved your appearance much by that last performance. You were better before. But never mind. Miss King has seen you at your best, the Sunday afternoon I brought you up to call, and she'll recollect what you looked like then. In any case, nothing you can do will make you as ghastly as you were that day on the yacht. If she put up with you then, she won't ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... of their looks directed the eyes of Tom Brown and his comrades towards a neighbouring thicket, where they beheld an object that was well calculated to inspire dread. It appeared to be a living skeleton covered with a black skin of the most ghastly appearance, and came staggering towards them like a drunken man. As it drew nearer Jumbo's limbs trembled more and more violently and his face became of a leaden blue colour. At last he became desperate, ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... OFTENER THEY OCCUR.—As O. S. Fowler says: "'The poison of asps is under their lips.' The first spat is like a deep gash cut into a beautiful face, rendering it ghastly, and leaving a fearful scar, which neither time nor cosmetics can ever efface; including that pain so fatal to love, and blotting that sacred love-page with memory's most hideous and imperishable visages. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... eternal, not temporary. In no department of life, has the scientific principle of self-interest and the rule of reason had a more confusing, corrupting, and destructive influence. To attempt to translate the meaning of a marriage into terms of a business partnership is a ghastly mockery. ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... and that must be given in the home, in the schools and from the pulpit and from the public press. I have become convinced from long labor in this reform that the ordinary license system is only a poultice to the dram seller's conscience, and for restraining intemperance it is a ghastly failure. Institutions and patent medicines to cure drinkers have only had a partial success. The only sure cure for drunkenness is to stop before you begin. Entire legal suppression of the dram shop is successful where a stiff, righteous, public sentiment thoroughly enforces it. Otherwise ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... English literature, and is worthy to be ranked with the works of Edgar A. Poe. Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius. It is a ghastly and gruesome creation. Not one bright ray redeems it. It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience. But it fascinates. Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... is with me, Avery," he said. "The fates have played a ghastly joke on me, but you are mine in spite of it. You came to ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... do not for a moment question." He looked about upon his companions. Three of them shook their heads gravely; but the fourth, in his over-zeal, attempted to, say "No," and burst into a laugh; whereupon they all broadly smiled, while Camille looked ghastly. ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... mouth and chin, bristly with the stubble of a coarse hard beard; and his complexion was one of that kind which never looks clean or wholesome. But what added most to the grotesque expression of his face was a ghastly smile, which, appearing to be the mere result of habit and to have no connection with any mirthful or complacent feeling, constantly revealed the few discoloured fangs that were yet scattered in his mouth, and gave him the aspect of a panting dog. His dress ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... could not believe the dreadful news, and took it for one of those ghastly rumours which circulate with such rapidity during periods of civil strife; but we were not left long in uncertainty, for the details of the catastrophe ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... its attitude towards, would nearly convey it. Everything is anti-human. How extraordinary, strange, and incomprehensible are the creatures captured out of the depths of the sea! The distorted fishes; the ghastly cuttles; the hideous eel-like shapes; the crawling shell-encrusted things; the centipede-like beings; monstrous forms, to see which gives a shock to the brain. They shock the mind because they exhibit an absence of design. There is no ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... and see what he ought to do? The thought hurt him, then lost edge, as if it had come in contact with a breastplate. Out of oneself! Impossible! Out into soundless, scentless, touchless, sightless space! The very idea was ghastly, futile! And touching there the bedrock of reality, the bottom of his Forsyte spirit, Soames rested for a moment. When one ceased, all ceased; it might go on, but ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... truth—fair Hope or ghastly Fear? God knoweth, and not I. Only, o'er both, Love holds her torch aloft, And ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... I watched Van Roon curiously as he sat propped up among his cushions, his smooth face ghastly in the green light from the lamp-shade. He held the stump of a cigar between his teeth, but, apparently unnoticed by him, it had long since gone out. Smith, out of the shadows, was watching ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... a quarter-past eleven, the outside door was suddenly thrown open, and in there staggered Jim, a haggard, wild-eyed being, ghastly white, utterly exhausted, and holding in his hand a wretched, scrawny branch of the mountain shrub he had gone ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... black crucifix. The candles stood, one at the head and one at the foot, on little tables. I entered the room and looked long at the dead old man. I thought it strange that there should be no one to watch him, but I am not afraid of dead men after the first shudder is past. It was a ghastly sight enough, however, and the candles shed a glaring yellowish ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... truly to shine.' It needed something more than this world could supply to make a man's face to shine under the sentence that he be hanged at the Cross of Edinburgh, his body dismembered, and his head fixed on an iron spike in the West Port of the same city. The disgraceful and ghastly story of his execution, and the hacking up of his body, may all be read in Howie, beside a picture of the Nether Bow as it still stands in our Free Church and Free State Day. 'Art not Thou from everlasting, O Lord my God?' were James Guthrie's last words as he stood on the ladder. 'O ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... standing high aloft, low lay thine ear, And there such ghastly noise of iron chains And brazen cauldrons thou shalt rumbling hear, Which thousand sprites with long enduring pains Do toss, that it will stun thy feeble brains; And oftentimes great groans, and grievous stounds, When ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... messenger was the neatest practical joke that had occurred in the county for some time. The always serious and anxious sheriff told the driver the accusation, and it was a genuine cry of horror that the young lover gave at hearing the truth at last, and at feeling the ghastly chain of probability that had wound ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... of her ladyship's room were down, and the chamber dark, and she was in bed with a nightcap on her head, and propped up by her pillows, looking none the less ghastly because of the red which was still on her cheeks, and which she could not afford ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... the two candles rose about their unsnuffed wicks and flickered in the draught, casting a fitful, ghastly light on Goliah's distorted features. The fierce efforts he made to scream for mercy, to vociferate the words that were strangling him, were such that the handkerchief knotted across his mouth was drenched with spume, and it was a sight most horrible to ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... of the valley, the moon peered up over its edge. He had never seen the moon before—except in the daytime, when he had taken her for a thin bright cloud. She was a fresh terror to him—so ghostly! so ghastly! so gruesome!—so knowing as she looked over the top of her garden-wall upon the world outside! That was the night itself! the darkness alive—and after him! the horror of horrors coming down the sky to curdle his blood, and turn his brain to a cinder! He gave a sob, and made straight ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... Chester, saddened and awed, came to show its sympathy for the stricken parents, and its pity, if nothing more, for the dead boy. But Helena, ghastly pale, had no room in her mind for either pity or sympathy. She heard Mr. Dilworth's subdued voice directing her to a pew, and a few minutes afterwards found herself sitting between Dr. and Mrs. King. Martha greeted her with an appropriate ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... Sam?" said Frank, after they had progressed about a mile, during which the outskirts of the city had given place to garden, cultivated field, trees dotted here and there, and then hedges which looked weird, ghastly, and strange in the moonlight, being composed of those fleshy, nightmare-looking plants of cactus growth, the prickly pears, with their horrible thorns, while more and more the way in front began to spread out wild, desolate ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... certainly force a crisis. The sooner the crisis came the better, and amongst those for whom that was better Philip de Commines was not the least. With all his heart he loathed the part he was compelled to play, even while determined to play it to its ghastly end. But to some men, Commines amongst them, the irrevocable brings a drugging of the sensibilities. When that which must be done could not be undone he would ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... the three besieged Earthlings, half in blackness, the light from the front making ghastly shadows on their faces. Acolites at some sorcerer's rite they looked, with the long inky patches that left them to dissolve formlessly against the far walls ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... than to live under the rule of people whose hearts are so utterly black and whose process of reasoning is so oxlike—they are so stupidly brutal. I knew then that no man could die better than in defending civilization from this ghastly thing which threatened her! ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... together so great a family as his predecessor did. Now when the stomachs of those that are thus turned out of doors, grow keen, they rob no less keenly; and what else can they do? for when, by wandering about, they have worn out both their health and their clothes, and are tattered, and look ghastly, men of quality will not entertain them, and poor men dare not do it; knowing that one who has been bred up in idleness and pleasure, and who was used to walk about with his sword and buckler, despising all the neighbourhood with an insolent scorn, as far ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... bright, bitter clearness. He could feel,—ah, that was the hell of it. That quivering response to the subtle nuances of thought! A profound change had come upon him, yet essentially he, the man, was unchanged. Except for those scars, the convoluted ridges of tissue, the livid patches and the ghastly hollows where once his cheeks and lips and forehead had been smooth and regular, he was as he ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... told her that he was alive. His color had changed but little; hovering death showed mainly by a sharpening of all the lines of his face. Yet it did not seem to be Bertram, but rather some statue, some ghastly ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... wife showed the rich man's daughter the A B C of woman's work among the sick and suffering. At first Rita could do little more than control her own nerves, and fight down the faintness that came creeping over her at sight of the bandaged faces, ghastly under the brown, of the torn flesh and nerveless limbs. Gradually, however, she began to gain strength. The rough brown hand moved so easily, so lightly; it laid hold of those terrible bandages as if they were mere ordinary ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... her eyeballs rattled in her head. The doll fell to the floor and lay there with closed eyes. Her face was pallid and ghastly. Her bonnet had fallen off, and her hair stuck out wildly in every direction. Her legs were doubled under her in the most helpless fashion. She was the forlornest figure of a doll imaginable. Presently Mary drew her hands away from her eyes and looked down at Miranda. ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... his feet and, crossing to the window, fumbled the shutter into place, his ghastly face turning and turning toward the revolver that glittered in such deadly fashion in Mr. Ravenslee's steady hand. At length, the shutters barred, the boy turned, and moistening dry lips, spoke ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... tidings could not now be suppressed, and the ball-room was filled with screams and faintings. The corpse was brought in, borne on the arms of the yeomanry, most of them wounded, and looking ghastly from loss of blood and the agitation of the encounter. The guests crowded round the sofa on which the body was laid, with all the varieties of sorrow and strong emotion conceivable, under the loss of a common and honoured friend. Tears fell down many a manly cheek; sobs were heard ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... impressive in this ghastly spectacle was the fact that each of the skeletons, though deprived of every rag of clothing, still wore a gold ring, too wide now that the flesh had disappeared, but held, as in hooks, by the bent ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... long hours of the night the scenes of the last few hours, of the last few days, came back to him and burnt into his soul. The gulf yawned before him now plain enough, open at his feet—black, ghastly. He shuddered at it, wondering if he should even yet fall in, felt wildly about for strength to stand firm, to retrace his steps; but found it not. He found not yet the strength he was in search of, but in the grey morning he wrote ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... voice would still have struck them with terror. She brought her deepest tones to those simple words, "What does this mean?" All at once it seemed to them that something had been meant, something absurd, monstrous, lawless, deserving a ghastly punishment. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... which, as Procopius had been told, the ground was covered with serpents, and the air was such that no man could inhale it and live. To this desolate region the spirits of the departed were ferried over from the land of the Franks at midnight. A strange race of fishermen performed the ghastly office. The speech of the dead was distinctly heard by the boatmen, their weight made the keel sink deep in the water; but their forms were invisible to mortal eye. Such were the marvels which an able historian, the contemporary of Belisarius, of Simplicius, and of Tribonian, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... traps. But it did look almost as though they were encouraging their two unheard-of visitors from another world to go on deeper and deeper into the heart of the eerie city (all the tunnels sloped down now), there perhaps to meet with some ghastly imprisonment. ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... its high promontory the Northern Lights scintillate and blaze, and out of its moving brightness the terrified fishermen behold the war-canoes of dead Indians freighted with their redskin braves; the forms of c[oe]ur de bois and desperate Frenchmen swinging down the sky-line in a ghastly snake-dance; the shapes and spars of ships long since forgotten from the "Missing List"; and always, most dread-inspiring of them all, the distress signals from the sinking ship of Mogul ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... for the complexion, Cho[u]bei took them, smelled and carefully tasted, and finally put some of the paste on the end of the hashi or sticks to arrange the charcoal in the hibachi. A smell of garlic pervaded the room. He noted the puffy face of O'Iwa, the unnatural, almost ghastly, white of the skin where the wide pockmarks permitted it to be seen. Within the circles of these scars there was a curious striated effect, only seen at times in the efforts of artists to depict the ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... Mr. Hanlon's body continued to kneel headless beside the log. Then the head on the ground popped like a flash to the neck it belonged to, and fastened itself accurately there in place. Ketch turned ghastly pale. ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... hours of that day were spent in ministering to the living and burying the dead. Along that battle swept front the Chaplain was always gladly welcomed and his divine Message reverently received. Death in its thousand ghastly forms, ever impending, ever threatening, impressed with serious religious thought the consciousness of even the most careless. In direct proportion to the coming and going of danger was the ebb and flow of the tide spiritual. ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... cab and crawled into the enclosure. Two carried a sack between them. Other men, some in cassocks, awaited them. They proceeded towards a hole dug in the middle of the field. At the bottom of the hole was quicklime. These men said nothing, they had no lanterns. The wan daybreak gave a ghastly light; the sack was opened. It was full of bones. These were the bones of Jean Jacques and of Voltaire, which had ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... Cabrieres being fortified was prepared to stand a siege; but on a promise of their lives and property the inhabitants opened the gates. Without a moment's hesitation the Baron gave orders to put them all to death. The soldiers refused to break plighted faith; but the mob had no scruples and the ghastly work began. 'A multitude of women and children had fled to the church: the furious horde rushed headlong among them and committed all the crimes of which hell could dream. Other women had hidden themselves in a barn. The Baron ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Twelfth Century;—something like the Ism of all true men in all true centuries, I fancy! Alas, compared with any of the Isms current in these poor days, what a thing! Compared with the respectablest, morbid, struggling Methodism, never so earnest; with the respectablest, ghastly, dead or ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... had seen him before. His eyes looked more black and prominent, and his face a great deal paler. But he did not trust himself with an immediate answer; and his features, as if in the effort to restrain the retort his anger prompted, underwent several grotesque and somewhat ghastly contortions. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... ride round in a circle, thinking he is advancing, till he dies. But it is as easy to be lost in a wilderness, where there is nothing to see, as in a wood where one can see nothing. And there is something even more ghastly in being lost below the broad heavens in the open face of day than 'in the close covert of innumerous boughs.' The monotonous swells of the sand-heaps, the weary expanse stretching right away to the horizon, no land-marks but the bleaching bones of former victims, the gigantic ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... at him like a fiery eye. He opened the case of the phonograph, which had been returned to its place on the piano, and then from a drawer in the bureau he took a small cardboard box. The wood in the fire flickered at that moment and started some ghastly shadows on the ceiling, but he drew a cylinder from the box and slid it on to the barrel of the phonograph. Then he stepped to the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... under Thy control. I called to see Mr. Spence; his natural powers decline, but heaven beams on his countenance. He said, while he was putting on his neckcloth, in the morning, he had been struck with the meagre and ghastly appearance he presented in the glass; but the sweet serenity of his soul compelled him to exclaim, 'Welcome old man! welcome declining age! welcome death!'—I spoke at the Prayer Leaders' lovefeast, but the enemy troubled me much afterward: ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... name, her cheeks were dyed purple, and in another moment became ghastly pale. "Why do you call me Dorris Ritter?" she cried, with gasping breath, "why remind me of the past, which stands like a dark spectre ever behind me, and grins upon me with bloody and shameful horrors?" Lost wholly in these fearful remembrances, she stared ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... preparations, or strong galleys, whose commanders, more bold than the rest, were willing, in cases not of absolute necessity, to brave the danger. Many of these vessels were wrecked. The fragments of them, with the bodies of the drowned mariners, were driven to the shore. The ghastly spectacles presented by these dead bodies, swollen and mangled, and half buried in the sand, as if the sea had been endeavoring to hide the mischief it had done, shocked and terrified the spectators who saw ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Henrietta, though her heart was full of anxiety about her mother, hovered over Isabella, who lay with closed eyes and ghastly ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... old woman, her nodding head bridling with a ghastly vanity. 'Though I am old and ugly now,—much older by life and habit than years though,—I was once as young as any. Ah! as pretty too, as many! I was a fresh country wench in my time, darling,' stretching ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... beside it their pinioned captive. As they approached to the little rude hamlet where they dwelt, a motley crowd of old men, women, and children, came forth to welcome their return; but when they beheld the ghastly body of their late chief, and the drooping looks of the warriors, their joyful cries were exchanged for wails of lamentation, and they tore their hair, and expressed the most violent emotions of grief. They wept over the bleeding corpse of the victim, while they derided and buffeted the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... the grave's dark hue Was in fixed shadow cast; His spasm-drawn lips more fearful grew In the ghastly shade of their lurid blue; With a shudder that ran that cold form ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... lowering his haunches, and rearing his head in a strange manner. The idea flashed on me that he would certainly turn, and then—what could happen? More horses were advancing, and two beasts could not possibly pass each other on that narrow ledge! But I was totally unprepared for the ghastly thing that actually did happen. The miserable horse had been seized with the awful mountain-madness that sometimes overtakes men on stupendous heights,—the madness of suicide. With a frightful scream, that sounded partly like a cry of supreme ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... orders grey; What ho! bring book and bell! Ban yonder ghastly thing, I say; And, look ye, ban it well! By cock and pye, the Humpty's face!" The form turned quickly round; Then totter'd ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... consciousness. How long he remained there was problematical, but on awaking Guir was still in the dark, and where he had fallen. At that moment a strange and overpowering desire seized him. He must paint the portraits of his murdered family before it became too late. Had he been sane, such a ghastly thought would never have possessed him; but Guir was crazed, and for days and nights following he worked in that dismal vault, by the light of a smoking lamp, at the task he had set himself, his fired imagination even intensifying the ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... grasping temper would allow, there had been a genuine wish to help undiscovered talent. He thought of the hand which had given him the check, and had a vision of it holding the revolver—of the ghastly, solitary end. And no one had guessed—unless, indeed, it were his wife? Perhaps that look of hers—as of a creature hunted ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... were secured, Marguerite second, and the Cellarman last; and they set out for the Refuges. The actual distance of those places was nothing: the whole five, and the next Hospice to boot, being within two miles; but the ghastly way was ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... ultimatum, and within five minutes they were in the midst of a violent quarrel, a burst of sporadic open fighting such as occurs near the end of all long wars and engagements. It brought about one of those ghastly lapses in which two people who are in love pull up sharp, look at each other coolly and think it's all been a mistake. Afterward they usually kiss wholesomely and assure the other person it was all their fault. Say it all was my ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... to catch us disobeying it. From college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School. And for four years I lived. Oh, I won't rhapsodize about New York. It was dirty and noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive. But compared with the moldy academy in which I had been smothered——! I went to symphonies twice a week. I saw Irving and Terry and Duse and Bernhardt, from the top gallery. I walked in Gramercy Park. And I read, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... to pass by that repugnant vision, the slightest details of her face and dress. Let me see if I can put together my impressions in the way and form in which I received them, as they were engraved ineffaceably on my brain in the light of the street-lamp which shone luridly over that ghastly scene. But I am exciting myself too much, though there is reason enough for it, as you will see further on. Don't be concerned, however, for the state of my mind. I ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... the brief conflict. Dad waved them back; then, with Tad holding up the fat boy's shoulders, Dad with Chunky's feet in hand, the two carried him back some distance, where they laid him on the ground. Stacy did not move. His face was ghastly. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... reached the apartment occupied by Ralph. The latter sprang up in bed with a cry of astonishment. He had heard but an hour before from Walter that all hope was gone, and thought for an instant that the appearance was an apparition from the dead. The ghastly pallor of the face, the eyes burning with a strange light, the flowing hair, and disordered appearance of the girl might well have alarmed one living in even less superstitious times, and Ralph began to cross himself hastily and to mutter a prayer when recalled to himself by the ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... began in distinct tones, addressing himself to that ghastly countenance still partly shaded by one hand. "I am here—Olaf ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... and every vestige of color left his face. Clear and distinct in the light from the yacht the Arab and his burden were outlined against the black screen beyond. There was no mistaking the earnestness of the threat, nor could the witnesses doubt the ghastly intention of the long, cruel knife that gleamed on high. Peggy's body served as a shield for that of her captor. Brewster and Bragdon recognized the man as one of Mohammed's principal retainers, a fierce-looking ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... relative, whom he rather unkindly disowns—he is stated to be "the light of the world" (p. 18). Is there any meaning in such a statement if it be not pertinent to ask what sort of light has led the world into the ghastly quagmire in which it is to-day agonizing? The truth is that Mr. Wells attributes to his God powers which, even if he had no greater knowledge than Mr. Wells himself possesses, could be used to epoch-making advantage. Fancy an omnipresent H. G. Wells, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... dreadful agony, sometimes sitting silent and motionless—gazing into vacancy, as if his faculties were bewildered and lost, and then suddenly starting up, amazed and trembling, and staring wildly about, as if seized with a sudden frenzy. His wild and ghastly looks, his convulsive gesticulations, and his incoherent ravings and groans, indicated the horror that he endured, and were so frightful that his officers and attendants shrunk away from his presence, and knew not ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... my brother!" was all Eustace's answer, as he threw himself on the grass beside Gaston, who, though bleeding fast, had raised his master's head, and freed him from his helmet; but his eyes were still closed, and the wound ghastly, for such had been the force of the blow, that the shoulder was well-nigh severed from the collarbone. "Reginald! O brother, look up!" cried Eustace. ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... few stars. Cautiously he ventured to shine his compass close to the ground. He was still headed right. The ghastly ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... the child, however, there was no ghastly imprint,—only a high and almost sublime expression,—the overshadowing presence of spiritual natures, the dawning of immortal life in ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... dead- carts filled with decaying bodies rattled through the foul streets, to drop their horrid burdens into the great pit at Aldgate; the bells of London tolled all day and all night for the passing of human souls. Hundreds of homes, isolated because of a victim of the plague found therein, became ghastly breeding-places of the disease, and then silent, disgusting graves. If a man shivered in fear, or staggered from weakness, or for very hunger turned sick, he was marked as a victim, and despite his protests was huddled away with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the bearers who laid their ghastly burden down, having little relish in the task. Yes, it was ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... heavily, yet it was she, Cally, who had caused it all. Suppose she had been a good daughter, to begin with; suppose she had even been an obedient daughter, and had kept her own counsel, as mamma had commanded and implored. Ah, how different would have been this ghastly summer!... ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... CONTINENTAL. A Briareus-handed, multiple-formed, Proteus-faced monster, of huge dimensions, wickedly scheming brain, myriad fanged, and every fang imbued with virulent copperhead poison, stormed through our streets in the light of day and in the gloom of night, during many ghastly hours, knowing no law save its own wicked will, while Treason, Cruelty, House-breaking and House-burning, Robbery, Assassination, Torture, Hanging, Murder, stalked on in its wild train of horror. But we know its face now, and it will be our own fault if anything so foul shall ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... seems doubtful, scholastically speaking, to Robert!) and to have only power at the end of my pen, and for the help of people I don't care for. At moments lately, thanks from a stranger for this or that have sounded ghastly to me who can't go to smooth a pillow for my own darling sister. Now, I won't talk of it any more. After all I try to be patient and wait quietly, and there ought to be hope and ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... dotted with groups of listless, desperate soldiers who fell out and sank on the ground as the straggling ranks of their comrades tramped on. Skirting the battle-field of Borodino, the marching battalions looked askance on the ghastly heaps of unburied corpses; but the wounded survivors were dragged from field hospitals and other cavernous shelters to be carried onward with the departing army. They were a sight which in some cases turned melancholy into madness. In order to transport them the wagons ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... choose between them, and the fate of himself and the lady would depend upon his choice. Sir Guy, after long hesitation, blew a shrill blast upon the horn; at the sound the hundred steeds stamped their hoofs, the hundred knights sprang up, and the unlucky knight fell down senseless, with his ghastly guide's words ringing in ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... worshiped at Naples, the dead bodies were arranged in niches all around the walls. They were dressed as they had been when alive, and their countenances, dry and shriveled, were exposed to view, presenting a ghastly and horrid spectacle. It was such means as these that were resorted to, in the Middle Ages, for making religious impressions ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... side; and certainly parallels could be found in the French invasion of Algeria fifty years later and in many other wars of the nineteenth century. When men have been fired with the diabolical passions that war arouses, and have grown accustomed to the ghastly sights on battlefields, they cease to be reasoning beings; they become fiends. But unfortunately it is necessary to explain what really occurred, as it is to Vinegar Hill and its terrible associations that the Nationalists ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... all, as they passed through the ruinous streets of what had been their home, were compelled to tread upon the unburied remains of their fathers, husbands, or brethren. To none of these miserable creatures remained a living protector—hardly even a dead body which could be recognized; and thus the ghastly procession of more than three thousand women, many with gaping wounds in the face, many with their arms cut off and festering, of all ranks and ages, some numbering more than ninety years, bareheaded, with grey hair streaming upon their shoulders; others with nursing infants in their arms, all escorted ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... heed to him, however. He only drew his daughter closer to his side. John noted that her cheeks were hotly flushed with anger, combined, perhaps, with fear, and felt the blood of wrath flood to his own and out again, leaving them, he knew, quite ghastly pale. He always flushed, then paled, when he was very angry, and when that pallor clung, as it did now, dire things inevitably impended. He was astonished at the strength of cold resentment in his heart ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... fiends, who, near allied, O'er Nature's wounds, and wrecks, preside; Whilst Vengeance, in the lurid air, 20 Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare: On whom that ravening[15] brood of Fate, Who lap the blood of sorrow, wait: Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see, And look not madly wild, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... voices of the waves sang hushed and murmurous nocturnes. Uniacke was taken by an almost insurmountable inclination to pause, even to turn back. Their progress to this grave seemed attended by some hidden and ghastly danger. He laid his hand upon the painter's arm, as if to withhold ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... his soul expanded with an inexpressible tumult of emotions, he drank in the blasphemous flatteries of the rabble, and assumed to himself the power and the dignity of the Most High God. Yet in the very ecstasy of those sensations, his countenance became ghastly, his lips writhed, his eyes beheld with unutterable dismay the omen of his dissolution—the visible phantom of an avenging Nemesis.[14] He staggered from his throne, crying aloud in the extremity of his anguish; a sudden corruption had seized upon his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... hands upon her heart, and struggled, and gasped,—as though she wished to speak but could not. "I suppose it is that girl who has done it all," said Lucinda. Lizzie nodded her head, and tried to smile. The attempt was so ghastly that Lucinda, though not timid by nature, was frightened. She sat down and took Lizzie's hand, and tried to comfort her. "It is very hard upon you," she said, "to be twice robbed." Lizzie again nodded her head. "I hope it is not much now. Shall we go up and see?" The poor creature did ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... one at the foot, on little tables. I entered the room and looked long at the dead old man. I thought it strange that there should be no one to watch him, but I am not afraid of dead men after the first shudder is past. It was a ghastly sight enough, however, and the candles shed a glaring yellowish ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... seed of Zeus left behind him his spear upon the bank, leant against tamarisk bushes, and leapt in, as it were a god, keeping his sword alone, and devised grim work at heart, and smote as he turned him every way about: and their groaning went up ghastly as they were stricken by the sword, and the water reddened with blood. As before a dolphin of huge maw fly other fish and fill the nooks of some fair-havened bay, in terror, for he devoureth amain whichsoever of them he ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... were surrounded by shrieking black children, with pointed wings on their shoulders and horns on their foreheads, bound to stakes to represent the hosts of hell—a performance which they tried to make at once ghastly and droll. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... like a wave. His heart bled for Lucille. No wonder the poor girl had been rummy at breakfast. What girl wouldn't be rummy at breakfast, tied for life to a ghastly outsider like himself? He groaned hollowly, and sagged forlornly in his chair: and, as he did so, the Venus caught his eye. For it was an eye-catching picture. You might like it or dislike it, but you could ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... save some splinters o' the schooner, anyway," the skipper chuckled, in a ghastly way, "even if ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... with a strange grin, as if she had uttered a ghastly but irresistible joke. Then he went in, and, when he reached the bed, wished he had stayed without. He was not one of those who, seeing little in the faces of the living miss little in the faces of the dead. The arrangement of the ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... journey home: the men slowly following with the ghastly mute-body on the rude litter, became a living memory to her for all the remainder of ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... pile of dirty sacking, in a half-sitting, half- reclining position, lay the recumbent figure, or rather form, of the unfortunate fireman Jackson, his face as ghastly as that of a corpse, while his rigid limbs and the absence of all appearance of respiration tended to confirm the belief that the ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... parapets, and, while the Federals converged from every point to this, exploding powder burned the faces of these contending hosts, who, hand to hand, fought each other to death, while far-away widows and orphans multiplied to mourn through the coming years over this ghastly folly of civil war. ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... speaks of 'the sneer of one of Johnson's ghastly smiles.' Garrick Corres. i. 334. 'Ghastly smile' is borrowed ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the thing was practically impossible for him, He was like the pastrycook's boy who is habituated and bilious. Then suddenly a new type, which he had despaired of finding, was displayed. His curiosity awoke; and, fascinated in the first instance by her ghastly reputation, he was fascinated gradually by her physical charms. Again he found himself enslaved by a woman—and the woman, who owed her fame to his services, was clearly appreciative. But he had a strong objection ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... moderate means, bore the chief burden of the war. They submitted to terrible taxation, to many privations, besides the universal gift of their young blood. We won the war and what was the result? The wealth of the country, through ghastly legislation, drifted into the hands of the profiteering classes, the wholesale shopkeepers, the ship owners, the factory owners, the mine owners. The professional man with two thousand a year was able to save a quarter of that before the war. After the war, ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that it seems as though no one year's sun would waken it. This is the granary of the land where the farmer who bears the burdens of the State—and who, therefore, ascribes last year's bumper crop to the direct action of the McKinley Bill—has, also, to bear the ghastly monotony of earth and sky. He keeps his head, having many things to attend to, but his wife sometimes goes mad as the women do in Vermont. There is little variety in Nature's big wheat-field. They say that when the corn is in the ear, the wind, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... entertain travellers. The winter avalanches are quite other things. Witness a little further in our track, where our guide stops us, and points to a place where all the pines have been broken short off by one of them. Along here some old ghostly pines, dead ages ago, their white, ghastly skeletons bleached by a hundred storms, stand, stretching out their long, bony arms, like phantom giants. These skeleton pines are a striking image; I wonder I have not seen ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet if ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... mildewed, faded, and half rotten with decay. It was a place where crimes might be committed, unrecorded and unsuspected—where screams would lose themselves in vacancy, and desolation and solitude would swallow up the ghastly evidences of outrage. Here was the fitting scenery for tales of preternatural terror or fiendish crime. Lucille felt her heart sink within her as she entered this vast and awful labyrinth. But she felt that, be her destiny what it might, she had herself ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... later General Havelock and his little band of heroes—some one thousand Englishmen who had marched with him from Allahabad, recaptured by Neill for England, and on to ghastly Cawnpore—arrived at Lucknow, and relieved the slender British force which since May had been holding the Residency against the fierce and ever-renewed assaults of the thousands of rebels who poured themselves upon it. He came in time to save many a brave life that should yet do good ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... the poor dreamer, "the clown makes a very pretty specter, with his ghastly white face, and his blood-boltered cheeks and nose. I never saw the fun of a clown before, no! no! no! it is not the clown, it is worse, much worse; oh, dear, ugh!" and Triplet rolled off the couch like Richard the Third. He sat a moment on ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... Death," a favorite subject of the painters and poets of the Middle Ages, representing a kind of spiritual masquerade, in which persons of every rank and age appear dancing with the skeleton form of Death. In this Spanish version it is perhaps more striking and picturesque than in any other—the ghastly nature of the subject being brought into very lively contrast with the festive tone of the verses. This grim fiction had for several centuries ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... and the works of darkness. Though they lived in the country, they did not rejoice in God's heaven, or in the moon and stars which he had ordained. They fancied that the night was the time in which all ghastly and ugly phantoms began to move; that it was peopled with ghosts, skeletons, demons, witches, who held revels on the hill-tops, or stole into houses to suck the life out of sleeping men. The cry of the wild fowl, and the howling of the wind, were to them the yells of evil spirits. ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... was who opened the door of an inner room where a group of disheveled women, their faces ghastly beneath the cheap paint, cowered about a roulette-table, and ranged them behind the shelter of the stout mahogany bar, seeing to it that ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... turned half round, and found himself confronted by Mrs Irwin, her pale features and white night-dress dabbled with blood, in consequence of a partial disturbance of the bandages in struggling with the nurse—a terrifying, ghastly sight even to me; to him utterly overwhelming, and scarcely needing her frenzied execrations on the murderer of her child to deprive him utterly of all remaining sense and strength. He suddenly reeled, threw his arms wildly into the air, and before I could stretch ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... take their seats. As my place was next to the window, I felt bound to help the porter hand in the small packages. The man Delora, who was wrapped up in a fur coat, and who looked ghastly ill, thanked me courteously enough, but the girl ignored my assistance. They took the two corner seats at the further end of the carriage. Delora ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... coming to life in its coffin; the First Napoleon in the flames of hell, with a multitude of women shaking at him the bloody severed limbs of their sons and husbands; a child burned alive in its cradle; the head of a decapitated criminal, and the visions that filled its brain,—such are some of the ghastly imaginings of this diseased and uneducated nature. Compare such works as these with Dore's crudest conceptions, and the difference between the inventions of genius and those of a morbid intellect becomes at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... hour, when he first looked upon the corpse. There it lay, a senseless shell, deserted by its immortal tenant, and totally unconscious of that subject which had so lately and so intensely interested them both. It appeared as if the ghastly countenance expressed its sense of the utter worthlessness of all earthly schemes of wealth and happiness. Eternity seemed stamped upon the pinched and sunken features; not eternity in the sense of imperishable matter, ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... fruit but briers and thorns. The dark ledges of rock thrust themselves above the surface here and there, like the bones of perished monsters. Arid and inhospitable mountain ranges rose before him, furrowed with dry channels of ancient torrents, white and ghastly as scars on the face of nature. Shifting hills of treacherous sand were heaped like tombs along the horizon. By day, the fierce heat pressed its intolerable burden on the quivering air; and no living creature moved, on the dumb, swooning earth, but tiny jerboas scuttling ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... criminal law. Not merely the English state trials and the French causes celebres are there, but the criminal trials of Scotland and of America, and detached publications of remarkable cases, Newgate Calendars, Malefactors' Register, Chronicles of Crime, with ghastly prints of Newgate and Old Bailey, with their executions. The Chancellor is not responsible for this part of the library, which owes its completeness to the morbid taste of his successor, who defends the collection ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... told of, And there are beings that live, yet not for the eye) An arm of frost above and from behind me 40 Pluck'd up and snatched me backward. Merciful Heaven! You smile! alas, even smiles look ghastly here! My lord, I pray you, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... other feature wore only an expression of abject humility; sturdy professional street beggars scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp, whom despair alone had driven forth into the night for charity; feeble and ghastly invalids, upon whom death had placed a sure hand, and who sidled and tottered through the mob, looking every one beseechingly in the face, as if in search of some chance consolation, some lost hope; modest young girls returning from long ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... shall see others there, and shall by them see themselves. There is an art by which a man may make his neighbour look so ghastly, that he shall fright himself by looking on him, especially when he thinks of himself, that he is of the same show also. It is said concerning men at the downfall of Babylon, that they shall be amazed one at ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... afraid!" They will allow the public to judge for themselves, but with somewhat of the feeling of the worthy uncle in Tom Jones, who, though he would let young people choose for themselves, would have them choose wisely. They try to be so awfully moral and so ghastly satirical that they must be answered: and they are best answered in their own division. We have all heard of the way in which sailors cat's-pawed the monkeys: they taunted the dwellers in the trees with stones, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... I tumbled it stiffly back it fell from the chair exposing a ghastly face. I drew away in a creepy horror, for as I looked at the face of the corpse I suffered a sort of waking nightmare in which I imagined that I was gazing at ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... man, he is. I sometimes think I shall be moped wi' sorrow even in the City of God, if father is not there.' The feverish colour came into her cheek, and the feverish flame into her eye. 'But you will be there, father! you shall! Oh! my heart!' She put her hand to it, and became ghastly pale. ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... getting on, Sam?" said Frank, after they had progressed about a mile, during which the outskirts of the city had given place to garden, cultivated field, trees dotted here and there, and then hedges which looked weird, ghastly, and strange in the moonlight, being composed of those fleshy, nightmare-looking plants of cactus growth, the prickly pears, with their horrible thorns, while more and more the way in front began to spread out ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... wailing chant—a hopeless prayer for mercy and deliverance. A guttering candle shed a ghastly ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... recoiled back into the boat, staggering down upon their seats. One alone remained standing, and with an expression upon his face as if he was desirous of again beholding the sight. It was not a look that betrayed pleasure, but one grim and ghastly, yet strong and steady, as if it penetrated the profoundest depths of the ocean. It was the look ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... Fys, above the Col d'Anterne. It happens to have a bed of harder limestone at the top than in any other part of its mass; and this bed, protecting its summit, enables it to form itself into the most ghastly ranges of pinnacle which I know among mountains. In one spot the upper edge of limestone has formed a complete cornice, or rather bracket—for it is not extended enough to constitute a cornice, which projects far into the air over the wall of ashy rock, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... listeners, or they would have saved themselves. There was a smothered exclamation from three voices at once, a burst of profanity, and Dan Lowrie had leaped the low hedge and caught Jud by the collar. The man was ghastly with rage. He shook the lad until even ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... bridal chamber, Death! Come to the mother, when she feels For the first time her firstborn's breath; Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke; Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake's shock, the ocean storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm With banquet song, and dance, and wine: And thou art terrible—the tear, The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier, And all we know, or dream, or fear Of agony, are thine. But to the hero, when ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... ghastly dream, from death-like trance Awake to woe, devoted France! To care and trouble, toil and pain, Till glory be acknowledged vain, And martial pomp a mere parade, And war, the bravo's bloody trade! A beacon o'er the tide of time Be thou, to point the wreck of crime! The spoiler spoil'd, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Of horrid apparition, tall and ghastly, That walks at dead of night, or takes his stand O'er some new-open'd grave; and, strange to tell, Evanishes at crowing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... Timorous, how many professed pilgrims hast thou befooled and turned back! How often does she attack and affright many real pilgrims! I am sure she has often made my poor heart ache with her ghastly looks and terrifying speeches. O may we ever say to her, in our Lord's words, 'Get thee behind me, Satan; thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... sudden revival of energy, the strange and inexplicable craving for maiming and killing, as well as many other matters with which I need not trouble you now, Adam. As I said just now, God alone knows what poor Captain March discovered—it must have been something too ghastly for human endurance, if my theory is correct that the once beautiful human body of Lady Arabella is under the control of this ghastly ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... caught her full in the face. She opened her eyes and tried to move, but those powerful arms held her more closely than before. Now she could have shrieked with horror. With returning consciousness the sense of her desperate position came on her with its full and ghastly significance, its awe-inspiring details. The grey dawn, the abandoned wretch who held her, and the stillness of this early morning hour, when not one pitying soul would be astir to lend her a helping hand ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the family were ready to retire and allow him a word with her alone. But, idle hope! Gradually it dawned upon him that they had no such intention. To relieve the strain, he became facetious and told funny stories; but this was an unlucky experiment, for his witticisms fell with a ghastly hollowness. No one laughed save the grandmother and the Guatemalan cousin, who could not understand, and at this Kirk fled helter-skelter from ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... were greatly excited. Tragedies enough happened up and down the coast when men were drowned or lost in the ice or met with fatal injuries. But never before in the Bay had one man been cut down by the hand of another. It was a ghastly thought, and the awfulness of it was perhaps accentuated by the snow dashing against the window panes and the wind shrieking around ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... divided for Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a brain- eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvelously dear experience. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I was in this life to woo a second time the woman I had killed by my own neglect ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... hung down from the little man's shoulders. The huge head, with grim, wide eyes and lolling tongue, jolted and swagged with the motion, seeming to grin a ghastly defiance at the world it had left. And the last Bessie saw of them was that bloody, rolling head, with the puny legs staggering beneath their load, as the two passed out of ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... the fearful rattle of musketry; where new graves were being made every day, where brother forgot a mother's early blessing and sought the lifeblood of brother, and friend raised the deadly knife against friend. Oh, the front, with its stirring battle-scenes! Oh, the front, with its ghastly heaps of dead! The life of the nation was at stake; and when the land was full of sorrow, there could not be much gayety at the capital. The days passed quietly with me. I soon learned that some people had an intense desire to penetrate the inner circle of the White House. No President ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... of principle, willingly undergo the hard labor of military training, of marches and campaigns, and the still more trying inactivity of life in camps and fortresses, in new and unfriendly regions and climates. They fearlessly face death in every ghastly form, on the battle field, by exposure in all seasons, by physical exhaustion, and by the most dreadful contagious diseases. They devote themselves unreservedly to the great cause, and in doing so exhibit the noblest ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... they endure without pain, and at last even come to like (especially if artists,) mud-colour and black, and to dislike rose-colour and white. And wherever it is unhealthy for {85} them to live, the poisonousness of the place is marked by some ghastly colour in ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... terrified her; seating himself in a chair, he buried his face in his hands, and would neither look up nor speak; not until Ramona was near crying from his silence, did he utter a word. Then, looking at her with a ghastly face, he said in a hollow voice, "It has begun!" and buried his face again. Finally Ramona's tears wrung from him the ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... room, they found a very different state of things from what exists now. The room was absolutely as it was left the night Count Albert burned the castle, except that all trace of the suspended suit of armor and its ghastly contents ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... to tell you the rest of this story as the old Pottawatomie told it to me, for it is near bedtime and these are the very trees between which the ghostly, ghastly figures flitted in the darkness. It is all past and gone now and you need have no fear. You boys on the outer edge who are crowding up to the light of the camp-fire are just as safe as the fellows in the middle. The thing to interest you is what the Indians did with the bullion, after they ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... "Miller of Dee," as for the sake of happy recollections she polishes afresh the pewter service on the parlour table, yet all the while her eyes are scrutinising the inartistic arrangement of the room. Why should the horsehair sofa be placed straight against the wall, and those ghastly wax flowers under glass covers adorn the stiff chimneypiece, which might be made so pretty? The memorial cards, that are framed and hung on the wall—how gruesome they appear in the spring sunshine! She longs to pull them down, and burn them, but to do so would be to violate ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... ambled across the front. It contained a long low room with a queer old-fashioned chimney place wide enough to sit in, a square south room that must have been a dining-room because of the painted cupboard whose empty shelves gazed ghastly between half-open doors, and a small kitchen, not much more than a shed. In the long low room a staircase twisted itself up oddly to the four rooms under the leaky roof. It was all empty and desolate, save for an old ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... if I had brutally struck him; I shall never forget the long, slow, almost ghastly look of pain, with ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... espouses Creusa. In the next Creusa is seen burning in the poisoned shirt, given her by Medea. In another Medea is seen in a car drawn by dragons, bearing her two children by Jason, whom she has stabbed in revenge for his desertion. Nothing can exceed the ghastly reality of death, as shown in the stiffened limbs and sharpened features of those dead children. The whole drawing and grouping is exceedingly spirited and lifelike, and has great ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... outcasts, and the demoniacal shrieks and ravings of Patrick Dolan, who was in the delirium which precedes death. It was not necessary that life should be taken by the members of the company. Death was busily at work, and before the wild winter night was ended, his ghastly victims were ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... more ghastly as Mrs. Percy spoke, but it was not within that lady's province to notice the colour of a washerwoman's face. She did, however, observe her lingering, weary steps as she proceeded through the yard, ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... mystic Tauler, for example, every detail is enlarged upon and even exaggerated, till the page seems to reek with blood and the mind of the reader grows sick with horror. We rather incline to throw a veil over the ghastly details, or we uncover them only so far as may be necessary in order to understand the condition of His mind, in which ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... "Isn't it ghastly—for all of us?" Miriam felt treacherously outspoken. It was a relief to be going away. She knew that this sense of relief made her able to speak. "It's never knowing that's so awful. Perhaps he'll get some more money presently ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... goods); and who could tell of what else? Letters, bags, purses, money—these any vulgar criminal might have, and bear no deeper guilt than that of theft; but, the clothes! Mr. Amidon shuddered as his logic carried him on from deduction to reduction—to murder, and the ghastly putting away of murder's fruit. Imagination threw its limelight over the horrid scene—the deep pool or tarn sending up oilily its bubbles of accusation; the shadowy wood with its bulging mound of ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... La Planche, 270. At Amboise, too, so soon as the court had departed, the prisons were broken open, and the prisoners—both those confined for religion and for insurrection—released. The gallows in various parts of the place were torn down, and the ghastly decorations of the castle, in the way of heads and mutilated members, disappeared. Languet, letter of May 15th, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... their feet, Trevors a second first and with the advantage clearly his now rushed Lee, seeking to finish what he had begun. And Bud Lee, his face white and drawn, looking ghastly with the blood smears across it, moving swiftly but not swiftly enough, went down, Trevors's weight against him, Trevors's fist beating into his ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... lost touch. Overtaken by the Syracusans, Demosthenes attempted to fight a rearguard action, but in vain, and he was forced to surrender at discretion with his whole force. Next day, Nicias with the van was overtaken, and, after a ghastly scene of confusion and slaughter, the remnants of the vanguard were forced to surrender also. Nicias and Demosthenes were put to death; great numbers were seized as private spoil by their captors, the rest of the prisoners—more ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... me by thy petty malice," answered Front-de-Boeuf, with a ghastly and constrained laugh. "The infidel Jew—it was merit with Heaven to deal with him as I did, else wherefore are men canonized who dip their hands in the blood of Saracens? The Saxon porkers whom I have slain—they were the foes of my country, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... desire to see myself, to realise at once in its full horror the ghastly change that had come upon me. I tottered to the mantel, and felt along it for matches. As I did so, a barking cough sprang up in my throat, and I clutched the thick flannel nightdress I found about me. There were no matches there, and I suddenly realised that ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... likewise fallen upon and their "joint" subdivided and hacked to pieces with knives made from shells. The bodies were not cooked all through, so that the condition of some of the revellers, both during and after the orgy, may best be left to the imagination. A more appalling, more ghastly, or more truly sickening spectacle it is impossible for the mind of man to conceive. A great corroboree was held after the feast, but, with my gorge rising and my brain reeling, I crept to my own humpy and tried to shut out from my mind the shocking inferno ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... the quarryman comes to tend his fire, and starts to see on the now redhot and glowing stones, sunk below the rim, the presentment of a skeleton formed of the purest white ashes—a ghastly spectacle in the grey of the dawn, as the mist rises and the peewit plaintively whistles over the ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... and that at last a great giant iceberg walls up the way in front, and we feast our eyes on the long-desired sight till after that the setting sun has tinged it purple (a sure sign of a fine day), its ghastly pallor shows us that the night is upon us. It is cold, and we are not sorry at half-past nine to find ourselves at Bourg d'Oisans, where there is a very fair inn kept by one Martin; we get a comfortable supper of eggs and go ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... sought a mean existence as teacher of English in a school of a remote seaside village. His spirit broke when the message came of the death of the girl in America who was waiting for him. Isolation from his kind and bitter hours left for thought made life alone too ghastly. He tried to make it more endurable by taking the pretty daughter of the head man of ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... Autolycus cured Ulysses, who had been injured while hunting the wild boar, by stanching the blood flowing from a wound in his leg, by means of a verbal charm. "With nicest care the skilful artists bound the brave, divine Ulysses' ghastly wound; and th' incantations stanch'd the gushing blood."[108:1] We have also the testimony of the Grecian lexicographer, Suidas, that various maladies were cured by the repetition of certain words, in the time of ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... you hosts, Of ghosts, And that without reflectors; And creepy things With wings, And gaunt and grisly spectres! He can fill you crowds Of shrouds, And horrify you vastly; He can rack your brains With chains, And gibberings grim and ghastly. Then, if you plan it, he Changes organity With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity - Driving your foes to the verge of insanity. Barring tautology, In demonology, 'Lectro biology, Mystic nosology, Spirit philology, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... months of slavery and wretchedness. Our position seemed absolutely hopeless, and I began to fear that we should never escape from the City of Blood. The scenes we witnessed there were so revolting, that I cannot now reflect upon them without a shudder. The ghastly "customs," the absence of all protection for life and property, the grinding oppression, the nameless horrors of all kinds, were terrible. Blood was continually flowing, for every anniversary demanded fresh holocausts, and the "Golgotha" presented a sight of indescribable ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... romance that had gathered round him fled away, leaving the saddest of all sad facts in living guise before me. Not only did the manhood seem to die out of him, but the comeliness that first attracted me; for, as he turned, I saw the ghastly wound that had laid open cheek and forehead. Being partly healed, it was no longer bandaged, but held together with strips of that transparent plaster which I never see without a shiver and swift recollections of scenes with which it is associated ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... chained by what now happened before their eyes. The group of servants parted and a woman staggered on to the bridge. Antoinette de Mauban was in a loose white robe, her dark hair streamed over her shoulders, her face was ghastly pale, and her eyes gleamed wildly in the light of the torches. In her shaking hand she held a revolver, and, as she tottered forward, she fired it at Rupert Hentzau. The ball missed him, and struck the woodwork over ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... arose in the morning my strange lodger seemed to be sleeping quietly. His face looked pale and ghastly in the light of day. I stepped close to his bed and, laying my hand upon his brow, was horrified to discover that he was dead. What was I to do? I sat down to think, trembling with fright. I must call in a policeman and tell him all I knew about my strange visitor. No, not all; ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... years, I have discovered to my surprise, and—let me confess it—dismay, that my point of view has strangely altered. I still consider that I have been the victim of one of the cruellest deceptions which a woman could endure; I still believe that in that first ghastly hour of discovery, flight was justified and natural, but—Well, Evelyn, dear! I have been living for months in very close intimacy with a little girl who thinks no evil, and is always ready to find a good explanation for what may on the surface appear to be unkind, ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the Ocean—quarto-sized and printed in agate. It was filled with mutiny, murder, storm, open-boat cannibalism and agonies of thirst, handspike and cutlass inhumanities. No shark, pirate nor man-killing whale had been missed; no ghastly wreck, derelict nor horrifying phantom of the sea had escaped the nameless, furious compiler. For four days and nights, Andrew glared consumingly into this terrible book, and when he came to the writhing "Finis," involved in a sort of typhoon tailpiece—he was whipped, and never could ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... league nor amity. May from my bones a new Achilles rise, That shall infest the Trojan colonies With fire, and sword, and famine, when at length Time to our great attempts contributes strength; Our seas, our shores, our armies theirs oppose, And may our children be for ever foes!' 210 A ghastly paleness death's approach portends, Then trembling she the fatal pile ascends; Viewing the Trojan relics, she unsheath'd Aeneas' sword, not for that use bequeath'd: Then on the guilty bed she gently lays Herself, and softly thus lamenting prays; 'Dear relics! ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... by daylight, but at twilight he would go out muffled up invisibly, whether the weather were cold or not, and he chose the loneliest paths and those most overshadowed by trees and banks. His goggling spectacles and ghastly bandaged face under the penthouse of his hat, came with a disagreeable suddenness out of the darkness upon one or two home-going labourers, and Teddy Henfrey, tumbling out of the "Scarlet Coat" one night, at half-past nine, was scared shamefully by the stranger's skull-like head (he ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... was thus gracefully employed, the agonized artist, his face suffused with blushes and fairly ghastly with an enforced smile, was painfully struggling to abstract himself, by changing the places of things, shifting the position of his easel, prying in a lost way into lumbered corners, and pretending to be in search ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... through act of mine any man pitied Dick. Truly, I would. Of all things ghastly, I can think of none so ghastly as Dick being pitied. He has never been pitied in his life. He has always been top-dog—bright, light, strong, unassailable. And more, he doesn't deserve pity. And it's ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... his head. The woman breathed an invocation to the Deity and sank back against the wall, her face ghastly beneath ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... straight towards that oaken beam, A trampled pathway ran; A ghastly shape was swinging there— It was ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... two men from Scotland Yard. Kerry stood awhile, chewing and staring at the ghastly face of ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... with two scouts and half a dozen troopers, had pushed out to overtake the regiment two hundred miles away. Forty-eight hours later, as the wagon-train with its guard was slowly crawling southward, it was met by a courier with ghastly face. He was one of three who had started from the ruined agency together. They met no Indians, but at Box Elder Springs had come upon the bodies of a little party of soldiers stripped, scalped, gashed, and ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... sense that the truth doubtless transcends and embraces all spiritual light hopefully discerned; but the moment that a man condemns those who do not exactly agree with himself, he sins against the Spirit. Is it not a ghastly and inconceivable thought that Christ should have authorised that men should be brought to the light by persecution? Or that any of his words could be so foully distorted as to lend the least excuse to such a principle of action? It matters not what kind of persecution ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... discovered on the floor and the door of the chamber, down the stairs, and along the passage leading to the street, whence they could be distinctly traced to the waterside, not so very far away. Imagination, working upon these ghastly survivals of the hours of darkness, quickly reconstructed the crime which it was evident had been committed. The boatswain was known to have had money on him; but the youth, it was recalled, had begged his bed. It was ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... in which proud Troy shall yield, And spread its smoking ruins o'er the field; Yet Hecuba's, nor Priam's hoary age, Whose blood shall quench some Grecian's thirsty rage, Nor my brave brothers that have bit the ground, Their souls dismiss'd through many a ghastly wound, Can in my bosom half that grief create, As the sad thought of your impending fate; 20 When some proud Grecian dame shall tasks impose, Mimic your tears, and ridicule your woes: Beneath Hyperia's ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... from her armchair, but sank back in it trembling very much. "So you are come, sir, are you?" she said, with a fond shaking voice. "Bring back the——Ah!" here she screamed, "Gracious God, who is it?" Her eyes stared wildly: her white face looked ghastly through her rouge. She clung to the arms of her chair for support, as the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and a feeling of illness; but we went down and took our breakfast below with the rest. At least I took mine as usual, though she did but toy with her food. Then all of a sudden she put her hand to her side and turned ghastly white, and fell off her chair. A scullery wench set up a cry, 'The plague! the plague!' and forthwith they all fled this way and that—all save me, who could not leave her thus. I made her swallow some hot cordial which I ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... health had been just struck down by a violent kick from a horse, and was not expected to live more than a few hours. The blow had broken his skull bone, and cut out a piece as large as the palm of his hand, presenting a ghastly and horrible sight. ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... Sought comfort in each other's eye; Then turned their ghastly look each one, This to her sire, that to her son." Scott's Lady of the Lake, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... multitude of women shaking at him the bloody severed limbs of their sons and husbands; a child burned alive in its cradle; the head of a decapitated criminal, and the visions that filled its brain,—such are some of the ghastly imaginings of this diseased and uneducated nature. Compare such works as these with Dore's crudest conceptions, and the difference between the inventions of genius and those of a morbid intellect ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... was upon his windpipe, and he was being borne to the earth. He battled furiously but futilely—with the grim tenacity of a bulldog those awful fingers were clinging to his throat. Swiftly and surely life was being choked from him. His eyes bulged, his tongue protruded, his face turned to a ghastly purplish hue—there was a convulsive tremor of the stiffening muscles, and the ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... woman was ghastly pale, and her sleep must have been very light, for suddenly she opened her eyes, and seeing the officers, uttered the cry, which at first only caused her lord and master to growl out an oath and turn over; whereupon she clutched at him wildly and cried to the men to leave them; they ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... And he would not move until Mr. Stevenson and I went in advance. By this change he sought to transfer the responsibility to us. Finally he rode up to us and said in a whisper, "We will camp here." The whole expression of the old man's face was that of ghastly terror. I was much annoyed, for I thought that, at the eleventh hour, his fear had overcome his desire to gratify us. Just then a Mexican lad on horseback approached; we were all mounted. I asked the lad, "Is there a lake near by?" He replied, ...
— The Religious Life of the Zuni Child - Bureau of American Ethnology • (Mrs.) Tilly E. (Matilda Coxe Evans) Stevenson
... the guillotine, calling up thoughts of severed heads from memory's cloisters. On the left you see a ghastly head; on the right the decapitated trunk. By the victim stand the bloody actors in the tragedy. Ladies and gentlemen! When I review the awful guilt of Marat and Robespierre, humbly do I give thanks that I have been kept from yielding, like them, to fierce ambition and lust of power, and ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... noble. The long speech of York, in Act I, coming, as it does, after a clash of minds turbid with passion, is most noble. It gives a terror to what follows. The calm mind makes no mistake. The judgment of a man without heart seems as infallible as fate, as beautiful, and as ghastly. All happens as he foresees. All the cruelty and bloodiness of the latter half of the play come from that man's beautifully clear, cool brain. He stands detached. One little glimmer of heart in him would alter everything. The glimmer never comes. Humphrey ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Waldron. As he re-entered the wood he met wounded men streaming through it, a few marching alertly upright, many more crouching and groaning, some clinging to their less injured comrades, but all haggard in face and ghastly. ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... believe that it was Dion who was speaking to her. Often she had heard him speak violently, irritably, even cruelly and rudely. But there was a sort of ghastly softness in his voice. His hand still held hers, but its grasp had relaxed. In his touch, as in his voice, there was ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... to gratify the spite of some one in authority. However this may be, the hanging of the Episcopal minister of Trinity-Gask was the last exercise of criminal jurisdiction on the part of the Steward of Strathearn. This was the last time the "kind gallows of Crieff" bore its ghastly fruit. The Highlanders' salutation to ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... the sea, the frosty bitter wind cut through to the bones. The men were badly provided against the weather; and hardy as they were, the weather killed them that night. In the morning, the boat drifted on shore, manned like a spectre bark, by the ghastly figures of the dead—freighted horribly with the corpses of ten men all frozen to death. They are now buried in Mawgan church-yard; and the stern of the boat they died in tells their fatal story, and points to the last home ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... will overpower your will. Nothing but complete sacrifice will satisfy you or Him, and I believe in you profoundly. I am sure that, whatever be the ghastly struggle, you will go through with it, and find your strength in Him. I pray ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... had been cut entirely off, and that his left arm was also much hacked, apparently by a sword. The guard conducted their doomed prisoner directly by us on the left, and when within three yards of us the appearance of his scarred cheek was ghastly; but as he turned his head to speak, a placid smile, as of heroic resignation to his fate, lit up the other side of his face, forming a contrast almost unearthly. We eagerly stepped forward to address ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... Cecil as they had charged together, and her mare, enraged and intoxicated with noise and terror, had torn away at full speed that had outstripped even the swiftest of her Spahis. A little farther on a dog's moan caught her ear; she turned and looked across. Upright, among a ghastly pile of men and chargers, sat the small, snowy poodle of the Chasseurs, beating the air with its little paws, as it had been taught to do when it needed anything, and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... time were very dark, and at several points we could see burning farm homesteads and villages, which to the thoughtful mind denoted the awful destruction and suffering envolved by the ghastly outrage upon humanity, being perpetrated by ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... ahead and led the pursuit in turn. The Spaniards fought with desperate courage, still suffering ghastly losses. But, do what they could to bear up against the English and the wind, they were forced to leeward of Dunkirk, and so out of touch with Parma. This was the result of the Battle of Gravelines, fought on Monday ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... notes of many a bird. Deep in the thickets of the wood With Lakshman and his spouse he stood, There in the horrid shade he saw A giant passing nature's law: Vast as some mountain-peak in size, With mighty voice and sunken eyes, Huge, hideous, tall, with monstrous face, Most ghastly of his giant race. A tiger's hide the Rakshas wore Still reeking with the fat and gore: Huge-faced, like Him who rules the dead, All living things he struck with dread. Three lions, tigers four, ten deer He carried on his iron spear, Two wolves, an elephant's head beside With mighty tusks which ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... there's no known or unknown form of torture I wouldn't undergo to get the old fool to introduce me to the man who composed the sonata; starting with the torture of the old fool's company, which would be ghastly." ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... we reached the summit of Mount Sneffels! It was in an awful mood of mind, that despite my fatigue, before I descended into the crater which was to shelter us for the night, I paused to behold the sun rise at midnight on the very day of its lowest declension, and enjoyed the spectacle of its ghastly pale rays cast upon the isle which ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... of the owner of the castle he smiled as though he had met a comrade. His was the only familiar face among all those people who were speaking his language. He was ghastly in hue, with sunken features and an impalpable glaze spreading over his eyes. He had no visible wounds, but from under the cloak spread over his abdomen his torn intestines exhaled a fatal warning. The presence of ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... falling and the German flares were commencing to fly. On the way back we met two Algerian troopers and in the gleam of a star shell and the fading twilight they looked more like two escaped denizens of the chamber of horrors than anything I could well imagine. Indeed, their appearance was so ghastly under the weird light of the flares and the fading day, that I involuntarily shivered, hardened though I was by that time to grim sights. Each of them carried on his shoulder the hind-quarter of a cow that had been killed by a shell at a nearby farm, and the dripping blood from the ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... the same hue as the ground. He started up in terror; a long vivid flash lingering more than a minute in the air, disclosed the object against which he had fallen; and paralyzed with horror, pale, ghastly, as if suddenly turned to stone, he remained. He uttered no word nor cry; but flash after flash played around him, and still beheld him gazing in stupefied and motionless horror on the appalling sight ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... might almost be called a bit of plain. Under the trees there the best strawberries grow, and there stood the temple of mysterious and blood-stained rites. Prowling continually round and round one of the trees, the ghastly priest was for centuries ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... I shall never forget. My heart misgave me as she opened the missive, for I could well divine its contents; and I almost reproached myself for being the messenger of such evil tidings. I watched her closely as she read. She was naturally somewhat pale, but I saw her face grow ghastly white before she had read two lines. When she had finished the perusal of the fatal letter, she pressed her hand upon her breast, murmured "Oh God!" and would have fallen to the floor if I had not caught her in ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... feeling rather sorry for the poor chap," remarked Tony. "I should feel ghastly if I had fallen in love with you after you had become engaged to another man, and ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... committed by the other side; and certainly parallels could be found in the French invasion of Algeria fifty years later and in many other wars of the nineteenth century. When men have been fired with the diabolical passions that war arouses, and have grown accustomed to the ghastly sights on battlefields, they cease to be reasoning beings; they become fiends. But unfortunately it is necessary to explain what really occurred, as it is to Vinegar Hill and its terrible associations that the Nationalists of to-day refer with triumph. Songs in praise of the ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... the unpleasant trail of a defeated army. Turks had fallen by the way and the natives would not bury them. Our aircraft had bombed the road, and the dead men, cattle and horses, and smashed transport were ghastly sights and made the air offensive. There they lay, one long line of dead men and animals, and if a London fog had descended to blind the eyes of our Army the sense of smell would still have carried a scout on the direct line ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... moved to pronounce his name, but some swift intuitive warning restrained the utterance. Suddenly a new horror, a ghastly possibility, thrust itself for the first time before her, and she felt as though some hand of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of the Triple Bough And the ghastly Dreams that tend you, Your growth began with the life of Man And only his death can end you: They may tug in line at your hempen twine, They may flourish with axe and saw, But your taproot drinks of the Sacred Springs In the living rock ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... bayonet-thrust or stroke of sword. More than one in his death agony slew the foe at whose hand he himself had received the mortal wound; and their bodies stiffened as they lay, locked in the death grip. Again the clouds came over the moon; a thick fog crept up from the river, wrapping from sight the ghastly havoc of the battlefield; and long before midnight the fighting stopped perforce, for the fog and the smoke and the gloom were such that no one could see a yard away. By degrees each side drew off. [Footnote: Keane writes: "The enemy ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... on her face, which had turned to a ghastly pallor. The barmaid, concluding that she was ill, served her promptly and ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... Vale of Tears afar, The spectral camp is fled; Faith shineth as a morning star, Our ghastly fears are ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... heard the approaching step, and turned round sharply. The detective saw that his face was ghastly pale in the moonlight, and his brows wrinkled ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... to bed, with the 'day of great importance' tingling in his ears. He could not go to sleep for reflections on the subject, and even after shutting his eyes it hovered over him in ghastly dreams. There was an immense table in an immense hall, with ten thousand parsons on the one side, and ten thousand old maids on the other. At the head presided Mrs. Marsh, with the bishop in waiting behind; while he himself was sitting in an arm-chair, suspended by ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... violent, is combined with the fantastic story of Erisichthon, 'a churlish husband-man,' who in the nymphs' despite cuts down the sacred tree of Ceres, into which the chaste Fidelia had been transformed. For this offence the goddess dooms him to the plague of hunger. The ghastly description of this monster, who may be compared with Browne's Limos, was probably suggested by some similar descriptions in the Faery Queen (I. iv. and III. xii). Erisichthon is put to all manner of shifts to satisfy the hunger with which he is ever consumed, and is at last forced to ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... and a nobler neck never fell before low beast—I strode away towards Westminster, cured of half my indignation at the death of Charles the First. Many people hurried past me, chiefly of the more tender sort, revolting at the butchery. In their ghastly faces, as they turned them back, lest the sight should be coming after them, great sorrow was to be seen, and horror, and pity, and ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... taking place sometimes at places and on days regularly set apart for the really bloody work. The fighters were partially protected by a sort of armour, and the wounds inflicted were generally more ghastly than dangerous; though a son of Bismarck was said to have been nearly killed at Bonn a few years before, and there was sometimes serious maiming. Perhaps one may say it was nothing but very rough play, but it was the play of young savages, whose ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... soul, at enmity with gods and men, could find no rest; so violently was his mind torn and distracted by a consciousness of guilt. Accordingly his countenance was pale, his eyes ghastly, his pace one while quick, another slow [citus modo, modo tardus incessus]; indeed, in all his looks there was an air of distraction."—Sallust, Catilina, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... literature, and is worthy to be ranked with the works of Edgar A. Poe. Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius. It is a ghastly and gruesome creation. Not one bright ray redeems it. It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience. But it fascinates. Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in fiction,—an ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... much immediate effect on the lower forms of life—including human beings, if you'll pardon the expression. But here, it causes a ghastly carnage, so ghastly it sickens me even to think ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... all the following night armed bands wandered about the streets of Laon searching everywhere for relatives, friends, or servitors of the bishop, for all whom the angry populace knew or supposed to be such, and wreaking on their persons or their houses a ghastly or a brutal vengeance. In a fit of terror many poor innocents fled before the blind wrath of the populace; some were caught and cut down pell-mell amongst the guilty; others escaped through the vineyards ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... feet. Young Cameron's face became ghastly pale. His hand clutched the top of Mr. Rae's desk. Twice or thrice he moistened his lips preparing to speak, but uttered not a word. "Good God, my boy!" said the Captain hoarsely. "Don't stand like that. Tell ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... thin, pale girl all in black, who only two months before had lost both daughter and husband; for the child had died scarcely a week or two before her father, Anthony Babington, had died miserably on the gallows near St. Giles' Fields, where he had so often met his friends after dark. It was a ghastly tale, told in fragments to Robin here and there during his journeyings by men in taverns, before whom he must keep a brave face. And a few farmers were there, old Mr. Merton among them, come in to welcome the son of the Squire of Matstead, returned under a feigned name, unknown even to his ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... madness, some ghastly joke again. By heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow! It was my brother Henry. He is my double. He lives in number 2 Dolphin's Barn. Slander, the viper, has wrongfully accused me. Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall. I ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... orders to shoot her if she should spring upon me, but on no account to fire before me. Kleinboy was to stand ready to hand me my Purdey rifle, in case the two-grooved Dixon should not prove sufficient. My men as yet had been steady, but they were in a precious stew, their faces having assumed a ghastly paleness, and I had a painful feeling that I could ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it continues standing, 'with a ghastly affectation of life,' after all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... reply, but pointed to a corner near the door. I looked in the direction indicated, and by the dim light of the lamp saw to my horror—a rattlesnake. I looked around for Dick; he was leaning against the wall, his face ghastly pale. Before I was aware of it Dick had kicked in the strong door. Osborne must have had the same idea for he too rushed for the door. They both reached the threshold at the ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... delusion of the cup, and yet I wondered, too, if perchance I might not have caught something of that American spirit of equality which is said to be peculiar to republics. Needless to say I had never believed in the existence of this spirit, but had considered it rather a ghastly jest, having been a reader of our own periodical press since earliest youth. I mean to say, there could hardly be a stable society in which one had no superiors, because in that case one would not know who were one's inferiors. Nevertheless, I repeat that I had felt a most novel enlargement ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the way into the "best room," a sunny, square room, carpeted with a faded and patched rag carpet, and papered with a horrible white-and-green-striped wallpaper, where a few ghastly effigies of dead members of the family hung in variously sized oval walnut frames. The house resounded with singing, laughter, whistling, tramping of boots, and scufflings. Half-grown boys came to the door and crooked their fingers at the children, who ran out, ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... the name of the murderess. "Scene on the scaffold!" It was a little after nine o'clock; the enterprising paper had promptly got out its gibbet edition. A morning of midwinter, roofs and ways covered with soot-grimed snow under the ghastly fog-pall; and, whilst I lay there in my bed, that woman had been led out and hanged—hanged. I thought with horror of the possibility that I might sicken and die in that wilderness of houses, nothing above me but "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." Overcome ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... feverish brightness of her eyes, she would have looked like a corpse. Her wrinkled forehead, her hollow cheeks, her white lips told their terrible tale of the suffering of years. The ghastly appearance of her face was heightened by the furnishing of the room. This doomed woman, dying slowly day by day, delighted in bright colors and sumptuous materials. The paper on the walls, the curtains, the carpet presented the hues of the rainbow. She lay on a couch covered ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... their solicitude, for the thought of death is always the least supportable when it draws near to the merely sensual and selfish. Sometimes they held him up; sometimes, with mistaken helpfulness, they beat him between the shoulders; and when the poor wretch lay back ghastly and spent after a paroxysm of coughing, they would sometimes peer into his face, doubtfully exploring it for any mark of life. There is no one but has some virtue: that of the clerk was courage; and he would make haste to reassure them ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her tears.... She knew she should have been glad, relieved. With Bonbright she had lived in daily dread. She had not loved him, and the fear that his restraint would break, that he would force his love upon her, had made her days a ghastly dream.... She should be crying out with the joy and relief of his removal. But she felt no relief, felt no joy.... She could not ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... I had conversed too long with abstracted truth to trust myself with the immortal thoughts of love. THAT S. L. MIGHT HAVE BEEN MINE, AND NOW NEVER CAN—these are the two sole propositions that for ever stare me in the face, and look ghastly in at my poor brain. I am in some sense proud that I can feel this dreadful passion—it gives me a kind of rank in the kingdom of love—but I could have wished it had been for an object that at least could have understood its value and pitied its excess. You say her ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... know how long it took—the time had come when Polly's head was to cease from staring down in a ghastly one-eyed way at her body, and it was to come down and crown ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... no longer now The song-birds singing at her heart, but there A thousand gnashing furies made their lair, And urged her on; her nearest pathway lay Over a little hill, and on its brow A group of trees, whereof each blackened bough Bore up to heaven as if in protest mute Its clustering load of ghastly charnel fruit,[12] The swaddled forms of all the village dead— Maid, lusty warrior, and toothless hag, The infant and the conjurer with his bag, Peacefully rotting in their airy bed. As on a battle ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... surprised, dumfounded, overwhelmed. The only thought that now ran through his addled brain was that he simply had to do something. He couldn't stand there forever, like a fool, waving a pistol. In a minute or two they would all be laughing at him. It was ghastly. The wave of self-pity, of self-commiseration submerged him completely. Why, oh why, had he got himself into this dreadful pickle? He had merely come to talk it over with Nellie, that and nothing more. And now, see ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... Hela (see note, canto I: 23) was hideous in appearance. Half of her body was livid in color and the other half bore the ghastly pallor of death. ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... and in this awful hour, with that ghastly form before me, truth and not false delicacy must prevail. I say then that the Countess of Hurstmonceux hunted me down and run me to earth, but all in such feminine fashion that I scarcely knew I was hunted. I was flattered by her preference, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... contrary, he is writing a fifth and sixth, and has carried his plan as far as a fiftieth and sixtieth volume of the book called 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy;' but they are rather to be attributed to his ghastly ghost, which is said to walk the purlieus of Covent ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... never been able to learn the ghastly details of her death. The police and an examining magistrate were said to be investigating the case, but nothing ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... dead of night From forth dull sleep by dreadful fancy waking, That thinks she hath beheld some ghastly sprite, Whose grim aspect sets every joint a-shaking: What terror 'tis! but she, in worser taking, From sleep disturbed, heedfully doth view The sight which makes supposed ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... they laid themselves down, the cold earth feeling agreeable to their fevered skins; and when the earth around them grew heated, they got friends to dig a few inches deeper, again and again, seeking a cooler and cooler couch. In this ghastly effort many of them died, literally in their own graves, and were buried where they lay! It need not be surprising, though we did everything in our power to relieve and save them, that the natives associated us with the white men who had so dreadfully afflicted them, and that their blind thirst ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... too rude a jest to share with her. Had poor Viola once grasped Harold Lind's estimation of her she would have as soon gazed upon herself in her coffin. Harold's comprehension of the essentials was beyond Jane Carew's. It was fairly ghastly, partaking of the nature of X-rays, but it never disturbed Harold Lind. He went along his dance-track undisturbed, his blue eyes never losing their high lights of glee, his lips never losing their inscrutable smile at some happy understanding between life and himself. ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Mr. Merrick recoiled. The face was seared with livid scars, the nose crushed to one side, the mouth crooked and set in a sneering grin. One eye was nearly closed and the other round and wide open. A more forbidding and ghastly countenance Mr. Merrick had never beheld and in his surprise ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... thee, to thousands, of whom each And one as all a ghastly gap did make In his own kind and kindred, whom to teach Forgetfulness were mercy for their sake; The Archangel's trump, not Glory's, must awake Those whom they thirst for; though the sound of Fame May for a moment ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... you were all in the wrong, and I feel greatly annoyed to find my young gentlemen conducting themselves like the disreputable low boys who frequent the fairs and racecourses of the county. Look at yourselves. Did you ever see such a ghastly sight? Burr major, your face is horrible. As for you, Dicksee, I am ashamed of you. Suppose any of your relatives presented themselves at this moment, and wanted to see you. What could I say? There, ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... there, he was aware of a man in black beside him, like himself, ghastly to see, with shadows and fires for eyes, and thin, parted lips that showed wolfish teeth, strong, stern, with ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... worst corner in the way of trenches I had seen since we came to Flanders. Behind the ditch rows of crosses, black and white, stood up a few feet away, ghastly reminders in the half darkness of the toll that had been paid to take and hold the trenches. The defenders here were buried ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... make confidences until their secrets become insupportable. However, Aunt Rebecca was now wide awake, and had trumpeted a pretty shrill reveiller. And Gertrude had started up, her elbow on the pillow, and her large eyes open; and the dream, I suppose, was shivered and flown, and something rather ghastly at ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... wind, the moon rose. Far indeed from being visible, she yet shed a little glimmer of light over the plain, revealing a world as wild as ever the frozen north outspread—as wild as ever poet's despairing vision of desolation. I see it! I see it! but how shall I make my reader see it with me? It was ghastly. The only similitude of life was the perplexed and multitudinous motion of the drifting, falling flakes. No shape was to be seen, no sound but that of the wind to be heard. It was like the dream of a delirious child after ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... above this scene of desolation. On that night, it was chilling, with a superstitious awe, the hamlets of New England and the gilded chambers of Versailles; but it is characteristic of La Salle, that, beset as he was with perils, and surrounded with ghastly images of death, he coolly notes down the phenomenon,—not as a portentous messenger of war and woe, but rather as an object of scientific curiosity. [Footnote: This was the "Great Comet of 1680.". Dr. B. A. Gould writes me: "It appeared in December, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... each way that, when described, it was too late to alter the helm. Its giant shape filled the foreground, towering high above the masts, grim and gaunt and ghastly, immovable as the adamantine buttresses of a frowning seaboard, while the liner lurched and staggered like a wounded thing in agony as her engines slowly drew her back from the rampart against which she ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... sister, and old David Deans, the patriarch of St. Leonard's Crags, and Butler, and Dumbiedikes, eloquent in his silence, and Mr. Bartoline Saddle-tree and his prudent helpmate, and Porteous swinging in the wind, and Madge Wildfire, full of finery and madness, and her ghastly mother.—Again, there is Meg Merrilies, standing on her rock, stretched on her bier with "her head to the east," and Dirk Hatterick (equal to Shakespear's Master Barnardine), and Glossin, the soul of an attorney, and Dandy Dinmont, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... clear and typical case of opium or morphine poisoning. To this conclusion all his symptoms seemed to point with absolute certainty. The coated tongue, which he protruded slowly and tremulously in response to a command bawled in his ear; his yellow skin and ghastly expression; his contracted pupils and the stupor from which he could hardly be roused by the roughest handling and which yet did not amount to actual insensibility; all these formed a distinct and coherent group of symptoms, not only pointing plainly to the nature of the drug, but also ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... command the principal streets, and barricades erected at various important points. Just at daylight, Renneberg himself, in complete armor, rode into the square, and it was observed that he looked ghastly as a corpse. He was followed by thirty troopers, armed like himself, from head to foot. "Stand by me now," he cried to the assembled throng; "fail me not at this moment, for now I am for the first time ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to play that they were living in the lower regions. Thereupon the whole party followed him down into the hold. The hatches and all the other openings were closed, and then Blackbeard began to illuminate the scene with fire and brimstone. The sulphur burned, the fumes rose, a ghastly light spread over the countenances of the desperadoes, and very soon some of them began to gasp and cough and implore the captain to let in some fresh air, but Blackbeard was bound to have a good game, and he proceeded to burn more ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... while the husbandman sleeps Taketh unwearied pains, a vigilant guard he keeps Tirelessly watching, and tending each evil plant. These are his pleasure gardens, leased to him through time Where he walketh to and fro, chanting a demon song; Tending with ghastly fingers, the scarlet buds of wrong, And drinking greedily in the ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... But I begin to fancy it will never happen. My resolutions, where are they, what comes of them? Nothing. I have tried everything except the opera. Everything else has been rejected. For a week I have not gone to bed at all. I wait and see those ghastly gray fingers smoothing my pillow. I am not wanted. I am crowded out. My hands tremble and I cannot write. My eyes fail and I cannot see. ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... spots which the Frenchmen visited bore evidences of a ghastly tragedy. So numerous were the human bones bleaching on the sandy soil that they called it Massacre Island (to-day Dauphin Island). It was surmised—and with some plausibility—that here had perished some portion of the ill-fated following of Pamphile de Narvaez. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... only watch and pity, and keep the bairns in the chambers that looked on the sea, so that their young eyes should not gaze on so ghastly ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... instance, we took nine days to get here from Paris, spending only one day at Chambery, for the sake of Les Charmettes and Rousseau. Robert played the 'Dream' on the old harpsichord, the keys of which rattled in a ghastly way, as if it were the bones of him who once so 'dreamed.' Then there was the old watch hung up, without a tick in it. At St. Jean de Maurienne we got into difficulties with diligences, and submitted ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... position, and people were not slow in coming to the conclusion that he required the stimulus and the strength of a solid majority behind him to bring out his peculiar talents. At all events, his first speech following the introduction of the Home Rule Bill was a ghastly failure. It was listened to in almost unbroken silence from the beginning to the end—not that the speech had not plenty of cleverness in it, the small cleverness of small points—but it was badly delivered. It did not seem to rise to the heights expected on such an occasion; in short, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
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