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More "Gruesome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we should all be thinking with pity of the dead and dying above us, but when you're a hundred feet or so below, the shots and cries of battle are neither exciting nor gruesome." ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... toes with delight, the tale being of that gruesome nature which appeals to him. It must have been tried on countless other children, for, despite Whinnie's autobiographical interjections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primitive Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked over in his ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... There was a gruesome sequel to this incident. Some days following the drowning of the runaway, Sam Clemens, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys went to the spot and were pushing the drift about, when suddenly the negro rose before them, straight and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... any characteristic series of pictures or incidents from Madame Bovary: take Bovary's bungling and gruesome operations on the club-footed ostler's leg, with the entire village clustering agape; take the picture of the eyeless, idiotic beggar on the road to Rouen; or the scene in which Emma offers herself for three thousand francs to Rodolphe; or the following bit, only a bit, from the detailed account ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... and Jeff Bates pried the trophies off the wall of the big office. The lawyer shook his head sadly. "Pity about Dan Torkleson. Gruesome affair." ...
— Meeting of the Board • Alan Edward Nourse
... There was something gruesome about the long ascent. He thought of stories he had read of lonely turrets in which men were beheaded, and otherwise made away with. It seemed he would never come to the top, and when at last he did it was to find two of the most awful-looking eyes he ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... Beyond, but we prefer the little tracks worn by the feet of the natives, which criss-cross everywhere. Jean won't stir a step without a horrid, dilapidated rag doll called Topsy. I do dislike the faces of rag dolls, their lack of profile is so gruesome, and Topsy is a most depressing specimen of her kind; but Jean lavishes affection on her. A woman-child is an odd thing. I remember being taken into a shop to choose a doll, and I chose a most hideous thing with curly white hair. No one could understand ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... feeling of supernatural voluptuousness, which a man runs after for the remainder of his life. A single kiss had been enough. Never had rendezvous been spent in a manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous divinity; for the mother had remained in Henri's imagination like some infernal, cowering thing, cadaverous, monstrous, savagely ferocious, which the imagination ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... decision of the first kind will become the less effective, and will be the more easily overrun the more firmly the idea is fixed that such preventive means are at his disposal. At the same time the discussion of all these sexual matters, even with their gruesome background, will force on the mind a stronger engagement with sexual thought than had ever before occurred, and this will find its discharge in an increased sexual tension. On the other hand, this new knowledge of means of safety will greatly increase ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Andrew, with a shudder. "What gruesome things to take to bed with you. I didn't; I was so tired that I went off directly and ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... which. Several of the stoutest men carried bales and bundles on poles. Some were evidently bales of tapa-cloth. The burden of one set of poles, heavier than the rest, however, was not so easily made out. My curiosity was whetted to know whether it was a roast pig or something of a gruesome nature, and I inquired about it. "I don't know," said Mrs. Stevenson, "whether this is a wedding or a funeral. Whatever it is, though, captain, our place seems to be ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... whispering ceased. A wave of excitement went round the room. Some people shouted, others pressed forward to gaze on the abandoned wretch who had been caught in the act of committing a gruesome deed. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... frighten the present occupants out of your chosen home by suggestion. No real ghost is required. Having selected the house you pay a call and lay ground-bait, so to speak. You tell the tenant you are interested in the place because you happen to know that at one time it was haunted. You relate a gruesome tale of some mysterious tragedy that you say has occurred there, and generally make ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... Mukoki had just come through the door after bearing out one of their gruesome loads, and the young Indian hurried to his side. He weighed one of the pieces in the palm ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... M'Bongwele—in whose territory we now were—a king of fierce, cruel, and jealous disposition, as we gathered, and so suspicious of strangers that he had issued a standing order against the admission into his country of any such, under certain gruesome pains and penalties. And it was by his orders that Lualamba and his warriors had come out on the previous night for the purpose of slaying the mysterious monster that had been seen flying so fearlessly and impudently ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... mournful—and a murmur went round among the eager watchers. It was her most famous dance—the dance of Death, the most gruesome spectacle, so it was said, that any dancer had ever conceived. She came on to the stage like the flash of an arrow, dressed in black that glittered and scintillated with every amazing movement. And then it began—that most ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... scaffoldings, which seemed to have been erected for the sake of making repairs and then left; the windows were curtainless, the floors bare, and rats ran hither and thither among the rubbish accumulated in the corners. Nothing could possibly look more desolate and gruesome. We saw no pictures; but as we did not explore every part of the rooms, they may have been there without our seeing them. We were further informed by the people of the town that in order to visit the rooms at night ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... see a typical tragedy of kinship. This receives curious corroboration in the fact that when, towards the close of the story, the scene shifts to America and the main motive—the unfolding of the fraternal fortunes of the tragic brothers, is made minor to a series of gruesome adventures (however entertaining and well done) the reader, even if uncritical, has an uneasy sense of disharmony: and rightly, since the strict character romance has changed to ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... pajamas and the morning was cold, but he suddenly felt a great drop of perspiration on his forehead. It was the sort of thing, this, which he had expected—had been prepared for, in fact—but it was none the less, in its way, gruesome. There was a further knock at the door, ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... tingling all over with the consciousness of having played a masterly game, when suddenly a gruesome idea came to him, and he sat up, breathless. Suppose Wain took it into his head to make a tour of the dormitories, to see that all was well! Wyatt was still in the garden somewhere, blissfully unconscious of what was going on indoors. He would ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... statement of it fills me with the fine old Greek sense of fate. Men sickened at dawn and were dead at sunset. Every day a cartload or two of corpses went over the bluff into the river; and men became reckless. Larpenteur and his friend joked daily about the carting of the gruesome freight. They felt the irresistible, and they laughed at it, since struggle was out of the question. Some drank deeply and indulged in hysterical orgies. Some hollowed out their own graves and waited patiently beside ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... limbs, the bleeding wound in His side, the face smeared with bloody sweat and dust, the torn brow and hair, and the swollen features, must have combined with all the horrible surroundings to make one of the most gruesome sights that ever man saw. And it was at this moment, in His extremity, that He says: "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." "Father, I have done all that I can do; now I leave Myself ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... grasped firm his foe, whose fingers cracked. The fiend made off, but the earl close followed. The monster meant — if he might at all — to fling himself free, and far away fly to the fens, — knew his fingers' power in the gripe of the grim one. Gruesome march to Heorot this monster of harm had made! Din filled the room; the Danes were bereft, castle-dwellers and clansmen all, earls, of their ale. Angry were both those savage hall-guards: the house resounded. Wonder it was the wine-hall firm in the strain of their struggle stood, to earth the fair ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... resting on the arm of his chair. The morning's mail still lay on the table, some letters open, as they had been when the discovery had been announced. Mrs. Pitts was apparently much excited and unnerved by the gruesome discovery in ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... newspaper account of an execution by strangling and burning at the stake. The woman concerned was not the last victim in Britain of this form of execution. The honour, I believe, belongs to one Anne Cruttenden. The account is full of gruesome and graphic detail, but the observer preserves ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... was a cruel ending for a gallant gentleman," said Collier, "and it makes gruesome telling. Have you anything else sweeter for the mouth, for there be enough of hogs on the land as well as on sea, and some of them go round the field, where men are lying helpless, on two legs and not on four, from whom heaven ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... Monarchs', a poetic castigation (without mention of names) of the type of ruler perfectly exemplified by Duke Karl of Wuerttemberg, up to about the year 1770; 'In a Battle', a powerful description of the rage of combat, with all its sickening and inspiring details; 'The Pestilence', a gruesome tribute to the power of God as manifested in the horrors of the plague, and 'Count Eberhard the Quarreler', a patriotic battle-ballad in honor of a locally renowned Suabian fighter. Better than any of these, however, from a poetic point of view, is the 'Funeral Fantasy', which was ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... a gruesome thing to do, perhaps, but it must be remembered that it was necessary to strike terror into the hearts of other evil-doers, to whom the free-booter in question had been something of a hero. Every Malik[1] who ...
— John Nicholson - The Lion of the Punjaub • R. E. Cholmeley
... their spirits at the very highest pitch of exhilaration, and their nerves by so much the steadier, and such rapid progress did they make that ten minutes later saw them clustered together clinging to the rocky pinnacle before mentioned. And a gruesome-enough looking spot it was—a sharp projecting point of rock overhanging a sheer precipice some two hundred feet deep, with a narrow snow-bank immediately beneath, and then another frightful abyss of unknown depth beyond. And, to the right and left of it, an almost vertical face of bare rock coated ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality; but he realized that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations. ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Rhamda and the Nervina. I had iron will and courage—also strength. The Rhamda was never able to control me. My life is gone but not my will. Now I have left him another. Do not surrender, Harry. It is a gruesome task; but hold on to the end. Help me up the steps. There now. Just wait a minute till ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... that wretched human beings once lay there rotting in the dark. The dungeons of Villeneuve made a particular impression on me—greater than any except those of Loches, which must surely be the most gruesome in Europe. I hasten to add that every dark hole at Villeneuve is called a dungeon; and I believe it is well established that in this manner, in almost all old castles and towers, the sensibilities of the modern tourist ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... away and the bonds of the king which were laid upon them, but their bodies were saved from harm. For their beauty was no wise injured, nor was any harm come upon their garments, nor their hair singed by the fire, but in God's protection they came forth gladly from that gruesome horror, wise of heart and favoured by ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... on the floor, and covered the face, which was less gruesome in death, for the pity of the eyes had given ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... is that gruesome object? Take care, don't touch it as it floats by; it looks like a bit of charred stick, but indeed it is ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... loud whirr of wheels, a buzz of internal mechanism, and all the little figures would stop dead with arms outstretched, whilst the beheaded doll rolled off the board and was lost to view, no doubt preparatory to going through the same gruesome ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... was at this discovery, to pause there staring at those gruesome figures would have only brought fresh alarm to the two watching my every movement from the edge of the clearing. Gripping my nerves I advanced over the first body, watchful for any sign of the presence of life within the cabin. There was none—the work of the ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... me, sir?" His words seemed gruesome. They seemed open to some vaguely sinister interpretation. But I ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... answered the young man. "Things are not often so serious as they are supposed to be. It's like being in a house that's supposed to be haunted—on All Hallow E'en, for instance—it's awfully gruesome and creepy at night when the wind moans and the owls screech. And then, the next morning, one wonders how one could have been such an idiot. Other things are often like that. You think the world's coming to an end—and then it doesn't, you know. It goes on just the same. ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... was lodged with a good woman who cleaned the church and school, and who kept her awake for half the night telling her gruesome stories of happenings in disease-stricken towns, such as Latimer was at that moment supposed to be. But if she thought to frighten Nealie into consenting to go back to Hammerville without finding her father she made ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... her! Sandy never forgot. Big, brave, and tender, he had set himself to the task of keeping his word and fulfilling his vision. He had shielded poor Molly—he had told her the pitiful story without its gruesome details! He had come back to Lost Mountain to help the men and women and save the baby-things! He had come home to—keep his word with her, with Madam Bubble! That was why he was ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... my little cell with a gruesome gesture. "This isn't my idea of a pleasant home. And yet it will be my home until someone decides that I'm ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... even developed a fondness for the morbid and the abnormal. This is revealed in 'Le Horla,' the appalling story in which he took for his own Fitzjames O'Brien's uncanny monster, invisible, and yet tangible. In the hands of the clever Irish-American this tale had been gruesome enough; but the Frenchman was able to give it an added touch of terror by making the unfortunate victim discover that the creature he feared had a stronger will than his own and that he was being hypnotized to his doom by a being whom he could not see, but whose presence he could feel. There ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... Civa is known in early Brahmanic and in Buddhistic writings, and even as the bearer-of-the-moon, Candracekhara, he contrasts with Vishnu, as his lightning-form and mountain-habitat differ from the sun-form and valley-home of his rival. This dire god is conceived of as ascetic partly because he is gruesome, partly because he is magical in power. Hence he is the true type of the awful magical Yogi, and as such appealed to the Brahman. Originally he is only a fearful magical god, great, and even all-pervading, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... played she was holding forth animatedly to a girl friend who had evidently dropped in from some store or office during the lunch hour. Now and again the fat man paused in his vocal efforts to reprimand her for her slackness. She paid no heed. There was something gruesome, uncanny, about the way her fingers went their own way over the defenseless keys. Her conversation with the ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... interest of all these poems turns mainly, of course, on the story, but also, in no small degree, on the splendid art which the poet displays. They are quite unlike any earlier German ballads, owing nothing to the folk-song and making no use of the uncanny, the gruesome, or the supernatural. There is no mystery in them, no resort to verbal tricks such as Buerger had employed in Lenore. The subjects are not derived from German folk-lore, but from Greek legend or medieval ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... failings might have been, he was no faint heart, and despite the shock of the gruesome discovery he continued his investigation of the silent ship. Apparently some attempt had been made when first the Buena Ventura was caught in the deadly embrace of the Sargasso to convey her treasure ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Sounds kind o' gruesome, don't it? 'Tain't nothin' very lovely neither. When that feller's pains in his leg gets hold o' him an' he roars out that way o' nights—that goes right through an' through any one. No, before I'd stand pain like that I'd go an' put a bullet ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... accomplished in perfect safety. My dangerous experiences ended for the rest of that dreadful day, which I spent in the haven of those walls, sheltering so much suffering, and that were, alas! by evening crammed to their fullest capacity. It was a gruesome sight seeing the wounded brought in, and the blood-stained stretchers carried away empty, when the occupants had been deposited in the operating-room. Sometimes an ambulance waggon would arrive with four or five inmates; at others we descried a stretcher-party moving cautiously across the recreation-ground ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... tops of the cocoa-palms look like pins planted in the ground. To the travelled man the view suggests many a nook in the Pacific islands. The bathing is here excellent: natural breakwaters of black rock exclude the shark. The place derives its gruesome name from olden days, when the smooth waters and the abundant fish and fruit tempted the fiery filibusters to a relache. It was given in 1726 by Mr. Smith, surveyor to the Royal African Company, after ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... face when he came forth to start for the Platte was a gruesome sight. "He looked," said the unfeeling linesman, after he'd gone, "as though he'd ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... darkly drawn under the metaphor of a man desperately wounded in some fight, and far away from physicians or nurses, and then the metaphor is interpreted by the plain facts of hostile invasion, flaming cities, devastated fields. It destroys the coherence of the verses to take the gruesome picture of the wounded man as a description of men's sins; it is plainly a description of the consequences of their sins. In accordance with the Old Testament point of view, Isaiah deals with national calamities as the punishment of national sins. He does not touch on the far worse results ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... not been at the house at all and so had not discovered the crime when he did. That would give Aleck Douglas more time to get away. But there was Jean, due at any moment now. He could not go away and let Jean discover that gruesome thing on the kitchen floor. He could not take it up and hide it away somewhere; he could not do anything, it seemed to ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... protested that far too much was being made of the statements of ignorant and terrified people, and asserted boldly that it would not attack the well-fed and prosperous classes; whilst others declared that the whole country would speedily be depopulated, and whispered gruesome tales of those scenes of death and horror which were shortly to become so common. Then the inhabitants of isolated houses like Woodcrych received visits from travelling peddlers and mountebanks of all sorts, many disguised in Oriental garb, who brought with them terrible stories of the spread of ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Mystery" was one of the most realistic stories of modern London life that has recently appeared. "The Golden Dwarf" is such another story, intense and almost sensational. Mr. Silver reveals the mysterious and gruesome beneath the commonplace in an absorbing manner. The "Golden Dwarf" himself, his strange German physician, and the secret of the Wyresdale Tower are characters and happenings which will hold the reader from cover ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... to the appalling tragedy which was taking place before their very eyes; for while they still watched, powerless to save, a terrific explosion occurred, followed by a rain of blazing pieces of timber and, gruesome sight! of portions of human bodies which had been whirled aloft, and now came hurtling down on the decks of the flag-ship. The fire ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... therefore, Slavophilism asks, for the degenerate justice of the west? None! Away with Europe then!—the Europe of competition and gruesome factories! The Europe of destructive forces, of greedy land grabbers, of capital and labor wars, where society is held together, not as in Russia by the ties of affection, brotherhood and communal interest, but only by money and greed, and where free thinkers, atheists and materialists abound, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... second long novel, also bears the stamp of Russian influence. It is a gruesome, repulsive story of domestic infidelity, in which he has handled the theory of pardon, the motive of numerous recent French novels, like Daudet's 'La Petite Paroisse' ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... two or three times, with no response, and then, in a state of panic, backed slowly towards the gate with his eyes fixed on the house. A loud crash sounded from somewhere inside, the door was flung violently open, and a gruesome figure in white hopped out and squatted on ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... absurd contradiction in terms involved in speaking of "Christian warfare." Few theologians or churchmen have dared to swim against the stream. In his admirable book La Guerre infernale,[58] Gustave Dupin has pilloried gruesome specimens of militarist Christianity. Nicolai gives other samples, which it would be a pity to leave unrecorded. In 1915, Professor Baumgarten, a Kiel theologian, placidly pointed out that there is opposition between the morality of bellicose nationalism and the morality of the Sermon ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... or fame their minions deceive, Let fate look gruesome and eerie; True glory and wealth are mine wi' Mary Grieve, When we meet by ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Collingwood left these gruesome details—highly pleasing to their narrator—and went up to look at his dead grandfather. He had never seen much of him, but they had kept up a regular correspondence, and always been on terms of affection, and he was sorry ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... to warn Sprudell again to "look where he was goin'," as he existed from that moment with his gaze alternating between the gruesome bundle and the gloomy face of his black-browed host. Incredulity and suspicion shone plainly in his eyes. Sprudell's imagination was a winged thing, and now it spread its startled pinions. Penned up with a murderer—what a tale to tell in Bartlesville, ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... attendant up two flights of bare, stone stairs, and down a long, whitewashed corridor. It was a gruesome place; rows and rows of heavy doors with little, barred windows. I noticed that each door had a combination knob, like a safe. My knees felt ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... resulted directly from the pressure of slave circumstance. A gruesome instance occurred in 1864 in the same county as the foregoing. A young slave woman, Becky by name, had given pregnancy as the reason for a continued slackness in her work. Her master became skeptical and gave notice that she was to be examined ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... it quite easy to picture myself lying in the bed with a smashed head, and blood all over the pillow. Then it occurred to me that the plaster might smash me all over, and my impressions of Farringdon Meat Market added a gruesome vividness to my conception of the consequences. I always found it pleasant to imagine horrible things; it was only the ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... of the stake sent physical pains tingling down the nerves of my body; and yet, turn as I would, my eyes would keep coming back t it, such fascination has the gruesome and the terrible ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... down a cement-floored corridor, the smell of formaldehyde thickening as they went, then into a small office with an open door, on the far side through which Les King was confronted with a frankly gruesome sight—a dissecting room with parts of cadavers lying around like orders in a ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... them and the oak of the cabinet. One sees this on Gothic chests in England and occasionally on the antique furniture of other countries. The red material stretched back of the metal fret-work, is said to be a souvenir of the gruesome custom prevailing in ancient times, of warning off invaders by posting on the doors of public buildings, the skin of prisoners of war, and holding it in place with open-work metal, through which the ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... each other of this promise, the day after their arrival, and grumbled. Secundina had as much as she could do to keep the rooms in order; and the only other service she was able to give the visitors was to recount gruesome stories of the villa while she made their beds or took a top layer of dust off their dressing-tables. According to her, the Bella Vista was the cheapest furnished house to let in the principality, because years ago a murder had been ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... three simple oral ceremonies said over the body, but the woman played a part which it is understood she does not in the Bontoc area. She carried a slender, polished stick, greatly resembling a baton or "swagger stick," and with this stood over the gruesome body, thrusting the stick again and again toward and close to the severed neck, meanwhile repeating a short, low-voiced something. After the body was cut from its shield a blanket was wrapped about it — otherwise it ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... ever saw in Alaska, also the most intelligent-looking. To run your eyes over him, you'd think he could outpull three dogs of his own weight. Maybe he could, but I never saw it. His intelligence didn't run that way. He could steal and forage to perfection; he had an instinct that was positively gruesome for divining when work was to be done and for making a sneak accordingly; and for getting lost and not staying lost he was nothing short of inspired. But when it came to work, the way that intelligence dribbled out of him ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... may be with others in such emergencies, but with me it always happens that the sense of fear departs with the presence of actual danger. Before the gruesome fancies of imagination I may quake and burn like any maiden alone upon a city street at night, until each separate nerve becomes a very demon of mental agony; but when the real and known once fairly confronts ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... go to Eleanore; she did not want to do it, but she could not help it. She was naturally vigilant, and she wished to ward off misfortune if possible. She was obsessed with an uncanny feeling, a gruesome curiosity. She dogged her sister's steps in secret. One time she saw from a distance that Eleanore had started off with a man who had been waiting for her. She could not move from the spot; ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... lay in the fact that one sometimes found it objectionable to have to look at these poor old creatures, dragging themselves around. They had nothing to do, it seemed, but to wait and die. One old man was a gruesome sight. He was about ninety years old and spent his days walking about the courtyard, wearing a cigarette tin hung around his neck, into which he used to cough with such terrible effort that it seemed as if he would die every time the spasm shook him. As a matter of fact, he and many others ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... gruesome. I thought of Dr. Fu-Manchu and the severed fingers, and could not repress ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... against what one might see, and she put it frankly to Miss Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she? "craping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours." The gas and the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms—so many of them as there were too!—with her glimmering taper. Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil from ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... houses, in different parts of the country, many weird skull stories, the popular idea being that if any profane hand should be bold enough to remove, or in any way tamper with, such gruesome relics of the dead, misfortune will inevitably overtake the family. Hence, for years past, there have been carefully preserved in some of our country homes numerous skulls, all kinds of romantic traditions accounting for their present isolated and ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... beast, but it was late before he had it skinned and dressed. When the carcase was hoisted to the gallows—and it seemed gruesome enough as it hung there in the pallid light of the moon, with the night birds dismally wailing like mourners from the lonely trees—we went home ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... blow which had struck him down had not crushed the life from him. He was awakened. But when, after four weeks of gruesome fever and delirium, his mind had somewhat regained its equilibrium, his hair had turned white as snow, and his children beheld an old, ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... school studies. I cannot pretend to diligence. The passing months found me less frequently in the classroom than in secluded spots along the Calcutta bathing GHATS. The adjoining crematory grounds, especially gruesome at night, are considered highly attractive by the yogi. He who would find the Deathless Essence must not be dismayed by a few unadorned skulls. Human inadequacy becomes clear in the gloomy abode of miscellaneous ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... open or pierced work, in the pattern of which may be seen three crosses. Upon the slab rests a representation of the corpse of a monk undergoing the process of decay, and being devoured by various lizards, snails, &c. It is rather a gruesome subject for contemplation, reminding one of some of the drawings in the Dance of Death at Basle. Immediately over the body, in the centre of the tomb, is a massive ogee arch, richly foliated, from which descends a rather cumbrous pendant—itself ogee in form—which divides the main ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... the fisher-boys ran out on to the breakwater in playtime. A boat had just come in through the pack-ice with a gruesome cargo —five frozen men, one of whom was dead and lay in the fire-engine house, while the four others had been taken into various cottages, where they were being rubbed with ice to draw the frost out of them. The farmer-boys were allowed no share in all this excitement, for the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... universally accepted, that only now and then did some bold thinker dare openly to gainsay it. The idea that a conviction of personal immortality has a specially ennobling influence on the moral nature of man, is not confirmed by the gruesome history of mediaeval morals, and as little by the psychology ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... "Oh! Nothing very gruesome," he confessed, then after a moment's silence he continued slowly: "Her children needed shoes and warm things for the winter. Marianne stole sixty metres of nets from the fishing crew at 'The Three Wolves'—she is hopeless, my friend." With a vibrant ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... loved, bound, and helpless—dead perhaps, shot from behind—and now thrust out from the verge into the abyss, to go hurtling into the mist-wreathed depths.... No, Zeke must not come back. The hardness crept again into her face, as she went forward. She held her eyes averted from that gruesome cavern ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... back to his room. He sat upon his bed holding his head in his hands. The sound of the accordion seemed gruesome now. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Mr. Mostyn found himself wholly unable to sleep. Many relics have curious histories, and the experienced archaeologist becomes callous to that uncanniness which seems to attach to some gruesome curios. But the slipper of the Prophet was different. No mere ghostly menace threatened its holders; an avenging scimitar followed those who came in contact with it; gruesome tragedies, mutilations, murders, had ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad men will sometimes induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Saint Scaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those who do know it would not say it for love or money. None but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch, can pardon them; that right belongs ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... type of monoplane I had acquired, a machine not suited for a novice, the mechanics had felt sure some disaster would overtake me. But, as it happened, their anticipations were not fulfilled. The journalists and photographers did not, however, have a fruitless journey. Though there was nothing gruesome to chronicle, they found ample material, when they learned of them, in the early morning adventures of myself and my friend with this 60 h.p. monoplane. Next day, in fact, our exploits were given prominence in the newspapers, and I received a number ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... billiards daily with the General, and should he prove refractory (a not infrequent occurrence) the General had only to threaten, "I shall have to make you smoke another of my black cigars, Billy," for the S.B. to capitulate instantly with a shudder, for he had gruesome recollections of the effects one of these powerful home-grown cigars had produced on ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... like loose mists that blow Across her crescent, goldening as they go High-kirtled for the chase, and what was shown, Of maiden rondure, like the rose half-blown. 120 If dream, turn real! If a vision, stay! Take mortal shape, my philtre's spell obey! If hags compel thee from thy secret sky With gruesome incantations, why not I, Whose only magic is that I distil A potion, blent of passion, thought, and will, Deeper in reach, in force of fate more rich, Than e'er was juice wrung by Thessalian witch From moon-enchanted herbs,—a potion brewed Of my best life in each diviner mood? 130 Myself ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... have looked upon some gruesome sights, and I have heard such tales of ruthless cruelty as you would deem almost passing possibility. I have read of the awful doings of the Lord Bernabo Visconti at Milan in the olden time, but I ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... took—wild horses could not have dragged him away in his present frame of mind—and finally, when they set out back toward the Canadian Line, he shambled along ahead of the team with head down and eyes averted from the gruesome bundle that lay in the sled. His punishment had overtaken him and he ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... ancient and enduring landscapes. Many of the country songs describing crime and death have refrains of a startling joviality like cock crow, just as if the whole company were coming in with a shout of protest against so sombre a view of existence. There is a long and gruesome ballad called "The Berkshire Tragedy," about a murder committed by a jealous sister, for the consummation of which a wicked miller is hanged, and the chorus (which should come in a ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... of Telegraph Hill. The place was neglected; a street had been cut through it, and on the banks of this street we could, at intervals, see the ends of coffins protruding. Some were broken and falling apart; some were still sound. It was a gruesome sight. ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... of the next half-hour, as told by Jake, would make your flesh creep. They did not dare to carry a lamp to light the gruesome task, and well as they knew the way, the possibilities of a stumble or a fall against some one of the many trees they had to pass filled them with constant terror. They did stumble once, and the low cry Jake uttered caused them new fears. Was that a window ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... wary journey through the corn. One by one the long aisles between the rows appeared. As they glanced along each of them it seemed as if some gruesome thing had just previously vacated it. Old Peter halted once and whispered: ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... into a dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows. Long streamers of garments fluttered from fire-escapes. In all unhandy places there were buckets, brooms, rags and bottles. In the street ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... low, half-hearted chuckle over his gruesome suggestion, and lazily getting to his feet, selected ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... him. I told him the whole gruesome story. He saw, he could not help but see what a deep impress the events of the night had made on me. He heard me to the end with every appearance of sympathy,—and then all at once I discovered that all the time papa had been concealed behind a large screen which was ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... preparing for his infernal work. He arranges black stones in a circle around a skull. His tools lie beside him: a ladle, bullet-mould, and eagle's-wing fan. The high voices of an invisible chorus utter the cry of the owl, which the orchestra mixes with gruesome sounds, while ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... how deeply this ballad, wedded to its wailing music, touches and moves a Manxman. Even to my ear as I have heard it in Manx, it has seemed to be one of the weirdest things in old ballad literature, only to be matched by some of the old Irish songs, and by the gruesome ditty which tells how "the sun shines ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... the articles, and softly laid them away. They were no longer gruesome, since even a few of them could recall the beloved and still remembered dead. As she was gently closing the lid, she felt a hand on her shoulder. Aunt Luceba was standing there, trembling a little, though the tears ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... in each other's footsteps they heard, far in the darkness, the gruesome tumult of owls. Once the Indian's lantern flashed on a snake which rose quickly from compact coils, hissing and distending its neck; but for all its formidable appearance and loud, defiant hissing the Indian picked up a palmetto fan ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... She stood gazing quietly, tenderly, at her father's body as if he were asleep and she were watching for some indication of his awakening. Then a puzzled expression came over her countenance. There was no trace of sorrow in it, only the look of perplexity. I decided to break the gruesome silence, but the thought of how my own voice would sound in that awe-inspired stillness frightened me. Gwen herself was the first to speak. She looked up with the same impassive countenance, from which now the perplexed look ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... she couldn't go one step, it made her feel "that low in her spirits," and Fred replied, by gosh, he didn't blame her one mite; whereat they wandered off and spent the evening at a very comfortable distance from the house, but fairly close together, revelling in a wealth of gruesome facts and suppositions. Katherine said she certainly never would marry at all, men were such dreadful creatures, and Molly said, yes, indeed, but what else could a girl marry?—while Edith determined to devote the rest of her life to attending and adoring the lovely, sad, drooping widow, ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... friend Karl Mayer he writes: "Mich regiert eine Art Gravitation nach dem Ungluecke. Schwab hat einmal von einem Wahnsinnigen sehr geistreich gesprochen.... Ein Analogon von solchem Daemon (des Wahnsinns) glaub' ich auch in mir zu beherbergen."[83] He is continually engaged in a gruesome self-diagnosis: "Dann ist mir zuweilen, als hielte der Teufel seine Jagd in dem Nervenwalde meines Unterleibes: ich hoere ein deutliches Hundegebell daselbst und ein dumpfes Halloh des Schwarzen. Ohne Scherz; es ist oft zum Verzweifeln."[84] ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... startled from my gruesome speculations by the captain asking me if I had made up my mind to go to St. Dunstan's. I had to confess that I did not know the place, where it was, or what it was for. Then he told me that he wished to take down some particulars regarding me. He wanted to know my full name, regimental number, ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... was afterwards imitated in the dress of the man who removed the dead from the arena. Surely something may be said for Gaston Boissier's suggestion that Dante's Tuscan blood may account to some extent for the gruesome ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... but for the flash of whiteness from the waves as they broke within a few yards of the cottage; the wind was raving, and the rain pouring down the air. A gruesome sound as of mingled weeping and howling came from somewhere in the dark. He turned again into the hut and closed the door, but could find no way ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... come on deck after a long and trying session in assisting Doctors Gys and Kelsey to care for the injured, a session during which Beth and Patsy had also stood nobly to their gruesome task. There were eleven wounded, altogether, in their care, and although some of these were in a critical condition the doctors had insisted that ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... was evidently also of granite, but at some recent period an attempt had been made to cover its forbidding facade with plaster. The workmen had wearied of their good intent and had left off when their labours were half finished, which gave the building the gruesome appearance of having been half skinned. Flush with the four sides of the square was an open concrete trench, approached at intervals by flights of half a dozen stone steps leading ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... intent on exact quantities of tea, milk, and sugar, and she passed the cup to the engineer with a smile. Each of the men admired her coolness, but Tollemache, who had been quietly scrutinizing the nearer hills, gave painful emphasis to this gruesome ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... It was gruesome. I sneaked away, and had already reached the foot of the hill, when, to my horror, I noticed the grey man approaching. He took off his hat, bowed humbly, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... own, which I then exchanged, dressing the lifeless form in the clothes I had worn on the preceding day, even to the dressing-gown which I had put on upon retiring to my apartments, while I donned his somewhat travel-worn suit of tweed. Having completed this gruesome task, I left the body in much the same position in which it had originally fallen, lying slightly upon the right side, the right arm extended on the floor, and, to give the appearance of suicide, I placed my own revolver—first emptying one of the chambers—near ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... side and hold the cadaver's chin, Brion," she said. "Hold it firmly so the head doesn't shake around when I cut. This is going to be a little gruesome. I'm sorry. But it'll be the fastest way to cut the bone." The saw ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... Strange, gruesome tales are told by those who, benighted or lost in the fog, have stumbled home through the dark of a winter night across the grim moorland. They tell—half dazed with fear—as they reach at last some house and welcome human companionship, of the wild baying of the hounds that drifted through ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... sign, others must have been badly slashed. In other words, our party was, numerically, almost the equal of his. Considering the man from Boston as on our side, we were seven to their eight. The lantern that we now lighted revealed more of the gruesome spectacle, and it made me feel sick to see that both the man from Boston and I were covered from head to foot with the gore in which we had been rolling; but to the natives the sight was a stupendous triumph; and the cook, when I next saw him, was ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... remembering something I had read not long before, 'it is indeed a wonderful, subtle thing. We live in the midst of the unknown. Unseen forces drag us hither and thither. At times we are brought face to face with the occult, the eerie, the gruesome. Charcot says in his superb work on the subject that—er—that—well, we will hardly go into it now. Some other time. The matter is a profound one, and not to be touched upon lightly. How is my ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... dinned into her affrighted ears by Celestine, as to the probable fate of Hatton and his little command. He pointed out to her, as he had to other ladies whom he had been summoned to attend that gruesome afternoon, that it was not the first time Mr. Hatton had been "corralled" by the Sioux, and that he had always successfully kept them at respectful distance, and his own command under cover, until the rescuers in shape ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... of course, come from at least a hundred miles above the Junction on the Green, or sixty miles up the Grand, as no waggon could get to the river at any place nearer to Cataract Canyon. The waggon-box had probably acted as a raft, bearing its gruesome passenger all these long miles into the heart of the mighty gorge, where the dragon stored his prize, and for many a year treasured it among ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... however, only the eastern end is ancient. The parish church of Our Lady was for the most part rebuilt in 1788, but it still keeps a good Norman door to the south of the nave. It was here that Our Lady had in Chaucer's day a very famous shrine concerning which the following rather gruesome legend is told. The body of a man, no doubt a criminal or suicide, having been cast upon the beach in this parish, was buried here in the churchyard. Our Lady of Chatham, however, was offended thereby, and by night went Herself to the house of the clerk and ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... their space helmets closed and adjusted the oxygen nozzles. Then, after testing their suit intercoms, they closed the inner-portal air lock, reduced the air pressure, and opened the thick pluglike outer portal. They stared out at the gruesome spectacle of torn hull plates, twisted spars, and broken pieces of equipment floating gently in the velvet space, outlined against the reddish hue of ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... read in some old bound volume at home a very gruesome account of the "Life and Misdeeds of Mr. Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner." The impression that still remained with her was of a man standing in the shadowy hall of just such an hotel as this, and pouring poison into a glass which he held ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... poster depicted the Damned in Hell suffering a new torment from their inability to get at the Filboid Studge which elegant young fiends held in transparent bowls just beyond their reach. The scene was rendered even more gruesome by a subtle suggestion of the features of leading men and women of the day in the portrayal of the Lost Souls; prominent individuals of both political parties, Society hostesses, well-known dramatic authors and novelists, and distinguished aeroplanists were dimly recognizable ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... In a moment while he stood shocked into immobility, the cave was a tiny cell. Down by his feet the gruesome mangled corpses were the size of children. The cave-roof bumped his head. He must get out of here! The realization stabbed him. Why, in another moment or two these dark walls would close upon him! Then with instant changing viewpoint he saw the true actuality. He was a growing giant, crouching ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... this panorama Passing slowly, dully by, With the sun's brass disc high gleaming From a white and cloudless sky, Sometimes drew fantastic pictures. Many a strange and gruesome sign— Phantom trees and fairy castles— Blurred the far horizon line. Then they'd vanish like the fancies Of a fever-smitten brain, And returning, changed in outline, Elsewhere on the mighty plain Would ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... design roughly but very finely carved. There stood on this two or three lustre plates, much broken but rich in colour; and on the walls were old masters of the Spanish school in beautiful though dilapidated frames: though gruesome in subject, ruined by age and bad treatment, and second-rate in their conception, they had a glow of passion. There was nothing in the room of any value, but the effect was lovely. It was magnificent and yet austere. Philip felt ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... melodrama, whose action dragged out at great length and with great gusto the misfortune and gruesome murder of an innocent youth. At the close of the last act a woman disguised as a man appeared upon the scene; she wore a pointed round hat, and a mask covered her face. A hurried love-scene, carried on in whispers, by the light ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... questions about the expected guests. She liked the gruesome sound of that term "blood relations" as Tippy used it, and wanted to know all about this recently discovered "in-law," the widow of her grandfather's cousin, Thomas Huntingdon. Barby could not tell her and Mrs. Triplett, too busy to be bothered, set her down to turn the leaves ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Inebriates' List," "The Cycle List," "The Pawnbrokers' List," reward bills, and police notices; it makes traffic regulations; it works with the Board of Agriculture when cattle disease breaks out; it issues pedlars' and sweeps' certificates; it keeps a gruesome record—a sort of photographic morgue—of all dead bodies found in London; and it has to give its consent before any summons may be taken ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... civilisation. The telegraph master there lived in a hut made of sheets of corrugated zinc, raised on piles twenty feet high and fortified against the Blacks. The entrance to it was masked, spear-proof and had two men always on guard—there were four men at the post. McKeith told a gruesome story of an assault by the natives, and of rifles at work through gun-holes in the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... working in a post that was not more than twelve feet in diameter, you may well imagine my feelings as I saw these boys fall. I fully expected that my turn would come at any minute, but I kept at work so as to keep my mind off the gruesome surroundings. ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... the terrible crime he was led to commit at the instigation of that human viper, Queen Caroline, and the licentious Emma Hamilton. He, to some extent, whittles down Nelson's share of the responsibility by putting the whole blame on them. But who can read the gruesome story of the trial and hanging of the aged Prince Carraciolli without feeling ashamed that a fellow-countryman in Nelson's position should have stamped his career with so dark a crime? At the capitulation of St. Elmo, ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... the looks of the field the task seemed difficult. In the little clusters of bushes, behind trees, in gullies, and in every conceivable place that seemed to offer shelter, lay the dead. What a shudder thrills the whole frame when you stand and contemplate the gruesome faces of the battle's dead. In every posture and all positions, with every conceivable shade of countenance, the glaring, glassy eyes meet you. Some lay as they fell, stretched full length on the ground; others ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... they really liked me and were concerned about me. This but served to confirm me in my madness. I moved in, and, lying in the dead man's bunk, all afternoon and evening listened to dire prophecies of my future. Also were told stories of awful deaths and gruesome ghosts that secretly shivered the hearts of all of us. Saturated with this, yet scoffing at it, I rolled over at the end of the second dog-watch and ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... through the lofty rooms and noble old hall, he could not have been a very happy one, and very little enjoyment could he have got out of his new possession, for, from the very hour he entered and took up his abode there, such unearthly and mysterious noises, such fearful screams and gruesome groans worried and haunted and dogged him, as made his hair stand on end, and nearly scared him out of his wits. A ghost, too, appeared in the park as soon ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... and the people died in thousands of sheer starvation. The Roman Empire had crumbled in the dust; after it fell that of Charlemagne into the abyss. The chronicles of Raoul Glaber are full of the most gruesome details of cannibalism, of diabolical appearances, of tortures that cannot be named. The only refuge seemed to be within the walls of the churches, where the shivering congregations gathered, mute ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... customs in Paris equally foreign to our, shall I say, Imperial ways; together with a plethora of scientific chefs who could metamorphose anything—rats as well as horses. There were revolutionaries in France in sufficient numbers to make traffic in gruesome dietary pay; and plenty of fodder, besides, with which to "fatten" beasts. All this gammon respecting Continental precedent and taste was beside the question; it only invited gratuitous vituperation of the French nation. An ugly feature ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... back into the room of the chains. There was only one thing to do now—reach Rupert and the others and prepare to meet these skulkers in the open. But before they had quite crossed the room Ricky came to grief. She caught her foot in one of those gruesome chains and stumbled forward, falling on her hands and knee. The noise of her fall echoed around the low ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... very few years, whereas the gradual extension of our poverty-stricken classes has been going on for centuries. To us poverty, besides being a horror, was more or less of a mystery; but America exhibited the development of the gruesome monster with lurid distinctness. In the old countries the men who first were able to seize the land gradually sublet portions either for money or warlike service; the growth of manufactures occupied a thousand years before it reached its present extent; and with the ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... get across, boys," he said, and the others agreed. They were hard men, but the dark and silence weighed them down and excited vague superstitious fears. It was a gruesome business in which they were engaged and they did not like ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... disaster that visited that city after the great cyclone. The first thing the Doctor did on our arrival was to get a carriage and drive through those sections of the city that had suffered the most. It was a gruesome sight, with so many bodies lying about the streets awaiting burial. But that was his grasp of life, his indomitable energy, always alert to see and hear the laws of nature at ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... the lofty rooms and noble old hall, he could not have been a very happy one, and very little enjoyment could he have got out of his new possession, for, from the very hour he entered and took up his abode there, such unearthly and mysterious noises, such fearful screams and gruesome groans worried and haunted and dogged him, as made his hair stand on end, and nearly scared him out of his wits. A ghost, too, appeared in the park as soon as ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... to her heart. Had not the two men said it was nonsense; that the cripple was a fool? Yes, nonsense, she could see that herself; yes, a fool, he had impressed her as such; but still the stupid words beat and throbbed in her heart, as gruesome as masqueraders in comic masks would be should they knock at your door at any other time save ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... well about the rent, the bills, and all the other worrisome things. Even Timmie, who was only nine, knew about them; and once Martin, aged six, had startled his elders by proclaiming on a sunny May morning, "This is rent day, isn't it, Ma?" in a tone of awe, as if the date marked some gruesome ceremony. ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... the two groups still kept their oddly separated formation. Behind them the two egg-masses of jelly were now seething in new activity after a brief lessening of their gruesome shivering. Blake now saw that there was a direct and unmistakable connection between the activity of the jelly and the corresponding ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... Miss Oliver? I don't know why Jem tells such gruesome things at a time like this when we're all out ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... indifference. Moreover, he could account for his physical absence from the centre of the stage, so to speak, by reminding all would-be critics that he was mentally on the job long before Ed Higgins made the gruesome discovery. In other words, it served his purpose to "lie low" and observe from well-calculated obscurity the progress ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... helmets, the gruesome figures in the foreground of this cartoon might have belonged in life to any one of the warring nationalities. It is a noteworthy fact, however, that not one of the nations at war has shown so little care for its dead as Germany, whose ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... and shattering burst of high-explosive shells, and the drone and whirr of flying splinters, you get labour conditions removed to the utmost limit from ideal, and, to any but the men of the Sappers, well over the edge of the impossible. The work at any other time would have been gruesome and unnerving, because the gasping and groaning of the wounded hardly ceased from end to end of the captured trench, and in digging out the collapsed sections many dead Germans and some British were found blocking the vigorous thrust of ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... a young man of Combe Florey Who wrote such a gruesome short story, The English Review Found it rather too blue And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... shivered and shook with fear, and when the crocodile, in a gruesome growl, remarked that he was hungry and wanted a good meal, the wretched creature hadn't a ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... ancient mystic faiths, A land of iron creeds and gruesome deeds, A land of superstitions vast and grim, And all the noisome growths that ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... of the Russians went on for days. Every one of them who came in from the farm got it—without mercy.... Different N.C.O.'s performed the gruesome rites... ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... evening overcoat. They had belonged to Robert Gareth-Lawless who was dead and needed such things no more. The same dim light showed the steep narrowness of the white-railed staircase mounting into gruesome little corners of shadows, while the miniature drawing-rooms illumined only from the street seemed to await an explanation of dimness and chairs unfilled, combined with ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thought, just as in morals, with greater boldness, he rebelled against a minute and cramping interpretation of Duty. We are not sure that his own optimistic doctrine did not play him the same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes to at least one half of the actualities of nature and the gruesome possibilities of things. It had no unimportant effect on Emerson's thought that he was born in a new world that had cut itself loose from old history. The black and devious ways through which the race has marched are not real in North America, as they are to us in old Europe, who live on the very ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... parrots much larger than those of the northern islands; they found pottery and rough wood carving, and the unmistakable stern timber of a European vessel. But they discovered stranger things than that. They found human skulls used as household utensils, and gruesome fragments of human bodies, unmistakable remains of a feast; and they realised that at last they were in the presence of a man-eating tribe. Later they came to know, something of the habits of the islanders; how they made raiding expeditions to the neighbouring ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... supernatural voluptuousness, which a man runs after for the remainder of his life. A single kiss had been enough. Never had rendezvous been spent in a manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous divinity; for the mother had remained in Henri's imagination like some infernal, cowering thing, cadaverous, monstrous, savagely ferocious, which the imagination of poets and painters had not yet conceived. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... fortune or fame their minions deceive, Let fate look gruesome and eerie; True glory and wealth are mine wi' Mary Grieve, When we meet ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... contains a gruesome moral tale by Ricardo Santiago, entitled "The Bell of Huesca". It is proper to remark here, that an important sentence was omitted at the top of page 3. The passage should read "'Sire, thy bell has no clapper!' 'Thy head shall be the clapper'; said the king, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... at The Mite Society, some evening, for 'an appropriate selection,' and then, with an elaborate introduction of the same, and an exalted tribute to the refined genius of the author, proceed with a most gruesome rendition of 'Alonzo The Brave and The Fair Imogene,' in a way to coagulate the blood and curl the hair of his fair listeners with abject terror. Pale as a corpse, you know, and with that cadaverous face, lit with those malignant-looking eyes, ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... the king which were laid upon them, but their bodies were saved from harm. For their beauty was no wise injured, nor was any harm come upon their garments, nor their hair singed by the fire, but in God's protection they came forth gladly from that gruesome horror, wise of heart and ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... Ah, what is that gruesome object? Take care, don't touch it as it floats by; it looks like a bit of charred stick, but indeed it ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... and charming story is in some parts rather over the heads of children, and a few of the incidents seem gruesome to the compiler. For this reason it is better to read the book to the child, so that these portions may ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... move. Your next is as follows. Every rustic-cottage contains gruesome china-ornaments and excruciating-cheap German-prints of such subjects as "The Tryst" (always spelt "The Trist" on the German print), "The Saylor's Return," "The Warior's Dreem," "Napoleon at Arcola," and so forth. Point to a china-ornament and say, "I never knew ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... Alison, her barbarous dismissal of Anthony, her quite inexcusable failure to give any reason for such treatment, her subsequent enlightenment by Anne herself—there is the skeleton whose dry bones he and she are to pick over—a gruesome business which has already been dispatched ... upon the twentieth day of February, gentlemen, up in the Cotswold Hills. They both remember it perfectly. Yet Valerie must forget it, while Anthony must think it ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... moment later I saw it—a small black oblong bundle—hovering beside us. It was perhaps a hundred feet away, circling us. Held by the Planetara's bulk, it had momentarily become our satellite. It swung around us like a moon. Gruesome satellite, by nature's ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... however, speedily were forgotten when Fred related the story of their gruesome discovery in the sheltered place or cave on the sloping side of ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... symptoms were evidently of a specially alarming type, for he was hastily buried with all his belongings, his slippers, his iron mug, his boots, his haversack, and the very stretcher on which he lay; then over all was poured some potent disinfectant. It was a gruesome sight! So to-day he lies in the self-same cemetery where rests many a British soldier who fell not far away in the fights of fifty years ago. It was British soil in those distant days, and is British soil again, ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... experiences, mixed up in hotch-potch fashion with the martial echoes that caught my ear from the banging drum and brazen bugle, at once recalled the gruesome fact that this was the eventful day fixed for my examination on board the Excellent; so, dreading lest I should be late, I incontinently jumped out of bed in a jiffy, proceeding; albeit unconsciously, to obey the last gruff ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... passed on, and the weeks. Mamma spent half her time over the newspapers. I consulted them, I could not help it, in my old fashion; and it made them gruesome things to me. But it was a necessity for me, to quiet my nerves with the certainty that no name I loved was to be found there in those ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Zyobite and an almost equally stalwart woman were both caught by one gigantic Quabo which had a tentacle around the throat of each. The man and woman were chopping at the viscous, gruesome head. One of the Thing's eyes was gashed across, giving it a fearsome, blind appearance. It heaved convulsively, and the three struggling figures toppled into the water and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... unfriendly-looking building of red brick, with a narrow, black-painted arched door. On the cross-section of the center panel was screwed a silver plate, with the name of the institution inscribed in black letters, which gave to the door the gruesome suggestion of a coffin ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... witness. He described in his own fashion the finding of Archibald McBride's body. Then a few skilful questions by Moxlow brought out the fact of his having met John North on the Square immediately before his own gruesome discovery. The little lamplighter was excused, and Colonel Harbison took his: place. He, in his turn, quickly made way for Andy Gilmore. Moxlow next interrogated Atkinson, Langham's client, who explained the nature ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... interfere with our entertainment. Both entrances were arranged and the old elevator (which had not worked for years) was put in order. It had been suggested once or twice that I should use it, but as I always had heard a gruesome tale of Madame Drouyn de l'Huys, when her husband was Foreign Minister, hanging in space for four or five hours between the two floors, I was not inclined to repeat ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... ungainly, uncouth, stiff; rugged, rough, gross, rude, awkward, clumsy, slouching, rickety; gawky; lumping, lumpish^; lumbering; hulky^, hulking; unwieldy. squalid, haggard; grim, grim faced, grim visaged; grisly, ghastly; ghost like, death like; cadaverous, grewsome^, gruesome. frightful, hideous, odious, uncanny, forbidding; repellant, repulsive, repugnant, grotesque, bizarre; grody [Coll.], grody to the max [Coll.]; horrid, horrible; shocking &c (painful) 830. foul &c (dirty) 653; dingy &c (colorless) 429; gaudy &c (color) 428; disfigured ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Heaven, is an academic and conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing for the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the dramatis personae of the gruesome scene—extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, could one come face to face ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... seemed difficult. In the little clusters of bushes, behind trees, in gullies, and in every conceivable place that seemed to offer shelter, lay the dead. What a shudder thrills the whole frame when you stand and contemplate the gruesome faces of the battle's dead. In every posture and all positions, with every conceivable shade of countenance, the glaring, glassy eyes meet you. Some lay as they fell, stretched full length on the ground; others show a desperate struggle for the last few remaining breaths. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... wife with only one servant will have to rub up her own silver backed brushes and sweetmeat dishes if she wants them to look nice. Of course it may be said that extra silver can be put by till circumstances improve, or that it might be useful in a financial emergency. This last idea is rather a gruesome one to take to a wedding, and it is in the early days of her housekeeping that the young wife likes to have her pretty things about her. Why an artistic chair or table should not be as suitable as an entree dish I do not quite see, and if a place is ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... York to live, I had explored the Eden Musee. One of the most gruesome of the spectacles which I had seen in its famed Chamber of Horrors was a representation of a gorilla, holding in its arms the gory body of a woman. It was that impression which now revived in my mind. But by a process strictly in ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... 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
... Sister had brought them some very small Japanese fencing armor, which they had of course put on with glee, and were clumsily fencing with wooden two-handed swords. And they had also rigged up in the dark nursery a gruesome man with a pumpkin head, which I was ushered in to see, and in addition to the regular eyes, nose, and saw-tooth mouth, Archie had carved in the back of the pumpkin the words "Pumpkin Giant," the candle inside illuminating it ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... of his work and looked at Auguste, who seemed to have turned faint. Only little Pauline was smiling. In imagination the others could picture those swarming, ravenous crabs crawling all over the kitchen, and mingling gruesome odours with the aroma of the ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Samuel, the Indian member of the staff, as their house mother. Just behind it is the thatched shed, carefully walled in, which serves as the dissecting room. To the uninitiated it is a place of gruesome smells and sights, for cadavers, whole or in fragments, litter the tables. The casual visitor sympathizes with the Hindu student who confides to you that during her first days of work in the dissecting room she could only sleep when firmly flanked by a friend on each side of her "to keep off the ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... work, in the pattern of which may be seen three crosses. Upon the slab rests a representation of the corpse of a monk undergoing the process of decay, and being devoured by various lizards, snails, &c. It is rather a gruesome subject for contemplation, reminding one of some of the drawings in the Dance of Death at Basle. Immediately over the body, in the centre of the tomb, is a massive ogee arch, richly foliated, from which descends a rather cumbrous pendant—itself ogee in form—which ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... adapted by nature for being cooked after this fashion. None of us—not even Master E. Smith, in whom I had previously remarked an unfailing appetite—cared to indulge in the dish. Indeed, it was not until I had removed the unsightly and gruesome object—these are the only adjectives that properly describe it—to a point considerably remote from our camping place that I deemed myself to be sufficiently revived to join the others in a frugal ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... aunt—really quite nice. On the lawn stood an incensed curate, grasping our small brother by a large ear, which—judging from the row he was making—seemed on the point of parting company with the head it adorned. The gruesome noise he was emitting did not really affect us otherwise than aesthetically. To one who has tried both, the wail of genuine physical anguish is easy distinguishable from the pumped-up ad misericordiam blubber. Harold's could clearly be recognised as belonging to the ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... of Women struck light across his blindness, and taking her in his arms, he looked her straight in the eyes and told her the whole gruesome bitter tale. Before he had finished she closed her eyes against his and swayed away from him to ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... around my little cell with a gruesome gesture. "This isn't my idea of a pleasant home. And yet it will be my home until someone decides that I'm too expensive ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... chuckle over his gruesome suggestion, and lazily getting to his feet, selected another ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... women of such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray, with a fine and ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... territory. Horses had to drink, men had to drink; and Ladd and Lash were not of the stripe that forsook a task because of danger. Slow to wrath at first, as became men who had long lived peaceful lives, they had at length revolted; and desert vultures could have told a gruesome story. Made a comrade and ally of these bordermen, Dick Gale had leaped at the desert action and strife with an intensity of heart and a rare physical ability which accounted for the remarkable fact that he had not yet fallen ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... times, with no response, and then, in a state of panic, backed slowly towards the gate with his eyes fixed on the house. A loud crash sounded from somewhere inside, the door was flung violently open, and a gruesome figure in white hopped out ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... her words, danced a kind of war dance in front of Mr. Calton, snapping her fingers and yelling out curses, as an accompaniment to her ballet. Her luxurious white hair streamed out during her gyrations, and with her grotesque appearance and the faint light of the candle, she presented a gruesome spectacle. ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... inter-relationships. His favorite diversion was to take up and pursue some genealogical thread, to follow its mazy meanderings down the generations, dropping in curious bits of unwritten history—some of it spicy enough, some of it boisterously funny, some of it somber and gruesome, but all of it alive with the very color and savor of the land that was a part of himself, his inheritance from the generations of sturdy pioneers. Possibly Westbury's history was not always authentic, but if at times he ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... studies. I cannot pretend to diligence. The passing months found me less frequently in the classroom than in secluded spots along the Calcutta bathing GHATS. The adjoining crematory grounds, especially gruesome at night, are considered highly attractive by the yogi. He who would find the Deathless Essence must not be dismayed by a few unadorned skulls. Human inadequacy becomes clear in the gloomy abode of miscellaneous bones. My midnight vigils were thus of a different ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... stands in the middle And tunes up his fiddle, And plays them a gruesome strain. And each gibbering wight In the moon's pale light Must dance to that ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... borrowed me of you in the night, howadji," pursued Najib, taking from the soiled folds of his abieh a large old volume, bound in stout leather, after the manner of religious or scientific books of a half-century ago. On the brown back a scratched gold lettering proclaimed the gruesome title: ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... Gravitation nach dem Ungluecke. Schwab hat einmal von einem Wahnsinnigen sehr geistreich gesprochen.... Ein Analogon von solchem Daemon (des Wahnsinns) glaub' ich auch in mir zu beherbergen."[83] He is continually engaged in a gruesome self-diagnosis: "Dann ist mir zuweilen, als hielte der Teufel seine Jagd in dem Nervenwalde meines Unterleibes: ich hoere ein deutliches Hundegebell daselbst und ein dumpfes Halloh des Schwarzen. Ohne Scherz; ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... cigars, Simms having begun to smoke of late years to discourage a tendency to stoutness. Then all would join in the diversions of the afternoon, which sometimes led to the "Edge of the Swamp," a gruesome place which the poet of Woodlands had ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... for all these years, found record in a novella of Boccaccio's followers. The Novelle answered in some respects to our newspaper reports of trials and the earlier Last Speech and Confession. But the example of Boccaccio raised these gruesome topics into the region of art. Often these tragedies are reported of the true actors; still more often under the disguise of fictitious names, that enabled the narrator to have more of the artist's freedom in dealing with ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... would be representative that did not contain some specimen of the gruesome. The most effective ghoul story in existence is ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... his supple arms Took up the gruesome weight, And, with a cry of bitter fear, He threw ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... shivered and shook with fear, and when the Crocodile, in a gruesome growl, remarked that he was hungry and wanted a good meal, the wretched creature ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... appearing to pause as though seeking some spot whereon to descend,—and after watching it for a minute or two he called the attention of some of the men around him to its appearance. They looked up wearily from their gruesome task ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... Bertha. I came alone. I had reasons to believe I had solved it. I found the Rhamda and the Nervina. I had iron will and courage—also strength. The Rhamda was never able to control me. My life is gone but not my will. Now I have left him another. Do not surrender, Harry. It is a gruesome task; but hold on to the end. Help me up the steps. There now. Just wait a minute till I ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... lantern, peered into the interior of the coffin, at the same time waving his hand in dismissal to Ah Fu. For a while he stood there, peering into the interior, and then, lowering the lid again, he relocked this gruesome receptacle and, lantern in hand, began to mount ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... has so pleasantly introduced himself to me, I know none of you. So I'll have to ask— (He stops suddenly and rises, facing them all. He points slowly to the chesterfield, facing fireplace up C.) That's rather a gruesome thing there. I think we'll move it into another room. Will some of you gentlemen carry Mr. Wales' body into the other room. (There is a pause. The men all hesitate. Finally MASON starts to move to chesterfield. DONOHUE is down stage R.C.) ...
— The Thirteenth Chair • Bayard Veiller
... the paper which he had thrown back to me and read the paragraph indicated. It was headed, "A Gruesome Packet." ...
— The Adventure of the Cardboard Box • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in American cities was brought about in a very few years, whereas the gradual extension of our poverty-stricken classes has been going on for centuries. To us poverty, besides being a horror, was more or less of a mystery; but America exhibited the development of the gruesome monster with lurid distinctness. In the old countries the men who first were able to seize the land gradually sublet portions either for money or warlike service; the growth of manufactures occupied a thousand years before it reached its present extent; and with the rising of manufacturing ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... turned up. The head is large, the eyes deeply embedded in their sockets, and the animal has the power of protruding and withdrawing the head much more extensively developed than usual. The "death's head" staring from beneath the dome-shaped back gives to the animal a most gruesome aspect. These details are supplied by the master of a beche-de-mer schooner, to whom all the nooks and corners of the Great Barrier Reef and of the other Coral Sea beyond, from New Guinea to New Caledonia, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... could let it appear that he had not been at the house at all and so had not discovered the crime when he did. That would give Aleck Douglas more time to get away. But there was Jean, due at any moment now. He could not go away and let Jean discover that gruesome thing on the kitchen floor. He could not take it up and hide it away somewhere; he could not do anything, it seemed to him, ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... were working in a post that was not more than twelve feet in diameter, you may well imagine my feelings as I saw these boys fall. I fully expected that my turn would come at any minute, but I kept at work so as to keep my mind off the gruesome surroundings. ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... {39} them to a desperate vengeance on the Pazzi. The Archbishop of Pisa was hanged from the window of a palace, while a fellow-conspirator was hurled to the ground from the same building. This gruesome scene was painted to gratify the ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... other. Halsey, forgetting his secret ill-humour, was presently listening open-mouthed. Mrs. Halsey laid down her knitting, and stared at the speaker over the top of her spectacles; while across Betts's gnome-like countenance smiles went out and in, especially at the more gruesome points of the tale. The light sparkled on the young Canadian's belt, the Maple Leaf in the khaki hat which lay across his knees, on the badge of the Forestry Corps on his shoulder. The old English cottage, with its Tudor brick-work, and its overhanging beams, the old English labourers ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... over it on their bodies. Gen. Grant, in substance, makes the same statement in his Memoirs. It was a fearful sight. But not far from the Peach Orchard field, in a westerly direction, was a still more gruesome spectacle. Some of our forces were in line on an old, grass-grown country road that ran through thick woods. The wheels of wagons, running for many years right in the same ruts, had cut through the turf, so that the surface of the road ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... a murmur went round among the eager watchers. It was her most famous dance—the dance of Death, the most gruesome spectacle, so it was said, that any dancer had ever conceived. She came on to the stage like the flash of an arrow, dressed in black that glittered and scintillated with every amazing movement. And then it began—that most wonderful ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... which he was the (rather late British) discoverer. But, on the whole, the group of early works dealing with medicine and surgery is of questionable interest outside the purely practical range as a comparative study, and those which treat of anatomy and other cognate topics are in the last degree gruesome. They are the antipodes to the ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... them with the statement that Captain Vavassour would undoubtedly take immediate steps to have it found and restored to them. Having done which, and excused myself upon the plea of urgent business— coupled with a suggestion that the ladies should remain below until the more gruesome evidences of the recent conflict could be effaced—I hurried away to the other end of the ship and effected the release of her officers and crew, who at once ascended to the deck and assisted our own lads to put matters to rights. Fortunately, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... saw an animal whose gruesome oddity even he, who knew so many of the strange creatures, two of which were never the same, that used to live inside the mountain with their masters the goblins, had never seen equalled. Its eyes were flaming with anger, but it seemed to be at the housekeeper, for it came cowering ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... sinister and threatening. It was absurd to suppose that an establishment such as this could be carried on without servants, or with less than three or four. But where were they? And then I remembered that Godfrey and I had not completed our exploration of the house. We had stopped at the gruesome room where the adept and his serpent gazed unwinking into the crystal sphere. There was at least one suite on the same floor we had not looked into, and no doubt there were other rooms on the attic floor above. But that any one could have slept on undisturbed ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... forward to end the discussion; but the skipper shouted out choice bits from time to time as they occurred to him, and sat steering and gibing, a gruesome picture of vengeance. ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... trench, and the last 500 yards of the journey were accomplished in perfect safety. My dangerous experiences ended for the rest of that dreadful day, which I spent in the haven of those walls, sheltering so much suffering, and that were, alas! by evening crammed to their fullest capacity. It was a gruesome sight seeing the wounded brought in, and the blood-stained stretchers carried away empty, when the occupants had been deposited in the operating-room. Sometimes an ambulance waggon would arrive with four or five ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... again. I disposed of the remains decent as I could, for Doc Carey was leisurely coming down National pike from Jane Aydelot's, an' it was gettin' late, an' no cheerful plate nor job in a crowd in sunshiny weather, let alone there in the dusk of the evening. Wow! I dreamt of that there gruesome thing two weeks. I throwed the shovel in the crick. Would you like me to show you where to go to dig, so's you can be sure your plan with Tank Shirley worked and you didn't drown, after all? And are you sure you ain't been misrepresenting things to me a little as agent ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... SPATULATE-LEAVED SUNDEW (D. intermedia) and the THREAD-LEAVED SUNDEW (D. filiformis) whose purplish-pink flowers are reared above wet sand along the coast, possess contrivances similar to the round-leaved plant's to pursue their gruesome business. Why should these vegetables turn carnivorous? Doubtless because the soil in which they grow can supply little or no nitrogen. Very small roots testify to the small use they serve. The water sucked up through them from the bog aids in the manufacture of the fluid so freely exuded ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... words seemed gruesome. They seemed open to some vaguely sinister interpretation. But I kept ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... again. Somehow, since learning Tony's opinion, the sound, as it came welling out of the swamp far away, seemed more gruesome than ever. Phil could easily in imagination picture the scene, with a posse of determined keepers from the convict camp following the lead of dogs held in leash, and chasing after a wretched fugitive, who had somehow managed to get away from bondage ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... raked from the polluted stream and held in their finger-like drooping branches human bodies in all shapes and attitudes with a semblance of naturalness which made an everlasting picture on my distraught mind. Of this pitiful gruesome company I ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... the hill out of sight of the gruesome, ghastly window display, and Miss Frayne gained ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... fear. Penarvon here has all the pluck in the world. Hinckley is a V.C. Captain Vandermere is a soldier, and I will answer for it that he has no nerves. Guerdon and I, I am sure, are safe. Let us hear your gruesome prophecy, my dear Saton, and if it comes true, we will form a little society, and you shall be our apostle. We will study occultism in place of bridge. We will be the founders ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... written will understand what I mean. It was, if I may say so, the want of experience. Death is a remorseless spoliator. The anguish of irreparable loss is familiar to us all. There is no life so lonely as to be safe against that experience. But the grief I had brought to these two ladies had gruesome associations. It had the associations of bombs and gallows—a lurid, Russian colouring which made the complexion ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... as he remembered the gruesome sight he had once noted far to the north one day. Then, on one of his fishing expeditions, he had come upon the body of a man hanging in a tree, evidently treed by wolves and then frozen. He wondered if some chance ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... see, and she put it frankly to Miss Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she? "craping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours." The gas and the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms—so many of them as there were too!—with her glimmering taper. Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer Brydon meanwhile held ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... there were dissensions between some of the colonies over the land-disputes; sparks were flying between the colonies and the mother-country; every day brought gruesome news from the back-country; there was a scarcity of guns and ammunition; militia captains were eagerly stealing one another's men to ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... Boers' wagons, surmounted by a white flag, were seen coming across the plain, their attendants being engaged for a long time in the gruesome task of ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... side of Ramsbury, and to the south of the Kennet, is the famous Littlecote Manor, a magnificent and unexcelled sixteenth-century house. Built by the Darells it passed to the Pophams, one of whom was a leader of the Parliamentarians. A gruesome and probably true story is told of the last of the Darells—"Wild Dayrell." A midwife deposed that she had been fetched blindfold to attend a lady at dead of night. When her offices were over, a wild-looking man seized the infant ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... incantations utters He generally mutters His gruesome blasts and bans But I, you need not doubt it, Prefer aloud to shout it, Hey, Presto! Pots ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... have been laid out in a small artificial lake fed by a tiny streamlet which forms one of the numerous tributaries of the River Cray. Its depth is greater than is usual in watercress-beds, otherwise the gruesome relics could never have been concealed beneath its surface, and the flow of water through it, though continuous, is slow. The tributary streamlet meanders through a succession of pasture meadows, in one of which the beds themselves are situated, and here throughout most of the year the ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... dressing the lifeless form in the clothes I had worn on the preceding day, even to the dressing-gown which I had put on upon retiring to my apartments, while I donned his somewhat travel-worn suit of tweed. Having completed this gruesome task, I left the body in much the same position in which it had originally fallen, lying slightly upon the right side, the right arm extended on the floor, and, to give the appearance of suicide, I ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... themselves in lively checks and tartans. It was as though they said—"Here at last is our opportunity for gratifying our natural taste in colours. It will probably be of but short duration. Therefore let us select a combination of all the most brilliant tints and wear them, for who knows how soon that gruesome pall of woe may ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... manifestation. The face of the young Roman centurion who had suffered martyrdom for his conversion to Christianity was smiling very sweetly and looking upwards, and in that part of his work the sculptor had been very happy. But the rest of the carving was gruesome and the anatomy was gross and bad, the figure being so disproportionately broad as to convey the impression of a ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... by anyone who then lived at Newcastle. It was not merely that the mortality was enormous, the deaths on some days being above a hundred, but that the circumstances attending the plague were of a gruesome and harrowing character. Not a few of the scenes in the streets recalled the story of the Great Plague of London. We had the same incidents of the dead lying unburied because there were none left to carry them to the grave. We had the piles of coffins waiting for interment ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... there I could not imagine. Whatever it had been he was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning perplexedly, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick which reminded me of gruesome things we had ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... three spacemen clamped their space helmets closed and adjusted the oxygen nozzles. Then, after testing their suit intercoms, they closed the inner-portal air lock, reduced the air pressure, and opened the thick pluglike outer portal. They stared out at the gruesome spectacle of torn hull plates, twisted spars, and broken pieces of equipment floating gently in the velvet space, outlined against the reddish hue of the ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... an account of how the body was found and how further investigation led the constable to the kitchen to make his second gruesome discovery. ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... emotions I worked! After we had once started, however, we forgot everything except the success of our operation. I omit a description of the details, as they might prove too gruesome. The woman fainted from shock just before we touched the bone,—Nature thus supplying an effective, if rude, anaesthetic. We had forgotten about sewing together the flesh, and when we came to this a boy was dispatched to the owner's house for a package of stout needles. These ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... nor had a single message of any kind or a reply to any, by any means, come out of Germany. For three to five miles about the lines there was a devastated ring, bare of everything, swept by fire and death. Beyond that was grim and gruesome silence. The airmen could see little. Houses were apparently deserted and the people lived in the woods or in the ground. Every particle of earth that could be spared was used to grow something to eat. In the large cities buildings and bridges were torn down. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... excellent example of transitional Franco-Italian sculpture; and the half-reclining bronze effigy of Prince Carpi from the great Franciscan church (the Cordeliers) of Paris, is wholly Italian in style. The gruesome figure, La Mort, in the embrasure of a window, from the old cemetery of Les Innocents, and a fine bust, 173, of John of Alesso, will also be noted. We pass to Room IV., dominated by the most eminent sculptor of the French renaissance, Jean Goujon (? 1520-1567), whose famous Diana and ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... rolled the ominous warning of a hundred muffled drums punctuated by the hollow booming of pieces of ordnance. The deafening claps of thunder and the dazzling flashes of lightning which lit up the ghastly scene testified that the artillery of heaven had lent its supernatural pomp to the already gruesome spectacle. A torrential rain poured down from the floodgates of the angry heavens upon the bared heads of the assembled multitude which numbered at the lowest computation five hundred thousand persons. A posse of Dublin Metropolitan police superintended by ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... cocoa-palms look like pins planted in the ground. To the travelled man the view suggests many a nook in the Pacific islands. The bathing is here excellent: natural breakwaters of black rock exclude the shark. The place derives its gruesome name from olden days, when the smooth waters and the abundant fish and fruit tempted the fiery filibusters to a relache. It was given in 1726 by Mr. Smith, surveyor to the Royal African Company, after Roberts the pirate, who buried ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... a Spanish painter, born near Valencia; indulged in a realism of a gruesome type; had Salvator Rosa and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... gathered up the skulls and bones of Incas that were strewn about and amused themselves by playing ten pins on the hard sand, sticking the bones up and rolling the skulls at them. Don Nicholas paid no attention to the gruesome sport; but stood calmly conversing with the officers ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... the sand. It came away easily, for the handle was burnt. He groped about near it and uncovered, one after another, a gold-washing dish, a pick-head, a couple of wedges, and a hammer. The sand had drifted over them and made a mound. Then he laid bare a truly gruesome sight—charred embers of wood ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... the beast, but it was late before he had it skinned and dressed. When the carcase was hoisted to the gallows—and it seemed gruesome enough as it hung there in the pallid light of the moon, with the night birds dismally wailing like mourners from the lonely trees—we went home ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... the lower jaw series at Teddington, which is also, in all probability, the only instance of a man's nightcap figuring in such gruesome circumstances. ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... for Eliza. Get some water, Cricket. Oh, baby, speak to me," poor frightened Eunice cried, half beside herself at the gruesome sight of the baby's white, still face, and that dreadful blood welling up so fast, and staining everything with its vivid red. Cricket flew to the edge of the beach, dipping water up in the crown of her sailor hat. She tore off her soft Windsor tie to use ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... drew a little harder on the pipe, the glow in the bowl revealed the tip of his nose, a part of the painted forehead, and the glittering black eyes. It was a gruesome picture, for, even when he was invisible, it seemed to Fred he could see the gleam of those ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... disaster had taken place, but what had happened on those gruesome sands I could only conjecture until I reached the Boatmen's Rooms. Outside the building I found in groups and knots a crowd of boatmen and pilots, and also Richard Roberts, the ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... source of the perfume by sniffing fragrance in the air. Her mouth had been open, the nostrils of her fine little nose had quivered. Hans Fuellenberg was correct in his observation that her eyes, as she held her head back, had been closed. The second time, she seemed to be drawn against her will by a gruesome something, which alternately aroused fear, horror, and curiosity. She held her eyes wide open, and now and then covered them with both hands, as if in dread ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Edward Crown wedged in at the bottom of Quill's Chimney, weighted down with stones and earth, alone served as an obstacle to the enterprise. He shrank from certain gruesome possibilities,—such as the dislodgment of stones at the bottom of the crevice and the consequent exposure of a thing that would haunt him forever. And even though the stones remained in place there would still remain the fact that almost within arm's length was imprisoned ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... so, I think the picture of Catherine is the gem of the book. She reminds me of her namesake of Siena—and would as little have failed in any duty, however gruesome. You remember Sodoma's picture. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... wall, where it comes over one with a good deal of vividness and still more horror that wretched human beings once lay there rotting in the dark. The dungeons of Villeneuve made a particular impression on me—greater than any except those of Loches, which must surely be the most gruesome in Europe. I hasten to add that every dark hole at Villeneuve is called a dungeon; and I believe it is well established that in this manner, in almost all old castles and towers, the sensibilities of the modern tourist are unscrupulously played upon. There were plenty ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... much," I said nastily. (When people presage a remark by saying that they only say it because they love you, you may lay long odds that it's going to be disagreeable!) "It certainly sounds a gruesome prospect. Not even a choice between bankruptcy and mania, but a certainty of both! And within a year, too! Such a short run for one's money! Aunt Eliza had some suggestion to make, then? And you evidently approved. Would you mind telling me ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and its web. If we bees fall into the spider's power we suffer the most gruesome death. The spider is heartless and tricky, and once it has a person in its toils, it never lets ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... With his strong hands the Girdle Marvellous From the Amazon Queen, while quailing shrank away The Maids of War. There in the Thracian land Were Diomedes' grim man-eating steeds: These at their gruesome mangers had he slain, And dead they lay ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... and lonesome, although many folks passed on the highway and whispered to each other that there was the spot where the gruesome tragedy had been committed. "And to think that the man's own daughter did it," they would generally add. "Beats all how bloodthirsty some folks can get. He must have cut her short on money or something and she was too high-strung ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... fruits and people cannot hold out much longer without a change. He still managed to swing himself over the counter as lightly as a cork when the enemy became too troublesome, and the redoubtable iron ruler had lost none of its gruesome terrors. ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... assumption was correct. Gradually the cheerfulness faded from the speaker's voice, the humorous incidents were past. Gruesome, hideous, grew the anecdotes, The hall shivered. Necks were craned, and white faces twitched suspensively. He dwelt on the agonies of the Condemned, he recited crimes in detail, he mirrored the last moments before ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... experience. It was Mrs. Triplett's fund she was drawing on, however, and old Jeremy's. Belle's note had started them to comparing reminiscences, and out of their conversation Georgina had gathered many gruesome facts. ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... are first darkly drawn under the metaphor of a man desperately wounded in some fight, and far away from physicians or nurses, and then the metaphor is interpreted by the plain facts of hostile invasion, flaming cities, devastated fields. It destroys the coherence of the verses to take the gruesome picture of the wounded man as a description of men's sins; it is plainly a description of the consequences of their sins. In accordance with the Old Testament point of view, Isaiah deals with national calamities as the punishment of national sins. He does not touch on the far worse ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... lie face down on the table, two cadets seized his hands and drew him forward, two others took him by the feet so that his body lay stretched out lengthwise. The tallow candles were taken from the table and lifted up high, and the whole affair had an absolutely gruesome look. ...
— Good Blood • Ernst Von Wildenbruch
... crude attempts of such poets as "Monk" Lewis or Southey to sound the note of terror. Yet they too, in their fashion, played a part in the "Renascence of Wonder." Coleridge, fascinated by the spirit of "gramarye" in Buerger's Lenore, etherealised and refined it. Scott and Lewis gloried in the gruesome details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and in their supernatural poems wish to startle and terrify, not to awe, their readers. Those who revel in phosphorescent lights and in the rattle of the skeleton are apt to o'erleap themselves; ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... is quiet, after the storm. He lies at rest beside the stream. This morning he will be found, lifted tenderly, lamented, mourned. It is not a gruesome place. I remember trees and fluttering birds. He sleeps—he sleeps—like Duncan he sleeps well at last. Is he to ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... awful gradations of gentleness lead from such as these down to those cabins where wallow the inventions of Nature's infancy, when, like a child of untutored imagination, she drew on the slate of her fancy creations in which flitting shadows of beauty serve only to heighten the shuddering, gruesome horror. The sweet sun and air, the hand of man, and the growth of the ages, have all but swept such from the upper plains of the earth. What hunter's bow has twanged, what adventurer's rifle has cracked in those leagues ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... them all good boys to be, And sailed away across the sea. At London Bridge that Bishop he Arrived one Tuesday night— And as that night he homeward strode To his Pan-Anglican abode, He passed along the Borough Road And saw a gruesome sight. ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... of these things in a detached, impersonal manner, as one who states commonplace facts. He had not particularly desired to speak of them. For him those gruesome incidents of war and invasion held no special horror. They might have rested heavily enough on his mind once. But he had come apparently to accept them as the grim collateral of war, without reacting emotionally to their terrible significance. And when Thompson ceased to question ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... sacred ash Yggdrasil when, growing suddenly faint, she loosed her hold and dropped to the ground beneath, and down to the lowest depths of Nifl-heim. There she lay, pale and motionless, gazing with fixed and horror-struck eyes upon the gruesome sights of Hel's realm, trembling violently the while, like one overcome ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come across. I said: "A professional ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... was a figure that formed a weird contrast to the other two. This one was lean, bent, and twisted like a gnarled tree that had been starved and warped in the forest. His dress was alike native, but the grotesque ornaments of animals' skulls, tails, dried monkeys' hands, and other gruesome relics gave the wearer an appearance that was repulsive to Saxon eyes. This freak of figure and dress was Thunder-maker, the great Medicine Man of the tribe. Without his presence no state conclave was complete; without his opinion no tribal law ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... Blossom"—she referred to her elder sister, Jemima—"was turning your room into a hospital-ward when I left, against the arrival of your mangled corpse. She had also ordered the wagon prepared like an ambulance, mattresses, chloroform, bandages—every gruesome detail complete. Our Jemima," she said, "is having the time of her life—isn't ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... buildings, the battered walls which now remain give but little indication of the imposing dimensions quoted above, and the visitor will have to depend on sentiment and the imagination rather than on actual sightseeing. The excavators in 1845 had a gruesome experience, for they discovered a charnel pit containing thirteen cart loads of bones of the fallen warriors at the battle of Lewes. Although nearly six centuries had elapsed the stench ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... be asked at the outset, what possible connexion can there be between the practice of so fantastic and gruesome an art as the embalming of the dead and the building up of civilization? Is it conceivable that the course of the development of the arts and crafts, the customs and beliefs, and the social and political organizations—in fact ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... sign, until he became conscious of deep weariness at so long standing on his feet. Then he saw, blossoming, the multiplying lights of an early winter's dusk—so numbly had the time slipped by. And in the gruesome close of this dreadful day, the desperate and perplexed man stole timidly down the stairways—avoiding the elevator—and across the street to the ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... statements of ignorant and terrified people, and asserted boldly that it would not attack the well-fed and prosperous classes; whilst others declared that the whole country would speedily be depopulated, and whispered gruesome tales of those scenes of death and horror which were shortly to become so common. Then the inhabitants of isolated houses like Woodcrych received visits from travelling peddlers and mountebanks of all sorts, many disguised in Oriental ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... astounded Indians with such ferocity that the diversion thus created enabled the settlers to escape from the deadly trap. During the next two years the history of the Cumberland settlements is but the gruesome recital of murder after murder of the whites, a few at a time, by the lurking Indian foe. Robertson's dominant influence alone prevented the abandonment of the sorely harassed little stations. The arrival of the North Carolina commissioners for ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... his own remarks, began to read a highly decorated account of the fearful injuries under which the last victim of the last diabolical explosion had been in danger of succumbing. Sir Roger read his gruesome narrative with much emphasis, and as he laid down ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... with impunity, are those who are rich enough, and sensible enough, to have two distinct establishments under the same roof. The ordinary eight or ten-roomed house, inhabited by decent middle-class folk, is a gruesome sight. What a huddlement of male and female! They are factories of quarrel and hate—those respectable, brass-curtain-rodded sties—they are full of things that won't bear mentioning. If our income never rises above that, we shall live to the end of our days as ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... themselves the result of a knowledge of Greek art and myth.[849] Early in the second century B.C. Plautus in the Captivi alluded to these paintings as familiar;[850] and we must not forget that the Etruscans habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for illustration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his work ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... prisonnieres?—Je crois, mon commandant, qu'elles sont allees quelque part faire une visite." And the ladies would be welcome. This is to take the most savage of Polynesians; take some of the most civilised. In Honolulu, convicts labour on the highways in piebald clothing, gruesome and ridiculous; and it is a common sight to see the family of such an one troop out, about the dinner hour, wreathed with flowers and in their holiday best, to picnic with their kinsman on the public wayside. The application of these ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the field the task seemed difficult. In the little clusters of bushes, behind trees, in gullies, and in every conceivable place that seemed to offer shelter, lay the dead. What a shudder thrills the whole frame when you stand and contemplate the gruesome faces of the battle's dead. In every posture and all positions, with every conceivable shade of countenance, the glaring, glassy eyes meet you. Some lay as they fell, stretched full length on the ground; others show a desperate struggle for the last few remaining breaths. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... whose lord lay slain, The robbers into gruesome durance drew. Swift should her hero come, like lightning's blue! She prayed for him, as crackling drought ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... right now." And I was able to look steadily at the gruesome surroundings and the dreadful burden ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... drink known as Hop Bitters is said to owe many of its supposed virtues to the bryony root, substituted for the mandrake which it is alleged to contain. The true mandrake is a gruesome herb, which was held in superstitious awe by the Greeks and the Romans. Its root was forked, and bears some resemblance to the legs of a man; for which reason the moneymakers [67] of the past increased the likeness, and attributed supernatural ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... he said. So he held her, comforting his heart that he had this right, until he drew near the cabin, and there Amalia saw the pelt of the sheep hung upon the wall of the cabin, pitifully dangling, bloody and ragged. Strangely, at the sight quite harmless, yet gruesome, all her fortitude gave way. With a cry of terror she hid her face and ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... his eyes well open, having been admitted to the temple by a young priest, who, carrying a taper, led him through several winding passages. A man could get into this gruesome building and never find his way out, thought Alyrus, and though a brave chieftain in his own country, he shivered here in the black corridors, ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... old bound volume at home a very gruesome account of the "Life and Misdeeds of Mr. Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner." The impression that still remained with her was of a man standing in the shadowy hall of just such an hotel as this, and pouring poison into a glass which he held up ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... to believe I had solved it. I found the Rhamda and the Nervina. I had iron will and courage—also strength. The Rhamda was never able to control me. My life is gone but not my will. Now I have left him another. Do not surrender, Harry. It is a gruesome task; but hold on to the end. Help me up the steps. There now. Just wait a minute ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... worse! The roots were so much deeper than that. He was not single-hearted and she was. In spite of all that he said, she knew he didn't really want to give up that girl. How could he? Even if the girl would let him go! And slowly there formed within her a gruesome little plan to test him. Then, ever so gently withdrawing her arms, she ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... as it blundered along. "Hi, ho, steady there, old fellow!" said Rudolf. He now entered the part of the woods where the beeches and oaks grow so closely together that at midday the sky seems green, rather than blue. The moon shone out suddenly, and he saw by its light a gruesome-looking head without a body that seemed to grin at him from among the undergrowth. His heart stood still for a moment, and then he laughed at his fears; for he saw that it was only a grotesque old tree-stump, such as one so often sees in ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... day; and at night when all the lanterns but one were extinguished, their slumbering shapes covered all over by white cotton sheets on the camp bedsteads, which were brought in every evening, conveyed the gruesome suggestion of dead bodies reposing on stretchers. The food, such as it was, was served within that glorified mosquito net which everybody called the "Cage" without any humorous intention. At meal times the ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... allowed to remain before the eyes of Queen and court, for half a dozen slaves had been standing in readiness with bowls of water, and some of these rushing forward carried away the head and body and flung it to the dogs, while others swiftly removed all traces of the gruesome spectacle. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... followers of Calvin had a charm for natures like Mistress Forrester, who, secure in her own salvation, could afford to look down on those outside the groove in which she walked; and with neither imagination nor any love of the beautiful, she felt a gruesome satisfaction in what was ugly in her own dress and appearance, and a contempt for others who had eyes to see the beauty to which ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... Zoological Gardens and travelling beast shows. "Giraffes drinking at the fountain pools, Trafalgar Square," was one of the most notable and characteristic of his studies, while even more sensational was the gruesome picture of "Vultures attacking dying camel in Upper Berkeley Street." There were also photographs of the large canvas on which he had been engaged for some months, and which he was now endeavouring to sell to some enterprising dealer or adventurous ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... B, C class in powers of repair by comparison with the angleworm, the lobster, or the salamander. Yet we are not without gruesome echoes of this lost power of regeneration in that our whole brood of tumors, including the deadly cancer and sarcoma, are due to a strange resumption, on the part of some little knot of our body-cells, of the power ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... all the chances and changes of seven hundred years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... with as much ease at himself as at anything else. "A woman scientist, ay? Funny things womenll do when they can't get a man. But longbearded or flatchested it's all the same. Gruesome, that's what they are, gruesome. Forget it. After we get this cleaned up we'll take care of any others that start, but personally I don't think therell be any. Sounds like a lot ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... now down the hill out of sight of the gruesome, ghastly window display, and Miss Frayne gained courage ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... that awoke to life as the stooping visitors rustled beneath them, slimy walls and ringing floors, all went to make up the vast grave in which she was to bury all hope of escape. Immense were the iron-bound doors that led from one room to another; huge the bolts and rusty the hinges; gruesome and icy the atmosphere; narrow the steps that led to regions deeper in the bowels of the earth. Dorothy's heart sank like lead as she surveyed the impregnable walls and listened to the mighty groans of long-sleeping doors as the shoulder of the sturdy Turk awoke them to ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... the youth to his gruesome sentry-go and turned back into the room. A man of fifty, with a tawny moustache, a long and rather narrow face and eyeglasses, was sitting at an office table with some papers in ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... repulsive figure of Jean Paul Marat. She knew nothing of his associates, Danton and Robespierre. It was in Marat alone that she saw the monster who sent innocent thousands to their graves, and who reveled like some arch-fiend in murder and gruesome death. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... barrel under the eaves of the house was nearly full of rain water, which they were likely to need, since their only supply of fresh water was contained in a five-gallon can, which would hold about two days' requirements. The rain water was good and would have been better but for Ned's gruesome inquiry: ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... the club daily, but he only once referred to our midnight search and the gruesome ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... Refectory. The buildings were clean and comfortable, and the only drawback lay in the fact that one sometimes found it objectionable to have to look at these poor old creatures, dragging themselves around. They had nothing to do, it seemed, but to wait and die. One old man was a gruesome sight. He was about ninety years old and spent his days walking about the courtyard, wearing a cigarette tin hung around his neck, into which he used to cough with such terrible effort that it seemed as if he would die every time the spasm shook him. As a matter of fact, he and many others did die ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... have been, he was no faint heart, and despite the shock of the gruesome discovery he continued his investigation of the silent ship. Apparently some attempt had been made when first the Buena Ventura was caught in the deadly embrace of the Sargasso to convey her treasure to the boats, for, at the head of the main companion-way, Bluewater Bill found a chest of antique ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... from me, he collapses. Nor does it relieve depression to be set down in a solemn courtyard, lighted by a solitary gas-lamp. This in itself would be quite sufficient to make a weary traveller melancholy, without the tolling of a gruesome bell to announce our arrival. This dispiriting sound seems to affect nobody in the house, except a lengthy young man in a desperate state of unwakefulness, who sleepily resents our arrival in the midst ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... in Car 104 looked over at Martin and Ferguson. "If it isn't the gruesome twosome," he called. "Where have you two been? We thought the front office had finally caught up with you and found out that neither one of you could read or write and that they had ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... answered: "Two days ago we did a portage on the Albany, and came, at camping time, upon the gruesome spectacle of two skeletons lying side by side under a little shelter formed of snowshoes and spruce boughs. We supposed that they must have been the Indians dispatched from Maxohama months ago with mails, only there were no mail bags, and no food bags either; so, of course, they ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... Vance Cheney, Loomis has found some of his most powerful inspirations in the work of our lyrist, Aldrich,—such as the rich carillon of "Wedded," and his "Discipline," one of the best of all humorous songs, a gruesome scherzo all about dead monks, in which the music furnishes out the grim irreverence of the words with ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... was a change in the scene. Under the tower a band of soldiers made a passage through the crowd of people. Pope John XVI came riding backwards on an ass. His ears and nose had been cut off, and his eyes had been dug out. It was a gruesome sight. A wine-bladder, waving over his head in the wind, made it worse. The people were silent, and shuddered simultaneously, for he was, after all, Christ's representative and St. Peter's successor, although ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... from my gruesome speculations by the captain asking me if I had made up my mind to go to St. Dunstan's. I had to confess that I did not know the place, where it was, or what it was for. Then he told me that he wished to take down some particulars ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... first beyond death's gloomy gate Shall fade away the mists that hide The gruesome and the nobly great, Borne ever on by time and tide. This from thy book of fate alone A liberated soul may tell thee: Perish thou shalt by deed thine own, And yet a stranger's ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... his toes with delight, the tale being of that gruesome nature which appeals to him. It must have been tried on countless other children, for, despite Whinnie's autobiographical interjections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primitive Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked over ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... of the afternoon he spent in trying to lower the army's confidence by telling all the gruesome stories of Indian warfare he could think of; but he frightened himself a great deal more than them, and at last had to abandon ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... seen rapidly drawn through the streets, the driver seeming to travel as quickly as he can. In the centre of the coach is the coffin, made of white wood and covered with black material, fastened on with brass nails. Around this gruesome object sit the relatives and friends of the departed one on their journey to the chacarita, or cemetery, some six miles out from the centre of the city. Cemeteries in Spanish America are divided into three enclosures. There is the "cemetery of heaven," "the cemetery of purgatory," and "the ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... knew nothing about it," she replied; "all that I know was that I had been much troubled about her and was anxious to help her. I went into a very heavy, deep sleep; but until next morning, when I heard of it from Mrs. C. I had no idea that my double had left my room." I said, "This power is rather gruesome, for you might take to haunting me." "I do not think so, unless there was something to be gained which could not be otherwise secured, some benefit to be conferred upon you." "That is to say, if I were in trouble or dangerously ill, and you were anxious about me, your double ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... It was a gruesome sight and even the French soldiers, used as they were to such spectacles, shuddered inwardly. It seemed foolhardy for the enemy to seek entrance to the house through that blocked door. Even the Germans realized it and would have drawn back but for the fact that ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... apparently with jerks; but all the world might well be dead and cold and turned to ashes. Often the very air seems to hold its breath for sympathy; at other times a lull suddenly awakens into a strange wind, blowing with unnatural effect. Then out upon the darkness, gruesome but sublime, flashes the glory of the incomparable corona, a silvery, soft, unearthly light, with radiant streamers, stretching at times millions of uncomprehended miles into space, while the rosy, flaming protuberances skirt the black rim of the Moon in ethereal splendour. ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... been open, the nostrils of her fine little nose had quivered. Hans Fuellenberg was correct in his observation that her eyes, as she held her head back, had been closed. The second time, she seemed to be drawn against her will by a gruesome something, which alternately aroused fear, horror, and curiosity. She held her eyes wide open, and now and then covered them with both hands, as if in dread of seeing ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... regain patrician leadership in the home of secession nor by the baneful resentment of the North. The soldier was made a political asset. For a generation the "bloody shirt" was waved before the eyes of the Northern voter; and the evils, both grotesque and gruesome, of an unnatural reconstruction are not yet forgotten ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... savor of everything that the young tyro in Occult art can picture to his mind; of the midnight magician and his mysterious, if not diabolical, arts, muttering his incantations, working his gruesome spells, and raising the restless ghosts of the dead. Strange fancies, these, and yet, so corrupt and ignorant have become the conceptions of the popular mind regarding the once sacred Science of the Temple and the psychological ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... Gardens, almost close at hand and with which we took in that age of lingering forms no liberty of abbreviation; to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, then in our interminable but so amiable Baker Street, the only shade on the amiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portal of the Bazaar—since Madame Tussaud had, of all her treasures, most vividly revealed to me the Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of the Chamber of Horrors which lurked ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... girls within an inch of their wretched lives. They are masked and in dominoes. You can imagine what Marjorie went through for a minute. I know a dance called the dance of the vampire bat. It is terribly, horribly gruesome. I am going to prance in on them with that. I have danced it in this very cloak. See how full it is." Ronny held up a fold for inspection. "I can make it look like wings. Then with the dance goes a very scary noise, half sigh, half whistle. ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... Crosby, who is known to nearly everyone, and Mr. Standish, who has so pleasantly introduced himself to me, I know none of you. So I'll have to ask— (He stops suddenly and rises, facing them all. He points slowly to the chesterfield, facing fireplace up C.) That's rather a gruesome thing there. I think we'll move it into another room. Will some of you gentlemen carry Mr. Wales' body into the other room. (There is a pause. The men all hesitate. Finally MASON starts to move to chesterfield. ...
— The Thirteenth Chair • Bayard Veiller
... had to shut the door to exclude the slant sheets of rain. All gathered in the upper end of the room where my chair stood, the only seat there except the floor. To the accompaniment of hissing rain and angry winds, the gruesome particulars of the triple funeral were narrated. Mariposa—with the baby on her lap—was chief spokeswoman, but nearly every one present had some item of his own, authentic or imaginary, to add. All were sure that the three whose fate had ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... One speak to-day?" Bassett asked, by this time so accustomed to the old man's gruesome occupation as to take even an interest in the ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... half of it was head, black and awful, with gruesome green features. Short, unjointed arms came out of its waist, with green claws dangling where the hands should have been; and below its short skirt flapped the tails of a swallow-tail coat. The girls were too much astonished to speak, as the creature advanced silently ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... painter, born near Valencia; indulged in a realism of a gruesome type; had Salvator Rosa and Giordano ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... this poor fellow, at least, and after working over him a while we were sure of it. The other could not be revived, so we weighted his feet, and let him slide the plank to his watery grave. But that wasn't all—however I guess I won't tell any more. It's downright gruesome, and I've got to go up and take a lookout, for we're likely ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... woman cut in pieces in the Rue Oberskampf—another forgotten story—he had taken to one of the editors of the "Epoque,"—a paper then rivalling the "Matin" for information,—the left foot, which was missing from the basket in which the gruesome remains were discovered. For this left foot the police had been vainly searching for a week, and young Rouletabille had found it in a drain where nobody had thought of looking for it. To do that he had dressed himself as an extra sewer-man, one of a number engaged by the administration ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... I cannot pretend to diligence. The passing months found me less frequently in the classroom than in secluded spots along the Calcutta bathing GHATS. The adjoining crematory grounds, especially gruesome at night, are considered highly attractive by the yogi. He who would find the Deathless Essence must not be dismayed by a few unadorned skulls. Human inadequacy becomes clear in the gloomy abode ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... leaned over the desk, and spoke in a gruesome whisper which made the cold run down our backs, 'that yon paper was your finger, one finger only of your hand, and it burned like that for ever and ever, and think of your hand and your arm and your whole body all on fire, never ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... from his last gruesome bit of stage-setting with a sigh of relief. "Go ahead." He pointed to one of the other archways. "I ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... was a mining fellow who used to come over and clean out my whiskey, and sing gruesome songs for hours together to a banjo that had, I think, two strings. I stayed out all night quite frequently when I had reason to believe that he was coming. Then, we killed a good many tarantulas—and a few ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... question have been laid out in a small artificial lake fed by a tiny streamlet which forms one of the numerous tributaries of the River Cray. Its depth is greater than is usual in watercress-beds, otherwise the gruesome relics could never have been concealed beneath its surface, and the flow of water through it, though continuous, is slow. The tributary streamlet meanders through a succession of pasture meadows, in one of which the beds themselves are situated, ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... to Eleanore; she did not want to do it, but she could not help it. She was naturally vigilant, and she wished to ward off misfortune if possible. She was obsessed with an uncanny feeling, a gruesome curiosity. She dogged her sister's steps in secret. One time she saw from a distance that Eleanore had started off with a man who had been waiting for her. She could not move from the spot; Eleanore caught sight ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... in Robespierre's berline and in that four years much of the things that were prophesied have come to pass —aye, and much more besides that was undreamt of at the outset by the revolutionaries. A gruesome engine that they facetiously called the National Razor—invented and designed some years ago by one Dr. Guillotin—is but an item in the changes that have been, yet an item that in its way has become a very factor. It stands not over-high, yet the shadow of it has fallen athwart the whole ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... I been feeling less anxious. His greeting was so entirely characteristic in the way he shuffled through the necessary condolences and jumped, with such evident relish, to the gruesome details. ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... go of them. No, they would keep on the ground right enough; they were felted and pressed together into a thick, hard mass. From the dawn of time they had served our brave warriors at sea, and it is by no means impossible that some of them had gruesome stories to tell of the days of Tordenskjold. The first thing I did, on obtaining possession of these treasures, was to get them into the dyeing-vat. They were unrecognizable when I got them back — in ultramarine blue, or whatever it was called. The metamorphosis was complete: their ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... an almost equally stalwart woman were both caught by one gigantic Quabo which had a tentacle around the throat of each. The man and woman were chopping at the viscous, gruesome head. One of the Thing's eyes was gashed across, giving it a fearsome, blind appearance. It heaved convulsively, and the three struggling figures toppled into the water and were ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... They shine from above, with increasing splendor, while these cast forth, from below, their uncertain lights. It seems to me that the farther we go the darker becomes the way, and its lights the more inconstant,—so fitful is their gruesome glare." ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... was lost upon his chum, for Hugh laughed merrily at the gruesome picture Thad drew of his complete subjugation to the ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... this chapter. None have been cited, so far, that do not belong absolutely to the nursery; and the collection of these even, though fairly ample, is not so full as it might be. We will conclude with a few, each of which forms a puzzle or conundrum—some of them, in all conscience, gruesome enough, and full of terrible mystery—but, individually, well calculated to awaken thought and stir ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... our garden and fanned himself with his hat, "now that you have got the old town geared up and jogging along smoothly with your almost boylike energy, let's forget all about 'em and get ready a really humming Scout-Campfire ceremonial for the second night of commencement. I have got one gruesome idea I will be ready to tell you about to-morrow. We needn't let in Roxy or the Dumpling or the other Kittens until it is all fixed, for they will be frozen with fear at the very idea of what will be a Scout initiation, all right enough. But they'll do as you say ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... and currents in those seas are strange and gruesome. Even as they lay, apparently motionless, with the sea as smooth as oil all round them, there came a sudden turmoil, and they were in a wild race of waters, with bubbling coils and swirls and frothing gouts of foam from rocks ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... fetch it. I also brought out from the dresser a few raw eggs, to break into a tumbler and swallow whole; for Hilda and I needed food almost as sorely as the poor beast herself. There was something gruesome in thus rummaging about for bread and meat in the dead woman's cupboard, while she herself lay there on the floor; but one never realises how one will act in these great emergencies until they come upon one. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... the whispering ceased. A wave of excitement went round the room. Some people shouted, others pressed forward to gaze on the abandoned wretch who had been caught in the act of committing a gruesome deed. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... was the remark King made a few minutes later. The storm was at its height; the sheets of rain that swept down the pebbly glen elicited the gruesome sentence. He stood directly behind the quaking Loraine, quite close to the open door; there is no doubt that the observation was intended for her ears, maliciously ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... The bad burn waits with his head unbandaged. My neighbour chokes in the clutch of chloral . . . O, a gruesome world! ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... on the floor, disconnected the wires, opened the plate of its chest and took out the small battery. And then it squatted its awkward bulk on the floor before us. Gruesome conference, with this huge mechanical thing apeing ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... A gruesome sight met them as Eli brought the dogs to a stop. Huddled close and lying by the side of the toboggan, partially covered by drift, were the stiff-frozen bodies ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... more gruesome phases of the belief in conjuration suggest possible poisoning, a knowledge of which baleful art was once supposed to be widespread among the imported Negroes of the olden time. The blood or venom of snakes, spiders, and lizards is supposed to be employed for this purpose. The results of its administration ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... churchyard, whilst a bat flits against a curious sky, which looks like a young grainer's first attempt at imitating "birds'-eye maple." Upon a second glance it seems possible that the "hose" is a snake, the tail of which the devil is gnawing. The gruesome design illustrates a yet more gruesome Interlude, entitled, "The Bat and the Devil." But it gives no fair idea of the contents of the volume, some of which ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... entanglement of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for a moment misty and aboriginal time big with portent. There is a ridiculous Scotch story in which one gruesome touch lives. A clergyman's female servant was seated in the kitchen one Saturday night reading the Scriptures, when she was somewhat startled by hearing at the door the tap and voice of her sweetheart. Not expecting him, and the hour being somewhat late, she opened it in astonishment, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Uncle Gulian; and though I ran after him and shook it (it only looks gruesome in the dark, you know) he never stopped, and he stumbled on the first step, and then he rolled—My! how he did bump"—and naughty Peter sat down on the stalls and held his sides ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
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