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More "Stifling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this foresight for offspring in a well-marked form. It is easy to understand that the species that first acquired and fixed an instinct propitious to the increase of the race has rapidly prospered, stifling beneath its extension those that are less favoured from this point of view, which is of capital importance in a struggle for a place beneath the sun. At the present day if the struggle of animal life offers few facts of lack of foresight for the rearing ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... incredible enthusiasm with which I was inspired by a far too ambitious scheme, I do so for the sake of the young, who will thus learn by my example to conquer their imagination. It is our most cruel foe. The student who has not succeeded in stifling it is lost for ever to erudition. I still tremble to think in what depths I was nearly plunged by my adventurous spirit. I was within an ace of what one calls history. What a downfall! I should have sunk into ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... their own prudent custom, it is with the utmost difficulty they can keep from laughing, when they see several French men or French women together, and always several of them speaking at the same time. I had observed them for two years stifling a laugh on those occasions, and had often asked the reason of it, without receiving any satisfactory answer. At length I pressed one of them so earnestly to satisfy me, that after some excuses, he told me in their language, "Our people say, that when several Frenchmen are together, they speak ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... come to her with open arms, take her in a close embrace, fall at her feet with a hoarse cry, as if he were stifling; and she, gently and sympathetically encouraged him, bending her head, offering her lips with an automatic loving expression which was the implement ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... lived for me, and when he found 'Twas vain, in holy ground He hid his face amid the shades of death. I waste for him my breath Who wasted his for me: but mine returns, And this lorn bosom burns With stifling heat, heaving it up in sleep, And waking me to weep Tears that had melted his soft heart: for years Wept he as bitter tears. Merciful God! such was his latest prayer, These may she never share! Quieter is his breath, ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... she had told no one that the mirages were no more than mirages—that her life still lacked all the vital elements of reality and sincerity. She was proud, and not even the people in dear old Marut suspected that she was stifling in the hot Madras air and in the unhealthy atmosphere of small lies and loose principles in which Travers was so thoroughly at home. Only Nicholson's sensitive temperament felt what others neither heard ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... thing that he did was to cut the cords and remove the gag that was stifling her. Attracted by the noise, the old nurse had hastened to the room with a lamp, which Renine took from her, casting ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... questions asked him, although he declared his answers by signs. The five Spaniards, on seeing their captain wounded—so suddenly that the murderer appeared and the blow was heard at the same moment—fell upon Ubal and cut him to pieces. They informed Master-of-camp Xara of the general's death, who, stifling his resentment, withdrew his men, and built a fort in the most suitable place, near the river. He founded there his colony, with suitable arrangements, so that our people could settle it. He appointed regidors and ministers of justice, and called it Nueva Murcia in honor of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... make history—a combination of freight, passenger, and "cattle." It had averaged eight miles an hour on its climb toward Yellowhead Pass and the end of steel. The "cattle" had already surged from their stifling and foul-smelling cars in a noisy inundation of curiously mixed humanity. They were of a dozen different nationalities, and as the girl looked at them it was not with revulsion or scorn but with a sudden quickening of heartbeat and a little laugh that had in ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... week for the heavier labors; and she ascended to a little pine wood on the right, all that remained of the superb pines which had formerly covered the plateau; but, here, too, she was ill at ease; the pine needles crackled under her feet, a resinous, stifling odor descended from the branches. And walking along the boundary wall past the entrance gate, which opened on the road to Les Fenouilleres, three hundred meters from the first houses of Plassans, she emerged ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Memoirs. The ramifications of the mischief they have done, have spread far and near. They have kept up a correspondence with some of the most patriotic individuals in every principal town and city in the kingdom; by which means they have frequently exercised the power which they thus acquire, of stifling those sparks of popular fervour, that would have long since kindled into an irrepressible blaze of patriotism, had it not been for the sinister exertions of this foul extinguisher of every particle of generous public liberty, that did not tend to promote their own base and selfish ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... Stifling a somewhat weary sigh, I returned the book to its place and lingered looking out of the open window into the deepening dusk. Mentally my mood was a restless one, but it did not reflect itself physically; for I stood there leaning against the window whilst a procession ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... had held off unconscionably long; the air within the lodge was stifling, and without the garden waited, breathless. Everything seemed pervaded by a poignant distress; the hush of feverish, intolerable expectation. The still earth, the heavy flowers, even the growing darkness, breathed the exhaustion of protracted waiting. Caroline felt that she ought to go; ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... frieze, he found some memory of sculptures he had seen and hardly heeded, ancient things with the eternity of youth on them, the captured splendour of moving limb and passionate brain. Then he was aware of fresh wind and fruitful earth, but as she passed out of sight, he was imprisoned again by stifling furies. He had begun to love Miriam with a sincerity that wished to win and not to force her; he had controlled the wild heritage of his fathers and tried to forget the sweetness of her body in the larch-wood; he was determined not to take what ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... of which I am now writing was the middle of March, the hottest and, in every respect, the worst month of the year in Singapore. Day and night the land was oppressed by the same stifling heat, a sweltering calidity possessing the characteristics of a steam-laundry, coupled with those of the stokehole of an ocean liner in the Red Sea. Morning, noon, and night, the quarter in which the Hotel of the Three Desires was situated was fragrant ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... life of just dreary commonplaceness, alone, uncared for, with no outlook, with no prospect of joys. I want the most there is in happiness—every girl wants that; and this monotonous existence has been robbing me, stifling me, until sometimes I've been wild enough to leap off a ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... She felt herself stifling in the wagon and flung aside the covering. Thrusting her bare feet into moccasins and slipping on a sweater, she stepped into the white world that had ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... court in the centre, ventilating the whole house, and affording a cool place, full of scent of flowers and sound of fountains for the burning afternoons; a belvedere tower also, on which to seek a breeze on stifling nights, when the very stars seem faint for heat, and the dim plumy heads of cypress and poplar are motionless against the misty blue sky. In front a broad terrace, whence to look down towards the beloved city, a vague fog of roofs in the distance; on the side and behind, elaborate ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... or five, who were lucky enough to be entangled with the lighter parts of the wreckage, escaped with their lives. But they were too much injured to get upon their feet, and there they lay, their sufferings made tenfold worse by the stifling air, and the horror of their inexplicable situation, until they were found and humanely relieved, more than ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... luxurious, but the girl's eyes grew thoughtful as they wandered round the room, for that evening the suggestion of wealth in all she saw jarred upon her mood. The great city lay not very far away, sweltering with its crowded tenement houses under stifling heat; and she could picture the toilers who herded there, gasping for air. Then her fancy fled further, following the long emigrant train as it crawled west from side-track to side-track, close packed ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... Motopu man died away. A ringing came in my ears as when one puts a seashell to them and hears the drowsy murmur of the tides. My cigarette fell from my fingers. A sirocco blew upon me, hot, stifling. Kivi laughed, and dimly I ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... that life is beautiful. Yes, if only it seems so! The life of us three hasn't been beautiful yet; it has been stifling us as if it was weeds... I'm crying. I oughtn't.... [Dries her tears, smiles] We must work, work. That is why we are unhappy and look at the world so sadly; we don't know what work ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... for?' well, I simply ran my pencil, so to speak, through her name and there was an end of her! The same with Sir Malcolm when I met him. And yet here was the family lawyer, who knew them both perfectly, so convinced of their guilt that he was obviously stifling investigation in any other direction. And on top of all that, all my natural instincts and intuitions told me that the man was a ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... insisted Millie, "of all the poor people stifling to-night in this heat, trying to sleep on the roofs and fire-escapes; and our flat so cool and big and pretty—and no one ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... he crossed the street and watched the windows from the other side, walking up and down in anguish of soul for half an hour or so in the stifling heat. Nothing stirred; the blinds were motionless; indeed, the prince began to think that the apparition of Rogojin's face could have been nothing but fancy. Soothed by this thought, he drove off once more to his friends at the Ismailofsky ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he felt himself choking, stifling. Despite all his efforts to cheer himself the young chief engineer felt certain that his chum had mysteriously met his fate, and that brave, dependable Harry Hazelton was ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... to get up when I heard your foot on the stairs. I feel stronger this morning, and I want to get out-of-doors. The house is stifling me. I have been listening so hard for the sound of her foot or her voice that when I try to listen I can't hear for the thumping of my heart in my ears. I want to be with her. I too am only a trouble to people. She and I will not be ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... delay at the end—long enough to make him break into a sweat of fear lest something should have gone wrong. Such thoughts come easily enough when you are lying full length in black darkness, in a hole just large enough to hold a man; in air so stifling that the laboured breath can scarcely come; with the dank earth just under mouth and nose, and overhead a roof that may fall in at any moment. The dragging minutes went by. Then, just as despair seized him, the boots ahead moved. He wriggled after them, finding himself ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... Jones up a dark, narrow, iron staircase till we emerged through a trap-door into a garret at the top of the house. I recoiled with disgust at the scene before me; and here I was to work—perhaps through life! A low room, stifling me with the combined odours of human breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... stifling evening, the evening of July the 29th. The rains had lashed the country for days, and even the trees that grew in among the houses of Paradise Street were fresh and green, though one of the hot, burning breaks ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... o'er which she leaned, As cold, with stifling breath, Her spirit sunk before the ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... through, very carefully with a serious brow. He finished it and then knew that he had not read a word of it. He went, slowly, to the window and opened it because the room was of a stifling heat. Then he took the letter again and read it. As he finished it again he was conscious that the door-bell was ringing. He wondered why it ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... mind that he had been lurking in a close and stifling hold, into which no single ray of sunlight penetrated, for three whole ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... wine jug to cool their parched throats, their shirts open in front, sweating in streams, panting from the lifeless sultry calm, enviously watching the gulls that sailed by just above the water, as though afraid of the stifling muggy air on high. After their meal, the men walked about on deck for a time, lazily, and with heavy eyes, drunk with sunlight rather than with wine; then they went below, one after the other, throwing themselves flat on boards that were wet with bilge-water, and ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... on August 5th, a day of intense, almost stifling heat, we went at once to Mrs. Van Every, who kept the most elegant boarding house in the city, whose spacious apartments seemed filled with the breath of Paradise, which added a grateful welcome to our travel-tired bodies. Mrs. Van Every's mien of pure and native dignity, her voice ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... in the carriage there commenced a scene which baffles all description. Some of my fellow-prisoners commenced shouting, some screamed and laughed, others mocked and jeered, whilst above all curses loud and deep hurtled through the stifling air, and made night hideous with the sound. Their yells and oaths still ring in my ears, and that which was to my companions a scene of the utmost jollity and mirth was to me the nearest approach to hell my imagination had ever conceived. It was a cold spring night that witnessed ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... days which followed, Mary Whittaker made new advances in the task of winning Learoyd's confidence and stifling the furies of remorse that had gripped his heart. All her quiet patience was needed, for although her progress was sure, there were times when he lapsed, apparently without reason, into his old mood of suspicion and hostility towards her. ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... later. August, hot and sunny, is reigning with quite a mad merriment, making the most of the days that be, knowing full well that the end of the summer is nigh. The air is stifling; up from the warm earth comes the almost overpowering perfume of the late flowers. Perpetua moving amongst the carnations and hollyhocks in her soft white cambric frock, gathers a few of the former in a languid manner to place ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... I know the hour when hope Sinks dead, and 'round us everywhere Hangs stifling darkness, and we grope With hands ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... man's family. There were twelve or fifteen children of different ages and sexes, and not one silent. Some were at table, some quarreling, some going to sleep, and some waking. Two women were in serious dispute, and the Tartar words poured out freely. The room was hot, stifling, and filled with as many odors as the city of Cologne, and we were glad to escape into the open air as soon as possible. I did not envy that Mongol gentleman his domestic bliss, and am inclined to think he considered it no joke to be as much married ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... cases? I can myself remember the time when the patient was treated on the lowering system, and when every breath of air was excluded from the sick-room, doors and windows being listed lest the slightest change should take place in the stifling atmosphere of the bed-room. And now all is altered; we have the system supported by nourishments, and abundance of fresh air let in. Indeed, it is most amusing to see the change which has taken place as regards fresh air; many of ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... soon found out to their grievous disturbance. When Mother Posset had drawn her from under her dead mother's body she had not left shrieking for an hour, but had kept up her fierce cries until the roof rang with them, and the old woman had jogged her about and beat her back in the hopes of stifling her, until she was exhausted and dismayed. For the child would not be stilled, and seemed to have such strength and persistence in her as surely ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... quick and comprehending mind saw and suffered things that formerly never affected him. The hard and sometimes cruel discipline, toil from sunrise to sunset, scant food, the stifling of ambitions—all these began now to be perceived and felt, and the impression they left sank into the soul of this rebellious boy. He saw a slave killed by an overseer, on no other charge than that of being "impudent." "Crimes" of this nature were committed, as far as he could see, with ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... piece of wood to another until she came near enough to get the beads I held out to her. I then went to inspect the inside of the cage out of which she had come, but could scarcely put my head inside of it, the atmosphere was so hot and stifling. It was clean and contained nothing but a few short lengths of bamboo for holding water. There was only room for the girl to sit or lie down in a crouched position on the bamboo platform, and when the doors are shut it must be nearly or quite dark inside. The girls are never allowed ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... first-class securities, stocks, bonds, etc., was paid April 27, each receiving $24,125.[26] Miss Anthony gives an amusing account, in one of her letters, of the awful nightmare she had on board the sleeper going home, when she dreamed that a woman was at the head of her berth stifling her while a man knelt in front, his hand cautiously creeping toward the inside pocket where she had sewed the money and bonds. She awoke with a scream and did not go ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... the rules which were subsequently made to carry it out. The introduction of proxies was no doubt intended to give absent creditors an opportunity of expressing their opinions upon any question which might arise. But the system was too often used for the purpose of stifling the views of those who took an independent part in the proceedings. The form of proxy prescribed by the rules contained no limitation of the powers of the proxy-holder and no impression of the opinion of the creditor. It simply appointed the person named in it as "my proxy," ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... found to my surprise and something like dismay, that the sleepiness which had hitherto oppressed me, had in some unaccountable way entirely fled. In vain I contemplated the bed, comfortable enough now in its appearance that the stifling curtains were withdrawn; no temptation to invade it came to arouse me from the chair into which I had thrown myself. It was as if I felt myself under the spell of some invisible influence that like the eye of a basilisk, held me enchained. ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... of arms and a head on Clytie's shoulder, wet eyes close in a corner that had once been the good woman's neck—and stifling sobs that seemed one moment to contract her body rigidly from head to foot—the next to leave it limp and falling. From the nursing shoulder she was helped to the bed, though she could not yet relax her arms from that desperate grip of Clytie's neck. Long she held her so, even ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... evil effects of excessive rains and strong winds; this may be easily done by placing an inverted bell-glass over the plants, invariably lifting this off on fine and warm days, and whenever there is no fear of damage from sudden winds or rains. Stifling hardy plants by keeping them in a confined atmosphere, whether indoors or out, is the worst possible plan to follow in order to ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... later, against my advice, the movement materialized, of my own accord I offered not alone my good offices, but my very life, and even my name, to be used in whatever way might seem best, toward stifling the rebellion; for, convinced of the ills which it would bring, I considered myself fortunate if, at any sacrifice, I could prevent such useless misfortunes. This equally is of record. My countrymen, I have given ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... canoe. His companion, still wearing the wolf mask, stepped out and lifted the helpless girl, bearing her along a path that led to a little opening where the moonlight fell brightly. He placed her on the ground and stood gazing down at her, his arms folded. He had removed the stifling blanket from her head ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... deck once more for a breath of fresh air, before retiring for the night to the hot and stuffy cabin. It was an exquisite evening. The moon rode in the pale green sky of the tropics. A strange light still lingered on the western horizon. The stifling heat of the Red Sea had given way long since to the refreshing coolness of the Indian Ocean. I strolled a while on the quarter-deck, and sat down at last near the stern. Next moment, I was aware of somebody creeping up ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... the sun struck the fly of the small green master's- tent Kingozi appeared, demanding water wherewith to wash. At the sound of his voice men stirred sleepily, sat up, poked the remains of their tiny fires. As though through an open tap the freshness of night-time drained away. The hot, searching, stifling African day ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... somehow without causing the horrible, strangling, helpless sensation he had suffered from before. In fact, it seemed to be pleasant and restful, and by degrees produced a sensation of coolness that was most welcome after the stifling heat at the top of the zigzag, which had been made worse by the odour of the ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... a shrill squeak, as of some animal in the agonies of death; and then there was a second squeak, that seemed to be suddenly interrupted by the stifling of the ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... of stifling heat, we moved slowly forward. The sound of the guns grew in intensity, from a faint rumbling to a subdued roar, until one evening, sitting in the open windows of a stable loft, we saw the far-off lightenings ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... when they set off; it was early afternoon, but the heat seemed more stifling than ever. They made no more pretence at conversation; both were buried in their own painful thoughts. The land fell away from Disscourn in all other directions, but toward Sant there was a gentle, persistent rise. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... housekeeper, with entire power over the servants, and I am very proud of that period of my life. And when I was sixteen we three girls were all sent up to California to Mills Seminary, which was quite fashionable and stifling. How we used to long for home! We didn't chum with the other girls, who called us little cannibals, just because we came from the Sandwich Islands, and who made invidious remarks about our ancestors banqueting on Captain Cook—which was historically ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... wife and mother, but also her husband's lover. But she soon saw that love went for little with Philippe, a studious man, much more interested in mental speculation and social problems than in any manifestation of sentimental feeling. She therefore loved him as he wished to be loved, stifling within herself, like smothered flames, a whole throbbing passion made up of unsatisfied longings, restrained ardours and needless jealousies and allowing only just so much of this to escape her as was needed to give him fresh courage at ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... reputation still; but these people were not fit for the encounter. They had been living in the moist mildness of Holland for thirteen years, and for more than sixty days had been penned in that stifling "Mayflower" cabin, seasick, bruised and sleepless. It sleeted, snowed, rained and froze, and they could find no place to get ashore on; their pinnace got stove, and the icy waves wet them to the marrow. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... there was not the faintest movement in his whole body, and his brows were still contracted in the same forbidding frown. If Varvara Petrovna had remained another three minutes she could not have endured the stifling sensation that this motionless lethargy roused in her, and would have waked him. But he suddenly opened his eyes, and sat for ten minutes as immovable as before, staring persistently and curiously, as though at some object in the corner which ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... could make an outcry Chester and Hal both leaped forward. The former's hands grasped the German by the throat, stifling the sound of his voice, and Hal quickly delivered two hard blows to the man's face. The German fell limply into Chester's arms, and the boy laid him quietly ...
— The Boy Allies On the Firing Line - Or, Twelve Days Battle Along the Marne • Clair W. Hayes
... the breath was fairly choked out of him. Joe Hawkridge was desperately thrashing about in the swamp, gasping and snorting, his cries also smothered. In a twinkling they were captives, their arms tightly bound behind them, the stifling grip of their necks unrelaxed. Weakened almost to suffocation, the two lads could make no lively resistance. Jack uttered one feeble shout for help but subsided when those strong fingers tightened the clutch on ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... the slippery walls of gloom, And dares not look beneath, lest Fate should come; He enters now the stifling clouds that creep Around the causeway, while its shadows sleep Upon the stream that ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... draw breath, to take in with his glance some wider horizon. Again he remembered that it was the month Mesori, that a year had passed since the maneuvers; he felt a yearning for the desert. How gladly would he mount his light chariot drawn by two horses, and fly away to some place where it was not so stifling, and trees ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... you. I know that old palace,—knew it thirty years ago,—and I know that cortile, and although I have not had the good fortune to run across either your gondolier, Espero, or his sweetheart, Mariana, I have known a dozen others as romantic and delightful. The air is stifling here. Shall we have our coffee outside on ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... with both at one portion or another of his career. But just this particular temper of Louie's, with its apparent lack both of passion and of moral sense, was totally new to her, and produced at times a stifling impression upon her, without her being able to explain to herself with any clearness what ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the sofa, wondering what was to be the fate of the unfortunate messenger, for, in spite of the sudden shutting of the door by the Russian, she caught a glimpse of the man lying face downwards on the floor of his stifling room. She also had received a whiff of the sweet, heavy gas which had been used, that seemed now to be tincturing the whole atmosphere of the car, especially in the long narrow passage. It was not likely they intended to kill the man, for his death would cause an awkward ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... committee, the nation had reason to expect that this proposal would have been embraced by a great majority; but several members, who in the preceding session had been loud in their demands of justice, now shamefully contributed their talents and interest in stifling ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... no better, and after the first week, the doctors decided that death was imminent. They were near the Line now, in the stifling heat of storms. The troop-ship kept on her course, shaking her beds, the wounded and the dying; quicker and quicker she sped over the tossing sea, troubled still as during ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... The same annual revolution whirls us through the balmy summer days and the biting winter ones. God's purpose is one. His methods vary. The road goes straight to its goal; but it sometimes runs in tunnels dank and dark and stifling, and sometimes by sunny glades and through green pastures. God's purpose is always love, brother. His withdrawals are gifts, and sorrow is not the least of the benefits which come to us through the Man ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... figment of the childish imagination. The first great discovery of the real nature of the stars did, in fact, logically or not, break up more effectually than perhaps any other cause, the old narrow and stifling conception of the universe represented by Dante's superlative power; and made incredible the systems based on the conception that man can be the centre of all things and the universe created for the sake of ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... same things a man does work as well in stifling her unrest as she fancies it has in man's case? If a woman's temperamental and intellectual operations were identical with a man's, there would be hope of success,—but they are not. She is a different being. Whether she is better or worse, stronger or weaker, primary ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... but huddle in with those poor laborers and working-women!" he would say to himself. "If I could but breathe that atmosphere, stifling though it be, yet made holy by ancient litanies, and cloudy with the smoke of hallowed incense, for one hour, instead of droning over these moral precepts to my half-sleeping congregation!" The intellectual isolation of his sect preyed upon him; for, of all the terrible things to natures ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... opened by a venerable Chinaman in the flowing robes of a priest. He looked at them doubtfully. Baskinelli spoke three words that his companions did not hear. The priest vanished. Quickly the door was reopened and they stepped into the dim, smoky, stifling presence of ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... she had faith in that—and he would find she had fought to the end, even if he came too late. She buried her face in her hands, stifling a sob that shook her body, yet when she lifted the head again, there was no glimmer of tears in her eyes, and her cheeks were crimson. She waited motionless, scarcely seeming to breathe—the statue of a ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... hard, swallowing insult and stifling my sense of decency as far as possible, in order that I might serve you and prove myself worthy to be your friend," replied Surigny, with such earnestness that Darrin now found himself staring in open-eyed astonishment at ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... sprang into the warehouse again; regained and partially closed the door, when the stifling smoke choked him, and he fell to the ground. A few seconds later, Dale followed him, and found him there. Applying his great strength with almost superhuman energy to the door, it shut with a crash, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... divine. To my girlhood's love must I say farewell— To the dreams that were sweeter than words can tell! The chill embrace of the waters cold, Clasping my form in their viewless hold, Laving my brow in their terrible play, Tangling my locks with their glittering spray, Freezing my warm blood, stifling my breath, With awful kisses that bring but death,— To such endearments I now must go Where ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... History to take the habits and instincts of animals as fixed points, and to consider their structure and organization, as specially adapted, to be in accordance with these. This assumption is however an arbitrary one, and has the bad effect of stifling inquiry into the nature and causes of "instincts and habits," treating them as directly due to a "first cause," and therefore, incomprehensible to us. I believe that a careful consideration of the structure of a species, and of the peculiar physical and organic ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... surrender to the mastery that would not be denied. Yet when he turned to her outside in the hot sunshine with the blaring band close at hand she almost shrank away, she almost voiced a pretext for continuing their unprofitable wandering through the stifling tents. For, strangely, though he smiled at her, there was about him in that moment a quality that went near to scaring her. Something untamed, something indomitable, looked out at her from his glittering eyes. It was almost like a challenge, ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... in what manner? By stifling me with virtuous rhetoric? Hah, it is rather awkward for you—is it not—that our sumptuary laws forbid you merchants to ...
— The Jewel Merchants - A Comedy In One Act • James Branch Cabell
... little of novelty in the journey or the voyage. There were the usual incidents of winter travelling—the hot, stifling car—the snowy country stretching out mile after mile from morning till night—the hotels, which seemed strangely comfortless for an invalid—and then the great city with its noise and bustle, and the steamer where they had nothing to do but ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... the foc's'le—a small, dark, stifling place where eight men slept. The thought of having to spend his nights in that dirty, close den made him half-inclined to jump ashore before the boat started. Quickly overcoming the thought, he set to work to discover which was his bunk, and ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... and strikes, a thin, sudden note like the sob of a child. Clock, buhl clock that ticked out the tortuous hours of my birth, Clock, evil, wizened dwarf of a clock, how many years of agony have you relentlessly measured, Yardstick of my stifling shroud? ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... strain that had come upon her escorts, and she felt less at ease in her journey. Never once had she faltered or complained, though she was sadly hampered by her totally unsuitable garments for such a walk. In the gloomy forest the heat was stifling; the trackless jungle was full of creeping life; at every step the feet tripped over fallen logs or crunched with shivery suggestion into rotten shells of storm-torn tree limbs. Bright eyes gleamed at them through the thickets, to vanish ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... ships lay motionless on the glassy water, with wood-work so hot as to burn the hands that touched it, with the meat putrefying in the casks below, and the water running from the loosened casks, and no one with courage and endurance enough to venture into the stifling hold even to save the provisions. And through all this the Admiral, racked with gout, had to keep a cheerful face and assure his prostrate crew that they would soon ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... and we ate our dinner there in the broiling sun, for we were above the trees, which ended some distance below us. It was fearfully hot—a dead, suffocating heat—with not a breath of wind to relieve the stifling atmosphere, and some one asked ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... not a pleasant sensation, that of a descent into a coal-pit. There is the rushing noise of the cage, the whirring of wheels, the constant dripping and plashing sound of falling water, the thudding of the pump, the stifling feeling of dank heat, the stuffy mist, and joined to all the knowledge that if that slender thread of wire-rope should happen to break, the cage would fall perhaps hundreds of feet, and its occupants ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn
... Calcutta by which I was to proceed to Bombay had already arrived. A few of us went on shore with small caps on our heads and some with cabbage tree hats, but we speedily discovered they would not do. The heat on shore was intense, a muggy, stifling heat, which to us Australians was killing. We were guided to the Bazaar, and introduced to several hotels by some five score natives, whose numbers increased as we proceeded, and were augmented by numerous sellers of sun toppee, pugarees, etc. We were ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... call from this house, and I thank you for the pleasant and friendly feeling you have shown. I have but a word to say. I had gone out of the room, not because of the discussion, but because it was too warm and the atmosphere so stifling, when I was recalled by hearing something to this effect: "That there had not been a single logical argument used on this platform in behalf of woman suffrage; that woman is abundantly represented by some man of her family; that when a woman lifts herself up in opposition against ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... firing of the rifle and which had hung for some time about the tree. Now we knew it could not be that, for it was growing thicker and thicker, and we noticed that it had a smell very different from that of burnt powder. Moreover, it produced a stifling, choking sensation, causing us to cough, and rub our eyes with the pain. On looking downward, I was unable to see either the ground or the peccaries; but I could perceive a thick cloud rising up all around the tree. I could hear the ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... word, with all it might mean, with all it might not mean, softened him as if by magic, made him gentle, amazed, shy as a boy, stifling under a ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... a patch of thorns to a flat tableland that was part of the Ceza stronghold. By it, when I had gained sufficient strength, sometimes we used to climb to the plateau, and there take exercise. It was an agreeable change from the stifling atmosphere of the Black Kloof. The days were very dull, for we were as much out of the world as though we had been marooned on a desert island. Still from time to time we heard of the progress of the war through Nombe, for Zikali I ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... to dodge the missile, while Rollo exercised great forbearance in stifling a bark, "Greek is not quite so severe to some folks ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fiddles. In Eisenach I was told that this viol was ten feet high. Hans used to play this instrument at the village church, and his playing drew such crowds that the preacher had just cause for jealousy, and improved the opportunity, yet stifling his rage he ordered the verger to lock the doors and allow no one to depart until ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... Jean had a stifling sense as of some great green tree bending down to crush her. She put out her hand to push ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... youth, faded in their prime! When a people cannot offer its daughters a tranquil home under the protection of sacred liberty, when a man can only leave to his widow blushes, tears to his mother, and slavery to his children, you do well to condemn yourself to perpetual chastity, stifling within you the germ of a future generation accursed! Well for you that you have not to shudder in your grave, hearing the cries of those who groan in darkness, of those who feel that they have wings and yet are fettered, of those who are stifled from ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... was possible only by a series of leaps or bounds; any other mode of progression would simply have resulted in their being tripped up at every other step. This, to men unaccustomed to such exercise, was in itself a sufficiently fatiguing process; but in addition to this they had to contend with the stifling heat of the stagnant atmosphere, which had been oppressive enough even whilst they had been in a condition of comparative inactivity; now it seemed to completely sap their strength and cause their limbs to hang heavy as lead about them. Then, too, the ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Example 24, No. 2, it is only one 16th-note short of a full measure. And although this 16th, being the cadence-chord, is actually equivalent to the whole measure, it is sometimes less confusing to the hearer to silence it. This is called stifling the cadence (or Elision); and its presence depends simply upon sufficient proof that what was supposed to be the cadence-measure (and to a certain extent is such) is at the same time really the first measure of the next sentence. The following contains an illustration of the elision ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... owner, and a warrant was shown to him. A heated argument followed, at the end of which the infuriated man waved us in with a magnificent and most dramatic gesture. There were some twenty rooms in the house, and the stifling heat of a July noon made the task none too enjoyable. The police inspector was extremely thorough in his work, and an hour had passed before three rooms had been searched. He looked into the cupboards, went down on his knees to peer into the ovens, stood on tiptoe to ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... heat and stifling air, worked steadily alone in the dusty office, the cold, homely face bent over the books, never changing but once. It was a trifle then; yet, when she looked back afterwards, the trifle was all that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... descend into dark vaults in which were fountains and baths with water ever cool,—to creep yet lower, with a dim flickering light, into the execution chamber, and stand under the beam which had sustained the fair form of many a frail and faithless beauty,—to retreat from the stifling influence of its confined air, and return to inspect delicate little mosques, in which the Queen and her maidens used to perform their devotions, and which were as pure and chaste as the ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... It was bitter, stifling, cruel work; with their mouths choked with dust, with their throats caked with thirst, with their eyes blind with smoke; while the steel was thrust through nerve and sinew, or the shot plowed through ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... doctor became wholly exhausted with the fatigue he had undergone, with the smoke and the fog, with the stifling, sulphureous air, with the tempestuous blasts, with the alternate extremes of heat and cold, and with the clamours, the lamentations, the agonies, and the howlings of the damned everywhere around him,—when, just in the nick of time, Beelzebub appeared to him again, and invited him ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... required us to form some decision. I formerly mentioned, that, during my abode at Malverton, I had not been insensible to the attractions of this girl. An affection had stolen upon me, for which it was easily discovered that I should not have been denied a suitable return. My reasons for stifling these emotions, at that time, have been mentioned. It may now be asked, what effect subsequent events had produced on my feelings, and how far partaking and relieving her distresses had revived a passion which may readily be ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... herself she strained her ears, listening, and now heard distinctly above the sounds nearer at hand a distant crackling roar and the thud of heavy branches falling. The interior of the cabin had now grown even dimmer—to a dark redness—and the smoke came billowing in at the window almost stifling her with its acrid fumes. Outside the window, when she struggled for freedom, she caught a glimpse of sparks, flying like meteors past the dim rectangle of her vision, small ones, larger ones, and then flaming brands which must set fire to ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... some tea?" said Jolyon, stifling the words: 'And see the house.' And he led the way into the hall. When he had rung the bell and ordered tea, he went to his easel to turn his drawing to the wall. He could not bear, somehow, that his work should be seen by Soames, who was standing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sometimes spattered Ferrol's clothes as he ran past. No matador ever played with the horns of a mad bull as Ferrol played his deadly game with Michael, the dancing bear. His breath was becoming shorter and shorter; he had a stifling sensation, a terrible tightness across his chest. He did not cough, however, but once or twice he tasted warm drops of his heart's blood in his mouth. Once he drew the back of his hand across his lips mechanically, and a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... heart and interest; there is nothing like a favor for securing the friendship or enmity of man, according to whether it be conferred with good will or hurled into his face and bestowed upon him in spite of himself. If the logical and regulated system of exploitation be chosen, stifling with the jingle of gold and the sheen of opulence the sentiments of independence in the colonies, paying with its wealth for its lack of liberty, as the English do in India, who moreover leave the government to native rulers, then build roads, lay out highways, foster the ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... was stifling. As she waited she gave a tired gasp. Colette ran to her. "Madame is ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... crowded around him, and greeted most of the score of swarthy men and women by name. Tony masterfully stripped him of his overcoat and cap and placed them in the kitchen from which emanated odors of strange things cooking. The room was stifling with heat and with ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... the afternoon was brilliant, but it is right to add that it required an African body and mind fully to appreciate the pleasures of it. The sun's rays were blistering, the heat was intense, and the air was stifling. Harold lay down and gasped, Disco followed his example, and sighed. After a few minutes spent in a species of imbecile contemplation of things in general, the latter raised himself to a sitting posture, and proceeded slowly to fill and light his pipe. Harold was no smoker, ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... lungs filled with the pungent stifling smoke of powder, his nostrils with earth and dust, he frantically wheezed and sneezed, leaping about, falling drunkenly, leaping into the air again, staggering on his hind-legs, dabbing with his forepaws at his nose head-downward between his forelegs, and even ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... not have heard his own voice, he was unaware of the magnitude to which the mighty uproar had enlarged itself. Suddenly, something smote the rock as with the hammer of Thor, and, as suddenly, the air around him grew stifling hot. The next moment it was again cold. He started to his feet in wonder, and sought the light. As he turned the angle, the receding back of a huge green foam spotted wave, still almost touching the roof ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... her offering and regarded it a moment in silence, while my aesthetic nature shook to its foundations. Stifling the moan of horror that had risen to my lips, I faced her with a smile. Balaclava heroes could have ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... estufa was as brightly illuminated as a small fire could make it, the smoke of which found egress through the door and the two air-holes, or rose to the low ceiling, where it floated like a grayish cloud. The air was heavy and stifling, and the odour of burning pitch proceeded from the pine wood with which the flames were fed in the centre of the room. Close to the fire the tapop had squatted, with three aged men by his side in the same posture. All three wore short, black wraps with red stripes. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... flushed face and smarting dilated eyes. This frustration of a purpose towards which he had set out under the exalted consciousness that he was about to compensate in some degree for the greatest demerit of his life, made him feel the air of the room stifling. ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... crowd the back of his mouth and strangle him. The sensation was that of a nightmare of impossible duration. It was possible to move and possible to see. One could breathe, with difficulty, and with titanic effort one could speak. But there was the same feeling of stifling resistance to every ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... sought refuge in a tomb, but the ashes had walled them tightly in. A soldier died bravely at his post, erect before a city gate, one hand on his spear and the other on his mouth, as if to keep from breathing the stifling gases. ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... go out as usual. Old Treffy seemed no worse than before,—he was able to sit up, and Christie opened the small window before he went out to let a breath of fresh air into the close attic. But there was very little fresh air anywhere that day. The atmosphere was heavy and stifling, and poor Christie's heart felt depressed and weary. He turned, he hardly knew why, to the suburban road, and stopped before the house with the pretty garden. He wanted to see those merry little faces again,—perhaps they would cheer him; he felt so ...
— Christie's Old Organ - Or, "Home, Sweet Home" • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... would have left all on board the submarine gasping and stifling sixty feet below the fresh air that meant life. There was but one thing to do — come to the surface and run for it in the ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... began to talk to Diana. In a few minutes he said, "Count, it is dreadfully warm in your rooms. I see the countess is stifling. I will give her my arm for a ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... watching to see what would happen next. He caught only snatches of the letter, just enough to know it was a description of a hunt in England, of a damp, cold, cloudy day, of an invigorating run—the contrast struck him forcibly—the stifling, hot little hut, and the jealous, half-savage woman standing there, her eyes aflame with anger at the slight she fancied ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... this afternoon, though I'm rather vague as to which train he arrives by. Rather a stifling day for ...
— When William Came • Saki
... of the existing calamity was the influx from the country into the city, and this was especially felt by the new arrivals. As there were no houses to receive them, they had to be lodged at the hot season of the year in stifling cabins, where the mortality raged without restraint. The bodies of dying men lay one upon another, and half-dead creatures reeled about the streets and gathered round all the fountains in their longing for water. The sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... a tunnel, and a cloud of stifling smoke wrapped the cars about and the cinders rattled against ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... he tried to write some letters. Worse and worse. The place was stifling, and the pen almost melted in ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... embarrassing situation, he should be rewarded with a peerage, of which he had long been desirous. He undertook on his side to obtain, by fair or foul means, a vote in favour of the peace. In consequence of this arrangement he became leader of the House of Commons; and Grenville, stifling his vexation as well as he could, sullenly acquiesced in ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "When a child," says a famous English writer, speaking of the chimney-sweepers of London, "what a mysterious pleasure it was to witness their operation!—to see a chit no bigger than one's self enter into that dark hole—to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on through so many stifling caverns—to shudder with the idea, that 'now surely he must be lost forever!'—to revive at hearing his feeble shout of discovered daylight,—and then (oh, fulness of delight!) running out of doors, to come just in time to see him ...
— The Nursery, March 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... Holloway pending the Trial. The Trial took place before Mr. Justice Bodmin in the following July, occupying five days of oppressive heat in the thrashing out of that vexed question, the guilt or innocence of Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S. who for airless, stifling years of weeks had eaten and drunk and slept and waked in the Valley of the Shadow of Penal Servitude. Who was conveyed from the dock to the cell and from the cell to the dock by warders and policemen, rumbling through back streets and unfrequented ways in a shiny prison-van. Who ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... thermometer was rarely above zero, and at night far below; but the heat and glare of the sun was stifling and blinding during much of the day; often they perspired profusely under their crushing burdens, with the thermometer nearly at zero. Snow fell daily, and ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... beating heart pressed and the lock, which in spite of its age seemed to have been recently oiled, probably by Barr, responded. The next instant with a click, the lock slid open and Billy walked out of the stifling air of the coop—free. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... more diffident instruments tinkled apologetically in the distance. Intermittently, across the gaunt scaffolding of the Ninth Avenue L, at one end of the block, roaring trains flashed long chains of lights. On the other hand, Eighth Avenue buzzed resonantly in stifling clouds of incandescent dust. The air ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... Mrs. Preston's, and how strange was this promenade down the fashionable boulevard where he had so often walked with Miss Hitchcock on bright Sundays, bowing at every step to the gayly dressed groups of acquaintances. He was taking the stroll for the last time, something told him, on this hot, stifling July afternoon, between the rows of deserted houses. In twenty-four hours he should be a part of them in all practical ways—a part of the struggling mob, that lived from day to day, not knowing when the bread would give ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... So I thought, so I said, when I knew not what I thought or said. Chagrin and stifling rage had enveloped my whole soul; love itself, in the full blaze of happiness, could not illumine it. But it has sent its daughter, Pity, more familiar with gloomy misfortune, and she has dispelled the cloud, ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... bordered with fruit-trees, whose white blossoms were then in full blow as well as their tender green leaves. The sky was blue, the air still, the May afternoon was full of brightness and fragrance. Released from the stifling class, surrounded with flowers and foliage, with a pleasing, smiling, affable woman at my side—how did I feel? Why, very enviably. It seemed as if the romantic visions my imagination had suggested of this garden, while it was yet hidden from me by the jealous boards, were more than ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... bureaucratic administration, conducted by an imported agency, and centring all power in its hands, and undertaking all responsibility, has acted as a dead weight on the Soul of India, stifling in us all sense of initiative, for the lack of which we are condemned, atrophying the nerves of action and, what is more serious, necessarily dwarfing in ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... there was indicated anywhere being a long and very distant strip of blue sky overhead when the weather was clear. Not even that to-day. The heavy clouds hung low, seeming to rest upon the house-tops, and shutting up all below under their breathless envelopment. Hot, sultry, stifling, the air felt to Betty; well-nigh unendurable; but Pitt seemed to be of intent that she should endure it for a while, and with some difficulty she submitted. Happily the place was cleaner than Martin's Court, and no dead cats nor decaying vegetables poisoned what air there was. ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... to the Gods that heard not, By fits that found no favor in their sight, By faces bent above the babe that stirred not, By nameless horrors of the stifling night; By ills foredone, by peace her toils discover, Bid Earth be good beneath and ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... breath increased, she felt suffocated. The livid dawn, the crimson sunset, changed to gray; the atmosphere around her grew thick; there was a smarting sensation in her eyes, a stifling sensation in her throat. Mechanically, not knowing what she did, she began to grope her way to the door. But in that thickening atmosphere she did not know which was the door—her outspread arms clasped some heavy piece of furniture—the wardrobe. She leaned against, it exhausted, helpless ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... themselves and their society strictly in the background, have nevertheless done what they could from time to time to assist the progress of truth in the world, and some half-century ago, in despair at the rampant materialism which seemed to be stifling all spirituality in Europe and America, they determined to make an attempt to combat it by somewhat novel methods—in point of fact to offer opportunities by which any reasonable man could acquire absolute proof of that life apart from the physical body which it was the tendency of science ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... filled with pity for her. He knew that a revelation of Penton's real character would sound as strange to her as to any person there. She knew her husband had "faults," but what does that common word signify to a woman in love? The atmosphere became too stifling for Evan. He felt his head throb and threaten to ache. He excused himself, ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... a clear, starry night and I heaved a sigh of relief as I saw the Schloss-Platz glittering in the cold light of the arc lamps. So pressing had been the danger threatening me that the atmosphere of the Castle seemed stifling in comparison with the keen night air. A new confidence filled my veins as I strode along, though the perils to which I was advancing were not a whit less than those I had just escaped. For I had burnt my boats. My disappearance from the Castle must surely arouse suspicion and ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... "Good!" Sabatini replied, stifling what seemed to be a yawn. "You have awakened me from a long sleep, so let your news be ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the thing fairly with you if you let us out," said Dalness, stifling his anger behind the door, but still with the full force of it apparent in the ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... icy, snowy, Sundays in mid-winter when one hugs the cheerless radiator and, shivering in chilly discomfort, wishes that Sundays were months instead of days apart. There are stifling, sticky, sweltering. Sundays in midsummer when one prays, if he can pray at all, for the night to come. And there are blustering, rainy, sleety, dismal, Sundays in the fall when the dead hours go in funeral procession by and the world ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... cheap lace and bits of stuff in the stifling air of the crowded place. They would buy a sack of salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or a bag of the greasy pink candy piled in profusion on the counter, and this they would munch as ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... foremost | of the | toilers, | when the | driver's | morning | horn Calls a | -way to | stifling | millhouse, | or to | fields of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... cool atmosphere met him with a sweet calm, which flowed over his perturbed soul like a benediction. He drew a chair from a pile in a corner and sat down for a moment near one of the little side chapels, to recover from the stifling heat without and prepare his thought for the impending interview with the Bishop. A dim twilight enveloped the interior of the building, affording a grateful relief from the blinding glare of the streets. It brought him a transient sense of peace—the peace ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... mercifully swallowed up this apparition: like as not, 'twas the sound of the fire itself. The end had come, both to the unhappy foresters and Robin's home. With a huge torrent of noise the roof of it crushed in, half stifling the fire. ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... whom he follows, determined not to endure the inquisition of their looks any longer, into the chapel. The humour of the whole scene within is excellent. The stifling closeness, both of the atmosphere and of the sermon, the wonderful content of the audience, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... deeply interested," I answered, stifling my eagerness, "and it would be very kind ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Cupid is thwarted in Australia not only by the natural stupidity, coarseness, and sensuality of the natives, but by a number of artificial obstacles which seem to have been devised with almost diabolical ingenuity for the express purpose of stifling the germs of love. The selfish, systematic, and deliberate suppression of free choice is only one of these obstacles. There are two others almost equally fatal to love—the habit of marrying young girls to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... whoever he is," Jimmie said, as they discussed the signals in the almost stifling atmosphere of the cabin, "is strictly next to his job! He's showing ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... Station. We were leaving by the 8.50 train, and we were not the only ones to leave Christmas behind, for hundreds of men were returning to the Front. Heartbreaking scenes were taking place, and many of the brave women-folk were stifling their sobs, in order to give their men a pleasant send-off, ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... uplifted to the Gods that heard not, By fits that found no favor in their sight, By faces bent above the babe that stirred not, By nameless horrors of the stifling night; By ills foredone, by peace her toils discover, Bid Earth be good beneath and ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... popularity ran against the accused, no one had been so loud as Scroggs; to attempt to the character of Oates or Bedloe, or any other leading witnesses, he treated as a crime more heinous than it would have been to blaspheme the Gospel on which they had been sworn—it was a stifling of the Plot, or discrediting of the King's witnesses—a crime not greatly, if at all, short of high treason against ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... not recovered from their surprise in the south, for no counterattacks were attempted, nor had any reserve divisions been brought to their support. Throughout the long, stifling July day squadrons of Allied aeroplanes were industriously bombing depots and lines of communication back of the German front. The much-lauded Fokkers were flitting here and there, doing little damage. Two were sent to earth by Allied airmen before the day was over. The Allies had a great ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... door behind him. He sat for a long time beside the table, absolutely spent, and still holding the revolver in his hand. He was shaking in a chill, though the temperature was over eighty, and the cabin, when he had first entered it, had seemed to him overpoweringly hot and stifling. He warmed himself with a nip of gin. He looked over his clothes for a trace of blood, and was thankful to find none. He took off his coat; he examined the soles of his shoes. No blood! Thank ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... drew back. All at once he forced his rebellious limbs to move on, and his trembling fingers to grasp the knife they had almost abandoned, and he stepped toward the regent, stifling a sob which was ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... appeared later; but in the meantime, the house being stifling hot, and the little patch of sand inside the palisade ablaze with midday sun, I began to get another thought into my head which was not by any means so right. What I began to do was to envy the doctor, walking in the cool shadow of the woods, with the ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there was something freeing and saving in that glimpse of herself as part of all the life there had ever been. Because the crowds had seemed the all—were suffocating her—something in that vastness of vision was as fresh air after a stifling room. It was not that it did away with the crowds—made her think they did not matter; they were, after all, the more vital—imperative—but she had more space in which to see them, was given a chance to understand them rather than be ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... ready for battle, for she spun all day long, and did not stop even to eat her chestnuts. A glance, as she passed, at the stable, still dark, where the horses were sluggishly moving about, at the stifling cow-shed, filled with heads impatiently stretched toward the door; and the first rays of dawn, stealing over the courses of stone that supported the embankment of the park, fell upon the old woman running through ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... back with De la Verendrye as chaplain. The trip was made at terrible speed, in the hottest season, through stifling forest fires. Behind, at slower pace, came the provisions. De la Verendrye reached the Lake of the Woods in September. Fearing the delay of the goods for trade, and dreading the danger of famine with so many men in one place, De la Verendrye despatched Jemmeraie to ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... in silence, stifling the impulse to rise and offer Apollo a chair. Instead, he turned lazily and knocked the ash collar off his cigarette, and afterward thumped the top pillow before ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... "the children are stifling me. Come and have tea; we have bought such a lot of buns. Will you help me put baby down in your corner? and you might give him your ...
— Troublesome Comforts - A Story for Children • Geraldine Glasgow
... court-martial was in keeping with that prelude. No effort was spared in stifling all the evidence on Lord Cochrane's side, and in adducing false testimony against him. Logbooks and witnesses alike were tampered with. In support of his scheme for annihilating the whole French fleet, Lord Cochrane produced in court a chart showing ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... all my thought To vex myself and him; I now would give My love, could he but live Who lately lived for me, and when he found 'Twas vain, in holy ground He hid his face amid the shades of death. I waste for him my breath Who wasted his for me; but mine returns, And this lorn bosom burns With stifling heat, heaving it up in sleep, And waking me to weep Tears that had melted his soft heart: for years Wept he as bitter tears. 'Merciful God!' such was his latest prayer, 'These may she never share!' Quieter is his breath, his breast more cold Than daisies in ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... couldn't see, probing the vast excavation before him, and then, strangely, he saw but couldn't realize what he saw. He stared for a solid minute, uncomprehending, then, stifling a gasp, he knew ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... in climbing up its sides. But it must fairly be owned that these advantages are accompanied by some very serious drawbacks. If Capri is fairly free from the bitter east wind of the Riviera, the Riviera is free from the stifling scirocco of Capri. In the autumn and in the earlier part of the winter this is sometimes almost intolerable. The wind blows straight from Africa, hot, dusty, and oppressive in a strange and almost indescribable way. All the peculiar clearness of the atmosphere disappears; one sees ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... clump of bushes overtook his quarry. There was no sound as the man beast sprang upon the back of his prey and bore it to the ground for steel fingers closed simultaneously upon the soldier's throat, effectually stifling any outcry. By the neck Tarzan dragged his victim well into ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... many interesting memories of those times cluster around this old place," he said, violently stifling a yawn. He had risen early and run far. Hunger and slumber contended ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... meant a fine; her head ached, and her feet felt like lead as she climbed the stairs to her department—a hot, dark, stuffy corner behind the shirtwaist counter. It was warm and close at any time, but today it was stifling, and there was already a crowd of customers, for it was the day of a bargain sale. The heat and noise and chatter got on Marcella's tortured nerves. She felt that she wanted to scream, but instead she turned calmly to a waiting customer—a big, handsome, richly dressed woman. Marcella ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Jack and Bart and grew very bitter, for somehow the fire seemed the result of their carelessness. Would they be trapped by it? They had two good strong legs. They would save themselves, he hoped. So must he! Gritting his teeth and stifling a groan, he tried to gallop, using the cane and injured foot in unison. It was painful, but he must make time—he must go ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... huddle in with those poor laborers and working-women!" he would say to himself. "If I could but breathe that atmosphere, stifling though it be, yet made holy by ancient litanies, and cloudy with the smoke of hallowed incense, for one hour, instead of droning over these moral precepts to my half-sleeping congregation!" The intellectual isolation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... courage for a weak, confiding woman to bid her loved ones leave her for the field of carnage than it costs them to face the cannon's mouth. Maddy found it so, but Christian patriotism triumphed over all, and stifling her own grief, she sent him away with smiles, and prayers, and cheering words of encouragement, turning herself for consolation to the source from which she never sued for peace in vain. Save that she missed her husband terribly, she was not lonely, for her beautiful dark-eyed ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... closed the door and went back to the sitting-room. The room was sweet with the primroses and white violets they had sent her from Woodcote the day before. Rose felt herself pitying the flowers for being taken from the woods and sent to wither in that stifling air. For it was stifling this afternoon. Even when she threw open the window, no breath of coolness came to fan her burning face. The sky was cloudless, but yellow with smoke, and a dull haze ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke
... longitude, 71 deg. 2' 30'' East—at the entrance of the Gulf of Cambay, to the south of the Gujerat Peninsula. Its length from east to west is six miles and a half, and its greatest extent from north to south is one mile. It has a small but very fine harbour. The climate is dry and stifling, the soil barren, water scarce, and agriculture much neglected. Its principal products are wheat, millet, nachni, bajri, cocoanut, and some kinds of fruits. The population of Diu consists of about 10,765 inhabitants, of whom 419 are Christians, 9,575 Hindoos, and 771 Mahomedans. At ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... was something irritating in the suspicion that she had laughed as if it were a huge joke—perhaps, even now, she was doubled up in her narrow couch, stifling the giggle that ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... of the stifling room, on a raised platform, sat two oily and fat negroes, making the place hideous with their ribald songs and the twanging of a guitar and banjo. When, a familiar air was sounded the entire gathering joined in chorus, and when such tunes as "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" came, ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... enough to "keep her going to the s'uth'ard," and then drew away his partner into the stifling little chart-house. "Now," he said, "you see how it is. Our little admiral up there is standing on his temper, and if he doesn't hear the plan of campaign, he's quite equal to making ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... very courts of law were honeycombed with corruption, and demoralised by the power of drink. His tremendous image of a fierce fire raging across a dry prairie, and burning the grass to its very roots, while the air is stifling with the thick 'dust' of the conflagration, proclaims the sure fate, sooner or later, of every community and individual that 'rejects the law of the Lord of Hosts, and despises the word of the Holy One of Israel.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... locked. The resistance recalled her to herself—she had a moment of shocked decency at the thought that she had been about to enter Constant's bedroom. Then the terror came over her afresh. She felt that she was alone in the house with a corpse. She sank to the floor, cowering; with difficulty stifling a desire to scream. Then she rose with a jerk and raced down the stairs without looking behind her, and threw open the door and ran out into the street, only pulling up with her hand violently agitating Grodman's door-knocker. In a moment the first-floor window was ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... concealed trap-door, which communicated with the storeroom. He had been doing this while I was waiting in the swamp. The storeroom opened upon a piazza. To this hole I was conveyed as soon as I entered the house. The air was stifling; the darkness total. A bed had been spread on the floor. I could sleep quite comfortably on one side; but the slope was so sudden that I could not turn on my other without hitting the roof. The rats and mice ran over my ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... the wide Atlantic, worthless London's puling child, Better that its waves should bear thee, than the land thou hast reviled; Better in the stifling cabin, on the sofa thou shouldst lie, Sickening as the fetid nigger bears the greens and bacon by; Better, when the midnight horrors haunt the strained and creaking ship, Thou shouldst yell in vain for brandy with a fever-sodden ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... Havana may prove, when seen through the moonlight of memory, it seems as good a place to go away from as any other, after a stifling night in a net, the wooden shutters left open in the remote hope of air, and admitting the music of a whole opera-troupe of dogs, including bass, tenor, soprano, and chorus. Instead of bouquets, you throw stones, if you are so fortunate as to have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Lincoln was the profoundest that he made in his whole life. He felt burning upon his soul the truths which he uttered, and all present felt that he was true to his own soul. His feelings once or twice came near stifling utterance. He quivered with emotion. He attacked the Nebraska Bill with such warmth and energy that all felt that a man of strength was its enemy, and that he intended to blast it, if he could, by strong and manly efforts. He was most successful, and the house ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... every evening, sitting in the stifling, ugly house, and poured out his soul as if it were a libation to a goddess. She sometimes answered by telegraph, sometimes by a perfumed note. He schooled himself not to feel hurt. Why should Babette write? Does a ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... were loved in life?" said the Empress, caressing the bird in the cage with one jewelled finger, but attentively observing her son from the corner of her august eye. "They were; they are not," he remarked sententiously and stifling a yawn; it was a drowsy afternoon. "But who is it that has abandoned us? Surely not the ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... nevertheless she made it quietly and cheerfully, expecting no reward nor desiring any. She didn't expect much of Elsie Marley, indeed, recollecting the atmosphere of the household in which the girl had been reared, which she had herself found impossibly stifling during a short visit ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... friends, o'erwhelmed with terror, told All that I knew of that which he had done. Thereat he uttered piercing cries of grief, Such as had never come from him before, For in loud lamentations to indulge He ever held a craven weakling's part, And, stifling outcries, moaned not loud but deep, Like the deep roaring of a wounded bull. But in this plight, prostrate and desperate, Refusing food and drink, my hero lies Amidst the mangled bodies, motionless. ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... whither, she knew not. A cold numbness had chilled her senses, but still her feet drove her irresistibly onward. A dark current seemed to have seized her, she only felt that she was adrift, and she cared not whither it bore her. In spite of the stifling dullness which oppressed her, her body seemed as light as air. At last,—she knew not where,—she heard the roar of the sea resounding in her ears, a genial warmth thawed the numbness of her senses, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... outlived the storm Won but a feeble, half-contemptuous smile; And if a bird attempted a brief song, I closed my ears lest it should burst my brain. After much wandering I came at last To cooler skies and a less stifling air; And finally to this more temperate clime. Where every beauty is of milder type— Where the simoon nor tempest ever come, And I can soothe the fever of my soul In the bland ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... a mutual opening of arms and a head on Clytie's shoulder, wet eyes close in a corner that had once been the good woman's neck—and stifling sobs that seemed one moment to contract her body rigidly from head to foot—the next to leave it limp and falling. From the nursing shoulder she was helped to the bed, though she could not yet relax her ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... one came. The signal was given for departure. The train glided out. Diana's head slipped back and her eyes closed. Muriel, stifling her tears, dared ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... again, and her soul appeared to wrap itself in denser gloom. The air of the room seemed to Amy stifling. The next moment she felt as if she were pierced with sharp spears of ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... attitudes favorable to the contemplation of her charms. She complied with all; from belly to side, from side to back I turned her; she smiled as if pleased, curious, and astonished; and when I turned to quench my passion in her, she met me with an ardour less demonstrative, but more stifling and satisfying than Charlotte; it was a worry to think that I had twice fucked her, and seemed to have finished each time ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... exercised about Duncan. She wondered what had happened to him after she had been parted from him by that shameful trick of the wicked "fairy mother." How angry and indignant she felt when she thought of it! Had Duncan wanted her? She seemed to see him lying up in that dark, stifling garret, perfectly still, on the dirty, unwholesome bed. She crept up and touched him. He was cold and dead. Then her mother came in, with grannie and Robbie following in slow procession behind. They were dressed in beautiful white robes like angels, and as they ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... hither flood And lean intent above the beach. Their beating hearts inhibit speech With stifling tides ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... rose and towered over Cameron, and then plunged down upon him, and clutched at his throat with terrible stifling hands. The harsh contact, the pain awakened Cameron to his peril before it was too late. Desperate fighting saved him from being hurled to the ground and stamped and crushed. Warren seemed a maddened giant. There was a reeling, swaying, wrestling ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... and held her hand as she stepped from one piece of wood to another until she came near enough to get the beads I held out to her. I then went to inspect the inside of the cage out of which she had come, but could scarely put my head inside of it, the atmosphere was so hot and stifling. It was clean and contained nothing but a few short lengths of bamboo for holding water. There was only room for the girl to sit or lie down in a crouched position on the bamboo platform, and when the doors are shut it must be nearly or quite dark inside. The girls are never allowed to come out ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... seeing maniacally in all men the assassins of his fame! and with the whole world against him, struggling for the thing that was his life, through day and night, in thoughts and in dreams ... struggling, stifling, breaking the hearts of the creatures dearest to him, in the conflict for which there was no victory, though he could not choose but fight it. Tell me if Laocooen's anguish was not as an ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... between Russia at Constantinople and Turkey at Constantinople, I should prefer the latter. The Turkish is in ordinary times a less stifling despotism than ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... tell," Mrs. Chatterton was saying to herself in the other room; "what good could it do? Oh! this vile air is stifling. Will no one come to say she is better?" And ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... night. The cool breeze which usually sprang up with the going down of the sun behind the chaparral-crested mountain was that evening withheld from Sandy Bar. The little canyon was stifling with heated resinous odors, and the decaying driftwood on the Bar sent forth faint, sickening exhalations. The feverishness of day, and its fierce passions, still filled the camp. Lights moved restlessly along the bank of the river, striking no answering reflection ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... or two, and then waited, for Andrew appeared to be attracted more than repelled by the gloomy aspect of the blank-looking place, and then, all at once, Frank's heart seemed to stand still, and a stifling sense of suffocation to affect him, so that it was some moments before he could speak, and then it was in a tone of voice ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... and exceedingly straight-laced in their morality. They were fine Bible students, indeed, Bible experts. This was a great joy to me at first, but the atmosphere to a red-blooded, jubilant nature like mine was rather stifling after a while. I was fond of a good story and was full of Irish folklore and fairy stories, and I noticed my brethren did not relish my outbursts of laughter. It was explosive, spontaneous and hearty, but not contagious among them. Their faces assumed a rather pained ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... in the sciences does not take on these delirious forms; it has the advantage of resting on an objective basis: it is the substitute of an unrepresentable reality. Scientific culture, which people often accuse of stifling imagination, on the contrary opens to it a field much vaster than esthetics. Astronomy delights in infinitudes of time and space: it sees worlds arise, burn at first with the feeble light of a nebular mass, glow like suns, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... may be born to erstwhile rural parents and may come to adult years with only a scant sense of the peace and beauty that can be found a few miles away, and often with little sense of anything else but the crumbling, teeming, stifling, noisy, sooty slums where they live—the other side of the monumental splendor along the Federal riverfront. Not all urban frustration is an outgrowth of the physical environment by any means, but much is. And this ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... they put his bloody shirt upon me? Already, without that, I swim in blood.... Why do I not drown in it?... How cold the blood is to-day!... Once it used to scald me, and this is no better! In the world it is stifling, in the gave so cold.... 'Tis dreadful to be a corpse. Fool that I am, I sought death. O, let me live but for one little ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... upon a sparrow. Within it sat two women, thickly veiled, and I give you my word that in a sense I pitied them, for not a doubt of it, but they were in the act of congratulating themselves upon their escape from France. But sentiment may become fatal if permitted to interfere with enterprise. Stifling my regrets I desired them to alight, and they being wise obeyed me without demur. I allowed them to retain their veils. I sought the sight of things other than women's faces, and a brief survey of the ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... from the one to the other in open-mouthed astonishment for a minute or two, and then it dawned upon him that Minnie looked, to say the least of it, uncomfortable, and stifling his curiosity, which was by this time greater than ever, as best he ...
— Hollowmell - or, A Schoolgirl's Mission • E.R. Burden
... slaying the slain. See, by the living God! see those foot Charging down hill—hot, hurried, and mute! They loll their tongues out! Ah-hah! pell-mell! Horses roll in a human hell; Horse and man they climb one another— Which is the beast, and which is the brother? Mangling, stifling, stopping shrieks With the tread of torn-out cheeks, Drinking each other's bloody breath— Here's the fleshliest feast of Death. An odour, as of a slaughter-house, The distant raven's dark ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... with a strongly marked and serious countenance, dressed in sober-coloured habiliments, had lifted up the stifling folds of the tent and was bending over me. "Can you speak, my lad?" said he in English, "what is the matter with you? If you could but tell me, I could perhaps help you—" "What is it that you say? I can't hear you. I will kneel down;" and he flung himself on the ground, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... difficulty in stifling a smile at this specimen of Mynheer Krause's eagerness for intelligence. He very gravely walked up to him, looked all round the room as if he was afraid that the walls would hear him, and then whispered for a few seconds into the ear of ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... it," she added, meeting an amused look. "I know a good deal more about sheep farming than either of you gentlemen. I can ride anything but a buckjumper, and boss the shepherds, and I do love the life, no stifling in fields and copses! I only wish you would come too, Bear; it would do you ever so much good to get a little red paint on those white banker's hands ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of bitched type but tickled to death simultaneously by C. P. M'Coy and Stephen Dedalus B. A. who were conspicuous, needless to say, by their total absence (to say nothing of M'Intosh) L. Boom pointed it out to his companion B. A. engaged in stifling another yawn, half nervousness, not forgetting the usual crop of nonsensical howlers ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... All was stifling hot, with a breath of coal dust and smoke to choke the lungs. Even the Greek firemen sweated and cursed, though they were used to that environment. An ordinary man might have succumbed simply to that fiery, foul atmosphere. It was like a ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... preserves it near him in the cavern. The majority of these underground people have no clothes to speak of. Girls of fifteen and big boys go about absolutely without any linen. The rest—perhaps three or four—have only a few linen rags upon them. In the stifling atmosphere of these cave-dwellings it is by no means rare to see big children almost, if not absolutely, naked. I saw a great girl with a wild shock of uncombed hair, wearing nothing but a very ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... in the same spot, drinking deep draughts from the wine jug to cool their parched throats, their shirts open in front, sweating in streams, panting from the lifeless sultry calm, enviously watching the gulls that sailed by just above the water, as though afraid of the stifling muggy air on high. After their meal, the men walked about on deck for a time, lazily, and with heavy eyes, drunk with sunlight rather than with wine; then they went below, one after the other, throwing themselves flat on boards that were wet with bilge-water, and sagged under ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... remember the time when the patient was treated on the lowering system, and when every breath of air was excluded from the sick-room, doors and windows being listed lest the slightest change should take place in the stifling atmosphere of the bed-room. And now all is altered; we have the system supported by nourishments, and abundance of fresh air let in. Indeed, it is most amusing to see the change which has taken place as regards fresh air; many of us sleep with our windows open, which would ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... prepared to drop down the wide chimney; for at night the fire in such a cabin was allowed to smoulder, the coals being kept alive in the ashes. But Mrs. Merrill seized a feather-bed and, tearing it open, threw it on the embers; the flame and stifling smoke leaped up the chimney, and in a moment both Indians came down, blinded and half smothered, and were killed by the big resolute woman before they could recover themselves. No further attempt was made to molest the cabin ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... keen and frosty, the cold, slaty sky was thickly studded with sparkling stars, the snow was crusted over—it was a fine, fresh, clear, wintry night; at another time it would have invigorated and inspired him; now the air seemed stifling, ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... heads, and wring their many hands in sympathy. Night, growing pale before it, gradually fades out of the church, but lingers in the vaults below, and sits upon the coffins. And now comes bright day, burnishing the steeple-clock, and reddening the spire, and drying up the tears of dawn, and stifling its complaining; and the dawn, following the night, and chasing it from its last refuge, shrinks into the vaults itself and hides, with a frightened face, among the dead, until night returns, refreshed, to ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... where he could grasp the edge, but his strength had given out when one more effort would have freed him. He felt himself sinking back. Over him was the sky, reddened now by the fire that raged below. Through the hole the pent-up smoke in the building found vent and rushed in a black and stifling cloud. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... senses. It might be an hallucination, the baseless fabric of a vision, some image conjured from the deep recesses of his loving heart by his enfeebled disordered imagination, and yet he surely had heard a living voice, "Seymour—John—Oh, my love!" Stifling the beating of his heart, holding his breath even, stepping softly, lest he should affright the airy vision, he staggered to the door and stood gazing; then he ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Sacramento Valley, and very repulsive the city of Sacramento, which, at a distance of 125 miles from the Pacific, has an elevation of only thirty feet. The mercury stood at 103 degrees in the shade, and the fine white dust was stifling. ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... the bells. Behind its moving masses the dawn of a new day—Sunday, the 24th of August, the feast of St. Bartholomew—was breaking over the Bastille, as if to aid the crowd in its cruel work. The gabled streets, the lanes, and gothic courts, the stifling wynds, where the work awaited the workers, still lay in twilight; still the gleam of the torches, falling on the house-fronts, heralded the coming of the crowd. But the dawn was growing, the sun was about to rise. Soon the day ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... accorded a free hand to the Devil to do his worst. As a matter of fact, it was simply a phrase adopted by the French economists of the eighteenth century to summarize the conclusion of their arguments against the antiquated restrictions which were then stifling the trade and commerce of France (see G. Weuleresse, Le Mouvement Physiocratique en France, 1910, Vol. II, p. 17). Properly understood, it is not a maxim which any party need be ashamed ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... in the west wing she rushed, stumbling over hose lines, battling against the stifling clouds of smoke which rolled down the corridor. The room was gained, the picture secured, and she turned to make good her escape, all other valuables forgotten. But even in that brief moment the ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... already preceded me into the stifling fumes. With a last long breath of fresh air I plunged in after him, scarcely knowing what would happen to me. I saw the figure on the floor, seized it, and backed out of the room ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... case was different; even the highest officials were not admitted until they had waited a long time, and after a great deal of trouble. They all waited patiently every day, like so many slaves, in a body, in a narrow and stifling room; for the risk they ran if they absented themselves was most serious. There they remained standing all the time on tip-toe, each trying to keep his face above his fellow's, that the eunuchs, as they came out, might see ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... invaluable to me. Foedora, thinking of the stifling odor of the crowded place where we were to spend several hours, was sorry that she had not brought a bouquet; I went in search of flowers for her, as I had laid already my life and my fate at her feet. With a pleasure in which compunction ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... cared these heavy-booted, rough-handed, big-framed, iron-sinewed, strong-hearted men for fresh air? They got enough of that, during their long hours on deck, to counteract the stifling odours ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... Sacramento on August 5th, a day of intense, almost stifling heat, we went at once to Mrs. Van Every, who kept the most elegant boarding house in the city, whose spacious apartments seemed filled with the breath of Paradise, which added a grateful welcome to our travel-tired bodies. Mrs. Van Every's mien of pure and native dignity, her voice of silvery ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... quite undone, Cried, while thus pleading with her son, Who, leaning on his blacksmith's forge The stifling sobs quelled in his gorge. "'Tis very true," he said, "that we are poor, But had I that forgot?... I go to work, my ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... nor any of the servants under him had appeared, a circumstance that, to Monte-Cristo, seemed inexplicable. He, however, did not pause to give it thought, but dashed up the stairway and strove to reach his wife's apartment; blinding, stifling clouds of smoke, through which penetrated the glare of the conflagration, drove him back again and again, but he renewed his attempts to force a passage with undaunted energy and courage. Finally, compressing his lips and holding his nostrils with the thumb and forefinger ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... how little that old man musing in his parlour had had to do for years with its activities. Cornal Colin would sit of an evening with candles extravagantly burning more numerous than before to make up for the glowing heart extinguished; the long winter nights, black and stifling and immense around the burgh town, and the wind with a perpetual moan among the trees, would find him abandoned to his sorry self, looking into the fire, the week's paper on his knees unread, and him full of old remembrances and regrets. It had become for him a parlour full of ghosts. He ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... wherewith to wash. At the sound of his voice men stirred sleepily, sat up, poked the remains of their tiny fires. As though through an open tap the freshness of night-time drained away. The hot, searching, stifling African day took possession ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... that he had been lurking in a close and stifling hold, into which no single ray of sunlight penetrated, for three whole days— three ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... day. On shore the heat was intense, and it was a relief to get out of the stifling carriages of the crowded boat train, and to breathe the gentle air from the sea that met them as they crossed the gangway on to the steamer. Juliet enjoyed every moment of the journey; and would have been sorry when ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... him, and greeted most of the score of swarthy men and women by name. Tony masterfully stripped him of his overcoat and cap and placed them in the kitchen from which emanated odors of strange things cooking. The room was stifling with heat and with smells—beer, garlic, tobacco, ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... stepped down from the bridge, having turned the wheel over to Alderson, he was approached timidly by Neidlinger and Gallagher. Higgins, in partial payment for his share in the revolt, was taking a turn at shoveling coal in the stifling furnace room. ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... he, "this place is stifling. If the Dons mean to make an end of us, they may as well ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... the opera-glasses and she raised them to scan the house. It was a gala night and the theatre was hung with flags and brilliantly illuminated. There were candles everywhere, and the great chandelier that hung from the ceiling was lit. The heat was stifling, and the incessant fluttering of fans gave the women in the parterre and in the crowded boxes a look of unrest that was belied by their placid, expressionless faces. Many glanced up at the Menotti in their box. There was ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... miles, and was seen in the far distance terminating in the low sandy promontory of Fumacina, where the Tiber falls into the sea. Alas! what vicissitudes had that coast been witness to! There, where the idle wave was now rolling, rode in other days the galleys of Rome; and there, where the stifling sirocco was sweeping the herbless plain, rose the villas of her senators, amid the bloom and fragrance of the orange and the olive. To that coast Caesar had loved to come, to inhale its breezes, and to pass, in the society of his select friends, those hours which ambition ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... square moved forward by its right to get possession of a knoll of rising ground. All had fought in this manner many times before, and there was no novelty in the entertainment; always the same hot and stifling formation, the smell of dust and leather, the same boltlike rush of the enemy, the same pressure on the weakest side, the few minutes of hand-to-hand scuffle, and then the silence of the desert, broken only by the yells of those whom their handful ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... But stifling her mirth lest she awake them, she called her husband to her side. After a few whispered words, they went away, and returned with down quilts and steamer rugs, which they gently tucked about the vanquished heroes, and then lowering the lights left ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... of all arms. Every few minutes there would come a break in the flow, and our motor would wriggle through, advance a few yards, and be stopped again by a widening of the torrent that jammed us into the ditch and splashed a dazzle of dust into our eyes. The dust was stifling—but through it, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... against an insurmountable difficulty; my brain was almost on fire; my eyes were strained with staring at the parchment; the whole absurd collection of letters appeared to dance before my vision in a number of black little groups. My mind was possessed with temporary hallucination—I was stifling. I wanted air. Mechanically I fanned myself with the document, of which now I saw the back ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... dreary barocco emblems mar the dignity of death. A bulky Pieta by Gian Bologna, with Madonna's face unfinished, towers up and crowds the narrow cell. Religion has evanished from this late Renaissance art, nor has the after-glow of Guido Reni's hectic piety yet overflushed it. Chilled by the stifling humid sense of an extinct race here entombed in its last representative, we gladly emerge from the sepulchral vault into the air ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... being naturally a religious and mystical soul, but blighted and narrowed through the influence of Catholicism. We are made to feel that the only thing the matter with him is his creed—"all those stifling notions of sin, penance, absolution, direction, as they were conventionalized in Catholic practice and chattered about by ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... she stood in the middle of the stage stifling with a sense of mortification and defeat, then turned, and without a word or look to any one went ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... laden with costly pottery, reached from floor to ceiling. The polish and the colors flashed already in the fierce light of the closely neighboring flames. Great drifts and clouds of smoke against the windows were urging in and stifling the air. The first rush of water from the engines beat ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... fit; and first I tried to put leeches on her temples, but they would not bite, and we resolved to carry her into the fresh breeze in the verandah, for the air of the room seemed laden with something close and stifling. When I threw back the covering of the bed, I perceived that the veins of both arms had been cut, and a few drops of blood stained her night-dress; also there was a small empty bottle in the bed with "Laudanum" on its label. The terrible truth was evident—she ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... broke into the shrill laugh of hysteria. Jane led her to the couch and sat beside her. Kitty leaned forward, staring at the floor. Now and then she pressed her handkerchief to her mouth, stifling. Suddenly she looked ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... faint and far away, like an echo out of a vast distance, and it was some seconds before he could realize where he was or form any definite idea of his surroundings. Gradually he became conscious that the air was no longer hot and stifling, but cool and fragrant with the sweet, resinous breath of pines. Looking about him, he saw they were winding upward along an avenue cut through a forest of small, slender pines, which extended below them on one side and far above them ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... clapped her hands and laughed with glee. Her gladness gave Carley a little twinge of conscience. Jealously was an unjust and stifling thing. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... from her seat and looked haughtily at her son, her heart beating with great, stifling throbs. In all the years of their lives they had never before exchanged one cross word with each other, and in that moment she hated, with all the strength of her soul, the girl who had sown discord between them, and she wished that Heaven had stricken the girl dead ere ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... pyramids of skulls festooned with human hair, a cave inhabited by reptiles with human faces, and an apartment whose walls were hung with carpets of a thousand kinds and a thousand hues, which moved slowly to and fro as if stirred by human creatures stifling beneath their weight. But Beckford passes swiftly from one mood to another, and was only momentarily fascinated by terror. So infinite is the variety of Vathek in scenery and in temper that it seems like its wealthy, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... and was put under the protection of a wild, rough- looking peasant woman, who stared at her like something from another world, but at length showed her a nook behind a mud partition, where she could spread her mantle, and at least lie down, and tell her beads unseen, if she could not sleep in the stifling, smoky atmosphere, amid the sounds of carousal among her father ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Cafe Royal. It was a sultry evening, and London was still stifling after a sweltering day. One had the feeling that the roofs and masonry of the buildings all about were still burning, as probably they were, with the heat of the sun that had been pouring down upon them all day; and the big city seemed to breathe its hot dust into ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... excitement and expectation that she could not be genuinely harsh. She had been thrilled by the audacity of the visit to Mr. Cannon. And though she hoped from it little but a negative advantage, she was experiencing the rare happiness of adventure. She had slipped out for a moment from the confined and stifling circle of domestic dailiness. She had scented the feverish perfume of the world. And she owed all this to herself alone! She meant on the morrow, while her mother was marketing, to pursue the enterprise; the consciousness of this intention was sweet, but she knew not why ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... future. But the rest of them waited in stolid, silent patience, sitting quite still in unbroken rank along the wall, their overcoats, if they had them, buttoned tight around their chins, though the office was stifling hot. The dirty man who was talking to the stenographer filled a pipe with some very bad tobacco and ostentatiously began smoking it, but not ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... seated around the long table in the stifling, breathless room, the armourer at the head. Those who came by way of the sewer had performed ablutions in the queer toilet room that once had been a secret vault for the storing of feudal plunder. What air there was came from the narrow ventilator ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... French, and a sermon in French was preached by an Abb; the music was excellent, all things airy and tasteful, and making one feel as if in one of the chapels in Paris. The Cathedral of St. Mary, which I afterwards visited, where the Irish attend, was a contrast indeed, and more like one of our stifling Irish Catholic churches in Boston or New York, with intelligence in so small a proportion to the number of faces. During the three Sundays I was in San Francisco, I visited three of the Episcopal churches, and the Congregational, a Chinese Mission Chapel, and on the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... broils of the European nations, there would remain but one act to close our tragedy, that is, to break up our union; and even this they have ventured seriously and solemnly to propose and maintain by arguments in a Connecticut paper. I have been happy, however, in believing, from the stifling of this effort, that that dose was found too strong, and excited as much repugnance there as it did horror in other parts of our country, and that whatever follies we may be led into as to foreign nations, we shall never ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... bedtime. Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always like, had I any mornings; but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth!) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should covet to be in company; but I assure you that is a ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... came forth. With a shuddering avoidance of the water he came tearing along as one running from a ghost, and was darting past the trees, when he found himself detained by an arm of great strength. Mr. Pike clapped his other hand upon the boy's mouth, stifling a howl ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... and which had hung for some time about the tree. Now we knew it could not be that, for it was growing thicker and thicker, and we noticed that it had a smell very different from that of burnt powder. Moreover, it produced a stifling, choking sensation, causing us to cough, and rub our eyes with the pain. On looking downward, I was unable to see either the ground or the peccaries; but I could perceive a thick cloud rising up all around the tree. I could hear the voices ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... to get out again. There was, in every room, an aged smell, grown faint with confinement. It pined in all the cupboards and drawers. In the little rooms of communication between great rooms, it was stifling. If you turned a picture - to come back to the pictures - there it still was, clinging to the wall behind the frame, like a ...
— To be Read at Dusk • Charles Dickens
... The room was stifling hot and full of flies; for the house was dirty and low and small, and stood in a bad place, behind the village, in the borders of the bush, and sheltered from the trade. The three men’s beds were on the floor, and a litter of pans and dishes. There was no standing furniture; Randall, when ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... boys, it was no good bothering. Keep a look-out? Well, you may guess I watched the fog for the signs of lifting as a cat watches a mouse; but for anything else our eyes were of no more use to us than if we had been buried miles deep in a heap of cotton-wool. It felt like it too—choking, warm, stifling. Besides, all I said, though it sounded extravagant, was absolutely true to fact. What we afterwards alluded to as an attack was really an attempt at repulse. The action was very far from being aggressive—it was not even defensive, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... walked on, looking out for a disengaged hansom. I could hardly breathe: my heart seemed stifling me. What was in her mind? What would the next few minutes mean ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... stole a glance at his companion, wondering if she shared his feelings. Her rapt profile betrayed no unrest, but politeness might have caused her to feign an interest that she did not feel. He leaned back impatiently, stifling another yawn, and trying to fix his attention on the stage. Great things were going forward there, and he was not insensible to the stern beauties of the ancient drama. But the interpretation of the play seemed to him as airless and lifeless as the ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... again, striking the polished oak in deadly cadence, stifling the voices. Over the stillness, one man spoke. He recognized the black voice of the judge and took his hands from his ears and put them in his lap. He was told to stand and ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... Note.) at most, seems hardly sufficient to protect the grubs against the inclemencies of the weather. Set on its pebble in the open air, without any sort of shelter, the nest will have to undergo the heat of summer, which will turn each cell into a stifling furnace, followed by the autumn rains, which will slowly wear away the stonework, and by the winter frosts, which will crumble what the rains have respected. However hard the cement may be, can it possibly resist all these agents of destruction? And, even if it does resist, will not the grubs, ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... pitifully few nickels for car-fare and lunch, in the cloak-room with her coat and hat. But she did not stop to think of that. She was fleeing again, this time on foot, from a man. She half expected he might pursue her, and make her come back to the hated work in the stifling store with his wicked face moving everywhere above the crowds. But she turned not to look back. On over the slushy pavements, under the leaden sky, with a few busy flakes ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... parlour pungent at all times with the odour of liquor,—but used only on rare occasions, most of The Palmetto's patrons preferring the even more stifling atmosphere of the bar-room,—the Wells Fargo Agent had been watching and waiting ever since he had left The Polka Saloon. On a table in front of him was a bottle, for it was a part of Ashby's scheme of things to solace thus all such ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... a pause that seemed to George to stretch on and on endlessly. The rain pattered on the leaky roof. Somewhere in the distance a dog howled dismally. The darkness pressed down like a blanket, stifling thought. ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... to the left. There's a pantry place on your right all full of flies and when you open the door they unsettle with a great buzz and shift into all sorts of shapes and patterns. Next to them is our sitting-room, the horrid place always dirty and stifling. Then there's the operating-room, then another room for beds, then the kitchen. Outside to the right there's the garden, dry now with the heat, and the orchard smells of the men they've buried in ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... the force of the wind could be fully appreciated, especially after leaving the stifling fo'castle. It seemed to stand up against you like a wall, making it almost impossible to move on the heaving decks or to breathe as the fierce gusts came dashing by. The schooner was hove to under jib, foresail, and mainsail. We proceeded to lower the foresail and make it fast. The night was dark, ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... system of corruption by which he and the other steamer owners were able time after time not only to continue their control of Congress and the postal authorities, but to defeat postal reform measures. For fifteen years Vanderbilt and his associates succeeded in stifling every bill introduced in Congress for the reduction of the ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... And my father is not young, Kathleen. So I thought I'd like to run down and take him out to dinner once or twice—to a roof-garden or something, you know. It's rather pathetic that men of his age, grown gray in service, should feel obliged to remain in the stifling ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... murdering or cursing all who resisted its advance. It exterminated scepticism by stifling knowledge, and putting a merciless veto on free thought and free speech, and by rewarding philosophers and discoverers with the faggot and the chain. It held its power for centuries by force of hell-fire, and ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... in the day and the atmosphere of the room had become stifling; but no one seemed to be conscious of any discomfort, and a general gasp of excitement passed through the room when the coroner, taking out a box from under a pile of papers, disclosed to the general gaze the famous white ribbon with its dainty ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... there was no one in sight; but he noticed that a side door of the Cathedral was ajar. The sacristan must have forgotten to shut it. Surely nothing could be going on there so late at night. He might as well go in and sleep on one of the benches instead of in the stifling barn; he could slip out in the morning before the sacristan came; and even if anyone did find him, the natural supposition would be that mad Diego had been saying his prayers in some corner, and ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... The weather had cleared up a little, but a kind of veil of dust, like a thick gauze, was still spread over the surface of the heavens, and the sun made every glittering atom of dust glisten again within the circuit of its rays. The heat was stifling; but as the king did not seem to pay any attention to the appearance of the heavens, no one made himself uneasy about it, and the promenade, in obedience to the orders which had been given by the queen, took its course in the direction of Apremont. The courtiers who followed ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... so-called advanced people and reformers, are no good; that we busy ourselves over foolery, talk rubbish about art, unconscious creativeness, parliamentarism, trial by jury, and the deuce knows what all; while, all the while, it's a question of getting bread to eat, while we're stifling under the grossest superstition, while all our enterprises come to grief, simply because there aren't honest men enough to carry them on, while the very emancipation our Government's busy upon will hardly come to any good, because peasants are glad to rob ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... of those who have passed away in the latter part of the period under study the power of initiative has gone. New proposals are hushed. Variation is discouraged; the rut of custom and convention is preferred. And a subtle stifling air of the impossibility of all active purposes pervades social and religious and business activity ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... weaker, but clung to life with extraordinary tenacity. And now very bitterly they felt the evils of this voluntarily embraced poverty, for the summer heat was for a few days almost tropical, and the tiny little rooms in the lodging-house were stifling. Brian was very anxious to have the patient moved across to his father's house; but, though Charles Osmond said all he could in favor of the scheme, the other doctors would not consent, thinking the risk ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... under the familiarities of prolonged intercourse, without any immediate appeal to my amour propre, I know not; but every reflective mind, conscious of being accessible to antipathies, will remember that one certain method of stifling them is for the object to make some appeal to our interest or our vanity: in the engagement of these more powerful feelings, the antipathy is quickly strangled. At any rate it is so in my case, and ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... same intelligence, adding the description of his disguise: on which the worthy magistrate put on his mask and bauta, and went out himself; when his eyes confirming the report of his informants, and the reflection on his duty stifling all remorse, he sent publicly for Foscarini in the morning, whom the populace attended all ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... will always dispose of surplus Cabbage advantageously, so there can be no serious objection to keeping up a constant succession. Plant out from seed-beds as fast as the plants become strong enough, for stifling and starving tend to club, mildew, and blindness. Where Red Cabbage is in demand for use with game in autumn, seed should ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... came somewhat to himself he was in a close, stifling room where candle-light from a distance threw weird shadows over the adobe walls. The witch-like voices of a woman and a girl in harsh, cackling laughter, half suppressed, were not far away, and some one, whose face was covered, ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... something about 'Jenny Jones, of Hampstead,' and then withdrew. To Kate Mr. A. assumed a gallant, lover-like manner; to John King an air of half-amused defiance. By-and-bye two stones were thrown violently upon the table, but no one expressed any audible alarm. Still the room was hot and stifling, the darkness affected the coolest imagination, and straining one's eyes and ears for spiritual manifestations produced a not unnatural feeling of uneasiness in the mind. Sometimes I fancied the table ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... all around me men were swaying, striking, shooting, panting, locked in a deadly embrace. A sweating, red-faced soldier closed with me; chin to chin, breast to breast we wrestled; and I shall never forget the stifling struggle—every detail remains, his sunburned face, wet with sweat and powder-smeared; his irregular teeth showing when I got him by the throat, and the awful change that came over his visage when Jack Mount shoved the muzzle ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... Red Ben ran his canoe. His companion, still wearing the wolf mask, stepped out and lifted the helpless girl, bearing her along a path that led to a little opening where the moonlight fell brightly. He placed her on the ground and stood gazing down at her, his arms folded. He had removed the stifling blanket ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... very early that year, and it was the hottest summer that Poppy had ever known. Even at the end of May and the beginning of June the heat was so great that it made people ill and tired and cross. Poppy's mother, who was never able to leave her bed, felt it very much. The court was close and stifling, and the old window in the small bedroom would only open a little way at the bottom, so that very little air could get into the room, and the poor woman lay hour after hour panting for breath, and ...
— Poppy's Presents • Mrs O. F. Walton
... smoke from the tunnel rolled in a thick cloud about them, stifling them. The girl, dazed with the roar and blinded by the smoke, could only cling to her protector. For an instant they felt as if they were about to be drawn into the awful power of the rushing monster. Then it had passed, and a roar of silence followed, ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... with a peerage, of which he had long been desirous. He undertook on his side to obtain, by fair or foul means, a vote in favor of the peace. In consequence of this arrangement, he became leader of the House of Commons; and Grenville, stifling his vexation as well as he could, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at home, was to be found at the stopping-place. Harris tied his team at the door and went in, shaking the snow and frost from his great-coat. The air inside was close and stifling with tobacco, not unmixed with stronger fumes. A much-smoked oil lamp, hung by a wall-bracket, shed a certain sickly light through the thick air, and was supplemented in its illumination by rays from the door of a capacious wood stove which ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... who cannot trust his happier instinct, but perforce believes that beyond the sepulchral line of mortality he shall know no more of his friends, may find, as helps to a willing acquiescence in what is fated, either one of two possible contemplations.8 He may sadly lay upon his heart the stifling solace, There will be no baffled wants nor unhappiness, but all will be over when hic jacet is sculptured on the headstone of my grave. Or, with measureless rebound of faith, he may crowd the capacity of his soul with the mysterious presentiment, In the unchangeable fulness of an infinite bliss, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... among the educated class. They had some profound thinkers among them: Tchernyshevsky, Dobroluboff, Mikhailoff, besides Herzen and Ogareff, the two men who brought out the Kolokol in London in the Russian language, and by their agents spread it broadcast over Russia. The stifling of the insurrection in Poland strengthened the reactionary party. More repressive edicts were issued, with the usual result, that secret societies multiplied everywhere. Then came the revolution and commune in Paris, which greatly strengthened the spread of revolutionary ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... immaculateness and order, was as dreary as a tomb, and as Lily, turning from her brief repast between shrouded sideboards, wandered into the newly-uncovered glare of the drawing-room she felt as though she were buried alive in the stifling limits of ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... Cadogan Square was still in the hands of the police. To this house and particularly to Kara's bedroom T. X. from time to time repaired, and reproduced as far as possible the conditions which obtained on the night of the murder. He had the same stifling fire, the same locked door. The latch was dropped in its socket, whilst T. X., with a stop watch in his hand, made elaborate calculations and acted certain parts which he did not reveal to ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... Look into our tent, or enter, if you can bear the stifling smoke and the close atmosphere. There, wedged close together, you will see a circle of stout warriors, passing the pipe around, joking, telling stories, and making themselves merry, after their fashion. We were also infested by little copper-colored naked boys and snake-eyed ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... all leisure, though, thus hanging about the Equator under the scorching sun, now at noon precisely perpendicular over our heads, the heat at night too being almost as stifling and the stars as bright as moons; for Captain Gillespie took advantage of our inaction to "set up" the rigging, which had slackened considerably since we entered the tropics, the heat making the ropes stretch so that our masts got loose and the ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... that noble and fast-sailing line-of-packet ship, 'THE SCREW,' was solely indebted to his own resources, and shipped his good humour, like his provisions, without any contribution or assistance from the owners. A dark, low, stifling cabin, surrounded by berths all filled to overflowing with men, women, and children, in various stages of sickness and misery, is not the liveliest place of assembly at any time; but when it is so crowded ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
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